The boy changes hands as he throws and catches. A quick snap from either wrist before he releases the ball, alternating the surfaces, so the ball hits the pavement first and on the next throw strikes the wall first, the flight switching between languorous arches and rapid straight lines.
A solid boy who is almost a man, wide-shouldered, drifting his hips from one side to the other, as if caught by a gentle breeze. This boy too has a scar across his neck. So they have met before, Grigory observes, although he doesn’t recall the boy’s face.
“Do you remember me?”
“Yes. You were the doctor who worked on my neck.”
“That’s right. How are you feeling?”
“A little better, stronger. It doesn’t scratch as much when I eat.”
“Good, that’s a good sign.”
Their voices linger in the air, so few other sounds present.
“What’s your name?”
“Artyom Andreyevich.”
“Artyom. That’s a man’s name.”
The boy smiles.
“I’m glad to see you up and about. It’s a pleasant ending to my day.”
Grigory lifts an open hand in good-bye and then pauses, leaving the hand in the air momentarily, as though he is stopping traffic.
“Are you afraid of dogs?”
“No.”
“Okay. Follow me then.”
Grigory turns and can hear the boy’s footsteps in pursuit, bouncing the ball by his side as he goes, never breaking stride. In the room, the boy kneels over the dog, stroking the side of its head. He hasn’t had an exchange with an animal since he left Gomel, and he feels this lack intensely, a farmboy surrounded only by people, forced to live in a warren of indistinct, prefabricated huts.
Grigory unwraps a fresh needle and twists it onto an old syringe, then slips it into the rubber cap at the top of the benzodiazepine vial and pulls back the plunger, so the liquid runs fast and pure into the body of the instrument. The boy watches with interest, seeing a man with skill and knowledge perform his routine up close. Grigory pushes the plunger upwards and a straight jet of liquid catches in the bulb light, breaking into droplets as it descends in a perfect parabola. He tells the boy to hold the dog’s head and to be careful in case it reacts badly. He slides the needle into its hindquarters, and the boy can hear the palpatory suck of punctured skin and watches the liquid drain from the syringe. He can feel the dog’s head vibrate in reaction to the pain, and keeps his hands soft yet firm. The animal moans but accepts his treatment.
They wait for the anaesthetic to take effect, and the boy looks around the room. His eyes settle on a page, torn from a magazine, which Grigory has pinned on the wall to the side of his bed. A small, imperfect moon hanging over a low mountain range, barns and shacks in the foreground, barely perceptible in the scale of the image.
“The place in this photograph. Is it near here?”
“No. It’s in America.”
“You have been there?”
“No.”
“Then why do you have it?”
Grigory looks at the image again. It has become so fused with the features of the room that he has almost forgotten it, a last remnant of a previous passion, the moon hanging serenely in a clear sky, all features of the landscape below placed in relation to its delicate curve.
GRIGORY’S FIRST CAMERA, at fourteen, marked the end of his childhood. He divided his youth by this distinction: pre-camera/post-camera. At fifteen, an elderly man in their building donated some darkroom chemicals to further Grigory’s passion and, in retrospect, this marked another stage in his maturity. He acquired some black foil at a market and set up his darkroom in the communal bathroom. A tiny room, seven feet by four feet, and traced a line of foam sealant around its perimeter, keeping out the slivers of light that would otherwise stream upwards from the irregular meeting points of the ancient wall and floor.
The room became a womb to him. Grigory would work in the middle of the night, when no one would be knocking on the door, the perfect darkness more enveloping than the sleep from which he had emerged. He knows the contours of that space more intimately than those of a lover, the positioning of the bathtub and sink, the small medicine cabinet with its mirror, the equipment tray he would carry from his room, rattling gently with bottles and beakers, placing it in exactly the same position each evening, so he could find the necessary materials in the darkness.
At the end of their street was a park with a copse of beech trees, which taught him about colour. So many images of the beech trees piled high under his bed, separated by thin sheets of cardboard. The depth and range and personality of colour. Day after day, throughout the summer and winter, he would take his camera to the trees and observe, over the passing weeks and months, how their colour adjusted according to time and light and weather, how purples would transform themselves to scarlet and orange, yellow and off-white, and the thousands of gradients between each shade.
GRIGORY LOOKS at this American landscape now, frayed around the edges, a crease line from the magazine’s spine bisecting the mountains, and turns to the boy and feels envious, despite the tragedy of his life, of the boy’s ability to view the world through inexperienced eyes.
“I brought it from home. I don’t know why I have it. Perhaps it reminds me that I have a small life. Does that make sense to you?”
The boy nods. “Yes.”
“I used to take photographs. When I lived back in Moscow. They were all of buildings and people. Full streets. At night the sky was orange. I like the deep, black sky in this photograph. In my apartment, I would look at it and feel like making a campfire in the middle of my living room.”
Artyom looks at the picture again and wonders what a photograph of their home would look like now. He knows all the stories. His father, while he could still speak, told him that everything around their home had turned white. Not as in winter with snow covering all things, but as in summer, with the grass high, leaves quivering in the breeze, flowers blooming in their fullness, but everything drained of colour.
If this same photographer had wandered into their homeland, would there be anything left to photograph? Only two shades left in that place. The dark sky and the white land, white as the clouds that streamed over this landscape in America. Artyom thinks of the tyre hanging from the oak tree outside their house, swinging lonely. Every part of his home, everything he touched, saw, put his weight upon, is underground. But he can’t imagine this, his mind isn’t able to erase all that he has known. When he finally goes back he knows he’ll feel like a cosmonaut walking on the moon.
IN MINSK, when they left his aunt Lilya’s building, they had no energy or desire to walk to the bus station, to wait in line and sign forms and be directed to a shelter which, they knew from the direction of the walking crowds, was at the other side of the city. Standing outside the apartment block, they could hear chaos still hanging in the air. Artyom’s mother walked as if carrying a weight—the way she clung to Sofya—and all three of them wanted, to their core, a place to lie down, somewhere they could close their eyes. They could face whatever would come tomorrow. They just couldn’t face it at that moment.
The weather was warm enough to sleep outdoors, but they would be exposed to whoever passed by. Artyom decided it would be too much of a risk and, besides, his mother needed some privacy, needed some time to take in her rejection.
Opposite them was a long row of metal shelters, low sheds made of the same tin sheeting as the roof of their izba. Each shelter was sealed with a padlock, and some had pieces of furniture outside them or other castoffs: a wing mirror from a truck, a bicycle seat with a bent shaft. Artyom looked around to see if anyone was watching and then walked the whole line of them, pulling at each lock, until finally, after covering fifty metres, finding one that wasn’t closed properly, he pulled open the door, hunched over, and walked inside, bumping into unknown objects. He stretched up until his fingers located the cable, which he traced to a switch at knee level just inside the door. He flicked it on.