Sin – A Novel in Short Stories (Грех. Роман в рассказах)
by Zakhar Prilepin
Click here to read the author's biography
Click here to read a synopsis
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Sample translation by Eithne Bradley
He was seventeen years old, and he held his body nervously.
His body was made up of an Adam’s apple, strong bones, long arms, absent-minded eyes, and an overheated brain.
In the evenings, when he lay down to sleep in his hut, he used to turn over the phrase ‘and he’s dead… he’s dead’ in his head, listening to it.
He’d try to imagine someone beginning to weep, and then his cousin crying out, whom he loved in a strange, juvenile, unnatural way. Him lying dead, and her crying out.
Somewhere, in the overheated mirage of his brain, it was already understood that he would never want to kill himself, he wanted so dearly and passionately to live: he was made of something other; he was made of warm blood, which wanted to flow and flow along its course - not to burst free through a vein, or a slashed throat, or a pierced chest.
He’d listen to the electrifying, internal voice ‘he’s dead…dead…’ and drift off, alive, with his arms flung out. That’s how people sleep who are condemned to happiness, to the tenderness of others: reachable, light on the tongue.
Sometimes, rats ran across the floorboards.
His grandmother used to poison the rats. She scattered something white for them in the corners, which they ate at night, squabbling and squeaking.
In the mornings he would wash in the yard, listening to the morning chatter: the timid nanny goat; the cheery pig; the loud-mouthed cockerel – and once he forgot to close the door to the house. He came in and saw the silly chickens fussing about near the poison.
They broke out clucking as he chased them away (in the yard, the cockerel crowed, severely). Jumping, dropping feathers, unable to find the door, (the cockerel in the yard kept on crowing, the vacuous poser) the chickens finally jumped out into the yard.
For a long time – probably a few hours – he worried that the chickens would start to mope about, like all animals at the approach of death, and would stop breathing; his grandmother would be upset.
But the chickens survived. Perhaps they hadn’t gobbled up much, or, more likely, they didn’t have enough chicken brain to realise they’d poisoned themselves.
The rats survived too, but they began to move around much more slowly, as if they were eternally deep in thought and no longer rushed anywhere.
One night, startled by a rustling, he turned on the light in the hut. A rat looked like it was running, but it couldn’t seem to cross the room. Gazing at the sudden light, it forgot where it was going, and started making its way round a weird circle, as in the circus.
He grabbed the poker, held out the sharp end, and with his slender muscles brought it down on the rat’s spine, and again, and again.
He squatted down, and looked over its cunning, laughing eyes, its disgusting tail.
He scooped up the body with the poker and carried it out into the yard, stood, barefoot, gazing at the stars, with the dead rat.
After that, he stopped saying ‘…he’s…dead…’ at night.
After waking up, he used to close the creaky door to the hut, where he spent his days and nights, bothering nobody, reading, looking at the ceiling, messing about, and would go into the house where his grandmother had long since got up to milk the goat, let the chickens out, drive the ducks down to the river, and had still managed to get breakfast ready, while his grandfather sat at the table, thick glassy spectacles on his nose, mending something and breathing loudly.
He used to peek into the big room, see his grandfather’s back, and instantly vanish without a sound, afraid of being asked to help. He could already manage to take something apart, but putting it back together again… the parts immediately lost their meaning, although their order had seemed clear and simple not long before. All you could do was sweep away the metallic rubbish with your hand and throw it away for good into someone else’s dustbin, ashamed of yourself and grinning stupidly.
‘You’re up?’ his grandmother would say warmly. She moved quietly, never fussing over the hob. He would sit down at the small table in the little kitchen, watching the flies buzz around. He’d get up and take the swatter – a wooden stick crowned with a black plastic triangle. Under its ringing smack, flies perished in smears like soft-boiled eggs.
Swatting flies was a pastime, maybe even a game. It wasn’t so long since he did play games, and that time could still be reached. Sometimes when he crawled up into the attic after old, dusty books (which were all the more coveted because of the dust) he would find iron cars without their wheels, and he was tormented by the painful desire to take them over to his hut, if not to push them around on the floor any more, then at least to admire them.
