An excerpt from the novel "In God's Language"
by Olena Stiazhkina
Translated from the Russian by Uilleam Blacker
They did see each other later, after his wife, Varda, had left—and not just in their dreams. Not often, but they saw each other. They would say hello, they would chat. “Here are mine,” she’d say and show him photographs. First in her wallet, later on, her phone. Revazov didn’t show her any photos. Ten minutes. Five. Three. Too little time for anyone other than Inna to be ‘his’ in that moment.
They didn’t let themselves get carried away, or fool around. Old friends—family, you might even say. It felt comfortable. No reason for yelling, sobbing, kisses. What would be the use? But each time, after their meeting, Revazov regretted that he was leaving her without the yelling, without the embraces that would be impossible to break.
Once a year he’d send her his best wishes on some holiday or other—on whichever one was on the horizon when he felt the longing rise up in his chest. It was always different holidays. She understood. And about once a year, when the longing welled up in her, she wrote to him . . . In the beginning, it was telegrams, later emails and text messages. “How are you?”
Of course, they never answered each other.
There was just one time. At an investment forum, where Revazov had brought along two partners and Inna had come with her translators. The moderators were disciplined, but there was chaos behind the scenes; the local bigwigs who were meant to open the thing were late and messed up the whole timetable, and got the speakers drunk at the beginning and not at the end. The whole forum turned into a party in the hotel lobby, and it was impossible to get anyone to go in to the conference rooms. Revazov’s partners had dissolved themselves in vodka, and Inna’s translators were practicing their Chinese, as the only ones who weren’t drunk were the guests from China.
“Let’s get out of here,” Revazov suggested.
She nodded.
It was autumn then too. It was cold, but underfoot there were still leaves and not yet puddles. She was wearing high, and most likely uncomfortable, heels. She speared piles of leaves with the narrow toes of her shoes; the leaves flew awkwardly into the air, and she even managed to kick them as they descended, as though they were small, deflated footballs. His daughter, Miriam, walked through leaves in exactly the same way. First in her baby shoes, then in her trainers, and now, more and more often, in shoes with narrow toes.
By the house where Inna lived (both then and now) they stopped and turned to face each other.
“Shall I read your palm?” asked Inna. He shook his head.
“No. I know everything about myself already,” he smiled. She took his hand and pulled it to her. This had all happened to them before. And so Revazov wasn’t surprised when Inna kissed him on the wrist.
This year he couldn’t find a pretext to write to Inna. There was nothing to celebrate. But when Varda’s absence stopped being so painful, he wrote: “Where are you?”
The commonplace of the whole summer. An essential phrase. It was the beginning of every conversation. Or every “contact,” as they’d begun to say. Beyond the frontline, in the rest of Ukraine, there was a different life. And there was a frontline of a different kind. His clients would report the shifting geography of the country. Friends too. Only Varda and the kids were in Mordor. And that was hard to take. And it was clear that everything was lost, precisely because they were in Mordor, and that the shadow would lie across that land for far longer than Revazov’s miserable new life . . .
Not everybody was leaving. Not everybody. Those who remained would say, “I’m in the city.” The city no longer had a name.
Inna wrote back, “Nowhere.”
Revazov called her landline. Over the last twenty years, only the first numbers had changed. There had been two, now there were three . . . The number of landline users had clearly gone up.
“What’s happened?”
“They’ve taken my husband. They want money. I think they’ve killed him already. I can just feel it somehow.”
Her voice was dull, her tone resigned. Everyone had already learned to live in that resignation. And it was more or less clear that, if not now, then tomorrow It, or they, would come. For us. For them. And you knew you should run away, but it was too late, there was nowhere to go, no strength left. No faith that, beyond the checkpoints, there was actually a horizon. And no more Tyulpan rocket launchers spewing their bloody mess all around.
“I’m on my way,” said Revazov, “I have connections.” He gave a bitter laugh at these words and left. The taxis, unlike the trolleybuses, which were reliant on electricity, were running efficiently . . .
Revazov recalled, against his will, his son’s former history teacher, who was now working for them; the unwelcome, shapeless, toothless, giggling apparition, wearing its pince nez, looking just like Beria; the image of his face kept crawling its slimy way into Revazov’s head, and just as the mythical seafarer couldn’t escape Aeolus, Zephyr, and his other companions, Revazov couldn’t get rid of this picture . . .
