Our mustaches had finally asserted themselves. Mine approached the coarse bushiness of the “walrus,” while Tolyan braved the slight curvature of the “petit horseshoe.” With the cool Baltic wind still whistling in our heads, we set out to stretch the balloon of our reckless youth to its limits. We played tennis and went to the movies with the prettiest girls in town, quickly earning the nicknames “tennisists the penisists.” In the winter, we sledded down the glaciers on oilcloth mats, then spent hours searching for lost hats, mittens, and boots. People in Magadan said about me: Tolik, he’s a good guy, smart, handsome, reads books, has a good job. But he has this friend in Sokol, Tolyan, who will be the ruin of him. Tolyan’s neighbors in Sokol said the same about the good, handsome, educated Tolyan and the bad influence of his debaucherous friend in Magadan — me.
Time rushed by slowly. Historians and journalists coined catchy terms: Khrushchev’s Thaw, followed by Brezhnev’s Stagnation. Tolyan and I still juggled the same activities: tennis, skiing, drinking, blurry days at work, and girls, with whom we broke up as soon as their slippers and bathrobes appeared in our bachelor apartments. Minimal responsibilities, minimal rewards. By the time I was twenty-seven, a sense of my own stagnation began to nag at me. When will my real life begin, I wondered, and what was it, exactly, this real life, the one I’d spent so many years preparing for in school? I didn’t share these thoughts with Tolyan; he was wholly in his element and happy.
One Saturday in March, when we were twenty-eight years old, Tolyan and I went skiing with several of our friends from the Aviation Administration. This particular slope, our favorite, was in the near wilderness and could only be reached by a rope lift. Over the years we had built a cabin up top and with every trip hauled food, alcohol, and gasoline from the bottom of the hill.
March was my favorite time to ski. The snow was still powdery, yet the sky was already bright blue and high. Compared to February’s temperatures and ferocious winds, it seemed almost tropically warm. The deep-frozen dwarf birches and low spruce shrubs were beginning to straighten their shoulders and push through the dense icy crust, buzzing with the electricity of the new sun. We buzzed with them, drunk on the heady spring air. The town was visible from the top of the slope: a white matchbox labyrinth cradled in the snow leopard — colored mountains. As we conquered the hills and drop-offs and caught sight of Magadan during the brief moments we were airborne, it felt as though we were flying toward it. And a part of us, the young, dreamy part of our souls, escaped and beat in the wind awhile longer after our skis hit the ground.
By five o’clock, everybody was getting ready to leave. Tolyan and I skied down first to have the mountain to ourselves. I led the way.
The air was thickening fast. Unexpected bumps lurched from under my skis. Gangs of dwarf birches sprang up out of nowhere on the turns. My heavy backpack was disrupting my balance. Halfway down the slope an invisible force tripped me. Before I fell, I heard a crunch like splintering dry wood. My skis had snapped off. My left boot was facing backward. It wasn’t pain, but the sight of that bizarre angle that made me nauseous. I pulled up my unharmed leg to my chest and began to moan.
Tolyan skidded by me a minute later. When he saw my leg, for a millisecond, a spark of anger animated his alarmed expression, the way he flicked the ice from his mustache and threw down his hat. (He had realized that we wouldn’t make it to the dance that night.) Then, just as quickly, his face took on the noble grip of determination.
“Don’t move.” Tolyan picked up his hat and jammed it on my head with its woven visor backward. I’d lost mine during the fall. Then he took off his skis and began the trek up the slope to the cabin to alert the others.
It was quiet. The world was expressed solely in shades of gray, as though somebody had sketched the scraggy trees and slope curves on white paper with a graphite pencil. I felt a sharp pain in my elbow and my back was sore, but the leg didn’t hurt. I barely perceived it as a part of my body. The snow Tolyan had picked up with his hat was dripping slowly down my neck. I was dizzy, yet I also felt a feral, jealous ownership of my body. My blood rattled as if I’d been plugged into a giant central life support system. I was hot and unafraid.
Dark fog saturated the air. Suddenly, I became convinced that the encroaching shadows of the mountains were about to absorb me into their indifferent landscape, make me a flat, black figure — of a man or just a log — invisible to my rescue party. This thought made me tranquil. If only I could send my parents a message that they shouldn’t worry, that I would continue my life, except not as Tolik but as an acorn or a little shard of ice.
I spotted a fallen cone next to a tuft of spruce bush needles. The composition looked remarkably like a miniature palm tree, and, for some reason, making this simple connection moved me to tears. I wanted to take a whiff of the spruce, a smell I associated with magic since childhood — probably because of the New Year tree — but I couldn’t lean far enough to reach it. I stared at the petals of the cone until they began to quiver, drawers about to open into another world. I felt like I was about to faint and began to hum under my breath. “Michelle, my belle…” And then I heard the voices of my friends calling out my name as they descended the slope.
Somebody had already skied down to call the ambulance from the bus stop, they told me. They hoisted me onto a wooden board and tied me down with rope. Tolyan and tall Oleg picked up the front end, and the shorter Slava and Artyom picked up the back. We inched down. When they ran out of war songs, they sang the discotheque anthems of the day, liberally interpreting the English lyrics: Shizgara, yeah baby Shizgara for Shocking Blue’s “Venus” and Just give me money, that pha-ra-on for the Beatles’ “Money.” It was getting darker every moment. My pain came to from the shock and began to howl. Finally, I saw the headlights of the ambulance flash from the bottom of the hill.
The last thing I remember before the operation is pleading for the doctors not to cut my ski boot. My Yugoslavian skis and boots were my most prized possessions and had cost a month’s salary. The diagnosis was closed fracture of the fibula and tibia, spiral, comminuted. Tolyan had stayed with me in the hospital late into the night.
This all happened on March 8, International Women’s Day. We had planned to attend a big dance at the Palace of ProfUnions later that evening. While I was enjoying the post-bone-setting morphine haze, Tolyan tried to call our girlfriends to let them know what had happened. But they had already left for the dance.
Mine was Lily, a little hourglass-shaped Jewish olive, with amber-clear eyes and a bead of a birthmark above her lip that drove me crazy. She was engaged to a rising Jewish academic, which I didn’t see as a problem at the time, at least not my problem. Lily ran to my apartment every other night. Who was I to stop her?
She visited me at the hospital three times. Each time the sight of me in bed with my broken leg in traction, supported by various slings, weights, and levers, brought her to tears. Poor Lily would put her bag on the stand near the bed — although many of my other, less mindful visitors simply hung their bags right on the weight — and stand shyly by my side. Then, her hands would hover above my full-leg cast, brush against my arm, and land over her mouth. She would kiss my forehead so tenderly that a wave of itching sensations rushed down my broken leg. I would seize my metal scratcher, insert it down my cast, and poke about savagely, moaning from pleasure and pain, which would trigger another bout of tears from my beautiful Lily.