Fish. Always the stories ended with fish. Now, as he had done that day, Yuri secured his helmet. It completely obliterated peripheral vision, but some days, that was a true blessing. And people may say what they want about luck and habit and superstition, may laugh at a grown man in a flight helmet, but when it came to fishing, nothing was more important than maintaining rituals, no matter how silly they may seem. This was another bit of wisdom gleaned from Mircha.
Yuri leaned over the sheer ice. The fish were as dark as stones and he loved them for their dodgy and quiet ways. Whatever their secret desires, if it were truly wings for fins, he'd never know. And somehow in Yuri's mind that made fish more noble than man, put them above the petty designs of people like him, standing on frozen ice or on muddy banks, their long shadows looming over them.
They were so splendid, these fish in their shiny coat of armour, impervious to the injustices of the day. And when he thought of them like this, he was almost glad when the wily eel or tricky pike sloughed a hook, freed itself, and swam away triumphant. Almost. Because he needed the food, after all. That was the real reason he and other veterans like him were all standing or crouching over the ice, freezing their hands and feet off. Because fish meant food or fish meant money. A deficit item like fresh fish could bring as much as fifty roubles if the right person arranged it with the right people. Sure Yuri knew about a practice in the West called catch and release. And in his heart he agreed with it completely. But these days his stomach held fewer philosophical inclinations. Besides, people in the West could afford to be more enlightened and environmentally responsible. They ate better over there and had the fat asses to prove it. Which is not to say he didn't believe in being sporting about the whole matter. He used baited hooks. Once he'd tried spinners. Today he was using his mother's ornamental spoon. Never—not even once—had he pulled any of Vitek's low tricks like rubbing slime on his arm and luring the pike or carp to swallow the arm up to the elbow, while punching them between the eyes as hard as he could with his free hand. Even so, Yuri felt a little anxious, couldn't help counting the veterans up and down the ice and wondering if any of them might be police. Nobody had a licence to fish here. Every one of the dark shapes over the ice was in actual fact a poacher. But as long as poachers shared their catch with the right people, life moved along like this river, without a snag, and everybody was happy. Everybody except the fish, that is.
Yuri set the auger, and started drilling.
'You! Prick on a stick! Hey!'
Yuri sat on his heels and squinted. He could not see who was yelling, but assumed they were yelling at him. Yuri pointed to the helmet, waved good-naturedly, and maintained air silence. Then he went back to drilling his hole. After all, as a veteran he had a right to fish here, at Mircha's spot.
'Bugger off, bottom feeder!' Crazy Volodya hollered at him from down river.
The rule of the river dictated that younger vets paid a fishing fee to the oldest and craziest vet. This morning, the oldest and—by far—the craziest vet on the river was Volodya, who lost his legs in the big war. Even without his legs, Volodya could beat Yuri to a pulp any day of his choosing. And Volodya would be well within his rights to do so: Yuri was only twenty-one, had fought in an unpopular war, had come home broken. Not like the old timers, not like Crazy Volodya who had in his day brought down German Junders, had the medals and decorations to prove it. Now Crazy Volodya sat in his wheelchair attended by two muscle-bound vets and fished anywhere he wanted. If you wanted to trade fishing spots with someone or move up or down river or dump bleach into the water or fish with Chinese firecrackers, then you had to work it out with Crazy Volodya. This always involved a complicated negotiation of favours and bribes or, at the very least, a simple beating. That was the hierarchy. And everywhere he went, no matter what he did, Yuri was at the bottom of the ladder.
Yuri packed up his gear and moved to a much less prestigious spot on the ice, close to the bank where plastic bottles and other bits of trash lay frozen in the ice. He leaned on the auger. The bit bucked just as it punched through to water.
'Yu—ri!' A voice, harsh as a crow's, sliced through the morning calm. It was Zoya, there on the bank wearing her most fashionable winter boots. She put her hands on her hips, shifted her weight from one foot to the other and back again. He read in those subtle movements her mood tipping from gorgeous wrath to toxic indignation and back to wrath.
'What are you doing?' she demanded. Even through the flight helmet, he could hear her slow-boiling anger. She was ovulating. He could hear it in her voice. The fuel behind her wrath. How dare he fish when her window of baby-making opportunity was so slim and narrow?
'Ice fishing.'
Zoya tapped her watch, a cheap Raketa, but he knew she considered it extremely fashionable. 'It's Sunday,' she reminded him.
Yuri inhaled deeply, waited for his lungs to burn. 'So, it's Sunday.'
'You're supposed to be at work. At the museum. With me.'
'I am working,' Yuri said. 'I'm fishing.'
Zoya sighed. 'Are you planning to have your head up your ass all your life?'
Yuri thought for a moment. 'No,' he said at last. 'Just through the holidays, I think.'
Zoya threw her hands up into the air. 'You'll lose the only job you're fit for. Nobody else will hire you, you know.'
Yuri hung his head. A muted flash of a tail fin caught his eye. When he looked towards shore a few moments later, Zoya had gone.
Yuri threaded his bait to the hook, a flashy silver chewing-gum wrapper, and bobbed it in the hole.
He supposed it was his good luck that there was a shortage of eligible bachelors. His luck that Zoya needed a place to live. Because, he was beginning to see, he needed a woman. And as his mother had been slow to object, Zoya simply remained, until asking her to go someplace else was almost unthinkable. He just didn't have it in him to make the big decisions by himself. For the most part, this situation, strained as it was at times, didn't seem to offend his mother's sensibilities as long as he and Zoya conducted their trysts at the museum or on the rooftop of the apartment building where his mother didn't have to see or hear them.
And living with Zoya, though an unconventional arrangement, sure, seemed natural, logical even given his long-established habit of letting God, fate or other women decide the course his life would take. And it seemed, always, somebody else—his teachers at school, his commanding officers, his friends and girlfriends—wanted to make these decisions for him. So let them, was his motto. Oh sure, every now and then, he'd make a token attempt, like refusing to work in favour of fishing, to suggest the illusion that he was an active participant in his own life. But the truth was he felt grateful and relieved when events or people conspired to take matters into their own hands.
All this to say that when Zoya arrived a few months before at the museum five minutes early and descended to the hat/coat-check corridor, a suitcase in each hand, he did not protest, and was, in fact, secretly glad. But even in that small action, her carrying her suitcases, her broadcasting her intent to live with him, there was trouble. He knew that as Tanya quietly exchanged the suitcases for claim disks, Tanya did not understand what the suitcases meant. By the time they all three left work for crumbling apartment building, Yuri carrying the suitcases, he knew Tanya had figured it out: her gaze never once lifted from the tops of her shoes. As Zoya chattered about this thing and that, delighted and taking delight in even the smallest things as people do when they have found love or convinced themselves that love has found them, Tanya did not say a word. And Yuri had wanted to comfort her somehow, to explain. After all, they had always been such close friends. And Yuri would have just as happily allowed himself to wind up with a girl like Tanya, if only Tanya had made her wishes more clearly known. He wasn't a mind-reader, for heaven's sake.