Voroshilovgrad (49 page)

“Injured,” I asked, “what now?”

“Dunno. We'll see.”

“They've got all their government decrees and orders after all.”

“You know,” Injured said, “they may not have any of that crap.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they might not have jack shit. They might be bluffing.”

The gray-haired man stopped short. Nikolaich ran up from behind. The penal battalion continued cowering behind their
commanders, feet shifting uncomfortably in their mud-caked boots. The gray-haired man turned struck a dramatic and overly theatrical pose and began shouting at Nikolaich without even looking at him. Nikolaich barked back in reply. They continued shouting at each other for some time, glaring at us all the while, until one of them finally realized that we couldn't hear their performance because the tractor engine was still running. The gray-haired man went red in the face, while Nikolaich flapped his arms like a caged bird. Finally, the tractor drivers realized that they were getting the signal to turn off the engine, which they did. It got quiet.

“Nikolaich,” the gray-haired man said after clearing his throat, now really hamming it up for the crowd, “what are they doing trespassing on these premises?” He waved his briefcase at us.

“It's unheard of!” Nikolaich snapped, soldier-like, and stomped his feet.

“Present these gentlemen with the order issued by the council and begin the demolition,” the gray-haired man hissed.

“Yes, sir,” Nikolaich answered, sweat dripping off his skin, breaking out into red blotches.

The gray-haired man popped his briefcase open, took out a piece of paper, and handed it to Nikolaich. Nikolaich struggled to swallow, as if the dry autumn air was clogging up his windpipe, and headed toward us. He was at a total loss by the time we finally came face-to-face. He didn't know who to show the order to—Ernst, who was considered an official airport employee; Injured, who had no official ties to the airport itself, but might slug him in the nose at any moment; or the Gypsies, whom Nikolaich didn't
know personally and who terrified him anyway. Our crew stared him down, laughing right in his face. Nikolaich started sweating even more profusely. After a lengthy pause, Pasha finally pocketed one of his cell phones and extended his hand. Relieved, Nikolaich gave him the piece of paper. Pasha perused the decree and then handed it to Borman, who also scanned the page. The document was passed farther down the line.

The decree looked pretty unconvincing. Firstly, it was a Xerox copy; secondly, the seals on the signatures had been smeared like sauce across a tablecloth; and thirdly, the signatures were very dubious. The wording of the decree was rather hazy: it primarily focused on Ukraine's gross domestic product and improving the country's investment climate, on democratic reforms and the government's approval rating, but there was absolutely no mention of transferring the deed to the airport to another party or the need to drive tractors down its runway. The page made the rounds and wound up back in Pasha's hands. Pasha then went back to starting at Nikolaich intently, refusing to lower his eyes, black as death in that light. Nikolaich stood his ground, also refusing to lower his eyes—a generous dose of hatred, overwhelming his tired and uncertain gaze, spread slowly and thickly across his pupils. Then Pasha lifted the decree up to his mouth, stuffed it between his teeth, and started chewing it, watching for Nikolaich's reaction. When it came, it wasn't quite what I expected—his face lost what was left of its color, yes, and he seemed to sink back into his camouflage outfit, his eyes losing their malice and looking only weary and timid now; but the overall effect was one of petulance—as though the whole world were ganging up on him. Meticulously
chewing the last bit of top-quality copy paper, Pasha swallowed the decree and grinned. Nikolaich threw his arms up in desperation, looking back at the gray-haired man.

“They . . .” he said. “Did you see that? They ate it. They ate it!”

The gray-haired man seemed lost in his thoughts. Evidently, Injured had been right—they were bluffing. They couldn't even rally the cops; all they had were some small fry with shovels. They thought they'd just waltz in here and we'd go along quietly. They hadn't gotten off to a great start—and, based on the gray-haired man's reaction, there was no turning back for them. His eyes started wandering; he got all squirmy, making an immense effort not to lose face. The soldiers looked deflated—they had come out here expecting that their day's work would just entail some manual labor for the benefit of the local oligarchs, but now that they realized that some punches were going to be thrown, and most likely they'd be the ones to take them, every one of them started hopping from one heavy, muddy boot to the other. When Pasha finally swallowed the decree the last flicker of hope whizzed past their crew cuts.

“Begin clearing the site,” the gray-haired man said, after he'd had a moment to collect himself.

