She and Oleh met three years ago. She had to do something about the facade of her office building, it was gonna fall off any minute; one of her friends (John? Yeah, it was John) recommended Oleh. He showed up empty-handed—these were the pre-Panasonic days—stepped out onto the balcony, climbed over the railing, and started making his way out along the ledge. But he came back before she could even start to panic, explaining that he’d needed to see everything up close. A few days later, his boisterous gang showed up, looking like a cross between a pirate crew and a penal battalion. They camped out in Sonia’s office for a week, sleeping on the desks, eating ramen out of Ikea bowls, and using the sink to wash. They patched up the facade, drank a whole crate of Crimean cognac, and became good buddies with everyone. “At my age, people don’t generally make new friends,” Sonia thought. “There are some exceptions, though, and after all, it’s exceptions that make life interesting.”
They knew a lot of the guests but they still felt like outsiders. Family get-togethers can be pretty odd affairs—the more friends you have there, the less welcome you are. Danylo was sipping his drink carefully. He’d picked out some of the groom’s friends—a bunch of Jesus freaks, fearless, committed missionaries wandering around a foreign city, saving souls like lifeguards at the beach—and struck up a conversation with them. The missionaries were a bit rough with Danylo, like a hairdresser is with a new customer. He liked that. He was always up for a thought-provoking debate. He told them a story about his friend who got mixed up with some missionaries; he had even given them the deed to his house in the residential neighborhood on the other side of the river. After that he got a year in the slammer for minor offenses, and when he got out three of God’s servants were already living in his house—and they left him out in the cold, how do ya like that? “And then,” Danylo added after a short, pensive pause, “he strangled them to death—all three of them—and put the house in some kids’ name. They weren’t his kids, obviously. You think a guy like that would have kids?” The story sent the missionaries scurrying off, and Danylo just let them go. His brother was sitting alongside him, sweating profusely, but he wouldn’t take off his jacket—it was as though he was anticipating something or listening for some signal.
“What’s your deal?” Danylo asked him. “Just chill out already.”
“I’ll chill out soon,” Oleh answered cheerfully. “When the time comes.”
“Yeah, sure,” Danylo said with a laugh. “I don’t know ’bout that.”
Some older neighbor ladies kept coming up to them and asking how they were doing. The wedding was a free-for-all, and the kids were relishing the chaos, crawling around under the tables and pouring warm wine into people’s shoes. Danylo actually liked it, but Oleh booted a few of the little munchkins in the ribs, and they crawled away into the dark and the dust in utter despair. Danylo had barely eaten anything. Oleh hadn’t eaten at all. The bride came over a few times, holding some warm wine that not even her icy fingers could cool off, making conversation about the weather and launching into beguiling digressions. Women and men were standing behind her; the women held flowers and ice that they rubbed on their red hot faces and the men hid metal and stacks of cash in their pockets, keeping a cautious eye on the sun and not stepping back into the shade, determined not to miss anything. The kids were yelling, everything smelled like water and windblown grit; they were about to get to the really good part.
“Huh, this is so strange,” Sonia told her mom. “I have a healthy lifestyle, I watch my diet, I don’t do drugs anymore, I don’t go to church—hell, I’m not even into yoga—but I keep having these dreams. I’m starting to think I’m doing something wrong. Like the one about the slaves. What could I possibly know about them? When did I even see them? It’s not like I have any friends that are in captivity. But still, I have dreams about them—I hear their prison songs and their cries. I dream about them toiling away, cutting their fingers, following orders, resting after the day’s work, and dying. Then they lie there in overcrowded graves covered with chalky earth, gritting their teeth, resentful and powerless.”
“All of our dreams,” said her mother, who had worked at a children’s library all her adult life and had a deep-seated aversion to fiction, “come from the books we read as kids. The better those books were, the worse you sleep at night. Why don’t you just get married?”
“I’ve already done that,” Sonia reminded her. “Twice. It didn’t really do it for me.”
Oleh surprised her. One time, she saw how he made some fat-cat clients pay his construction crew for a job they’d done. Those clients commissioned a project and closely supervised the work for months, but then they kept ducking Oleh, and eventually told him to settle matters with their guys in Kyiv. Oleh arranged a meeting at a Georgian restaurant in town and invited Sonia. The clients showed up late, all sweaty and out of breath, didn’t apologize for making Oleh wait, and complained that they could barely squeeze their way into the restaurant and up the stairs.
“It’s crowded downstairs, like a damn town fair. Maybe they’re giving out free stuff,” they said.
“Those are my guys,” Oleh answered. “They’re waiting to see how this meeting goes. Getting out’ll be even harder.”
The clients slumped in their chairs, decided against ordering any food, asked for some still water, and signed all the necessary papers. “I wouldn’t wanna be with him,” Sonia thought to herself back then.
When a smoky haze started creeping out of the hallways and everything started to smell like honey, sugar, and cinnamon, and the sun set over the towers and antennas of the city’s upper neighborhoods, while down here, at the foot of the south-facing hills, the evening air was cooling off the greenery, they decided it was time to take off. They saw that the bride and groom had gotten into a serious fight and that the whole soccer team had piled out and was now standing at the door and anxiously debating something or other, which also indicated that it was time to go. Danylo rose to his feet unhurriedly, went over to the bride’s godfather, who had been sleeping upright in a chair by the bar, his head resting on a bunch of forks, and knocked him to the ground, slugged one of the soccer players who was trying to pick a fight with one of the servers, ran his heavy hand along the head lawyer’s pale back, sending fire through her skin, and walked away without looking back, detecting the smell of charred sugar and wet tobacco that lingered behind him. Oleh headed out too, his hiking boot nailing Hrysha in the ribs, so he wouldn’t ruin the reception, picked the fallen server up by the collar, clutched Dasha for a moment, feeling that everything in her was burning with bitterness, then kept walking, only looking at his brother’s unwavering back, only following his bruised head, only trusting his brother, and only listening to him. They walked up to Sonia to get their car keys.
“You’re leaving so soon?” she asked, clearly disappointed.
Danylo tried cracking a joke, while Oleh rooted anxiously through his pockets for his cigarettes, then Sonia grabbed Danylo’s hand and placed the keys in his palm, but she didn’t let him go, pulling him along, instead.