“What’s going to happen to her?” I thought to myself. “How’s she going to get by? What’s she going to do from here on out?” I passed the Institute, crested the hill, and stopped by our school. My old, four-story apartment building was directly across from it. It was so badly maintained that the front door wouldn’t even close. Sometimes I’d wake to the sound of young voices coming from the stairwell—kids ducking in for a smoke break. I lived on the top floor; the only thing above me was the roof. Hundreds of pigeons lived up there—sometimes their cooing would seep into my dreams. One time, when we were already in high school, Marat dragged me up there to go “hunting.” I don’t know why he felt the need to do that. I don’t remember why I agreed to go along with him.
“There are hundreds of pigeons up there,” he said excitedly. “They’re sleepy at night; you can just stuff ’em in a sack.” We met outside my building in the evening. He had a gym bag with him. We went up the stairs. Marat stepped out first. I followed him. It was stuffy and quiet up in the attic. Only the eerie, invisible rustling of wings broke the silence. I took out my flashlight, but Marat stopped me just in time.
“Put that away, you’ll scare ’em off,” he said. He stepped forward. The pigeons were perched on the beams, sleepy and defenseless. He grabbed them and tossed them into his bag. They submitted with a chilling, doomed air, unable to process what was happening to them, unable to look death straight in the eye. Soon enough, the bag was full. It was rustling, as though two people were arguing inside. Marat walked over toward a window and stepped out, onto the ledge. He called me over and I followed him. We carefully positioned ourselves by the window, taking in the buildings down below. The city blocks where we were born and raised shone into view, dark and silvery—heavy conglomerations of structures and sprawling treetops. Apartment blocks with darkness pooling in the hollows between them, like water in the holds of sunken tankers, shone into view. Windows and balconies, antennas and ladders shone into view. Arches and doorways, telephone poles and kiosks shone into view. Bricks and tin, grass and stones, clay and nighttime earth shone into view. Spiderwebs, filling the air like thin veins, shone into view. Down toward where the river ran, the buildings dropped off and the roofs of warehouses and auto repair shops shone into view, and the cold mercury of its current shone into view, and on the opposite bank were the spectral pipe of the old windmill, the lights of houses, and the white smokestacks of furnaces and factories. Thick silver flooded the earth and the sky, and you could only guess who lived down there and what was happening. Marat looked straight ahead, entranced.
“You know what?” he said. “It’d be sweet to buy up all of this someday.”
“What for?”
“What do you mean ‘what for?’ It’d boost my status. Can you imagine having your own house like that, all to yourself?” he said, pointing at the windows across the way. “When I grow up, I’m definitely gonna buy all of this. I’m gonna buy everything and everyone. Everything around here is gonna be mine.” He thought for a second, then added, “Well, I guess it already is.”
“Exactly,” I agreed.
“Hey, you don’t think I can do it, do you?” Marat was offended. “You’ll see. I can do anything I want. How can you not believe me? You’re my friend—and my student.”
“Huh?”
“I taught ya how to box!”
“I don’t know about that. You just knocked me around in the ring a couple times.”
“It doesn’t matter. I could even say you’re my favorite student.”
“Hey, why don’t we let them out?” I asked, pointing at the bag. “Come on, man, this isn’t cool.”
Marat kept quiet—apparently vacillating—then he opened the bag and shook the birds out onto the slate roof. They rolled a bit, flapped their wings, and flew away into the nighttime air. Marat tossed the bag to the side. He sat there in silence. I didn’t really know what to say then, either. Suddenly he turned around. The thin, reflected sickle of the moon glinted sharply in the cracked window behind us. There was so much light coming off it. It blinded and disquieted us. Marat extended his hand cautiously and broke off a piece of glass, as if he was snapping the moon in two. One half remained. It got darker.
ROMEO
Two years ago, I could feel my heart waking me up every morning, “Come on, we don’t have much time, we’re gonna miss all the good stuff!” It would hop up and down impatiently, urging me to get moving. “Come on, how much can a guy sleep?” I’d get up and run outside, and then not a single one of the city’s wonders could escape me. Two years ago, my lungs devoured the air ferociously, and I was sure that something extraordinary—white light, fireworks, and grand orchestras—was waiting for me just around the next corner, something like a holiday. Actually, there was nothing waiting for me except cold spring drafts, but that didn’t get me down one bit. Twenty—that’s the age when the devil pays you a visit to gripe about his troubles. All you have to do is sleep as little as possible. Well, that and use condoms. Then you’re golden. Everything will fall right into place. Everything will happen just the way you want it to. Whether you want it to or not.
I got here at the end of May. I walked through town from the train station. I didn’t have a lot of stuff with me—a leather backpack containing a few T-shirts, an old laptop, and a thermos of cognac I hadn’t finished on the train. Jeans, Keds, and an aggressively green button-down shirt—I was here for the long haul, and I’d packed accordingly. My gait was smooth and buoyant from running daily that spring, my haircut made me look like Boney M.’s lead vocalist during their heyday, and the bountiful sun reflected off dark sunglasses covering half my face. I was a rock star—it was impossible not to notice me. At least that’s how I saw it. I took a liking to the city—quiet neighborhoods down by the station overrun with apricot trees and grass, outdoor garages, ramshackle additions, and condemned buildings (or at least they ought to be condemned) from which retirees, as slow as chameleons, would emerge from time to time—it was all all right by me. The smell of sugar and cocoa floating around the blocks down by the chocolate factory, the grim shop floors of the empty enterprises down by the market, iron gates, corner stores, and doctors’ offices—it was all mine for the taking. I popped out by a river. “Huh, turns out this city has bridges. That’s good,” I thought to myself. “A city on the water is more calm and secure; life in that kind of city has its own order and sticks within its own boundaries.” I later found out that there wasn’t just one river here. The city lay between two of them, up in the hills; it might as well have been on an island, flashing its white and red buildings enclosed by hot May greenery. “All right, Kharkiv,” I said, stepping onto one of its bridges, “are you ready to rock?”