Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan Read Free Book Online Page A

sleep.”
    â€œGo sleep in the trailer,” Kocha replied.

    Light was poking through the shades, filling the room with sunny dust particles. Hot streaks spread across the floor like spilled flour. Some makeshift blinds made out of old tape reels were hanging over the doorway. It must have taken Kocha a while to put them together. I stepped into the room without shutting the door and took a look around. A draft disturbed the curtains, and they started rustling like cornstalks. Two couches, drooping in the middle, had been set up against the walls. A kitchen with a stove, an ancient fridge, and various appliances hanging on the walls was on the right.On the left, in the corner, stood a desk cluttered with all sorts of dubious-looking trash—I didn’t want to root around in it. An odd smell topped off the room. I had been absolutely certain that a room inhabited by Kocha would have to reek. Of what? Well, just about anything—blood, sperm, maybe even gasoline—but no, the trailer smelled like any other place where a man was used to bedding down in comfort—it was the same odd smell you always find in the rooms of contented widowers (if one can put it that way) who have no real insecurities. “Well, the Kocha I know has no real insecurities, obviously,” I thought to myself as I sank onto the tidier and least droopy-seeming couch. I flopped down, pulled off my sneakers, and suddenly the hassle of this whole trip hit me. All the stop-and-go driving, hitchhiking, drinking Karolina’s sweet beverage, seeing the black sky over the raspberry fields, and sleeping in a truck cab. This whole morning seemed like it would have no end to it. I had been operating some mechanism without even knowing it—and it had just malfunctioned. Something just wasn’t right. I felt I was standing in a spacious room into which some total strangers had been allowed just before all the lights went out. I had been in that room before, and knew its layout, but the presence of those strangers, who were standing next to me, silently, hiding something from me, made the familiar space foreign.
    â€œWhatever,” I told myself. “I can always just go home.”
    The wall above the couch was covered with old photographs, magazine clippings, and colorful illustrations. Kocha, just like a real serial killer, had pasted up fragments of faces, contours of bodies, and shreds of crowds with some eyes and mouthsprotruding at random. They were joyful collages; they also contained what appeared to be excerpts of different magazine stories pasted together—random glossy pages and then just plain paper, along with labels peeled from beer bottles, political pamphlets, pictures from fashion magazines, black-and-white pornographic shots, soccer team calendars, and someone’s driver’s license prominently displayed. From a distance the whole thing ran together into some bizarre pattern, as though someone had been painstakingly disfiguring the wallpaper. Up close, though, the eye was immediately drawn to a multitude of minor details—the faded yellow newspaper clippings, the mannequins whose eyes had been gouged out, freshly-spread glue, and dark crimson drops of strawberry jam resembling dried-up nail polish. A solid light-green, claylike background littered with letters and symbols, broken lines, and contrasting colors wrapped the whole construction together. No matter how intently I looked at the thing, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Eventually, I ran my finger down the wall until I caught a glimpse of Kocha’s army photo; I ripped it off. A capital U poked out from underneath. It was a map. Probably a map of the USSR—the Carpathian Mountains, the Caucasus, and Mongolia were in sandy clay, the taiga and Caspian Lowland were in light green, and, apparently, the deserts were signified by a chalky dry area, where the sandy clay had hardened. The Pacific Ocean was dark, dark blue and the