Voroshilovgrad (5 page)

“Sonny boy,” the driver responded firmly and convincingly, “that's the city over there, and we can't go into the city. We're hauling goods.”

I got off the bus. The sun had set; it got chilly right away. I put on my coat and set off along the highway. I got to the gas station in about twenty minutes. The windows at the service station were dark. “Where's Kocha?” I wondered. It seemed completely abandoned, and the front door was padlocked. I decided to wait around a bit nevertheless. I walked behind the building by the grass and raspberry bushes where Kocha's trailer was. I could see a few old, beaten-up automobiles. The trailer was also locked. Feeling my way through the darkness, I found a lonely truck cab, with no trailer in sight. I jumped in and took off my sneakers. The moon was hanging up above, and the asphalt was losing the heat it had soaked up during the day. Right in front of me, in the valley below, was my hometown. I put my backpack under my head and fell right back asleep.

2

The dog was black, tinged with swampy green. It crept forward apprehensively, hunching down as it went, trying to go unnoticed. It approached quietly, its fearsome paws tearing through the tall grass, and then it was looming over me, blocking out the sun. The rays of morning sunlight gave its skull a golden hue. I met its glassy gaze and saw my own reflection looking back at me. It bounded forward, paused, then moved again. It froze for an instant and nudged me with its snout. Its hungry eyes lit up, and the grass behind it curled into an emerald wave, concealing a bloody, sunny thicket.
Half asleep and sensing motion, I thrust my hand forward instinctively.

“Herman, hey buddy!”

Putting my feet down heavily on the bent iron rods, I pulled myself up.

“Herman! Pal, you're here!” Kocha said, coming up to me and gesturing vaguely with his long, skinny arms, and bobbing his nearly-bald skull, but he couldn't squeeze through the broken window, so he just stood back a bit in the sun that had already risen and was now ascending to just the height it wanted. “Well, what are you lying around for?” he asked hoarsely, pawing at me. “Hey buddy!”

I tried to get up. My body wasn't cooperating after a night on the hard seat. I stretched out my legs, bent over, and just fell into Kocha's embrace.

“Hey pal!” I could tell how happy he was to see me.

“Hi, Kocha,” I replied, and we shook hands, patted each other on the shoulder, and drummed each other on the back for a while, demonstrating just how grand we thought it was that I had spent the night in an empty car and he was there to wake me up at six in the morning.

“When did you get in?” Kocha inquired after the first wave of happiness had passed. Incidentally, he still hadn't let go of my hand.

“Last night,” I answered, trying to free myself from his grip, and finally put my shoes on.

“How come ya didn't call?” Kocha had no intention of letting go.

“Kocha, you're a little bitch,” I said, finally extricating
myself and finding that now that I had it back I didn't know what to do with my hand. “I've been calling you for the last two days. Why haven't you been picking up?”

“When'd you call?” Kocha asked.

“In the afternoon,” I said, finally managing to pick up my sneakers.

“Ah, I was sleeping,” he said. “I've been having trouble sleeping lately. I'll sleep during the day and then come to work at night. But there aren't any customers at night,” he continued, fidgeting a bit and then motioning for me to follow him. “Well, and more importantly, our phone isn't working—we didn't pay this month's bill. And yesterday I was in town. Come on, let me show you around.”

