Zakhar Prilepin - Sin

Molotok, with a red face, kicked the poser in the ribs with his heavy boot. He jolted from the blow. Coughing, he got on all fours and tried to crawl away. I stepped on his coat.

“Don’t go away,” I said to him.

Molotok kicked him again — in the stomach, and I thought I saw something fall out of his mouth.

His arms weakened, he couldn’t stay on all fours, and he fell face down, with his chin in the pond, blowing red bubbles which kept bursting.

I squatted down next to him, grabbed a firm hold of the hair on the back of his head, and several times, seven I think, I smashed his head, his face, his nose, his lips, against the asphalt. I wiped my hand on his coat, but it still remained dirty, slimy and disgusting.

Only then did I notice that the foreign car… with those teenagers in it… was still there. They were watching us from behind the glass.

Looking around, I found a rock. They realized what I was looking for, and they rapidly turned the car around, its brakes squealing.

“Get the fuck out of here!” I shouted, throwing the rock, but it didn’t reach them.

Molotok also found a rock, but it was too late to throw it. Rocking the stone in his hand, he threw it into the grass by the roadside.

“Bye, Syoma,” I said almost inaudibly.

“Yes, let’s,” he replied hoarsely.

At home, my wife was sitting in the kitchen.

“I’m very tired,” she said, not turning around.

Taking off my boots, tearing them off, as they were stuck, I looked at the back of my wife’s head.

The child in our room began to cry.

“Could you go to him?” she asked.

I went into the bathroom, and turned on a jet of cold, almost icy water. I put my hands under it.

“Could you?” she asked again.

I stubbornly rubbed my wrists, palms and fingers with soap, so that the soap got under my clipped nails. I put my hands under the water yet again and looked at what was pouring off them.

The child cried in the room alone.

Two sons are growing up.

One of them is four months old. He wakes up at night; he doesn’t cry, no. He lies on his stomach, supports himself on his elbows, raises his white-domed little head and breathes. In short, fast breaths, like a dog following a scent.

I don’t turn the light on.

I listen to him.

“Where are you running to, lad?” I ask hoarsely in the darkness.

He breathes.

His head gets tired, and it hits the mattress of the child’s bed. Oops, there’s the rubber nipple under his face. He understands everything, the wise minnow — he twists his head, takes the nipple between his lips and sucks.

If he gets tired of the nipple, there is a soft noise — it falls out. And he breathes again.

From his breathing, I guess that he has turned his head and is looking into the darkness: I can’t see anything.

…But I want to sleep.

“Ignat, you’re a rascal,” I say sullenly.

He falls silent for a moment and listens: Where do I know that voice from?

My head is heavy like a damp burdock in autumn — nothing sticks to it, except sleep, dragging downward, into sticky mud.

Initially I turned the light on when I was woken up by his breathing — he was happy then. Every night we talked until dawn on the couch. I put my son next to me, and we talk. He grimaces, I laugh, keeping my mouth shut, so as not to scare him. Now I don’t turn on the light, I’m tired.

I don’t even remember the minute when he falls asleep, because I’ve fallen into unconsciousness earlier myself.

At night I wake up once, sometimes twice — in sinful fatherly horror: Where is he? What’s that? I can’t hear him breathing!

But if it’s getting light already, the darkness is fading — I pull the cover from the bed and see him there: his face is like an onion bulb, and he’s quietly snuffling.

I like to kiss him when he wakes up. With my lips I touch his cheeks, filled with the milk of my darling, and I am enraptured.

Lord, how tender he is. Like the flesh of a melon.

And his breath… What is the blooming of the shaggy flowers of spring to me — my son snuffles by my face, radiant as though after Communion.

I raise him up above me — his two cheeks hang down, and his saliva drips onto my chest.

I jiggle him to make him laugh. Do you know how they laugh? Like sheep: Ba-a-a-a.

I throw him up gently, without stretching my arms. He doesn’t laugh. But he twists his head: Aha, this is where I live…

“Bleat like a sheep, Ignatka, come on”! I jiggle him. He doesn’t want to. He’s sick of being shaken, he’s going to get grumpy.

I put the baby on my chest, and his feet kick me in the stomach. He raises himself up on his elbows, and looks at my head. He gets tired of this, and lowers his head: A beard, viewed close up. And interes-ting beard. If I could just figure out how to chew it.

I stroke his warm head. It seems to be covered in soft fat.

I’ll pester the baby and look him over until my darling wakes up in the next room.

We have a large apartment, two spacious rooms with high ceilings are divided by a corridor. In the second room on the lower bunk of a two-level bed, my darling is asleep. I sent her there in the evening so that she would get some sleep. And on the upper bunk is my elder son, five years old, with an angelic nature, and my eyes. His name is Gleb.

She’s woken up, my flower, and seeing her reassures and soothes me. She comes towards me shyly:

“Get any sleep?”

She’s not asking about me, but about him. Because if he was asleep, then I would also have had some dreams.

She kisses us in turn, but him first. She says tender words to him. She only smiles at me. Then she places her palms under her breasts — they’re heavy, I can see it too.

“It’s built up,” she says.

“He’ll drink it for you,” I replied. “He won’t mind.”

He never cries, not even when he’s hungry. He only sometimes starts to whine, without any tears, as if he’s complaining: I’m lying here by myself, guys, is it hard to amuse me? For example, I like to look at the bookshelves, when I’m carried past them. There are a lot of different colors in them.

When he was born, he didn’t cry either, I saw it myself, I was there; he didn’t cry at the hospital either, and during his first days at home he lay there, entranced, and looked attentively at the world. Only on the third day of our life together, when I went into the kitchen to check on the cabbage soup, I heard a baby’s offended cry.

I ran to him — and immediately guessed what was going on.

“Did you pinch him, you little bitch?” I asked my darling, hiding a smile.

“I thought he was mute,” she replied.

Although I forgot — once he did cry his eyes out.

Spoiled by his constantly good mood, my darling and I ran out to the shop, leaving the children at home. To buy sweet biscuits for mama and bitter wine for the father. When we came back, we could already hear a terrible wailing, and in two voices.

I flew up the stairs, kicking my shoes into the corridor — my younger son was bawling in his bed, already hoarse, and my elder son had shut himself in the toilet, and was screaming his head off.

“Ignatka, dear!” said the father to the younger son.

“Glebushka, darling,” said the mother to the elder son.

“Mama, help Ignatka!” Gleb sobbed into my darling’s stomach. “I can’t make him quiet!”

He felt sorry for his brother.

Soon Gleb will appear, wandering in on his long awkward legs, my luminous child.

And we will all be together, three men and one girl.

She is very pleased that there are three of us and one of her. My darling never wanted to give birth to someone in her own image. Perhaps because she herself was an eccentric and headstrong girl, until I clutched my greedy hand around her wrist and gave her my child to bear — to the detriment of her girlish lightness, but to the benefit of her human wisdom.