Voroshilovgrad (46 page)

The gray-haired man turned off the phone and handed it back
to Nikolaich, his hands pale and bloodless. He took a snow-white handkerchief out of his jacket pocket, and his trembling hand wiped off a copious layer of sweat off his face. He struggled to fit his handkerchief back in his pocket, but he eventually managed to stuff it in more or less as neatly as before. He took his briefcase back from Nikolaich, who, expecting the worst, curled up behind him like a dog encountering a group of strangers. Injured was smiling in a rather peculiar manner.

“Well, this is how it's gonna go down,” the gray-haired man declared, addressing Injured. The fingers that clutched the handle of his briefcase had turned blue. “I warned you. Don't say I didn't warn you. You have exactly twenty-four hours. We are going to bulldoze everything tomorrow. And you'll be held liable for failing to cooperate with the lawful representatives of the utilities department.”

Once again he reached for his handkerchief and started wiping the sweat off his neck, his hands shaking all the while. He headed for his car without saying another word. Nikolaich, trotting along at his heels, gave us a strange, threatening look before hopping in the Jeep. It was as though he wanted to say something but lacked the courage to do so. Instead, he decided to bide his time.

“Well,” Injured said, “now we've got some real problems.”

7

He knew what to do. He had calculated everything precisely and knew that his friends would have his back if things got rough.
Because business is just business, but the blood they shed together during fights on the soccer field and around the neighborhood bound and united them. This had nothing whatsoever to do with business. The cry of bloodlust far outweighs the voice of reason—that's what Injured thought, anyway, and he was proved correct. It was confirmed the very next day when the entire gang, all the guys I'd known since I was a kid, crawled out of their dens, offices, stores, and markets to come back us up, like it always was in the good old days. Except, of course, that this wasn't the good old days. It was now.

As soon as Nikolaich and the gray-haired man left the airport, Injured and I also headed back to the city. He let me out by the community college dorms; I dived into the echoing October air and came out from behind the college buildings into a quiet, empty street. I pushed on till I reached the stone wall around the hospital. “There are times when someone's expecting you,” I thought to myself, “and you just have to come back whether you want to or not.” The buildings were quiet and spiderwebs were coasting by. The patients peering out the windows looked like fish in an aquarium.

The nurses couldn't wait to tell me about Olga. They griped about her bad manners, lack of discipline, and generally grating personality. They couldn't be sure what my relationship to her was, so they didn't go into too much detail. Mainly they did a lot of sighing, not really expecting any sympathy from me.

Olga was alone in her ward—perhaps the kind-hearted nurses couldn't bear the thought of inflicting her on a roommate. She was sleeping in her bed, a carefree smile on her face. She was wearing worn Levi's jeans and a heavy baseball jacket. Her right pant leg had been torn all the way up to her knee and her cast looked like a new sneaker. Her hair flamed in the afternoon sun, and her skin faded into the snow-white sheets like milk on rice paper. Vases filled with flowers rested on the chairs and floor. The wasps and butterflies that wavered around the flowers were torpid and inattentive—like they usually get as winter comes on. I cautiously took a seat on the edge of the bed. There were oranges by the bed, open books resting on the floor, and Olga was still clutching her cell phone, even in her sleep. There were apple trees outside the hospital windows, their branches, quivering dryly in the light breeze, been picked nearly bare by the nurses and patients. Nearly bare, as just then a tiny apple fell off one of them and plunked down onto the windowsill. Olga opened her eyes.

“Herman? What are you doing here?”

“I decided to pay you a visit. Who brought all the flowers?”

“Nobody,” she said, after a second's delay, as though she'd opted against fabricating any stories. “I asked the nurses to bring them. I wanted you to think that somebody had been worrying about me.”

“That's more or less what I thought.”

“Great. That's just great.”

“How's your foot?”

“It's fine.” She checked her phone for new messages and then
set it off to the side. “I asked them to let me out yesterday, actually. I said I was absolutely fine, but they wouldn't hear of it. They just went berserk.”

“They said you were the one who went berserk.”

“Yeah, sure,” Olga said, a bit offended. “Like I don't have anything better to do. Well, whatever—one more day in here and I'll be going back home no matter what. I've got a ton of work to do, you know? It's not getting done while I'm stuck in this goddamn place.”

“How'd you break it, anyway?”

“I wanted to close the door, that's all. Those bastards got me so worked up.”

“What'd they even want?”

“Who knows.” She fiddled with her phone again aimlessly before putting it back down. “They were real nosy, sniffing around, asking tons of questions. They were some real nasty guys. Also, one of them had a bald spot on the side of his head. Ever see anything like that?”

“What do you mean
on the side
?”

“Well, not up top, in the middle, like normal people have—off to the side, right above his ear. And he kept on asking me to repeat myself like he was a little deaf or something. He and his bald spot—they really pissed me off. Finally, I couldn't stand it anymore, so I kicked them out.”

“Sorry for causing you so many problems,” I said.

“It's no big deal. It's my own fault, really. At first I was just so mad at you . . . It's a good thing you decided to come by. Are you going to stick around for a while?”

