Laziness
Ira says that he’s lazy, and it’s true and it isn’t. Yes, Vasya perceives that he’s not making enough of an effort. But this is something in his character, against which he actively, furiously labors. He strains against his laziness like Gulliver straining against the ropes of the Lilliputians. But Ira never acknowledges this effort; she cannot appreciate that laziness is like a chronic illness, a climatic condition, a tidal wave. And at no time of the day does he feel more submerged than when, his head throbbing and his lungs bursting, he sees through sleep’s greenish murk the shimmer of morning light several stories above his head. Pedaling his arms and kicking wildly, he never reaches it. Perhaps it isn’t the morning light to which he strives, but something infinitely better. He wakes to find himself beached on the shore of their ill-lit apartment, enveloped in the vapors of cigarettes and fried fish, the cries of quarreling children and the melodrama of the day’s first video.
He closes his eyes, shutting out his vision of the hours ahead. At this moment he yearns to make any sacrifice, suffer any hardship, and undertake any kind of selfabasement that would change his life. And then he waits, with dissolving faith, for the inspiration that will show him how.
Missing
If they had all their teeth, their grins would be predatory, but Yura, Borya, and two fellows Vasya doesn’t know are missing between them an entire mouth. As Vasya approaches, wary, his own smile flutters like the light of a cheap candle. Borya asks him to guess what’s gone. Vasya surveys the park, its crumbling concrete paths nearly obscured by the overgrown grass and shrubbery, its de-slatted benches, its sightless overhead lights. Well, Vasya says, the bottle’s here at least, give it over. Borya steps away, hauling it out of Vasya’s reach and revealing behind the men a squat gray pedestal. Embedded in the pedestal’s granite are two shards of metal in which Vasya perceives the vestiges of two sculpted boots. He stares at these, reminded of a cripple begging in the market this morning, a soldier who lost both feet to a land mine somewhere.
Lermontov’s been swiped, sold for scrap, Yura announces, as proud as if he’s done it himself. The men laugh, but Vasya softly says, no, Lermontov’s over there, and shrugs toward a still-intact stone figure across the way. They admire the statue for several moments and turn back to the boots. Borya passes Vasya the bottle, its sides slick. Vasya pauses before he drinks. He says, this was Pechorin, remember? You know, from Lermontov’s book. The men nod and offer murmurs of congratulation for his literary knowledge. Vasya smiles at the compliments, but the recalled trivia has given him a proprietary interest in the statue and now a tremor of regret at its loss.
G-7
Coffins, say the bills of lading, but scores of Chechen fighters are concealed within the trucks. Arriving in Budyonnovsk, 140 kilometers across the border into Russia, they seize the local administration building in a blaze of gunfire and raise the Chechen flag. They set fire to houses and cars, spray bullets at passersby, and pull civilians out of buses and nearby offices and shops. Several hundred hostages are drenched in gasoline. Then they are marched several kilometers to the town hospital, while the Chechens continue their running gun battle with the security forces, who fire at terrorists and hostages with faint discrimination. Vasya watches it all on television; at one point, the sound of gunfire outside becomes so intrusive that he is forced to close the windows. President Yeltsin leaves Moscow to attend a G-7 meeting in Halifax.
For several days, the Chechens stand off the surrounding police and army units; and then the Interior Ministry’s Alpha Task Force storms the hospital. In the four-hour assault, dozens of hostages and patients lose their lives as Alpha fires grenades and rockets into wards marked with white sheets. Alpha snipers pick off women and children. When a cease-fire is called, Chechen commander Shamil Basayev frees hundreds of hostages, who beg the security forces not to storm the hospital again. Inside the hospital, hostages volunteer to take up arms against the army and police. The fighters give blood for transfusions. After a second assault is repulsed with more loss of civilian life, friends and relatives of the hostages encircle the hospital to act as a buffer. The attention of the nation rests on the White House in Moscow, where Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin has taken charge. He is prepared to negotiate by telephone, on live TV.
Sleepwalker
Pictureless, the television cheers, its static the night’s only sound. Vasya, who has awakened from a moment’s doze jammed with a series of complicated, terrifying dreams, lifts his feet from the bed and finds the floor. The fibers of the coarse Ossetian rug, a wedding present, burn his soles. For more than a minute, he wonders whether he cares enough to investigate Ira’s absence. He finally stands and pads by the TV set, following the reach of its gray radiance into the hallway.
At the end of the corridor, in a kitchen suffused by the television’s electromagnetic remains, Ira stands by the sink, sponging herself. She maneuvers the foaming sponge in long, errant strokes, washing him out of her, showing no more determination than when she cleans the breakfast dishes. There is a soft pop as the sponge seals and releases the crevice between her legs.
Vasya is shamed by their bodies, distended, welted, warted, and pimply. Neither of them is yet thirty years of age, but look… Outside his cousin’s banya, she stands in the snow with her legs apart, the remnants of a perfectly aimed snowball caught in the space between her breasts. She laughs full-throatedly: at her wonder for being here, at the way the cold has tautened her skin, and also at his embarrassed, appraising stare… She opens the door to their hotel room in Sochi and behind Vasya, his knuckles poised at the place where the door has been, pass two bearded, middle-aged men in suits. She jumps back as if burned, her tiny hands frantically searching for her sweet spots. As Vasya turns, the two men bow curtly and go on their way… On a summer afternoon as hot as today’s, but in another decade, her sleeping body stretches across the sheets like a continent.
Mondays
The market is closed every Monday. On this Monday, Vasya brings a folding table to Pushkina, the street that runs outside the market, and neatly stacks piles of dry goods upon it. At adjacent tables, his competitors sell identical goods at identical prices for the same 5 percent commission, which they receive from the same businessman, who comes around to collect their receipts at the end of the day. Before the arrival of the first customers, the sunbeams accumulate on Vasya’s face; he stands there as a proprietor, his legs apart, his shoulders straight, and his hands clasped below his waist, rocking a little, unbalanced by anticipation. And then the customers come, picking through the Korean T-shirts, the Bangladeshi baseball caps, and the Indonesian jeans with a listlessness that suggests they have given up finding loose Krugerrands scattered among them. White Eagle and Red Lion ward off the heat and cold. Friends stop by, people he has known his entire life. They take a swallow and congratulate him for his participation in the market economy. This is the best day of the week, even if it profits him barely.