Сергей Жадан - Mesopotamia

“Sleep makes us strong,” the grooms said, “and vulnerable.” Zebras are another matter entirely. Generally, a zebra’s route to the circus skirted a few laws. They were transported across Asian republics under assumed names, their age, gender, and medical history changing along the way. They were kept together in the circus’s own paddocks, quickly growing accustomed to large, rowdy crowds and never straying from their herds. When one of them died, the rest would encircle the body to keep the circus staff away. It was as though they were offering up a sacrifice to the just gods presiding over the heavens. Reemerging from this sticky stream of information, Yura rose to his feet laboriously and plodded outside to have a cigarette. “What’s the deal with those zebras?” he thought, disgruntled. “Where’d they even come from?”

He waited for everyone to fall asleep, found the cute nurse, and spent the night with her on the pull-out bed in the staff room. She was so flustered she didn’t know what to say, except that kissing was off limits. Everything else was fair game, though. She tried to keep quiet so they wouldn’t wake up the goners in the clinic—the pull-out bed squeaked like a ship’s timbers. Her hair—blond and sunny—was so long that different sections of it had different smells; hot wind and dark river water mingled together. It seemed that her throat was delicate; she was always catching colds. She was weary and demure. “Sleep makes us strong,” Yura thought as he was dozing off. “And vulnerable,” he added, listening to her breathing.

The windows faced the shade cast by the trees whose branches touched the sills, catching and cleaving the sun’s rays. Wasps would occasionally fly into the clinic, but as soon as they caught a whiff of the stagnant smell of chlorine and death in the hallways, they wasted no time flying back outside, where thick July spiderwebs would ensnare them. A police car pulled up at around ten. A pair of patrolmen had arrived, escorting Artem, a cheerful deserter who’d been caught about two months ago. Now they brought him to the clinic from his pretrial detention center every morning for treatment, and he relished setting off on these grand adventures with the fuzz as his lazy entourage. He said hello to Yura, yelled something spirited at the nurses, growled at the cops, and basically acted like going to a TB clinic was a lifelong dream of his, and he was over the moon to see it finally coming true.

Yura’s friends came by in the morning and stood by the fountain, not talking to the locals. When he stepped outside, they gave him a full report. Zhora, who worked at a 24-hour pharmacy in town, had an authoritative air about him—he was a representative of the medical community, after all. His long fingers latching onto Yura’s shirt, Zhora leaned up against him and whispered in his ear.

“Black Devil’s looking for you. He’s making the rounds of all your friends. He went to your old man’s place.”

“Well, what’d my old man do?”

“He threw him out.”

“Good for him! All right, you better get going. Don’t go blabbing around town.”

Back in the ward, Valera kept bombarding him with questions about Alla, demanding details, expressing his support, and offering his assistance. Eventually the young guy couldn’t take it anymore and disappeared into the hallway, slamming the door behind him.

“That’s enough. Don’t get all riled up,” Yura said severely to the circus guy, thinking about all the distressing things going on with Sania. He seemed to like the nurse. Everyone here seemed to like her. But she rendered him speechless—Yura could see that perfectly well. The young guy would blush the instant she came into the ward. He’d look at her hair and manicured nails, clearly noticing the scar on her wrist and undoubtedly paying attention to her weary face, gold medallion, and absent wedding ring, her high heels and roaring laughter. She never stopped laughing; it was as though administering inpatient treatment was her idea of a good time. She had sharp teeth, the kind any man would love to get chewed up by. The young guy could only exhale after she had left again. Yura thought Sania must hate his guts. Maybe he did. Yura remembered hating his old man for bringing his girlfriends home and getting annoyed whenever he’d come home late and stumble over their stuff on the floor—stockings and sweaters, faded jeans and flashy dresses. Those warm pieces of fabric smelled like the bodies of grown-up women; Yura would pick them up and toss them into his dad’s room, feeling their lightness—that pissed him off, but there wasn’t much he could do. There comes a time in every boy’s life when he puts a knife to his father’s throat. The real question is where to go from there.

Meanwhile, Valera was at it again. As soon as the young guy had hopped in bed and rolled over to face the wall, he launched into another cock-and-bull story.

“The circus gave me everything I have,” he said. “A job, an education, and love. The circus taught me to be attentive with children and treat my elders with respect.”

“You talk like Mowgli,” Yura interrupted, but that didn’t rattle the old circus hand; he just smiled, making all his creases tighten up, and started talking about circus dynasties, glorious traditions, and techniques for applying clown makeup that were passed down from fathers to eldest sons, painting pictures of the passions brewing in the dressing rooms, exposing bloody mysteries and divulging secrets about mysterious conspiracies. He just kept going, on and on, even when the staff started making the rounds; he told Alla about his first wife, showed the doctor pictures of his daughters, suggested he marry one of them—true, she’d already been married for years, but he hinted that he could resolve that little hitch in no time. “Where there’s a will there’s a way!”

“Huh, a dynasty,” Yura thought, a few colored pills resting in the palm of his hand. His dad had always wanted them to work together. “Real men don’t play music,” he’d say to Yura. “Real men have enough on their plates without music.”

His dad was part of the country’s migrant labor force, working seasonal railroad jobs; one time he took Yura along. It was the middle of the summer, around this time of year, during a heat wave, and his dad was sitting there on the tracks, right on the ties, next to all the other laborers, waiting for the foreman to come over and tell them to unload some boxes of canned food from the train cars. Yura, wearing his white shirt and dark work jeans, was sitting next to him; it may have been the last time they sat so close to each other, out in the open, in the sweltering heat, passing each other cigarettes. By sharing his cigarettes, his dad seemed to be saying, “Now you’re with us—you’re one of us now.” They all shared their cigarettes and water—in their simple clothes and beat-up shoes, they were real men with real problems.

“Yeah,” Valera drawled, as though he’d heard Yura’s thoughts, “beat-up shoes, sweat-laden warm-ups—we had to work day and night, our whole life was packed in between those walls saturated with men’s odors and women’s perfume. All those joyous nights and bloody mornings! Insults and confessions were behind the making of every performer—love was born and hope died behind every door; the men fed the wild animals every morning, broke them, and softened their movements, while the women stood in cold hallways, nurturing treacherous plots in their hearts, scheming to escape from this troupe of roadside misfits. But you can’t escape yourself, you can’t escape your sorrow, so it lingered in their eyes and their movements in the ring were precise and unyielding.”

Alla just couldn’t fall asleep that night; she kept waking him up, pulling him out of his slumber. There was always a moment when he had no idea where he was; he immediately thought of Black Devil, but then he recognized her by touch, calmed down a bit, and asked for some water. He asked her to tell him about her parents. “I wonder what kind of dynasty she comes from. I wonder what they wanted from her,” he thought.