How Am I Gonna Play Guitar Now?by Marina J. Neary |
Part 1 appears in this issue. |
| conclusion |
“Am I a coward?” Basil kept asking himself as he was running through the woods behind his village. “Am I a fool? Would I rather let the Muslims blow me to pieces than let my friends cut off one goddamn finger?”
He finally stopped and pressed his sweaty forehead against the trunk of a pine tree, waiting for his heartbeat to slow down. How he cherished that tree at that moment. The mere thought of someone chopping it down struck him as blasphemous. There had been talk of clearing that part of the forest to make room for a new collective farm.
“Poor old girl,” Basil whispered, digging his fingers into the sappy bark. “If only I could save you...”
Every Westerner has to have at least one cathartic tree-hugging incident. It suddenly dawned on Basil how much his compatriots disgusted him. What a shame that this mossy primeval paradise was inhabited by ax-bearing savages! Clearly, Belorussians did not deserve to live on such beautiful land. Poles he could tolerate. Lithuanians, maybe. Hell, even Jews! After all, Jews are sensible people who do not spit into the well from which they drink. Anyone but those Eastern Slavs who only knew how to mutilate and pollute!
Chernobyl, Afghanistan... Those were not random disasters. Those were omens, painfully blatant yet still ignored. Belorussians deserve a medal for screwing themselves over and then passing their own stupidity for martyrdom. They pour poison into their own rivers and then wonder why their babies are born lobster-handed.
As much as Basil despised his fellow-villagers, he could not hide in the woods forever. It was getting chilly, and he had nothing on except for his undershirt with a faded Harley Davidson logo. Reluctantly, he detached from the trunk of the tree and looked towards his house. There was no light in the windows.
“They’re gone, thank goodness,” he sighed and headed home.
He remembered that Alesya Melekh was supposed to come to the village any day. What part of her body will be pierced this time? What color will her hair be? What filthy joke will she tell him? What if he shared his epiphany about Eastern Slavs with her? No doubt, she would agree with him and reward him for his wit.
As soon as Basil walked into the house, the lights went on. The kitchen was filled with neighborhood boys.
Basil cursed quietly, and when someone swiftly hopped to the door and locked it, he cursed louder.
Andrei placed his hand on Basil’s shoulder and spoke with brotherly tenderness: “You can’t wiggle your way out of it, Bas. We won’t leave until our job is done.”
“You’ve got no job here!” Basil exclaimed, shoving him aside.
“It ain’t for you to decide,” a stocky black-bearded man interjected. “Too late. You ain’t got no say in the matter, Wolenski.”
That man was Anton Melekh, Alesya’s father, the best butcher in the village. He cracked his neck and rubbed his hands, as he usually did before slaughtering a boar.
“Listen up, rooster. You got my baby girl knocked up. Looks like your fancy rubbers failed. And I says, my grandbaby’s Daddy ain’t going to no Kabul. He’s staying right here and paying child support. So, be a sport and present that finger of yours already. I let you keep your dick. That’s mighty generous on my part. Seize him, boys.”
Basil watched in horror as his playmates took off from their seats and rushed towards him, as if they had been waiting for Anton’s orders all this time. He heard their jubilant howls and his own hoarse voice, cursing every one of them.
Gregory did not participate in the seizure because of his maimed hand. As a guest of honor, he was observing the scene from a corner, the same one where Basil’s mother had set up a miniature shrine.
Andrei Melekh was twirling the ax, biting his lips. One could tell that this scene was causing him a fair amount of discomfort.
“Quick, get him drunk!” he cried through tears.
Somebody shoved a bottle of vodka into Basil’s mouth, nearly breaking his front teeth. At first Basil kept turning his head from side to side. Then he realized that it was in his best interests to swallow as much vodka as possible, because he had no chance of escaping the ax. Resigned, he gulped the remaining content of the bottle greedily and then asked for more.
“There’s no more!” somebody yelled. “The second bottle got smashed!”
“That’s enough!” Anton Melekh commanded. “Take him to the table now.”
“I’m not ready!” Basil kept screaming.
Andrei tagged at his father’s arm imploringly. “Hear that, Pa? He’s not ready yet. We need another bottle of something.”
“Oh, quit whining,” Anton snapped, pulling his arm away. “There isn’t much use in you. Can’t even stand up for your sister’s honor.”
He tore the ax from his son’s hands, nearly splitting his own forehead with the blade, and made his way to the table.
