by Oleg Pavlov
Without allowing him to get his wind, they grabbed him under the armpit on each side and dragged him along. But even hanging limply as they hauled him along, he seemed to be fighting, angrily butting his forehead against the empty air. He could not take in the fact this was only happening to him. As he writhed in agony, he called out: ‘Lyoshka, hang on in there! Our time will come… Just give it time, we’ll get out. We’ll do them…’ And then he groaned a bit and commanded himself with all his might: ‘A death for a death!’
The guard returned, out of breath and surly, and led him to the dining area. He barked, ‘Surname?’
The answer came as a belated moan: ‘Hlmuorov.’
He suddenly added gruffly: ‘I reckon you’re a grass. Sold your friend down the river, did you?’
When he had ladled a bowl of barley porridge from the army pot, he shoved it towards him: ‘There, eat!’ But the man who he thought had betrayed his comrade for a bowl of porridge for some reason would not touch the food. ‘I told you to eat.’
‘Uh-uh.’
‘Lost your appetite? Wouldn’t mind giving you a good pummelling. Don’t worry, we’ll do it once you’re back in the cell.’ All the men who had come off duty came to gawp at the informer. ‘We’ve already tidied up his teeth a bit.’ ‘There’s a Judas for you.’ ‘You’ve wasted your time washing and shaving, ’cause you’re a dead man. Better just go and hang yourself.’ They couldn’t force him to eat for fear of consequences from on high – they’d get porridge all over him. Then the guard remembered the order to smarten the prisoner up: after a quick think, they told him to take off his boots, then they put him in front of a rusting basin to wash them. Without a brush or even a cloth, it was a case of cleaning them by hand. This they could make him do, jabbing his side, reawakening his still painful wound. The boots now shone, but they shoved him again: ‘Come on, get them cleaner, Judas!’ And when they got to his coat, which they had been ordered to return, they made him pluck off by hand all the mud that had stuck, even the tiny specks.
An hour must have passed, if not more. They still had to take the prisoner back for interrogation. Outside the doors to the office, the guard suddenly hesitated: an angry female shout was coming from the investigator’s room. ‘Hey, don’t you treat me like that. Svetlana Ivanovna Svetikova is a human being! And you, you piece of trash, are getting her worked up. Right, I’ve had it. You’re a dead man. I’m sick of this. We’ll rid the earth of your presence tonight.’ The guard knocked and opened the door, without waiting for permission. Shouts burst forth: ‘Sign the interview record, you fucker, or I’ll make you eat it…’ The woman’s distorted face could be seen in the doorway. Risen from her chair in fury, she was wielding a scrawl-covered sheet like a sabre over the head of the man sitting across the table. Only his back was visible, but it was hunched and somehow remote, as though it were part of an already decapitated body that for some reason had been set on a chair.
The boss stopped the interrogation and left the office. She examined the prisoner from head to foot and, pleased with his appearance, she sent the guard away. Firmly and authoritatively, she said, ‘Follow me!’ One after the other, doors swung open, and it became more light and airy. ‘I shall lean on you. I am expecting, you know; it’s hard for me to do things alone. I just want it to be over. You’re lucky that your case came to me, seeing as Nazeikin has outdone himself this time. Be thankful you had someone to plead for you. One thing I’ve noticed in my time is that if a man’s willing to sacrifice everything and fight tooth and nail, he’ll save his loved ones. But the type who just mumble and grumble are wasting their time camping on your doorstep – their kith and kin have had it.’ She stopped and recovered her breath. They must have come to the last door. She pulled his military ID out of her jacket pocket. Returning it to him, she said: ‘If you had any cash with you, don’t try getting it back. Well, you’re demobbed and can make your way home now. You saw nothing and you don’t know anyone. You weren’t in this town yesterday or today, got it?’ Suddenly she shouted harshly, ‘Or do you want to go back inside?’ He smiled and kept a guilty silence, not realising that the boss would have been all too happy to have him back. ‘Oy, what’s all this? They took your gold teeth?’ she said, gasping and in a lather. Something made him shake his head in happy denial. ‘Well, just resign yourself to it, son; you’ll live. And as for your teeth – once you’re out you can fit yourself up with all the teeth you like, even gold ones.’
