Sin

Karlsson

That spring I quit my job working as a bouncer at a bar. I was so filled with tenderness towards the world that I decided to join the foreign legion as a mercenary. I had to find some way to apply myself, by any means.

I had turned twenty-three: a strange age, when it’s so easy to die. I was unmarried, physically strong, energetic and cheerful. I was good at shooting and could allow the possibility of shooting at anything, especially in another country, where there are other gods that don’t care about me.

In the large city where I came from a distant suburb, there was something similar to an office of the foreign legion. They accepted my documents and talked to me about some specific issues.

I did as many push-ups as they needed, did as many chin-ups as they wanted, happily ran for five kilometers and did some other things, either jumped or did sit-ups, probably one hundred or one hundred and fifty times.

After a psychological test that was ten pages long, the psychologist raised his indifferent eyebrows at me and said tiredly: “Aren’t you a person to envy… Are you really like this, or have you already taken this test?”

As I waited to be summoned to the representative office, I wandered around the city and breathed in the warmth that smelt of bushes and petrol with my young lungs, and as I gathered air into them I thought that if I wanted to, I could take off a little.

Soon after that, two weeks later, my money ran out, and I had no means of paying for the empty room I was renting, with a wonderful hard bed and two dumbbells under it, and almost nothing to feed myself with. But like any happy person, a way out of the situation found me itself, hailing me during a daily walk that was almost as long as noon.

When I heard my name, I turned around with a light heart, always prepared for everything, but at the same time not expecting anything from life but good things.

His name was Alexei.

We had once been introduced by my strange girlfriend, who embroidered pictures, I don’t remember what these creations are actually called. She gave some pictures to me, and I immediately hid them in a shoebox, sincerely thinking that sewing on epaulets was much harder.

I took the box along with me. Along with the dumbbells, it was my most prized possession. Two or three semi-literate letters from comrades from my barracks past lay in the box, and a bundle of tender and heart-wrenching letters from my brother, who was in prison for committing ten, or maybe twelve, robberies.

Next to the box, there was a volume with three novels by a great Russian émigré, a soldier in the Volunteers Army, and French taxi-driver. Reading his novels, I felt in my heart that clear and warm bitterness, almost incomprehensible to me, that spread out into a smile even as I was about to hit someone.

There was also an exercise book, in which sometimes, not more than once a week, but usually much more rarely, I sometimes wrote down rhymed lines, surprising myself. They came to me easily, but inside I realized that I didn’t feel anything that I described, and had never felt it. Sometimes I reread what I had written and was surprised again: where did that come from?

I never even looked at my girlfriend’s embroidered pictures.

Then she had an exhibition, and it turned out to be a lot more than epaulets, and she asked for the pictures back, but I had lost them, of course — I had to make up some lie.

But I went to the exhibition, and for some reason she introduced me to Alexei, although I didn’t express any desire to be introduced to him, or to anyone at all.

At first glance, he made a strange impression. He was morbidly fat, with traces of teenage acne that had not healed. The features of his face were blurred, as though they had been drawn on wet paper.

But Alexei turned out to be a friendly sort of person, and immediately suggested that we drink at his expense somewhere nearby, and so I didn’t really get a proper look at the exhibition.

For some reason, he was the person who happened to have been pushed out into the springtime street to hail me when I had run out of money, and he loudly spoke my name.

We said hello, and he immediately squatted down to do up his shoelace. I pensively looked at the top of his head with its sparse, sweaty thin hairs — like children have, when they are almost newborn.

His head was large and round.

Then he got up, and I didn’t even think of starting the conversation, but he easily started talking, he simply caught some word in the air, whatever one was closest of all, perhaps the word was asphalt, perhaps it was shoelace, and he followed it, and kept on talking. It was all the same to him what shoelace to begin with.

Without thinking it over, I agreed once more to drink at his expense.

After we drank half a bottle of vodka, and I had listened to everything that he said for about half an hour, I finally pronounced one phrase. It was simple: “Me? I live well; I just don’t have a job.”

