Rainy evening
by Zdravka Evtimova
[ fiction - january 03 ]
Somebody was pounding at the door of the flat. The bell did not ring any more, there was no linoleum on the floor. Her brothers had sold it half a year ago. It was only in the evenings, when her mother came home from work dog-tired, that her sons and Nora sat at table to have dinner together, all four of them. Their father had gone to work in Poland long ago. "Will you enter that maths contest?" Nora's mother had asked a month ago, looking at Geno, one of the twin brothers. "No, I won't," the boy answered. "Mathematics cannot feed me. Our father might send for my brother and me. We'll clean hotels. I don't believe he's married a Polish woman as they say." "Your maths teacher said you were doing well, son. She wants you to enter the competition." "She's crazy," the boy had snapped.
It seemed the man outside had lost patience, for the door opened and wet shoes splashed muddy water onto the bare concrete in the corridor. The newcomer moved as freely as if he were in his own bathroom.
"Hello. Is anybody here?" a man's thick voice cried out. Nora did not say a word and felt no fear. She simply grabbed the cleaver hidden behind the door of the kitchen. "Hey! Are there people in here?"
What Nora saw in the corridor made her drop the cleaver. A big, strange man in denim overalls stood in her flat shouldering the twisted and ragged figure of a boy. Blood was dripping onto the cement floor. The stranger's blue trouser legs were soiled almost up to the knee with blood.
"So you're in here," the man remarked and asked in a businesslike manner, "Where do you want me to leave this one? There's the second one outside." Nora silently pointed at the plank-bed in the kitchen where she sometimes slept. It was covered with an old, shabby rug.
"He'll mess up the bed," the man pointed out in a non-committal voice. "I can see it's not very clean though, so don't worry. Wait here. I'll go and bring in the other one."
The second one was Gero. His face looked like a sunflower without its seeds, the skin of his cheeks was covered with small sores as if somebody had pierced it with a gimlet.
"Nora," the boy groaned, a stream of blood trickling down his mouth.
"Don't panic," the man said. "There's nothing busted in him. His ribs are OK, he's bleeding from the mouth because he's bitten his tongue. The other one isn't OK and that's a fact. Show me where I can leave him."
Nora entered the living room. When her father still had a job, he had partitioned the room with lacquered smoked boards on which her mother put flowerpots. When her brothers were younger, her mother used to arrange textbooks on them, too. These days, the boys had thrown dirty socks and T-shirts all over the place in a smelly confusion; her parents' broad bed was in the dark part of the room. Nora wondered where she had met the stranger and what he'd say the minute he saw the mess. There were two bunks by the wall, one above the other, in the better half of the room where the twins slept, but the shirts and shorts on the floor looked knee-deep. When the man in the blue overalls came back carrying the boy on his shoulders, Nora took him to the worse half of the room behind the varnished smoked boards.
"I'm sorry I have to bring you in here. It's a little untidy," she mumbled.
"It's a sty," the man commented. "Hey, be careful. He might have some busted ribs. They beat him with iron bars."
"Who were they?"
"Mr Anev's guards. They caught the kids stealing scrap iron from his warehouse."
"Who are you?" Nora asked.
"Why do you want to know?"
"You're very attractive," Nora said, looking at him pertly.
"I'm one of Anev's blokes."
"Then you beat him too?"
The man did not look the least embarrassed; he peeked into her eyes - his were as round and brown as a dog's - and answered flatly, "Yes, I beat both of them."
Nora looked at him silently and saucily; the fellow was tall, thin, with a volcano of bushy, black, tousled hair, which - even not very clean - looked beautiful. A thought crossed her mind: if she had to push him out of the room, she might have to hit him on the back of the head with the cleaver and drag him down the flight of stairs. This would be a very tough task.
"So why did you bring the kids here?" she asked. The man looked at her, showing no embarrassment at all, and explained curtly, "I'm waiting for you to pay me a lev or two for my kindness. If I had left them in the yard outside by the scrap iron, the stray dogs would have pissed on them. It was raining. And there's flu in town. They might have died."
"How much do you want?" Nora asked.
"A fiver," the man answered. "2.5 levs a boy."
Nora watched him carefully: yes, he was quite tall, but looked weak. She could thrash him with the chopper all right, but, well, would those squirts from his gang follow in his tracks? Hardly likely. Hardly, indeed. After beating her brothers, they most were probably drinking beer in some sleazy pub.
"There's something else," the man went on. "Guys said you looked good and I might get lucky. You look good, all right, and I ask myself..."
