Zakhar Prilepin - Sin

“Dearie…what is it? What’s happened… dearie?”

Then only I twisted my lips, and my tears burst out — they ran and flowed down all the sides of my childish face, the reflection of which I often try to see in the faces of my children.

Grama bandaged my finger, and I didn’t tell her anything, and never told anyone about it in my life, because I completely stopped thinking about it.

Death, as annoying as the toothache, I only remembered when I heard my son, and I had completely forgotten the incident with the axe — it unexpectedly appeared in my memory together with the clamminess in my heart, and the feeling of bleeding flesh, when my darling told me:

“There was a phone call. Your grandma is dead. Gramma.”

The village where I grew up is a long way away. It takes a long time to get there, and trains don’t go there.

I went to the garage, to my large, white car.

There was a large, white snow lying by the garage, and I spent a long time clearing it away with a spade, and was soon wet and angry.

Then I used a crowbar to crack the ice that seemed to be trying to get into the garage. The broken ice lay in crooked, sharp pieces on the snow and on the uncovered asphalt.

I spent a long time warming up the car, and I smoked, sweating, exhausted, broken into frozen pieces myself — a shard of white forehead flashed in the rear vision mirror, and a white, freezing hand holding a cigarette stuck out the window.

Ten minutes later I pulled out of the garage, hearing the crack of ice and the crunch of snow under the wheels.

It was completely dark now, and it was clear that I would have to drive all night to help my grandfather organize the funeral.

I ran home, and my darling came out to meet me and see me off, holding Ignatka in her arms, with Gleb standing by her, his lips trembling. He couldn’t bear it, and sobbed that he didn’t want me to go away. Scared by his cry, the baby also gave a thin screech. Completely broken up, I ran down the steps, hearing the heart-wrenching voices of the two children, afraid to hear a third crying voice in addition to theirs.

“What’s wrong with you, damn it!” I cursed; the car door slammed, and forgetting to turn on the headlights, I tore through the yard in complete darkness. When I switched on the lights, I saw a dog running and looking around in terror. I slammed on the brakes, the car skidded, I frantically spun the steering wheel in the opposite direction, and pressing the accelerator, I shot out onto the empty street.

Half an hour later, I had calmed down a little, but the road was awful; the constantly falling snow was wet and immediately congealed into ice on the windshield.

Once every half hour I forced myself to stop, ventured out into the nasty, cold darkness, and scraped the frozen snow off the parts of the windscreen that the constantly crawling windscreen wipers could not reach.

There were no officers at the checkpoints, and there were increasingly fewer cars coming in the opposite direction. I was overtaken several times, and I stepped on the gas so as to drive in company with someone, unobtrusively staying one hundred meters or so behind. But soon these cars turned off to the left or the right, to the villages alongside the roads, and in the end I found myself alone, among the snow and the Middle Russian plateau, on the way from Nizhny Novgorod to a Ryazan village.

Sometimes I started talking out loud, but the conversation didn’t catch on, and I fell silent.

You remember how Gramma brought you tea in the morning, and biscuits with country butter… You woke up and drank, warm and happy…

I don’t remember.

You remember.

I tried to perk myself up, to stop myself from being sad, from drowsing off or moping painfully and drearily.

Remember: you are a child. I am a child. And your body is still weak and stupid. My body. Remember…

Gramma is nearby, she loves me without measure, she is attentive and tender. And around me the world, which I measure with small steps, still believing that as soon as I grow up I will walk across it in its entirety.

Gramma and I talked a lot, she played with me and sang to me, and I also loved her very much; but everything that I remembered so vividly suddenly feel apart from some reason, not a single happy event from the recent past became living and warm, and with a screech the wipers dispersed the memories from the windscreen.

The road wound through the Murom woods.

There were endless little creeks covered with ice, and villages without a single light burning.

I wanted to see at least a street light — so that it would wink in welcome — but who needed streetlights here but me.

The car travelled smoothly, although the road, I could see and feel, was slippery, uncleared and not sprinkled with sand.

After several hours I came to an intersection — my path was cut off by a four-lane highway. And here at last I saw a massive truck coming from the left, and I was happy to see it, because I wasn’t lost on this frozen earth alone — here was a trucker going full speed ahead.

His truck is empty, and so he’s not scared of the traffic cops or the devil, and perhaps he’s also happy to see me…

This is what I thought as I pressed on the brakes to let the truck past, but the road did not hold my car, and the wheels did not grip the asphalt. And even the wind, it seemed, was blowing into the back windscreen, pushing me, placing my body, locked in a warm and smoky salon, under a blow.

Ivau! Ga!

Good morning, Papa…

I tore at the gearstick, shifting from neutral into second, then right into first — trying to brake that way. The car jolted, for a moment it seemed that it had slowed down, but I was already on the highway, and was looking stupidly ahead, into the emptiness and the falling of white snowflakes. From the left, my face, a mad-eyed reflection in the rear vision mirror, was bathed in a ghastly light.

The driver didn’t slow down, but turned the wheel and powerfully moved into the empty opposing lane. The truck, crashing and waving the enormous tail of the trailer, drove right past my eyes, maybe just half a meter from my car.

When the huge hulk disappeared, stirring up a cloud of snow, I realized that I was still swaying slowly. And I was gently moving the wheel, like a child pretending to be a driver.

I crossed the road in first gear. The trucker drove in the opposing lane for about a hundred meters, then moved back into his own lane, without stopping, to tell me that I… That I was mortal.

I cracked open the window and moved into second gear. Then into third, and almost straight away into fourth.

“Hi, Zakharka. You’ve aged.”

We were playing hide-and-seek in the empty lot behind the shop, a few village boys.

The one whose turn it was to lead stood facing the door, loudly counting to one hundred. During this time, everyone was supposed to hide.

The dark-faced, gap-toothed, sharp-shouldered boys hid in the labyrinths of the nearby new two-story building, which smelt of brick dust, and in the dark corners, of urine. Someone sneezed in bushes, revealing himself. Others, scraping the skin on their ribs, crawled through the gap in the fence that separated the village school from the lot. And they also climbed trees and hurtled off the branches, running to overtake the leader to the door of the village shop, to touch the square drawn on it with a brick, shouting “Keep away!”

Because if you didn’t say that, you’d have to be the leader yourself.

I was the smallest one, so no one really looked for me.

But I took care to hide, I lay there motionless, and listened to the toothy laughter of the boys, quietly envying their impudence, their swift heels and dirty language. Their dirty language was made of different letters than the ones I pronounced: when they cursed, each word rang out and jumped like a small and ferocious ball. When I cursed — secretly, in a whisper, with my face in the grass; or loudly, in an empty house when my mother was at work — the words nastily hung on my lips, and all I had to do was wipe them off with my sleeve, and then for a long time examine what had dried on it…