Sin

There won’t be anything

Two sons are growing up.

One of them is four months old. He wakes up at night; he doesn’t cry, no. He lies on his stomach, supports himself on his elbows, raises his white-domed little head and breathes. In short, fast breaths, like a dog following a scent.

I don’t turn the light on.

I listen to him.

“Where are you running to, lad?” I ask hoarsely in the darkness.

He breathes.

His head gets tired, and it hits the mattress of the child’s bed. Oops, there’s the rubber nipple under his face. He understands everything, the wise minnow — he twists his head, takes the nipple between his lips and sucks.

If he gets tired of the nipple, there is a soft noise — it falls out. And he breathes again.

From his breathing, I guess that he has turned his head and is looking into the darkness: I can’t see anything.

…But I want to sleep.

“Ignat, you’re a rascal,” I say sullenly.

He falls silent for a moment and listens: Where do I know that voice from?

My head is heavy like a damp burdock in autumn — nothing sticks to it, except sleep, dragging downward, into sticky mud.

Initially I turned the light on when I was woken up by his breathing — he was happy then. Every night we talked until dawn on the couch. I put my son next to me, and we talk. He grimaces, I laugh, keeping my mouth shut, so as not to scare him. Now I don’t turn on the light, I’m tired.

I don’t even remember the minute when he falls asleep, because I’ve fallen into unconsciousness earlier myself.

At night I wake up once, sometimes twice — in sinful fatherly horror: Where is he? What’s that? I can’t hear him breathing!

But if it’s getting light already, the darkness is fading — I pull the cover from the bed and see him there: his face is like an onion bulb, and he’s quietly snuffling.

I like to kiss him when he wakes up. With my lips I touch his cheeks, filled with the milk of my darling, and I am enraptured.

Lord, how tender he is. Like the flesh of a melon.

And his breath… What is the blooming of the shaggy flowers of spring to me — my son snuffles by my face, radiant as though after Communion.

I raise him up above me — his two cheeks hang down, and his saliva drips onto my chest.

I jiggle him to make him laugh. Do you know how they laugh? Like sheep: Ba-a-a-a.

I throw him up gently, without stretching my arms. He doesn’t laugh. But he twists his head: Aha, this is where I live…

“Bleat like a sheep, Ignatka, come on”! I jiggle him. He doesn’t want to. He’s sick of being shaken, he’s going to get grumpy.

I put the baby on my chest, and his feet kick me in the stomach. He raises himself up on his elbows, and looks at my head. He gets tired of this, and lowers his head: A beard, viewed close up. And interes-ting beard. If I could just figure out how to chew it.

I stroke his warm head. It seems to be covered in soft fat.

I’ll pester the baby and look him over until my darling wakes up in the next room.

We have a large apartment, two spacious rooms with high ceilings are divided by a corridor. In the second room on the lower bunk of a two-level bed, my darling is asleep. I sent her there in the evening so that she would get some sleep. And on the upper bunk is my elder son, five years old, with an angelic nature, and my eyes. His name is Gleb.

She’s woken up, my flower, and seeing her reassures and soothes me. She comes towards me shyly:

“Get any sleep?”

She’s not asking about me, but about him. Because if he was asleep, then I would also have had some dreams.

She kisses us in turn, but him first. She says tender words to him. She only smiles at me. Then she places her palms under her breasts — they’re heavy, I can see it too.

“It’s built up,” she says.

“He’ll drink it for you,” I replied. “He won’t mind.”

He never cries, not even when he’s hungry. He only sometimes starts to whine, without any tears, as if he’s complaining: I’m lying here by myself, guys, is it hard to amuse me? For example, I like to look at the bookshelves, when I’m carried past them. There are a lot of different colors in them.

When he was born, he didn’t cry either, I saw it myself, I was there; he didn’t cry at the hospital either, and during his first days at home he lay there, entranced, and looked attentively at the world. Only on the third day of our life together, when I went into the kitchen to check on the cabbage soup, I heard a baby’s offended cry.

I ran to him — and immediately guessed what was going on.

“Did you pinch him, you little bitch?” I asked my darling, hiding a smile.

“I thought he was mute,” she replied.

Although I forgot — once he did cry his eyes out.

Spoiled by his constantly good mood, my darling and I ran out to the shop, leaving the children at home. To buy sweet biscuits for mama and bitter wine for the father. When we came back, we could already hear a terrible wailing, and in two voices.

