I stood without a hat, sweaty, happy, in a black, or rather red, pit, dug out in the midst of white snow. The snow lay on faint paths, on statues and on iron fences, on graves and on disheveled wreaths.
Vova handed me a piece of bread and a slice of sausage.
How delicious, my God. Cover me over right now, I know what happiness is.
Vova turned around to bring more snacks, and got the scoop of the spade in his backside.
“Damn you, earthworm!” he shouted happily, and didn’t do anything to retaliate.
Vadik also laughed. White unchewed bread could be seen in his mouth, and this seemed attractive to me. Vadik had good, strong, white teeth — and now there was white bread in his teeth.
“Let’s finish up now, we’ll get the coffin,” Vova said. “Who have we got today? An old woman?”
Making mournful faces, we entered the apartment.
Already on our way to the fourth floor, we had stopped talking, in order to calm down somehow. Otherwise the corpse would have been collected by three sweaty guys who had drunk two bottles of vodka between them, with teeth chattering, and with a stupid chuckle bubbling in their teeth.
Quiet relatives moved aimlessly along the walls, women in black scarfs and men in coats. At loose ends, the men went out to smoke in the stairwell every ten minutes.
“Time to take her away?” they asked, as if we were in charge in this home.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Need any help?”
“No, we’re fine.”
Until recently I had only carried cupboards up and down staircases. Now I had realized that a coffin was essentially no different from furniture. You just couldn’t turn it upside down.
Vova always went first, and carried the narrow end, the legs. Vadya and I clung on at the back.
We were slowly followed by a few friends or relatives. Their somber faces reflected the conviction that any minute we would drop the coffin.
But we completed our task energetically, and almost easily.
By the entrance, we put the coffin on some stools. We all took a breather.
“Could you take a photo of Grandma?” someone asked me.
“Sure,” I replied, before I could get my breath back, surprised as usual at why the hell people needed pictures of corpses. Where did they put them, did they hang them on the wall? Look, kids, that’s your grandma. Or did they put the photo in an album? That’s us at the beach, there we are at our neighbors’ dacha, and this is the funeral… It’s not a good photo of me, don’t look.
I put the instant photo in my pocket so that it would come out without being affected by the winter sun and light snow.
The bus drove up, and the driver got out, and opened the back doors of his rust heap.
The relatives had all wandered off somewhere, even the one who asked me to take a photo.
“All right, load it in,” said the driver.
Vadya shrugged his shoulders: he was smiling again.
“Listen, let’s load it in while there’s no one around,” Vova said to me. “My feet are freezing. Otherwise they’ll come out and start milling around.”
And indeed, the relatives did not come out to say goodbye until quarter of an hour later, and Grandma was already on the bus.
By that time we’d already managed to argue with the driver, asking him to turn the heater on; he looked at us as if we were idiots and didn’t turn it on.
“Don’t be sad, granny, we’re about to go,” I said quite seriously, but my silly brothers, who were stomping their frozen legs in boots that were rock-hard from frost, found this incredibly funny.
“What, aren’t we allowed to say goodbye?” a tearful woman’s voice said. The door opened after the voice, and we saw a small crying face, which was hardly visible under black lace, so abundant that it was almost indecent.
“Shall we carry her out again?” Vova asked insolently.
“Never mind now…” the woman replied.
A man came bounding up to us, evidently very happy that we weren’t taking the coffin out.
“Are you cold, guys?” he asked affably.
“Are we ever…”
Something that I can never understand is speeches by a grave. You stand with a spade and go crazy: you feel like knocking down the idiot who’s talking, so that he spills, the asshole, into the red pit. It’s embarrassing to listen to people, where does all this stupidity in them come from?
Nailing down the coffin lids with long, reliable nails is also something that I don’t like doing very much, for some reason; but this is probably because I can’t do it as nimbly as Vova. He drives the nail in with three blows — beautiful work…
Lowering the coffin is much more interesting: it has a bit of a children’s game to it, a painstaking, pointless child’s task. One of the men who has come to pay his respects always helps us out here: because we need four, not three men.
And shoveling in the earth is quite enjoyable… We take off our jackets, cheerful, continuous sweat runs down our handsome faces, and the spades fly. First the earth falls loudly, hitting the wood, then it falls with a dull thud. The sound gets duller and duller. And then just a soft hill is left, and we have made all our morning’s work on the frozen earth come to nothing.
Now there’s time to have a good smoke, while the rest slowly disperse. We smoke, licking the frozen salty moisture from our lips. Now we will be taken to the wake, at some shabby café, and we’ll get drunk.
We’re always happy when we are seated somewhere in the corner, or better still, at a separate table.
I like cheap cafés, their damp smell, as if they cooked soup there around the clock, and swimming in the soup are tired vegetables, withered potatoes, exhausted carrots, and among other things, it seems, the cook’s apron, if not in its entirety, then at least the pocket…
In cheap cafés, there are dark windows, with mist-covered glazed tiles, and dirty windowsills. When you move the chairs, they make a horrible squeak as they move across the broken square tiles, and the tables shake, drenching themselves with juice. We have juice on the table, I don’t like it, but I’ll drink it.
Initially we behave quietly, we eat everything quickly, and so they start to serve the new dishes with our table. It is always empty, our table, in two minutes there is not even any mustard on it, Vova has scraped out the jar with his heavy, chapped fingers; only the lumpy grey salt remains in the salt cellar. We’d sprinkle the salt on some bread, but we already ate the bread, before we had hardly sat down.
After half an hour, the wake gets noisy, and no one hears or sees us anymore. Sometimes someone may sit down with us and say that grandma was a good person. And we drink with him without clinking our glasses, although he is eager to bash his glass against ours. He’s not used to it yet, perhaps this is his first grandma, but we’ve had so many, we don’t even remember which number this one is.
Vova, the cunning bastard, has gone to take a leak, and has already found out where the crates of vodka are, two of them, and snatches a bottle without asking — they take a long time to bring us one, and there is still a lot of food, we’re used to consuming it sparingly.
As soon as we realize that the relatives have already begun to thin out, and our young, undesirably cheerful voices sound too loud in the emptying café, we guess that we should leave.
We swallow the food, stick an unfinished pie in our pockets, and pour out the new bottle, almost a whole glass each, gulp it down and rush outside, to cool off our hot heads.
We smoke and jostle each other, and look at each other tenderly. No one wants to go home, and waits for events to take some interesting turn of their own accord.