The Gardener from Ochakov

30

GETTING KOLYAN OUT of the house in his morose, drunken state was no easy task. Igor tried persuading him gently, then talking to him sternly. Eventually he fetched Kolyan’s padded winter coat from the hallway and forced him to put it on. He made him pull the warm hood with its fake fur trim over his head and pull the drawstring around it taut, leaving just a small gap for his eyes. Then Igor took a vial of bright green antiseptic ointment from the medical kit and painted the visible part of his friend’s face green. Kolyan decided to cooperate. Either that or he could no longer be bothered to resist.

‘They’ll think you’re a drunk and that you’ve been beaten up,’ said Igor, helping his friend to stand up so he could look at himself in the mirror. ‘Honestly, I wouldn’t recognise you!’ He looked at Kolyan’s reflection – a pair of eyes, apparently bruised, staring vacantly out of the ‘burrow’ formed by the tightly pulled drawstring of the hood.

‘Yeah,’ sighed Kolyan. His voice sounded lost and helpless. Igor knew that he had to seize the moment and drag his friend out into the yard before he gathered the strength to stand his ground or to panic in the face of his destiny.

‘What about my bag? It’s got my laptop in it,’ protested Kolyan, looking back at the front door as Igor pushed him towards the gate.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll be back here in a couple of hours.’

Kolyan didn’t speak for the rest of the journey. To begin with, he walked quite energetically. Only the closely drawn hood betrayed his fear. After a little while, clearly overheating, he released the drawstring and greedily inhaled the cool, moist air.

The first commuter train was almost empty. They had the whole carriage to themselves. Kolyan sat on one of the wooden benches and tightened his hood again. Thanks to Igor’s newly discovered artistic talent, Kolyan’s face was genuinely unrecognisable – he looked like a typical alcoholic, on the well-trodden path to becoming a tramp and thereafter to the eternity of winter, to a blizzard and a snowdrift from which there is no return. The brandy and home-made liqueur he’d consumed helpfully reinforced this impression. Igor smiled as he admired his own handiwork and the effects of the antiseptic ointment.

‘You don’t look like yourself at all,’ Igor whispered to his friend.

‘I’m never going to look like myself again,’ Kolyan muttered gloomily.

He seemed to be starting to sober up, but the return to sobriety is a lengthy process and not even the walk from the station to Proreznaya Street was enough to turn Kolyan back into a normal, fully functional human being.

As they passed the Opera, Igor called the photographer and told him that they would be there in ten minutes.

When they arrived, the photographer was already waiting for them in the courtyard. He was yawning, and his eyes were still adjusting to the light of the breaking day. He looked alarmed at the sight of Kolyan, but his expression softened when he saw Igor and he visibly relaxed.

‘Everything’s nearly ready,’ said the photographer, opening the door. ‘Would you like a coffee, perhaps?’

‘I think we could all do with a coffee,’ nodded Igor.

Igor-the-photographer hung his all-weather hunting jacket on a hook near the door and disappeared into the kitchen.

Igor beckoned Kolyan into the living room and reached his hand out to the wall. There was a click, and light flooded the room. In front of them, a number of photographs had been attached to makeshift washing lines with plastic pegs and were moving gently, as though they were swaying in a breeze.

‘What are those?’ murmured Kolyan.

‘All in good time! Just wait a minute. Let’s sit down,’ said Igor, quickly scanning the photographs. The order in which they were hanging was not particularly conducive to a virtual tour of Ochakov. Igor lowered himself onto the sofa next to Kolyan.

‘All in good time,’ he repeated, feeling the weight of exhaustion beginning to press down on his shoulders. ‘Let’s have our coffee first. The photographer will go through them all with us.’

This necessary pause gave Igor a chance to concentrate and work out what he actually wanted from the viewing. Revived by the smell and subsequently the taste of his coffee, the photographer already had a clearer idea than his two guests did.

‘I’d like you to show them to us in sequence,’ said Igor. ‘The complete series, I mean, like they’re going to be on display at the exhibition.’

The photographer drank his coffee and nodded decisively, then started walking among the suspended photographs.

‘We need to start from the beginning,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the first prints ready.’

He rustled about behind the screen for a few minutes, then came out and placed a pile of large black-and-white photographs on the coffee table in front of Igor and Kolyan.

‘Look at those ones first. I’ve already gone through and put them in order,’ he said. ‘While you’re doing that, I’ll take the others down – they’re dry now.’

‘Look at them closely and try to remember everything,’ Igor whispered to Kolyan, relieved that the photographer was out of earshot. ‘There, you see, that’s Ochakov. That’s the street where Vanya Samokhin lives with his mother. There they are, the two of them, and that’s Vanya and me. That’s Chagin’s house, and that’s Iosip and Fima on the doorstep… Don’t worry about those two. If you see them, cross the street… Ah, look! That’s the market. And there’s Valya! You can’t tell from the photo, but she’s got red hair. She really is beautiful… There’s something completely wild about her,’ he went on, shaking his head with a sigh.

Igor saw that Kolyan was peering at the image of Valya standing behind her display of Black Sea flounder and gobies.

‘I would go anywhere for a woman like her,’ added Igor, glad that the photograph had aroused his friend’s interest. ‘Into the past, or into the future!’

He heard footsteps behind him, and another pile of large prints was placed on the table.

‘There, that’s the rest of them,’ said the photographer, settling down in one of the armchairs.

As he reached for the next photograph, Igor froze. It was another close-up of Red Valya, but what unnerved him was that Fima Chagin was standing right in front of her. He was staring at her with a look of undisguised menace, and it was obvious that she was genuinely terrified.

‘What’s going on between those two?’ asked Kolyan, although he didn’t sound particularly interested. ‘Are they lovers, or what?’

‘She’s married. Her husband’s a fisherman, and she sells his catch. I don’t think they’re lovers.’

Kolyan looked strangely at Igor, out of the corner of his eye. He started to raise the hood of his padded jacket.

‘Just tell me,’ said Igor, his tone completely serious. ‘Can you see how real it all is?’

Kolyan nodded and glanced at the photographer, who was listening to their conversation.

‘It’s real all right,’ whispered the photographer, looking straight back at Kolyan. Then he nodded at Igor. ‘Only he won’t tell me how he does it!’

‘I’ll tell you one day,’ promised Igor, with the hint of a mischievous smile.

‘I hope so,’ said the photographer. ‘It would revolutionise photography. I mean, it already has, but –’

‘Have you got any small prints from the latest films?’ interrupted Igor.

‘Yes, I made some test prints. Do you want to take them with you?’

‘Yes!’

They walked back down to the station at a brisk pace. It was clear that Kolyan had completely sobered up. His hood was up over his head, and the gap left by the drawstring revealed only his eyes, his nose and a bit of green skin. There was hardly anyone about, and to add to their good fortune it began to rain heavily, which helped to slow the start of the new day.

When they got to the station, the driver of an old Zhiguli agreed to take them to Irpen for a hundred hryvnas.

The windscreen wipers on the Zhiguli squeaked noisily, scattering drops of rainwater from the windscreen. Igor sat next to the driver. Kolyan, with his hood still up, fell asleep on the back seat.

‘So, have you two had a good time?’ asked the driver, a working-class man of around sixty.

‘Yes,’ answered Igor. He nodded at his sleeping friend. ‘He’s going to be out of it for a while!’

‘In a good way, or a bad way?’ asked the driver.

‘In a good way,’ said Igor pensively.

As the elderly driver contemplated Igor’s response, his thoughts turned to the vicissitudes of his own fate.