“What’s happening to me, how can I get out of here? Where does this damn hallway go?” I thought. I lunged forward, groping for the wall, and my hand connected with something hard—some kind of metal protrusions and dowels. I was beating one fist against black emptiness and still trying to hold on to the forks and knives with the other. I touched ripped wallpaper over cool, bulging bricks. I touched a wire hanger. I touched curtains and hats, kerchiefs and cellophane. Suddenly, my fingers stopped on something spongy and warm. I tried to identify it. Feathers—those were feathers—soft and weightless. Something like a recently stuffed bird, something packed with blood and memories. I touched it cautiously, probingly, trying to find out what this thing was. The darkness trembled at my touch and carried some faint reverberation, as if someone had sighed. I felt something moving. Horror seized me. Horror and desperation. I burst right into the darkness, fingers splayed out before me. I knocked the hanger to the floor, overturned some pots and pans. My hand struck a hard surface; the darkness burst open and harsh light hit me in the eyes. I stumbled into the old kitchen, where I had been a thousand times, where I knew every nook and cranny, where everything was familiar and elicited no fear or suspicion. Alina stood in the middle of the room, stirring something in a large pot. She gave me a surprised look. My expression was apparently a bit troubled.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“I got turned around.”
“You all right?” Her voice was skeptical.
“Yeah,” I lied. She probably didn’t believe me, but she didn’t press the issue.
“Here, take this out to the table,” she said after a short pause. She handed me a bowl of vegetables and I headed back.
By the time I got there they had just finished consoling Kostyk and were trying to remember where they’d left off and figure out where the conversation had broken down and why it had taken a turn for the worse. Kostyk was sobbing bitterly, his head in his hands and his hands on the baked fish. One might have thought he was lamenting over it—the fish, I mean. Sasha had moved over to him, laying a comforting hand on the back of his neck as if soothing a horse.
“It’s gonna be okay, kid,” he said. “There’s no point beating yourself up over the dead.”
Clearly offended, Kostyk sniffled, wiping away the tears and snot dripping down his face with his sleeves. With his sharp profile, Sasha hovered over him like a raven; Benia was smoking anxiously, tapping the ashes into a dish of marinated mushrooms. Rustam and Sem sat off to the side, still arguing about something or other. I sat down next to them, placing the vegetables on the table.
Then Sem told us a fascinating story. It was so incredible and so convoluted that even Rustam, Marat’s younger brother, who was a witness to those events, threw up his hands in protest, opened his eyes wide, and shook his head disapprovingly, countering and correcting the storyteller—and boy, did he need to be corrected!
“None of us know,” Sem said, sparking his lighter and making the scars on his broken and re-broken nose flare pink in its naphtha glow, “how close to us death is at any given moment. None of us can even imagine how deeply we have ventured into its domain.” He may not have been as lucid as I’m making him sound—he took a few anxious drags and he stumbled over his words a bit, but his story was definitely about death, I know that for a fact.
“Death never meets us halfway; it can bide its time and pick the right moment. It stands in crisp, emerald grass—invisible and inevitable, observing how casually and imprudently we run into its shadow. Sometimes we’re able to slip out of its shadow again. But most times, how we react isn’t up to us. We are vulnerable in the face of death, paralyzed with fear and a sense of doom. Hardly anyone’s capable of overcoming that sense of doom. Marat’s situation was particularly strange. He wasn’t afraid of death, and he loved women. One time they offered him a coaching position at some foreign club. You guys all heard about that. You know what he said to them? He said he’d die here, alongside his mom. Everybody knows how courteously and honorably he treated women. He might have gotten that from his mom, or maybe it went with his athletic discipline. Whatever the case may be, he basically worshipped women. One time, last spring… about a year ago, actually, Marat was drawn into a fight. He was just walking home after a match, descending the hill on Revolution Street, when he saw some prick hitting on this girl; he just wouldn’t leave her alone. Marat got into a fight with him, obviously. You’d think it’d be easy for a professional boxer to knock out some joker on the street. But what that prick lacked in skill he made up for in stamina. His head was made of iron, you could bash him with a bicycle frame until it bent, and it wouldn’t even faze him. They duked it out for two hours, grappling and then stopping to catch their breath and then going at it again. Even the girl lost interest; she tried to humor them, but after a while she couldn’t take it anymore. She excused herself and went on her way. Neither of them tried to stop her. Eventually, Marat’s boxing skills allowed him to emerge victorious—he knocked that meathead down. He was just lying there on the warm, evening asphalt, bleeding. Marat was just about to turn around and head home, but something stopped him, something compelled him to stay. He bent over, hefted that tough guy over his shoulder and started carrying him toward the bright lights shining by the metro station, thinking he’d just drop him off in front of a pharmacy. The guy was heavy and cumbersome—his legs were dragging along the ground, his jeans were sagging, he was breathing hoarsely and dripping blood down Marat’s neck. But Marat forged on; he knew that an honest man doesn’t leave corpses in his wake, he doesn’t play dirty. He hauled that prick all the way over to the pharmacy and carefully set him down by the door. He was just about to try and get the night shift clerk’s attention, but he decided to wipe the blood off the guy’s face first. As soon as he leaned in, his rival opened his eyes, pulled a pair of long, shiny scissors out of his back pocket and drove them into Marat’s side—then he just ran away. Marat tried to catch him, but the scissors were slowing him down a bit. Scissors still jutting out of him, he decided to head home, staggering from wall to wall and tree to tree through the night. It turns out the girl was a hairdresser.”
And then they started chattering all at once, interrupting and deriding one another.
“He wasn’t boxing anymore! He was already coaching kids then!” Rustam yelled.
“Whatcha talkin’ about?” Sem said, shaking his head. “I went to all his fights. He didn’t box like the old Marat, obviously, but that’s just how it goes.”
“What fights, what are you talking about?” Rustam asked hotly. “He would just loaf around on the couch for weeks at a time. He wouldn’t even leave the neighborhood.”
“That’s right. He’d only leave to box,” Sem declared.
“With who? Come on!” Rustam sprang to his feet, but Sem tugged at the sleeve of his athletic jacket to make him sit back down. “His heart was aching.”
“Yep, that’s true.” Kostyk backed him up. “His heart ached with kindness!”
I said my goodbyes, shaking Rustam and Sem’s hands, patting Kostyk on the back, writing down Sasha’s phone number, and waving to Benia. Nobody stopped me. They were all exhausted, falling asleep at the table, but they held their ground—it was as if they were afraid of being left alone with all those stories. The fog rose toward the May sky, laying objects bare and hollowing out the darkness. Three windows on the second floor yellowly consumed the night. All three neighbors—the two heavyset women and the frail one—stared intently at my back, both presaging and foreseeing something to come.