He immediately offered me a job. In the same place where he worked.

We quickly became friends, I don’t know what he needed me for. But he didn’t depress me, didn’t irritate me and even cheered me up sometimes. He liked to talk, and I didn’t mind listening. Strange things were constantly happening to him — he was always falling asleep drunk in stairwells, night trains and public squares, and would wake up to find he had been robbed or beaten up, or was in the drunk tank, where he had also been robbed.

He had a gentle and quite tactful sense of humor. Sometimes his ideas about life turned into colorful aphorisms. When he was sober, he moved quickly, but only over short distances — to the smoking area, say. He smoked a lot, he liked baggy shirts, his shoes were always dusty, and always had laces.

I addressed him tenderly: Alyosha. He was just over thirty, he had graduated from the Literature Institute and had served in the army, where, in some way unfathomable to me, he had not been killed.

Our work wasn’t hard. We were reinforcement workers in one of those worthless offices that have become so numerous in our strange times. They were born and died almost painlessly, although sometimes they left without pay those yawning workers who had failed to sense the approaching collapse.

In the evenings, when the workday was coming to an end, he would quietly approach me, and lean over, whispering:

“I feel sad, Zakhar. How about drinking some vodka?”

We would wander out of the office, already feeling the tender anxiety of approaching alcoholic intoxication, and that made us start talking louder, taking delight in incidental trifles.

He talked almost all of the time, I only interjected occasionally, not more than a dozen words in a row; and if what I said made him laugh, this made me happy for some reason. I didn’t ask a lot from our friendship, I was used to being satisfied with what I had.

As we approaching the kiosk, Alyosha started speaking more quietly: as if he were afraid that someone would catch him buying vodka. If I didn’t follow Alyosha’s example of quieting down by the kiosk, and kept acting the fool, he would hush me. I would shut my mouth, staying happy on the inside. I have a strange habit of sometimes obeying good, kind, weak people.

We pitched in together to buy the vodka, usually equally — but Alyosha never trusted me to buy anything, he took the money from me and pushed me away from the window of the kiosk with a look that said unless he did everything himself, I would be sure to get confused and buy a box of candy instead.

He bought a bottle of vodka, a dark yellow bottle of lemonade and two plastic cups. Alyosha didn’t believe in snacks. Afterwards — so he thought — the money left over would probably come in handy, when everything had been drunk and of course it wouldn’t seem to be enough.

We would go into a quiet, neglected yard. In the corner of the yard there was an old bench — to the right of it there was a crooked old yellow building, and on the left there was a row of damp, rotting barns, where we went to urinate once we’d drunk the vodka.

As we approached the bench, he would say with relief: “Well, here we are…” In the sense that everything had worked out fine, despite my clumsy, noisy behavior, and annoying advice about buying at least something to chew on.

He always put the vodka away in his bag, and poured it out when he thought necessary.

We threw the rubbish off the bench, laid out sheets of newspapers, and joked quietly. The jokes already sounded in a different register: the throat quieted down as if it was saving itself for the burn that was soon to come, and did not effervesce so loudly and cheerfully.

We lit cigarettes, and sat for a while in silence, looking at the smoke.

Then Alyosha poured out some vodka, and I sat with my head inclined, watching the gentle flow of the clear liquid.

After the first shot, he would start coughing, and coughed for a long time, with a look of unusual disgust. I chewed on the stem of a fallen leaf, good-naturedly cursing myself for not taking a little money from Alyosha to buy myself some food.

From time to time, out of the crooked yellow building, young people would come out, hunched over, with stupid faces, wearing leggings rolled up to the knees and flip-flops; they talked loudly, tirelessly swearing and spitting on the ground.

I scowled and didn’t take my eyes off them.

“Just without any excesses, Zakhar, I beg you. No excesses,” Alyosha would immediately say, looking to the side, as if he did not want to catch the disgusting youths with his gaze.

“I won’t do anything, I won’t,” I would laugh.

