Katia Kapovich

White hail pelting the frozen bog, I’m stuck in the first line of January, following my host’s dog on his walk through the stone century, around the quarry, slices of marble and mud, past a herd of miners exhaling smoke, past a barn smelling of merde, and back to where I’m stuck and broke. The fucking dog barks at the night, mad at the stars all his life and then again. I rethink kicking him out, but being cool, I let him in.

When his owner died in 2000 and a new family moved into their Moscow apartment, he went to live with mongrels in the park. In summer there was plenty of food, kids often left behind sandwiches, hotdogs and other stuff. He didn’t have a big appetite, still missing his old guy. He too was old, the ladies no longer excited him, and he didn’t burn calories chasing them around. Then winter came and the little folk abandoned the park. The idea of eating from the trash occurred to him but the minute he started rummaging in the overturned garbage container, a voice in his head said: “No, Rex!” The remnants of a good upbringing lower our natural survival skills. I met him again in the early spring of 2001. He looked terrific. Turning gray became him. His dark shepherd eyes were perfectly bright, like those of a puppy. I asked him how he sustained himself in this new free-market situation when even the human species suffered from malnutrition. In response he told me his story; how at first he thought that life without his man wasn’t worth it, how those who petted him when he was a pet then turned away from him, and how one night he had a revelation. His man came to him in his sleep, tapped him on his skinny neck and said: “Let’s go shopping!” So the next morning he took the subway and went to the street market where they used to go together every Sunday and where vendors recognized him and fed him to his heart’s content. “Perhaps you should move closer to that area?” I ventured.—“No, I’ll stay here,” he sighed, “oldies shouldn’t change their topography. That’s what my man said.” Indeed, he sounded like one himself.

I’m jotting down these lines, having borrowed a pen from a waitress in this roadside restaurant. Three rusty pines prop up the sky in the windows. My soup gets cold, which implies I’ll eat it cold. Soon I too will leave a tip on the table, merge into the beehive of travelers and board one of the ferries, where there’s always a line to the loo and no one knows where the captain is. Slightly seasick, I keep on writing of the wind-rose and lobster traps, seagulls, if any—and there always are. Check the air and you’ll see them above straw hats and caps. The sun at noon glides like a monstrous star- fish through clouds. Others drink iced tea, training binoculars on a tugboat. When I finish this letter, I’ll take a gulp from the flask you gave me for the road in days when I was too young to care about those on the pier who waved goodbye. I miss them now: cousins in linen dresses, my mother, you, boys in light summer shirts. Life is too long. The compass needle dances. Everything passes by. The ferry passes by ragged yellow shores.

I grew up in a village built on coal and labor. An outhouse on a dirt road by a water pump glared at the whitewashed fences of uniformed yards that gaped like broken teeth in the mouths of miners. All summer we played Cossacks and Bandits, shot our symbolic rifles and revolvers and when killed would crush a wild cherry in the breast pocket, the spot where the heart stopped. Who started it? The red spreading over white satin never to be washed away completely, “I killed you! I killed you!” I screamed as he fell down. Men found him three years later in the abandoned mine after an explosion, his clothes covered with coal dust and blood. Women howled like wolves. “It’s nothing, he’ll get up,” I thought, “it’s just that stupid wild cherry on his shirt.”

On the eighth day he coined the word “alone” and saw that it was as good as everything else. A yellow school bus rattled down the lane, a wind blew in a drainpipe, strong, mellifluous. I brought two empty crates to the parking lot, watched neighbors with briefcases and car keys. At noon a mailman passed by where I sat invisible, like a tree among trees. Why, why, I asked. I wanted to know why, but only scared a squirrel that dropped his acorn when my voice broke silence unexpectedly— a white noise in a wireless telephone. My club soda went flat in the bottle. With a spit of rain, a wind blew again from the lake. I raised my index finger and touched it, pleading, give me a break, give me a break.