We are Scythians

My wife has told me to get a move on with this book, so I've set myself the deadline of April 28th 2011 to finish it by.

Chapter 23
The brownstone facade of the Historical Museum stretched almost symmetrically along two quiet, sunny backstreets behind Lenin Avenue. Zhenya approached from the direction of the market, having picked up some dried fish to go with her beer that evening. (It was going to be another slow, awkward night at her mother's, she feared, avoiding conflicts, or any possible breakthroughs in communication, in front of a TV cop show—but at least there were only a few days now before she could go home to Britain, thank God.) At the back of her throat a maddening tickle, which she had carried about with her since she'd arrived in town, made her splutter at intervals fitfully, though it was still nice along there, away from the noise of the market. The building itself must once have seemed quite grand in its provincial setting, and may even have been the townhouse of a prosperous factory owner before the revolution, she thought. Now, its pallid-green, mock-Doric plaster columns, which were squeezed in on either side of the corner entrance-way, reminded the visitor of nothing so much as Miss Havisham's ancient wedding cake, as if something important had been irretrievably lost.
It was Independence Day and a small group of cadets from the military academy were milling around the museum’s entrance, eating ice-creams, somehow too timidly. Despite the weather, which was already stifling at that early hour, they were making the most of the holiday atmosphere on what was probably one of the last bursts of summer. They were dressed in dark jackets and white, creasy trousers, like dishevelled naval officers from the nineteenth century.
Zhenya wondered why she'd chosen the place for a visit. She'd never been that interested in the past—not that past, anyway—and she was not a tourist. She was beginning to think she might have picked the wrong day for such an excursion. But she was there now. It gave her a chance to spend more time away from the house—and, you never knew, she might even enjoy it. Along the bottom right-hand wall of the museum, an array of bulbous stone figures, the totemic remains of a previous steppe culture, were rotting away in the sun; three tall, imperious poplars, swaying every now and then only at their heights, lined the pavement in front of them. At the foot of the short flight of steps up to the double front-doors the young woman noticed a worn-out metal boot-scraper, so that the image of a horseman in a white peasant smock, dismounting his steed after a swift ride over the steppe, flared briefly across her consciousness. Then the horseman scraped the mud from his high riding boots before entering the townhouse for a sumptuous dinner at a long, polished table, and Zhenya followed him in.

Maternity Ward No. 6

I got stuck on that last chapter: I think it started in the wrong place. In the meantime, here's a short one.

