Solar Plexus

ONE Alik-1

ONEAlik

Of course, my sister could have exaggerated some things, or not told me everything, she is a woman after all; but even if she is more at fault than she believes, she has a husband and a brother, and it’s up to them to decide how she should be punished, since the necessity has arisen. The man who does not understand such simple things and has allowed himself to raise his hand against a woman must pay for what he did. He must certainly pay, no matter how important a position he may hold…

Alik carried on slicing the water melon rind into the bowl and shoved it with his foot, moving it closer to the lamb that was tied to the bed. The little bell on the slim leather collar jingled quietly, and three nickel-plated spheres on the headboard of the bed began jangling too. There had been a lot of them once (two big ones and eight small ones on each headboard), but they were easy to unscrew and they had all gradually disappeared, a few at a time — Alik and his sister had loved to play with them when they were still children.

The lamb squinted approvingly when Alik threw a few pieces of watermelon flesh into the bowl from his own plate, and forgot about the strips of rind. Alik smiled — as soon as the first white bread had appeared in the shops in forty-five or forty-six (he didn’t remember exactly when, it was almost eight years ago already) — long queues formed for it immediately. Only shortly before that people had waited all night for the black bread that had now become plentiful. But before even a month had passed, people simply couldn’t manage without white bread any more.

Alik stroked the lamb and went behind the partition to wash his hands. After filling the washbasin with water from the bucket, he splashed the remainder over his boots — there was clay stuck to them because they were laying a gas pipe into the yard of the house. The gas had to be delivered from somewhere far away, and they had collected money from the residents, but Alik had been excluded from the listings because of the fire safety regulations — either his living space was too small, or there was too much wood in the flat. The wall of the corridor that faced the yard was made entirely of wood, and the partition dividing the washbasin and the kitchen table from the passage into the room was plywood. The floor on both sides of the partition wasn’t combustible, though, it was hard asphalt, but the engineer and the fireman with the moustache hadn’t taken that into account.

The difficulties over the gas hadn’t really bothered Alik: there was no way that he would be left without gas when they were piping it in for everyone else. And indeed, two days ago the gasmen who had begun digging the trench in the yard for the pipe promised to put in a gas stove for him without permission from the engineer and the fireman, on condition that he took down the plywood partition. He agreed, of course, he didn’t really need the partition, his mother had put it up when his sister still lived with them, but now it was more of a nuisance than anything else.

After washing his hands, Alik changed his clothes and went out into the yard. The gasmen had littered it with pipes, and there was a work table heaped high with their tools standing in the arbour under the grape vine. That was why all the neighbours were sitting in their flats. Usually on such a windless September evening the yard was full of people, but now he couldn’t see anybody, even in the windows. There was only old Khanmana kneading dough, as she always did on Saturdays, under the first-floor balcony; the tandoor stove in the corner of the yard, between the stairs and the arbour, had been smoking when Alik got home from work.

Khanmana had made the tandoor two years ago, immediately after she moved into their yard from Bilgyo. And a month later, when the clay was completely dry and rang like metal if you tapped it, how the neighbours had gasped when the old woman lit a fire and then waited for just the right amount of time before slapping the first flat cake of dough on to the red hot wall and then, a few minutes later, the fire-breathing opening of the tandoor had yielded up a yellowish-brown churek with slightly burned edges. None of them had ever seen how bread was made, all their lives they had simply bought it in the shop.

But Khanmana herself was even more astounded when Alik rolled out some dough and stuck his head into the tandoor in order to slap his own flat cake on to the wall. The old woman could scarcely believe her eyes when she saw his cake there beside all of hers. The neighbours were surprised too at first, but then they remembered that he used to study in the bakers’ school at the bread factory, in forty-four, after seventh class at school. His sister had a child, her husband, Nadir, was still away at war, they hadn’t received their father’s “killed in action” notice yet, and Alik had to do something to help the family. One of their father’s comrades who, like their father, used to drive a bread van before the war, came back from the front with one leg missing and offered to get him a place in the bakers’ school where he’d been working as a mechanic for a year. Food and a grant were provided, and, after graduating, you got half a loaf of black bread in addition to your pay, if you could sneak it out without the guards noticing. Everyone else managed it, but that half-loaf was the reason Alik never became a baker — he couldn’t bring himself to steal it, not even for the sake of his little nephew. So he had been forced to graduate from the driving school instead.

Khanmana was kneading her dough on a large copper tray with serrated edges, a home-made sieve lying on the small bench beside her; the old woman could turn her hand to anything: she mended her own shoes, made trunks and stools and even gradually extended her basement by taking advantage of hollows in the foundations of the building. In two years she had shifted the wall about ten metres and an entire new room had appeared.

Alik walked closer and looked at the dough disapprovingly.

“What don’t you like about it?” the old woman asked with a frown.

