An Excerpt from the novel "Iron Water"

by Myroslav Laiuk

Translated from the Ukrainian by Yuri Tkacz

Bohdan’s father arrived in an ancient black Volga. He called the car Esmeralda. You don’t see those anymore – many people might have taken it for a Maybach. Right from the start Ivan kept his head slightly bowed, averting his gaze, resorting far too often to phrases of ‘please’, ‘excuse me’, ‘would you mind…’ Straining his cheeks, which resembled stewed fish, he courteously opened the trunk, swept his hand across the front seat draped with a Hutsul rug. Inside the car smelled of varnish and a linseed decoction – something Bohdan’s mother gave him when his stomach played up.

They shook hands, like two old-timers, neither daring to embrace. Ivan seemed to be okay: healthy, supposedly sober – but in reality, he was like a branch that had broken off a tree and tied back to the trunk in the nick of time.

Bohdan was meant to get off in Zabolotiv, which was closer to Kosiv, but had fallen asleep and left the bus in Chernivtsi. Meanwhile, his old man had had to double back. Bohdan then hitchhiked to Vyzhnytsia. It was there at the bus station they met. While he was waiting, Ivan approached a woman with a gold tooth who was selling mushrooms and asked where she had brought them from. But the old woman grumbled that she wouldn’t say, because her village was always overrun with people like him during the mushroom season – one couldn’t venture into the forest to get away from them. Ivan asked how much she wanted for her gold tooth. She said he could have it in exchange for his Volga. Bohdan was somewhat embarrassed by his father’s behavior, having expected that the old man had indeed turned into a boring sect member. 

Although he had the means to buy an imported car, Ivan refused to forsake his old faithful, which he called by a woman’s name even in conversation with strangers. One would have expected him to act more normally. He was never one to drive Esmeralda on a bad road, or leave the car incorrectly parked, and he would never let someone else take it for a spin. He would never have gotten behind the wheel after having a drink. Ivan cherished his dear Esmeralda like a nutshell guarded the kernel within, or a skull guarded one’s brain, or like that chain of things in the fairy tale about the immortal Koshchiy (island-oak tree-chest-hare-duck-egg) guarding the needle on which the wizard’s life depended. He had picked up Esmeralda brand-new from the showroom back in 1989 and scratched the car as he went around the first bend. But after that, she bore the status of the inviolable. 

Ivan had wanted to open the door for his son, but Bohdan opened it himself, his fingers leaving a greasy mark on the polished black paint near the lock. A lawyer was waiting for them in Kosiv. For the next fifteen kilometers, Ivan sped along without any distractions, as much as the rutted road allowed, reminiscent of Klychko’s left brow in his fight with Lewis. Alongside the road stood a row of neat white houses, looking like teeth, their front yards populated with rubber swans, plastic deer, and plaster Virgin Marys. Could there be anything more in bad taste than these garden sculptures? As they drove past a wide-open field, a small fox raced them for a while, and then finally disappeared near the turn-off to the abandoned airport. The men sat in silence: Ivan pretended to be concentrating on the road, while Bohdan pretended that he was more tired than he really was. Even when Ivan spotted the fox, he only pointed to it, and his son merely moved his eyes, without turning his head.

“What’s up?” Ivan suddenly nudged his son and smiled, as he stopped to let an old man cross the road; all of Bohdan’s schoolmates had once pitched in to buy a bottle of vodka for this old fellow, so that he would let them borrow his AK-47 for their “Defence of the Homeland” lesson.

“Nothing, everything’s okay,” Bohdan involuntarily pulled away, as if he’d received an electric shock.

“Don’t hunch your shoulders.”

“I won’t,” his son laughed.

They arrived in Kosiv. Picking up the lawyer near the hospital, they made their way to the notary’s office. There they xeroxed a few more of Bohdan’s documents, signed them, and the lawyer said that everything would be ready in a few days.

They hopped back in the car and Ivan again set off in the direction of Vyzhnytsia. For a moment there Bohdan decided that his old man was taking him back to the train station. At one point he even thought of asking Ivan to stop – because Bohdan meant to go to Burkut, at his mother’s request, to see if it was practical to build something there. But when they stopped at the gas station near Shevchenko’s statue, he recalled that his father filled up Esmeralda only at this place. Ivan had it in his head for some reason that this was the only place in the region that served undoctored gasoline. He wasn’t about to fill Esmeralda with doctored gasoline. He wasn’t going to be tight with his money and was ready to travel further, as long as Esmeralda got the best there was. Ivan had once told his son: ‘The most important talent a man can have is to sense where savings can be made and where they shouldn’t be made under any circumstances.’

You could save money on jeans, but never on a Sunday suit. Cheap tea was okay – but never coffee. You could cut corners with your old man, but never with your mom. It was okay to skimp on food, but definitely forbidden in the case of a concert given by your favorite musician. It was alright to be stingy on trips to expensive local sanatoriums, but one should never cut corners on trips to Rome or Paris.

It smelled of gasoline. Ivan lit up, but no one said anything to him. He greeted the gas-station attendant, and the attendant greeted Bohdan, although Ivan never introduced Bohdan to him. His father asked the attendant to fill the tank to overflowing. The attendant actually did it: petrol dripped onto the cracked concrete pavement. At first, Bohdan had wanted to say that in summer it was better not to overfill the tank, but then he changed his mind and, taking a cigarette from his father, lit up as well.