His grandmother was good at being quiet, and her silence demanded no answer.
The potatoes were frying, spitting and flexing when the lid was taken off and they were stirred, piping hot.
Lightly salted gherkins lay limp on a plate, leaking weak brine. The pig fat was fetched warm, softened and breathing out its aroma, after the chill from which it had been taken.
He chased away the flies from the table and suddenly looked at the swatter with interest – at its thin, strong, wooden frame, fitting into the black triangle.
He threw down the swatter, screwed up his face squeamishly, wiped his hand on his shorts, sucked in his stomach, and his chest ached like he’d swallowed a glass of iced water (but the taste of moisture did not remain, only the oppressive ache)
‘Why was this given to me? Why is this given to everyone?… Couldn’t it have been different somehow?’
‘Will your grandfather have breakfast?’ his grandmother asked, turning off the hob.
‘Of course he will,’ her grandson responded cheerfully, pleased at the distraction from himself.
He knew his grandfather didn’t sit down at the table without him.
He went into the room and called loudly:
‘Grandmother’s calling you to eat!’
‘To eat?’ replied his grandfather pensively. ‘I don’t really want to… well, let’s go; let’s sit down.’ He took off his glasses, carefully laid down the tiny screws and pliers, and stood up with a groan. His house-shoes shuffled along the floor.
His grandfather ducked under the lintel calmly, with a slight, goose-like movement and went into the kitchen. In passing, he glanced over the table with a proprietorial air, as though he were investigating whether something had suddenly gone missing– but everything was always in its place and, truth be told, had already been there for more than a decade.
‘Will you be taking a drop, Zaharka?’ he asked with well-concealed craftiness.
‘No, why drink in the morning?’ replied his grandson brusquely.
His grandfather nodded ever so slightly: good answer. He ate sedately, sometimes glancing sternly over at Grandmother. He asked something about the housekeeping.
‘Oh, hush, you!’ replied Grandmother. ‘T’aint as though I’d not know what to feed the hens without you around.’
An almost imperceptible expression flitted across his grandfather’s face, as though he were saying: ‘silly woman – always silly…’ But it always ended there.
The old people never argued. Zaharka loved them with all his heart.
‘I’m going to go and visit the girls…’ he said to his grandmother after finishing his breakfast.
‘Go on then,’ she replied jovially, ‘and you all must come to ours for lunch.’
His cousins lived there in the very same village, two doors down.
The younger girl, Ksyusha, was short, pleasing, with cunning eyes and had recently come of age. The older girl, tender-eyed, black-haired Katya, was five years older than her.
Ksyusha used to go to the dancehall at the other end of the village and come back at four in the morning. But she didn’t sleep much and always woke dissatisfied. She would gaze at herself in the little mirror for a long time, sitting by the window so the daylight fell on her face.
By midday she would end up in a better mood and, looking attentively into the eyes of her cousin Zaharka, who had come over to stay, would tease him and ask him frank questions, hoping to hear honest answers.
Her cousin, who had come for the summer, understood at once that Ksyusha had not long gone through that thing that’s important for women, and it made her happy. She felt more sure of herself, just as though she’d got something else interesting to support her.
He wriggled out of his cousin’s questions, getting sidetracked with gusto by the bare-legged little boy, three-year-old Rodik, Katya’s son.
The older sister’s husband was serving his second year in the army.
Rodik spoke very little, although it was already time he talked. He cutely called himself ‘Odik’ with a little, barely audible ‘k’ at the end. He understood everything, only he didn’t remember his daddy.
Zaharka carried the boy with him, sat him on his shoulders, and they would wander around the area, the suntanned lad and the pale child with the fluffy hair.
Sometimes Katya would come out of the house, where Zaharka would hear her replying to
Ksyusha, ‘Well of course, you’re the cleverest of us…’ or ‘It’s all the same to me what you do with yourself, but you’re going to peel the potatoes!’
Her strictness wasn’t serious.
She would come out, and watch searchingly as Zaharka, with Rodik on his shoulders, walked slowly towards the house, chatting.
‘Stones,’ said Zaharka.
