Sankya

CHAPTER ONE-2

Someone passed him a flag. Venka tore off the material and powerfully swung the staff at the officer, who was busy shoving his club into someone else’s face and didn’t see it coming.

The officer’s cap slid down the back of his head, and the blood began to flow in a thin stream down his forehead to the bridge of his nose, where it parted and spread in a canopy across his brow, cheeks, and eye sockets.

The officer looked up, his eyes bulging, as if trying to see the wound.

Another staff landed on Sasha’s shoulder; the flag flapped. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the other flags on other shoulders, like spears, their tips pointing at the policemen and the conscripts holding together the enclosure.

Again, Sasha was pushed from behind so strongly that he fell forward, and as he fell, he pushed his hands into the chest of a conscript who held his club up and began to blink anxiously — either he didn’t know how to swing it or he was too afraid.

Sasha managed to stay on his feet, pushed the conscript away, and lifted the section of enclosure above his head.

The tirelessly screaming mass broke through the pen. The policemen backed away, staring at the protestors. Someone led the officer with the busted head towards the police car.

“Guys, I beg of you,” someone shouted too late from the stage.

Hefty troops in camouflage, the OMON, arrived.

Three, registered Sasha. For now just three of them.

Sasha threw the fence at them, nearly tearing his arms from their joints. The fence rumbled as it hit the tarmac, falling just short of the OMON unit running towards him. They stopped and yelled angrily, but Sasha couldn’t make out the words. They began advancing again, and Sasha threw another section of fence.

One of the OMON fell crookedly underneath the crashing metal. The two others tried to free him.

“Please retain your composure!” the stage shouted. “Continue the rally!”

The formation tore forward, along the avenue. The police stood helplessly, like the honorary guard, overlooking the young, happily howling horde entering the city.

The plaza spilled into a pedestrian street, and the first thing that bore the brunt of the freed crowd’s fury was a taxi stand and several stalls selling flowers.

The women merchants grabbed armfuls of flowers and ran off. Not yet deliberately, still by accident, the protestors knocked over one basket with roses, tulips, and carnations — and right away they liked it, right away got hooked. When Sasha came through, the whole street was covered in crimson, yellow, pink, burgundy. The flowers crunched underfoot, and the stems snapped.

For some reason Sasha gathered up flowers, maybe three or four bouquets from a flower rack not yet thrown to the ground, and for a short time he ran with them, fully realizing the uselessness of his act.

As he passed the taxi stands, he saw a scared taxi driver hit the gas pedal — his passenger didn’t have time to get in fully and she held onto the door, screaming bloody murder as the cab dragged her a few metres.

The other taxis blew their horns and braked erratically, trying to get out of there.

Sasha showered flowers on an impoverished refugee from god-knows-where sitting on the tarmac with the requisite baby in her arms, and he almost knocked down Venka, who was stopped near a*****e window, shopping, it looked like, for the right weapon.

Venka found a rubbish bin, and one moment later it crashed through the store window.

There were still a few ordinary people out on this Sunday morning. The occasional pedestrian scattered, rushed away and didn’t look back. A man in a blue coat ran out of a*****e and trotted up the street. For a moment a security guard in a black jacket appeared, then immediately disappeared into the doorway, yelling something into a mobile phone.

A beautiful foreign car parked on the wrong side of the street — someone parked it here in defiance of the guardians of the road and the rights of pedestrians. The car’s alarm squealed, which was probably what irritated the raging crowd. Several boys turned it on its side with surprising ease and then flipped it upside down.

A little farther down the street, there were more cars, and shortly boys and girls were jumping up and down on top of them with a wild, almost animal glee.

Looking for something to break — to break loudly, with a crash, to smash to pieces — they moved down the street, each of them one-on-one against the city.

The kids didn’t raise their voices and went about their business viciously and with poise.

With a terrible metal screech, a few arcade games fell onto the tarmac.

One of them managed to dislodge the enclosure of a summer café, snatching off” the beautiful black chains and launching the enclosure through the brightly coloured windows.

One of them got cut and wrapped his sliced hand in a piece of satin drape, liberated from the café together with the curtain.

Kostya Solovy, a tall, strangely beautiful, unique type — in a white suit jacket, white trousers, and white shoes with pointy toes that perfectly complemented his pointy vampire ears — grabbed a black chain, and, swinging it nimbly, put out each streetlight he met.

No one got too close to him — the heavy chain drew pretty circles, and if it wasn’t for the dumb racket around him, it would be possible to hear the quiet wailing that the chain emitted on its circular route.

Behind the glass window of a clothing store stood thin-armed, pinheaded mannequins pretending to be beautiful women in short skirts and bright blouses.

They broke the window, and tore the beauties into pieces in the street. Those bringing up the rear were startled when they tripped over body parts.

Sasha understood that the cops had been able to block off some of the protestors after the initial break — he saw that fewer of them were left, possibly only about two hundred people. Many of them were already escaping into the inner courtyards, understanding that the free-for-all would not last forever.