I flew up the stairs, kicking my shoes into the corridor — my younger son was bawling in his bed, already hoarse, and my elder son had shut himself in the toilet, and was screaming his head off.

“Ignatka, dear!” said the father to the younger son.

“Glebushka, darling,” said the mother to the elder son.

“Mama, help Ignatka!” Gleb sobbed into my darling’s stomach. “I can’t make him quiet!”

He felt sorry for his brother.

Soon Gleb will appear, wandering in on his long awkward legs, my luminous child.

And we will all be together, three men and one girl.

She is very pleased that there are three of us and one of her. My darling never wanted to give birth to someone in her own image. Perhaps because she herself was an eccentric and headstrong girl, until I clutched my greedy hand around her wrist and gave her my child to bear — to the detriment of her girlish lightness, but to the benefit of her human wisdom.

Now the children strengthen and build our love. Gleb often says:

“Guilt should always be divided in half.”

He sometimes runs to his mother — he kisses her hurriedly, and then rushes to me, and also kisses me. As if we ourselves had kissed in reconciliation — we weren’t sitting in different corners of our kitchen for no reason. And what to do after this? We all three laugh together and run to Ignatka’s call to prayer.

You forgot about me! he says without words, conveying his idea like this:

“Ivau! Ga!” and something else, avoiding the alphabet.

We compare how the first has grown, and how the second is growing. They are very different. The elder liked order, he ate at specific times, slept for a certain number of hours, and woke up with an accuracy to the minute. The younger knows nothing about order, no matter how hard we’ve tried to teach him. He wakes up and goes to sleep when he feels like it; he may eat fifteen times a day, or ask for the breast four times over three days. He has his own inner laws, and good on him — the main thing is that he be in a good mood.

The younger brother is friends with the elder. For example, however I jiggle him, the baby does not laugh much. But as soon as Gleb comes along, the younger brother is prepared to play and almost jumps with his stomach, as if he could make a leap like a clever frog — from the bed into the couch, and from there on to the floor. Gleb starts to turn somersaults, or knead the pillow — Ignat laughs so hard that I am afraid for him.

And most remarkably, as soon as the parents enter the room, the laughter stops: Don’t interfere! We’re having our own fun here.

Our sons are close to each other, they have an understanding as if they were from one tribe, and my darling and I were from another. Perhaps it’s a similar tribe, but it’s still another. But it’s a friendly one, of course. And it even pays a tribute. And it’s happy that it has to pay the tribute. Otherwise, what could it do with this wealth of strength, health and love of organization? Must it really be given only to each other? Then it would run out quicker.

Ignat snuffles at the milky breast.

He’s sucked my darling dry, the little white beast.

And he holds the breast tenderly with his hands, as if he’s afraid to spill something. Sometimes he jerks: Ah, the milk has stopped flowing!

“What are you worried about, Ignat,” my darling says to him, giving a welcoming nipple to the fussing child. He closes his eyes in bliss.

Now his brother has turned up. His face is sleepy, his arms are dangling, and a morning branch is sticking up in his underpants.

“Good morning, Gleb.”

“Good morning, Papa. Good morning, Mama.”

He goes up to Ignat and touches his ear.

“Shhh…” Mama says. “Don’t bother him.”

He likes to disturb us and get in the way, talk constantly, ask questions, answer them, philosophize, make comments, generalization and far-reaching conclusions — far beyond his judgment, experience and understanding.

He can feel a change in his parents’ mood with invariable precision, a slight hint of bewilderment from his father, which would inevitably turn into anger — if not for the son.

“Papa, don’t swear!”

“I’m not swearing yet, Gleb,” I say in a cold voice.

“You already are…” he says very confidently.

You can’t hide from his confidence, you can’t get around it, to jump out of another corner, carrying your cherished resentment on your deeply unshaven face. Because while you go around it, you forget what the resentment tasted like and what color it was, and from what bacteria it appeared on earth.

My darling addresses Gleb like an oracle, like a wise man, as if he were not a rosy child on long legs, but a wise seraphim.

“Glebushka, what do you think, did I act correctly?”

Or — in a woman’s shop:

“Glebushka, which gloves do you like the best — with buckles or without?”

