Сергей Жадан - Mesopotamia

“Did she take her tigers with her to dinner?”

“I’m being entirely serious with you,” the circus guy said sternly, his feelings clearly a bit hurt by Yura’s quip. “When I first joined the troupe, she wouldn’t give me the time of day. She had so many guys to choose from! It was love at first sight for me, though. Then we ran away—I already told you that. But it didn’t last long. I was young, I lost my way. I was a real pansy.”

“Then what?”

“Then I lost her. It was my own fault. I just couldn’t hold on to her.”

“Like during a trapeze show?” Yura was confused, again.

“Like she left me, during one of our tours.”

“What kind of tour?”

“Around socialist Romania. We spent a whole month there. I was young and self-assured, but I had no idea what I wanted and needed in life. I forgot all about her and started focusing on myself. She could feel that. She tried to fix everything at first, but I just wouldn’t listen. I think everything changed after we got back from Crimea. She realized how much of a pansy I was, that I always back down right away, and that I wasn’t willing to hold my ground for her. She didn’t say anything, even though she knew it was over. Then during the tour she and one of our guys—one of the bosses—got together. I didn’t even know what hit me. They came back here together. I wanted to quit, but I didn’t have the resolve to do it.”

“Yeah, Valera.” Yura patted him on the back. “That’s messed up.”

Valera seemed to like that they were always talking about him. Even the young guy poked his head out from under the covers and started listening to the old-timer’s love stories with a morose expression on his face.

“Don’t I know it,” Valera said. “I’m too ashamed to even think about it. Just imagine it—you’re living with her, thinking this is gonna last and everything’s just great. At some point, you stop noticing her and you forget that everything can change at the drop of a hat. Then that’s exactly what happens. You don’t even realize how… where was the error in my calculations? Well, you start blaming everyone else, even though it’s your own fault and nobody else’s. You start doing stupid stuff. You try and fix everything. You try to forget about it. But how can you fix something that doesn’t exist anymore? And how can you forget about everything? You just can’t. You can’t escape from yourself. You can’t escape from your grief.”

The old-timer was a real mess at this point; Yura thought he shouldn’t have made him dredge all that stuff up. They should have just talked about zebras. He wanted to get up, but Valera held him softly by the arm.

“Those tours… there’s a different sense of time and a different way of doing things. They just forgot about us. Our month-long tour came to an end. Winter set in and we had to get back somehow. The bosses had just abandoned us. We didn’t even have any gas left. Our guys sold it all to the locals.”

“Why didn’t you ride the zebras back, over the mountain passes?” Yura joked—but as soon as he saw the circus guy’s distraught, fat-lipped face, he corrected himself. “The horses—I mean the horses, not the zebras.”

“That just wasn’t gonna happen,” he answered bitterly. “They were circus horses, they couldn’t carry heavy loads.”

“Just like in Mesopotamia,” Yura said.

The conversation died because there wasn’t anything more to say and too much had already been said. Everyone just sat there, waiting for the doctor, not knowing what to do with themselves—and when he came into the ward, followed by Alla, pushing her cart, everything took a turn for the worse. The timing was so poor—something felt off. The most terrible thing was that Sania’s mom had barged in too, right on the doctor’s heels, bombarding him with questions and demands. An anxious blush was strolling across the doctor’s face; he kept repeating, albeit a little too cordially, that she wasn’t allowed in there, that it was not permitted, and that it wasn’t safe, after all. But Sania’s mom put on a mask and brazenly ignored all of the clinic’s regulations, and the doctor, a gentle and proper individual, just couldn’t bring himself to kick her out in front of her soccer star son. Actually getting inside the ward seemed to embolden Sania’s mom—she started acting like she owned the place, immediately sitting on the young guy’s bed, patting him on the back as if soothing a horse, taking out some candy and a cookie and asking him how he had been feeling. She acted just like a teacher—even when she asked you how you were feeling it seemed as though you would get marked down if she didn’t like your answer—and she looked exactly like you would expect a teacher to look—appropriately enough, since she was a teacher. The young guy was anxious; he refrained from responding at first. Then he asked his mom in a whisper to leave the doctor alone, shooting mortified glances at Valera, hoping for some backup, observing Yura’s reaction out of the corner of his eye, afraid to look at the nurse and getting horribly flustered when he tried to answer the doctor’s questions. Sania’s mom didn’t even seem to notice the doctor. She was acting like she was proctoring an exam, simply waiting for the doctor and Alla to leave so she could spend some quality time with her son. So when Alla approached the young guy and saw his open palm (she saw its trembling and the beads of anxious sweat on his forehead, caught a glimpse of the bags under his eyes, so dark they looked like bruises, realized that he hadn’t been sleeping well, that he didn’t like it here one bit, and that he’d be more than happy to hightail it out of here, but where could he even go—his mom was at home, and it wasn’t exactly clear which was better, staying here among the corpses or moving back home to be smothered by her love—she managed to see all of that in a split second, committing it to memory and feeling quite surprised), she dumped about a dozen pills into it, and his mom, paying no attention whatsoever to the nurse, was rooting around under the bed for her son’s socks, chastising him for being so messy and disorganized. Alla tried to turn the whole thing into a joke, flashing her incredible smile… and the young guy just went berserk—there was some spring inside him, it had been there for a while, compressing, pushing against his heart until the organ finally popped out of his chest; he’d been holding back for too long, and everyone had been demanding too much from him. A month lying on this cot with these pricks—one of them had lost his marbles a long time ago, blowing smoke up his ass with his zebra and antelope bullshit, and the other guy was fucking treating him like some little bitch, like he was the fucking odd man out, like he should fucking take the goddamn fucking blame for fucking everything, like he was some little cocksucker who wasn’t worth the fucking time of day! Fuck that shit! The young guy knocked those shitty-ass socks right the fuck out of his mom’s hands, chucked the cookie at the wall (the doctor managed to dodge it and Yura got up, dumbfounded), and erupted, yelling at his dumbass mom to not fucking touch him, to leave him the fuck alone, that he’d do whatever the fuck he wanted with his goddamn socks, and that she could get her idiot ass out of here and never come back.

Everybody froze, at a complete loss for words. The doctor gently clasped Alla’s elbow, while the young guy’s mom stood in the middle of the room, bewildered—she was on the verge of tears, but she had lost the ability to cry after forty hard years in the classroom. The young guy was looking around at everyone, his eyes filled with hatred and despair, trying to formulate his next string of maledictions, when Yura suddenly interrupted him.