Then, also, there was the ticking in his head. The sprockets, Zoya maintained, whenever he brought the matter of the incessant noise up with her. But he knew better. The sound was like that of a stuttering oven timer lodged at the base of his cerebellum, which was, come to think of it, not functioning very well and hadn't been, not for a long time. His head, he decided, was a cheap clock that didn't know its own ruin.
Yuri clapped his palm against an ear, as a swimmer forcing out water, then pushed on the pedals. It wouldn't be so bad, this ticking, if it weren't so loud. He had stuffed cotton wool in his ears. He'd fashioned plugs of soft wax. But only two things helped. The first: fishing.
Hardly a surprise. Even before he was called up into the army, before all that business in the south, fishing had been his passion. Fish, Mircha had once told him, formed a connection between the water and air, between our world and theirs. And Yuri preferred their world of water. For water, he had learned long ago, was a far more forgiving medium than air. The water turned light viscous and noise unraveled in muted threads, as if from the edges of a dream. It was the same sensation he could achieve when he wore his father's souvenir helmet, which was the second course of self-therapy. The helmet was a replica, and not even a good replica, of the type of helmet made famous by the cosmonauts. A horizontal crack stretched from one end of the plastic visor to the other. It had no monetary value whatsoever, or certainly Yuri would have sold or traded it by now, but its sentimental value was unbounded as it was the one and only item that had once belonged to his father that Yuri still had.
As a boy he wore that helmet from the moment school let out in afternoons to the moment it began again in mornings. He even wore the helmet the day his father left them to go to the war. He and his mother, along with the entire city, had turned out to watch the motorized rifle unit leave in a line of transports for the Bakharevka base. And while others waved their paper flags, their eyes covered with handkerchiefs, Yuri, his eyes shielded by the plastic visor, trained his gaze on his father. He watched without blinking as they disappeared behind that thick veil of dust.
And he wore the helmet now. All this to return to a world of diminished illumination. A world discerned only through the cracked visor that weakened light to wavering bands. All this to woo water for its own sake. All this to return to a place where that extra inner padding of the helmet pressed against his ears, and all noise dampened to the language of water and Yuri could be, once again, a fish.
Yuri leaned the bike against a frozen birch and stepped cautiously over the shore-fast crusts of river ice. The sound of gunshot thundered through the ice. Yuri dropped to his knees, held his breath, counted the ticking in his head. Not gunfire, just ice compressing. Yuri stretched flat over the ice and peered at the darkness below. They were his brothers and sisters huddled down there, whispering secrets about the rest of them and their clumsy paddling over their glass ceiling. Tell your dream to a fish and he'll carry it for you. This was another bit of advice that Mircha once gave him. Yuri cupped his hands to his eyes and squinted at the fish below, his mouth moving silently. His dream: if he couldn't be a fish, then he wanted to spend his every waking moment in the company of fish. He was with Mircha and Vitek ten years ago when he first said this. They'd been ice fishing, a first for Yuri, something he had hoped his father would show him when he returned from the war.
'It's an exercise in patience, what we're doing here,' Mircha said that day. 'Patience is what you get when you divide the number of days you've gone without eating by the temperature outdoors.' Though he was only ten years old at the time and had a poor grasp of integers, by Yuri's reckoning, they were all becoming very patient people.
'Do you know what they're doing down there?' Mircha pointed to the ice, to the fish beneath the sheer layer. The ice was so thick and it was such hard work for Yuri to drill through it with the auger that Yuri had figured the fish simply froze like everything else in wintertime, and had said so.
'No, not frozen,' Mircha explained, helping the hole along by sprinkling vodka at the edges. 'They're just sleeping. And dreaming. Do you know what they're dreaming of?'
Yuri looked at Vitek, who was lobbing small rocks at the power lines. Yuri shook his head no.
'Wings for fins, blue sky for water.' Mircha steered Yuri back to shore. 'You see, fish are just like us. They dream of flight. They look at birds and long for all the same things we do. Do you know what the difference between them and us is?'
'They taste better fried in oil?' Vitek called hopefully.
Mircha glared at Vitek. Then Mircha draped his arm over Yuri's shoulder and spoke in confidential tones. 'The difference is that we—that is, you and I—can do something about our dreams. That's something they don't teach you in school and you won't read it in any book, but it's true all the same.' Mircha said this with a jerk of his shoulder, as if earmarking with his entire body the veracity of his words. 'Yes, fish have dreams, just like you and me. But they've lost their piss and fire. They've forgotten how to fight.'
It was a cold day in March, and windy. Mircha's coat gaped open, wide enough for Yuri to see that Mircha was wearing his beloved T-shirt, 'Make a Splash!'—the one given to him by a portable commode salesman from Canada. Yuri stared at the T-shirt. He knew that Mircha sincerely believed that it was a man's duty to make his mark in this world. That is, all men should piss in the wilds and the cultivated places, too. The wind whipped up and Mircha's coat sailed out at a crisp ninety degrees. Yuri could not help noticing Mircha's empty sleeve.
Mircha followed Yuri's gaze. 'Over it went. Blown clean off. The captain said he watched it drop four hundred feet or more into the Amu Darya. Ever seen the Amu Darya?'
'No,' Yuri shook his head.
'No,' Vitek called out, lobbing a rock at Yuri's head.
What Yuri wanted to know, what he wanted to ask, was if Mircha in all his comings and goings along the front had ever seen or heard any news of Yuri's father. But even then Yuri understood that you don't interrupt a veteran telling his story. And Mircha's stories, once started, were like the old T-64 tanks that knew only one direction: forward, no matter what the cost.
'Glistening and sharp like the metal of a trap. Like a silver chain and there we were pinned on the road, wounded and dying. Russians and Georgians and even a handful of Lithuanians. And then a sound you don't ever want to hear, Afghan rebels. We heard them baying and calling, "Here we come! The wild Mujahideen, the wild jackals, coming to kill the intruders!"' And then Mircha threw his head back and howled, just like a dog whose ribs wanted to climb out of its throat.
'And then what?' Yuri asked. A small rock whizzed past his ear.
'And then what?' Vitek mimicked in a shrill voice, then threw another rock. Yes, even then Vitek was a bully.
'The Georgians!' Mircha snorted. 'Honestly, they are the world's crappiest fighters. It's no wonder they get their asses kicked so often. All this to say, we tucked our tails between our legs and we ran, those of us who still could. And then a whirlwind of noise filled the air. And what came whistling over the rise?' Mircha leaned towards Yuri as if waiting for the right answer. And when Yuri didn't say anything, Mircha shouted, 'Black Tulips! Those helicopters of death, that's what we were hearing. The sound of the turbine rotors of these big cargo helicopters carrying the bodies of the dead. And something else you should know.' Mircha touched his stump. 'It was the way then to airlift bodies and dump them in the mountain lakes. You can just imagine what it did to those fish—may they all croak!'