Voroshilovgrad (23 page)

8

The rain and the twilight were running together, currents of water were moving in fat, coarse strands, weaving themselves into the air. It was as though we were riding along the bottom of the river when its surface was suddenly blanketed by darkness. Shadows and rays of light moved all around as invisible water dwellers rose up from the silt and came dangerously close to us, two drowned
fishermen on a scooter. The rain was warm, like water at a river's mouth. Waves were crashing down on the scooter, and we nearly skidded off the road a few times. Olga stopped and desperately surveyed our surroundings. “We gotta get out of the storm!” she yelled. Sheets of rain were breaking over her face, and I could hardly hear a thing, but I knew what she was getting at—we had to stop somewhere, the storm was too heavy to go back or push through. “How?” I yelled back. She thought for a second, then: “There's a turn up ahead, we'd better try it!” she yelled, and we forged on, fighting through the waves and scaring away the river ghosts. Occasionally, the scooter would get bogged down and stop—still wearing her sunglasses, Olga could barely see the road ahead, so we were moving blindly. Nevertheless, she made the right turn, and we found ourselves on a side road. The narrow, overgrown asphalt track slalomed between clumps of pine trees. We continued deeper into the forest; the scooter's wheels kept getting tangled in the grass, and it was slow going, but Olga now appeared to know the way, so she was able to dodge bushes and potholes with confidence. We soon found ourselves in front of a dark fence.

I hopped off the scooter to open up the gate, which was just a metal sheet held in place with wire, and Olga pushed her scooter inside. The rain had flooded everything in sight, so we were standing in water up to our ankles. Evidently this was an old Young Pioneers camp from the Soviet days. Off in the distance, I could just make out some old metal buildings—sheets of rain were falling on them too. There was a little square with some sort of peeling monument in the center; pine trees stood tall above it, with the
rain presiding over everything. We rolled the scooter up to the nearest building and rested it up against the front wall. Olga, who had been here before, ran under the cover of the next building over, the largest of all of them, and turned the corner, passing under a line of windows. There was an entrance there, covered by a patch of soaked, sprawling flowers that almost completely concealed the doors. She hunched over the lock, started spinning something, and the door popped open. We sprang inside, as if we were diving into a tin cookie jar while kids happily drummed on it with sticks. The rain beat loudly on the building's metal walls, a sweet rattling sound that shook the entire structure. We couldn't even hear ourselves breathe over that constant, wet drumming. We walked down a hallway and found ourselves in a spacious room. Shelves of old books stretched along walls covered with children's pictures; dark vases of dried flowers rested on the windowsills and a tattered couch had been dragged out into the center of the room.

“This is the Lenin room,” Olga said and walked over to the bookshelves resolutely. She browsed for quite some time, but couldn't seem to find anything interesting.

“How do you know?”

“I worked at this camp for a few years. We had counselor meetings in here. Nobody used the library, from what I remember. Listen,” she turned toward me, “I have to do something about my clothes. I'm absolutely soaked. Would you be okay with me hanging up my stuff?”

“I could just leave. But I'd rather stay, of course.”

“Just don't look at me then, all right?”

“Well, where do you want me to look?”

“All right, damn it, look wherever you want,” Olga said. “Just don't be weird about it.”

She slid off her shirt, stepped out of her jeans and threw everything on the windowsill, neatly placing her sunglasses on top. There she stood, in her orange underwear, glaring at me.

“Okay,” she said, “I realize that this could look a bit odd, but you can hang up your clothes, too. We have to wait out the storm anyway.”

“Look odd to who? Are there security guards here?”

“Technically, yes,” she answered. “But what's the point of guarding the place in the middle of a storm? They're in town, probably. Don't be scared.”

“I'm
not
scared.”

Nevertheless, I decided against getting undressed. Who knows how she would have taken that. I flopped down on the pullout bed, which squeaked in response, and lay there in the twilight, taking in the steady sound of the rain—it was like old ship engines humming. Olga bounced around the room, looked over the children's pictures, found a stack of Young Pioneer magazines somewhere, then brought some over and lay down next to me. It was hard to see in there, the air was so damp it seemed to have congealed around us in the dark, so Olga just skimmed through their pages, looking at the bright images. I leaned in toward her and started looking too. Olga noticed my interest, and began lingering on each page so I could get a good look at everything.

“When I worked here,” she said, “we would read these magazines out loud before bed.”

“Why don't you work with kids anymore?”

“Well, it just didn't pan out. I didn't like the Pioneers. They could be real pieces of shit.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. Although I guess it might be inappropriate for a former camp counselor to talk like that.”

“Maybe so.”

“Did you go to camp as a kid?” Olga asked. “I mean a Pioneer camp.”

“No, because I didn't really get along with other kids. That's also why my teachers never really liked me.”

“Let's talk about something else, then, you wouldn't find it interesting,” Olga said. She tossed the magazines on the floor.

“That's not true. I wanna hear it. You know, I often think back to my German class. It sure was weird studying German in the Soviet school system. There was a kind of unhealthy, anti-Fascist pretentiousness that went along with it. In like fourth or fifth grade we got this one assignment—we were given postcards with pictures of different cities on them. You remember those? Back then they were sold at every post office, whole sets of them.”

“Nah, I don't remember them.”

“Well, they were at every post office. Like postcards with pictures of Voroshilovgrad on them. That city doesn't even exist anymore. It's called Luhansk now. But I talked about it in German for years. Funny how that works, don't you think?”

“Oh yeah. Hilarious.”

