Voroshilovgrad (4 page)

“Well there, sonny boy,” he asked, “are all the spots taken?”

“Yep.”

“Stand here next to me, otherwise I'll fall asleep too. It's all right for them—they can pass out, but I'm the one that's responsible.”

“Responsible for what?”

“The goods, sonny boy, the goods,” he said in a confidential tone.

He started telling me some sob stories about small-fry entrepreneurs from the Donbass region and their families. Two days ago they picked up the goods (athletic gear, Chinese-made sneakers, and other shit like that) in Kharkiv and headed for home. As soon as they got outside the city, the poor old bus broke down. “Sonny boy, the suspension is always giving me trouble—the last time it got fixed was before the Moscow Olympics, back in 1980! So we spent the night on the side of the highway.” The driver slithered back and forth between the tires while the small-fry entrepreneurs set up camp, lit a fire, sang songs, and played the guitar. They even managed to enjoy themselves. In the morning, the driver went to the closest village and brought some farmers over with a tractor. The farmers hauled them over to the train depot. They spent the next day and night there. The entrepreneurs doggedly stayed up all night, protecting their goods and singing songs on their guitar. They only ran over to the train station once to buy booze and
get some new strings. Eventually, the driver fixed the suspension, loaded up the entrepreneurs the best he could, and set off on the ill-fated road back to his beloved mining town in the Donbass region. When he saw the pileup near the bridge, he didn't lose his cool; he cut a quick U-turn and got over to the other side of the river by taking some back roads. Now nothing could hold him back—well, at least that's what he said.

The bus was coughing up a lung trying to crest a gentle rise. Up ahead, a wide, sunny valley filled with light-green cornfields and golden ravines stretched out before us. The driver pushed on decisively. Then he turned off the engine and relaxed a bit, letting the bus coast. It slid down the decline like an avalanche caused by a bunch of Japanese tourists shouting at the top of the mountain The wind was whistling, brushing against the sides of the bus. Bugs were smashing into the windshield like drops of May rain. We flew downhill, picking up speed amid the hovering voices of those Indian singers promising enduring happiness and a painless death. Once we had rolled to the bottom of the valley, our momentum carried us upward for a while when the land began to rise again. At that point the driver tried to restart the engine. The Ikarus bus stalled with a sharp iron-on-iron screech, and then it came to a complete stop. Desperate now, the driver remained silent—and I felt too awkward to speak up. Finally, he dropped his head onto the wheel. His shoulders heaved from time to time. At first I thought he was crying, which I found oddly touching. After listening in a bit closer, though, I realized that he'd just fallen asleep. All the other passengers on the ghost bus were asleep too, and nobody was so much as thinking about protecting the goods.
I walked up and down the aisle once again, then peered out the window. The wind was gently brushing against the young corn; there was absolute silence, and the sun was eating away at the valley like a grease stain attacking a tablecloth. Suddenly, somebody touched my hand. I looked around. At the back of the bus there were some dark brown curtains that hadn't been washed for some time. It had seemed to me that there wasn't anything behind those curtains except maybe a wall or a window or something like that. But no, a hand was sticking out. It grabbed me and dragged me easily inside. After slipping through the invisible entrance I found myself in a tiny room. It was a kind of chill-out space, a place for meditating and making love, a little cell caressed by perfume and shadows. Synthetic Chinese rugs bearing strange ornaments and images depicting deer hunting, teatime, and Beijing pioneers greeting Chairman Mao decorated the walls of the tiny space. Two small sofas were placed up against the walls. Three dark-skinned men and one dark-skinned woman were sitting on these sofas. They were in their underwear, the men's strange and white, the woman's modern and sporty. Skulls dangled from heavy necklaces wrapped around her neck. Instead of a comb, there was a paper knife sticking out of her hair, and she had a thermos resting on her lap. Their skin blended into the darkness; all I could see was the greedy glint of their yellowish eyes, illuminating the room like amber. She reached out, grasped my hand and didn't let it go, looked me straight in the eyes and asked:

“Who are you?”

“Who are
you
?” I countered, feeling the warmth of her palm and the weight of her silver rings.

“I'm Karolina,” she said, and drew back her hand sharply. After sizing me up, one of the men whispered something to his neighbor, and the latter laughed briefly.

“Where are you going?” Karolina asked, looking me over in the partial darkness.

“Home,” I answered.

“Who's expecting you?” she asked, taking the knife out of her hair and letting her flowing locks cover her eyes.

“Nobody.”

Karolina laughed.

“Why are you going to a place where nobody is expecting you?” she asked, producing a pomegranate from somewhere or other and cutting it in half.

“Why does it matter?” I was baffled. “I just haven't been there for a while.”

“Have some,” she said, offering me half of the pomegranate. “What are you going to do there, in this place where nobody is expecting you?”

“I won't be staying there too long. I'm leaving for Kharkiv tomorrow.”

“You're that afraid of returning?” Karolina asked, chuckling, lifting her half of the pomegranate to her mouth and sucking on it. “How can you be so sure? You haven't even gotten there yet and you're already planning to leave. You're afraid.”

“I've got stuff to do,” I explained. “I can't stay any longer than that.”

“You can if you want.”

“No,” I said, irritated. “I can't.”