When I’m drunk I have a tendency to start fights, be rude and do all sorts of stupid things. But no matter what disorderly state I’m in, I would never involve this heavyset, hulking man, who probably has a diseased liver. He couldn’t fight or run away — why should he have to die there because of my foolishness?

“I won’t do anything,” I repeated honestly.

The young guys were shouting something to their girlfriends, who appeared at various windows on the second or third floor. The girls plastered their faces against the glass; the faces displayed a strange mixture of interest and contempt. Having grimaced and given unintelligible replies, the girls went back into the depths of their nauseating apartments with an abundance of metal dishes in the kitchens. Sometimes, after the girls, the irritated faces of their mothers appeared at the window for a moment.

Finally, the guys would disperse, taking away the blisters on their knees and the nasty echo of foul, stupid swearing.

After the second shot, he cheered up, and drank with increasing ease, still with a sour squint, but no longer coughing.

As we began to feel warmer, Alyosha’s terrible face turned pink, and he began to talk. The world, it seemed, had revealed itself to him anew, and was child-like and surprising. In every monologue by Alyosha, there was always a lyrical hero present — he himself, a calm, friendly, kind, non-envious person, worthy of tender love. How could you not love Alyosha, if he was so touching, soft and cheerful? So I thought.

Sometimes, out of forgetfulness, I tried to tell some story out of my own life, about my job at the bar, about the crazy things that happened there, though I had never been beaten up, and was never humiliated; but Alyosha would immediately start to fidget impatiently, and in the end he would interrupt me without hearing me out.

Having smoked again, both of us feeling extremely satisfied and tender, we would once more set off to the kiosk, looking back doubtfully at the bench: we didn’t want anyone else to occupy it.

We had a tradition: we always went to a bookshop after the first bottle, but never bought anything. Alyosha only bought books when he was sober, after he had been paid, and I took them out of the library.

We simply walked around the shop, as if it were a museum. We touched the covers, opened the first pages, and looked at the author’s faces.

“Do you like Hemmy?” I asked, stroking the attractive blue tomes.

“You get sick of his hero very quickly, this annoying strong guy. A beer bar, a boxing bar. Tigers and bulls. Tigers’ habits, bulls’ balls…”

I looked over Alyosha’s figure ironically and didn’t say anything. He didn’t notice my irony. It seemed to me that he didn’t notice it.

Alyosha himself had been writing a novel for five years now, with the fine but outdated title “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” I never could explain how I knew that it was outdated.

Once I asked Alyosha to read the first few chapters, and he didn’t refuse. The novel featured Alyosha himself,renamed Seryozha. For several pages, Seryozha suffered from the stupidity of the world: peeling potatoes in the kitchen (I liked the “starched knives”) and even sitting on the toilet — next to him, like a boil, there was a basin hanging on the wall; I also liked the boil, but not as much.

I told Alyosha about the knives and the basin. He grimaced. But after enduring a small pause of several hours, Alyosha unexpectedly inquired in a dissatisfied voice:

“You write something, don’t you? And you even get published? I don’t know why you need that… Maybe you’ll let me read your texts?”

The next day he returned the pages to me, and mumbled, looking to the side:

“You know, I didn’t like it. But don’t be upset, I’ll read some more.”

I laughed whole-heartedly. We got into a shuttle bus, and I tried to cheer up Alyosha, as if I was guilty of something towards him.

It was a foul and sweaty summer, exhausting to itself. It smelt of gasoline inside the shuttle bus, and all the opened windows and hatches did not make it any less stuffy. We were driving over a bridge, hardly moving in an enormous, harried traffic jam. The river flowed beneath, looking as though it had had oil and gasoline poured into it.

The shuttle bus shook, overcrowded with people, who hung on to the handles with suffering faces. My Alyosha, heavy and soaked through, crushed on all sides, felt especially faint.

The driver had some loud, hoarse-voiced music playing on the tape-recorder. He was obviously keen to acquaint the entire bus with the grimly zealous gangster music he liked so much.

