Stories of a Life by Nataliya Meshchaninova

Author:Nataliya Meshchaninova [Meshchaninova, Nataliya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

Desire

i make a wish on a strawberry.

On a plane’s contrails.

On a star.

On a wave.

I wish he’d get hit by a tram.

I was always afraid of the dead. But I liked his corpse. Not that I liked the corpse itself, but the image, him lying there dead, never to stand up again … What a heartwarming sight.

We’re in a traffic jam, it’s hot, there’s a commotion ahead. We hear that some woman was cut in half by a tram. Our bus slowly approaches the place where it happened, and I see a piece of her leg sticking out from under the tram. Seeing it excites me. Excites my imagination. For a minute, I imagine it’s his leg. My heart starts pounding gleefully. A few moments, then … ugh! It’s over. He’s alive again, sitting here, healthy as a horse. He’s bugging my mom, saying we should walk instead.

Uncle Sasha, my stepfather. The second of my four stepfathers. And the most memorable.

He was small, shorter than me and even shorter than my mother, who was practically a dwarf. He was catastrophically thin, the result of polio.

A nimble neurotic. A violent psychopath. A pathetic little fucker. Yes. A pathetic little fucker.

I swim past him. He can’t really swim, poor half-dead rat. As I swim by, my mom grabs me by the ankle and starts washing me with dish soap. She washes my greasy little head. All three of us are up to our waists in the stinky Anapka River. If you swim five minutes downstream, you’ll reach the sea. The river flows into the Black Sea, where there are waves, sand, kids, and people. But we’re here. We’re here, scrubbing ourselves with dish soap and washing our underwear. We’re here, taking pictures in front of the reeds and eating tomatoes with salt.

Why are we here and not, oh, I don’t know … at the beach?

Well, because Uncle Sasha is ashamed of his skinny arms. He’s ashamed of his skinny legs. For Uncle Sasha, the public beach is torture. He goes on vacation just to stand up to his waist in the river, not taking off his shirt (apparently his arms were worse than his legs; I never saw him without his shirt, although I saw him without his pants), and snicker at the people sailing by on catamarans, who’d pissed away all their money to sail on the stinking Anapka, when the beach was barely a hundred meters away. A man of contradictions, that Uncle Sasha.

We came here on vacation, but in the mornings, we work on a vineyard and in the evenings, we bathe with dish soap.

“Mom, what if Uncle Sasha stayed here and washed his hair, and we went to the beach? Can we?”

“Shh, what are you talking about, be quiet, go, go on, go play.”

My mother is scared of Uncle Sasha. He’d gone psycho and thrown wood-carving knives at her a couple of times and she was afraid of provoking him.

Wood carving is what brought them together. Back then she didn’t know that he would pitch knives at her and that they would break the skin.

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