Samson was deafened by the sound of the saber striking his father’s head. He caught the glint of the flashing blade out of the corner of his eye and stepped into a puddle. His already dead father’s left hand pushed him aside so that the next saber neither quite struck nor quite missed his ginger-haired head, slicing off his right ear. He managed to reach out and catch the falling ear, clutching it in his fist before it hit the gutter. His father, meanwhile, collapsed right onto the road, his head split in two. A horse stamped the body into the ground with a hind leg’s shod hoof before its rider dug in his spurs and charged forward at a dozen townsfolk who were running and leaping into the gutters, realizing what awaited them. Five more riders galloped past.
But Samson didn’t see them. He was lying flat against the slope of the gutter, the palm of his left hand open on the wet earth and the fist of his right hand tucked under his head. His wound burned and burned, loudly and sonorously, as if someone were hammering a steel rail right above it. Hot blood poured down his cheek and seeped under his collar.
It started raining again. Samson raised his head. He saw before him the sole of his father’s dark blue, English-made, high button shoe, which, though splattered with mud, still looked noble. His father had worn them constantly and carefully for five years, since 1914, when a shoe dealer on Khreshchatyk, spooked by the outbreak of war, had lowered the price, rightly sensing that international hostilities didn’t bode well for the sale of fashionable goods.
Samson didn’t wish to see his dead father in full, with his head split open, so he crawled backward along the gutter, tightly clutching the severed ear. He got out on the road but couldn’t straighten up. For a moment he just stood there, thin and hunched over, not allowing himself to turn around. When he at last took a couple of steps, he tripped over a corpse. Samson made his way around the body, but then an awful roar again assaulted his head, pouring like molten tin into the hole that had been his ear. He pressed his fist against the bleeding wound, as if trying to plug it shut, to block the noise that had burst into his head. Then he started running. He was simply running away, but it happened to be in the direction from which he and his father had come, toward Zhylianska Street, where he had been born and raised. Amid the general roar, he made out individual gunshots, but these didn’t stop him. He ran past confused, aimless townsfolk, all of them staring blankly, and when he felt that he could go no farther, that his legs were giving out, he spotted a large sign above the door of a two-story house: DR. N. N. VATRUKHIN, SPECIALIST IN DISEASES OF THE EYE.
Samson ran up and pulled the door handle with his left hand. Locked. He knocked with his fist.
“Open up!” he shouted.
Now he pounded the door with both fists.
“What do you want?” a woman’s frightened voice asked from within.
“A doctor!”
“Nikolay Nikolaevich isn’t seeing patients today.”
“He has to! He’s got to see me!”
“Who is it, Tonya?” a rich male baritone asked from deeper within.
“Someone out in the street,” the old woman responded.
“Let them in.”
The door shyly opened a crack and the old woman peeked out at blood-stained Samson. She allowed him inside and immediately slammed the door shut behind him, double-bolting it.
“Oh, Lord! Who did that to you?”
“Cossacks. Where’s the doctor?”
“Let’s go . . .”
The doctor, smooth-shaven and gray, silently treated Samson’s wound, applied a gauze pad with ointment, and bandaged his head.
Somewhat calmed by the noiseless flat, Samson looked at the doctor in quiet gratitude and unclenched his right fist.
“Can the ear . . . be saved?” he asked, barely audible.
“I couldn’t say.” The doctor shook his head sadly. “I’m an ophthalmologist. Who was it?”
“Don’t know.” The young man shrugged. “Cossacks.”
“Red anarchy,” Vatrukhin replied, heaving a heavy sigh. Then he went over to the table, rummaged in the top drawer, took out a powder box, and brought it back to his patient.
Samson removed the lid. The box was empty. The doctor tore off a piece of cotton wool and lined its bottom. The young man lowered his ear into the box, closed it, and stuck it into the patch pocket of his tunic.
He looked up at the doctor.
“My father’s still out there,” he said, wincing. “On the road. Hacked to death.”
The doctor smacked his lips bitterly and shook his head.
“One can’t even leave the house, these days,” he said, throwing up his hands. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got to go and get him . . .”
“Do you have money?”
“He did, in his wallet. We were on our way to the tailor’s, to pick up a suit.”
“Let’s go, then,” Vatrukhin pronounced, gesturing toward the door.
This time, the streets were deserted. The crack of rifle fire sounded in the distance. The sky seemed to be leaning lower and lower over the blood-engorged town, as if preparing to lie down for the night on its roofs and cemeteries.
When they reached Nimetska Street, where Symon Petliura’s horsemen had overtaken Samson and his father, they saw ahead of them two carts and about a dozen men in peasant garb. Several corpses had already been lifted onto one of the carts, but Samson’s father still lay on the side of the road. Only now he was barefoot—someone had taken his English shoes.
