June 22, 1993
Tuesday
10:15 AM
Unclear. I couldn’t answer simple questions: «Why am I riding along? Where to? Why aren’t I jumping out of the car?»
We languished in traffic jams that reeked of exhaust, boredom, and impatience. Crawled along the Garden Ring, waited for red to turn green... to part ways with Zhorik, all I had to do was open the door and run for it.
Why wasn’t I running? What was I afraid of? I think I’d found the answer. What held me was the sheet of paper with my handprint on it, sitting in Zhorik’s pocket. That blood-stained scrap of waste paper held some inexplicable force. It bound me and Zhorik together.
Or didn’t it?
I had my doubts. A pile of questions churned in my head. What would happen if I swiped the paper? Destroyed it with my own hands? Would I die and end up back in the sands? I’d been promised that losing the paper meant going back there. Or would I not? Maybe I’d just been sleeping all night and had a bunch of dreams?
Who was Zhorik, anyway? Where had he come from?
I tormented myself with questions and found no answers. I suffered and agonized over the not-knowing. Longing consumed me at the thought of going back. Wide awake, I could see a terrible crash — impact, ringing, screeching metal — and myself, flattened inside a crumpled car. Death was close. It breathed down my neck. It reached out with cold fingers. It laughed in my face... Definitely the ravings of a gray mare, hooves drumming at the back of my skull, whinnying away...
I chased off the spell with a decision: don’t give in to panic, and wait for things to become clear.
I also decided to dot the i’s in my dealings with Zhorik. I needed to show him I disapproved of illegal activity, so from now on he’d better figure out what was and wasn’t allowed in my presence.
Not putting off Zhora’s education, I declared a boycott over the looting and, on top of that, doused him in contempt, so he’d know exactly who he was dealing with.
I declared the boycott and doused him in contempt silently — that is, I clenched my jaw and scowled.
I sat there darker than a storm cloud.
Zhorik, like a seasoned fighter pilot, kept swiveling his head, gawking at every woman on the sidewalk. Not one got past him without a thorough once-over. He whistled first «Venus,» then «Paint It Black,» scratching his belly. He never once so much as glanced my way.
By the time we dragged ourselves to the Lyudmila department store by Kursky Station, Zhorik spat out the window and announced, «No sign of the chick. Let’s wait a bit.» He pulled the front wheels up onto the sidewalk and killed the engine.
His face had gone stony, blank.
What was going on? What chick? Why were we waiting?
— There she is. Sit tight, — Zhorik ordered a couple of minutes later. He spat on his palms, smoothed down his mop of hair, and jumped out of the car. Made a beeline for a bespectacled girl in a yellow pantsuit. She’d appeared from the direction of Kursky Station and stopped in front of a shop window, glancing around nervously. Her eyes slid over Zhorik as he approached with his loose-jointed gait, then she looked away... She was thoroughly startled when Zhorik touched her shoulder. Nobody approaches a classy girl looking that scruffy!
Not that Zhora cared. While the girl was collecting herself, he casually turned the looted pager over in his hand, tucked it back into his pocket, and waved a hand toward the car.
Well, not so much waved as gestured her over.
Zhorik threw open the right rear door. The girl squeaked a «Hi there» in my direction and, after a bit of shuffling, settled onto the seat. Zhorik jogged around to the driver’s side, sat down behind the wheel, and glanced questioningly into the rearview mirror. A squeak came from behind him:
— My name’s Ira.
— Nice to meet you, Roman, — I mumbled.
Zhorik snorted, started the car, and asked:
— So where are we headed, Irisha?
The girl named some Verkhne-Nizhne-Tverskoy lane or other. I thought: «Great, we’re just going to drop everything and start chauffeuring around Zhorik’s lady friends now.»