“Have you put enough salt in it this time?”

Even though Khanmana was fifty years older than Alik, she didn’t take offence at his jokes, and she never missed a chance to answer back.

“Teach your wife to make it to your taste, if you ever find one! How’s your lamb?”

“Alive and well, thanks to your prayers…”

“Half-starved, no doubt.”

“Yes, half-starved, because you never feed him!”

“Why should I feed your sheep?”

“You brought him here, you should feed him.”

“I thought you were going to eat him, not make friends with him! Were there many guests at the circumcision feast last night?”

“Yes.”

“So why did you go to bed so early?”

“You saw me?”

“I see everything.”

“Don’t you ever sleep? I need to find you a good husband, one of the watchmen, then you’ll sleep like a sixteen-year-old girl.”

“Promises, promises…”

“There’s one who’s been waiting to get married since Tsar Nicholas’s reign, but he’s too fond of playing his own whistle. He grabs hold of it at the slightest excuse…”

The old woman laughed, and adjusted her hair where she thought it had come out from under the faded silk headscarf which she tied with its ends in a tight knot so that they stuck up like ears.

At Alik’s request, Khanmana had brought him a lamb from Bilgyo in early August, for his nephew’s planned circumcision. For years his sister had not been able to bring herself to do what had been done to all the neighbours’ boys ages ago, and then everything had come together very conveniently: her husband, Nadir, went away on a work trip, and Alik decided to make yet another attempt to get it done. His sister fluttered her hands in fright, then tried to put off the final decision until her husband came back, but eventually she gave in when Alik explained that after the operation the boy would not be able to go to school for a week or two, and the summer holidays were already nearly over. As for Nadir, he didn’t really care whether his son was circumcised or not, so it was a good thing that he wasn’t there, he’d be spared unnecessary bother.

They brought the lamb from Bilgyo ready for the feast, but the Lezghin who earned his living from circumcisions and regularly made the rounds of the yards offering his services, had disappeared. While they were waiting for him to reappear, the boy became very attached to the lamb, and Alik had grown used to the animal too. So when the Lezghin finally did put in an appearance, the shashlik for the guests invited to the family festival was made from meat that Alik obtained at short notice from a butcher he knew. The meat was fresh, fatty and, to judge from the sheep’s ribs, young, but Alik reminded the butcher that he had had a bad experience with meat bought there two months earlier that looked just as good, but had been lacking in fragrance and flavour. The butcher exchanged glances with his puny fourteen-year-old nephew, who was helping to joint a carcass hanging in the doorway, and asked Alik what sort of taste he thought a sheep which lived in a flat with electric light, ate white bread, listened to the radio and watched the television with the rest of the family would have?

Fortunately, the shashlik turned out very tasty, Alik’s nephew barely even cried when the red-haired Lezghin deftly stretched out the pink flesh and sliced its end off with the narrow, wellhoned blade of a cut-throat razor. There were quite a lot of guests, mostly relatives and neighbours, and there were plenty of presents at the head of the bed on which Alik’s nephew lay, pale and frightened, but happy at having passed this severe test with dignity.

Alik walked across the yard towards his sister’s place. The conversation with Khanmana had annoyed him. Exactly what he had feared had happened: Nadir got back on the day of the circumcision after all and kicked up a big fuss, and his stupid and insulting behaviour towards Alik was apparent to everyone in the yard, otherwise Khanmana would not have asked why he went home so early that evening, when the festivities at his sister’s apartment were still in full swing.

Of course, Nadir had good reason not to like him: no doubt it was hard to forget when a sixteen-year-old boy had almost stabbed you with a kitchen knife in the passage to your own courtyard. All the rest of it — the photographs in the arms of various Hungarian, Polish and Czech women, or whoever they were, and the brazen drunken stories told in his sister’s presence about the jovial European life, and the buxom lover Tosya, who lived in the post office yard, and the many other things that had almost resulted in Alik’s sister being left alone with a child on her hands — all of that, naturally, was forgotten, but the hatred, the humiliation and the fear remained forever. What other explanation could there be for Nadir’s attitude to him in all the years since then?

Forced back against the wall between the rubbish bins and the water metre, the erstwhile liberator of Europe had not even contemplated offering any resistance, his military experience told him immediately that there was only one likely outcome, and he gave his word that he would thenceforth remain an exemplary husband and a caring father. Otherwise he would have been left lying in the dark gateway, all punctured — Alik had no other option, although he had no desire to cause anyone any harm, least of all his sister’s husband.

The rubbish bins by the gate had been doused with some dark, stinking liquid that had driven all of the yard’s cats back up to the first floor; on the narrow balcony running round the yard two of the women were beating out the stuffing of a mattress that had clumped together during the winter, and he had to wait a moment for them to stop brandishing their long, flexible sticks before he could go up the stairs.