Lilac bushes loomed on the far side of the road. Something had happened to them – it was only late August, and all the leaves had dropped. Now they were just piles of grey branches resembling tight rolls of fiberglass. Although in the past these had been the first lilacs to bloom in early May in the Carpathian Mountains. On that day mom would ask father to pick her up later than usual from where she worked at Regional Energy. When it grew dark, so that no one would see, they drove up here and mom would pick the first branch of flowering lilac. 

She would dash into the car with it, and Ivan would speed off, as if he had just robbed a bank. Bohdan would yell: ‘Faster, dad, faster!’ and mom would egg him on: ‘Go! Go! There’s cops on our tail.’ ‘Yeah, there’s a hundred cop cars!’ Bohdan would scream.

Nearby, a cow was grazing beside a once attractive wooden sign with now-rotted boards and bearing the word ‘Kosiv’.

“Remember that time when Ihor, who bought that house near the dispensary, returned from Brazil?” Ivan hastily finished his smoke.

Bohdan looked down, remembering his cigarette. The cigarette paper had fallen apart and there was a small pile of tobacco in his palm.

“…How he started to squeal like some calf when he saw the cow,” Ivan sucked on his cigarette one last time and got back inside the car. “And then he raced off to hug it and kept repeating: ‘My creamy princess.”

“Don’t know if I remember…”

This strange reply begged a clarifying question from his father. However, Ivan was not forthcoming.

“The important thing is that you don’t smoke,” his father tried to joke, pointing to the loose tobacco which fell from Bohdan’s hand.

A red Volkswagen Passat stopped near the sign bearing the name of the city. A girl with extremely long straightened hair emerged from the rear door. This was the spot where Bohdan’s classmate Bozhena had once tried to convince him that a bus with black transplantologists occasionally stopped here. They would catch children, cut out some of their organs, and ‘let them go without their innards.’

“That’s Dzvinka, our neighbor. Recognize her? You were friends with her one time.”

“Back when I was a kid,” Bohdan said instinctively, not believing that it was really her.

“And then I think you became more than just friends.” 

As a lad he had been ‘more than just friends’ with quite a few girls. They loved him more when he conformed to social norms. In general, he had learnt to act the conformist when this was necessary: to control his emotions, to think and then speak, to refrain from saying what he thought, to put his irritability on show only when he was alone. Because of his family history, everyone expected him to explode. However, even back in school he had learned not to reveal any weaknesses, and if he was unable to hold back, he would hastily patch over the suspect incident. He even taught himself not to tap his foot when he was sitting down or to needlessly keep adjusting his hair. So, he was able to change girlfriends quickly and easily. All the same, it was hardest with the last one. He never did quite understand if he had loved her. But during those relationships he realized how quickly he was changing partners – just as soon as they had an inkling of ‘who he really was.’ They all said they were attracted to him because of the strength of his hands and the sharpness – like a chisel – of his Adam’s apple. Well, and of course his passion for ‘Hermes’ shirts, brand-name wallets and running shoes, which the lad immediately began to buy up, as soon as customers ordering new doors began to inquire about the carpenter who had made them, and the manager accordingly began to pay Bohdan much more. He invited girls to the most expensive restaurants and detested public transport. The only thing which gave Bohdan away as being a skilled carpenter was the fact that he always took the girls to different hotels – to find out what the doors there were like.

“What’s she do now?”

“You haven’t heard?”

“Nope.”

“It’s a long story.”

“So, what does she do?”

“As far as I know, nothing. Even while she was a student, Dzvinka began to work as a translator. She was studying Chinese. Then she lived in America, after that in China. And her grandpa was here on his own. On New Year’s Eve the old fella slipped and broke something in his spine, became paralyzed from the neck down. So, she returned and started looking after him here.”

“What about her parents? Auntie Liuba and her husband?”

“Both Liuba and Misha were working in England, and it turned out they each found themselves new partners and couldn’t give a shit about the old man. Well, the old fellow’s very quarrelsome, wouldn’t hear of Dzvinka leaving. The girl couldn’t step out of the house for a few years, we would bring her food. The old fella didn’t let her live her own life and destroyed her career. And then suddenly last year he felt much better. And little by little he got back on his feet.”

“And how’s she now?”

“The old fella got it into her head that she was too good for the others. She pretended not to notice the local lads, even shunned her old school friends. A few days ago people saw her at the club in Verkhovyna – they said she was high on drugs.”

Dzvinka walked up to the city sign and taped a piece of paper onto it. Then she hurried back into the car, the driver put his foot down and they disappeared in a flash, leaving Bohdan feeling as if he wasn’t sure about the taste of something and wanted to try it once more. Bohdan wanted to run over and see what Dzvinka had written there. But he felt this would give away his feelings.

After they left the gas station, the attendant kicked Ivan’s cigarette butt, together with the crushed filter from Bohdan’s cigarette and pushed them over to the drain with his shoe. Ivan reversed down the road until he reached the city sign on which Dzvinka had taped something. He quickly hopped out, read it, and returned to the car:

“She’s searching for someone ‘to look after an old man.’ Probably wants to get out of this place. Well, may the good Lord help her!”