‘Sto’ repeated Rodik.
‘Stones’ repeated Zaharka.
‘Sto,’ agreed Rodik.
They were walking along the gravel.
Katya, Zaharka understood, was thinking about something important as she gazed at them. But he didn’t reflect on what precisely. He liked living easily, curling up in the sun, never thinking anything over seriously.
‘You’ll be hungry, won’t you, hikers?’ Katya would say, in her pleasant chesty voice, smiling.
‘Grandmother invited us over for lunch,’ Zaharka replied without a smile.
‘And in realising his own warm, moist animality, Zaharka felt, especially passionately and not at all painfully, that his heart was being squeezed, his real, fleshy heart, thrusting blood to his hands, to his scorching palms, and into his head, scalding his brain, and downwards, towards his stomach, where everything was… proud with the realization of the endlessness of youth.’
‘Oh, all right then. Plus our Molly Moan is refusing to carry out her orders in the kitchen.’
‘My name’s Ksyusha,’ her sister would reply with all the severity of her sixteen years, walking out onto the road. She had already dolled herself up in a skirt, reckless in the wind. She fluttered about in sandals, and a tiny T-shirt which always showed her tummy. On her face two feelings were wonderfully expressed at once: annoyance with her sister, and interest at the appearance of her cousin.
‘Look how silly she is, Zaharka!’ she seemed to be saying with her whole appearance.
‘And look at what a nice tummy I’ve got too, and the rest…’ Zaharka kind of read into it as well, though he wasn’t entirely sure he’d understood correctly. Anyhow, he turned away.
‘Shall we go and eat apples in the meantime, Rodik?’ he said to the boy sitting on his shoulders.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Katya, tagging along.
‘Lessgo,’ said Rodik in delayed response to Zaharka, to Katya’s delight: it was the first time she had heard those words from him.
They walked through the orchard - looking around at the varieties of apple that were still unripe, and the giant kind and yellow ones - towards the tree whose fruit was already good and sweet in July.
‘Apples,’ Zaharka would repeat clearly.
‘Pulls,’ agreed Rodik.
Katya would burst out laughing, with the young, clear, vibrant laughter of a mother.
When Zaharka bit into the strong apple, with its stem removed, it seemed to him that Katya’s laughter would look like this moist, fresh, crunchy whiteness.
‘’But we’re only little, we can’t reach to pick them from the branch,’ Katya groused jokingly and gathered up the ones that had fallen onto the ground overnight. She liked them softer, redder.
They took it in turns to feed Rodik little pieces of apple. He had been put down on the ground -
Zaharka was afraid of accidentally scratching the little boy with the twigs in the orchard.
Sometimes, without noticing, they would both give him a piece of apple at the same time.
Rodik, who never refused anything, stuffed his mouth full and chewed, staring with ecstatic eyes.
‘Ooh!’ he would point at an apple which hadn’t yet been picked off a branch.
‘Should I pick this one too? What a carnivore you are,’ Zaharka replied sternly; he liked being a bit stern and a little bit dark, when inside him everything was roiling with the joy and irrepressible sweetness of life. When else can you be a little dark, if not at seventeen? And even more so in the presence of women.
After a little while, Ksyusha would appear in the orchard: she was bored on her own in the house. And her cousin was there.
‘Have you peeled the potatoes?’ Katya used to ask.
‘I told you, I’ve just painted my nails, I can’t. Do I have to tell you a dozen times?'
‘Tell your father about your nails. He’ll clean them off for you.’
Ksyusha ripped an apple off another tree, not the kind that was to her older sister’s taste. She didn’t want to copy her sister in any way. She would eat reluctantly, never taking her eyes off her cousin.
‘Is it tasty, all green like that?’ Katya would ask, teasing Ksyusha gently, squinting at her.
‘And how’s yours, all wormy like that?’ replied the younger one.
They would all walk over to the grandparents’ for lunch. The sisters would patch it up at once, when the discussion moved on the village news.
‘That Alka’s with Sergei,’ Ksyusha was claiming.
‘That can’t be, he’s meant to be marrying Galka. The matchmakers have already been,’ Katya didn’t believe her.