Revazov arrived at the local administration building, now occupied by them, and spent a long time searching for the “historian,” wondering how this drunk had managed to carve out his new career selling human beings for peanuts. In the office marked “SMERSH” they said that the historian was now a Colonel in the Interior Ministry, but in the Interior Ministry, they were pleased to inform Revazov that the historian had become a General, only now attached to the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Revazov didn’t know if he could handle a meeting with a Marshal, but the Prosecutor’s Office relieved this worry, informing him that, ‘Your friend has been transferred to agricultural work’. Revazov wanted to ask: “Where to? Central Asia?” From what he could remember of Soviet life, any kind of agriculture was a demotion. And the warmer the locations to which the party dross was punted off, the more humiliating the demotion . . . Having to earn your daily crust felt like a bitter failure to those who’d made their names breaking fingers and knocking out teeth.
He eventually found the historian in the “Ministry of Transport.” The office had no windows, and several other ministers of some description sat in the adjoining reception area. It stank of toilets and cabbage pies.
Everyone here looked despondent and out of sorts. And you could feel that their revolution was over, that it had taken to drink from grief. Now it was wandering around somewhere nearby, it’s face blue and swollen, but the historian and his colleagues no longer had the desire to try to decipher its garbled, dirty hints.
“They’ve ruined the transport system . . . It’s a wreck . . . Can’t even find a decent train car or a cattle truck to send all that filth off to Siberia,” the historian grumbled. And muttered something about himself, about his bitter fate and the vicious battle against the private minibus drivers, about the time before the Gregorian calendar was introduced, about the outdated methods of collecting taxes from the fat-cat taxi drivers . . .
He muttered, yelled, and fell silent by turns, as though pausing sometimes to listen to someone answering him. Above his desk hung a portrait of “Givi”—one-time parking attendant at Donetsk’s Covered Market, today Marshal of the United Armed Forces of the South of Russia.
“I have to find someone,” said Revazov.
“The prices have gone up. I have to go through middlemen now, and that costs more,” the historian said gloomily.
“First find out if he's alive. I won’t pay for a dead man . . .”
“You will, no getting around it . . . Fucking intelligentsia—don’t want to have to bury your friend in a ditch, eh? Well, just you wait!” The historian threatened Revazov with his index finger. Revazov thought the teacher looked like a cartoon dinosaur: big body, small head, and tiny little hands with little sausage fingers. Although dinosaurs didn’t have sausages. Or fingers. And as Revazov looked at him it struck him that he’d be able to kill not only strangers but also this guy—real, familiar, harmless, his son’s old teacher . . .
His heart started racing again. And Revazov only now understood for the first time that the historian looked like Beria. But could Beria really be similar to a dinosaur?
*
He really was dead. Inna’s husband. Vlad, it seems, was his name. Revazov found him at what used to be a training complex belonging to a football club. The complex had been built out in the suburbs, and sparkled, as people used to say, like something foreign, something imported, with its blinding green pitches like the green contact lenses in the eyes of Hollywood stars, with its gravel paths and subtropical bushes that flowered and gave off intoxicating, suffocating scents and in winter were wrapped tightly in white material so that they looked like unmelting snowmen, with the neon-lined contours of its buildings; all of this garishness brought to mind the American oilcloth they used to cover Dostoevsky’s murdered heroine Nastasya Filippovna. It was too luxurious, too foreign, too inappropriate, and somehow resembled a synthetic shroud covering the grim suburb’s corpse.
The complex had been taken in May. They started calling it “the barracks.” They made a mess of it, trampled all over it, stole everything there was to steal, broke everything, basically, they helped it blend in to the surrounding architectural landscape. In June, it started taking incoming fire. It was bombed with precision, professionally. And they couldn’t quite believe at first that they could also be on the receiving end of something like this . . . They had thought that their ticket to the war, issued to them somewhere far away from here, guaranteed them immunity, a sure-fire investment, a sort of insurance policy; for them, the enemy was a fictitious object. And, therefore, it was possible to kill him, he who was fictitious, but not them, who were supposedly real.
The first stage of this surprise passed quickly. And when the complex became dangerous, they started calling it “the concentration camp.” Without any shame. To end up in the concentration camp meant you were so close to death that you were good for neither digging trenches nor for trading with your relatives. They didn’t even guard the prisoners here particularly closely, because they didn’t have the strength to escape . . .
The historian said that Vlad was at the training complex . . .
He needed someone to go with him. Not Inna. Someone who could drive a car or dress wounds. Who could, if necessary, call . . . someone, some relative and say: you can stop looking for him now, or look in such and such place . . .
