I took a look at our crew. They hadn’t changed much in the past forty days, but they hadn’t changed much in the past ten years, for that matter, unless you count the wrinkles slicing up Benia’s face, making him look even more like Mick Jagger. Decked out in a black sweater and fancy dress shoes, Benia was trying to look put together, using his last ounce of strength to do so. I was one of the only ones who knew that his company had been squeezed out of the market, so he was living off his savings. It was obvious they wouldn’t last much longer, which probably accounted for why Benia’s hair had started graying even faster. Honest businessmen had fallen upon hard times in Kharkiv… well, what can ya do? Kostyk had gotten even fatter, although that hardly affected his personality, since he had always been a pretty wretched human being. That doesn’t change much over time… Kostyk worked on the railroad—i.e., he had some management position at the Southern Rail Station downtown. I wasn’t quite sure what he managed; I suspect he wasn’t either. As he put on weight, he started taking things too seriously. He stuck with us, his childhood friends—he didn’t hang out with anyone else. I guess Sem had changed the most. Well, he got a new tracksuit, that’s about it. As a veteran cab driver, he could quick-draw his keys. He had a battle-ready stance, a suspicious attitude toward his passengers, and a deep-seated hatred of traffic cops. As for me, I could feel a warm clump of fatigue balling up somewhere between my heart and spleen, pushing upward. It was taking over more and more space in my body, compelling me to listen—something was going on underneath my clothes and skin, in my soul. Nothing—not my 9–5 office job, not even moving up the corporate ladder—could counteract that clump eating away at my internal organs like a piranha somebody had set loose inside me. Back in the day, I’d decided to stick to familiar territory, so I took a job at the local factory, just two blocks away from where I live. I worked my way up, and fifteen years later I even got my own office. The factory hadn’t been operating for ten years, though; I was like a deckhand trying to get promoted on a sinking ship. In theory, it was possible to move up the ranks, but at the end of the day you’re still gonna wind up on the bottom of the ocean. We turned the old labs into rentable office space and the old factory floors into rentable warehouses; I made good money and wore a suit that didn’t quite fit. Just like my friends, I started having sleeping problems, and my first gray hair sprouted up a while back. I didn’t see any point in griping about it, I just started cutting my hair short. The security guard ladies at the factory actually liked my crew cut—they started to respect me. Or pity me. All of us, Marat’s friends I mean, had hit that age when life slows down and gives you more time alone with your fears and insecurities. Marat had only made it to thirty-five, but each of us could look forward to a long life and a natural death. Maybe from Alzheimer’s.
Marat’s mom and his dad, Alec, sat on opposite sides of the table, as if they were strangers. His dad kept quiet, while his mom was going on about the salads, making everybody wish she’d keep quiet, too. I sat there, only occasionally contributing to the conversation, trying to remember the good times. I put on a mournful face whenever I turned to talk to the mother of the departed, and I could feel moisture rising from the river, high enough to reach our old neighborhoods, thickly planted with trees and densely covered with gates, towers, and communal apartments. Sem and Marat’s uncle Sasha had hung some heavy lamps on the apple branches, running long cords across the yard from the garage, and the yellow electricity mixed with the white blossoms and blanketed us in shadows. Once the sun had set, all the guests started saying their goodbyes, planning their next get-togethers, sighing, exchanging kisses and promises to be there for one another and lend a helping hand, then stepping through the gate, back to life.