Stupefied by the heat, by the stuffiness, by other people’s bodies, but most of all by the ghastly racket that was booming out of the driver’s speakers, shutting my eyes I imagined that I was whacking the singer over the head with a heavy chair leg.

The traffic jam was steadily getting worse. Cars honked angrily and incessantly.

Alyosha stared vacantly at a spot somewhere above my head. Sweat kept pouring down his face. You could see that he was also listening to the performance, and it was making him feel ill. Alyosha chewed his lips, and said distinctly, almost syllable by syllable:

“Now I know what hell looks like to Mozart.”

We couldn’t bear to stay in the shuttle bus, and long before we reached the place where we worked we got out, and decided to drink some beer. My friend panted and rolled his eyes, gradually coming to life. The beer was ice-cold.

“Alyosha, you’re great!” I said, admiring him.

He didn’t show that he was very happy with my words.

“My fine friend, let’s not go to work,” Alyosha suggested. “Let’s make up some lie.”

We rang the office, lied to them, and didn’t go to work, but sat in the shade, swigging beer.

Then we went for a walk, virtually holding each other by the arm, fully aware, but not saying it out loud, that we would be outrageously drunk by the evening.

“Look, it’s our bookshop!” Alyosha said, enraptured. “Let’s go and commemorate the books that we could have bought and read.”

We once more wandered between the rows of books, brushing against the beautiful covers and touching the spines of the books, which, I always remember, gave out an acrid odor.

“Gaito, the magnificent Gaito… Look, Alyosha! Have you read Gaito?”

“Yes,” Alyosha grimaced. “I’ve read him”.

“And?” I raised my eyebrows, with a premonition of something.

“He’s not a bad writer. But all these uninteresting, pointless descriptions of exercises on the chin-up bar… this character who is only concerned with his bravery, although it would seem that he also solves metaphysical problems… the same guy from novel to novel, who discreetly flexes his triceps and always knows how to break a person’s finger… It’s a secret aesthetic of violence. Remember how enthralled he is when he watches a gigolo getting beaten up?”

“Stop it, Alyosha, you’re nuts,” I interrupted him and left the shop, angry for no apparent reason.

My friend followed, without looking at me. He was in the mood to drink vodka and looked keenly at the kiosk, as though it might go away.

“And what about the Russian American, the butterfly enthusiast? What about his books?” I asked an hour later.

“It’s strange that you know your literature,” Alyosha said instead of replying. “You’d be better suited to throwing knives… or spears… And then shave your head with them. With blunt blades.”

“His Russian period is especially unpleasant,” Alyosha replied a minute later, pouring out the rest of the vodka. “Although I haven’t read anything from his American period, apart from the novel about the little girl… But then, many Russian novels are revolting because of the narrator. A sport snob who despises all…”… — Alyosha searched for a word, and not finding it, added, “all the rest…”

“A person like you,” Alyosha suddenly added in a completely sober voice, and immediately started talking about something else.

He sat on the bench, enormous and corpulent. The sides of his white, flabby body bulged out of his shirt. I smoked a lot and looked at Alyosha attentively, sometimes forgetting to listen to him.

For some reason, I remembered a story that Alyosha had told a long time ago, about his father. His father was an invalid, he did not leave the apartment, and had been bed-ridden for many years. Alyosha never visited his father, although he lived nearby. Alyosha’s mother looked after the invalid, her former husband, from whom she had been divorced a long time ago.

“I last saw him when I was twelve years old, I think,” Alyosha said. “Or eleven.”

It was quite unclear whether he was ashamed of this or not. I thought a little then about Alyosha, about his words and his father, but didn’t come to any conclusions. I don’t like to think about such things generally.

Alyosha was soon fired from his job, because he had completely stopped going there and doing anything on time; as it happened, some time later the same lot also fell to me.

I didn’t see Alyosha for a long time. It seemed that he felt seriously resentful about something, but I wasn’t interested in his resentment.

