RuKsaK

A Russian winter hates its summer. It folds in the long, supping months of summer and squeezes the last drops of light and heat out of it. The skies become a wrinkled granite, spattering and vomiting snows, laying murderous frosts across the vast Russia. Icicles, body-size, hang off buildings, waiting for their chaotic plunge – around twenty people a year are pounded to death by these. Grey invades. Walking time doubles, everyone takes on an old man’s pace, shuffling with feet in invisible chains.
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A sign saying ‘bar’ is not easy to find in a Russian February. The weather anchors your head to the floor and you watch your inching, imprisoned steps slicing the snow below you. Conversation is spat quickly, like it’s final somehow, as the cold jumps into any open hole and vacuums all the fluids.
‘Fuck me Dom. Where’s a bar?’
‘Dunno Ruk.’
‘Minus twenty-five.’
‘Saw it on the telly.’
‘I’m fucking freezing.’
‘I’m in pain.’
‘My hands are fucking hurting.’
Pause.
‘Ruk – a bar!’

Inside, seated at a warm plastic table, we ordered vodka as our faces excreted the ice that had clung to them.
‘This is insane Ruk.’
‘We can wear this though. I mean, it’s a memory burn. We’ll talk about our minus twenty-five hunt for a bar in St.Petersburg. We’ve got it now, the pain remembered, the water piling down your face and the vodka on the way. I never drink vodka in England, but you’ll have to fuck me sideways to stop me having some here, now, in this. This is a celebration, because we’ve got new ‘us’ here. Brilliant!’
‘That’s why were doing all this I suppose.’
‘Yes – let’s drink.’

And, so we baptised our fleeting internal spring seasons. We were sure we were new again. Nowadays, I don’t know.
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Three weeks later I was walking from the badly concreted building where I worked into the frozen, ex-socialist street outside. It was cold, again, and incurably. I’d been in Russia for two months. Aged thirty, I saw the first dead body I’d ever seen (V.I.Lenin would be the second, not the last). It was a homeless guy who’d decked out on a bench, no doubt despondent and drunk enough to not care if the winter drank him gonewards. There was no doubt about his deadness. His eyes, although still in his head, had disappeared somehow – lifeless is a pitiful word for dead eyes – vanished is a better one I think.

I’d like to say I went for help. I didn’t. I walked on for lunch and ate it with the same tastes as always and thought little about why my food should taste the same or even different. My answers were as useless as the dead guy’s. I was happy for the lunch to end though, because I wanted another look. I’d never seen a dead guy and I wanted to see more of his deadness.

When I walked past him again, I slowed my pace out of respect for my eyes, thinking, as all dumb humans do, that more looking means more knowing. His eyes had completely recessed now, just sockets. His tongue had slid out, not a tongue anymore, but an obscene fruit vacating, slipping obnoxiously into the freezing air. His skin, if that’s what it still was, had gone purple – a colour too rude for death and the weather. It was then I felt the physical distaste I’d hoped for.

Two policemen were standing with their backs to him. They’d have looked no different waiting for the driver of an illegally parked car.

Getting back to the office, I said:
‘I’ve just seen a fucking dead bloke on the bench down the road.’
‘Oh aye – how come?’
‘He’s died in the cold. It looked pretty grim. It looks like death is more painful after you die. That fucker’s tongue was running for it and his eyes had been poked out the back of his skull.’
‘Aye – you wouldn’t want to die in this weather would you?’
‘No – on the back of a bus maybe, not a bench.’
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For the time being I filled my warm pockets with his dead face. His death got stuffed in there with the vodka, our melting faces, some great smiles, pussies, a few homes lived in, and so many assortments of me.
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Haven’t cleaned those pockets in a few years now.

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Winter downs a big, old blue cup