Samson bent over the body, trying to avoid looking at the head. Reaching his hand under his father’s chest, he felt for the wallet in his coat’s inner pocket and pulled it out. The wallet’s plumpness surprised and somewhat embarrassed him. He slipped it into the pocket of his tunic, rose to his feet, and looked back at the carts.
“Need me to take it somewhere?” asked the peasant holding the empty cart’s horse by the bridle.
“Yes, I do.” Samson nodded and looked back at the doctor.
“What is the closest funeral home?” the doctor asked.
“That’d be Gladbach’s,” the peasant replied. “Got money on you? I don’t take any of them ‘coupons’ they’re printing these days.”
“We have Kerensky rubles,” the doctor assured him.
“Alright, then.” The man nodded. “Let me give you a hand with ’im—wouldn’t want that mess all over your clothes . . .”
Samson glanced down at his dirty trousers and tunic, then he and the peasant both bent over his father’s body.
On Tuesday, March 11, 1919, his life as he knew it was over.
“I would advise you to take the coat,” the clerk at the funeral home said in Russian with a Polish accent. “We don’t bury people in coats. Coats won’t keep them warm, where they’re going. But I would put something on his feet.”
The body of Samson’s father lay in a rough-hewn coffin. The head, covered with a square of purple Chinese silk, appeared to be unbroken. The undertaker had bandaged it well, reuniting its split halves.
“What about this board?” Samson asked, indicating with a glance one side of the coffin, which had obviously been intended for some other purpose.
“You know, we have our own sawmill near Fastiv, but it’s impossible to reach now—and if you do reach it, there’s little chance of coming back,” the clerk said. “Where we were short of good wood, we used planks from an old fence. Too many clients—the carpenter can’t keep up. But perhaps it was a fence your father knew well from his walks . . .”
* * *
The usually deserted cemetery on Shchekavytsia Hill above the Dnipro River was as loud as a busy street corner. Even the croaking of hundreds of crows, who had taken a fancy to the crown of a mighty oak in the section for Old Believers, was unable to drown out the din. Moaning, crying, anger—but these mournful voices came from the edge of the cemetery, near the cliff side. Samson, however, stood in the very center, watching two peasants deepen a narrow pit between two old graves. From time to time, he would take a couple of steps back, so that the brown earth flying out of the pit wouldn’t land on his shoes.
“Can’t go any deeper!” one of the men shouted from below. “Hittin’ coffins down here.”
To corroborate his words, he slammed his shovel against a wooden surface, which uttered a muffled, plaintive response.
Samson peered down.
“Will the coffin fit?”
“If we squeeze it in, sure,” the man answered. “Might get a little squashed.”
The darkened edge of Samson’s mother’s coffin showed on the right. They’d buried her five years ago. She’d passed not long after his sister, Verusya, from whom she had contracted the lung ailment that took both their lives. Now Samson’s father would lie next to them, the third, leaving Samson no space in the family grave.
His gaze rose to the tombstone—a concrete tree with missing branches, carved with the words VERUSYA KOLECHKO. ZINAIDA FYODOROVNA KOLECHKO. REST IN PEACE. FROM YOUR LOVING FATHER, MOTHER, AND BROTHER.
The inscription muddled Samson’s thoughts.
The men lowered the coffin on their ropes. Its narrow foot easily reached the bottom, while the upper part got stuck a bit higher up.
The men worked at the brown earth with their shovels and the upper part sank down a few inches.
“Won’t drop further now,” one of the men said, shaking his head. “But it’ll settle in time, always does. That’s how it always is.”
Samson nodded, and as he did so he felt the bandage slipping down his head. He felt for the knot above his severed ear, undid it, tightened the bandage, and retied it again.
“Hurts bad?” one of the men asked solicitously.
“No,”
Samson answered. “Just aches a little.”
“That’s how it always is,” the man commented, his uncovered head nodding up and down, slowly, in the manner of an all-comprehending sage. Then he drew a crumpled checkered cap from the pocket of his padded jacket and put it on.
Once they were paid, the men went back to their cart, leaving Samson alone. And then the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, its rays pacifying the whole cemetery. The crows fell silent. The weeping and shouting on the cliffside died down. Everything seemed to be hiding, holding its breath. Everything but the cool March breeze.
The brown patches of earth on the old, hardened snow around the fresh grave looked to Samson like bloodstains.
* * *
Having cleaned off its collar and padded shoulders, Samson hung his father’s soiled but solid coat on the left side of the closet. The right side was occupied by his mother’s clothes, including her beloved gray fox fur coat.
He went into his father’s study. Before now, he’d hardly ever set foot in this small, cozy room, with its single window overlooking the street. His father kept his writing desk in German order. On the right edge of the tabletop lay an abacus, a gift from the owner of the trading company whose accounts his father had kept right up until it was closed down last year. The abacus’s walnut frame was inlaid with ivory, and its beads too were noble—made from the bones of a “sea creature,” as his father liked to put it.