“If you let me, yeah.”

“Sure, stick around for a while. My relatives loaded me up with oranges. I feel like it's New Year's.”

“Why New Year's?”

“I would always eat oranges on New Year's when I was a kid. Or when I was sick and had to stay home from school. It makes me feel like a schoolgirl again. Help me eat some of these, okay?”

“Sure,” I said and started peeling.

The oranges were warm like fluorescent lamps. Juice squirted out of them and the wasps immediately started swarming over our heads. Juice dribbled down Olga's fingers as she ate; her fingers were so long I watched the drops trickle down for what felt like an eternity. Finally, she swept the drops away.

“Hey,” she said, “I know that Injured's got some scheme going on out there . . . at the airport.”

“Yeah. So what?”

“Are you going to be there with him?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Keep an eye on him, all right?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“He's been acting strange lately. Maybe he's getting old.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Stick with him, okay?”

“Sure.”

“And watch your own back too.”

“Whatever. What could happen to me?”

“I hope nothing,” she said. Then, “Read to me a bit?”

I picked a book up at random. It was something to do with
accounting. Countless passages were marked both by coffee stains and underlining in pencil; it was as though somebody had wanted to rewrite practically every sentence.

“Got anything interesting?” I asked Olga.

“I grabbed whatever I had in the office.”

“Oh, hey” I said, “I just remembered. The presbyter gave me some kind of book. Want me to read it to you?”

“The presbyter?” Olga asked, looking upset for a moment. She quickly collected herself, however, or at least pretended she had. “All right, go for it. What's it about?”

I took out the book Tamara had given me. The pages were well-thumbed and yellowish; a few of them had even come loose from the binding and would fall right out if I wasn't careful. It was pretty obvious that the book's owner had used it heavily, marking certain passages and maybe even rereading it, but hadn't taken very good care of it. It was probably even taken along on trips, but it had never been left behind or forgotten. It had a rather peculiar title, too—
The Development and Decline of Jazz in the Donetsk Region.
I flipped through its yellow pages.

“I don't know whether or not you'll find it interesting,” I said. “It might be better just to read about accounting.”

“I'm so damn sick of accounting. What's your book about?”

“About the development and decline of jazz. In the Donetsk region.”

“People played jazz down there?” she asked.

“I guess so.”

“Well, c'mon,” Olga said. “Just start reading from the middle, though. It's more interesting that way.”

Olga made herself comfortable on the hospital pillows, looking somewhere past me, somewhere toward where the slow shadows of apple leaves were moving along the white wall:

it seemed as though the October sun had gotten irrevocably tangled in the tree branches, its rays moving along the floor like seaweed in transparent water. I remembered that Olga and I had been in a hospital together once before, and that things had ended rather strangely that time; or, rather, everything had taken a strange turn around then and had continued being strange to this day . . . and would probably go on being strange for some time more.

So, I opened the book to a random page and started reading:

The development of the jazz scene in the Donetsk Region has traditionally been accompanied by climactic events and scandalous details. It is doubtless this scandalous quality that accounts for the almost complete lack of substantive research on the rise of jazz in the industrial south of what was then the Russian Empire. The story to be told in this book is particularly odd and has yet to be exhausted.

Our primary concern here will be the nearly forgotten 1914 spring-summer tour of the region by the Abrams sisters. However, one could not start this account without providing the reader with a little context by describing the events leading up to the tour. The Chicago Methodist Church found itself the focal point of these events, as one of its smaller congregations was at this time running a soup kitchen that had formed a close partnership with a local branch of the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC), a charitable organization created to provide support for imprisoned anarchists, primarily those incarcerated in Tsarist Russia. The ABC was tasked
with raising funds, hiring defense attorneys, and spreading anarchist literature across Europe. During the winter of 1913, one Mr. Shapiro, as well as his son—both active members of the ABC—met Sarah and Gloria Abrams, who were both singing in the Chicago Methodist Church's choir. The meeting took place in the aforementioned soup kitchen.

Gloria and Sarah Abrams had gained recognition on the North American musical scene as two of the most famous and original singers of spirituals—it was they who were largely responsible for the genre becoming a mainstream, rather than strictly religious, musical phenomenon. The Shapiro family immediately took an interest in the sisters' musical talents, seeing in these African-American sisters' popularity an opportunity to further their own political agenda. After much persuasion and numerous threats and bribes, the oldest member of the Shapiro family, Lev, managed to strike a deal with the sisters. The plan was simple—recruit the sisters and arrange a tour of the Donbas Region, a predominately industrial part of the Russian Empire, in order to spread anarchist literature among the working class, and in the process transfer a large amount of money to local anarchist organizations to finance revolutionary activities. Initially, the sisters categorically ruled out the idea of collaborating with émigré anarchist organizations. However, Lev Shapiro managed to woo Sarah, the younger sister, who was facing the possibility of being expelled from the Church at the time. Gloria and Sarah agreed to take part in this dubious operation and reach an accommodation with the church leadership on all the finer denominational points.