He started drinking, of course. Yevgenia is a handsome woman, grand, attractive, but he looked like a dung beetle: black brows, black mustache, and mad eyes on fire. It was tough on her. And just before his time was about to end, somehow he got hit on the ribs with a log unloading train cars, and it bruised his lung. It wasn’t a serious bruise even, but you can’t hide from your fate – sarcoma came and got him. When they laid him out, he looked like an angelic old hermit: all skin and bones, and his white beard. You wouldn’t recognize him.
The last month before he died he lay there at home and just kept groaning: “How long? How long? How long?” Yevgenia took care of him in silence: she’d come, clean his bed, turn him this way and that so he wouldn’t get bedsores, and he’d keep at it: “How long before I die? Is it soon? I’m sick of it, Yevgenia, sick of it!” And she’d just fix his pillow, turn on the radio for him and go to the office.
Valerka came late to the funeral – couldn’t get a ticket. After serving in the highway corps in Voronezh (construction crew, basically), he got packed off to be a lieutenant out in Tajikistan, paving roads for the local goat herders. He came back alone, leaving his wife with the baby. He visited his father’s grave, and then spent the next five days in a drunken stupor with the guys. Then he got up, put his uniform back on, and left.
And Yevgenia soon married Timofei Andreyevich, the hunter. He got her transferred from the Executive Committee back to Fish and Game. People say they live quietly and never fight – Pesteryev, he used to beat her up pretty regularly, especially after he started at Conservation. That job’s cursed, I’m telling you. Maybe someone really put a jinx on it. People say Lukeria’s mother was seen on the night of a full-moon, walking backwards thrice around the Conservation office – right after they gave Lukeria’s then husband seven years for selling the museum’s parquet on the side. True, that was a long time ago, in the early seventies, but women believe it – the old hag’s still alive and is the scariest witch for miles around.
Victory
I, for one, have great respect for the Tatars. One – they don’t ever touch moonshine or port, because it’s death to the liver; two – when they get a mind to do something, they don’t let up until they get it done; and three – they’re loyal, and always stand up for one another. Kind of like the Chechens almost, only Chechens are more headstrong and as far as being afraid goes – they don’t even know what that means: you know their mothers hold babies above mountain gorges by their heels, just hanging there, to teach them bravery. But that’s Chechens, and we’re talking about Tatars here; they’re a proud people, you know, but it’s a special kind of pride they have – not showy like the Chechens’, but quiet. You, for example – you ever been to a banya with them? Oh that’s a whole other story. We used to have this one nut – a total egghead, boys said he used to work for Aleksei Tolstoy in the archives somewhere, until he lost his marbles, and they sent him to pasture to Stargorod. So this loon, his thing was – he was always cold. He’d go into the steam room, climb to the very top birth and just stand there, and sort of weave about, and make these mincing steps in place – like a tiny dog that’s wanting to pee – and there was no way anyone could drag him down. He’d dance up there for a while, and then – flop! – and get a ride to Doctor Vdovin in the emergency van. So this one day, a Tatar came in with his son, and our Dancing Pete’s been hanging out on his perch since the start of the shift. When the old Tatar went to work on his son, our guys all split from the steam room, but the loon stayed. Then the old man got done with his kid, and sent him out to the predbannik, and set the steam room to his own liking – and that’s when our egghead couldn’t take it anymore: I tell you, he howled like the factory siren, and shot down from his birth like an eagle – whoosh! – straight through the showers and into the pool. A good fright can make you do just about anything: he gulped a lungful of ice water, went all goggle-eyed, and, as he was, glasses and all, plopped there at the bottom like a damned flounder – took three of us to get him out of there. But now, whenever we think he’d had enough steam for the day, one of the guys just shouts, “Hey, you up there, I see your Tatar coming!” and he shoots out of the steam-room like a bullet. ‘Cuz, you know, he could croak on us any day, standing up there, Doctor Vdovin said so himself – he’d have a heart attack and wouldn’t even know what hit him.
So, what I’m saying is, Tatars are special, and I personally can totally see things their way. But then, on the other hand, life is life, and you can’t do anything about that either. The Tatars, by the way, had their women in line longer then everyone else, but they’ve given up now, too. The old guard – those still hold strong, but with the young ones – there was trouble. Take Ravil Nigmattulin with his Gulnara. This all happened right before I retired from taxi-driving, and Ravil – we called him Igoryok – only just came to the trade. Ravil’s not exactly a tall guy, but sturdy, you know – big bones, shoulders like a pair of tires. Only a fool doesn’t like good food, and then you sit behind the wheel all day long – Ravil started getting fat, and the guys talked him into taking up body-building. He was made for it, too – he was such a softie, a real teddy bear. He got hooked up with Tolya Kazak, the one with the striped pants, and started lifting in Tolya’s gym. It was only later I figure out that getting fat wasn’t the whole story.
As far as drinking went, he never really did any. Very rarely, once in a great while he’d have a glass with us on payday – he was afraid of his Gulnara, and I’m here to tell you, that’s how you spoil a woman. And I’m not just saying so – I was there.
This one time, the guys were parked at the railway station, and I just came to shoot the breeze with them – I was already retired, and had gone to work at the banya, been sitting here ever since – when all of a sudden, we heard a fight. We went to take a look: here’s this one massive dude cleaning up private cabbies like puppies – he’d grab one by the scruff with one hand and slam him on the head with the other, like hammering nails, and go for the next. They’re beating on him, but he pays them no mind, just works them over like that: grab, slam, toss, grab, slam, toss. Guys, I yelled, they’re beating up our Ravil – let’s go help him! I knew he wasn’t the kind of guy to get himself into a bind over nothing. I knew it: someone crossed him – asked three times the meter rate when Ravil wanted a ride home, and it’s not kosher to rip off your own, folks supposed to look out for each other, any one of us’d give a brother two meters if he could, but you don’t ask, it’s a matter of honor... But these young punks – they’re wolves, never mind they park with us; they have their own rules, especially at night, so they just told him to pay up or beat it.
Long story short, we extricated our Igoryok from the pile, and I took him home – we lived on the same street. But here’s the thing: the boy was wasted, drunk as a fish, I’ve never seen him like this.
When I got him to his gate, Ravil pulled on my sleeve – he wanted to sit down on a bench outside, and you couldn’t get away from him if you wanted to, he had an arm like a crankshaft. So we both sat down. Being drunk, he started talking. Turns out, Gulnara works at the furniture factory, and they just made her a section head. So he was out of options: try as he might, fight as he might with other drivers to get the fattest cats, he had no chance of catching up with her. No equality in his family. And for a Tatar – that’s worse than a knife under the ribs. Plus, the neighbors started talking that Gulnara had fallen in with some bad women. She, of course, told him that she was late all the time closing out and settling accounts, but he was like: “I don’t buy that!” I set him straight: my mother-in-law’s sister’s daughter works at a store, and is forever stuck there till late with the books, they have to – if they get audited, and something’s not right, it’s her head on the plate. But this was now, and the day before he decided to teach her a lesson: when she came home late again, Ravil locked the door and wouldn’t let her on. She must have heard him inside, though, because she cried a little, whined a bit, and then went ahead and yelled: “Help! He’s raping me!” That’s no joke – Ravil ran out of the house. That’s when she, the fox, snuck in, and locked the door on him – let him sit outside or go sleep in the woodshed.