“Generally, those postcards had government buildings or maybe monuments on them. But what kind of monuments could there be in Voroshilovgrad? Well, presumably there was one to Voroshilov . . .
Honestly, I can't remember anymore. I had to talk about what I saw on the postcard. But what was there to see? The monument itself, a flowerbed around it, and then there would always be somebody walking by, and maybe a trolley in the background. There might not be, though, and that would make it a little harder, since there would be even less to say. The sun might be shining. There might be some snow on the ground. Voroshilov might be on a horse, or on foot, but that'd be worse, for the same reason . . . I could have told a whole separate story about the horse. Well, you just had to start talking. But what can you really say about something you've never
actually
seen? So, you start making stuff up. At first you could talk about the monument itself—I mean about the real person it's a monument to. Then you'd just have to move on to the random people passing the monument. What could you really say about them, though? Well, that woman is wearing a yellow sweater and a black dress. Maybe she's carrying a bag. With bread in it. Then, after you've covered all of the people, you could say a few words about the weather. Mostly, what I'm getting at is that it was all so artificial—all those pictures, all those stories, that language, a handful of canned phrases, that silly accent, and your pathetic attempts to put one over on your poor fuckin' German teacher. Ever since, I just haven't been able to stand German. And I never went to Voroshilovgrad, either. And now there's no such thing as Voroshilovgrad.”

“Why are you telling me all this, anyway?” Olga asked.

“What do you mean?” I was disappointed that she had to ask. “Well, take this whole situation with my brother,” I said. “It reminds me of German class. It's like I'm being asked to talk
about what I see in the pictures, and I really don't like talking about things I know nothing about, Olga. I don't even like the pictures! And I certainly I don't like being backed into a corner, and told to play by someone else's rules. Rules only have meaning as long as you're abiding by them. As soon as you start ignoring them, it turns out that you don't owe anyone anything, you're not obligated to make up all kinds of silly stories about things you actually know nothing about. Then it turns out that you can get by just fine without all those made-up stories, and there aren't any rules—what they're showing you doesn't exist anymore, so there's nothing to say. It's all a sham, they're just trying to use you . . . and it's all perfectly legal, of course. It's like school all over again. The thing is that we all grew up a long time ago, but we're still being treated like kids, like unintelligent, deceitful, irrational bastards who need to be coerced and corrected and have the right answers beaten out of them.”

“What do you mean it doesn't exist anymore? You exist, don't you? And I do too.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I exist. But there's no Voroshilovgrad anymore. We have to come to terms with that.”

“It's pretty much the same thing with the pioneers,” Olga replied. She fell asleep after that, I'm not sure exactly when.

The rain didn't like it would be letting up anytime soon—it continued to rattle against the tin box of the Lenin room, filling the darkness with its monotonous tapping. The longer the storm
continued, the colder it got in that damp Pioneer room. My clothing, wet and heavy, was dragging me down; I felt like a scuba diver, and when I finally hit the ocean floor, where the rain ended and a thick, inky darkness set it, it was even colder. No matter how hard I tried to ignore the cold, I couldn't warm myself one bit. Olga was still lying next to me in her orange underwear, shivering in her sleep. Her skin was shining; I touched it, and it felt like river water, receptive and cool. “Just make sure she doesn't wake up,” I thought.

I touched her wet hair, and again it felt as though my hands were penetrating the surface of a river, and that surface was calm and clouded so I couldn't see anything beneath it. I caught hold of some shells, trying to reach the bottom. I was afraid my hands would snag on fishing hooks someone had left behind. Her eyes were closed and her eyelids were translucent. They were like ice through which you see the forlorn shadows of the drowned and the dark green seaweed drifting like tumbleweeds along her body's underwater currents, drifting due south, toward her heart. Sliding down those green channels, I cautiously touched her soft, cheekbones—beneath her skin was shadowed and particularly thin, like a spiderweb being stretched by the wind. She was whispering something in her sleep, something I couldn't make out, her lips barely moving as if she was talking to herself, asking herself some tough questions she didn't want to answer. The luminous lines of her collarbone showed through the darkness, like rocks by the coast with the waves wearing their angles down. As I touched them, I tried to feel the motion of the seaweed down below. I could hear her heart; its beating was a steady as the turning of a
sunflower following the day across the rainy sky. I carefully slid my hand farther down, only grazing her breasts to avoid disrupting her breathing. Her skin was firm yet yielding, like flags flapping in the sea wind, directing the movements of clouds and birds. Guided by the blood flowing through her capillaries, I slid down her legs, her fragile porcelain knees, her nearly weightless calves. I reached her toenails, speckled with polish, like shards of broken tea sets, then moved up slowly, as if my palms were full of sand lifted from the bottom of the river. Without opening her eyes, Olga turned toward me and cautiously placed her hand on me, sliding underneath my T-shirt, touching me as though she were touching empty air. We were lying on a worn-out couch, indoors, with darkness and water pouring out of the sky, embracing sheepishly, like young pioneers. She was talking to herself, and I was trying not to interrupt—“Let her talk,” I told myself as I touched her breasts. She took off my shirt and said something to me, nestling up against me and seemingly reading a message written on my skin, some sort of code only she could comprehend. I can't recall anyone ever paying such close attention to my skin. She was examining it thoroughly, pensively, as though she were looking for traces of injections or old burns that had healed long ago but still caused me pain. I even thought that she might have mistaken me for someone else, someone she really wanted to talk to. She was hovering over me, incredibly close, and I pulled her against me. But she extricated herself smoothly and wound up somewhere behind me instead. She leaned over me.