They gather speed, careening through the streets. Yevgeni has to lean forward and clutch the headrests of the seats in front in order to avoid being shaken around. The men beside him list from side to side as though caught in the midst of a powerful sea storm. If they crash head-on into something, Yevgeni knows he would be flung through the windscreen. Air whips through the car from the broken window, fragments of glass shuffle across the dashboard.
They brake suddenly, and a woman sprawls over the hood but rolls off sideways and continues into the street. Yevgeni can’t believe that the driver can anticipate anything, considering the speed at which they’re travelling.
The driver constantly combines the hand brake and accelerator, so that the car bolts and buckles with a stubborn will and Yevgeni’s shoulders keep connecting with the seats in front. He has to concentrate intently to avoid ramming his head into the hard frames underneath the upholstery.
They drive for ten minutes maybe, the driver relaxing—less to contend with as they move to the outskirts of the city. Yevgeni is glad, after all, that they’re not bringing him home; he’s not ready to face his mother and aunt, not after what just happened. And he doesn’t even want to think about playing the fucking kiddie tune.
They screech sideways and come to a halt. He hears doors click open one after another, and the men jump out. He stays where he is for a moment, disoriented, nauseous.
He hears Iakov shouting after him and gathers himself and steps out of the car. They are far away from anywhere, some industrial area. The place is lit only by car headlights; they aren’t the only ones who have decided to come here, wherever here is. Gigantic light poles, like tree trunks in the gloom. People running, carrying large boxes with their lids torn off, dumping them inside the cars and then running back for more. Some people, his mother’s age, older, are pushing and dragging caged carts, the kind you see being hauled out of delivery vans, stacked with boxes upon boxes. The boxes spill out their contents as they’re being bumped along. A packet of biscuits rolls end over end towards a drain, scuttling away from the madness. A can of sardines comes to a stop against a lamppost.
Kids a few years younger than Yevgeni are smashing windscreens with wheel wrenches. The glass sounds like crashing waves and the panes fold in a way he wouldn’t have predicted, a tapestry of cracked glass that curls up like burnt paper. Near the steel roll-up door at the entrance to the nearest warehouse a young woman is pouring honey into her mouth, and it spills along her neck and slowly makes its way down her T-shirt, though not spilling exactly, he thinks, rolling, turning over upon itself.
Inside, people have paraffin lamps and candles and torches for guidance, and they crash their carts into one another’s and scream and yell.
Boxes stacked upon boxes, wide aisles of thick steel shelving. People crawling up them, ripping and tearing with glee, feeding on their contents, dropping them from a height to their partners on the floor down below. People throwing jars against the concrete floor just to watch them explode. Yevgeni stays near the walls, crouching out of sight, retreating into the darkness. At the end of a centre aisle, four boys stand and tear the tops off cardboard packets of washing powder and shake them out, and the white particles drift down in a foggy haze, settling in piles, sticking to the thin metal filaments of the shelving units so, at a glance, they seem like small, snow-laden trees in what looks like a minute winter garden, a place of quietude amid all the chaos. Yevgeni hunkers down in an empty space under the shelves and tucks his legs up, wrapping his arms around them, and watches the soap dust linger on its way down and smells the soft chemical smell, and thinks of his aunt and his mother standing on their balcony at home, wearing the borrowed dresses, their hair pinned up, staring at the fireworks, wondering where he could be, their hands knitted in worry, starch under his mother’s nails.
BUT HIS MOTHER stands alone, watching, wearing her housecoat, a scarf wrapped around her pinned-up hair, looking out for her boy, trying to make out his form in the moving shadows. Maria is inside, at the table, clasping Grigory’s hand, two steaming glasses of tea in front of them. They don’t speak. Now is not the time. Now is only the time to sit and be free from explanations. Grigory removes his hand from hers and clasps her shoulder, her upper arm, her wrist, examining each part of her by touch, turning them over in his skilled hands, naming her bones once more, claiming them, whispering, “Manubrium. Ulna. Radius. Scapula.”
Alina turns towards the door and watches. She can’t go inside to break their reunion. She can’t go to bed alone, imagining her boy out there. She can only stand here, on this balcony, waiting dutifully.
Chapter 27
Sunlight has persuaded the city to return to itself once more. Yevgeni steps into the morning. It’s time to go home. He passes a construction site and stops and walks in, wary of guard dogs, and opens the cab of a digger and finds what he had hoped, a workman’s jacket, heavy and black with a luminous strip around the waist. He takes it, resolving to bring it back in a couple of days. Someone will arrive at work and have to make do with a thin coat, and there are many things in life that aren’t fair but this is one he can do something about.
He walks through the still streets, windows smashed and cracked; on the pavement a baby’s bottle and a bicycle tyre, broken glass and food containers encrusted with ice. A bread van passes him, the driver looking casually amused at the obstacles to his regular route, one hand out of the window pinching a cigarette, swerving gently every now and then to avoid the smouldering piles left over from improvised fires.
Snow sponges up the wash from the streetlights, which burn again, as though nothing had happened. Morning in Moscow: the city timid and languorous and his. In these hours he owns both the city and the day. He feels different, feels that he knows the character of things in a way that he didn’t before last night.
Yevgeni walks for a half hour, and the buildings become older, more solid, and he arrives at a great square and looks at the trees, their branches snapped, with twigs and large splinters bobbing in the fountains, and realizes where he is: the statue of Pushkin looking down on him, the Rossiya cinema to his right, the great plate-glass frontage smashed to such an extent that the place looks skeletal, half finished. Even the huge movie posters at the front have been taken. It becomes obvious to him now where he is headed. It’s probably no accident that he’s ended up in this district, his legs know the route well enough to carry him here unthinkingly.
He walks through alleyways, litter spreading from overturned bins. He passes a house with emaciated plants dangling over the porch and a sundial on the patch of lawn to the side that has been reappropriated as a bird table with a netful of nuts hanging from one corner. Another corner, another street, walking until he reaches the turquoise building. In the morning sun it looks as though someone has slugged it in the stomach. Its roof sags, concave but valiant, a patchwork of replacement tiles fixed at irregular angles so that streams of air filter through the house.