Chapter 21

Lodged in the doorway between the corridor and her ward, Vita looked the agitated stranger up and down.
“My wife,” he said, “how is she?”
He was a short, slightly-built man with greying, unruly hair, aged between 40 and 45. In the dim hallway of Maternity Clinic No. 6, against walls of pale mint-green, Vita could make out the signs of controlled strain on his patchily stubbled face. He had the grin, she thought, of an ingratiating wolf.
With one arm behind her, one on the handle of the ward’s swing-doors, it was as if she thought he might try to force his way in past her. It had been a busy afternoon and she'd been run off her feet (though, because of staff shortages, she’d be on duty for a couple more hours yet), and had only meant to dash out for a drink from the canteen, when the visitor, who was waiting for news on the condition of his pregnant wife, had pounced on her before she'd emerged fully from the ward entrance. A strong whiff of freshly smoked tobacco suffused the fabric of his dark-blue suit. He had on a denim-blue shirt and a grey tie, which he had roughly loosened.
“Look, I’ve been here for two, no, more than three hours, and no one will tell me a thing.” His pale, apprehensive face loomed out of the semi-darkness disconcertingly like an unattached balloon. “Is she alright?" he said. "I came as soon as I heard. You see, she's never been very strong.” Then he tapped nervously on the glass cover of his watch, which looked expensive. “How is she?" he added after a pause. "Can I go in?”
“No visitors at this stage,” replied the nurse, confident in the authority of her white staff coat. “It is not permitted.”
At this, the visitor hopped awkwardly, as if he suddenly felt prickly all over—as if the walls of the hospital had trapped him in a role he was unused to, draining him of his strength. He seemed to wobble between attack and retreat. Finally, the visitor managed to master himself—calculating, perhaps, that a friendly approach on this occasion might be more fruitful. As he prepared for this change of tack, the little man tugged at the woollen lapels of the jacket draped over his shoulders against the chill of the dark corridor, where not even the famous late summer heat of the Black Sea Steppe could penetrate.
“It’s just that she’s not very strong,” he repeated, with greater reticence than before. “With our last child, she was in a lot of pain. The doctor said they were lucky to survive—though both did, thank God.” As he blessed himself, he coughed violently into the clenched fist of his free hand.
“You must let us do our job,” said Vita. “Look, she’ll be fine. We’re just waiting until the contractions become more regular.”
The man nodded, unable to speak through his coughing fit. He pulled a hanky from his inside jacket pocket and phlegmed into it vehemently. For as long as he had been there, he had eaten nothing, drank nothing, and the sly self-assurance of his face, which seemed to have become etched in it, had taken on a waxen translucence. He popped out onto a stairwell to smoke a panatella, blowing the smoke out of a window hatch in a glass wall that looked out over a Spartan car park two stories below, where, on the pavement approach, under the shade of some ailing poplars, motionless invalids in wheelchairs had been parked up, out of the way. On a wall above a notice board beside him, an old cardboard sign read, “Children are the future of the State.” He shuddered, imagining the children of Beslan running through the flames of the burning school-building, mown down in the crossfire (the incident had happened almost a year before). Then he thought about his own children—two boys and a girl, all below the age of eight. Perhaps he would call work. Flicking open a mobile, he was soon back in a world he knew, berating an unfortunate subordinate on the other end.

Up in the air

Chapter 14
Kiev, late summer 2005

The smell of unburnt petrol fumes filled the grimy-white BMW. In the back seat, feeling queasy, Zhenya was on the verge of sharing the observation that she could hardly have guessed, when she’d phoned for a cab that morning, that they were willing to throw in a fairground ride as well.
“Mind if I smoke?” said the driver as they juddered over some tramlines. He reached confidently for a carton of cigarettes in the front pocket of his checkered shirt, anticipating no objection.

“But the car,” spluttered Zhenya, genuinely afraid, “won’t it explode?”

In the rear-view mirror, she saw the driver pull a down-in-the-mouth expression of disappointed resignation, and he hunched his shoulders as if to say “suit yourself”. Since then, he’d been zipping in and out of the lanes of heavy traffic on the long, straight road to Borispil, swerving ever more wildly, ever more recklessly from side to side, coming up short behind a convoy of slow-moving Kamaz trucks, or belting down the wrong side of the road, slipping back into lane just ahead of an oncoming school bus, so that the young woman's hangover, which she'd acquired during an evening spent on a stool at the bar of the Ukraine Hotel, was rocking about in her head like a bag of stones. Then, just before the airport, without saying a word, he'd pulled in to a siding next to a row of silver poplars and Zhenya had tensed up, ready for the worst. But the hollow-faced driver just hopped out of the car and removed the magnetic taxi light from the car roof, got back in and restarted the engine.

Humdrum

Chapter 24

Osip Galkin trudged solemnly along the tarmac path back through the YunKom estate, tired now, but heading home. Twilight as it fell was almost granular, like soot, but at least the heat seemed to be lifting at last. On the corner, a feisty young mongrel was yapping at flies and passers-by, its head held stiffly, proudly, and behind the dustbins, from some withered bushes that rustled with the bright sound of tinsel, the inevitable crickets were scratching a weary tune. Coming towards him on the path, a tiny old woman, taking quick, short, bird-like steps, and wearing white pop socks on her sandalled feet, carried in each hand a galvanised-iron bucket of cold potatoes, which she’d probably been hawking down at the railway station. She was grimacing under the strain.

