Sankya

CHAPTER TWO-1

CHAPTER TWOSasha parted with Venka and Lyosha at the metro stop — they decided that separately they would arouse less suspicion.

He travelled from Moscow to his provincial town — five hundred versts from the capital — by elektrichka, or, as his comrades liked to say,by “dog sled.”

He sat in solitude in the corner of the carriage; inside him something periodically trembled, an echo of recent experiences — the rhythm arose again, the crashing, the din. Sasha tuned into this rhythm, finding the sensation agreeable.

The city turned out to be weak, toy-like — breaking it open was as meaningless as breaking open a toy: there was nothing inside, only a plastic emptiness.

But this was also the reason for the emerging, childlike sense of triumph, a bittersweet feeling of victory, which made everything appear easier than it had been previously.

When the ticket-collectors arrived, Sasha retreated into the vestibule,observing their blue uniforms and severe faces from behind the dirty glass. He waited for the next stop, skirted the car via the platform, and retook his seat in the corner.

Periodically he sucked on his busted lip, but it no longer stung — he was healing as quickly as a cat.

It seemed that the train rolled along noiselessly — Sasha didn’t hear anything.

Outside the window, a dismal squalor. He saw his own reflection in the glass: short hair with rebellious fringes, unshaven cheekbones, tanned skin, a prematurely wrinkled forehead…an ordinary face.

He arrived in his city. The train doors slammed behind him as if he were an appendage that had just been cut off.

Chasing away the stupid thought that an ambush was waiting for him at the entrance to his building (Right, as if they’d already set up traps across the whole frigging country…), he ran home.

The lock emitted a familiar, soft clinking sound.

The door opened.

Mother worked the night shift, the flat was empty.

Sasha rang a guy he knew, asked for a lift to the village. The guy replied grimly, “I’m heading out there today.”

He left Mother a note: Mum, everything’s fine.

* * *

The ride to the village was customarily bumpy. The guy’s “penny loafer” rumbled along. On the windscreen, instead of a current proof of inspection, was a little calendar displaying the numbers of the current year in bold; the little calendar was supposed to fool the guardians of the highways. They had encountered only one checkpoint so far; the policeman looked at the penny loafer with disgust and turned away.

The guy was silent the whole way, sometimes tuning into the various clanking noises that the car made. The succession of these sounds seemed arbitrary to Sasha. The guy, it seemed, was able to discern each individual instrument in this cacophony.

Passing another checkpoint, the driver stiffened slightly, his eyes darkened and he tightened his grip on the steering wheel, staring straight at the road to avoid even brushing the policeman with his eyes, as if he were some evil spirit.

A moment later, the driver was calm again.

And Sasha, probably, was too.

The paved road turned into a dirt road soon after the checkpoint. Beyond the orchards and the two quiet villages — not even a barking dog — the country road wove through a pine forest. The forest was dark.

The narrow road, laid over the old rail tracks, exposed its robust, even ribs that walloped and wrenched the car.

The penny loafer blazed ahead, looking a bit possessed, its one good headlight shining, the other barely bright enough to illuminate itself. The single beam of light made the branches twist and contort. A fear of the dark and of trees surfaced from somewhere in Sasha’s childhood; he lit a cigarette and felt better.

He remembered cutting the grass with his father once — Sasha was about nine. Father cut and then Sasha took a turn while Father smoked, and then Sasha raked the cut grass into rows. The twilight thickened; they were to be picked up by a truck, but the truck hadn’t yet come. Father made a bonfire. Sasha gathered kindling, not daring to stray too far from the fire. When Father left the clearing, Sasha skittishly monitored the crunch of breaking branches in the forest, and soon Father re-emerged, clutching an enormous haul. The fire trembled; the branches popped.

That clearing is coming up now…here it is.

The truck finally came. Father said to the driver: “I’ll spend the night here.” When the truck began to move, Sasha looked out of the window. Father stood some distance from the fire. Sasha could not read his face.

And if you could discern it, what then? What would you see?

His inner voice spoke with irony, even irritation. Sasha did not like this voice and did not answer it. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and tried to distract himself.

A dirty windscreen. The mini calendar. Wipers frozen in mid-motion. The inside of the glove box with its broken door. Sasha’s matches fell out of the glove box twice before he tired of catching them and set the matchbox near the gear stick.

The driver’s grizzled cheek.

The driver’s house slowly rotting away in the village.

Sasha’s grandfather and grandmother, his father’s parents, lived in the village. He hadn’t seen them in a year. You couldn’t get to the village in the fall, winter, or spring — only during the warm and dry month of May. Or by tractor. Barely anyone had the guts to travel to the village by transport of any other kind.

He no longer wanted to smoke; his cigarette didn’t shorten the distance ahead but tastelessly, queasily dragged on along with it, and the ash fell on his trousers at every bump in the narrow road, the driver eyeing him as Sasha brushed away the glowing embers.

“f**k!” Sasha cursed himself, regretting the burnt holes in his trousers, and threw the half-smoked cigarette out of the window.

Sasha slid down his seat, almost lying down, legs spread to balance himself, and tried for a moment to maintain his body in this relaxed travel-exhausted state. Another bump bounced him into the driver. Sasha was going to apologise but changed his mind and instead sat up straight, looking ahead firmly.