A stack of cardboard folders, stuffed full of documents and fastened with string, usually sat on the left side of the desk. But when the trading company closed, these folders had migrated to the floor. Samson’s father had been in no hurry to get rid of them. He used to say that life could not sustain itself without air, water, and trade, and so he held on to the belief that the trading company could reopen as soon as “those who were dissatisfied became satisfied.”
On the walls to the left and to the right of the desk, another three dozen abacuses—a whole collection—hung on nails. Previously, they had all seemed the same to Samson, but now that he was alone in the flat and able to examine them more closely, he saw many differences in shape and shade, as well as in bead coloring. The small number of photographs in wooden frames looked strange and silly on the abacus-bedecked walls. One showed Samson’s grandfather and grandmother, another his father and mother, and a third showed himself and Verusya as small children wearing sailor suits.
Samson moved closer to the photograph of himself and his sister. His hand reached for the abacus hanging directly beneath it.
With some force, he pushed one of the beads toward the empty left side of its rod.
“Verusya,” he said glumly. Pushing the next bead in the same direction, he said, “Mother,” and then, sending a third bead after them, in a completely deadened voice, “Father.”
He separated a fourth bead from those remaining on the right and slid it back and forth across the rod.
Uttering a little grunt, Samson walked away and sat down at his father’s desk. He pulled out the top left drawer and took out their family passport. The photograph showed all four of them. The passport had been issued on February 13, 1913. His father had secured it with the idea of taking the family to Austria-Hungary, to the spas. Now there was no more Austria-Hungary, no more Russian Empire, and no more Father—only the passport.
Samson closed the little gray booklet and slipped it back into the drawer, placing beside it the powder box containing his ear. Then he raised his hand to his right temple and palpated the wound beneath the bandage. It really was aching dully rather than hurting badly.
He snapped his fingers near the wound and the click seemed loud and resonant.
Well, at least I can still hear, he thought.
On the ninth day after his father’s murder, Samson looked at himself in the mirror, at his sunken eyes, his sunken cheeks, and his stained, frayed bandage.
The days flowed past like rainwater down Volodymyr Descent, noisily, underfoot. Samson never once went out into the street, only glanced, from time to time, out of the windows of his father’s study and the living room. Those in his own room, like those in Verusya’s room and that of his parents, overlooked the courtyard, revealing the still-bare branches of the old maple tree. But Verusya’s room might as well have not existed now. Its door was completely blocked by a sideboard. Two days earlier, Samson had also hidden the door to his parents’ bedroom with a wardrobe. These rooms, closed off from the outside world, somehow concealed the pain of his losses, making it a bit easier for Samson to bear the thought of his departed parents and sister.
The rain gave way to sleet, the sound of feet squelching through puddles was now and then overpowered by the clatter of horseshoes on cobblestones, and sometimes the noise of an engine would swoop in like a gust of wind, drowning out everything else, but never for long.
After polishing off a plate of yesterday’s oatmeal jelly, a source of sustenance he’d grown quite sick of in recent days, Samson brushed the dried mud from his father’s coat and put it on. He looked in the mirror again. No, the coat didn’t make him look any more like his father, whose face radiated wisdom and self-confidence even as his brown eyes shone with imperturbable placidity. The coat, with its air of respectable significance, simply emphasized, by contrast, Samson’s frightened, unshaven countenance.
He put the brushed coat away in the closet, but these thoughts about his father, which had rightly welled up inside him on the ninth day, when Orthodox tradition decreed that the dead be mourned, demanded action. Should he ride over to the cemetery? No, that course of action Samson immediately rejected—too far, too dangerous.
Even if you lined up Red Army men with rifles along the entire route, it would still be dangerous. Who knows what might get into their heads, whom they might suddenly see as their enemy? Should he go to church, then, and light a candle? This, of course, was possible, but neither his father nor he himself had ever been particularly pious. His mother used to attend services on feast days, but she barely mentioned it, let alone spoke of it at length—too shy.
Samson retrieved his father’s wallet, sat down at his desk, and listened to the sounds of Zhylianska Street filtering in through the closed window. He pulled out and counted the Kerensky and Duma rubles that had been issued by the Provisional Government. The wallet also held three business cards; a certificate of membership for the Kyiv Society for Proper Hunting; a tailor’s receipt, folded many times, for the entire cost of the fabric, the cutting and the sewing of the suit, and confirmation of the accuracy of all measurements taken; several stamps for paying various duties and fees; and an oval-shaped photograph of Samson’s mother.