‘I’m telling you, yesterday they drove past on the motorbike.’
‘Maybe he was giving her a lift?’
‘At three in the morning?’ Ksyusha would reply mockingly. ‘Past the bridges…’
‘Past the bridges’ – that was what those welcoming glades were called where village lovers went on motorbikes, or went out walking for a while.
Zaharka looked at the sisters and thought that Katya had been going ‘past the bridges’, and
Ksyusha too. For a painful moment he imagined the hitched-up skirts, the hot mouths, the breathing – and turned his head, chasing away the darkness, such a sweet darkness, almost unbearable.
He dropped back a little, looked at the sisters’ ankles, calves, saw Ksyusha’s tanned, frog-like little thighs and, through the sunlight-filled skirts of her sarafan, Katya’s hips, which had only become more attractive since she gave birth.
He wanted a river to be nearby, only a few steps away: he would have dived into the water at a run and wouldn’t have swum up for a long time, moving slowly, softly touching the sandy bottom, seeing fish dart away in the cloudy darkness.
‘Why’ve you dropped back?’ asked Ksyusha, turning around.
Zaharka wanted Katya to have asked that question. Katya was having a conversation with Rodik.
‘Shall we go for a swim?’ he suggested, instead of answering.
‘Are you going to carry Rodik all that way with you?’ Katya asked, having turned round to face him. She walked a few steps backwards along the road, smiling at her cousin.
Zaharka broke into a smile, against his gloomy will.
‘Ob. Vious. Ly.’ he replied, looking Katya in the eye.
Rodik, imitating his mother, also turned around and walked backwards, turned around for a second, immediately got tangled up in his own legs, fell over, and they all burst out laughing.
They didn’t fit in the kitchen any more, and ate in the big room, at the long table with its garish stick-on cover, here and there accidentally punctured by a knife and also scorched with the semicircle of an overheated frying-pan edge.
The sisters were crunching on cucumbers.
Zaharka liked their excellent appetite.
It was very sunny.
Katya put a little bit of potato in a small dish for Rodik. He messed it around with his hands, all covered in fat and oil, constantly dropping potato on his legs. Katya picked the potato off her little boy’s legs and ate it, entirely radiant.
Zaharka sat opposite, watching them and gently stroking Katya’s leg with his bare foot. She didn’t move her leg away and, it seemed, was paying no attention to her cousin. She was teasing her younger sister again, listening to her grandmother, telling a story about a woman, their neighbour, and remembering to admire Rodik. Only she didn’t look at Zaharka at all.
But then again, he was watching her steadily.
Ksyusha jealously noticed this.
The bread was very tasty. The potato was wonderfully sweet.
They ate from the same huge frying pan, searingly hot and reliable.
‘Tomorrow, Grandfather’s going to stick the pig,’ said Grandmother.
‘Oh, it’s good you reminded me,’ said Katya.
‘Why?’ asked Grandmother.
‘I won’t come tomorrow. I can’t stand to see it.’
‘Who’s forcing you to? Don’t go into the yard, then you won’t see,’ laughed Grandmother.
‘I won’t come either,’ Ksyusha agreed with her sister for the first time.
The sisters helped clear the table. While they did so, Zaharka crafted a bow outside – rather more for himself, than for Rodik. What good would a bow be for Rodik, how would he manage it?
But the little boy followed Zaharka’s work intently: he watched him first find and cut down a suitable bough; then, having bent it, wind twine around it, which fitted into specially cut grooves.
‘Bow,’ Zaharka said clearly. ‘B-b-bow!’
‘Oh,’ Rodik repeated.
‘He’ll soon start talking with you,’ said Katya, who had come outside.
‘Are you two going hunting?’ asked Ksyusha, who had appeared right after. ‘Will you take me with you? Rodik, will you take me with you?’
Rodik stared at Ksyusha unwinkingly. Zaharka gazed unblinkingly at Katya.
‘Only, the potatoes need to be peeled in any case,’ said Katya ‘Before we go swimming.