Vita hadn’t been pleased to see him: one of the women on her ward was having a difficult delivery and she would have to work late. She’d thanked him absent-mindedly for the chocolates and flowers, but would he mind taking them with him, and she would see him later at home? It occurred to Galkin that his wife might be having an affair. Who with? At the hospital, there must be plenty of opportunities. Osip's monobrow lifted at this novel possibility; what bothered him most was how little it worried him. What did he think of her, after all this time? They’d been teenage sweethearts and, apart from a brief and ill-advised marriage to a law student at the institute in Kharkov, they’d been together ever since—almost 20 years! Of course, he had no wish to see her harmed, and more often than not now he stayed silent when she said something he thought overbearing or crass. There was still a certain sentimental tenderness, but in truth he found her a bit vulgar, grasping, lacking in philosophical perspective, too swamped in life’s minutia to be able to develop an overview of it.
Alongside the tarmac strip, some telephone cables sagged mournfully between two wonky posts and a crooked birch leaned forward as if into a stiff wind. He looked behind him at the path spiralling up the hill he’d just climbed, continuing to harangue himself bitterly over of the day’s failures. Of course, he'd have shot Kulyeba, if Kulyeba had turned up—he had to believe that. It wasn't as if he didn't have the evidence of his guilt. But Osip couldn't even plan that properly. Time was running out and he was going in circles. What use was he? He felt transparent, light-headed, nauseous. There was a sensation, low in his belly and not fully articulated, that he was walking back through his own life, but could not recognise anything. He looked ahead again, but could not go on. Quite calmly, he considered the possibility that he was going mad—but what were the giveaway signs? How was he supposed to tell?
Osip frowned with the effort of thinking. What good was he? He recalled the look on Mila’s face once as she'd opened a box of perfume he’d bought her—crafty and bright-eyed, full of real delight and feigned surprise (she had a great sense of entitlement). At her flat, he liked to sit on the shabby sofa and watch her through the shimmering rainbow curtain over the doorway as she stood out of the balcony, puffing away happily on her long, slim cigarettes. This soppiness made him wince. The worst was he'd had no-one to talk to about her since her death, not even Arkady. Yet what was the use dredging up the past? He had long regretted confessing the affair to Vita—and not just because of the tears and tantrums, which he thought he understood. It was unseemly to foist yourself on others.

