Spring of a Down - 16
Сонце і Слово
It was a bad night. It was dark but the heavens were gutted with stars. To the source of night is its beginning, it is said. This Yevhenvi knew well; cold is worst at sundown.[1]
The brutal tea with the last remnant of lemon juice was the last sip of food or drink that he would have. His dungarees fell loosely down his legs. He was sleek and slender before the war; now he was emaciated. He hunched beneath a cement wall. It was now open-air but that was recent. All was messy and stained.
The was a towel that he used as a tablecloth and another chair that held up the other piece of the table. Formica held with aluminum rods. He had taken this from a dead man, with the mug, in the early hours of the yesterday morning. Before the sun came up.
There was at least a light coming up from a flashlight. He warmed his hand on the mug. It was close to Kyivean sky but not quite – he was in the wastes of Kharkiv. Take the corner and go on to midnight. If he lived, he would write it in an American Notebook. The last thing he had purchased in New York upon that January. After that, it was fire from the Ashes.
It had been a long week today. Dry as dust. This he knew though he was scant 20 years young with short dirty blonde hair shocked up straight.
It began in the morning: he was sleeping at the last stop on the metro: Oleksiivske. He somehow awoke, probably to the boots a stepping brash. He took the greasy satchel and split because he knew a sealed-off exit. He lowered down and saw a Russian infantryman with his gun out searching for hostages to the back. Yevhenvi carefully wiped his sleeve across his nose to clear away the bespattered snot. He still could not breathe, and his mouth strolled shut. There was a kind of hushed without breathing. The was glass that needed another word other than strewn. Shatter implied an order. He shook his head. The was some kind of gash on the back that had bled and bled but not the third bled, because that would be sensed by the face.
He crouched behind a charcoal large stuff bear. He smiled – there was no coverage here. Only the obscurement of his body. Soma, if not the Parry Homeric sense.[2]
The Russian infantryman look at him but did not see him. Yevhenvi felt tightness over his belly as the muzzle strew across. Hairs on his abdomen elevated as if expecting to have been shot. Maybe a veteran would have known to aim first - but not some fresh from дедовщина – the reign of the grandfathers.[3] Somehow this eased this torso. He watched the Russian recruit look down the metro, obviously deciding whether to go down into the sullen smoke. Maybe Yevhenvi senses a decision without decisiveness directed the recruit to move onward.
That tightened the groin up again – which way was the recruit going? Yevhenvi watch the google strewn face. The was no answer from the muscle that gripped the face. The eyeballs contract into the million-meter stare. The recruit turned and as he did so a barrage of three propel him backwards. Then a Ukrainian guardsman stood up out of cover.
He flipped his thumb at Yevhenvi.
After that, he wandered east, to where he used to live. High towers fill with stairs all the same. He lived there in a tiny, small studio where we could look at the hostel. They were people worse off than himself – without books to read and without a laptop to scour the world. Now he was worse off than even the hostelers.
He used to visit one – Mrs. Gradenko.[4] He remembers her tall tales about how in the old days they planned new ways of cheating.[5] He pretended to be fascinated. Really, he had nothing else to do but look out at the crest with spruce trees among the apartment buildings and watch the gas flame shoot up between the black soot of missiles. He then set his course for her room, even though it was brown. He knew he had not to ask for anything but tap water because she had only crackers and cat food. Without a cat.
He got to the space between the apartments and hostel with its degraded cement circle and scrubby short grass. No one had mowed it. A Sunflower grew wild and like a Solar Phoenix gulped down the light to the temple of the sun.[6]
But there he saw a fire 5 floors up and he took a large leap through the green ladder and outer door and up the double-folded concrete stairs. There were smoke and burning scraps everywhere in just a few short seconds. An electricity flash had floomed.
As he came up, he saw a firefighter coming down through the gloom with ghastly daylight punching through the long windows. Everything was held together by the bars. He was doffed with a heavy mask and carrying a body. The body had a grey dress and wiry grey silver hair – then Yevhenvi realized it was the remains of Mrs. Gradenko.[7] Her left half of the face was blacked, and her left eyeball hung out by the tendons turning blood red.
The firefighter pushed Yevhenvi’s starved frame against the wall and moved clunky floorward. One more statistic.
He got out – he did not remember how. Where to go?
Yevhenvi then wandered back to his newfound abode. He saw a thin old man try to strike a match to get a fire started.
But the lecturing gene starts Yevhenvi off: “Don’t do that thing are too flammable here.”
The old man looked up at him. “You have had a bad day. So, what if I burn us to death? No loss for the living. That belly is mithering.”
“You are wrong. Every man is more precious than gold. I have seen three facemasks today, and I am not one of them. ”
It was a good day.
[1] Yevhenvi (Євге́н)– “well born” a diminutive.
[2] Milman Parry showed the Homer recited, not wrote down his works. In fact, there was no written Greek because the old symbols, borrow from the Minoans had been forgotten and the Phoenician had not been adapted.
[3] The reign of the grandfathers means harassment of the recruits by long serving foot soldiers.
[4] Police, “Mrs. Gradenko”
[5] Police, “Mrs. Gradenko”
[6] Ivan Drach (Іва́н Фе́дорович Драч) Several references to his works.
[7] Police, “Mrs. Gradenko”