THE DAY BEFORE his welcome back party, a dirty, sweaty, and sullen Diogen arrived at the town station with his knapsack. He wanted to shower and sleep and then go out to his secret spot on the riverbank, to sit under the honeyberry tree, eat its tiny purple fruit, and sing. Diogen loved to sing, and he loved to sing opera, and what he’d loved most about the YWA was that he could escape for an hour every day into the empty fields and sing at the top of his lungs. No one knew if he sung well, or if he sung badly, and neither did Diogen, but it made him feel as if he were a soaring bird, a turquoise tropical flurry of feathers in the sky. He also loved singing quiet traditional songs of love and loss, his throat trembling with a tender vibrato.
After Rosa married Ruben, Diogen discovered that singing to himself in the mirror when everyone was out of the house made him weep with joy, especially if he painted his lips red and put on a pair of Rosa’s clip-on pearl earrings. Mozart’s aria “Vorrei spiegarvi, oh Dio!” was possibly his favorite. He also loved to watch the teenage boys swim across the river. The boys, sometimes in groups, sometimes in pairs, swam across the foaming waves in a display of budding masculinity; the river was rough and wild, full of whirlpools, and there were rocks and caves on each side, ideal for exploring and diving. Diogen sometimes joined them, though he could only swim over to one side; he would always walk back across one of the bridges. He loved to watch the way the muscles moved in their arms, in their legs, the steadiness of their feet as they hopped between rocks, their fearlessness, the drops of water on their hair, on their eyelashes, the way they emerged unscathed from the freezing river.
The boys swam for the delight of swimming, but also to impress girls. There was one girl in particular, Sofia, a dark limbed nymph with hair the color of coal—this is how one of the boys described her—who would come down every day around noon and dive into the river elegantly. She would swim to the nearest rock and lay there sunbathing. The boys would dive around her, swim past her, shout out to each other over her, like a school of splattering fish; Sofia paid them zero attention. But there would be a moment in the day when she would throw them a glance, just before she swam back to shore and disappeared, walking off, in another boy’s words, with the gait of a goddess. Diogen appreciated Sofia, liked her lack of care for the hysterical boys. But he did not care to impress her. His focus, the focus of all his songs and energy for some time now, was on Ivan Ivanovich.
Ivan lived in the old neighborhood, with his mother; his father had died in a coal mining accident some years before. Ivan was shy and softly spoken. Diogen had observed his every move, gesture, characteristic, and quality. The first time they met, on a winter night as Diogen was roaming the streets, singing under his breath, Ivan appeared in front of him, distracted by something and the two men nearly bumped into each other. Ivan said, “Oh, excuse me,” and blinked, startled, and his eyes, the color of chestnuts, appeared to Diogen to be glowing more intensely than the Earth’s molten core; he observed a fire inside them, and Ivan’s breath, when he said excuse me, exhaling the words, enveloped Diogen and cradled him, lifting him out of the cold night. The town streets and his entire life up to that moment appeared to him mundane, dreary, perishable; everything suddenly seemed irrelevant, offensive even in its lack of significance compared to Ivan’s eyes, the beauty of his being. Diogen noted the wave in his mahogany hair, the length of his slender fingers, the calluses from the hard strings of the cello—although he did not know at that time that Ivan played the cello; he saw the movement of his thigh as he stopped, the molecules of his breath as its vapor vanished into the frigid air. Diogen wished he could preserve each speck of air that surrounded Ivan and store it in a jar as an object of utter beauty.
Ivan came to the river with the boys, but made little noise. He swam across the river with ease. Diogen watched him break the waves and whirls and felt breathless with the agonizing pull of his biceps. The two men were not exactly friends, and although they spent little time interacting, they were aware of each other. Ivan knew when Diogen was there, and when he fished, if he caught several freckled trout, he would gift one to Diogen. Diogen was usually alone in his spot under the tree. He had a fishing rod, though he rarely put bait on the hook; it was really that the rod gave him the appearance of doing something, liberated him from unwanted questions of what he might be doing all alone by the river. Sometimes both Diogen and Ivan went along with the boys to explore the craggy rocks on the banks; the summer heat would lower the river, exposing the panicking crabs that scuttled away from the boys’ grabbing fingers. Those were the moments Diogen cherished, for it gave him the opportunity to move in Ivan’s proximity and breathe his air, and he felt as if they were performing a dance. He knew where Ivan lived, knew his daily patterns; Ivan was alive in Diogen’s life through persistent, precise, involved observation.
A month had passed since Diogen had departed for the YWA, and since he had seen Ivan. The last thing he wanted was a Welcome Home, Comrade party; it was enough that his military service, a year-long prison sentence as Diogen saw it, something he could not even begin to fathom how he would survive, either physically or mentally, was due to start in three weeks. He had been putting it off for four years by doing his university degree, and mostly by Ruben’s interventions through military connections, but there was no more time to bide. He now had three weeks of freedom, and he intended to spend them filling every brain cell with the image of Ivan.
He walked home through the all too familiar streets, his head down, trying to avoid greeting the tailor, the butcher, the cobbler. But a strange thing caught his eye—sheets of paper torn from a school notebook with a handwritten note reading: “The Invention—Unveiled! Come and See Your Future! Entry: 500 dinars.” And their street address. Their home address: Number 23. Diogen stopped in front of one sign and re-read the note. Yes, their home address. He laughed—500 dinars was a fortune, a month’s average salary. He tore off one of the notes and walked home.