In the hallway of his flat, only the sour smell of burnt cooking fat, tinged with cabbage and gas, was waiting to greet him. Heavier than the air around it, his being sank. He stooped to switch on a low floor lamp under a row of coat hooks—it was quite dark now—but the lamp’s sphere of illumination was unable to penetrate very far into the gloom. As he hung it up on a wall peg, he felt as worn out as his bomber jacket—as if he were hanging himself up there, his own flayed hide. Really, what was the point of him? He forced off first one boot then the other, but without loosening the laces enough, side-footing them in the vague direction of the passage wall. Wiggling his toes into a pair of black slip-ons, the coolness of the slippers' lining through his socks gave him some momentary low-level relief.
In the kitchen, which was small and cramped, a saucepan of cabbage soup was laid out on the cooker and a wicker basket of bread on the folding table over by the window. There was a tea towel laid over the basket to keep the bread fresh. Trying the dials of the radio, a blast of raucous folk music assailed him, and he switched it straight off. From a biscuit tin on top of a cupboard by the cooker, he fished out a small package. Then he opened the door onto the balcony, which was little more than an oversized window box with a railing, and squeezed out onto the narrow platform, freeing from the light blue “Prima” carton a single cigarette.
Vita was sure to find out. A childish fear surged through him. He closed the door to, defiantly, the blaze of the struck match absolving him temporarily.
Behind the metals plant, the sun was melting away and the structures of the gas-storage tanks were the huge helmets of medieval knights in silhouette. How nice it was out there, above it all. Between his fingers, he let the cigarette consume itself. He couldn't understand why he'd stayed with his wife. He couldn’t fathom why he’d split with Mila. She wasn't everyone's idea of a beauty—she seemed always to smirk out of the side of a crooked mouth, and she wore an old black beret everywhere. But with her, it had always been easy: they’d just play cards, listen to music, chat about this and that, have a drink or two (she liked white beer and sweet Russian champagne). Also, she loved to dance and didn’t care at all if he wore his shoes indoors. But it was too late. He’d chosen the easy path: this cowardice not only sickened him, it baffled him, as he couldn’t quite work out how or when it had happened. For an easy life, he’d left important things unsaid. Or he'd tried to say them, but they'd come out sounding reflexive, insincere. One god-awful night towards the end, they'd been walking along a miserably rainy street in Donetsk, when she’d said without a lead up, “But I love you,” and he had mumbled to the pavement: “I love you, too”. Now, he could no longer tell if the memory was real. And his life had been no easier. He and Vita had so little in common. It was a strain simply to find new ways of avoiding her. He suspected that, at bottom, he might have stayed with her just to avoid an awkward scene. He looked down at the decrepit playground, which was deserted. In the distance, a great white smog-cloud had formed over the steel plant in the shape of an anvil, as if there had been an enormous explosion. Why was it so bloody difficult to get what you want?
From the direction of the steelworks came the clatter of numerous invisible machines, and a low unexplained rumble, like rubble, filled his ears. He peered up at the cosmos, but there was so little there he recognised: the Great Bear and the Little Bear, which looked more than anything like a couple of household saucepans, and the Milky Way, a stain on a tablecloth. Humdrum, monotonous, unspeakably dull. How tedious life was, how tedious it was to live—a bind, and irritation, the irritating buzz of an insect that you are not quick enough to swat, or even see. A humdrum buzz in the eardrum. Mundane as the clatter of domestic pots and pans. In the distance, Osip heard a discordant train whistle, like two bum notes on a harmonica fighting it out to make it to the top, struggling for air.

Memo

As I've got older, novels and plays have become more important to me for some reason. So, just to remind myself of what I've read, or might want to reread, here is a list, as far as I can recall, of the fiction that I've perused over the past five years or so.

Novels and short stories
The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The Yacubian Building, Alaa Al-Aswany
A Room with a View, Forster
Barry Lyndon, Thackery
Vanity Fair, Thackery
The Power and the Glory, Greene
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky
Candide, Voltaire
Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee
Don Quixote, Cervantes
Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell
Homage to Catalonia, Orwell
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Emma, Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Mansfield Park, Austen
To The Lighthouse, Wolfe
Mrs Dalloway, Wolfe
Farewell Gulsary, Aitmatov
Jamila, Aitmatov
Fiesta, Hemmingway
The Old Man and the Sea, Hemmingway
Hemmingway’s short stories
If This Is A Man, Primo Levi
Life and Fate, Vassily Grossman
Robinson Cruesoe, Defoe
Swann’s Way, Proust
The 42nd Parallel, Dos Passos
The Hobbit, Tolkien
The Foundation Pit, Platonov
The Inheritors, Golding
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The Return of the Native, Hardy
The Trial, Kafka
The Rainbow, Lawrence
Selected Tales, Lawrence
War and Peace, Tolstoy
Yellow Dog, Amis

Shikasta, Doris Lessing
Blade Runner, Dick
Time Out of Joint, Dick

The Lady with a Dog and other stories, Chekhov
The Steppe, Chekhov
The Dual, Chekhov
The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov

Shakespeare
Anthony and Cleopatra
Richard II
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
The Merchant of Venice
Hamlet

Detective and crime stories
The Woman in White, Collins
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle
Wysteria House, Conan Doyle
The red-headed league, Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskevilles, Conan Doyle
White Queen, Boris Akunin
Leviathan, Boris Akunin
The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
Tishomingo Blues, Elmore Loenard
Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard
The Silver Pigs, Lindsey Davis
Three Hands in the Fountain, Lindsey Davis
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie

Blind justice

Chapter 11
Tram No.40 clattered slowly along Partisan Street. Outside the Palace of Justice, a life-sized cut-out of Femida, dispassionate goddess of law, was propped up against a wall like an advertising board. Heavily made-up, she had brass scales in one hand and a broad sword in the other, her eyes blindfolded.
There'd been news about Vazgen. A contact in records had traced his girlfriend to a block of flats on Karl Liebknecht Street, just over the railway track, so perhaps he was still in town. Osip had asked for a squad car to pick him up in, but Bobrovski had refused. The girlfriend, it turned out, had worked in Mila’s salon, though Osip couldn't remember whether he'd seen her there or not.
Arkady was to meet him at the Italian cemetery, and they'd take his car from there—it was safer to arrive together, in case Vazgen put up a fight. The investigator scanned the courtyard beside the tram stop for his promised back-up team, but there was no one about. He decided to carry on to the terminus anyway.
In the municipal park, the grass was sparse and wizened, the ground baked hard by a brazen sun. Maybe the captain was right: this wasn’t his job. What had got into him? Osip loosened his tie and wiped the sweat from his hairline, and his jaws clamped together involuntarily, pulsing the muscles in his cheek. Winding around the terminus, which was looped like a lasso, the tram came to a stop and its doors squeaked open. In the shadows of a narrow side alley, between a breeze-block shelter and the huge, pale-green cinema, Arkady was puffing a cigarette, shifting his weight from one foot to another. The cinema, themed like a roman temple, now mostly showed soft-porn, shoddy horrors, Bollywood imports. Someone had graffitied glasses and an imperial beard to the face of a girl in a mini-skirt looking saucily back over her shoulder out of a tatty poster on the wall, a few wisps of pubic hair along the knickerline. Emerging into sunlight, Arkasha shielded his eyes. The two men stopped on the patchy tarmac and bear-hugged. Since the incident at his flat three days before, Arkasha’s appearance was transformed, his face re-energised, again uncannily youthful, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
"And your people, where are they?" asked Arkady.
"Just us, I’m afraid," said Osip. “Where’s your car?”
"No car," said Arkady, giggling nervously. From an inside jacket pocket, the sleeves of which he’d rolled up to the elbows because of the heat, Arkasha pulled out a hefty steel spanner and said: “I brought this, though.”
By the time they reached the footbridge over the bunched tangle of railway tracks up to a coking plant, Arkady had again withdrawn into the privacy of a cigarette. In silence they ascended the wooden stairs, and Osip considered briefly what it was like to be Shapiro, forever making unpalatable compromises with men like Kulyeba, whose gift was simply that they lacked the capacity to be ashamed; scurrying this way and that through the cracks in life’s skirting boards, past traps, like a rat. Kulyeba had “eased” Shapiro out of the steel plant after he’d fronted it for him as a favour, and at some personal risk. He’d probably made some money, though, and at least he’d survived. Others hadn’t been so lucky (two metals traders who’d tried to set up on their own had been shot). Yet Arkady retained a likeable lightness, almost an innocence, that was hard to define.


Down on the track, through the bridge’s iron safety grills, Galkin could see a gang of railway workers, berry brown and stripped to the waist, resetting short sections of rail in the blistering heat. Involuntarily, he rubbed the prominent scar on the right side of his forehead where a suspect has once caught him with a broken bottle.
On the opposite platform, the two men trudged towards a gravel path that ran parallel to a pockmarked road, back in the direction they'd come from, their earlier buoyant spirits now seeming to evaporate through the pores of their skin. What were they doing there? And what the hell were they going to do when they arrived at Vazgen’s hotel? He imagined taking Vazgen by surprise in a body tackle, a sharp twinge of anxiety assailed the officer: he'd like to avoid violence, if he could, but perhaps it wasn't possible.