Otherwise the baby won’t have anything to eat…’
They ran back to the sisters’ house. Katya put a bucket of water, a bucket of potatoes, and a saucepan on the floor. They sat down around it. She gave out the knives. Ksyusha got the smallest, irredeemably blunt one. Grumbling, she went to swap it.
The three of them peeled the potatoes together, laughing at something. Rodik wandered around nearby. Katya sometimes fed him raw potato. Ksyusha would rebuke her:
‘What are you doing? Call yourself a mother… how did they trust you with a child?’
‘Watch out they don’t trust you with one too,’ replied Katya, blowing away a lock of hair that had fallen on her face, then brushing it into place with the hand gripping the knife.
Zaharka was enjoying himself and trying not to look at the sisters’ knees: Ksyusha’s were more tanned, Katya’s whiter. Katya’s were round, and Ksyusha’s were elegantly embossed with bone, like those of some tall wild animal, I don’t know, maybe a deer…
And Katya still sat a little further away from the bucket of potatoes, and when she bent forward…
‘Oh my God, why are you teasing me with that…’
Zaharka went outside. The chickens, stupid with the heat, wandered around slowly.
‘Ahaka!’ Katya burst out laughing from inside the house, her voice was coming closer.
‘Did you hear what he said? Where Ahaka? There’s your Ahaka, Rodik! There he is!’
Rodik ran out on his stumbling little legs, sunlit eyelashes, ears nestled in fluff.
It was a ten-minute walk to the river. Zaharka would take off his shorts, and throw himself into the water with a running jump so that he didn’t see the sisters getting undressed. ‘I’d rather not see them at all,’ he thought cheerfully and untruthfully, and immediately turned around towards their voices.
‘How’s the water?’ both sisters asked at the same time. They looked at each other, first annoyed, as though each suspected the other of mocking her, and then both burst out laughing.
They didn’t quarrel any more that day.
Katya had brought apples with her. Lying on the bank, digging into the sand with their feet, they nibbled on the rosy fruit. Zaharka threw the half-eaten bits into the water ‘Why are you doing that?’ Ksyusha drawled, disgusted.
‘The fish will eat them up.’
Katya kept on sitting up and calling out: ‘Rodik, don’t go in deep! There’s fishies in there!
Hey!’
‘There?’ asked Rodik, pointing at the middle of the river with his tiny finger, and inspired, he would strike out further.
‘Zaharka, you tell him, he only pays attention to you.’Her cousin watched, chewing on the apple stem, as from under Katya’s swimsuit some black curls were escaping, clinging to her damp, white leg, still with undried golden drops on it.
‘Rodik!’ he cried out, unexpectedly loud even for himself, enough to make the boy jump.
‘God, why are you shouting like that?’ Katya said, startled. She had leapt up from the sand like a shot.
‘I’ll go to him, lie down…’ Zaharka caught up with Rodik.
‘Shall we go and cut some reeds?’ he suggested. ‘We’ve already got a bow, we need arrows.’
‘Lessgo,’ Rodik replied eagerly, and crawled out of the water.
They walked along the bank, the small, innocent paw in the young hand with its strange fate line and deep life line.
They came back with broken-off reeds for arrows. On the way Zaharka had found some wire which he wound around one of the stems.
‘Well, froggies, did you get sick of waiting for the prince?’ he asked, twanging on the bowstring.
The sisters turned around smiling drowsily. He raised the bow upwards and let fly the reedstem, which flew up unexpectedly high.
Rodik immediately lost sight of the arrow and, not understanding where it had got to, looked around, astonished.
He was woken by the squealing of a pig.
‘They’re slaughtering it already! Damn, I didn’t make it!’
He leapt off the bed, dragging on his shorts, almost falling over.
But they were only tying up the pig as of yet: tightly bound with rope which cut into its greasy hide, it stood in the darkness of the barn and every time a human being appeared it began to squeal.
Zaharka observed it, having come to stand in the doorway. He’d hardly opened his eyes; he hadn’t washed yet, and was smiling.
There wasn’t a single thought in his head, but somewhere around his heart, his blood thrilled softly at the strange-tasting sweetness of the death of another, even that of an animal.
‘You’re yelling, pig? Do you want to live?’ or something like it fluttered around in a shadowy, secret corner of his brain.
