His eyes open somehow in slow motion — has he recognized me? I thought he was sleeping, I thought he would leave his interior only with difficulty. Does he remember me?
Pumping my fist provides the initial, necessary surges. The red ribbon crawls into the transparent corridor. The blood reaches his vein. Expecting the end, he could hardly have hoped for such a final self-sacrifice. Well, Comrade K-shev, obviously there are moments when even your fabricated ideology bears fully ripened fruit, full-blooded, that is. Now it’s my turn, now the hemoglobin in me will do the rest — disease added to disease doesn’t always mean twice the disease — you only live once. Perhaps it means a cure, perhaps survival. Perhaps going back over the boundary, beyond which responsibility loses its meaning. Life, in one of its strange forms, is suffering — I give it back to you now, Comrade K-shev. I, one little Pioneer, the only one who did not turn traitor and consign you to oblivion. You can live, breathing oxygen through the radioactive cells that we now share. By your gaze I can tell that you weren’t expecting it. Yes, coming out of a coma is painful, no doubt about it. Why does it always work out such that happiness can’t be had without just a little more suffering? And not without you: not without you also means not without your definitive destruction — you understand what I’m getting at. Revenge has to play out its endgame. I’m listening, I’m waiting for the whole truth, my ears are sizzling with impatience. Comrade K-shev?
The Boss’s circulatory system envelops us, every one of us. The queen bee attracts her drones. The sun rises and sets, the goal is visible during the daylight hours, but once night falls, we stagger around in the numbing darkness, flapping our arms like wings, but without the elevating power. A slow falling, my body grows pale, emptiness frosts over my veins.
My blood is no longer inside me, it has crept out, yet it’s pleasant somehow — like an obligation being lifted. I can’t feel myself.
But what do I sense in this case, whom do I feel?
He’s dreaming now, the exhaustion before death is lapping at his body and every muscle. The magnified blossoms of the pumpkins, a bright, egg-yolk yellow — they jut out to the side above the splashes of green along the trellis. They’re licking their viney chops, they’ll drink him up with their mouths. And every drop of blood as well. I get off the motorcycle, kill the motor — I don’t want him to hear me. He’s dazed, I know — perhaps he’s injured, but at the very least he’s probably deathly tired after an all-night chase, in the rain. I left the gendarmerie, the dogs, the posse behind me, I’m going on alone, I’m going first.
There he is — it isn’t easy for him to hide. I catch sight of droplets on the rocks, red drops of fear, red drops of death. Not his — killers always leave traces behind them in the blood of their victims. In just a short while I myself will rise like the sun, after taking the shot. I take out the pistol. I know there’s at least one bullet left, I’m sure of it. The blue cartridge glints in the hole of the chamber, like the gap from a pulled tooth, and the hammer glows whitish-silver from up above.
His head — resting against the wall, leaning back and to the side, his cheek propped against a sack. The hemp rope encircles its edges like a pillow under a corpse’s skull. Should I fire point-blank, from a few feet away? In the chest or neck? The last cartridge, the last bullet, the last drop of my blood. A lone fugitive, the only one left. Not quite killed off yet, the last guerrilla.
The tube shifts — the transparent piping that connects the still-breathing chunks of flesh in some strange way — the blood in his blood, the blood in my blood. This is the end, which means that the long chase is coming to a close.
Like twins of an evened-out age, the bodies hooked up to the IV find their center, the golden mean.
As I’m killing you
I might resemble, too
a star that is
finishing its flight.
As I’m killing you
I might be dying, too—
but death is also
a form of life.
I can’t deny it, Blondy, I can’t help but admit after everything that’s happened, that I, too, used to sing along with the Argirovi Brothers.
In the golden mean, the silver of my blood, like electrolysis, welds together the twins in me and in him.
In Hamburg the lioness at the Hagenbeck Zoo startles, pricks up her ears. Victim, prey or carcass? K-shev is sick, far too unwell for his bodily remains to be fed to the king of predators. As for the crocodiles — why not? Those prehistoric reptiles can digest everything, evolution itself passes through their stomach and intestines.
He knows, of course, that in the end his corpse will have to be buried. Now I understand why he picked Hamburg of all places — not because of the quality of the medical care. And not because of the Reeperbahn. The reason lies in the uniqueness of the Ohlsdorf Cemetery: the largest graveyard in Europe, covering 400 hectares, and the largest in the world. Here you can really get lost, be nobody. However, he’ll be of no use to me anonymous.
Only a short while remains until morning, only a short while until sunrise, washed in a radioactive haze. Just the physical luminary that spews life and under which life crackles as if electrified. We’re standing in long rows in front of the granite pedestal. Music blares through the loudspeakers, and our shoulders touch — mine and the shoulder beneath the white blouse of the girl next to me. I don’t know her name, but if we were alone right now, even right here out of the open, under all that music and those lights, with the convenient untying of our Pioneer neckerchiefs that is even prescribed in the manual for the ceremony. And if our shirts went as well. And if after that.
But then the drape covering the monument is pulled away, terribly slowly and irreversibly. You aren’t ready — no matter how much you’ve prepared, and despite the fact that you’re expecting it, can you really be ready? — the cover slips off, falling like a sheet revealing the body of a dead man for his loved ones to identify. It’s him all right, no doubt about it, the sculptor has captured a striking resemblance. With the help of characteristic details. By means of perspective. K-shev, cast in metal — it’s terrible.
To tell you the truth, I know that in the end his death will rob me of everything. It will leave me only the monuments, from which you can’t demand accountability, not for anything.
Since his corpse really does need to be buried, for hygienic reasons at the very least — I’m forced to make a decision. However, on the other hand, due to certain personal, historical reasons of my own, it’s important that we wait until she is convinced that it’s true. To that end, even if only temporarily, the most convenient solution is the mausoleum.
The Mausoleum
Everyone else goes to visit loved ones in some normal way — to the neighboring street, to the country or to a near or a faraway city. Even abroad, if they’ve managed to maximally distance themselves from familial circles.
We, however, visit “Daddy”—my father-in-law, in fact — in the heart of the nation, at the foot of the very citadel of power.
“Let’s go see Daddy again,” she’ll say.
“Fine, let’s go,” I’ll reply.
And shove my fist into my pocket.
I don’t have a father, she had told me. Now, when the dream is on the way to becoming a reality, she cries absolutely unexpectedly, at every entering. I don’t like it, but whatever — I’m the last one, who. What can I say?