The girlfriend’s apartment block was at the far end of Karl Liebknecht Street. A short distance from the entrance, the two men came to a halt. Osip looked the tall building up and down, as if to assess the size of the task ahead. The building was 12 stories high and ultra-slim, like the component on a circuit-board. On its roof, ringed by a simple balustrade, was what looked like some large-scale communications equipment. By the dusty steps’ entrance, emaciated birch trees stood guard, stooping like so many bony Don Quixotes, lances raised. Osip's consciousness quivered, itching for a smoke, and Arkady shifted from foot to foot. Absorption in the task ahead deadened an awareness of the surrounding urban noise.
“Wait by the double doors,” said the investigator. “If you hear shooting, make yourself scarce. But if he runs out, see if you can’t trip him up.”


He waited in a chilly hallway which had walls the colour of eggshell as the narrow lift descended with the sound of nails scraping down a blackboard; at ground level, its dented metal doors opened stiffly. On the eighth floor, Galkin stepped out into a dim corridor. On the concrete floor ahead of him was a dead rat, lying on its side, peacefully, as if in sleep, two paws tucked up sweetly under its jaws. Shivering in disgust, but stepped over it carefully, as if not wishing to wake it. Osip thought about Femida, with her scales held out before her, boldly—but at least she was armed. When he knocked on a red door, twice, it was open. Down a fusty hallway a stoop-shouldered, stocky young man in his 20s was sitting on the side of a bed, motionless, puffy-eyed. He had jug ears and a skinhead, and his red paisley shirt was unbuttoned, half-tucked into his belted black jeans. A lit cigarette was jutting cockily from the side of his mouth. Behind him on the unmade bed could just be made out the figure of a half-naked girl stretched out, comatose.
“The militia have the place surrounded,” said Galkin theatrically, raising his voice. “You'd better come quietly.”
But the young man didn't stir. Perhaps he was weighing up his options. Perhaps one of the gnarled threads of smoke curling up from his dangling fag had stung him in the eye at the critical moment, inhibiting his ability to respond. Supposing that he was just stoned, however, the officer advanced down the hall, which smelled of tooth-decay or of sweet bad breath, where his attempt to handcuff the suspect met little resistance.
Back out on the towerblock steps, Arkady inserted the spanner back in an inside jacket pocket irritably: having gone to the trouble of psyching himself up, he seemed put out to learn that it was all over without much fuss.
“Thanks for your help,” said Galkin, "I can take it from here". Then he prodded the suspect back in the direction of the little wooden bridge and the tram.
"Want to meet up later for a drink at the Alligator Club?” said Arkady. Galkin said he'd be there in a couple of hours.
The tram back across town was full of Saturday shoppers heading for the busy central market. The conductress, as he paid their fares, gave Galkin and his charge a look half-suspicious, half-puzzled, but she kept stum. Galkin stared out of the window at the forest of tall chimneys of the steel plant, densely packed, each spouting a wind-sock of black smoke. Vita probably wasn't up yet. On the kitchen table at home, he’d left her a gift-wrapped package of the crimson shoes she'd wanted and a note wishing her all the best on her 35th.

Big Girl’s Blouse

This is my (loose) translation of a poem written by Vladimir Mayakovsky almost 100 years ago. The original is underneath.

I’ve decided to sew myself black pantaloons
from the velvet of my voice; a yellow shirt
out of sunset. Like Don Juan, on the world's
main drag I'll strut my stuff and flirt.


And going to pot, let the earth exclaim:
“But you'll ravish the verdant spring!”
I'll fling at the sun: “But it's good to loaf
on the tarmac”—me with an insolent grin.

O, it isn’t because the sky is blue
or the world is my love in this festive clean
that I give you poems as bright as “tra-la-la”,
or like toothpicks, essential and keen.

So, girls who would call me brother
and girls who my flesh would arouse—
drench me, a poet, with smiles and I’ll sew them
with flowers onto my big girl’s blouse!