I still got no call from the representative office of the foreign legion.

I didn’t turn the light on in the room, and rolling the black dumb-bell with my frozen-toed foot, I looked out the window, dreaming of having a smoke. I had no money to buy cigarettes.

I got the strange, inexplicable feeling that the world, which lay so firmly beneath me, was starting to strangely float away, as happens when your head spins and you feel nauseated.

Against my usual custom, unable to stand it, I once went to see my neighbor, whose telephone number I had left at the representative office when I was interviewed. I asked my neighbor: “Has anyone been looking for me?”

That time no one had been looking for me, but a few days later, my neighbor knocked on my door: “There’s a call for you!”

I ran across the landing barefoot, and grabbed the receiver.

“So, are you still working? Idiots like you stay afloat everywhere,” I heard Alyosha’s voice. He was undoubtedly drunk. “Aren’t they taking you into their… what’s it called? Pension… Legion… Do you miss manly work? You want to shoot someone’s head off, don’t you?” Alyosha laughed deliberately into the phone. “The cannibal poet… You, you, I’m talking about you… A cannibal and poet. You think it’s always going to be that way?…”

“Where did you get this number from?” I asked, turning to the wall and seeing my annoyed reflection in the mirror, which hung by the door, next to the telephone.

“Should that be the first question?” Alyosha asked. “Maybe you should ask how I feel? How I’m feeding my family, my daughter…”

“I don’t care about your daughter,” I replied

“Of course, all you care about is your reflection in the mirror.”

I hung up the phone, apologized to the neighbor, and went back to my room. I went over to the bed and haphazardly kicked at the box of letters — I hit it. The papers spilled out, some pages flew from under the bed and settled on the floor with a gentle rustle. There was no rug on the floor: just painted boards, between which coins sometimes fell when I took my pants off and laid them out. Yesterday evening I had pointlessly wiggled an iron ruler, left over from previous tenants, into a gap, and barely resisted the temptation to break one of the boards. There was a coin with the number 5 there, I thought. A packet of Korean noodles. Even two packets, if you bought the cheaper kind.

For the first time in years, I was furious.

Throwing on a light jacket, in the pocket of which several coins had clinked yesterday, or to be precise two, I went to buy bread. On the door of the small, quiet shop, there was a sign: “Loader urgently wanted.”

The next evening I went to work.

Loading bread was a pleasant task. Three times a night, there was a knock on the iron shutters. Who’s there? I was supposed to ask, but I never did, I just opened up — simply because a minute before I had heard the sound of the bread truck approaching. A gloomy driver stood on the other side of the window. He handed me a form, I signed it, the pen was always in the pocket of my grey uniform.

Then he opened up the doors of the truck, which he had backed up to the window of the shop. The truck was full of trays with bread. He gave them to me, and I ran around the shop with the trays, putting them in special stands — the white bread went with the white bread, the rye bread with the rye bread.

The bread was still warm. I bent my face over it, and every time I could hardly restrain myself from biting off an aromatic piece of it as I ran.

Once, in the morning, the driver put a tray of bread on the window before I came back. Without waiting for me, the driver went back into the truck for the next tray, and the tray that was on the window fell off. The bread scattered over the floor, and a few buns were covered in the dirt that had been tracked in by my shoes.

“What the fuck are you doing?” the driver was quick to blame me for my sluggishness, although it was his fault.

I didn’t say anything: to punch him in his stupid face, I would have to walk through the shop to the exit, open the iron door with two locks on it, fumble with the long key that didn’t always go in right away…

The truck shortly left, and I turned on the light in the shop, and gathered the buns off the floor. I wiped them with my sleeve, and put them back on the tray. Two pink buns wouldn’t get clean — the dirt only smeared over them, so I spat on their pink sides several times — that was a much easier and better way to clean them.

Alyosha appeared by the shop quite by accident, and I still can’t fathom why he was made to cross my path this time.