They like him at kindergarten, and he is accepted by the boys in our yard — although they are older than him by two, three or even four years; during family excursions to the shop, Gleb is greeted by the charming young girls from the neighboring dormitory with incredible, almost playful tenderness:

“Hi Gleb! Look,” the tender-faced blond girl says to her friend “It’s Gleb!”

“Hi there, Gleb!” the second girl cheerfully says.

And they look at him as if they are almost in love. They don’t even look at me. Damn it, they don’t even look at his father.

Gleb replies to the girls calmly, taking their joy as something for granted.

“Gleb, who are they?” my darling asks, as soon as we walk away from the girls.

He tells us their names — Vika and Olesya. And that’s it, no more information but that.

I once heard them talking — at the playground in the yard. I walked past the wooden fence and saw that these beauties were laughing, looking at Gleb — not patronizingly, in the way that youths make fun of children, but quite heartily. Gleb, waiting for them to stop laughing, continued his story, and furthermore in different characters.

It seems to me that his vocabulary is much larger than most of the guys who are the same age as these girls. Every time I walk by the dormitory, there are males smoking by the entrance — and I feel an urge to interrupt someone’s profane mumblinb:

Doesn’t it upset you that you’re already twenty years old, and you’re still a complete moron?

I’m probably getting old, if I’ve become so irritable. Ten years ago I drank a wonderfully large amount of alcoholic beverages with guys like this — and at the time I thought they were fine fellows.

I’m getting old, I didn’t even go to the girls who were being entertained by Gleb at the playground. When I saw myself as a lively father perched on the neighboring bench with some stupid phrase on his lips such as Having fun there? — when I imagined this picture, I squirmed all over with disgust.

And I’m not even thirty.

I’m not even thirty, and I’m happy.

I don’t think about the frailty of life, I haven’t cried in seven years — since the moment that my darling told me that she loved me and would be my wife. Since then I haven’t found any reason to cry, and I laugh a lot, and even more often I smile in the middle of the street — at my thoughts, at my darlings, who with their three hearts lightly beat the melody of my happiness.

And I stroke my darling’s back, and my children’s heads, and I also stroke my unshaven cheeks, and my palms are warm, outside the window there is snow and spring, snow and winter, snow and autumn. This is my Homeland, and we live in it.

Only sometimes my elder son ruins my mood with his voice, persistent as a stick:

“Mama, does everyone die, or not everyone?”

“Only the body dies, son. The soul is immortal.”

“I don’t like that.”

I avoid these conversations and smoke in the corridor. Pointlessly, as if I am intentionally halting the movement of my thoughts, I stare at the wall.

I thought about this for the first time when I was a little older than he is now — probably when I was seven.

In my grey village, which was only slightly pink in the evenings, I hacked with my little axe at the woodchips spread out on a stump when this thought unexpectedly doused my childish heart with clammy cold — and from horror bordering on anger, I hit my finger, splitting the nail in half.

Afraid to scare my grandma, who was turning hay not far away, I hid my hand, clenched it in a fist with the index finger sticking out, dripping red and smarting terribly.

My grandma — I called her “Gramma” — immediately guessed that something unpleasant had happened, and she was already running to me, asking:

“Dearie…what is it? What’s happened… dearie?”

Then only I twisted my lips, and my tears burst out — they ran and flowed down all the sides of my childish face, the reflection of which I often try to see in the faces of my children.

Grama bandaged my finger, and I didn’t tell her anything, and never told anyone about it in my life, because I completely stopped thinking about it.

Death, as annoying as the toothache, I only remembered when I heard my son, and I had completely forgotten the incident with the axe — it unexpectedly appeared in my memory together with the clamminess in my heart, and the feeling of bleeding flesh, when my darling told me:

“There was a phone call. Your grandma is dead. Gramma.”

The village where I grew up is a long way away. It takes a long time to get there, and trains don’t go there.

I went to the garage, to my large, white car.

There was a large, white snow lying by the garage, and I spent a long time clearing it away with a spade, and was soon wet and angry.

Then I used a crowbar to crack the ice that seemed to be trying to get into the garage. The broken ice lay in crooked, sharp pieces on the snow and on the uncovered asphalt.

I spent a long time warming up the car, and I smoked, sweating, exhausted, broken into frozen pieces myself — a shard of white forehead flashed in the rear vision mirror, and a white, freezing hand holding a cigarette stuck out the window.

