12
On Monday, when he reached Tsoi’s Wall, Mitya saw that Marina was sitting there with Sasha and some other people in leather jackets, but no Gleb. When she saw him, her mouth stretched into a smile. She put her thumb up to say that everything was great and that she had done all that was expected of her. Sasha was playing a song by Tsoi, and the people sitting around, including Marina, sang along.
And for two thousand years, there’s a war,
A war without reason or cause,
This war is the business of youth,
A cure against getting old.
Flowing vermillion blood,
In an hour, just regular soil,
In two, there are flowers and grass,
Warmed up by the rays of the star
That we’re calling the sun.
Mitya knew that song well. It was one of the most popular Kino songs, and Vovka liked it a lot. It was one of the songs he liked to scream at the top of his lungs from that woman’s window early in the morning.
Once the song was over and Sasha stopped playing, Marina left the singing circle and walked over to Mitya. She waved goodbye to everyone else, and they waved back. Only Sasha got up. He nodded at Mitya and asked Marina:
“You sure I can’t take you home?”
“No, stay, play, it’s so nice here today, so many good voices,” she said, gently patting him on the cheek. “I need to help Mitya with something, and he’ll see me home.”
Sasha was reluctant, but he kissed Marina on the cheek and went back to the circle, where people were taking beers out of a black grocery bag.
“I got 200,000 rubles,” Marina said to Mitya, as they turned the corner and headed for the metro. She was excited to be in this position: a benefactor who gives her friend the money he so desperately needs. “That will buy him four bottles of vodka, I checked. Or a ton of glue. But I hope he buys something more useful. Here.” She handed a plastic bag to Mitya. “I also put in a can of sgushenka. I hope he tries the condensed milk and decides he wants to have more sugar instead of bukhlo and kley.”
Mitya nodded. “So how were you able to get this much in a weekend?”
“I have my ways.” She said mysteriously. Marina didn’t want Mitya to know the prosaic truth of how she’d gotten the money: it would make her seem less noble, and could even cause her friend to like her less.
Mitya took the bag from her and held it throughout their commute. Marina told him about her life back in Donbass: it was nice, but everyone was poor. Because of that, her father was often angry and beat her. So she wanted to try to make a life in Moscow, get a good job, or marry a rich guy, to be able to bring her mother and grandmother to live with her.
Mitya was reluctant to reciprocate by sharing his own story with Marina. Their lives seemed to have some commonalities, but he felt like the behavior of his father and Vovka was something to be ashamed of. He wasn’t complicit, but still ought to protect his family’s honor in the opinion of everyone else. That’s what Mama and Babushka always told him: some things were only family things. And there was also that saying: “Don’t take the trash out of the izba.” Mitya never fully understood how one could keep up a proper household if one was not supposed to take the trash out. Wouldn’t it make the house dirty, overflowing?
So Mitya didn’t take the trash out and didn’t go into many details about his family. Instead, he told Marina about Valerka: how he loved his birds and was gentle and sweet. Mitya was not sure if he wanted to tell Marina about the dress. She would be able to understand, but he was afraid of being misunderstood. And he also felt like she might diagnose him again, like when she concluded he was goluboy, the previous time. Maybe he was. He had been thinking hard about this ever since, but that was his call to make. He decided to start from a safe distance and then feel his way, maybe share more truth with her, tell her about the needle.
“I also like to dress up funny,” Mitya said to Marina, “and grown-ups judge me for it, but Valerka didn’t.”
“What do you mean, dress funny?” Marina asked. She looked him over and saw a simply dressed boy, jeans and a sweater, a jacket, like everyone else.
“Well, like costumes. Sometimes like a clown. Sometimes like a girl.” It seemed that if he buried the truth under layers of embellishments, it wouldn’t stand out quite as much.
“You are so bohemian,” Marina gasped. “This is what I expected from Moscow. Not from eleven-year-old boys, of course. But I thought that everyone here is weird and artistic, but the majority of people I encounter are as plain and boring as back in Donbass. Gleb has some friends that are like you, I think. You should definitely come along with me to a kvartirnik.”
Once they arrived in Konkovo, Marina hid behind the kiosk again. She would follow Mitya from afar so that he wouldn’t get in trouble, in case the homeless boy and his friends chose to take advantage of him, or something of the kind. Once she determined Mitya was safe, she would leave. She was sad that she wouldn’t be able to participate more, but she didn’t want to threaten the investigation.
Mitya was thankful to her. Surely, she had better things to do with her day, but she not only found money for Mitya to use but also wanted to make sure he would be all right. It was more than he expected any grown-up to do to help him and Valerka. Although, now he wasn’t sure that he wanted to consider Marina an adult. She was more of a sister that he didn’t have. Or the sister he wanted to be like.