The previous evening, when it was already dark outside, the yard-sweeper’s widow had knocked on his door and told him that a peasant woman was selling milk and butter in the back wing of the building. He ran down in time to buy half a pound of butter and a quart of milk. And when the bottom step of the wooden staircase creaked under his foot, just outside the yard-sweeper’s cubbyhole of a flat, the widow, a woman of about forty-five with a fondness for modest, inexpensive headscarves, invited him into her kitchen. The stench from that kitchen was terrible, viscous, as if someone had been frying
onions for hours. But Samson accepted the invitation with no complaints and sat down at the table for a cup of tea.
“You’re an orphan now,” she said in a pitying, partly questioning tone. “Can’t go on that way for too long. It’ll kill you . . .”
“What can I do?” Samson asked, intending simply to prolong her verbal participation in the discussion of the situation in which he, thanks to fate, had found himself.
“Marry,” she said firmly. “Marriage drives away orphanhood. And you’ll eat regular then, too.” She examined his face critically, apparently passing judgment on his hollow, stubbly cheeks. “If it’s a good match, you’ll put your suffering behind you . . .”
“I’m still young,” Samson responded, after giving it some thought. “Too early for me.”
“Whaddaya mean, early?” she objected. “I got hitched at fourteen!”
Samson finished his tea. Lifting the bottle of milk and pack of butter from his lap, he rose to his feet and thanked his neighbor.
“If I spot someone who’s right for you, I’ll be sure to tell you,” the widow promised as she closed the door behind him.
The milk and butter now took their place on a windowsill in the living room. The cold tiled stoves were asking for firewood, but it seemed to Samson that the air in the flat was still warm from the last time he’d stoked them. Before going to bed, he burned half an armful of wood in the stove responsible for heating both the living room and his bedroom. The air in his father’s study, of course, was prickly cold, but still not as frigid as on those winter days when they’d been left with no firewood at all. Yet he and his father had managed, somehow. And at winter’s end, they’d found out that someone had hidden a huge amount of firewood in their cellar. Stolen, apparently. Whoever it was had disappeared, allowing the building to live in warmth. But the sun was already turning toward spring, and natural warmth was just around the corner.
When the light outside grew gray and twilight was approaching, Samson put on his old high-school greatcoat, slipped the tailor’s receipt into one of its pockets, and set off for Nimetska Street.
Everyone he passed seemed to be proceeding with utmost caution, trying not to look around them, as if afraid to witness something unpleasant. As he walked, his wound reminded him of its existence. After adjusting and retying the bandage, he went on down the path that had turned out to be his father’s last. At the place of the murder, he stopped to look at the gutter and the edge of the road. He remembered how he had returned here with the doctor. His head began to buzz, as if the blood had risen in his thoughts.
And these thoughts of his grew heavy and sluggish, taking on the taste
of blood. They seemed intent on engulfing him with their heaviness and sluggishness, and so Samson moved away from the scene with decisive steps, turned onto Nimetska, and only stopped when he reached the tailor’s residence, which bore a sign reading, SIVOKON, TAILOR. SUITS. MORNING COATS. TAILCOATS.
The light in the workshop’s window wasn’t bright. A brighter one shone from the two windows on the first floor. Samson knocked loudly and waited.
The tailor, whom Samson had only seen a couple of times in his life, opened the door just a crack and asked, without saying hello, “What is your business at this odd hour?”
Samson introduced himself and slipped the receipt through the gap, which the door chain kept from spreading any wider than a fist.
The tailor let Samson in and heard him out, nodding sympathetically.
“You’re slighter than your dear papa was,” he said with a sigh. “I can recut it, of course . . . but now’s not the time. My hands are trembling. Better to wait. You can take it, if you want. Or I can keep it a while longer, if you’re afraid to carry it at night . . .”
“I’ll take it,” Samson said.
It wasn’t yet so very late and scary when he set off for home. He even passed a pair of young women, both neatly dressed in somber colors. He heard one of them whisper to the other, “Look, what a handsome fellow—wounded, like a hero . . .” He stopped and followed them with his eyes, then adjusted his bandage, which had begun to slip again. It occurred to him that, in the dark, no one would see that the bandage was old and dirty.
The suit was folded, wrapped in paper, and tied with twine. He carried it under his arm, pressing it close to his body, so as not to attract the attention of passersby.
At home, he placed the suit, without unwrapping it, at the bottom of the left half of the closet, beneath his father’s coat.
He spread his greatcoat over his blanket and went to bed in his warm undershirt and long underwear. He lay there, waiting for his body to warm up, but could not fall asleep. Then he thought he heard a rustle, like that of a mouse gnawing on paper or cardboard. He got up, lit a kerosene lamp, and peered into every corner of his room, yet failed to discover the source of the susurration. The sound accompanied him all through his search for the unseen mouse, which was surprising, since mice usually fell silent as soon as he began to look for them. When he stopped, he realized he could still hear the rustle. Now he was sure it was coming from elsewhere, outside his room. He went out into the hallway; ...
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