“What did you say to me?”
She held a long pause, then splayed icy fingers whacked me right across the face. After that, she yanked the kid away and dragged him over to the bar. I darted after them, but the door was shut. I pulled it toward me, then rammed my shoulder into it, and finally pounded on it with my busted-up fists for a while. Of course, I could have just gone to the other entrance, but what the hell would’ve been the point of that? “What the hell?” Dasha’s words echoed. I trudged home, went up to my apartment, threw my dirty clothes away, and packed my things, leaving my sunglasses on the table and walking back down the stairs. “I’ll spend the night at the train station,” I thought.
Everything I knew about this city, I’d learned from her. She was the one who told me all those farfetched stories, talking loudly and with conviction, listing names and places, recalling dates, drawing pictures in the sand with the sharp tips of her high heels to show me where the rivers flow and where they dry up. She told me about the city’s fortifications and underground passageways, about the metal dragons that breathe fire in the dark caves of the trolley depots, and the impenetrable shells protecting the fierce animals that hide out in sandy burrows around the reservoir. She told me about the models of flying factories and engines of mass destruction manufactured by children at the Young Pioneer centers, mentioning something about fertile soccer fields and their strange plants that help you sleep and improve your memory, whispering jumbled rumors about the Polytechnic Institute’s secret labs that loom unreachably on the horizon, the research institutions that have been trying to produce an elixir of youth for a good hundred years now, and the shortest trolley lines of all, the ones that run right through the city’s apartment blocks. She mentioned something about the cold steel weapons cranked out by old factories, the trees plastering the sky in the summertime, and the fact that you couldn’t see the moon or stars at night. That’s why some people say there are witches living around here, and they’re right, she declared. Things are just dandy for them, because Kharkiv is a pretty livable city—that’s why people who have drowned or hanged themselves wind up here, floating down the rivers, penetrating the city through its train stations, multiplying, and improving the country’s demographic situation. But in the winter, the moon hangs right outside your window—just reach out and grab it—it looks like cheese molded from clay and grass. She said it was easy to endure the long winters in the city because the factories always warm up the morning air. Come spring, thaw water erodes the foundations of old health resorts in the suburbs, the rivers run red and smell like medicine, so the smell of spring is ammonium chloride. She said they were shooting people in the streets, that there was still a war going on, and nobody was planning on surrendering. It will all keep going as long as we keep loving one another, she explained, as if offering a hint she expected me to pick up. There’s enough love to go around. I didn’t get what she meant by that.
JOHN
The moment just before waking was long enough for Sonia to have a dream. It was short and unsettling. She saw a river and ships sailing up it—old and rusty, with yellow water-stained sides and black ash-stained funnels. They halted in the middle, their horns wailing despairingly. Sailors—tired and unshaven, which made them even more decisive and belligerent—were jumping over the side, swimming ashore, trudging onto the sand in their heavy clothes and worn-out shoes, walking along a quay, glancing angrily at the ships whose horns were blaring so loudly that she finally woke up. “Well, all-righty then,” she thought. “We’re gonna have a lot of guests today.”
Everybody else in the house was still sleeping. She quietly slipped out from under the covers. The nights were warm, and they slept completely naked. She liked that, and she liked waking up and finding the room just the way it ought to be—everything felt light and exposed. He was a deep and still sleeper; his head faced east all night. “He sleeps like a Sunni,” Sonia thought, putting on a T-shirt and stepping into the hallway. His relatives were sleeping in the living room. Yesterday she tried to learn all their names, but she couldn’t keep them straight, it was utterly hopeless; they all stuck together, sleeping side by side like pilgrims and upholding a defined family code and set of hierarchical principles. Three guys were squished together on the couch, and somebody’s nephew—a timid, chubby kid—was wedged hopelessly between his elders, like a bobsledder. The women were lying on camel-wool rugs spread across the floor. The men hadn’t gotten undressed before bed; they were sleeping in their Sunday best—one of them hadn’t even bothered to undo his tie, probably to avoid the hassle of tying it again in the morning. The women slept in warm robes, with the slippers they’d brought along with them from home by their heads. They turned in early, slept soundly, and didn’t scream in their sleep. Sonia suddenly realized that she had nothing on but the T-shirt, so she shut the door softly. Her uncle Hrysha was sleeping like a real champ on the pull-out bed in one of the children’s rooms. Sheets in disarray, he was frozen in some ludicrous position, his head buried under a pillow, left arm crushed by his skinny hips and right arm dangling somewhere under the bed. His blanket was lying on the floor, like a paratrooper’s chute abandoned on the ground, the sheets were drooping like a flag torn off the enemy’s headquarters, and his dentures were suspended in a glass of water on a chair by the bed. At night, she’d heard Uncle Hrysha tossing and turning like a sinner on the devil’s roasting spit, moaning, whimpering, jerking to his feet occasionally to grab the glass with his dentures in it and gulping greedily, gargling, then spitting the water out again. He’d calmed down by the early morning, his blue lips whistling some obscure melody from the dreams of sleepwalkers. Sonia went into the bathroom and locked the door, took off her shirt, stepped into the tub, and turned on the hot water. “I have some time while they’re all still sleeping,” she thought.
The water touched her skin, making it warm and receptive. “I could use some tenderness,” Sonia thought. “I could use sex and a nice cup of coffee, with milk.” She bumped into Senia as she was stepping into the hallway. He must have felt that she was gone and gotten up to search for her. He’d been standing outside the door, waiting for her to finish, and now he shoved her back into the bathroom as soon as the door opened, pulling at her shirt. “Perfect timing,” Sonia thought, giving him a hand with it. But as soon as he had gotten her propped up just right on the edge of the tub, holding her up with one hand and pulling his own shirt off with the other, somebody knocked tentatively on the door. They’d forgotten to lock it, so they stopped—Sonia listened hard, and he started grinding his teeth. Another knock.
“Damn,” he hissed, releasing Sonia, tossing her the shirt, and opening the door. Looking even chubbier and more dazed after a good night’s sleep, the nephew stood there in a women’s nightshirt and blue sweatpants, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Sonia had managed to cover up a bit by putting the T-shirt on her lap. But Senia just had one hand over his private parts; the nephew stared intently at him, clearly frightened and anxiously tapping his feet. Nobody said a word for a little while, but then he couldn’t take it anymore.
“The toilet’s next door, it’s just the tub in here,” he said forcefully, leaning out into the hallway, flipping on the light for the other room, fading back into the darkness, and shutting the door.
He tried grabbing her shirt again, but Sonia pushed his hand back firmly, pulled the shirt back on, and headed toward the kitchen. He stayed put. Sonia thought he’d been a little too rough with her when the kid started banging on the door, and he had thrown her the T-shirt too hard, as though he was trying to get rid of her. None of this felt like it was supposed to, but did it really matter? Nope, not one bit. Her wedding dress hung from a light fixture in the kitchen. Sonia got started on the coffee. “It’s going to be a long day… and a fun one too,” she added.