That was one of the simple desires people now had—to be identified. Nobody was too picky about being put into a mass grave, although ending up lying underneath a pile of them was something that neither they nor Revazov found appealing. To be identified is not to prolong another’s suffering. Not to force them to wait for you.
Revazov went alone. Because anybody who came with him would end up a target, a traitor, an innocent victim, or maybe even a guilty victim—an aggressive victim who got into a fight deliberately and got mown down by a machine gun. Shot in the back, as usual . . .
Grandad Lazar used to say that Jesus was a human being adopted by God. Not born but carried through the passionless body of Mary. And he had always had his eyes open wide. And Peter hadn’t denied Jesus three times. It was He who had denied together with Peter. And together with Judas He betrayed. And together with them He was ashamed and died. And rose again.
‘And if you,’ said Grandad Lazar, ‘give to another more than he can bear, then you are a coward, and also a traitor . . . And you’re the one who should die for this.’
He could have called Igor, the neighbor with whom he’d killed the Russian mercenaries before. That would be some party—you, me, and my ex’s husband . . .
Inna’s husband had been dead for several days. He lay among the other bodies in a room at the complex that they’d fitted out with refrigerators. By the door, there were three lawnmowers, two metal buckets full of bullet holes, the frame of a Gazel truck, and some packs of yellowed leaflets that for some reason had never been distributed, but would come in useful soon as fuel for potbelly stoves, bonfires, fires in metal barrels . . . There was a shortage of paper now in the city, but not here. Paper is a great reason for hope.
“Take whichever one’s yours,” said the caretaker grimly.
“Can I call a hearse?” asked Revazov.
“A hearse?! I’ll give you a hearse!” he spat, and snorted. Then he remembered he had a gun and shot lazily into the ground, almost without anger. He proudly adjusted his woolen papakha hat.
“Did you come here on foot or what?”
“On the bus . . . then on foot.”
“Haha . . . on the bus with a stiff . . . Hehe . . . Now that’s funny.”
“Where are you from, bro?”
‘We’re from Nalchik . . .’
The name of the foreign town rang out joyfully. Revazov gave a short, quiet sigh. He looked at the face under the papakha and caught himself trying to commit it to memory, so as to be able to recognize it later. It turned out that it was perfectly possible to call a hearse. The funeral business was booming. Wooden crosses, paper flowers, inscriptions on graves. If people had money to pay for all this, Revazov thought, it could be a decent business opportunity. But judging by the texts on the grave markers they weren’t paying much. They just copied, mixing stuff plagiarized from other graves with the drunken pathos of cinematic nonsense about “officer’s honor.”
During the siege of Leningrad they’d moved bodies on sleds. In winter. And in spring, when the snow had melted but there was still no food? How did they move them? Did they sling them over their backs? Drag them by the legs? They just abandoned them, because the winter had drained them of the ability to grieve, to feel . . .
“Ivan,” said Revazov to the body, “I’m Ivan. And I never laid a finger on her after your wedding. Just know that.”
He hauled the body onto his shoulders. He carried it to the bus stop. There was a smell. And the softness of a lifeless person. And yes, he began to feel sick. But it would have been even worse, impossible, to drag him by the legs.
The undertakers sent a car to the bus stop. They didn’t ask any questions. Nothing surprised them anymore. They gave him a price that was tolerable. He had saved some money on the historian by telling him that he’d pay for Vlad upon receipt, at the training complex. And the whole time—on the bus on the way there, while he’d been talking to them, while he’d been identifying the body—by the jacket, by the most recent photograph, by the trousers with the white paint stain on the pocket—and while he’d been carrying him, the whole time he’d been thinking how he’d love to be a fly on the wall when the guy in the pince-nez tried to demand the money from the guy from Nalchik.
These thoughts made him smile.
But the other thoughts—about calling Inna and telling her to come and get the body from the morgue, about the emergency meeting place they’d agreed on, which was now already obsolete. He called her, and when he started talking he couldn’t stop . . .
Two strangers can become communicating vessels filled with grief. It works well: a stranger’s grief doesn’t take up too much volume. It evaporates easily, like dew in the sun. When people know each other, their grief multiplies, and both vessels become full, and the glass is put under great pressure. The grief can’t escape, has nowhere to go. The vessels break.
For Revazov, anyone who came to him carrying Varda’s dead body over his shoulders would immediately become Charon.
And Charon doesn’t get telegrams or text messages asking “How are you?”
We don’t care how Charon is. And that’s it.
These other thoughts made Revazov cry.
In 2018, this text was accepted for Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2019 anthology.
Cover photo by Julia Dragan