He went on ahead. I followed behind him. I detoured around a Moskvitch car with burnt tires, and then a heap of scrap metal, airplane parts, refrigerators, and gas stoves, and slipped behind Kocha as he walked over to the gas pumps. The gas station sat about one hundred meters off the northbound highway. The city through which the highway ran was down below, in the warm valley, about two kilometers away. On the other side of the valley, to the south, sprawling fields gave way to the city's outermost neighborhoods. A river flowing from the Russian side of the border toward the Donbass region encircled the city from the north. The left bank was on a slight incline, while tall, chalky mountains, whose summits were covered with wormwood and blackthorn, dotted the right.
A TV tower, visible from any point in the valley, soared upward, resting atop the highest hill and looming over the city. The gas station was situated on the next hill over from the tower. It had been built back in the '70s. An oil depot had appeared in the city around that time, followed by two gas stations—one on the city's southern border and the other on the northern one. In the '90s, the oil depot went bankrupt, along with the other gas station, so this one, on the Kharkiv highway, was the only station left in town. In the early '90s my brother got involved, just as the oil depot was on its last legs, and took over. The station itself was looking pretty shabby these days—four old pumps, a booth with a cash register, and an unused flagpole you could hang someone on, if the mood struck you. There was a cold warehouse stuffed with metal out back. Clearly, infrastructure didn't take priority, since my brother invested his money in improving customer service by gathering up all sorts of appliances and mechanisms for repairing everything imaginable. He lived in town, coming to work every morning and descending back into the valley well after nightfall. He had a killer team working alongside him—Kocha and a guy everybody called Injured, both self-taught mechanics who had resuscitated numerous trucks over the years, something they took great pride in. Injured also lived in town, whereas Kocha had been forced out of his apartment, so he hung out at the gas station all the time, sleeping in a trailer furnished according to the principles of feng shui. There was a patch of asphalt with a repair pit near the station, and a few metal tables were sunk into the ground off to one side, under the lime trees. Gullies and apple orchards started behind the gas station, stretching along the chalky mountains; to the north the
landscape gave way to steppe, broken up by the occasional noisy tractor. Mangled car parts had been heaped together behind the trailer—stacked tires and the remains of disassembled vehicles. The cab of a Kamaz truck, offering a panoramic view of the sun-kissed valley and the unprotected city, was hidden away in the raspberry bushes. But this business wasn't about infrastructure or old pumps. It was all about location. That was certainly what my brother had in mind when he decided to buy this gas station. The fact of the matter was that the next place to get gas was seventy kilometers north, and the highway ran through several dubious places, places with no government to speak of, and hardly anyone to govern. It seemed as though there wasn't any cell service up north, either. All the drivers knew that, so they wanted to fill up at my brother's place. Moreover, they knew he had Injured working for him, and Injured was the best mechanic around: the god of drive shafts and stick shifts. In short, the place was a gold mine.

Two detached car seats had been brought over and planted by the brick booth, next to the gas pumps, covered with the black skins of some unidentifiable animals. Springs were jutting out randomly from the cushions, and a long metal arm or lever had been attached to one of the seats, making the thing look like a catapult. Kocha wearily plopped down onto the seat, took out his cigarettes, lit one of them, and pointed at me, seemingly saying, “Take a seat, buddy.” I did so. The sun was beginning to radiate heat like rocks on a riverbank, and the sky whirled along above us,
goaded by the wind. It was Sunday, at the end of May—a perfect day for getting the hell out of here.

“You here for long?” Kocha asked, whistling a bit as he spoke.

“Heading back tonight,” I answered.

“Why ya leaving so fast? Stay for a few days. We'll go fishing.”

“Kocha, where's my brother?”

“I already told you, in Amsterdam.”

“Why didn't he tell anyone he was leaving?”

“Herman, I don't know. It wasn't planned, you know. He just up and left. He said he wasn't coming back.”

“Was he having problems with the business or something?”

“What problems could there be, Herman?” Kocha replied testily. “We don't have any problems here, or any business either—it's just a mess. You can see that.”

“So what's next?”

“I don't know. Do whatever you want.”

Kocha put out his cigarette and tossed the butt into the bin labeled “No Smoking.” He tilted his face toward the sun and didn't say another word. “Damn,” I thought. “What's going on in that head of his? He's probably hiding something—sitting there cooking up some scheme.”