Zhora, in flagrant defiance of the traffic laws, swung out into the middle of Zemlyanoy Val and shot off against oncoming traffic toward the three train stations. He rained down colorful curses on clueless newbie drivers, sidewalk hack cabbies, and parasitic traffic cops, cut off inattentive motorists, and kept trying to slip through red lights. We tore up to Sadovo-Chernogryazskaya, turned toward the center against all the prohibition signs, squeezed through to Bakhrushinka, and stopped by a gray six-story building.
— This is it, I think, — Ira rustled through her bag. — Wait here, I’ll be right back.
Leaving a faint trace of perfume, our fellow passenger left the car and vanished behind a metal door plastered with flyers reading «Buying an apartment. Urgent.» I glanced sideways at Zhorik:
— Girlfriend?
— First time I’ve laid eyes on her, — Zhorik smiled. — Though she’s worth a tumble. Small women are frisky. This chick’s a real-estate agent. Arranged to rent an apartment downtown yesterday. Only problem is, we look like a couple of losers, which doubles the price tag. Whatever, we’ll manage. We’ll pass ourselves off as businessmen from Farttown, running a million-ruble co-op behind the barn back home. Conquering Moscow!
Farttown it is, then. I had no complexes about my own clothes — stylish, youthful. But Zhorik, in a T-shirt and pants that had never met an iron or a washing machine, looked like a bum.
I got to thinking: «Tenant — that has a proud ring to it. An apartment! A tenant!! But what’s this got to do with me? I should be sitting in the reading room, cramming notes... Wait! I’d missed the main thing! What was today’s date? I’d ended up in the sands two days before my exam, meaning June 20th. Hung around there for a month or two. Was it August now?»
Out of the entryway’s darkness, flinging the door open and slamming it shut with a double bang, Ira burst out. With a shuffle and a wriggle she resettled onto the back seat, squeaking: «The owners aren’t home. We’ll wait.»
Zhorik glanced at the watch he’d taken off the car’s owner and grunted: «We’ll wait.» He adjusted the pager on his belly with an air of authority.
Pierced by the thought of the missed exam, I spent a couple of minutes pulling myself together, then turned to Ira and asked:
— What’s today’s date?
— The twenty-second.
— Of August?!
— June, — Ira’s eyes went wider than her glasses. She shifted her gaze to Zhorik. He yawned:
— That’s just the kind of joke we make back in our village.
Reassured — must’ve imagined it, that’s all — I turned my gaze back to the courtyard.
Just as we started sighing, checking our watches, and, each of us perhaps privately regretting something — I certainly was — a cherry-red Grand Cherokee Limited crept into the courtyard, a four-wheeled calling card of thorough, all-around prosperity. It stopped crosswise in the yard. Out of the jeep hopped a guy of about twenty, with the haughty face young Kostolevsky might have had, decked out head to toe in foreign brand-name clothes. Behind him climbed down a grandmother of indeterminate late-pension age, likewise dressed to the nines.
«The owners!» Ira jumped out of the car. Zhorik tossed off a «Sit tight» and clambered out after her. Straightening his numb lower back, he hobbled over to the jeep. There he got his body vertical, shook the guy’s hand, stood around, smiled a bit, got a word in, listened to a couple of sentences, nodded, adjusted the pager on his belly. Judging by the snatches of conversation drifting over, he was taking part in a discussion of the lovely weather they’d been having. Then the foursome vanished behind the door I now knew inside and out.
I started weighing it up: what would happen if I bolted right now?
Everything happening now was a continuation of those dreams, however strange they seemed. I was dealing with the aftermath of a six-week journey that had somehow been packed into a single night. The proof that it had all really happened — the scar on my stomach. A scar earned not in a dream, not in some drunken nightmare, but in an actual fight. So did that mean the warning — that I’d die if the paper fell into someone else’s hands — was real too? Either way, it made sense to wait for Zhorik and find out for sure.
«I’ll wait. I’ll wait. I’ll definitely wait it out. Wait for Zhorik and ask him. Wait and ask, wait and ask...» I rattled off to myself in every possible variation, stroking the scar.