Mitya found Chervyak at the same spot, only this time he was selling bananas. It took the homeless boy a minute to understand who Mitya was and why he said that he had brought something. Finally, when he remembered and Mitya handed him the contents of the bag, making sure to neatly fold the bag and put it away in his pocket, Chervyak’s face lit up.
“Wow, I can get, tipa, ten bottles of vodka for this,” he said, counting the yellow 10,000-, orange 5,000-, and green 1,000-ruble notes. When Mitya handed him the can of sgushenka, Chervyak licked his lips and said that it was his favorite treat in the whole wide world. He proceeded to open the can with a large rugged knife that he produced from inside his parka.
“A guy I ran with made it for me especially,” he explained, as Mitya watched him place the tin on the ground by the curb and poke holes around the lid with the tip of the blade. “It’s made from a car’s leaf spring.” He didn’t have a spoon, so Chervyak proceeded to drink sgushenka right from the can. He slurped loudly and then seemed to roll the liquid around his palate. There was an expression of bliss on his face. Some of the substance was left on Chervyak’s chafed lips, pearly, half-transparent, gooey, and Mitya had the strongest longing to go up to the boy and lick it off his lips. He fidgeted in place to shake off that weird feeling.
After swallowing sgushenka, Chervyak carefully closed the lid and put the tin in his inner pocket so that it stood upright. Mitya thought about warning him that it might spill. But Chervyak’s clothes were pretty dirty anyway, and this comment would only prove that Mitya was a boy with a home, someone who could get clean and had clothes worthy of care. It made him uncomfortable, to see the difference between himself and Chervyak so starkly. He tried as hard as he could not to call unnecessary attention to that. Mitya wanted Chervyak to like him, although, of course, there was no obvious way to establish whether he did or not, since money was involved.
“I’ll bring this to the rest of the boys,” Chervyak said, licking his lips. “They’ll be so happy. We haven’t had sgushenka since Komar’s eighth birthday two months ago.”
Mitya figured that Komar, a mosquito, was also a homeless boy, and was surprised to find out that there were homeless boys as young as that. How early did they start?
Chervyak put the bananas into a sack, lit a cigarette from a pack he had in his pants, and led Mitya down the stairs into the metro.
“You know the Cheremushki rynok? That’s where we live. It’s a ride away. I can’t sell my stuff close to the market because they’ll find out. Also, here I can raise the prices, charge the people for avoiding the trip.”
He still had the cigarette in his mouth when they entered the metro vestibule. Mitya had never seen anyone smoke inside the metro, and he was appalled by Chervyak’s moxie. No one seemed to be paying attention, though, when Chervyak jumped over the turnstile instead of paying with a ticket. Mitya hesitated and then followed suit, again afraid to show that he was coddled. But instead of jumping over, he crawled under, which proved quite uncomfortable. He felt that he must have dirtied up his outfit, but didn’t check it: the dirtier he could get, the better he would fit in.
“What was it that you wanted to find out from my patsany? I forget,” Chervyak asked.
“I wanted to find out if any of them know about how my friend got killed,” Mitya reminded him.
“Right. We’ll see. Some of these boys are pretty messed up. I mean, even I don’t remember anything you’ve told me, and it was, like, a week ago? Some days ago?” Chervyak scratched his head. There was a fog inside his head that never cleared up. He believed it was from not sleeping enough. It must be the glue, Mitya thought, but he didn’t say anything. Would Chervyak be just like Vovka one day, out of touch with reality, hurting people, sick?
“Have you lived in the market long?” Mitya asked.
Chervyak was eager to respond. Sgushenka had perked him up, and the story spilled out of him smoothly.
“Just a few months. Me and a bunch of other kids, we lived in an empty old building for two years, I think, not far from there. But they said the building was a mess, and the government khuynuli it this spring. Then it was summer, so we just lived in the streets. We went to this village where one of the boys had a grandmother. Swam in the river. It was nice.” Chervyak half closed his eyes, dreamily, recalling his summer adventures. “There’s also a bunch of places where the people come to their dacha only for the weekend. So we had places to sleep. But when the summer’s over, it’s not fun to be in the village. Only abandoned dying dogs. We moved back to Moscow. It was still warm, but Luzhkov, the suchiy mayor, was sending all the homeless away, or putting us in jail. He wanted to have his stupid 850th-anniversary celebration for Moscow without the homeless everywhere. So we couldn’t sleep in the streets. We found this sweet hookup in the market. Something always works out. That’s how freedom works.”
Mitya was once again taken aback by the word he used. “Freedom.” Did Chervyak consider himself free? He had no place to sleep, always had to look out for himself, and work, and steal. How was this “freedom”?
Chervyak had exhausted his chattiness and drifted off into the sweet memories of his summer, of swimming in the river and waking up to bird songs. He nodded quietly to the sugar crush.