Кофта фата
Я сошью себе черные штаны
из бархата голоса моего.
Жёлтую кофту из трёх аршин заката.
По Невскому мира, по лощёным полосам его,
профланирую шагом Дон-Жуана и фата.

Пусть земля кричит, в покое обабившись:
"Ты зелёные вёсны идёшь насиловать!"
Я брошу солнцу, нагло осклабившись:
"На глади асфальта мне хорошо грассировать!"

Не потому ли, что небо голубо,
а земля мне любовница в этой праздничной чистке,
я дарю вам стихи, весёлые, как би-ба-бо
и острые и нужные, как зубочистки!

Женщины, любящие моё мясо, и эта
девушка, смотрящая на меня, как на брата,
закидайте улыбками меня, поэта,-
я цветами нашью их мне на кофту фата!

(1914)

The Alligator Club

Chapter 12

The Alligator Club was tucked away to the side of a double-helix stairway that wound up through the multiple floors of the Palace of Culture. When Galkin arrived at the bar, two little girls in blue leotards and pink leggings were standing on tiptoes ahead of him; bunking off a gymnastics class, they were buying with their attendance money a tasty snack of crisps, coconut sweets, fizzy drinks.
Shapiro was sitting at the other end of the bar, peering out of a large window into Lenin Square. He was nibbling on a few thin shreds of dried calamari laid out on a saucer and was most of the way through a beer.
As the children counted out their precious coins, Osip waited his turn. When the girls left, skipping, pleased with their haul, he ordered a couple of bottles of Obolon Light lager from behind a half-sized, glass-doored fridge.
“Arkasha,” said Osip, approaching his associate along a short central aisle. Placing the cool, perspiring bottles down on the tabletop, he pulled up a chair and sat down. “How’s things?”
“Can’t complain, can’t complain,” said Shapiro, grinning. “Small victories!" he said, raising his glass half-heartedly.
“Sorry I’m a late,” said Galkin, “there was some paperwork.”
“No problem, no problem,” said Arkady. “To life,” he said, and they clinked together the fresh bottles of beer. Behind them, on a TV mounted against a yellow wall above the stencilled outline of a blue palm tree, a sports broadcaster was reading the football scores. Wild-eyed, Arkady leaned on his elbows over the table, took a few swift sips as he squirmed uneasily in his chair. “Enjoy yourself while you can,” he said, “you can’t take it with you when you go.” Then he offered the investigator a cigarette from a depleted carton.
“Not for me,” said the officer.
“Can't tempt you, then? Good for you. Never look back, that’s my motto. But with me, if you live, you live. O, and, by the way, how’s the wife?”

Both men’s spouses were fine. Vita Ivanova, Osip’s second wife, was fine—still at the hospital, working long hours. They seemed to cross paths less and less, now that the boys were growing up. And Katya Ramizovna, Arkady’s third wife, was fine—still running the second-hand clothes shop he'd bought her, and which she liked to call a “boutique”. But for some reason the doctor had put her back on tranquilisers.
Osip weighed up his companion for a moment. What age was he? He guessed that he was in his mid-30s. He had on what must once have been a good grey woollen suit, but it was too loose about the shoulders, as if he was wasting away inside it. When he smiled, which was often, faint wrinkles appeared in concentric half-circles on his cheeks, at the corners of his mouth, surrounding everything he said in multiple brackets, asides within asides.

Clutching their beers the two men peered out into the square, which was bright as a desert, each finding one of those rare, separate moments of serenity, or perhaps its was just easeful oblivion, non-consciousness. At the other end of the room the stocky barman, slouched on a stool, was flipping a matchbox over and over on the wooden bar top. “I wish he’d stop that,” said Shapiro, “it’s getting tiresome.” Along Heroes’ Alley, the outlines of youthful soldiers’ faces lined the path on a series of small terracotta tablets, above their dates, and there were intermittent sprigs of wilting daffodils dug into the flowerbeds. In the metallic basin of the desiccated fountain, a pigeon hopped, hot-toed, over the scorching tin.