Something vague stirred in his mind, something that seemed apart from Sasha himself. Sometimes he was surprised to notice this stirring of what seemed like his own thoughts — a withered muddle of observations that he didn’t really control, connections made between things he barely noticed and things he’d already forgotten.

Loneliness, Sasha thought, was unreachable because you couldn’t ever be alone with yourself — beyond the reflections left you by those who’ve passed you by, beyond the generous clinging thistle of slights, mistakes, and upsets. How can there be loneliness when a human being always has memory right there, stern and calm?

What is loneliness if everything you’ve experienced is with you and in you, as if you were an ice-cream man who has sold out but continues to walk around with his empty cooler and even places it beside him when going to bed at night, thought Sasha, and ironically chuckled at himself.

Nonsense. What nonsense, said the voice.

Sasha didn’t answer, but he agreed this time.

***

The village was dark; the lights were out in most windows.

Sasha did not experience any revitalization from returning to the place where he had grown up.

For a long time now it had been difficult for him to feel any kind of joy upon returning to the village — just the sight of it was bleak and sickening.

Several village men, slowly walking alongside the road towards the penny loafer, had stopped, trying to peer inside the car: Who’s here? To see whom? Sasha didn’t even look at them, not wanting to recognise anyone. Everything was foreign.

The driver approached his own house.

“Walk the rest of the way?” He either asked this or simply stated it without pronouncing the question mark.

“I’ll walk,” Sasha said, trying not to sound somewhat defeated (which didn’t work too well), and climbed out of the car.

Sasha had paid for the ride in advance.

He stretched his leaden body and walked down an almost completely dark road towards his family home.

The road was mangled and dirty. Some of the locals threw their rubbish, scraps, and slop directly into the nearby ditches — the chickens pecked at what they could reach, and the rest of it was slowly rotting. Sasha stayed away from the ditches, guessing where they were by the smell and the unpleasant softness of the moist, rotted-out soil nearby.

He decided to take a shortcut down a neighbouring road and through a vegetable patch, because he would feel less nauseous if he approached the house unseen, from the back, gradually submerging into the unsightliness and desolation.

Turning onto the path, his feet slipped apart in the mud. Sasha waved his arms and cursed quietly.

His attempts to avoid the mud were futile. As he cut across the vegetable patch, he sank into it. He walked the final few metres to the gate soiled, stepping into the black muck with resignation.

Haven’t forgotten how to open the latch, have you? He tried to be cheery, to get psyched up.

He could barely fit his hand through a gap in the gate (this was much easier in childhood with a thin little paw), and move the dead bolt aside.

“Haven’t forgotten,” Sasha whispered to himself, straining for some feeling of joy. He pushed his worthless mood one last time like a swing, but he didn’t feel happier; he didn’t feel anything.

“Haven’t forgotten,” he repeated aloud one more time, the phrase no longer correlating to anything, empty of meaning. It was just necessary to say something as he closed the gate and moved across the yard, between the two sheds and the barn, neglected by his incapacitated grandfather. Farther along were the stables, where Granny hadn’t kept a goat for the past year, no pigs for three, and ten years since Domanka the cow was led away on her last walk. The stables emitted no scents of life, no manure smell. Not a single furry soul shuffled its hooves — nothing chewed, breathed noisily, nothing was frightened by Sasha’s steps. Only the smell of dirt and decay.

Sasha looked sadly at the house — the small windows were dark. Stepping slowly and gingerly, he passed the rickety fence, which towered to his right, and the gloomy red brick sidewall of the house on the left, and for some reason he stopped at the corner of the house — around this corner was the front door. Near the entrance, Sasha remembered, was a small bench, and he already knew that Grandma was sitting on it, her soft, tired hands folded in her lap.

A child stood on the road near the house holding a switch. Mouthing something, he whipped a puddle with the switch and hissed, jumping away from the splash.

Sasha took another half step.

Yes, Granny was there on the bench — without expression or movement; it seemed as though she saw nothing. And the child’s behaviour, his aggression, his language, also showed that he did not see, did not register, a grandma sitting on the bench.

It was as if Grandma and the child were in two different dimensions.

The road was deserted, dark, and dirty, just like all the rest of the roads in the village. Behind the vegetable patches, overgrown with scraggly weeds, the next village was visible, barely marked by a few sparse yellow windows. The sun was setting, had almost set.

The child waved the switch around and shuffled on the spot.

Grandma gazed, without blinking, over the child, over the vegetable patches, over the trees.

The village was disappearing, dying out — one could feel it in everything. Like a pockmarked, hardened, dark ice floe, it had separated from the shore and was drifting away quietly. The abandoned sheds near the road had sunk into the ground, their sides black and moist, full of rot. Grass grew on their roofs, and even a few twisted, sickly saplings hung on, their roots searching for earth — beneath their weak grip were the cold, empty interiors, where garter snakes crawled through broken dishes and punctured barrels, no longer disturbed by anyone.

The bushes grew out and crept into the road.

Amongst this gradual and near-complete decay, the child appeared strange, out of place, almost a shameful sight.