Nikolaich waved to the tractor drivers, as if to say, “Come on, start the engine. Now we're gonna mow every fuckin' thing down!” But, oddly enough, the drivers just waved back, as if to say, “Fuck that shit, you mow it all down yourself.”

“Nicky boy,” Nikolaich shouted at one of them. “Rev it up, c'mon Nicky boy!”

But both drivers shook their heads desperately, as if to say, “Boss,
we're on break for the rest of the day.”

“Hey!” Injured called out at Nikolaich. And then, to the rest of us, “Chill, guys.” He was speaking calmly, as though trying to get us all to be friends. “They've got nothing.”

“What do you mean ‘they've got nothing'?” Nikolaich asked, offended.

“You know exactly what I mean,” Injured said. “So beat it already. We'll sort everything out ourselves—we don't need any lawyers.”

“We got nothing, huh?” Nikolaich asked, not hearing a word Injured said. He ran up to the tractor, which was yellow as the sun, and started jumping up and down, waving at drivers to come down. “We got nothing, eh?”

“C'mon, you fuckin' bitch,” the gray-haired man sputtered at Nikolaich, “do something. C'mon, you son of a bitch!”

Nikolaich stopped his hopping and considered the members of the penal battalion: his last line of defense. They did their best to disappear, lining up behind the gray-haired man, but the latter took a step off to the side, propelling them into Nikolaich's field of vision.

“You hear that?” Nikolaich asked his troops. “What are you standing around for? Forward!”

The penal battalion swayed and headed straight at us, but stopped after just a few steps, holding their shovels indecisively. Pasha exchanged scornful glances with Borman. And at that point, Arkady, pushing himself off his Volkswagen, moved forward. Prokhor followed suit. Unhurried, Arkady took out a pack of Camels, taking one for himself and then extending the pack to Prokhor,
who took one too.

“In all honesty,” Arkady said, “the seal was just fine. But that signature—man, that was something.”

“Not at all,” Prokhor said, gesturing for a light.

Arkady took out his lighter, lifted it up to Prokhor's cigarette, and then lit his own cigarette from the tip of Prokhor's. I could already tell where this was going.

“The signature was just fine,” Prokhor continued, taking a luxuriant drag. “The seals, though—the seals were fuckin' shit.”

“The seals were fuckin' shit?” Arkady repeated, adding a hint of poorly concealed sarcasm.

“That's what I said.”

“The seals were absolutely fine,” Arkady said heatedly. “Come on, dumbass, did you even look at them?”

“You're the dumbass,” Prokhor replied—likewise heatedly, it must be noted.

Arkady neatly put out his cigarette and nailed Prokhor with a right hook from nowhere. Prokhor spun down the asphalt toward the penal battalion, his Camel flying out of his mouth in a wide arc—but he recovered almost instantly and pounced on his assailant. Arkady sidestepped Prokhor, who flew past him, charging like a bull. He pivoted and darted back toward Arkady, essentially hopping into his arms. Both of them wound up rolling down the warm asphalt like kids on the beach, Arkady trying to choke Prokhor, Prokhor repeatedly boxing Arkady's ears, maybe trying to make him go deaf . . .

The soldiers just stood there and watched, shocked, trying not to breathe, because they naturally didn't want to disturb those
two ferocious lions of organized crime. Nikolaich, the old prick, knew all about our local gang's antics, and shouldn't have been unnerved, he stood there dead still, all pale and green, as though he had broken out in camouflage. The tractor drivers were peering intently out of their windshield, already quite invested in the struggle playing out in front of him. At last realizing how much these Gypsies were making a fool out of him, the gray-haired man spat onto the asphalt and tossed his briefcase from one hand to another.

“That's enough,” he said, just loud enough for everyone to hear. “You're fuckin' dead meat. I wanted to settle this peacefully, but now you're fuckin' dead meat. You don't even know how fuckin' dead you are, you can't even imagine. And you, you fuckin' bitch,” he hissed at Nikolaich. “Go hang yourself. You got that straight, you fuckin' bitch? Go and hang yourself right this minute.”

He turned around and climbed into the Jeep. It peeled out, and disappeared behind the hangar. The troops scurried somewhat timidly off to their truck, hanging their heads. They tossed their shovels up first, then hopped inside and disappeared around the corner.

