And now the courtyard-dwelling children have jumped in, yes, jumped in up to their waists, their spindly malnourished legs churning his viscous blood to clot.
'Don't listen to her. I did not do those things,' Yuri appeals to the children. They will understand. He is a child, too, more or less. Childlike, anyway. 'The twelve-year-old girls I did not rape. Their grandmothers I did not shoot between their eyes.' Now Yuri pleads with Mother. 'I only opened the tank hatch once during daylight. And then only to ask an old man for directions. And then only to watch as he lobbed a grenade at me.'
'But you saw Atrocious Things happen. You watched the others doing those Things. You said nothing.' Now Mother's mouth is a keyboard, her tongue the element striking the keys. Even worse, she's stepped out of her Red Star work dress. The dress, voluminous and capacious as language itself, has sopped up most of Yuri's bad blood. Now, together, mother and son, they stand gazing at one another, naked and ashamed. Never has Yuri been quite so terrified.
'For God's sake, some of us need our sleep!' Zoya's voice rent the nightmare wide open. Her fingernails clawed at the flight helmet. 'If you can't talk quietly in your sleep, as a matter of courtesy you should at least talk about something interesting.' Zoya wrapped herself in the blanket and rolled away from him. And if not that,' now her voice, muffled by the blanket, sounded as if it came from a vast and impenetrable distance, 'then do something useful like go fishing.'
Fishing! Such a suggestion.
Yuri hopped out of bed. Down down down the stairs to the courtyard he went, to the place where he'd stowed his bike which appeared to have mysteriously shed yet another essential part, this time a sprocket. Yuri scaled the heap, searching. Up to his armpits in darkness, he could just make out the figure of one of the children. Quite possibly they didn't sleep. Certainly they weren't idle. It was the girl, Big Anna. She'd gathered some of the smaller scraps from the heap: a cracked jump seat from an MTZ-5—those old tractors from Minsk that rumbled over every lonely field in Soviet films—a shoal of plastic water bottles, and a bike sprocket. It caught and cast the meagre moonlight, shining with such lustre and silvery iridescence that Yuri knew with absolute certainty that it was not his sprocket and could not possibly have been discarded on the heap as rubbish. It was just that fine.
Big Anna dangled the sprocket over her head.
'Wh-where did you get that?' Yuri asked, incredulous.
Big Anna laughed, a liquid sound. 'Ten roubles answers all questions.'
Yuri dug into his hip pocket. He speared the rouble note on the jagged lid of a can of sprats, then watched as the sprocket whistled through the air and landed at his feet.
In record speed Yuri reassembled his bike and pedalled for the river. The more time he spent around people, the more he admired fish.
Ah, fish!
He knew them as well as, if not better than, he knew himself. Men and fish, after all, are more alike than most people know. The body of a fish is three-quarters water. The body of a man is three-quarters water. Man and fish have backbones and skulls housing the brain and the paired sense organs: eyes, ears and olfactory organs. The inner ears of fish, like those of man, detect gravity and motion as well as sound. In both creatures the four-chambered heart lay in a separate cavity at the front of the body. This was why Yuri was almost certain that fish have all the same problems people do.
Having four chambers to harbour their worries, they understood the need to hide. They had learned to fear the shadow of men. They had seasonal longings that fuelled desperate acts. Consider the instinct to migrate to the sea—so common among trout populations of the Don and Volga where a body of salt water lay nearby. The memory of the sea remained in their mouths and in the gills, which, having learned to breathe in both waters, eventually drove the fish back to the water they worked so hard to leave. Yes, they killed themselves trying to reach the waters of their youth, just as other species of trout killed themselves in their attempts to reach their upriver spawning grounds. Did the trout swimming upstream pass along news to the downriver-travelling trout? Did they grow any wiser for all their troubles? Did they tell the secrets of the men lurking above with sticks and nets, firecrackers and the occasional bottle of bleach in their hands?
Apparently not, Yuri decided as he hid his bike behind a stand of frozen birch. It was each trout for himself. Yuri blew on his hands. The ice was thinning at the edges of the river and in a few weeks it would break and buck with a boom and roar. It was the sound of the Devil coming up for air, driving all the hungry fish before him. And Yuri planned to be right there, rod and net in hand, ready to bring in the hungry pike, one right after another.
Yuri squinted. He could just make out two figures stationed downriver behind a wheelchair. And though Yuri could not see him, he knew that in this chair sat Volodya, taking note of who fished and where.
Yuri uncapped his bottle of vodka. The bottle was the mistress and Yuri understood, had always understood even before his father left, why the old men and the young men on park benches and doorway stoops kissed the neck of the bottle before finishing the last drop. Nothing compared to the love of the bottle—not even the love of a woman. 'Who needs them?' Mircha asked Yuri who, at the time, might have been twelve, or maybe thirteen. 'A man can never make a woman happy and as there are so many of them and so few of us, who's to say we won't wind up with a bad one? But vodka never nags, never complains. Never reminds one of one's moral failings.' Here Mircha gazed over the neck of the bottle to consider Yuri. 'There simply is no such thing as bad vodka. The two words cannot coexist side by side.'
Yuri nodded then, as he did now, and swallowed a mouthful. A man may privately think the vodka is bad (God forbid), after a quick toss back of a hundred grams of poorer-quality stuff. The burn, the wince, the dyspepsia—a body can't argue with that. But never does a man mention it. For vodka must always be praised, regardless of the quality. Vodka is good. Very good. Truly exceptional vodka is excellent. That said, in Yuri's opinion the Rasputin he now held at arm's length was just so-so.
'Bitch!' Yuri spluttered. The gazes of a few vets fishing upriver lifted momentarily, fixing the source of the interruption, then dropped back over their holes. 'Bitch,' Yuri repeated, this time with more tenderness. This affectionate cursing was just one of the many protocols of vodka consumption, which are so firm and reliable that certain birds set their wings by them. And Yuri was as loyal and true to these protocols as a healthy lung was to air. The idea being that in the cosmogony of needed and necessary things, vodka was life. Breath. Hobby. National sport. Every Russian man's first love. The Swedes and Latvians liked to think they knew a thing or two about the stuff, and mention vodka around Polish tourists and they'd immediately arrange their faces into long and superior expressions and their bodies into proprietary postures. But give a bottle to a Russian—that is, give some vodka to a well-trained professional whose body is a finely tuned instrument of consumption—and watch what the stuff is good for.
Yuri took another healthy drink and set to hacking a hole in the ice. The thing was, he imagined now that he was explaining his drinking to all the people in his life who disapproved—that is, Mother, Zoya, Tanya. The thing was, nothing made him feel as good as vodka did. Sure, he was grateful for Zoya's attentions, grateful that there were times she wanted him. But love-making was just a tingle at the base of his spine compared with the way vodka hit the bottom of his stomach and bloomed warm and bright through his chest. And vodka was a practical fisherman's aid, helping him to keep his hands steady and sure.