I was on my way to my shift, finishing a cigarette, taking the last drags and throwing the butt in the ash-bin, and Alyosha came towards me out of the open doors of my shop.

Not seeing any reason to still be angry with him, I greeted Alyosha, and even gave him a small hug.

“What, do you work here?” he asked.

“I’m a loader,” I replied, smiling.

“Can I come in? To get warm? For a little while?” Alyosha asked hurriedly, clearly not wanting to hear a refusal. “I’m going home soon anyway, I’ve bought presents for my daughter,” he showed me a bag as proof.

“No, you can’t right now,” I replied. “Only when the salespeople and the manager leave. In an hour.”

An hour later someone started banging on the door. Alyosha was already drunk, and with a friend.

The friend, I must say, seemed to me to be a decent guy, with a childish look, healthy, taller than me, and quite charming — he had small ears on a large head, and a warm palm. He was silent almost the whole time, and did not even try to participate in the conversation, but he smiled so touchingly that I constantly wanted to shake his hand.

I showed them my bread and my trays. I took them to the little room where I’d recently been spending my boring nights, as if in expectation of some disaster, without really knowing what it looked like: since my fourth year at school, when older pupils had taken money from me, I hadn’t experienced any disasters.

The guys had brought vodka with them

“There’ll be warm bread coming soon,” I promised.

By the time the bread was delivered, we were all drunk already, and were laughing a lot.

Alyosha was showing me the presents for his daughter. First there was a strange anemic fluffy animal that I flicked on the nose, which genuinely offended Alyosha. Then the book “Karlsson” with color illustrations.

“It’s my favorite story,” Alyosha said, unexpectedly serious. “I read it from the age of four to the age of fourteen. Several times a year.”

He told me this in such a tone of voice as if he was admitting something incredibly important.

Ever since I was a child, I couldn’t stand that book… I thought clearly, but did not say it out loud.

As I stomped across the stone floor to open the window where I was given bread, I remembered how Alyosha had just tenderly slapped his new friend on the shoulder, and said:

“Drink up, boy!” — and turning to me, he added: “But you’re not a boy anymore.” And we all laughed, without understanding what exactly we were laughing at.

A minute later, laughing, the three of us unloaded the bread together. The driver — the same one, I think — kept looking at us with interest. As I took the last tray of bread, I swore at him for no reason. He responded — but without much ill-will, and even, immediately understanding the mood I was in, he tried to put the situation right, and said some words of reconciliation. But I had already given the tray to Alyosha’s new friend, and went to open the door.

“Wait there, I’m coming out,” I said to the driver over my shoulder.

On the way, I remembered that I was going to the doors without keys, I’d put the keys on the table in the little office, I thought. I went back but couldn’t find them, and for some reason moved the opened bottles and bitten pieces of bread around. I found the keys in the inside pocket of my uniform — and realized that I had felt them jabbing me painfully when I pressed the tray to my chest.

When I got outside, the truck had driven off. The smell of bread drifted out of the shop into the street.

Alyosha wandered out after me with a cigarette between his teeth. Following him, smiling gently, his friend appeared in the open door.

We threw snowballs, trying to hit the streetlight, but missed — although we did hit a window, from behind which, trying to save the street lights from us, an unknown woman threatened us, banging on the glass.

Acting stupid, Alyosha’s friend and I banged our shoulders together, and I suggested that we fight, not seriously, just for fun — by hitting each other with our open hands, not with our fists. He agreed.

We stood in position. I jumped energetically, while he didn’t move, and looked at me almost tenderly.

I took a step forward, and was immediately knocked down by a direct blow to the head. The fist that hit me was clenched.

When I came to a minute later, I rubbed snow into my temples and forehead for a long time. The snow was hard and had no smell.

“Did you fall down?” Alyosha asked, not putting any emotion into his question.

I shook my head and squinted sideways at him: it was painful to turn my head. He was smoking, very calmly, directly in the light of the street lamp, bright from the snow.

The next day I got a call from the legion office. I told them that I wasn’t going anywhere.