Although reason, intelligible, human reason whispered to him: you should be sorry for it, how can you be like that, aren’t you sorry?
‘I’m sorry,’ he agreed easily.
Incidentally, the squealing was impossible to bear for long.
He pulled the door shut and walked up to his grandfather who had sat down on a tree stump.
His grandfather was sharpening a knife - which was already fearsome - whose long blade kept flashing in the sun.
Zaharka’s dour grandfather did not look at him.
‘How does it know you’re going to slaughter it?’ Zaharka asked loudly, hardly drowning out the squealing.
Grandfather raised his small and, for some reason (it seemed to Zaharka), unfriendly eyes for a moment. He stood up and trudged off into his workshop for something.
‘He didn’t hear me,’ thought Zaharka.
‘Beasts know everything,’ said his grandfather quietly, to himself, not addressing anybody.
A minute or so later, Grandfather came back and Zaharka realised that he had been mistaken about his serious manner.
‘You ever seen a pig stuck?’ his grandfather asked simply.
‘No,’ replied Zaharka happily.
His grandfather nodded. It wasn’t clear what that meant: ‘well, today you’ll find out’, or ‘it’s good you haven’t’.
Grandmother appeared, with two iron basins clinking together. She had contrived to bring six along right away.
She glanced at Grandfather, who was pottering around slowly, but she didn’t start hurrying him, although she really didn’t want to keep hearing the incessant squealing.
Zaharka hung around for a minute or so, and decided to nip to the toilet.
Wooden, welcoming, pasted inside with old wallpaper, the hut stood beside the kitchen garden.
When he was walking up to the toilet, Zaharka always looked over at the rows of watermelons.
The watermelons were offensively small and green.
‘They won’t be ready before I leave, they won’t,’ Zaharka said miserably to himself as usual.
Inside the toilet hut, it was always gloomy, but there were pleasant rays of sunlight coming in through cracks between the boards. One or two fat flies flew about, as ever. No-one ever sat down for more than a few seconds.
Once again they were buzzing angrily.
On the nail there was an old agricultural machine-operator magazine. How many times had
Zaharka looked through it, not understanding a thing? In lazily looking through the dusty pages, in this incomprehension, in the sunlit cracks, the debauched flies, the closeness of the wooden walls, the yellow wall-covering, torn away here and there, the rusty bolt, in the ceiling covered in black roofing felt so that nothing seeped in – in all of this there was a quiet, almost unattainable, lyrical righteousness.
The pig suddenly squealed more horribly, terribly, desperately. Zaharka began to hurry.
The squealing was cut off before he got there. He also had to let his grandmother through, she was rushing somewhere, and by the way she looked – slightly agitated, but also serene at the same time (‘that’s it, of course, thank goodness…’) - Zaharka understood that they had stuck the pig.
With his red hands, Grandfather was unhurriedly untying the knots which had held the pig to the barn post. He could have cut them right through but he didn’t, to save rope.
‘Did he not wait for me on purpose, or not?’ wondered Zaharka, and found no answer.
Once freed, the pig’s rear end drooped down to begin with, but the animal still held itself up,
Bound to the post by its powerful neck. Grandfather moved away the basin full of the blood which had flowed out of the slit throat, and loosened the rope around its neck.
The pig fell with a soft sound.
Zaharka came up close to it, looking with interest at the silenced animal.
An ordinary pig, just dead. An even slit across its throat, a lot of white fat.
‘I can’t see that knife,’ his grandfather was casting around, looking. ‘Zaharka, have a look.’
The knife was stuck in the wall of the barn. Its handle was warm, the blade covered in drying blood.
He gave the knife to his grandfather, holding it by the blade. He got his fingers dirty, he looked at them afterwards.
They were cutting open the pig’s belly. It lay there, fallen apart, rent open, scarlet, raw. Its innards were warm; you could have warmed up your hands in them.
If you looked at it through half-closed eyes, perhaps slightly stoned, they could have looked like a bouquet of flowers. A warm bouquet of meaty, living, animal flowers.
