Сергей Жадан - Mesopotamia

“Hey, quit yelling at your mother, ya clown.”

“What do you care?” The young guy scowled at him, finally encountering a worthy opponent.

“Shut your trap!” Yura advised him.

“You shut yours.” The youngster wasn’t backing down.

Yura gave him a sudden, hard slap. Caught off guard, the young guy lost his balance, fell onto the bed, right onto the candy and pills, instantly popped back up, enraged and ready to charge at Yura, but his resolve faltered when he saw his rival’s eyes. He just turned around and bolted out into the hallway, his mom in tow. The doctor waited a bit and then followed them. Alla gave Yura a harsh look and rolled her cart out of the ward. Valera saw a piece of the cookie that had landed on top of his sheets. He picked it up.

“Huh, I like this kind,” he said, chewing.

She tried to keep him out. “Let’s talk tomorrow. It’s late,” she said, clearly agitated, holding the door of the staff room shut. “You’re gonna wake everyone up. Go back to bed.”

“Bullshit,” Yura countered, gently yet persistently pounding on the door. She eventually let him in.

“All right, all right,” he said. “Quit acting tough. Why were you holding the door shut?”

“You don’t even know when you’re going to get out of here,” she answered. “Or whether you’ll ever get out. Isn’t that true? Why start all of this now?”

“What do you mean I don’t know when I’m gonna get out of here? That’s up to me. I’m gonna get out. I’ll get out tomorrow. That’s the least of my worries. When the doctors were taking out my appendix and they forgot me on the operating table because it was Easter that day—now that was a time I wasn’t sure I’d make it.”

“Sure, they did. You’re full of it. What’d you whack the kid for?”

“To teach him a lesson,” Yura answered. “How’s your stepdad hanging in there?”

“He’s fine. They’re going to start taking in the harvest soon. He’s all worried.”

“I can imagine. What else is there to worry about in the sticks?”

“When’s the last time I talked to a woman like that, especially at night?” he thought to himself, sitting there, carefully shifting the sleeping Alla’s legs into his lap. “I guess it must have been with taxi dispatchers. But sitting next to a woman, rubbing her feet, stroking her calves to warm her up—I couldn’t tell you the last time I did that.” He sat there, his head resting up against the wall. She’d conked out quickly, holding his hand for a bit and then letting it go; he’d risen to his feet and walked over to the window, glanced at the neighborhood—quiet and empty—faintly illuminated by the streetlights, and then come back to find her already sound asleep. He sat down carefully, leaning back against the wall. Her hand pushed through a dream and grabbed his, then released it again. For some reason, Yura thought of that one especially long and harsh winter, when all they had left in the kitchen was black tea and there was no use thinking about anything else, so they didn’t. Life felt easy and endless; he was so young—his bones weren’t so brittle and his heart wasn’t so threadbare. Alyona took their financial woes in stride.

“It’s no big deal,” she said. “You’ll be making money once you start filling arenas. We’ve got time.”

They bounced around for weeks on end, sleeping on friends’ floors and drinking on rooftops in the winter. “Those were our glory days,” Yura thought. Everything came so easy when they were first getting started, and only their thoughtlessness and carelessness kept them from shaking the big, wide world down for everything that rightfully belonged to them. “We should have beaten and squeezed every last penny out of life, we really should have,” Yura thought regretfully.

Who knew that everything would change so hopelessly and pass by so quickly? Alyona came down with pneumonia in early March; she was out of commission for a while. They ran out of money quickly and had no way to get more. They didn’t have any medicine at home. They ran out of food, too. All the friends they’d been gallivanting around town with night and day had disappeared, evaporating into the icy, lilac twilight. Alyona started feeling even worse; she couldn’t get out of bed for a few days, lying there, buried under all the blankets and jackets they had in the apartment. He sat next to her, holding her hand, like he was doing now in the staff room, holding on and feeling her body temperature rising, heat roaming around under her skin, flames scorching her from the inside. She wasn’t griping about it, though; she merely asked him to keep holding her and not let her go. He kept holding her, never letting her go, up until the second she got better. Where did all of that go? How could all of that be forgotten? How could all of that be lost? He thought back to the last time he’d seen her—a few years ago, when he gave her a present to pass on to their little Mashka. Then he regretted the whole silly idea—her black, drained eyes, exhaustion and desperation, vulnerable, exposed neck, and icy fingers. No earrings or watch. Nothing to talk about, nothing to ask about. The weakness we harbor inside ourselves, the weakness that we cling to, kills us. It devours us from the inside like a virus—it keeps us from making the right decisions, from sticking by our loved ones—it makes us feel doomed, although we aren’t really. Yura could feel himself dozing off. “It’s a good thing I didn’t have to kick the door in” went the thought that capped off his day.

They had to lock the doors overnight at the warehouses where they slept, to fend off the drafts and stray dogs. Packs of them were keeping watch outside, hiding in the frosty mist of the railroad yard, scurrying down the sidings, heads held high, howling into the cold Bucharest sky. Winter came early that year; hoarfrost lay on the wires and apple branches. Bonfires heated up the warehouses quickly. They burned cardboard from the train station or hay found in freight trains. Their animals stood, still and obedient, day in and day out, waiting for their food. The horses were spooked by the nighttime howling of the dogs, seemingly anticipating their death, which might come at any moment. Every morning, the local government would send them delegations from various churches or members of Parliament; acrobats and hypnotists would emerge from the warehouses and bargain with them at great length. But no command was ever given to send the circus troupe back home, so they kept guarding their props and grazing their tame beasts, occasionally launching brazen raids on food storehouses in the suburbs, stealing crops out of the fields, and returning to their warehouses with fresh provisions for themselves and their animals. They slept, curled up between lions and foxes, quenched their thirst with chicken blood, and made animal sacrifices, entreating the heavens to send them blessings and good weather. The locals resisted as best they could, desperately trying to protect their emporia and household treasures. Finally, given the sheer volume of written complaints—some anonymous and some signed collectively by the workers of local enterprises—the management of the train station put their necks on the line for the circus, allocating them a few economy-class sleeper cars. Shortly before Christmas, they loaded up the animals and their requisitioned goods and the train headed east. The cars were laden with women’s fur coats and Turkish carpets, crates of oranges and glossy synthetic coats from East Germany—a real find! The worst thing was that the animals kept multiplying, causing a serious discrepancy between their actual and documented population; the border guards grew anxious, railroad workers scattered back to their homes, and people shut the gates of their roadside towns, as if the plague were coming. Eventually, they were let through. They traveled for ages, traversing the Carpathian Mountains, getting delayed at small stations in Eastern Galicia for weeks at a time, exchanging their East German coats for sheep’s milk cheese, and stubbornly pushing forward, homeward, to a place where nobody was waiting for them any longer.