Voroshilovgrad (38 page)

“Well?” Mr. Slick said.

The security guard opened the door hastily and stepped back,
letting Mr. Slick slip by. Mr. Slick stood in the doorway for a moment, peering in.

“Just like you asked for,” the security guard said.

“Well, what do you want me to do with it?” Mr. Slick asked, irritated.

Flustered, the security guard shrugged his shoulders. I looked into the next compartment. There was a table there, to which an unhappy black sheep had been tied with a long rope that looped all around its body.

“Fuckin' cunt,” Mr. Slick said. “Nick, couldn't you buy some regular meat?”

“We really couldn't, boss,” Nick answered. “There aren't any markets or anything around here.”

“Well, you better get a move on,” Mr. Slick said. “You brought it, so you do the cooking.”

“Me?” Nick asked, terrified.

“Well I'm not gonna do it, obviously,” Mr. Slick answered coldly, stepping aside, taking out a toothpick, and starting to dig around between his straight, tiny teeth.

Nick was at a loss. He was clearly afraid of his boss, so he nodded at his bearded partner, who had just come in. The latter got him a big bread knife, and they approached the animal together.

The sheep was oddly submissive. They both grabbed it; Nick was holding the knife, but he was so anxious that all he could manage to do was stab ineffectually the poor animal, not kill it. The animal wasn't happy about this, and it finally tried to break free. Eventually Nick stabbed like he meant it and the sheep began shuddering. Nick sank onto the floor, so his partner took over. He
grabbed the still-struggling animal by the neck, like an American paratrooper capturing a Taliban fighter. He pressed the blade up against its throat and jerked the knife toward him. The sheep's head lolled, but it was still kicking, and the security guard also fell to the floor. The knife skidded off to the side, landing at Mr. Slick's feet.

“You morons,” Mr. Slick said. “You can't do anything right. Give me that,” he told Nick, gesturing at his holster.

Nick gave him his Makarov pistol and stepped out of the compartment, humiliated. Mr. Slick zipped up his jacket, flipped off the safety, and fired wildly. Blood sprayed all over, dousing Mr. Slick's jacket, but he was unfazed, continuing to fire bullet after bullet into the animal. Ringing, morning silence set in. I peered into the compartment. Mr. Slick, covered in sheep's blood from head to toe, was standing there and examining his victim. Oddly enough, it was still alive. The compartment had acquired a strong smell of gunpowder and intestines.

“Herman,” Mr. Slick said, without turning around. “Finish it off. Or are you too much of a pussy? I don't want it to suffer anymore.” He handed me the pistol.

“I guess I'm too much of a pussy.”

“Yeah? How come?” he asked. “Are you afraid of a little blood?” He turned to face me. “What are you going to have for breakfast?”

“Dude,” I said, “there's no way I'm having breakfast with you.”

“Is that right?”

“Yep, that's right.”

“You're all a bunch of pussies,” said Mr. Slick. “Every single one of you. If you're afraid of blood, you're never
gonna get anything fuckin' done in life. That goes for you, too, Herman. You're never gonna get anything fuckin' done.”

“Whatever,” I answered.

“Whatever?” the drunken Mr. Slick asked. “Okay, whatever. So, you're not going to have breakfast with us?”

“Nope.”

“Fine,” Mr. Slick said. “Nick, call up the engineer and tell him to stop the train. One of the passengers will be getting off.” He looked back at me: “You aren't gonna get anything done, ever,” he repeated.

“You've got some blood on your chin. You might want to wipe it off. It doesn't look too nice.”

At first I thought they were going to open fire on me, but no, the ghost train rolled away down the tracks without a shot. Shortly afterward, the train disappeared, leaving only the smell of hot metal to remind me that it had ever existed.

4

At the beginning of October, the days are as short as a soccer player's career; the oily sun flows past overhead, weighing down the shadows on the ground, bringing the grass to life, and warming the asphalt's broken heart.

I veered away from the tracks, heading down an old highway almost completely overgrown with cattails. Some bewildered wasps were buzzing along the road and sun-warmed spiderwebs
grabbed at my face and clothing, sticking to my skin and getting caught in my hair. The highway stretched through boundless cornfields, and the landscape was featureless—no trees, no towns, no signs of life or death.

Farther along, I found a fork in the road. To the right, the highway pushed on into a valley, looking just as endless, sun-drenched, and webbed-over as the portion I'd already crossed; I decided to bear left instead, following the sun and walking between bare fields where the harvest had already been gathered. The road here was well-worn, so it was easy going, though the sun, moving along the sky's smooth surface, began to blind me. I stopped a few times to rest on the dry grass and look up at the sky, feeling the juice in the grass cooling and going still. “I have no idea where I am anyway,” I told myself, so it makes no difference where I pop out. Just keep heading west, away from the border.”

The fog started rising again at dusk. At first it cropped up in the distance, out in the yellow fields, hanging there as thick as smoke, gradually expanding; soon enough I couldn't make out a thing except the sun's crooked rays cutting through this white film, filling it with light from the inside. My long shadow stretched out behind me like a crashed kite that didn't want to fly anymore. The fog crawled out from the lowlands, and the sun was glimmering, chopping through it like an underwater flashlight. In time the sunlight faded and the fog went dark; I found myself in the middle of a great milky film.