Kocha was fifty or so. He was pretty energetic for his age, had lost most of his hair, and was decidedly off the grid. The remains of his formerly luscious locks, now surrounded by bald patches, were sticking out every which way. Back when I was a kid, he still had a full head of hair; I remember seeing Kocha a lot back then—he was the first living thing my consciousness registered, aside from my parents, relatives, and our other neighbors. As I grew up, Kocha grew old. We lived in adjacent buildings in a new neighborhood that was constantly expanding, so I felt as though I grew up on one big construction site. Our neighbors were mostly workers at the small nearby factories (there weren't any big industrial concerns in our city), and then a few railroad men, all kinds of white-collar dipshits (teachers, office workers), military personnel (like my father), and members of the Communist Youth League—the leaders of tomorrow, as they said. As far as I can remember, Kocha wasn't there to begin with; he moved to our street after we did; but it still felt as though he'd lived in our neighborhood his whole life. He had joined the leaders of tomorrow, grown up without any parents, and gotten himself into some trouble with the law, gradually becoming something of a local menace. It was in the '70s that our neighborhood really started expanding, so Kocha's wild adolescent years coincided with intensive infrastructure growth—Kocha held up our new grocery stores, cleaned out the newly opened newspaper kiosks, and broke into the newly constructed civil registry office; simply put, he was keeping up with the times. Acknowledging their helplessness, the authorities handed Kocha over to the Communist Youth League, hoping they would straighten him out. For some reason, they didn't consider Kocha a hopeless case, so they got right down to molding him into a model Communist. For starters, they enrolled him in the local vocational school. Kocha stole a lathe during the second week of classes, and they were forced to expel him. After a year and a half
of hanging around the neighborhood, he finally got hauled off to the army. He served in a construction battalion by Zhytomyr, but he came back home with paratrooper tattoos. These were his glory days. Kocha made his rounds in full uniform, beating up anyone he didn't recognize. All the guys, myself included, worshipped Kocha then since he was such a bad example. This was when the Communist Youth League made one last, pathetic attempt at winning Kocha over by giving him a one-room apartment in the building next to ours. He moved in and immediately made his home a pit of debauchery. In the early '80s, all our neighborhood's young overachievers passed through his apartment—boys became men and girls gained valuable experience. Kocha started hitting the bottle harder and harder, so he barely noticed when the USSR collapsed. At the end of the '80s, when a serial killer went on a rampage in our city, the authorities pointed the finger at Kocha. The neighbors too—everyone was convinced that Kocha was the one raping the girls coming home from the milk factory on starry, perfumed nights, and then stabbing them with a long jagged piece of scrap metal. Nevertheless, no one had the guts to do anything about it—they were too scared of him. In time it seemed he'd earned all the men's respect and the women's affection. Then, at the beginning of the '90s, the authorities had to take matters into their own hands once again, absent the now-defunct Communist Youth League: at the end of a solid week of partying, Kocha burned down a billboard advertising a newly formed joint stock partnership, and this wound up being the final straw. The powers that be had already been at their wits' end; but then they busted into Kocha's own apartment and put him under arrest.
A small protest had been organized by the time they led him outside. The guys and I (we were grown-up by then) all backed Kocha, but nobody gave us the time of day. He got a year, and did his time somewhere in the Donbass, where he hooked up with some Mormons. They gave him a bunch of pamphlets, as well as some cologne and cigarettes, at his request. After a year in the can he returned home a hero. Shortly thereafter, the Mormons came around looking to save his soul. They were three young missionaries wearing cheap yet sharp suits. Kocha let them in, listened to their spiel, took a shotgun from underneath the cushions on his sofa, and herded them into his bathroom. He kept them in there for two days. On the third day he rather imprudently decided to wash up regardless, opened up the bathroom doors, and let the Mormons break free. After running over to the police station they tried filing a report; however, the cops quite rationally decided it would be easier to lock up the Mormons for an identity check instead. Over the next few years, Kocha tried, unsuccessfully, to get his act together. He got divorced three times. Moreover, it was the same woman every time. Clearly, his love life was a mess, and Kocha's youthful energy was slipping away from him. It finally slipped away completely in the late '90s, when he wound up in the hospital with part of his finger bitten off and his stomach punctured. His wife had done the biting, during an argument, but Kocha flatly refused to say who was responsible for his stomach. Around that same time, my brother started helping him out by giving him some odd jobs, a little money, and whatever else he needed. He and Kocha went way back, apparently; my brother hinted at this a few times, although he never wanted to get into it.
He just said you could trust Kocha—he'd be there if you got into a jam. Some Gypsies forced Kocha out of his apartment a few years ago, so he moved up here, to the gas station. He lived in the trailer, led a calm, serene existence, spent most of his time reminiscing, and wasn't even thinking about getting his apartment back. He was a mess—his balding head had a soft pink tint to it, and his glasses made him look like some insane chemist who'd just discovered the formula for an alternative, environmentally-friendly form of cocaine and decided to test it out on himself, with some very promising results. He wore orange work overalls and old, beat-up army boots; most of his clothing came from military surplus shops, in fact; he even had foreign socks labeled
R
and
L
so you couldn't confuse the right and the left. His wrists were wrapped in handkerchiefs and bloody bandages and his face and hands were always scratched and cut up. His hands were generally so red he looked as though he'd been eating pizza with them.