Yuri held his head in his hands. 'Look at you. You can't even fix a lottery or steal a windscreen wiper. Or scare away street thugs. All you can do is talk. And write.'
'OK. So, OK. I can see that you're bitter. We'll talk more when you've assumed the correct emotional posture. But honestly, Yuri. How can anyone have any respect for a man who doesn't act like a man?'
'I don't know.' Yuri touched his face cautiously. The nose, still there. The ears, there. Front teeth, chipped but there. A side tooth, definitely missing. 'What is a man, anyway?' Yuri swallowed a mouthful of blood.
'Nonsense. You're supposed to shout—no, no—to protest: "I'm a man!" Whatever that is.'
'Sure,' Yuri patted his legs, arms. Intact. Pain level seven and rising.
Mircha looked at his hands, the steam curling skyward. 'I see that I have quite a lot to write. When men don't know what it means to be a man. When they forget how to fight, what it means to live with honour. The importance of kicking ass. Keeping promises. By the way, I'm anxious about that titanium arm. Did you dig out the hole like I asked you to?'
Yuri blinked. 'I've had sightings of a shovel, but whenever the slender neck is almost in my grasp, the damn thing disappears.'
Mircha slapped the back of Yuri's head with the palm of his hand. 'This is the fate of a prophet—to be abused at the hands of my disciples. To dispense wisdom that people, and by people I mean you, disregard. It's quite a sad and sorry state.' Mircha handed Yuri the flight helmet, then retreated into the lowering frost.
At the courtyard Yuri sat on the bench and packed ice around his nose. The twins were out and in high spirits. They took turns harassing Zhytka, Vitek's dog, first patting and then pinching it. The dog, confused, alternated between wagging his tail and whining happily, then hurting. Happy, hurting. The dog understood the dualities of life, the hardship and inherent humiliations and contradictions of existence. Good Boris tickled the dog's stomach. Bad Boris lit a red-tipped match and fed it to him.
Yuri pulled the metal bench behind the heap. Though dusk had yielded to true darkness, he could see that the hole had grown much larger, longer and deeper. He lit a match. A placard in neat script read 'who hath made foolish the wisdom of this world?' and a trail of sunflower seeds teetered at the hole's edge. Quite obviously the children lived down there. Yuri peered inside the hole and spied a pile of shoes and galoshes of all sizes and umbrellas in varying states of decline tucked to one side. He dropped his line, dragged it carefully through a channel of wet mud.
'Five roubles if you want to fish here,' a child's voice sang from the rooftop.
Vitek joined Yuri on the bench, his palm held in readiness. Without a word, Yuri handed over the five-rouble note. Yuri could see that Vitek had stuffed more padding into the shoulders of his leather coat. Despite this effort, Vitek had acquired a strange two-dimensional look to his body. But then, given the day's events, his swelling face, it was quite possible that Yuri had lost sight in one eye.
Vitek scrutinized Yuri. 'Boy-o. Do you look beat.' Vitek ran his tongue over his gold teeth. Security, those teeth. It was fashionable for street businessmen to cap their teeth in as much gold as they could afford. It would buy a good funeral some day, provide for nonexistent heirs. Give the doctor something to dance about. But just now, the way they caught the moonlight so peculiarly, it only made Yuri's aching head hurt a little more. 'Listen. I can help you.' Vitek opened a fresh bottle of Crowbar. 'We're a team, you and I.'
Yuri quelled the urge to shudder. In actual fact, Vitek was the kind of guy who could crawl up a man's ass without using soap. Even so, vodka-drinking protocol dictated that one must never refuse it, regardless of its source. 'We are?' Yuri took the bottle and swallowed long.
'We are the men of the building, after all.' Vitek studied Yuri's shrinking posture, the stove-in chest, the sagging shoulders, the flight helmet resting against his ankles. 'Well, I'm the man, anyway. And with some work, you will have manly moments. Just consider how manly you'll feel in the hull of a tank sighting down the enemy.'
'How manly?'
'Very,' Vitek assured him with another pass of his tongue over his teeth.
'And consider how manly you will feel bringing home a tank gunner's wages.'
'How manly?'
'Extraordinarily manly. A successful operation gets each soldier three million roubles. Knocking out an enemy firing position would get you three million more. Knock out a tank and get a voucher for another three million.'
'What if I die?'
Vitek's smile broadened. 'Fabulous news! You'd get 130 million roubles.'
Yuri took another healthy drink, wiggled his line. 'Where do you come by your vast reservoir of information?'
Vitek held up the latest issue of the Red Star and smiled a smile as shiny as an oil slick.
'I don't know.' Yuri shook his aching head slowly from side to side. 'What do we need to go down there for? Give me another reason.'
'I can give you millions of reasons. There's millions of litres of oil down there. And if that doesn't make a man rich, then I don't know what does.'
'What about the Far East? We've got so much oil in Nefteyugansk, we could swim in it for years and never come up for air.' Yuri stood and tucked his helmet under his arm. 'I just don't see.'
'Oh, you don't see? Well, that makes everything all right, then, doesn't it?' Vitek's voice was pure acid.
Yuri blinked in surprise.
Vitek draped an arm around Yuri's shoulder. 'Here's where the dog has teeth.' Now Vitek was all honey, his boyhood best friend again. 'How old are you?'
'Twenty-one.'
'How many arms have you got?'
'Two.'
'Legs?'
'Two.'
Vitek smiled. 'Here's the thing. You being so gloriously whole, you'll likely be called up anyway. So why not beat the crowd to the punch? Voluntary re-uppers get paid more.'
'I'll think about it,' Yuri said, pulling in the line.
Vitek strolled toward the stairwell. 'Think, but not too hard.'
Dangling from the line was a small silvery-coloured fish. All bone, no flesh. This fish, he had heard, lived at the bottom of the world. It measured time by turning quietly in the mud, but nobody believed that this fish really existed. And here it was, gasping for air at the end of his line. Yuri carefully pulled the hook out and threw the fish back into the hole, which looked all the world to him now like a huge wound, dark and weeping.
Yuri trudged up the stairs. The noise of the pounding of drums in his head was terrific. The noise outside his head was colossal. For here was Zoya's voice falling like a sledgehammer from the windows. 'Plums! Plums!' She believed eating fruit out of season would increase her chances of conceiving. Ditto for eating liquored cherries that came in fancy boxes. Did it matter to her that these were deficit items, and therefore nearly impossible to find in the shops, even if they did have the money to buy such items?
'Cherries!' Zoya yelled and pulled the windowpane closed.
Apparently not.
Yuri pushed open the door to the apartment and stood on the threshold, scanning the apartment. Mother not in sight. The little Latvian TV in the kitchen spluttered and cracked, and in between the static Yuri detected the sound of women greatly vexed, speaking rapidly and without pause. It was the Spanish soap opera Zoya loved to watch, The Rich Also Cry.
Yuri walked to the kitchen, sat heavily in the chair and worked the helmet over his head painful centimetre by painful centimetre. 'I ran into some trouble today.' Yuri set the flight helmet on the table with a loud thunk. 'I got beat. Twice. And I lost my bike, and a tooth. But then a miracle, of a sort. There is a hole behind the heap. It is quite large and possibly growing. And I don't care if you believe me or not. I dropped my line in and caught a small silver fish. It smelled bad so I threw it back.'