“Pigs,” someone screamed, and the horde tore up the street, dropping rubbish bins and crashing merchants’ stalls.

There was the continuous din of broken glass. The city’s mixed-up and finely ground colours became unusually bright that morning.

Journalists with camcorders ran along with the crowd — businesslike, and, it seemed, maybe even happy about what was happening.

“Over there! Quickly!” a person with a microphone urged the camera operator.

Sasha carried on with a clear head, chasing away all feelings other than the desire to smash and break as many things as possible.

In the street, Sasha saw pink and yellow stuffed toys, prizes from a tipped-over glass “one-armed bandit,” pathetic looking, as if they’d got lost.

From god knew where, the short elderly mayor appeared, walking towards them.

“Stop!” he commanded, and the fear in his voice could be heard so clearly that it was obvious he didn’t really want anyone to obey him.

Venka ran and landed a flying kick in the mayor’s chest. The mayor fell, his arms splayed.

Sasha stopped near the old mayor, resisting his own desire to lift the man up, help him back to his feet, to apologise even.

The mayor grabbed at his holster with a jerky motion, not because he wanted to use his gun, but for fear of losing it, for fear of being left without it.

The mayor began calling Sasha obscene names, and he changed his mind about helping the fallen old man and even stomped on his nearby cap.

“What are you doing, you?” said the mayor, sitting up. He looked very silly like that — sitting on the pavement, no cap, already an old man.

“You yourself are to blame for everything,” Sasha said furiously. He turned around, and Venka immediately caught him by the sleeve and pulled him in the opposite direction.

“The cosmonauts are coming. Come on…we need to get out of here.”

They passed the Nature’s Offerings shop sign with several letters hanging, half torn off. They skirted the showcase window with beautiful zigzag cracks, flew into a piss-soaked inner courtyard, and immediately found themselves at a dead end.

“s**t, I don’t know this neighbourhood!” Venka said, smiling and cheerfully babbling on. “They’re pulping everyone, these cosmonauts. A true m******e. They’re herding us down towards the cops…”

Sasha surveyed the walls, hoping to find an escape.

“A staircase,” said Sasha.

There was a fire escape ladder leading up the side of a four-storey building, but it was too high up to reach by jumping.

“Stand on my shoulders,” Venka said.

Sasha smiled and looked, tenderly perhaps, at him. Because Venka did not say: “Let me stand on your shoulders.”

“And what about you? You’ll hide in the sand here?” Sasha said.

“Pretend to be a water hose,” Venka said, cackling stupidly.“Hey, lady!” He noticed her and stopped laughing. Venka ran up to a first-floor window and began to tap on it rapidly. “Lady, don’t go!”

The woman returned to the window, c****d her head. “What do you want?”

“We are being chased! There! Being beaten and chased! Open the window! Chased!”

Venka gesticulated wildly. He clearly had not yet decided what role to play: the whiney young i***t, emphasizing the “Please take pity on us, ma’am!” or the serious young lad in trouble with the law, going with, “Help me, woman! This can happen to anyone!” As a result,he shifted back and forth between the two, failing to elicit any trust from the woman standing behind the window.

“Damn, if only it was some granny. A granny would have felt sorry for us,” said Venka when the woman, without replying, drew the curtains, but continued standing near the window, her heavy silhouette still visible.

“Probably her other windows face the street,” Sasha said, then cut himself short. It was already clear that if the woman knew what they had been up to she would have never let them in.

“We’ve got about two more minutes…” Venkasaid, having missed the connection. “Sasha, check this out.” (“Check this out” was his pet saying. It could mean a million things, and in this case, it meant, “Here’s a good one for you!”) “There was a sportsman running in front of us there, a jogger. A simple athlete, right. Out for a Sunday morning run. He was the first one to come upon the OMON. In his red shorts. Christ, they f****d the poor guy up. Morons, s**t. Really improved his health.”

There was the sound of steps, and Venka froze with a smile on his face, and for some reason Sasha suddenly felt like sitting or even lying down.

Lyosha Rogov ran into the courtyard — a guy from somewhere in the North. From Severodvinsk, probably.

They barely knew each other, but Sasha had already taken notice of Lyosha for his solid, non-phony composure.

“Why are you standing around here?” Lyosha asked evenly.

“Are the cops already out there?” Sasha answered his question with a question.

“Probably another hundred metres. Is this a dead end? I think the next courtyard is open. I took a stroll here yesterday.”

As they ran back into the street, they marvelled at the chaos and devastation once again.

“They torched a car!” Venka said joyfully. The air was filled with the barking of dogs, howling sirens, police whistles.

Sasha spotted two more overturned cars, one of which, about seventy metres down the street, was on fire. No one would approach it. It seemed that the police had held back because of this — they were wary of an explosion.

Ten metres away the second car rocked peacefully on its roof.

The alarm wailed incessantly and nearby an alcoholic hag was doing a little dance, her face dirty and her lips moist, like the inside of a cheek. The hag smiled, revealing a toothless mouth.