Сергей Жадан - Mesopotamia

And then they started chattering all at once, interrupting and deriding one another.

“He wasn’t boxing anymore! He was already coaching kids then!” Rustam yelled.

“Whatcha talkin’ about?” Sem said, shaking his head. “I went to all his fights. He didn’t box like the old Marat, obviously, but that’s just how it goes.”

“What fights, what are you talking about?” Rustam asked hotly. “He would just loaf around on the couch for weeks at a time. He wouldn’t even leave the neighborhood.”

“That’s right. He’d only leave to box,” Sem declared.

“With who? Come on!” Rustam sprang to his feet, but Sem tugged at the sleeve of his athletic jacket to make him sit back down. “His heart was aching.”

“Yep, that’s true.” Kostyk backed him up. “His heart ached with kindness!”

I said my goodbyes, shaking Rustam and Sem’s hands, patting Kostyk on the back, writing down Sasha’s phone number, and waving to Benia. Nobody stopped me. They were all exhausted, falling asleep at the table, but they held their ground—it was as if they were afraid of being left alone with all those stories. The fog rose toward the May sky, laying objects bare and hollowing out the darkness. Three windows on the second floor yellowly consumed the night. All three neighbors—the two heavyset women and the frail one—stared intently at my back, both presaging and foreseeing something to come.

I knew the hairdresser. Marat met her last March. He just happened to be walking by when he had some automatic reaction to the light sparkling on windows displaying pretty women’s seemingly severed heads. He decided to stop in. It was the end of a cold workday, and she was the only one there. She was just about to set off into the night—what’s the point of sitting around in a salon when real, juicy life is getting under way on the other side of the black windows? She had already shed her shiny apron with its numerous pockets stuffed with scissors, combs, and electric trimmers. And then Marat stepped inside. She immediately noticed the dark circles under his eyes, which alluded to all his sleepless nights and his tobacco-roasted lungs; she noticed his stubble, which, oddly enough, made him look younger and meaner than he really was. She noticed his bandaged right hand, which made her realize that this here was a guy that wouldn’t back down if challenged, no matter what. Her eyes slid down his black hoodie, down his Nike gym bag, down his black jeans dotted with cigarette burns, all the way to his light sneakers. He looked like a movie hitman. The cops always find the distinctive footprints left by those sneakers, that’s what gives them away. She put her apron back on and nodded at a chair, signaling Marat to take a seat. She walked over, examined him at length in the mirror, and ran her hand through his prickly, black hair. She readied the scissors carefully; there were sparks flying off Marat and she was afraid of getting burned.

Marat told us that her whole look was too pink and too bloody. Pink hair, bloody makeup, pink shirt, bloody nails, pink, fluffy slippers, and blood-colored underwear. When she touched him, he felt how impatient her hands were, how adept she was at touching men, feeling their heat and restraining the quivering tension of their bodies. Or not, Marat added. He spun the chair around and pulled her against him, but that pink apron of hers, weighed down by all kinds of hairdresser stuff, kept getting in the way. Marat tried pulling it off, but it clung to her body, determined to protect her from the caresses of strangers. Then she untied the strings and tossed it on the floor, and the ringing metal of scissors and combs flew under the chair. Now she stood before him and he looked at her bare stomach, which her tiny shirt did nothing to conceal, and then he jerked her down onto his lap, stripping off all her clothes, not daring to stop, not for an instant, propelled by some unaccountable urgency. She didn’t even close the door of the salon; somebody peeked in while Marat was ripping off all her red straps and pink stockings, holding her against him to feel her skin grow warm from his touch and cold from the brisk March draft whipping in from the street. When she cried out and froze, he turned her face toward the light, trying to understand what had happened, why she wasn’t moving, until he too froze and could do nothing but keep squeezing her and examining her hair and eyebrows up close, stunned at the brightness and color of this girl, imagining how many meticulous minutes of drawing before her mirror and draping herself in brilliant folds they entailed, and then marveling at how easily she had shed them all again. He was also surprised by how quickly and smoothly she quieted down. Her gaze was intent and detached, instantly disconcerting; he stood up, carried her across the room, tossed her onto the leather couch decisively, though not very tenderly, and walked out the door. He hadn’t said a single word to her the whole time.

He came by the next evening. She was by herself, like before. Marat closed the door, standing there and waiting in silence. She knew where this was going; she turned off the lights. Outside the window, the street was infused with strands of light and shadow; they blended together and streaked apart, blurring and eroding the neighborhood’s buildings away. She rushed to tell him odd and unexpected things, saying that she’d been waiting for him and that she knew he’d come, telling him about herself, reminiscing about her ex-boyfriends, quietly explaining what she liked and what she didn’t, what she loved and what she feared until the wee hours of the morning, showing no signs of fatigue, not asking him a single question, doing everything he wanted, submitting to everything—they kept going until he let up and fell asleep.

For some reason, Marat liked her; he talked about feeling her heart speed up when they kissed and then turn slow and quiet again.

“Sometimes when we’re together she acts like I’m not even there, even though she’s lying next to me. Or on top of me. She looks right through me, at something only her eyes can see. Maybe she’s just listening to my breathing or maybe she’s just inhaling my smell. Couldn’t tell ya,” he said.

He seemed to like that too. At home, he wouldn’t even bother hiding the fact that he was going to the salon. When he started going there more regularly he’d say that he needed to go to a salon to get a good shave, that a real man should always be clean-shaven. The trouble was, he’d sometimes shave before he left… He was crashing and burning, and all his relationships were falling apart—with Alina, his parents, and his brother too. He’d even started fighting with his hairdresser girl more often. One time he admitted that he was afraid to let her cut his hair.

“She’s gonna chop my head off one of these days,” he said ominously. That’s pretty much how it all played out. Remember that story about the scissors? He made the whole thing up in my kitchen, with his hand pressed to the gaping wound. He was complaining that she had gone completely insane, that she wanted to kill him, that she was demanding the impossible from him, and that she was fucking him like there was no tomorrow. He tried talking to her, just to explain something to her.

“Do you realize that?” he yelled. “I just wanted to talk to her!”

But that caused even more drama; she just didn’t want to hear it, crying and accusing him of God knows what. He got all riled up, screamed at her, demolished the chair, smashed the mirror, threw bottles of cologne on the floor, and bent some hair dryers in half. Well, that’s when she drove the scissors into his side, right up to the handles.

“Just don’t tell anyone, all right? Nobody can find out about this.”