I heard the voices of Gagarin, Gigit and Besa on the bank.
‘What’s happening? Have you two gone crazy?’ asked Gagarin.
‘Ah, there’s nothing happening! It’s just that the fish is so big they can’t get it onto the boat,’ said Gigit sarcastically, knowing perfectly well that that bonehead Mel must have ruined the fishing as usual.
‘Hey, Kolima!’ shouted Besa. ‘You can go ahead and kill him, don’t worry. None of us saw a thing. We’ll say he went swimming on his own and was drowned.’
I was angry, but at the same time the situation made me laugh.
‘Switch on that motor. Let’s get back to the bank,’ I said to Mel gruffly.
‘Don’t you want to have another go?’ he asked me, sounding rather crestfallen.
I looked at him. His face in the darkness seemed to belong to a demon. I said to him with a smile:
‘Another go? And what torch are we going to do it with?’
On the bank everyone laughed.
When we reached the bank, Besa, who was always joking, looked into the boat and confirmed:
‘Just as I thought, brothers! These two have eaten all the fish themselves! And they were so desperate not to share it with us they’ve eaten it raw!’
And they all roared with laughter. Mel laughed too.
I alone was a bit sad. I had a feeling something new was about to happen in my life; I sensed an air of change around me.
We had a fantastic party. The others had caught some big wels catfish; we cleaned and prepared them for cooking in the earth. Everyone seemed a bit withdrawn, though, as if they were aware that we were about to go through a significant period of change. We talked about things of the past; each boy told stories about his childhood, and the others laughed or sat in silence, respecting the atmosphere that was created by the narrative.
We sat around the fire all night, until dawn, watching the sparks and the pieces of ash that had turned to dust rise up into the air, mingling with the faint gleams of the morning which was bringing a new day.
I too laughed and told a few stories, but I was filled with a new emotion, a kind of sad nostalgia. I felt that I was standing in front of a great void towards which I had to take the first step, and this was my last chance to look back and fix in my memory all the beautiful and important things I was about to leave behind me.
After drinking wine and eating and talking until dawn, I went away to sleep in the woods. I took a blanket from my boat, wrapped it around me and walked towards the bushes, where there was a freshness in the air that brought relief. My friends were scattered around; some were asleep in front of the nearly dead embers. Mel was lying in the middle of the track that led to the pool where we had left the boat: it was a very muddy path, but he was sound asleep, with his arms round an oar. Besa was wandering around with an empty bottle, asking the boys if anyone knew where the supplies were. Nobody answered him – not because they didn’t know where the things were, but because they were all in a total stupor.
As I walked along, wrapped up in my blanket, I felt a sense of disgust; I remember that although I was drunk and couldn’t even walk straight, I thought with absolute lucidity that we were a bunch of pathetic drunkards who were only capable of getting into trouble and making a mess of our lives.
As soon as I lay down on the ground, I fell asleep. By the time I woke up it was already evening and darkness was beginning to fall. My friends were calling my name. I opened my eyes and lay there, not moving; I felt even more strongly than the night before that something was really about to happen in my life. I didn’t want to get up; I wanted to stay in the bushes.
When we got home I took a sauna. I lit the stove and burned some wood, then I prepared the dry oak branches and put them in the warm water so I could use them later for the massage. I mixed some pine extract with some lime essence and put it by the stove, to infuse the air that I would breathe. I made myself two litres of a tisane of dog rose, lime, mint and cherry blossom. I spent the day relaxing in the sauna, lying naked on the wooden benches which slowly cooked me. Now and then, as I lay surrounded by that aromatized steam, I drank the very hot tisane in big gulps, without noticing how much it scalded my throat.
That night I slept flat out, as if I had fallen into a void. The next day I woke up and went out of the house. I opened the mail box to see if anything was there and found a small piece of white paper with a red line across it from one corner to the other. It said that the military office of the Russian Federation asked me to present myself for verification, bringing my personal documents. It added that this instruction was being sent for the third and last time, and that if I didn’t present myself within three days I would receive a criminal conviction for ‘refusal to pay my debt to the nation in the form of military service’.
I thought the note was a trifle, a mere formality. I went back indoors, fetched my documents and, without even changing my clothes, set off in my flip-flops towards the address indicated, a place on the other side of town, where there was an old Russian military base.
At the entrance I showed the note to the guards and they opened the door, without a word.
‘Where do I have to go?’ I asked one of them.
‘Go straight on. It’s all the same anyway…’ a soldier replied, without enthusiasm and with obvious irritation.
‘Bloody idiot,’ I thought, and I headed for a large office where there was a notice saying: ‘Military service and new arrivals section.’
The office was dark; I could hardly see a thing. At the back there was a little window in the wall, out of which there came a dismal, faint, yellow light.
There was the sound of someone tapping on a typewriter. I approached and saw a young woman, in military uniform, sitting at a small desk, typing with one hand and clutching a mug of tea in the other. She took little sips and kept blowing into the mug to cool it.
I leaned on the counter and craned my neck: I saw that on her knees, under the desk, the woman had an open newspaper. There was an article about Russian pop stars, with a photo of a singer wearing a crown decorated with peacock feathers. I felt even sadder.
‘Hello. Excuse me, ma’am, I’ve received this,’ I said, holding out the note.
The woman turned towards me and for a second looked at me as if she couldn’t understand where she was and what was happening. It was clear that I had interrupted a train of thoughts and personal dreams. With a quick movement she picked up the newspaper that lay at her knees and put it upside down behind the typewriter, so that I couldn’t see it. Then she put down her mug of tea and, without getting up or saying anything, and with an indifferent expression on her face, she took the white sheet of paper with the red line from my hands. She glanced at it for a moment and then asked, in a voice that sounded to me as if it belonged to a ghost:
‘Documents?’
‘Which documents, mine?’ I asked awkwardly, taking my passport and all the other things out of my trouser pocket.
She eyed me rather scornfully and said through clenched teeth:
‘Well, certainly not mine.’
She took my documents and put them in a safe. Then she took a form from a shelf and started filling it in. She asked me my first name, surname, date and place of birth, and home address. Then she went on to more personal information. After asking me for my parents’ details, she said:
‘Have you ever been arrested? Have you had any problems with the law?’
‘I’ve never had any problems with the law, but the law seems to have problems with me now and them… I’ve been arrested dozens of times, I can’t remember how many. And I’ve done two stretches in juvenile prison.’
At this her expression changed. She tore up the form she had been filling in and took another, larger one, with a line running from one corner to the other, like that on the postal note.