The ice now opened, Yuri dropped the line, a brass wire attached to a coat hanger. He peered into the black water. Another thing about drinking vodka, about fishing: both activities afforded clarity of thought, a depth of contemplation, a grandiose ability to see subtle connections. Both activities led to the understanding of certain universal truths. For instance, his previous unassailable logic notwithstanding, for all the similarity between man and fish, there were, admittedly, a few differences. Where a man has arms and legs, a fish has fins. Where man wears a singlet of skin, fish wear a shining chain mail of scales. Yuri peered in the hole he'd made, watched the dark water begin greasing to ice. He poured a little vodka into the hole and the ice curled to the edges.
Fish, Yuri knew, had no need for the curative effect of vodka. Where a man has regret, fish have only dreams. Their problems are few. They do not suffer cold sweats or night terrors. They don't worry about employment. They have jobs, sure. Even Yuri knew that. But as they went about it all so quietly, it was as if whatever they did was no work at all. And they don't argue with the clumsy failings of their fellow cohabitants. They don't remind each other of how stupid, how morally bankrupt, how useless they have become to one another.
Likely they were not overly harassed by the females of their species, nor were they bullied about by fish with greater clout. Probably they did not hear ticking inside their heads. In fact, the fish Yuri knew moved about their world with such grace and dignity, flapping their gills in a way that suggested theirs was a world so beautiful, so completely free of complication that they simply could not fathom an end to it. Which explained their umbrage, the baleful looks they cast when hooked.
The line went taught. Yuri yanked the line and hauled up his catch, visor-level for inspection: a pike, and ornery, judging by its vicious snapping and thrashes in the air.
'You! Spaceman!' Volodya's bellows knocked from bank to bank, tree to tree.
Yuri dropped the fish on top of his plastic bag and pounded on the flight helmet with an open palm and scoped the fog.
Volodya's entourage emerged from the darkness, materializing grain by grain until Yuri could discern with definite clarity the two vets, each of whom had a hand on one of the chair grips, and each of whom now appeared taller somehow, broader of shoulder. Volodya sat straight as a plank in his chair, his service cap low over his forehead. Volodya had lost his legs just below the hips and with his service trousers tucked tight under his stumps it appeared that the front wheels of the chair were his feet. And now the vets had set the brakes so that those wheels rested on top of Yuri's feet.
'What are you doing here?' Volodya asked.
Yuri looked at the pike on the bag. 'I'm fishing.'
Yuri glanced at the vet standing to the left of the chair and took in his service coat with the many badges, confirming what he already suspected: here was a man honoured several times over for doing serious harm in Georgia. Yuri squinted at the vet on the right. This one had received even more badges for his service in Bosnia. In the hierarchy of the feeding chain, Yuri, who had received no medals, no honours, no badges for kicking anybody's ass anywhere, would be lucky to make off with the fins and tail of his pike.
'You know the rule,' the vet on the left said quietly.
'Whose river do you think this is?' the vet on the right asked.
'His?' Yuri pointed to Volodya.
'So whose fish is that you're holding?' the vet on the left asked.
'His?' Yuri lifted his visor, pointed to Volodya.
'The kid is not as stupid as he looks,' the vet on the left said to the vet on the right as they took off their coats and draped them over the grips of Volodya's chair.
'Gentlemen, please!' Yuri pulled off the flight helmet and attempted the cavalier pose of one who has considered the possibility of getting beaten within a centimetre of his life and found it not a bit troubling.
'This pike is so small, of such insignificance, but absolutely I was going to bring it to you anyway.' Yuri looked at the pike resting stone still on the plastic bag. 'I just haven't had time to bash it properly on the head.'
Mention an itch. No sooner were the words out than the vets rolled up their sleeves.
'Cheer up, boy-o.' Volodya flashed Yuri a munificent smile as the Bosnian vet retrieved the pike. 'This is the price of living. And you're lucky.' Volodya glanced at Yuri's legs, marvellously whole and intact.
Then pain: a pounding punctuated with sharp interjections. A dash, dash. Boxer's blows to the face. Oh Mother. A comma, a semi-colon, a reprieve and then ellipses. All the pieces of punctuation brilliantly effected by the closed fist, the knee to the groin. Yes, he was getting the message. He was, merciful God in heaven, learning the lesson loud and clear. Oh Mother. Full-stop.
When he came to, a quick inventory. Afternoon glare achingly white. His flight helmet, check. His rod, check. Pain scale was six and holding. He hadn't made out too badly, all things considered. And Volodya was right: Yuri was lucky. This time they'd only given him a warning beating. Yuri pulled on his helmet (Oh, Mother!), retrieved his bike and pedalled slowly towards the museum. Beyond the city the sky had cracked open for the afternoon, allowing a thin verge of throbbing light to spread into a low welt of frost and pollution. Yuri turned his head and trained his gaze on the front tyre. The ticking in his head—still there—and afternoons like these, even the sky hurt him.
He wheeled his bike through the back door of the museum. This door no one ever bothered to lock because, with the exception of the toilet paper that Caretaker Daniilov stocked on Tuesdays, there was nothing to steal. Which said something about the art hanging on the walls. The art! Oh, God, it hurt. Yuri moaned and steadied himself on a faux statue of Venus. Someone had taken a healthy bite out of Venus' left buttock—not hard to do, as the statue been fashioned from foam.
In the beginning it bothered him, this art. If he had any pride, any shame, any artistic integrity he would denounce this museum as a cheap fraud, ridiculous in its pretensions. But the sad fact was that even if he were to shout it from the rooftops, no one, not a soul, would care. Even sadder, after a few weeks of working in the museum, Yuri stopped caring, too. After all, a job was a job. And he needed a job. Catching the occasional pike or carp, deficit items each, wasn't enough and even though Russia was a new country, it still went better with men who made some attempt to work than with those who outwardly loafed.
Yuri let the visor fall and felt his way towards the hat/coat-check counter. This corridor he'd never liked. Even in the interior gloom of low wattage lighting, the art was still offensive. The pseudo-Kuntskamera exhibit turned his stomach. Never mind that he had actually helped fashion the foetuses out of yellow foam. In the main, Yuri was a big fan of babies everywhere, but these were not babies. These were circus freaks, and not even real circus freaks at that. And yet, the babies paled in comparison to the painting boldly displayed next to the bathrooms. A reproduction of an eighteenth-century painting divided into twelve squares, each square depicting deaths of beloved apostles. Yuri flipped up the visor and squinted at the apostles meeting their reward, in this case horrible deaths by dismemberment, boiling, crucifixions, stonings. And the expression on their faces was so serene, of such solemn patience, as if the loss of their life was of no great importance, that Yuri couldn't help looking at them. Couldn't help looking at them and counting twelve more reasons why he could never be a Christian.
And then came sound, noise of a museum in the afternoon. Shoes and umbrellas, galoshes, clicks and thuds, thumps, the noise of children moving in groups, and then the distinct sound of Tanya behind the check counter: clomp clomp clomp. Even when wearing her most fashionable pair of shoes her tread was of the heaviest sort. And there she was, her full face round and close and peering through the darkened visor at him.