Ten minutes later I pulled out of the garage, hearing the crack of ice and the crunch of snow under the wheels.

It was completely dark now, and it was clear that I would have to drive all night to help my grandfather organize the funeral.

I ran home, and my darling came out to meet me and see me off, holding Ignatka in her arms, with Gleb standing by her, his lips trembling. He couldn’t bear it, and sobbed that he didn’t want me to go away. Scared by his cry, the baby also gave a thin screech. Completely broken up, I ran down the steps, hearing the heart-wrenching voices of the two children, afraid to hear a third crying voice in addition to theirs.

“What’s wrong with you, damn it!” I cursed; the car door slammed, and forgetting to turn on the headlights, I tore through the yard in complete darkness. When I switched on the lights, I saw a dog running and looking around in terror. I slammed on the brakes, the car skidded, I frantically spun the steering wheel in the opposite direction, and pressing the accelerator, I shot out onto the empty street.

Half an hour later, I had calmed down a little, but the road was awful; the constantly falling snow was wet and immediately congealed into ice on the windshield.

Once every half hour I forced myself to stop, ventured out into the nasty, cold darkness, and scraped the frozen snow off the parts of the windscreen that the constantly crawling windscreen wipers could not reach.

There were no officers at the checkpoints, and there were increasingly fewer cars coming in the opposite direction. I was overtaken several times, and I stepped on the gas so as to drive in company with someone, unobtrusively staying one hundred meters or so behind. But soon these cars turned off to the left or the right, to the villages alongside the roads, and in the end I found myself alone, among the snow and the Middle Russian plateau, on the way from Nizhny Novgorod to a Ryazan village.

Sometimes I started talking out loud, but the conversation didn’t catch on, and I fell silent.

You remember how Gramma brought you tea in the morning, and biscuits with country butter… You woke up and drank, warm and happy…

I don’t remember.

You remember.

I tried to perk myself up, to stop myself from being sad, from drowsing off or moping painfully and drearily.

Remember: you are a child. I am a child. And your body is still weak and stupid. My body. Remember…

Gramma is nearby, she loves me without measure, she is attentive and tender. And around me the world, which I measure with small steps, still believing that as soon as I grow up I will walk across it in its entirety.

Gramma and I talked a lot, she played with me and sang to me, and I also loved her very much; but everything that I remembered so vividly suddenly feel apart from some reason, not a single happy event from the recent past became living and warm, and with a screech the wipers dispersed the memories from the windscreen.

The road wound through the Murom woods.

There were endless little creeks covered with ice, and villages without a single light burning.

I wanted to see at least a street light — so that it would wink in welcome — but who needed streetlights here but me.

The car travelled smoothly, although the road, I could see and feel, was slippery, uncleared and not sprinkled with sand.

After several hours I came to an intersection — my path was cut off by a four-lane highway. And here at last I saw a massive truck coming from the left, and I was happy to see it, because I wasn’t lost on this frozen earth alone — here was a trucker going full speed ahead.

His truck is empty, and so he’s not scared of the traffic cops or the devil, and perhaps he’s also happy to see me…

This is what I thought as I pressed on the brakes to let the truck past, but the road did not hold my car, and the wheels did not grip the asphalt. And even the wind, it seemed, was blowing into the back windscreen, pushing me, placing my body, locked in a warm and smoky salon, under a blow.

Ivau! Ga!

Good morning, Papa…

I tore at the gearstick, shifting from neutral into second, then right into first — trying to brake that way. The car jolted, for a moment it seemed that it had slowed down, but I was already on the highway, and was looking stupidly ahead, into the emptiness and the falling of white snowflakes. From the left, my face, a mad-eyed reflection in the rear vision mirror, was bathed in a ghastly light.

The driver didn’t slow down, but turned the wheel and powerfully moved into the empty opposing lane. The truck, crashing and waving the enormous tail of the trailer, drove right past my eyes, maybe just half a meter from my car.

When the huge hulk disappeared, stirring up a cloud of snow, I realized that I was still swaying slowly. And I was gently moving the wheel, like a child pretending to be a driver.

I crossed the road in first gear. The trucker drove in the opposing lane for about a hundred meters, then moved back into his own lane, without stopping, to tell me that I… That I was mortal.

I cracked open the window and moved into second gear. Then into third, and almost straight away into fourth.