The neighbors—the two women between whose wide hips I was nestled and the skinny one that Kostyk had been edging off her seat—were the first to leave, carrying their stools like Christmas presents. Blind-as-a-bat Zurab was next. Nobody had invited him in the first place, and he obviously wasn’t in any hurry to get home; he lived in a metal shoe-repair shack on Revolution Street, packed with soles and boot leather. It was pitch black in there, not that he needed any light. He had some freakish talent for fixing shoes. Clearly, nobody was waiting up for him, but he decided to call it a night anyway. Maria, somebody’s distant relative who had a deep voice and a once-elaborate hairdo that was now a frizzy mess, left after him. She sold vegetables at a stand on top of the hill, by the Revenue Service building. She was close to Marat’s family; she had cried openly—hers had probably been the only genuine tears shed at his funeral. Her son Mark accompanied her in his white overalls with yellow paint stains. He left because he had to get back to the furniture-repair shop on Darwin Street to repaint a set of plywood shelves a couple of Armenians had brought in, to make them look brand-new… and Polish-made. Zhora, who was doing a trainee program at a pharmacy, was the next to go. He worked the night shift; when he got off, he’d raid the beer kiosks on Pushkin Street, pulling the clerks out of their murky morning slumber and demanding their attention and sympathy. The terror of our neighborhood’s 24-hour convenience stores left, telling everyone to enjoy the rest of their night—he sure would. Tamara, our exhausted yet unstoppable homeroom teacher, left after him, taking a piece of pie with her, wrapped up in tabloid journalism. We were all tired of engaging her, so we just had to listen to her rambling, nodding in agreement and not bothering to interject with anything. Clearly bored by this one-sided conversation, she thanked Marat’s parents curtly and disappeared, floating through the gate like a ghost. Then Pasha Chingachgook and his lady, Margarita, headed out. Marat had called them his brother and sister-in-law, but his wife didn’t have any siblings, so it wasn’t clear how they could be related. Pasha walked with a limp due to an old motocross injury; i.e., he stole someone’s scooter and crashed it. Sometimes it seemed as though Margarita had a limp, too. Maybe it was because she was always walking arm-in-arm with Pasha, trying to adjust to his wobbly gait. They went on their way, like two merry sailors who had been discharged as unfit for service. Bob Koshkin and Sasha Tsoy, two guys who were part of our neighborhood gang despite being a bit younger than us, rose to their feet laboriously and slipped into the darkness. Koshkin had been weeping and pouring himself drink after drink because he was about to leave for Philadelphia. His dad’s relatives, who had gotten stuck there back in the nineties, hadn’t been responding to any of his family’s letters, so Koshkin’s dad, who went to synagogue regularly, decided he’d had enough of their nonsense. He figured he would send his only son to find out where the hell they got off ignoring him. Koshkin had even bought a cowboy hat with Hutsul embroidery patterns running around the band, which he figured would help him blend in with the locals. This was pretty much going to be his first time venturing out of his parents’ home, if you don’t count Pioneer camp—Koshkin’s dad worked there, so when the summer session rolled around, Koshkin Jr. would feel like a repeat offender doing some more time in the can, where he would be greeted by the guards’ friendly, familiar faces. Sasha had been itching to leave for quite a while; he was planning on going to a poetry group at some hip café, but he didn’t want to admit he was into poetry, so he just sat there anxiously. Sasha was the son of a Korean student who washed up in Kharkiv in the early eighties. He didn’t really get along with his father, so he kept his distance, living on his own and writing lofty philosophical poems. He rubbed some people the wrong way, so he was always getting into fights with poets he didn’t know; he usually got his ass kicked, but that never seemed to get to him. Alla the Alligator took off after a while—we just didn’t want to let her go; she wasn’t dying to get out of there or anything, but she had to get up early, punch in at the TB clinic, check up on her patients—all that stuff. She was probably the one who was happiest to see all of us; she kept reminiscing—telling old stories and improvising when she got to the parts nobody could remember anymore. She shared her plans for the future with us, assuring everyone that her wild days were over now that Maria had gotten her a nursing job. Now she had a new and exciting life—the only problem was that patients kept dying on her. The electric light made the soft wrinkles under her eyes quiver; her dyed blond hair seemed bright with sparks in the twilight, and when she hovered over the table to whisper warm words of gratitude into someone’s ear it would hang down into their wineglasses, turning it pink and damp. She was bouncing off the walls, blabbing away all evening, acting like this was her birthday party, and demanding everyone mark the occasion by drinking deeply and speaking kindly. She eventually had to get going, though. The closer she got to the gate and the deeper she stepped into the darkness pooling in the yard, the thicker the gloom hanging above her head became—it was as if, over there, out of reach of the yellow lamps, where the light dropped off, she had to breathe ash and clay and speak with the dead souls hiding out inside that clay. I watched her slide out the gate and suddenly remembered that she was the first woman Marat slept with—that’s just how it played out. Well, she was Benia’s first, too. And Kostyk’s, obviously. And Sem’s, for those keeping score. And if you really need to know, she was mine, too.