Nora did not say anything. The gloomy, allergic rain went on knitting its cold strait-jacket for the town. The windows of the other small blocks of flats glowed with faint-hearted light; in the distance, the Struma river glided under the iron bridge, hurrying to flee to Greece as soon as possible. The potted and holed asphalt glittered where the street lamps were not busted - silver seas of asphalt-paved rain flooding the cheap neighbourhood of the town.
"Will you help me to wash the kids?" Nora asked. "I am by myself, they're heavy and I can't lift them."
The man looked at her, flabbergasted; her question appeared absurd to him.
"Are you crazy?" he shouted, his voce and body full of suspicion. "It's a pig sty here and you're a woman. Aren't you ashamed to live in such a hole?"
"Don't you live in a similar hole?" Nora asked him. "I'm positive your mother washes your pants. Your socks, too. If you won't help me, go away."
"Listen, bimbo. I carried these wretches to your hole. They could have died. Is that clear? Give me a fiver. Now."
"I've got no money," Nora declared, looking him straight in the eye. "Even if I had, I wouldn't give you any."
The tall thin man bent over one of the twins who lay prostrate on the bunk, pulled him roughly as if he were wrenching a post out of a fence, then again shouldered him.
"If you have no money, I'll bring him back to the yard of the storehouse," the stranger said. "Is it clear? Let the dogs and bitches piss on him."
"Take something from the apartment instead of money," Nora pointed at the only flowerpot: the single remaining proof of her mother's efforts to brighten the flat.
"Are you crazy or what!" the tall man glared at her. "What the fuck would I do with half-dead flowers... Well. Is it true you your father went to work in Poland and married there?"
"Yes, it is," Nora snapped at him.
"And you take care of your brothers now?"
"Yes," Nora said biting the word into shreds.
"You're in a fine pickle," the stranger stated sounding unconcerned. "Come on, give me a fiver." He still had not taken Gero's shabby body down from his shoulders, and droplets of blood dripped from the kid's face onto the front of his overalls.
"Help me to wash them," Nora repeated.
"You are very insolent," the stranger's head turned nose forward to her. Nonetheless the man obeyed: he left the bigger twin on the bottom bunk and his skull, overgrown with the volcano hair, crashed into the planks of the upper bunk. "Fuck, it's as narrow here as in a rabbit warren," he cursed, his enormous shoe kicking a pile of creased clothes.
"Calm down," Nora warned him. "If you kick about like this the house will collapse." She worked her way into the man's brown eyes and asked, "What's your name?"
"Why are you so interested?"
"Because whenever I fall in love with somebody I write down his name," Nora answered without looking at him." I haven't seen you at the Greasy Café where I work. Take this," she said pushing a rag in his hand. In fact, it was not a rag but an old T-shirt, which she tore into three pieces before the dog-brown eyes of the stranger. "Wipe the blood on his face."
"My name is Petko," the man muttered. "I'm not going to wipe the face of this scum-bag."
"If you call him scum-bag again, I'll cut your belly with the chopper," Nora stood up, pointing to the small hatchet by means she and her mother and had cut the meat with in happier days. Now its blade was rusty; none of the family used it because there was never any meat.
Then she went to the bathroom; of course, there was a schedule according to which different neighbourhoods in town had drinking water on. Now the drinking tap was dry, so she grabbed the 20-litre canister and after a tedious slalom dragged it to the plank-bed in the kitchen in which her brother lay, a kid good at maths, in a torn wet jacket and trousers soiled with blood.
"It hurts, Nora," the boy cried out. She started washing his face, then tried to take off his trousers and froze in her tracks. His left knee was swollen, black and hideous. The kid groaned quietly. "It hurts. It hurts a lot. A lot."
Nora rushed to stranger and said, "His leg is broken."
"It's not," the man shouted at her. He had already started wiping the blood from the second twin's face and chest.
"The other one's leg is broken. The one in the kitchen," Nora shouted back. "Get up. You'll carry him to the bus-stop, then you'll help me get him into the bus to the hospital."
"You're nuts!" the man cursed. "Why should I carry him?"
"You are a human being, aren't you?" Nora asked quietly. "His leg is broken."
"If you keep on babbling, I'll break your leg too," the man told her calmly. "I'll take the small TV set." Spiders jumped out of his eyes and caught the two halves of the room in their cobwebs. The only thing of any value they trapped was the puny black-and-white TV set that their mother had to sell months ago in order to pay the ticket to Varna and send one of her sons to a maths competition. "I'll take the TV set and after that I'll carry this wretch to the bus-stop. I can carry the other one as well, but I'll take the alarm clock, this one, on the table. I'll take... er...er..." he did not like anything and trying to make the best of the bad bargain, added, "I'll take the cushion in the corner. The embroidered one."