Grandfather masterfully extracted the heart, kidneys and liver. He threw them in the basins.
With his hand he squeezed out what was held in the rectum.
A living being which used to greet Zaharka sullenly in the mornings, rubbing its side on the barn, which grunted in excitement when the bucket of slops appeared, which had been able at the end of it all to produce a surprisingly powerful squeal – this creature had ended up insignificant, worthless: it was possible to cut it up, dismember it, drag it apart into pieces.
And the stupid, separated pig’s head already lay there with its nose upwards, its jaws open. It looked as though the pig wanted to howl, that it was just about to begin.
And seeing that head, even the chickens were dumbfounded, and the cockerel avoided it, and the goat looked out of the darkness with its suffering Judaic eyes.
Zaharka walked through into the house. His grandmother, hurrying towards him with a cloth in her hand said:
‘Have something to eat; I left it for you…’
But he didn’t start eating - not because he had lost his appetite from seeing the slaughtered hog.
He couldn’t wait to go over to the sisters’. All of this living essence, satiated by life in its most true and primal form, entirely devoid of soul – all this, with those bright, aromatic, colourful innards; with legs flung wide open; with the head tipped back, senselessly upwards and the clean smell of fresh blood - didn’t let him; it stopped him staying in one place; it drew him in and distracted him, seethed around inside.
That same oppressive ache - like that of icy water - which tormented him, unexpectedly turned into a sensation of sweet anticipated warmth.
The warmth was in his hands, his heart, kidneys and lungs: Zaharka saw his organs clearly and they looked just like those which had steamed before his eyes a minute before. And in realising his own warm, moist animality, Zaharka felt, especially passionately and not at all painfully, that his heart was being squeezed, his real, fleshy heart, thrusting blood to his hands, to his scorching palms, and into his head, scalding his brain, and downwards, towards his stomach, where everything was…proud with the realisation of the endlessness of youth.
For some reason he grabbed the bow, which was lying by the house, walking along, feeling as though he had just killed the animal; and he didn’t seem ridiculous to himself.
The first person he saw was Rodik, who had already scared away the chickens – they were frightened of him anyway. He struggled to hold it in, not to tell Rodik what it had all been like. He even said a few syllables and then cut himself off, moving his awkward lips in vain.
Ksyusha came out. Katya followed behind her.
‘Well, did they slaughter the pig?’ asked Katya, widening her eyes, looking as though the slaughtered pig was just about to trot up, huffing and grunting through its open throat.
Ksyusha also glanced over, scared.
‘We could hear it squealing from here. Katya and I closed all the windows and doors,’ she said.
Zaharka drank in the sisters, his joyful eyes moving from the first, pretty face to the second, beautiful one, and he searched for the right word to begin telling them about the heart, the throat, blood, and suddenly, at once, in a flash, he realised it was pointless to tell them.
‘Do you have any empty tins?’ he asked.
‘We do,’ Ksyusha replied with a shrug. ‘Over there, in the rubbish, I think there were some.’
Zaharka cut the lids off three tins. He cut each one in half with a big pair of scissors. With a pair of pliers he bent them around yesterday’s reeds and curled them under. He battered down the resulting sharp point with a hammer.
The sisters went off to do their own things. Only Rodik stayed, shifting from one foot to the other beside him, sometimes saying ‘Oh!’. He fell into doubtful silence for a long time after
Zaharka’s:
‘Arrows! Say: arrows!’
‘Auws.’
‘Precisely,’ Zaharka agreed.
He pulled on the bowstring, let fly an arrow. It soared up rapidly, then, it seemed to hang frozen in the air for a moment, and fell gently downwards to stick into the ground.
‘Wow,’ said Ksyusha, who’d come onto the porch with a floor-cloth in her hand. ‘How pretty!’
The arrow stuck upright, swaying slightly in the breeze.
‘It’s standing up straight,’ added Ksyusha dreamily.
‘She’s in a good mood today,’ thought Zaharka, ‘She’s washing the floors.’
He couldn’t restrain himself and asked:
‘What kind of dirty work are you up to?’