“You only think you'll leave right away because you've forgotten all the experiences you had there. Once you remember, you'll find that leaving is harder than you think. Here.”

She handed me a mug filled with something she had poured from the thermos. The drink smelled like a mix of cinnamon and valerian. I tried it. It had an acerbic and spicy taste to it. I drank it all. I was knocked out immediately.

Wheat fields surrounded the airport. Some bright, poisonous-looking flowers were growing closer to the runway. Wasps were hovering lazily above, frozen in mid-flight as if there were corpses below them. Every morning the sun heated up the asphalt and dried out all the grass poking through the concrete slabs. Flags were whipping in the wind off to the side, above the air-traffic control station. A bit farther away, behind the administration building, the blistering morning sun touched down on a row of trees woven together by spiderwebs. Strange gusts of wind tore across the fields like animals emerging from the night, attracted by the airport's green lights, only to retreat back into the wheat to hide from the burning June sun. As it warmed up, the asphalt reflected the sunlight, blinding the birds flying over the runway. Gas tanks and a couple of trucks were parked at the fence. Some empty garages, smelling of sweet stagnant water and oil, were just emerging from the darkness. After a while, some mechanics appeared, changed into worn black overalls, and started fiddling around with their machines. The early June sky hovered above
the airport, flapping loudly in the wind like freshly washed sheets, rising and swooping down to the asphalt. Around eight, the laborious roar of an engine made itself heard, heaving air in and out of the depths of the atmosphere. The airplane itself was still hidden behind the sun, but its shadow scurried across the wheat fields, scaring the hell out of the birds and foxes. The surface of the sky shattered like porcelain. A good old Antonov An-2, the pride of Soviet aviation, a model that had seen its share of combat, though this one was almost certainly a crop duster, was descending nearby. Deafening the morning with its prehistoric motor, it spun around the sleepy city, awakening its residents from their light and fleeting summer dreams. The pilots scoped out the fields of crops topped with sunny honey, fresh grass sprouting on the railroad ties and embankments, the golden river sand, and the chalky banks the color of silverware. The city was left behind with its factory smoke stacks and railroad; the airplane was getting ready to land. Light poured into the cockpit and shone coldly on the metal. The machine whipped across the runway, its stiff wheels bouncing up and down on the cracked asphalt. The pilots hopped down onto the ground and started helping the baggage handlers pull out large burlap sacks full of regional and Republic-wide newspapers, letters, and parcels. Once everything had been unloaded, they walked over to the building, leaving the plane to warm up in the sun.

My friends and I lived on the other side of the fields, on the outskirts of the city, in white panel apartment buildings surrounded by tall pine trees. In the evenings, we would escape from our neighborhood, roam around in the wheat, hiding from passing cars and scampering along the fence, and then we'd take a rest in
the dusty grass and look at the aircraft. The An-2, with its all-metal airframe and canvas-upholstered wings, looked like something not of this world, some conveyance utilized by demons who burned the sky above us with oil and lead. God's messengers were riding inside it; the mighty propeller was smashing the blue ice of the sky and hurling poplar fuzz into the next world. We came home well after dark, pushing through the hot, thick wheat, all the while dreaming about aviation. We all wanted to become pilots. The majority of us became losers.

From time to time I still have dreams about aviators. They're always making an emergency landing somewhere in wheat fields. Their planes cut at dusk through the thick wheat like razors; all the canvas upholstery gives with a loud ripping sound as the stalks wrap around their planes' undercarriages before they become bogged down forever in the black, dried-up earth. The pilots bail out of their boiling cockpits and fall into the wheat that immediately spins a web around their legs. They stand and peer into the distance as if they're trying to make out something on the horizon. But there's nothing on the horizon except for more wheat fields. They go on for miles; there's no hope reaching the end. The aviators leave their aircraft to cool down in the twilight and make their way west, chasing the rapidly guttering sun. The stalks are tall and impassable; the pilots can hardly make their way through the fields; they forge along nonetheless and smash up against an invisible wall, over and over again, even though they know they have no chance of getting out. They're wearing leather helmets, goggles, flight gloves. For some reason, they don't want to detach their open parachutes; they trail the aviators like long and heavy crocodile tails.

I woke to the humming of the engine. The three men were sleeping next to me on the couch, and Karolina was gone. I looked out into the main section of the bus. It was already quite late; to the right, outside the window, the evening sun was speckled with red. I wondered what time it was. I walked up to one of the entrepreneurs dreaming sweet dreams, moved his hand and looked at his watch. It was nine-thirty. “Damn,” I thought to myself, “did I really sleep through my stop?” I went up to the driver. He greeted me like an old friend, without taking his eyes off the road. I looked out the windshield. There would be a turn coming up, but I knew that if you kept going straight, then in a few kilometers I'd get where I was going. But the driver was slowing down and was getting ready to take the turn.

“Hey guy, look,” I said to him, “why don't you drop me off at the gas station. It's only a few kilometers away.”

“The one up on the hill?” asked the driver.

“Yep.”

“By the tower?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Nope,” he said. “We're turning here.”

“Hold on,” I said, hoping to strike a deal. “You've got something wrong with your suspension, right? My brother has a repair shop. He'll give you a complete overhaul.”