Zakhar Prilepin - Sin

He laughed a lot, teasing his cousins about little things, and felt that he had become more confident and stronger, though when this had happened remained inexplicable.

Ksyusha made a few feeble brush strokes and went away somewhere.

Katya talked merrily about her sister: what she was like as a child, and how this childhood ended one summer. And she talked about herself, about the strange things she did when she was young. And even when she wasn’t young.

“Idiot,” Zakharka said in response to something trivial.

“What did you say?” she asked in surprise.

“You’re an idiot, I said.”

Katya fell silent, and went away to mix the paint. She concentrated as she stirred a stick in the can, lifting it up and watching the thick paint slowly dripping off it.

About three hours later, they were sitting on the steps of the house. Katya was peeling potatoes, and Zakharka was chewing pumpkin seeds, feeding some of them to the chickens.

“You’re the first man to call me an idiot,” Katya informed him seriously.

Zakharka didn’t reply. He looked at her quickly and kept chewing the seeds.

“What do you think about that?” Katya asked.

“I only called you that because of something you did,” he replied.

“And the worst thing is that I wasn’t offended at you.”

Zakharka shrugged.

“No, say something at least,” Katya insisted. “…about that…”

“Would you have been offended at your beloved husband?” Zakharka asked, just for the sake of asking something.

“I love you more than I love my husband,” Katya replied simply, and cut the last piece of skin off the potato.

With a gentle splash, the potato, naked like a baby, fell into the bucket.

Zakharka looked at how many seeds were left in his hand.

“What else are we going to do today?” he asked, after a silence.

Katya looked somewhere past him through clear, thoughtful eyes.

In the house, Rodik woke up and lifted his voice.

They rushed to him, almost competing, each one with their own tenderness, which was so abundant that Rodik shrank away in surprise: what’s up with you?

“Shall we go for a walk?” Katya suggested. “I’m sick of working”.

Along a faint path, which Zakharka had never walked on, they quietly wandered around the back of the village, with Rodik on Zakharka’s shoulders, as always.

They walked through shady bushes, sometimes along a creek, and then along a quiet dusty road uphill slightly, towards the sun.

Unexpectedly for Zakharka, they reached an iron fence, and iron gates with a cross on them.

“The old cemetery,” Katya said quietly.

Rodik didn’t care where they were, and he ran between the graves and rusty fences, chattering in his own language.

Katya and Zakharka walked together, reading the old Russian names, calculating the years of life, delighting in the long lifespans and wondering at the short ones. They found entire families buried in the same patch of ground, old people, those who died on the day they were born, brave soldiers and young girls. They tried to guess how, and for what reason, and where it had happened.

At a grave without photos or dates, they stood pointlessly, and looked at it. Katya was in front, Zakharka was behind her, close to her, feeling the warmth of her hair and with all his hot body feeling how warm she would be, how flexible and intolerable if he embraced her… right now…

Katya stood there motionless, without saying anything, although they had just been joking incessantly.

Suddenly, Rodik came running out at them, as if from out of a hiding place, and they all livened up — initially quite randomly, pronouncing strange words, as if they were testing their throats. But then everything became better, much better, quite good indeed.

They returned feeling quite revived, as if they had just been in a very fine and welcoming place.

They took up the brushes with pleasure once more.

All that day, with its smells of paint, the unnaturally bright colors, the quick lunch — spring onions, radishes and the first young tomatoes — and then sheets of wallpaper, intoxicating glue, Rodik getting underfoot, already smeared with everything possible — in the end he was taken to Grandma — and a still ill-tempered Ksyusha (“…she had an argument with her boyfriend…” Katya whispered), and their hands, washed with gasoline in the pale summer twilight — all of this, when Zakharka finally went to bed at night, for some reason transformed into a very bright carousel, a whirligig, on which he was spinning, and wide-eyed faces flashed past, looking fixedly, but then the chairs on the long chains were taken a long way away, and only the colors remained: green, blue, green.

And only by morning, with the distant singing of birds, came an unexpected stillness, — transparent and gentle, like at the cemetery.

…Every one of my sins… Zakharka thought sleepily, every one of my sins will torment me… And the good that I have done — it’s lighter than fluff. It will be blown away by any draft of wind…

The following summer days, which had begun so long and slow, suddenly started to slip by unnoticeably, like the almost even circle of a whirligig, identically happy to such extent that their pattern faded.

On the last morning, already packed, wearing jeans, a sturdy shirt, and shoes that surprised his feet, Zakharka wandered around the yard.

He wondered what else to do. He couldn’t think of anything.

He found the bow and the last arrow for it. He stretched the bow string and let it go. The arrow fell in the dust, a pink feather on its end.

Like a fool, he said to himself happily. You’re behaving like a fool.

He kissed Grandma, hugged Grandpa, and walked away, so as not to see their tears. Strong and weightless, he almost flew to the highway — the name given to the asphalt road outside the village, where a bus drove past at six in the morning.

He didn’t go to say goodbye to the sisters, what was the point of waking them up.

How the starlings are screeching, he noticed on the way.

And he also thought: The burdock is aromatic.

He rode in the bus with a clear heart.

How right everything is, my God, he repeated serenely. How right, my God. What a long life lies ahead. There’ll be another summer, and it will be warm again, and flowers in our arms…

But there was never another summer.

That spring I quit my job working as a bouncer at a bar. I was so filled with tenderness towards the world that I decided to join the foreign legion as a mercenary. I had to find some way to apply myself, by any means.

I had turned twenty-three: a strange age, when it’s so easy to die. I was unmarried, physically strong, energetic and cheerful. I was good at shooting and could allow the possibility of shooting at anything, especially in another country, where there are other gods that don’t care about me.

In the large city where I came from a distant suburb, there was something similar to an office of the foreign legion. They accepted my documents and talked to me about some specific issues.

I did as many push-ups as they needed, did as many chin-ups as they wanted, happily ran for five kilometers and did some other things, either jumped or did sit-ups, probably one hundred or one hundred and fifty times.

After a psychological test that was ten pages long, the psychologist raised his indifferent eyebrows at me and said tiredly: “Aren’t you a person to envy… Are you really like this, or have you already taken this test?”

As I waited to be summoned to the representative office, I wandered around the city and breathed in the warmth that smelt of bushes and petrol with my young lungs, and as I gathered air into them I thought that if I wanted to, I could take off a little.