He did not understand that he was being released. When it happened, he took fright: they opened the steel door – and suddenly he was standing in a clean, deserted street, with nowhere to go. His benumbed legs were gently buckling, and in his head he could hear the boss’s whining voice, now directed at the man to whom he was being transferred right outside the gates of the building, with its outer bricks as red as blood.
His keeper was deaf and seemed unable to believe that he was looking at the very person whom he’d recalled so lovingly as a son all this time, though he had not dreamt that he’d set eyes on him again when he’d seen him off to his native parts, already imagining him with his eternal tooth. ‘Why did you do it?’ the man seemed to be asking with heartbroken eyes. He stood there, realising that it was Abdulla Ibrahimovich who had come for him, but he could not speak. He was silent. The deaf man gazed hard at him, waiting in distress for an answer, some movement of the lips. He shouted as though fearful that he had just lost his hearing: ‘What did you say? What are you saying?’ Seeing a smile that bared some black wounds in place of the teeth, he shrank back in silence.
Abdullayev began walking without looking back. He set off timidly behind Abdulka, tailing along and probably hoping for forgiveness, but for the whole journey he seemed intentionally to be lagging behind. As they walked through the streets, twilight descended. Everything unfamiliar and strange was seeing them off through the city until, in the cold and emptiness, the railway station emerged.
The waiting room was swarming with people and filled with light. Beyond the black mirrors of windows looking straight out to the platform, a distant roar could be heard. Women, men and children, who seemed to be seeking safety here, were jostling in their search for a place under the soaring empty vault. Or, finding a place, they were huddling: some against their luggage of prim, stumpy-nosed suitcases, in shades of black or brown; others against their belongings, which were bursting the sides of their bundles, or simply huddling against each other so as not to be lost. At the window to the military ticket office, there was space again to breathe. In this oasis of order and of a law distinct from that of the public queues, they were given upon request an outbound passenger seat on a train leaving at midnight.
Not far from the military ticket window a patrol group was standing about – a duty officer and two lads in officer cadet uniforms who smelled of aftershave. The officer took a closer look and his face darkened: the newly arrived passenger in hideous boots, who had something just as unsightly sticking out from the collar of his greatcoat and whose face had clearly taken a hammering, evinced such disgust that it was too late to ask him for his papers: this scarecrow was crying out for arrest. Abdulka shuddered at the officer’s gaze and backed away, shielding the lad. The patrol group surrounded the two of them. The deaf man pulled the officer aside and whispered: ‘Don’t touch him, please. He’s released on health grounds, he isn’t right in the head. His train is coming soon. He’s going home to be unwell.’ The face of the duty officer, which had been intently morose, suddenly went soft and a little stupid: he believed this and gave an understanding nod, glancing over his shoulder in his desire to move away from this scarecrow of a soldier.
The patrol group retreated.
Abdulka had no further business in this city. With the look of someone who was staying behind, like a loving man with no one left to love, he was saying goodbye at the train station merely to an hour of his own life. His face was forbiddingly aloof. They spent this time together in the waiting room because the boss wa
s waiting in the warmth for his commuter train home. Suddenly the deaf man whined to himself, not realising that the words could be heard: ‘I wanted good for you. I treated you all well…’ And stony-faced, he suddenly fell silent. And when he looked for the last time, he said in a menacing voice: ‘Don’t follow me! I don’t know you.’
He was left on his own, and the man who had so simply and brutally given him back his rescued life went away, this time for ever. Along with the ticket there was money in his pocket, ten roubles: a reddish-coloured note just as final – Abdulka’s last sacrifice – as that last fierce gaze of his and his last words.
The unkempt and feral-looking soldier, who smiled like a monkey at everyone he met, soon attracted attention at the station: he looked as if he were searching lucklessly for something or someone. He showed up several times at the buffet, eyeing the same counter that looked like a bone picked clean. In the late evening, the only beverage available in the buffet was something labelled ‘tea drink’. The lad asked for a glass of this tea and handed over his ten roubles in payment for this brew priced at a few kopecks. He drank it hungrily and left. When he turned up again, he asked firmly for a cup of tea. The swill was lukewarm but, standing to the side, he slurped on it for a long time, as though it were freshly boiled.
