“It’s better to hire people you know. At least they won’t unionize on ya.”
So the boss went with Mark, and afterward he’d often say he’d done a good deed, but he later expressed remorse for his actions.
“Mark,” the boss told his newly minted apprentice, “you have to honor your parents, even if you don’t have any.” Mark grew up without his father, who had gone up north with a lumber company and never come back, so his mother raised him. She did the best she could, which was pretty terrible. His uncle Kolia would step in at the most crucial moments—he bribed the draft board to get his nephew off the hook, got the college admissions committee to give him a slot in night school, and found odd jobs for him. But he kept his distance, never quite letting his guard down. Mark realized that, so now, at the ripe old age of thirty, he only trusted providence… though providence hadn’t done much to earn his trust.
The job wasn’t very interesting, but on the plus side it wasn’t too demanding for the new apprentice—Mark hauled some furniture around, polished some things, and sanded some boards. Whenever the boss headed out to run errands, Yasha would go pick up some wine and Mark would sprawl out on the couch and flip through old newspapers, clearly dumbstruck by the kind of headlines he found there. The liquor store was across from the shop, built right into the factory’s entry hall. Everybody knew Yasha there and nobody liked him. Yasha had the gentle touch of a true mentor, treating his student well; he even made all the alcohol runs himself. After a few drinks, the master would start talking about his life, and the apprentice would listen inattentively, not giving much credence to what he heard. According to Yasha, there were no women in the world he hadn’t slept with, and no men he hadn’t shared drinks with. Mark would show up to work in varnish-stained Keds, baggy white jeans with bright chemical speckles, and T-shirts his mom had scored at some Swiss charity event. He was calm, amiable, and a bit reserved; his heart wasn’t really in it, and he would’ve quit months ago, if it hadn’t been for Kolia. He was afraid of Kolia, whose imposing apathy had a debilitating effect on him. Otherwise, Mark was doing pretty well—he didn’t have any friends and he lived with his mom, though they hardly talked because his mom didn’t have any new stories and he didn’t feel like hearing the old ones again. He enjoyed napping in the afternoon and he’d have some pretty exotic and menacing dreams during his siestas—snakes with women’s heads and foxes with the voices of opera singers, buildings on fire, and rivers with dragons flying over them. He’d wake up in the late afternoon and climb out through the window to sit on a bench outside. Stray dogs would encircle him, ready to pounce, but they lacked the gusto to go for it—after all, what could you take from this odd character who smelled like varnish and wood? What could he have in his pockets besides nails, string, metal plumb bobs like machine-gun cartridges, and drawing compasses? Sometimes Mark would spend the night at work, switching on the table lamps, and bugs would be drawn into the room, only to be scorched by the bulbs and plummet to the floor. Mark roamed around the room, and the bugs crunched cheerfully under his feet like peanut shells.
He’d been up all night; he wanted to prolong that state that follows an extended stretch of sleeplessness, that feeling of being detached from the motion of the planets through the heavens. Thirty is the right age for learning to enjoy the passage of time and stop regretting that it passes so quickly. His habits had long since become fixed, his anxiety had dissipated, and he had comfortably settled into his addictions. The need to fight off drowsiness and preserve the eerie and fleeting quality of the world’s darkness within himself hit Mark hardest in the summer months. At around 6 a.m., he’d completely lose the ability to orient himself in time; the sun was already over the trees, but the moon was still hanging up in the sky—it seemed as though the city had woken up a while ago and everyone was attending to important business, which gave Mark an unaccountable feeling of anxiety or anticipation, like the planets had perfectly aligned above him, hinting at the beginning of something important in his life, the kind of thing that ought to begin on one of these strange days at the end of June, when suns and moons multiply and hide in the air like foxes in warm grass. He shut the windows, walked outside, and took out his phone to check the time. At that very moment he got a call from Kolia.
Kolia owned two vegetable stands on Horse Lane and two more downtown. Mark’s mom worked at one of them. He tried opening another one at the beginning of the summer, but it went bust, which caused his pancreas to start acting up. Kolia decided to steer clear of hospitals—alcohol was his go-to medicine. Yesterday morning he’d made a long haul out to some wedding—he had a classmate who had died a few years ago, leaving behind a solid legacy and an adult heiress. It was her daughter tying the knot. He came, congratulated the newlyweds, held forth about family obligations, hit on the women, and argued with the men. The pain flared up that night. He got taken to the hospital. He got pissed. He argued with the doctor too. He called his nephew as soon as she left the room.
“Markster,” he said flatly, choosing his words carefully so he wouldn’t sound too helpless. “I can’t really talk, there’s people sleeping here. Listen up, go over to my place, you have a set of keys. Grab my toothbrush, grab my razor, grab my hair dryer, grab my slippers, grab my towels, underwear, some magazines, my hot-water bottle, my cards (I’m talking about my playing cards, you know), a bowl, a spoon, my knife block, a few clean dress shirts and ties, handkerchiefs, my teapot, my thermos, my toaster—”
“Are you moving or something?” Mark interrupted.
“I’m in the hospital,” Kolia answered brusquely.
Mark got scared. Kolia continued, “They brought me in right after the wedding, in the middle of the night. I didn’t even have a change of clothes. Come on, Markster,” he said coldly, putting some pressure on his nephew. “Move! Move! Move!”
His anxiety rubbed off on Mark. Kolia was always getting on his case—he was always riding everyone, he micromanaged everything, spinning a system of family relationships like a sticky spiderweb, taking deep offense whenever anyone would slip out of his tender yet firm embrace, and talking about his clan an awful lot—mostly good things—but he still treated them like debtors.
Kolia resided in a two-story building not far away; the whole first floor belonged to him. The building was buried deep in a nook between large apartment blocks, so you couldn’t even see it from the street. The walls exuded moisture, the balconies were drooping, and the ceiling should have collapsed a long time ago, but it was still intact, supported by invisible braces and beams. Kolia arranged buckets and pots all over his rooms like he was setting cunning traps to catch precious raindrops. Back in the Soviet days, four families lived in the building. Kolia’s family had two rooms on the first floor, next to the Pavlovs—Papa Pavlov, an engineer, Mama Pavlov, an engineer, too, and their busybody drama-queen daughter. Shalva Shotovych, a factory foreman up on Shevchenko Street, a lonesome unmarried jigit of Georgian descent with tons of connections around town, lived right above them. Some old Bolsheviks lived in the other corner of the second floor; Kolia could never tell them apart… or maybe they were just that good at disguising themselves. At the beginning of the nineties, the Pavlovs suddenly turned out to have been Jews all along, and promptly emigrated, selling their apartment to Kolia for peanuts. The Bolsheviks’ ranks thinned over time. Eventually, there was only one old lady left, and she wasn’t feeling too hot, either. She’d sometimes look in the mirror by accident and give herself a real scare. Kolia would sometimes stop by and give her some food. Shalva left, too, but without selling his apartment. Once every two years or so, he’d fly in from Hamburg or some other place where he was working down at the docks, air out the rooms, sit with Kolia in the evenings, tell him about his new life—he wasn’t griping at all, but Kolia would still try to console him. Shalva refused to sell his apartment, for some odd reason. It was as though he was keeping one last corridor open in case he had to retreat, some illusion that all was not lost and everything could still work out in the end. So Kolia was all by himself—his parents had died, his sisters, Zina and Maria, got married, had some kids, and got divorced, but they were in no hurry to return to the nest. Between raising Mark and working for her brother, Maria had her hands full. Zina lived by the sea and hardly ever visited. Mark’s mom got married, but it didn’t work out. His aunt Zina got married, but that didn’t work out either. He viewed this as some sort of family curse. Kolia hid stacks of cash in his fridge, kept vegetables he’d bought from wholesalers in the hallway, and slept blissfully sprawled out on a sofa. He didn’t have much luck with the ladies, and they didn’t have much luck with him, either. Kolia had olive skin, squinty eyes, a heavy, mistrustful gaze, a dull smile, yellow teeth like an old stray dog, weak lungs, and a heart swimming in fat. He made himself breakfast every morning. No wonder his pancreas had started acting up.