But somehow he knew saying these things would not make Tanya feel any better. She was a sensitive soul. One look at that overstuffed notebook told him that. And he knew some things people should keep to themselves. He could never tell Zoya, for instance, that they were an item only because Zoya had insisted upon it and his mother hadn't protested. Nor could he ever reveal that another reason he'd gone along with it all was (God help him, it's such a stupid reason, but true) because Zoya's eyes were the same dark shade of purple and blue that spotted the Balik Lake trout. Tanya's eyes were more of a nicotine-stain-coloured brown-yellow like the underside of a Caspian Sea trout of the Kura River. A big-boned fish, the Caspian Sea trout—not his favourite, really. And when a man weighs the benefits of waking up to one face over another for the rest of his life, well, frankly, appearances do make a difference, though he knew it was unwise to say so in the presence of mixed company.
Just then, through the sheer ice, Yuri glimpsed the dark body of a pike. Hope inflated his veins and he felt his blood moving clean and bright. Scavengers and not overly smart, pike will eat anything—even in these temperatures. And they were greedy. Yuri yanked the line and quickly re-baited, this time with a ball of chicken lard, soft from being in his pocket, warmed by his thigh. Further up the line, Yuri tied his mother's tiny souvenir spoon. On the handle was a bright enamel picture of the Matterhorn, a mountain they'd never seen but which inspired the fish to bite. Yuri blew on his hands and dropped the line.
Not two minutes later the rod bowed sharp. Yuri hauled the line and pulled up the pike. It thrashed and twisted, its jaws snapping the air, its eyes consumed with rage. Yuri threw it on the ice and held it there under his knees. With a pocket knife, he made a horizontal slit below the jaw and retrieved his mother's ornamental spoon. He hovered there, waiting for a bellow from upriver. When it didn't come, Yuri tucked the spoon into his boot and the pike into a plastic shopping bag, and he pedalled home as fast as he could, the ticking in his head keeping time with the pedalling of his feet.
As Yuri coasted beneath the arch and into the dvor, Vitek's voice sailed caustic and brisk from behind the scrap heap. Even through the padding of the flight helmet, Vitek's voice was a slap against the ears: 'Queue up, you little creeps!'
Yuri dismounted, wheeled his bike to the lime tree, looped a chain and lock around the trunk and watched the children line up oldest to youngest: a yellow-haired girl, a red-haired boy with cracked glasses, two boys, identical twins with white hair and sallow skin, and a small dark-skinned child, whose sex Yuri could not determine.
'Now when you pick a pocket, you must remember: teamwork! Teamwork is the fuel that allows common people to produce uncommon results.' Vitek waved his arms at the stone archway. 'Now go out there and work as a team.'
The children didn't move.
Vitek picked up a piece of rusted cable and swung it through the air. 'Go on! Get lost!' he shouted, and the children trudged towards the arch.
Vitek stuffed his hands in his pockets and strolled towards Yuri. 'What's in the bag?'
'Pike,' Yuri said, opening the bag and peering inside. Vitek took the bag and bobbed it as if his arm were an imaginary scale. 'Feels like four kilos, maybe even five.'
Yuri handed over the pocket knife and Vitek laid the fish on the stone bench, where he began cutting the pike in two. Well, it was Vitek's way to nose in and take a portion of anything other people had. It was all part of his Mafiya-wannabe protocol. In short, it was Vitek's only goal in life to convince everyone that he had connections and knew things that he didn't and that he should be paid for cultivating his great reservoir of useless knowledge. Always it had been this way, for as long as Yuri could remember. Vitek, the little scabby-kneed apartment bully who grew up to be the big apartment bully claiming equal parts Mongol and Gypsy but establishing himself around the apartments as a full-blooded asshole. Vitek, who liked to wear his cracked leather jacket and slouch in the stairwells and doorways. Even worse, these days Vitek considered himself nouveau intelligentsia because he knew a man who completed computer school and could take a photo of any ordinary woman and superimpose her face over the body of known porn stars. All of which was to say, how people used their know-how left Yuri in a severe state of bafflement.
Yuri observed Vitek sawing and sawing with the knife and making zero progress. No, Vitek wasn't handy. But a few things he did know. That much Yuri had to give him. Though he failed entrance exams to the technical schools and though he'd never seen Vitek with a girl, the way Vitek talked about them convinced Yuri that Vitek was wise beyond his years when it came to matters of business and matters of the gentler sex. And what Vitek didn't know as fact, he valiantly made up for with an unbounded confidence that defied logic. His latest investment, bottled river water which Vitek hailed as having cryogenic properties due to the enormous chemical content, had been a dismal failure. 'It's a free market now. We have to get to the train stations and sell things—anything!' Vitek had urged, and because they had nothing they gave him their vouchers, their savings. Which he'd promptly invested and lost. Yes, Vitek thought he could crush hedgehogs with his bare ass. It was an entertaining image and Yuri closed his eyes, imagining.
'What's so funny?' Vitek puffed his chest out.
'Nothing.'
'Let me tell you something. Fishing is OK, but if you want to make some real money, you should re-enlist.'
Behind them Lukeria's windows crept up. Then out came Lukeria's head, her rubber plunger held to her ear.
'With all your experience, they'd probably promote you right away. Make you an officer. Then you'd really be in the money.'
'I'll think about that.' Yuri slung the bag with his half of the pike in it over his shoulder and climbed the stairs for the rooftop. Call him an idiot, and every day from the third floor Lukeria did, but even Yuri was smart enough to know that the Russian Army would be the death of him.
Yuri climbed the service ladder and pushed open the hatch that opened onto the roof. If he couldn't have water then give him the uncluttered air. Give him the pocked cornices and buckling tarpaper. Give him the rooftop that afforded him the perspective to see the broad expanse of landscape beyond the crumbling fringe of city. Give him the many shades of grey a city could yield, none of them pretty. Because no city lasts for ever. Something breaks the city blocks—in this case, trees, shiny and hard and blacker than city soot. A frozen vein of ice knuckled through them and into the city. It was a contrast hard and sharp on the eye, but somehow soothing to the soul. There was such a thing, even now, as black and white, and that he could still see and recognize the difference meant something to him.
Overhead a plane ripped the sky into halves. Below him in the courtyard Azade emerged from the latrine, a twig broom in hand. Yuri watched her sweep salt over the ice and listened to her muttering. Complaining. About Vitek. There was something wrong with Vitek's head, she grumbled. And she was right, Yuri knew. Since his days in the Mozdok mobile hospital, one thing he'd learned was how to determine whether or not someone had a head problem.
In Yuri's case it was simple. For three weeks he could not see, could not talk, hear or move. It was as if he'd pulled his father's cracked flight helmet on and it had attached to his head completely.
His ears could not bear to hear any more. And within this darkness and silence Yuri was plunged into a loop of nightmarish memory he could not escape: Yuri ploughing through downtown Grozny in the T-90 tank. And what were they ploughing over? The bodies of their own dead and the people standing in the hulks of their apartment buildings. They were ethnic Russians. 'Comrades! Please!' an old man yelled at Yuri, who had the gun barrel leveled at the ground floor of the apartment. Sitting ducks, that's what they all were, the wily Chechens having taken to the hills.