Avoid the Day by Jay Kirk

Author:Jay Kirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

16

JAKE WANTED SOUP. THIS IS WHAT ELÉONORE INFORMS me when she comes to knock on my door. The sun was already setting. I had been taking a late-afternoon nap after an early afternoon of casual drinking with Bob’s gypsy friends, the ones he and Jake will be jamming with tonight at Café Bulgakov, near Unirii Square. The name of the band was Palatka, a pretty big act, as far as these kinds of things went, at least on the Eastern Euro folk revival circuit.

Jake and Bob, she said, had already gone ahead to set up.

I’m still groggy, momentarily stupefied to find Eléonore at my door, but I get my jacket. We go hunting for soup and finally find the kind Jake likes, the kind with sheep intestine, two blocks from the Bulgakov, and she carries the takeout down the street in a deliberate kind of way I would have a hard time characterizing, yet it struck me as memorable. The Bulgakov was like a medieval fortress, and we had to wander around a bit, through a labyrinth of connecting rooms and corridors, where I seem to recall torches flickering on the walls, but that can’t be right, and in retrospect I think it is an almost certain misperception. We finally found our friends in the cellar bar, down a narrow vaulted stairwell.

There was a band playing, something superficially rocklike, but more woodsy than folk, however electrified. Kids danced around us, or at least made the minimal necessary gestures of dancing. I was reintroduced to half a dozen people I’d already met earlier in the afternoon, including a man named Florin, the prima violinist. We could barely hear each other over the music. Palatka’s band manager was there, too, kind of a snotty-looking guy named Raoul whom I immediately disliked. Jake slurped his soup, while the rest of us resumed drinking in a tight cramped circle pressed against the bar. The ceiling was a low, curved brick arch. We barely had enough room to properly hold our drinks as we watched the kids stomping around: one androgynous youth danced just inches from me, moving pale and sweatless. Between sets, Raoul, who was pressed against me to my right, holding a glass of pálinka the color of goat piss, shoved himself even closer, offering a damp hand that I declined, and slurred, h’mmm, one of those American names, h’mmm, Jay, ha ha ha, spitting on me, and I felt the disgusting heat from his body, his sour breath in my face . . . H’mmm. J’ay. J’ay. J’ay. One of those Am-er-ican names, Annyira vicces!

He wore sunglasses, even though it was night and we were in a basement. Everything about him was repellent and made me even more bored than I already was. He wore a straw hat that looked as if he had personally plucked the straw himself, en passant, from the nearest, most crap-ridden bale of hay, assembling it absent-mindedly on his head, probably on his way over this evening.

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