A fortress wall, heavy and impenetrable, ran along the right bank, propping up the hills and keeping the city from expanding any farther. The customs office was behind the bridge—city guards in gilded armor and traffic cops wielding striped sticks stopped cars and trucks as they tried to pass through the city gates, checked their goods, and searched their trunks and the travelers’ suitcases, looking for undeclared emporia and banned literature. The travelers were checked for syphilis and the plague, and the more suspicious of them were detained and quarantined at the gray barracks the Red Cross had set up by the bus station. The mornings were the busiest time for those officers; they had to catch merchants trying to worm their way into the Old City through underground passageways or stow away on metro cars, and sizable cohorts of sailors who avoided paying any tariffs or declaring any of their cold steel weapons who ascended the surrounding hills by dark footpaths that wound through the gardens and vacant lots behind the Polytechnic Institute. The travelers and men of trade who paid their taxes in full were admitted to the city and either climbed up the cracked cobblestone road, or the new asphalt one the government had recently laid, to the upper neighborhoods, where there was more sun but less greenery. Banks and stores, 24-hour kiosks where you could always get a pack of cigarettes and 24-hour pharmacies where you could always get your particular drug cocktail lined narrow streets packed with advertisements and automobiles. Flashy dresses and jewelry burned pink and green in display cases, serving men carried heavy water jugs out of the stores, rushing to bring them to local kitchens, where cooks were lighting their ovens to prepare exquisite Italian and Arabian dishes for the heads of their households. Restaurants and coffee shops were welcoming their first patrons—those who’d arrived from other cities that morning or hadn’t had the time to grab a bite to eat after a night on the town, or those who lived in hotels and nightclubs for weeks on end and just wanted to be around people, so they followed the alluring morning smell of cognac. Students gathered in cheap cafeterias, spilling beer all over their lecture notes, taking out hunting knives and vowing to gut deans and professors, catching up on the latest news, and reading protest poems aloud. Businessmen were sitting in expensive restaurants and closing deals, pricking their fingers and signing contracts in blood. The women standing on the streets smelled like sleep and love; the children were running to school, re-creating the magnificent stories they’d seen in their dreams the night before. Their screams soared up into the sky and disturbed the trembling currents of air—they froze and changed direction.
Up high with the rising morning air, among the solar fires and poplar clouds, there were enough churches, mosques, and synagogues to hold all the city’s residents if danger were to strike, monuments to poets and university founders, sprawling parks where birds and beasts brought from Asia and South America roamed free, and theaters, palaces, the hall of burgesses, the municipal government building, and the main department store, all stacked on top of each other. In the mornings, street sweepers washed the steps leading up to monuments and concert halls, traffic cops despairingly stopped bicyclists who flew out into the main square, scattering flocks of pigeons and red, squawking parrots, and eminent professors and councilmen headed to their offices to attend to the city’s needs, protect it against unnecessary fiscal risks and other threats to civilization. The city fathers walked out onto the high tops of their towers, surveying their neighborhoods, swollen with sundust, catching the nearly imperceptible smell of the river flowing from the south, gazing at the surface of the northern river glistening like an airplane’s wing, listening to the birds circling over them, and lifting their heads to the heavens to ask the saints for mercy and intercession. The saints stood there in the blue, invisible space beyond the currents of wind and pockets of turbulence, feeding the birds of the air straight from their hands, listening to the voices down below; they were giving the city fathers an answer, and it went a little something like this:
“We are doing everything we can. We would like things to go well for you, but how they go is not entirely up to us, so you shouldn’t rely on us alone. Most of our woes and crises of faith stem from our own unwillingness to separate our actions into two categories—good ones and bad ones. We have our love, but we don’t always use it. We have our fear, and we rely on it more than we ought to. There are two paths in life—one leads to heaven and the other to hell. Those paths often cross, though.”
MARK
They set up their furniture-repair shop in the basement of the local utilities department. There was no sign, but the people who needed to find it could—turn after the metro, pick out the right building, duck into the brick archway, and you’ll see the black metal door in the wall. Just knock or ring the bell. They’d stuck a sagging couch down there for the employees to nap on if they didn’t have any work to do. Stationary equipment loomed in the middle of the room, and tables cluttered with jars, brushes, dry rags, pencils, worn-down sandpaper, and dull foldable knives with bent blades crowded up against the walls. A heavy, swaying lamp dangled from the ceiling and yellowed Soviet factory posters and a few wrestling plaques hung on the walls. The shop smelled of paint, varnish, old wood, and other people’s homes, where all those chairs, wardrobes, bureaus, and bookcases had been before customers lugged them down here to get fixed or restored.
In the mornings, they’d open the windows, which faced an apartment complex overrun with grass and wild garlic. Fresh air and the muffled sounds of the streets would fill the room. There were some gnarled apple trees out there, and the furniture guys put a couple of benches in their shade—another place for naps. There were some wobbly little structures built against the sides of the apartment blocks a little farther away, beyond the trees, but it was no easy task fighting through the twisting ivy and tall grass to get to them. Even farther back towered a jagged section of brick wall—all that remained of the buildings that had once stood there, now ruined and forgotten. The wall ran up against a wide street that stretched uphill, past the Polytechnic Institute, toward the center of town. In the summer, the block would be completely empty, and the grassy spaces enclosed by the apartment buildings would be as quiet as churches on Monday. There’d be even less work, leaving the employees with nothing better to do than listen to the radio on their cellphones.
Mark started working here back in the winter. In March, the shop was damp; he and his partner in crime would sit there, drinking their boxed wine, pairing it with scoops of the hard, dark snow that would linger on the ground under their windows until mid-April. His partner in crime, Yasha, had been at the shop since the beginning. He’d known the boss since the eighties—they were working at the bike factory, just going with the flow, then the nineties hit, they tried to start charting their own course, and the boss capsized. Loyal to a fault, Yasha waited for him faithfully, like a sailor’s wife at the harbor. About ten years back, at the beginning of the 2000s, the boss got the green light to set up shop in the basement—he had to pull a lot of strings to make it happen, too. He’d find all his customers himself, buy all the used stuff himself, drop off salvaged material at night, stop by with some shady customers in the morning, casually raise the price on bureaus, make some calls, avoid some people in town, hardly socialize with anyone—hardly anyone liked him—but his heart wasn’t really in it. Yasha, who had nimble fingers and a resilient liver, was the one who really kept the place running. But Yasha wasn’t getting any younger, so he asked for an assistant. The boss wouldn’t go for any outside help. After all, he barely trusted the guys he had. But then Kolia, one of Yasha’s good buddies, recommended his nephew Mark.