He was hungry. In the shelter they’d be handing round breakfast by now. There were so many people there at this stage that there were no more queues; the militia came around delivering bags with packages of food for each meal, collecting the bags when everyone had eaten. Artyom hoped his mother would save something for him. But of course she would, she was his mother.
He waited for a while and then approached one of the bins and rummaged around. Nothing. He dug through a few more. Near the end of the street he found the carcass of a chicken, some tea leaves stuck to it, bits of newspaper, but nothing he couldn’t pick off. He ran his fingers in the spaces between the legs and the body, scooped up slivers of white meat from between its ribs. Real meat. Now that he had a taste for it, he wanted to stuff the entire thing into his mouth, wanted to crunch on the bones until there was nothing left. He raised the carcass to his mouth and licked it, taking in some tea leaves but mostly enjoying the grease on his tongue.
“Hey. Get away from there.”
The rubbish collectors had rounded the corner. They hung from the truck in their bright orange jackets, staring at him. One of them stepped down.
“What are you doing? Get away, you fucking rat.”
Artyom wiped the grease from his mouth with his sleeve.
“I’m sorry. I was waiting for you. I’m looking for Maksim Vissarionovich. He collects rubbish.”
“I think you’re looking for fucking dysentery. That’s what I think.”
Artyom didn’t know what dysentery was.
“I need to speak to Maksim Vissarionovich. Do you know him?”
“No. And I don’t care. Go and root through some other rubbish. Just do it in another area of town.”
The man was standing close to his face, all aggression. Artyom stepped out of his way, and the men emptied the bins into the back of the truck and clattered them on the pavement. Artyom was fascinated. He’d never seen a vehicle like this one. It had an internal arm that crushed the rubbish down and drew it inside. He stood and watched as they passed. But they didn’t go very far. The truck cut out and when they tried starting it again the engine just made a dull, straining sound. They popped the bonnet and rummaged around for five minutes with the same result. Artyom knew that sound. He approached the engine and grabbed the ignition coil with such assurance that the men let him carry on. He unbolted the coil, cleaned the contact points with his shirt, then replaced it in its slot and tightened the bolts. He gave a thumbs-up to the driver, who turned over the ignition, and they listened to it moan and gurn until it spluttered into life.
The man who had spoken to him smiled wryly, calmer now. “What’s this guy’s name again?”
“Maksim Vissarionovich. I don’t know his last name. He lives near the bus station.”
“Anyone know him?” he asked his workmates.
Shakes of the head.
“Okay. We’ll find you someone who does.”
He indicated for Artyom to sit in the cab, and the rest of the men returned to their platforms and grabbed their respective handles. They drove through the streets, low-hanging branches scraping the windshield. The driver had a knob on the steering wheel, which he used to drive the thing one-handed, grinding it around corners, driving so close to lampposts and walls that Artyom was sure they were going to crash, until he flicked the wheel in the right direction and the truck spun around miraculously on its own axis.
They left the city and, after a few minutes, turned off into a narrow side road arched with trees. They stopped at a barrier, where the driver flashed a card to a man in the booth, and they edged down a slope and onto a concrete platform.
Gulls dropped down from the sky and skimmed over a vast synthetic territory, a seascape that was entirely made up of things discarded. Bulbous plastic bags, strings of electrical cable, and soggy cardboard were congealed into a single, amorphous mass. Bulldozers surfed the waves of slosh, surging uncertainly against the semisolid waste. They looked as if they could tip over at any moment, but they climbed steadfastly before plunging back once more into the expanse.
The man from the back of the truck walked forward to a tin shed twenty metres away. Artyom sat in silence in the cab, the driver barely looking at him—not out of spite or revulsion, Artyom sensed, he was just a man who didn’t feel a need to make a connection, who was happy in his own thoughts. The man emerged from the shed and beckoned him with a wave, and Artyom opened the cab door and the air slithered into his nostrils, leaving a filmy residue against the back of his throat. He had never smelled anything like it. He clasped his hand to his nose and breathed only into the cupped space of his palm. As he stepped out onto the ground, a grey, cloacal muck encased his shoes. It was a struggle even to walk in this place.
“I asked around. He’s due back in a couple of minutes. You can wait here.”
“Thanks.”
“And you. Thanks for your help.”
They shook hands and the man climbed back on the truck. Artyom watched as it rounded one of the mounds and backed up against a low concrete wall, and spat out its chewed-up contents. The men stood around and shared a cigarette and talked amongst themselves, and when their truck was emptied they stood at their positions once more and drove up the laneway, back into the morning, into fresh air.
Artyom stood and watched, captivated, his hand still in front of his face, and took shallow breaths through his mouth. The graveyard of all that was once useful. It was all a kind of greyish brown, an anonymous sight. After a few minutes of looking, he was shocked to realize that there were some people moving through the rubbish, covered in this sludge, barely distinguishable from their surroundings. They walked with sacks slung over their shoulders and picked things up and examined them, turning them over in their hands. What a way of life. Rising every morning to scavenge around this hollow, barren terrain. This was not a place Artyom could ever have imagined, a place so man-made. He looked out at these people wading through filth, letting out a bleat of delight if they salvaged something they could sell, finding small traces of encouragement buried in all the desolation, their comrades running towards them to share in the excitement. And Artyom would return frequently to this moment in the following weeks, when he watched sickness engulf his father, when blood seeped out through the pores of his father’s skin, when he began to realize that he could never understand or predict the pathways that someone’s life could take; that the will of a desperate person was stronger than anything he knew and that fate unspools in its own stubborn way, beyond influence or rationale.
Maksim arrived and greeted him, full of consideration, and fed him and took him back to the shelter, returning three days later, having located his father in one of the hospitals. Maksim waited at the gate while they washed as well as they could and dressed in the best clothes they had brought with them. As they got in the car, she looked at her children and said, “Don’t we look well?” and smiled. It had been a month since Artyom had seen his mother smile. He found the sight so reassuring, as comforting as a fire on a winter’s afternoon.
At the front door of the hospital they used the last gold tooth to bribe their way into the building.
There was nobody else there. The place was wrapped in silence. The only sounds were the echoes of footsteps that rang through the corridors. It was disconcerting to see a public building so empty. A shrill silence. Their ears attuned to the constant turmoil of the shelter. Sofya said, “I think my ears are going to crack,” and Artyom knew what she meant.