Something similar happened in the waiting room, where he took each seat in turn as they became vacant, but then happily gave them up to women with children or to the elderly. And on the platform too, he paced from end to end with an air of great importance, coming to the notice of all the people meeting or seeing off each new train as he enquired which train was arriving or departing and from which platform, and then reported this information to anyone standing open-mouthed or rushing to find out. As he passed the patrol, he tried as impressively as possible to salute the duty officer and seemed to be deliberately popping into their sight. Suddenly he went and asked for permission to make a call of nature, as though he were deserting his post. The officer was confused; nevertheless, timorously mirroring his seriousness, he personally gave him permission to do so, and even sent one of his cadets to show the way to the toilets. He addressed the officer again for permission to take a walk in the station forecourt – and they quickly tired of him. The officer brushed him away, telling him gruffly that he could go wherever he wanted. He returned to the waiting room carrying a huge watermelon, which at this time of night the Kazakhs had done well to sell him from their wind-battered nomadic stall that resembled a tent, awaiting late-night customers in the forecourt. Hugging the old and weighty watermelon he had bought unintentionally and to all appearances not for himself, he popped up again before the commander and reported that he’d purchased a watermelon. The cadets looked at each other and grinned. The officer felt uncomfortable, frowned and shooed him away from the patrol group. He believed that he should share the watermelon, and spoke of this with haste, whereupon the commander simply shouted at him to clear off. Realising that he was being driven away, he hugged the offering that had so angered these people and hastily asked just one question to find out what time it was. The duty officer’s face froze in fear, yet also darkened ominously. Luckily for him, not far off some citizen at a loose end heard the question, looked at the clock hanging overhead in the waiting room and casually replied, telling him the time.
Knowing how long he had to wait for the train, he slowly paced along the platform. It was too cold to stand on the spot, and walking about with the watermelon was as oppressive as it was arduous. He did not dare throw it away, as he did not consider the money spent on it his own; it belonged to Abdulla Ibrahimovich. Feeling stupid and wretched, he suddenly thought of the hungry little girl who had once begged right in front of him. He could not remember what she had looked like, it seemed he had only felt her hunger – and at first slowly, then more boldly, he headed off in the opposite direction to that of his train. The rails covered everything as though they were waves, their steel crests gleaming in the moonlight, and it seemed as though they were even giving out a heavy murmur similar to the breathing of the sea. Underfoot the gravel was quietly gnashing its teeth. The cold of the steel river came alive with the coloured lights of the signals. The wind brought in turn the ethereal freshness of the cold and the shiveringly palpable drizzle, then the fumes from the sleepers with a hint of something burning – probably coal in the stoves of the trains racing past. He could clearly see the night when they had walked at this very hour, in this very direction, crossing the same silent expanse, and he realised with surprise that this had all happened before: only it had been without the heavy watermelon that he was carrying for the girl, thinking, for some reason, endlessly of her, not of the others who had also once been with him.
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Current & Upcoming Books
01
Juan Pablo Villalobos, Down the Rabbit Hole
translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey
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02
Clemens Meyer, All the Lights
translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire
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03
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
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04
Iosi Havilio, Open Door
translated from the Spanish by Beth Fowler
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05
Oleg Zaionchkovsky, Happiness is Possible
translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield
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Carlos Gamerro, The Islands
translated from the Spanish by Ian Barnett
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07
Christoph Simon, Zbinden’s Progress
translated from the German by Donal McLaughlin
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08
Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods
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09
Deborah Levy, Black Vodka: ten stories
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10
Oleg Pavlov, Captain of the Steppe
translated from the Russian by Ian Appleby
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11
Rodrigo de Souza Leão, All Dogs are Blue
translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry & Stefan Tobler
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12
Juan Pablo Villalobos, Quesadillas
translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey
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13
Iosi Havilio, Paradises
translated from the Spanish by Beth Fowler
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14
Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative
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15
Benjamin Lytal, A Map of Tulsa
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16
Ivan Vladislavić, The Restless Supermarket
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17
Elvira Dones, Sworn Virgin
translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford
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18
Oleg Pavlov, The Matiushin Case
translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield
