They don’t ask about soldiers here. They don’t talk about the military here. Even those men who have just come back from service avoid the subject when they sit together in groups in the long evenings.
Iosif stands from the table and walks outside, and Artyom follows him.
Iosif’s mother asks where they’re going and Iosif tells her that the sheeting on the roof needs to be fixed. He’ll nail it down in case the helicopters pass again and it’s ripped off. In the shelter, Iosif looks in the steel box under the workbench for a hammer and nails. There are only two walls to the shelter, facing north–south, made of thin lengths of wood, with the bark still on them. Logs are piled up against one of the walls, and there’s a small strip of earth where you can stand—the place where the boys kept their motorbike—which is spotted with blotches of oil from all their futile mechanical efforts.
“When did they leave?”
“Last night.”
“Last night? And they haven’t come back yet?”
“No. Of course not. Did you not notice your father gone?”
Artyom didn’t. His father often comes home when Artyom is asleep and leaves before he wakes. His father needs very little sleep. Sometimes Artyom wakes in the middle of the night and he can hear the wireless playing in the kitchen. There’s candlelight and he knows his father is just sitting and listening. His father can sit for hours without distraction. When he was small, Artyom used to walk into the kitchen and ask his father why he was still awake, or sometimes he would say he was thirsty and his father would take the bottle of milk they kept sitting in a bucket of water—before they had a fridge—and let Artyom drink a mouthful, but no more than that. And he would sit in his father’s lap and listen to the dancing violins and thudding drums of the music that would remind him of fairy stories, of little elves and big, stomping ogres. The volume turned down so low that it seemed at odds with the drama of the music, as if someone was telling him an epic tale in snatched whispers. Artyom would lie like a sick calf in his arms, drinking in any warmth that came his way.
Iosif finds the hammer and rattles an old tin can full of nails, looking for ones that are strong enough for the job.
“Do you know where they’ve gone?”
“Pripyat. But you didn’t hear it from me. If he comes home and Mother knows where he was, he’ll hit us both with this.”
Iosif wields the hammer as he speaks, lets its weight drag his wrist wherever it wants to go.
“No, he won’t.”
Artyom says this instinctively and they both look at the hammer that Iosif holds under his chin. Sometimes Artyom speaks with a definition that Iosif admires.
“Why did they go to Pripyat?”
“I don’t know. What, you think I know everything? I don’t know.”
Iosif finds the nails and puts them into his pocket and they climb onto the roof, pushing their legs off the side of the shelter to give them momentum. The structure wobbles when they put some force against it.
“I’m surprised the thing wasn’t flattened when the helicopters went over.”
“I know. Me too.”
If they knew any specifics about the helicopters, what model or make they were, they would have used those terms, but they don’t. They know every model of car ever produced in the Union. They know nothing about helicopters.
They walk along the roof, careful to stand only on the supporting beams, defined by the lines of nails; they don’t want to fall through. Iosif kneels at the place where the tin sheeting has come loose, takes a nail into his mouth, and holds it down. Artyom steps over him and weighs it down a little further along. This isn’t really necessary, but he needs to make himself useful. Iosif decides to put new holes in the tin. If he just uses the old ones, it will be easy for the nails to be wrenched out.
Iosif bangs on the first nail, and the sound of the nail scratching the sheet makes Artyom want to bite down on his knuckles. He won’t react though; he can’t lose face in front of Iosif. He thinks that Iosif’s mother must feel like she’s in the centre of a tin drum. He expects her to come out and wait until they’re finished, but she doesn’t. Every sound is magnified against a tin roof. In their own house he often hears rats scuttling above them, a sound he has never become used to. He loves when it rains, especially when evening is closing in and he’s doing his homework by the stove and the drops come down, with a beautiful regularity, falling evenly over the whole roof, just gravity and water.
Iosif makes quick work of the hammering. Iosif does everything in short, sharp bursts. He’s small but incredibly compact. His father has said he’ll make a good boxer someday, and Artyom doesn’t doubt this, the way Iosif darts about. Even in school, when they have writing exercises to do, Iosif can’t help but look about him, can’t help but jitter his legs and elbows.
When he’s finished, they sit and stare across the fields. Near the grain silo, there are two tractors tilling the soil. Both of them know how to drive a tractor, but the kolkhoz manager won’t let them do any of the machine work. They only get the dull jobs, like feeding the pigs and milking the cattle. They’ve pleaded with him enough times, but he always says, “And what if something happens, what then, you break a tractor, what then?”
“I wonder what this all looks like from a helicopter,” Artyom says.
“I don’t know.”
Iosif doesn’t like to wonder. He likes to deal only with things that are in front of him. Artyom can see him scanning already, looking for something else to do, now that their Sunday routine has been interrupted.
“We can probably go on the bike when they get back.”
Artyom lights up. Of course they can. How could he have forgotten?
“We can go places now.”
“I know.”
“We can ride to Pripyat, maybe even to Polesskoye.”
“We can ride to Minsk.”
They’ve never been to Minsk. But they’ve heard stories from their classmates.
“What about diesel?”
“We’ll get some from the tank near the tractor shed. We won’t need much. They won’t miss it.”
Artyom nods. “Of course.”
Iosif always knows where to get the things they need. He takes a handful of nails from his pocket and hands half the pile to Artyom and points to an empty paint tin near the gate and throws a nail at it. They’re always throwing things at other things. The bucket is too small and the angle of the opening too narrow for them to have any real hope, but they like the challenge anyway.
“First one to land it gets first ride.”
“Deal.”
They fall into a rhythm, unspeaking, Iosif biting his tongue as he throws, and Artyom thinks again about what they look like from above. Two boys sitting on a weathered, green tin roof. He thinks that from up there everything must be broken into flat shapes. Great, square fields. Narrow, thin roads. The circular top of their grain silo. He wonders what the soldiers think of them. They must think these boys have nothing to do, they must think it’s so far from any action. But Artyom and Iosif can throw nails at cans. They can make forts in trees. And now they can ride their motorbike through fields, hear it hum over muddy lanes.