We made our way down Kutuzovksy, stopping for ice creams and bottles of water. The midday sun pressing into us with no shade or breeze. Her fine hair soon a thick wet mess, E asked me to carry her most of the way, sweaty in my arms, almost slipping from them.
At home we washed
vishinei (sour cherries) and
sliva (plums) and ate them, watching great fat flies buzzing around the windows. Then she fell asleep.
I wrapped a t-shirt around my head to block out the sun and put my feet up. Something smelled strange - maybe the pillows, maybe something from the fridge. I could not get up, and closed my eyes the same as E now splayed across the couch. The sound of grinding metal, of circular saws chugging through plywood filtered up to us from the hotel renovations.
I found myself remembering Redhook, Brooklyn. The most dangerous place in America when I worked there, welding circus scenery and dodging stray gangland bullets. There was a methadone clinic on the corner and dealers just outside it. Van Brunt was a street of abandoned buildings then, and the great ancient warehouse we worked in. Uncooled in the summer, unheated in the winter. Forced to wear a full-body jumpsuit to avoid getting burned by welding slag, I drank two gallons of water a day in the volcanic artificial night of my welding area. There was a stench there too, mostly of rotting river rats in the walls. Some as big as my forearm when we found their dry husks.
I thought of the packs of inbred wild dogs there, just like the ones in Moscow, their ancient nipples dragging across the cobblestones. I thought of the scrawny prostitutes that gave $5 blowjobs to Hacids around the corner from the warehouse - their arms outside of the station wagons, just their faces lost behind the darkness of the windows. I thought of the junkies that wandered the streets, stealing our tools if we left them on the ground for a few minutes when we tried to work on the sidewalk. They would try to sell them back to us a few minutes later.
It was the same relentless sun there. The same giant green flies buzzing around the shit in the street. The same sense that you were at the end of the world, and there was no law, no rule, no reason. Just the choas of a brand new car that could get parked across the street, unlocked and doors open. Then the bomb would go off. A great chemical cloud of smoke, green in the mid-day sun. The fire would eventually go out after the plastic and the gasoline had burned off. Next the junkies would arrive with the sloppy-wheeled shopping carts they forced across the cobblestones. Everything would be stripped away - copper wires, brake pads, sparkplugs. Now the car would look like a skeleton balanced on a series of cinder blocks, maybe surrounded by bits of broken windshield. Next, someone would move in, and make it home. Cardboard would fill the windows for privacy. Two or three would be sleeping there when we got to work in the morning, their hands graceful as angels, maybe a long line of piss walking away from them and across the sidewalk. Maybe a few plastic bottles of Midnight Dragon rolling around in the breeze. In Moscow they call these people
zapor, a special kind of drunk. Next, the car would be lit on fire once again - maybe with them still inside. Blankets and paper quickly burned to nothing. The weathered skeleton would get bashed in, and picked over once again. It would sit for some days, maybe a weekend. And then one day it would just be gone. Maybe just a shadow of the bomb on the ground, and then even that would disappear.
Comments