At that moment, the smaller twin, who was absolutely no good at any subject at school, swollen and black after the beating, said spitting blood with his words, "Nora, I am OK. Bring Geno to the hospital."
Nora looked at him, noticed a shadow in his green, sly eyes; all his cunning had evaporated and it was a sad thing, but she did not say anything.
"That was grandpa's alarm clock," the boy said, spitting blood onto what was once a Persian rug and now had no nationality whatsoever.
After a while, Nora and the stranger walked in a single file to the front of the block, under the rain in the tight screw-press of April; the tall man in the blue overalls carried the boy with the limp, damaged leg on his back. Nora padded after him trying to protect her brother from the downpour with an umbrella.
"Guys say you are pregnant by Gozo, the owner of the Greasy Café," the stranger muttered to the rain, which gave him no answer. "Listen," he went on. "Give me the front door key of your flat. Leave the brat in the hospital and then I'll take the TV set."
Nora did not respond.
"Give me the key!" the stranger repeated, bending like a woman in childbirth. The boy's quiet groans dissolved in the rain and mixed with the wet noise of their steps. She did not respond again; the tall man leant down abruptly and left the boy on the ground. Nora said nothing, bent down, clutched at her brother's coat and lifted him. The boy was heavy. Although his body was not big, she could hardly carry it along the sidewalk.
"It hurts! It hurts!" the boy moaned. "Nora, give him the key. Let him take the TV. Please!"
The stranger's overall was dripping wet; the legs of his trousers were too short. They were sodden, too, and stuck to his skin.
"You didn't give me a fiver," he reminded her, throwing his words into the rain. Nora did not answer. She had already lifted the boy on her shoulders and tried to take the first step. Her foot slid. She staggered but kept her balance and took another step. The kid's leg hit the curb and his sick voce pleaded: "Nora, please, give him the TV. Give it to him! Give it to him!"
Nora said nothing. She straightened up. Very slowly, step by step, she walked on to the bus stop that had thawed in the rain. Its silhouette looked like a mysterious, unattainable galaxy in the dark. Suddenly the man caught up with her, grabbed the boy and without saying a world shouldered him as easily as is if he shovelled sand into a ditch.
"You are a beast," the man said.
"I will not give you the TV set," Nora snarled. "I'll not give you a fiver. Remember. I'll meet you somewhere, and I'll beat you black and blue by the end of the week. Today is Wednesday. By Sunday you won't be happy and kicking."
The tall man said nothing. He spat, but the rain quickly brushed his spittle from the sidewalk. Then he held the boy with one hand, ordered him to shut up and spat again. His right hand sank into the pocket of his overalls, wet like a soldier's shoe in the deluge, rummaged around, found nothing, then tried another pocket. Finally, he extracted a five-lev bill folded four times over and waved it in the dark.
"I'll give you a fiver if you sleep with me," he said lifting the money to Nora's nose. "I won't take your TV and I'm giving you a fiver at that. I must be crazy."
"You aren't crazy," Nora said. "I am pretty and you are not blind."
"Give him the TV, Nora. Please. Tell him to walk more quickly," the boy moaned. "It hurts a lot. It hurts."
"I have wanted to get laid for two months now," the tall man mumbled to the rain and to the kid who was groaning on his back.
"You'll help me to clean my place," Nora said pushing his shoulder. "We'll clean my place and you'll get laid."
A car passed by, its tires cutting the moist lane of the speedway, throwing waterfalls of freezing rain over the three of them. But Nora was not scared. She was sopping wet. She knew that at 10.30pm her mother would come back home from work. Perhaps she already had. Then she must have seen the other twin on the plank-bed, the blood on the now colourless Persian rug, the dirty marks of the stranger's enormous shoes.
"Where do you live?" Nora turned to the man who had already reached the bus stop. "You can't come to my place after the doctor has examined Geno in the hospital. My mother is coming home from Sofia."
"I thought we could do it at your place," the man said, looking at her.
"You are no good at thinking," Nora interrupted him.
"Nora, it hurts! It hurts so much!" her brother shouted, deafening the thunderbolt that the black pack of the clouds dumped on them. "It hurts so much."
"I haven't touched a woman for two months," the tall man mumbled. His right hand let go of the boy and reached out to Nora's wet turtleneck sweater.
"No," she cut him short. "You still haven't taken him to the hospital. Give me the fiver," she said, and hid the wet bill in her coat pocket. "You'll be OK! You'll be OK," she whispered to her brother. "We'll catch the bus and you'll be OK."