‘We’re starting redecorating today. Our Ksyusha so wants to have her room painted orange, she’s prepared to sacrifice anything for it,’ Katya replied for Ksyusha.
Ksyusha, annoyed with both her sister and her cousin, wrung the dirty water out of the rag.
Zaharka went and wandered in the orchard for a bit, listlessly nibbling on an apple.
He carried Rodik on his shoulders for a while, then the boy was taken off to have a nap, and
Zaharka went back to his place so as not to get in the sisters’ way. They were clearing up with a will.
Grandmother had already scrubbed away the blood in the yard, while nothing at all was left of the pig: only meat in basins.
Making the door creak, he went into his hut.
It was stuffy. He took off his shorts and slipped out of his T-shirt, ruffling up his hair a bit.
He fell back on the bed, bouncing a little on its springs. He leant on his side, reached out for an old book, which had a worn-out cover and was missing many pages, but then didn’t bring it closer.
He buried his cheek in the pillow, and fell still. Suddenly he remembered that he had not slept enough; he closed his eyes and immediately saw Katya…thought about Katya, Katya’s, those things of Katya’s….
He lay there, remembering the squealing that morning, the arrow’s flight, the black water from the rag, the taste of apple, the apple tree being shaken, swaying, the bark close by, the shaded bark, the rough bark, bark, ba… ark… ba…
The door creaked and he awoke at once. ‘Katya,’ his heart skipped a beat.
In came Ksyusha in a hilarious swimsuit: all made up of some kind of ribbons with bows.
Screwing up his eyes, Zaharka looked at her.
‘Did I wake you up? Were you sleeping?’ she asked quickly.
He didn’t reply, stretching.
‘We were going to go for a swim,’ added Ksyusha, sitting down on the bed so that her thigh touched her cousin’s thigh. ‘Also, I’ve already got a headache from the paint - we started painting.
The doors.’
Zaharka nodded and stretched again.
‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’ asked Ksyusha. ‘Why don’t you ever say much?’ she repeated more cheerfully, and her voice was a tone higher – a voice which usually precedes action.
And so it was: Ksyusha lightly moved her left leg over Zaharka and sat on his legs, firmly holding his knees in her hands, lightly squeezing them. She looked as though she were getting ready to pounce.
‘Well I sort of do say something…’ thought Zaharka, looking over his cousin with some interest.
With his feet, he felt her firm, cold buttocks now and again. She rocked her bottom from side to side a little and completely unexpectedly shifted position to further up, unacceptably far up – clamping her legs to his thighs. She began tickling Zaharka gently under the arms.
‘Are you afraid of being tickled?’ she asked and without pausing: ‘What a hairy chest you have…like a sailor’s. Where are you going to go and serve in the army? In the navy? They’ll take you on.’
Ksyusha looked completely calm, as though nothing surprising was happening.
But Zaharka, while she moved and wriggled around on top of him, felt distinctly that under her funny material with the bows, the glad rags, something was alive, very alive…
This went on just long enough for it to become clear to both of them: they couldn’t carry on like that anymore; they had to do something else, something impossible.
Ksyusha looked up with calm, clear eyes.
‘I’m uncomfortable like this,’ said Zaharka suddenly. He made Ksyusha get down and sat opposite her, hugging his knees to his chest.
They chatted for another couple of minutes, and Ksyusha left.
‘So, are we going for a swim?’ she asked when she was already outside, turning around.
‘Let’s go, yeah,’ replied Zaharka, who was seeing her out.
‘Then I’ll call Kat, and we’ll pop round to yours,’ Ksyusha walked out of the yard, bows waggling.
‘I’ll call Kat…’ he repeated meaninglessly, like an echo.
He walked over to the hand-basin, which looked like an inverted German helmet. An iron rod stuck out from the hole in the centre of the basin. If you lifted it, water flowed out.
Zaharka stood motionless, staring at the basin, rubbing the tip of his tongue along the inside of his teeth. He lifted the iron rod a tiny bit; it clinked slightly. There was no water. He pulled the rod downwards.
Unexpectedly, he noticed a dried spot of blood on it.
‘Grandfather probably wanted to wash his hands after he slaughtered the pig…’ he guessed.