I stuck to the main road as long as I could, trying not to lose my way, but soon enough the fog became all-encompassing and impenetrable. All I could do was continue to move forward, slowly,
pushing the heavy evening air aside with my hands. I couldn't help but feel as though I was always about to collide with something or someone in that milk, at any moment I would run into some barrier, touch someone's face or calf or pull some object out of the fog. When this feeling became too much to ignore, I stopped dead in my tracks in all that silence and dampness swimming around me, sent swirling by the west wind. But, after all that, I didn't hit anything—something reached out for
me
. Someone's hand, in fact. I leapt back, but quickly regained my composure. I touched the extended hand, and as I did so, three children emerged from the sheets of fog. The kids were wearing filthy tracksuits—the first in red, the second in white, and the third one in both red and white, though he was so filthy I could hardly tell. Two of the kids were obviously younger than the third; they were barefoot, while the older boy had wooden sandals. Judging by their Asian features, they were Mongols or Buryats, and they had coarse, black hair and dark skin—though, again, this might only have been because they were so filthy. There was a degree of apprehension in their intrigued eyes—they looked at me like I was a moose that had roamed into their backyard. At last the oldest boy grabbed my hand firmly and led me into the fog. I allowed myself to be pulled along, peering into the milky film, trying to make something out, but I couldn't even see my own shoes

Some soft lights were glimmering up ahead; they grew more and more intense as we approached, singeing the nighttime air. We
ascended a hill, leaving most of the fog behind in the valley, and then found ourselves in the middle of a wheat field filled with faint noises. The lights were revealed as campfires drying out the damp gloom; this was some kind of camp, and a rather large one at that—there were dozens of military tents there with household appliances, dishes, old travel bags, and other miscellaneous bundles heaped around them. Sparks were rising into the black and white sky where the thick, dark void was mingling with the few patches of fog that had drifted this high; the men and children of the camp were mainly huddled around their fires, arguing and trying to keep warm, while the women were bustling out of their tents and disappearing into the disquieting twilight. The men were small in stature, and most, like their children, were dressed in tracksuits, though some also sported hats, and one or two were wearing camouflage. They sat around their fires, apparently arguing, while the women were calling back and forth. The children would run out into the darkness, come back with clumps of dry grass, toss them into the bonfires and dive back into the inky hole.

It was hard to say just how many people were in this camp; the fires seemed to reach all the way out to the horizon, and all the voices were blending into a tense hum, as at a railway station. Nobody paid any attention to me: apparently, they didn't find outsiders suspicious. The three kids who had led me there took me to one of larger fires and ran off. The men sitting there were speaking some Asian language, no doubt discussing the pressing Mongolian issues of the day, and giving no outward sign of either hostility or welcome. I stepped away from this group and headed farther into the camp. It was obvious that they intended to leave
at any moment—their things were packed: pots and pans, wooden furniture, toys, and drums all tucked away under the tents. I saw bicycles parked on the outskirts of the camp. The flags of some unknown republics were flying over the camp, blending in with the dark landscape. And yet the ground by the tents was well-trodden—however temporary this stopover, they had been hanging out here for quite a while, though the real mystery was how they'd gotten here and how they intended to continue their journey, since there weren't any cars, buses, or trucks in sight. Maybe they were traveling by bike? Who knows?

The women cast cheerful glances at me as they rushed by, though immediately dropped their heads again and continued on their way as soon as I took notice. Now and then I also began seeing what looked like servicemen, enlisted in some inexplicable army, wearing gray uniforms with uncanny insignia that meant nothing to me, ducking into and out of the tents. They too paid me no mind. Unsettled by something, they only ever looked up at the sky or at their watches. The tension was palpable in the camp; and I knew why this place had reminded me of a railway station: it was as if everyone was all ready to go, all packed up, hanging anxiously around the platform, but the train was running late, and no one knew why.

One of the tents had a particularly large band of these nomads hanging around it: men, women, and children alike. The men were talking, the women yelling, the children bobbing around between them. Some dark-skinned teenagers stood off to the side, not daring to come any closer, while dogs sniffed at the men's sneakers apprehensively. Even farther off I saw a couple of the men
in military uniforms, a few bald-headed guys in long robes, and some old women holding bundled herbs and decked out in funky dresses. Everyone in this crowd was peering at the curtain covering the entrance to this particular tent. A light was glimmering in the window and aromatic smoke was coming out of an opening in the middle of its canvas roof. Something important was going on in there; perhaps the fate of this whole tribe hung in the balance? I was trying to squeeze my way closer to the entrance when somebody called out to me.

“Hey, I know you.”

I turned around and saw Karolina, wearing a gray camouflage top and high army boots. She had a black beret on her head, and dyed red dreads, robust and durable like nautical rope, poked out from its sides. She was holding a heavy flashlight and shining it straight in my eyes.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I could ask you the same question.”

“I work here,” she said.

“I'm going home.”

“Have you been on the road for a while?”

“Yep, sure have. My train took off without me. I've been walking all day.”