It got incredibly quiet. All we could hear were Arkady and Prokhor trying to catch their breath down on the asphalt. Nikolaich looked us over, taking in each face in turn stopping at Ernst. He zeroed in on Ernst, even though he hadn't actually done anything to Nikolaich—Ernst was only standing there alongside his friends, just killing time. But Nikolaich was staring directly at Ernst, who intercepted his scornful look and answered in kind. So there they stood, nobody paying much attention to them—Pasha had gone over to help Arkady and Prokhor up. Borman was surveying our
guys, talking over the fight in detail, and Injured was talking with someone too, but something struck me as wrong about the way Ernst and Nikolaich were still standing there, glaring at each other like dogs before a fight, as though time had stopped and this whole situation pertained only to them, as though it were up to the two of them alone to decide how we were going to finish this.

It was obvious what Ernst was thinking. Ernst was thinking, “Something bad is going to happen, something real bad is definitely going to happen. For now, nobody can really tell—they all think that the worst is behind us and that the storm has passed. But that's not true at all.” Ernst was very familiar with this feeling, with the sense of impending danger. It was coming, all right, and there was no way to avoid it. They'd have to run this gauntlet one way or another. There would be no way to speed the process up or avoid it altogether. All you could do was look the ominous beast in the eye and wait. Its terrible snout would sniff you for a while, then it'd just walk away, leaving fear and stench behind. Ernst almost immediately had a flashback to when he once felt the rotten breath of brewing trouble. He recalled that trapped feeling that clogged his lungs, he recalled that deep-seated fear that encroaches upon new territory like swollen rivers in March. Also, he remembered that the most important thing is to keep fighting and maintain eye contact. Then everything would be fine, and then everything would pan out—the most important thing is to be ready for the worst.

It was just as obvious what Nikolaich was thinking: “I still have time to fix everything. I'll get the job done, everything is going to be all right.” Even while everyone was jeering at him, while
everyone was humiliating him in front of his superior, in front of the army guys he'd arranged to have sent over, he kept thinking the same thing:“I'll get the job done. I'll fix everything.” What was he planning on fixing? Nikolaich had no clue. Over the past two days, he'd made his life so complicated that he no longer knew how to make things right again. Those cunt Gypsies had made him look like a fool in front of the gray-haired man. Nikolaich could picture it now—the gray-haired man regaling everyone at the office with the story, giving Mr. Pastushok a report on how Nikolaich had handled himself, making him look like a total asshole in the eyes of all those bastards at work. If people didn't laugh at him so much, if they didn't humiliate him so often, he'd persevere somehow, he'd get through it. Now they were just ripping his heart out, though, right through his throat, and stomping on it. And this was a never-ending, vicious cycle. He stood there with tears of desperation in his eyes, remembering the throbbing pain of endless humiliation—he could barely admit that to himself that he had always lived with it.

Ernst thought back to the old German military positions: trenches covered in springy pine needles that crunched under one's feet, poorly preserved fortifications, completely forgotten. He'd hunted for them for a while because he knew that there should be some trenches still around, at least according to the military maps. However, none of his friends who were digging around in the woods and marshes here from dawn till dusk—unearthing weapons, medals, and most importantly, unaccounted-for Wehrmacht soldiers who were worth big bucks—knew anything about those positions. Moreover, they would all laugh
at him, saying, “Dude, this is just like you and your tanks. Quit dreaming—there aren't any trenches still out there.” But Ernst took it upon himself to talk with the locals, and one of them eventually admitted that there
actually
were some trenches, deep in the woods, but now they'd be nearly impossible to find. After the war, they purposely planted a ton of pine trees out there, because they didn't feel like extracting all of those shells and bombs that had fallen into the sand dunes near their posts back in '43. The trees were just there to keep people from wandering around. Ernst combed all of the nearby forests and windbreaks, on all fours no less, and finally came across a few heaped trenches that were almost completely concealed by the pine roots. He set up camp for two days, meticulously digging through hot sand infused with bullets, shell casings, and army uniform buttons. In the evening of day two one of the locals called the cops, who sped on over and nabbed Ernst Thälmann, the renegade archaeologist. Maybe that was when Ernst had felt a similar terror, and when he'd learned how to master it: when they were taking him back to the station. He knew that the next few months would be rough and that he'd have to prepare himself for the worst. He'd have to live through that nagging sense of impending doom, knowing that it would recede, eventually. Just wait it out. Persevere.