“This goddamn procedure is taking more time than it should,” he said. “Well, boys, hold him down and get your hands out of my way.”
Basil let out one last scream when he saw Anton’s square bearded head with an ax raised above it.
When blood splashed on the table he could not scream, as his throat filled with vomit. The vodka and the supper came out of him at once, mixing with the blood. The boys fled back. Andrei buried his face in Gregory’s shoulder. Everyone stood quietly for a few seconds. Something had gone wrong. Instead of one, there were three fingers lying on the table.
The surgeon did not seem perturbed in the least. He took a few steps back, examining his handiwork.
“Well, what do you know? A job overdone, eh? Damn, who would’ve thought?”
Unable to make any sound except for husky rattle, Basil got up from the chair and slowly brought his dripping right hand to his eyes. His cheeks inflated as if he was going to vomit again, and the boys drew a few more steps back. Andrei was shaking in the corner, with Gregory trying to console him.
“Don’t be a girl now. It’s all over. He’s a tough buck, I tell you. Look, he’s still standing.”
As soon as Gregory had spoken those words, Basil collapsed.
* * *
When he came to his senses the next morning, the first thing that he saw was Alesya Melekh, his occidental deity who had played her part in his execution. She was sitting on the edge of his bed, with her cellophane-wrapped legs crossed, chipping the polish off her toenails, letting the ashes from her cigarette fall right on his sheets.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Les?” Basil asked.
He was growing aware of the pain in his right hand but tried his best to ignore it for as long as possible. He could not muster the fortitude to look at the bloody mess under the hastily applied bandages.
“No idea what you’re ranting about,” Alesya said, moving away from him. “Go back to sleep.”
Leaning on his good hand, Basil elevated himself on the pillows.
“No, I’m up, really. Had I no right to know the truth?”
“About what? My father’s childhood dreams to play field doctor?”
“No, about the baby.”
Alesya tossed her head back and blew smoke through her shivering nostrils.
“Oh, that...”
“Yes, that.”
“It’s not like I’m keeping it. There’s this doctor in Minsk. My roommate Nadia told me about him. She goes to him all the time, and she can’t say enough good things about him. There’s nothing this guy won’t do for a box of candy. And if I throw in a blow job, he’ll put that metal spiral thing in my womb to make sure this screw-up doesn’t happen again. I don’t trust rubbers anymore. My faith in them is shaken.”
“I thought Western women didn’t get abortions.”
“Bah! Whom am I kidding? It’s all a lie. I’m just a village slut with a diploma. And that’s just a piece of paper. God, what a bore...”
“So there’s no chance of me talking you out of it?”
“Afraid not.”
“Well, in that case, good luck at the doctor’s. So we’ll both be bleeding for a while, huh?”
“Looks like. I guess it’s our punishment.”
“For what?”
“For thinking that we could rise above this radioactive swamp. We’re such idiots. There’s no Western promise. Not for us.”
She tossed the cigarette butt out the window, pulled the shirt over her rounding belly that was destined to become flat again in a few days, and walked out of the room. It was the first time that Basil saw her walk normally, without any ankle-twisting or hip-swishing. It was not the walk of a goddess descending from Olympus. It was the walk of a girl on her way to an abortion clinic.
With Alesya out of sight, Basil could allow himself some weakness. His head rolling on the pillow from side to side, he began moaning, timidly and quietly at first, like a wounded puppy, but then louder, until his howling could be heard in the next room.
Instantly, Andrei and Gregory flew in, brisk as two young sparrows. They brought him a jug of freshly brewed moonshine and a bottle of painkillers.
“Take this and you’ll be back on your feet by tonight,” Gregory advised. “It’s just a little goodie basket from my Mama.”
“And my Mama is making your favorite patties with eggs and cabbage,” Andrei interjected cheerfully, having already recovered from the horror of the night before. “Doesn’t it feel good to stay in bed all day? Hey, there’s a soccer match on TV, Brazil against Germany. You don’t mind if we just stay here and watch? My TV is busted.”
They turned the TV on and hopped on Basil’s bed without removing their shoes. For about fifteen minutes they chatted among themselves, pointing at the screen, elbowing each other. Then Gregory slapped himself on the knee, as if he had remembered something of grave importance.
“Bas, we’re gonna need your help tonight. Get this. Ivan Astakhov took my motorcycle without permission and decided to have a little race with a cop. He completely forgot that the bike wasn’t even registered. So now I can’t get to town.”
“Yeah, Bas, we gotta teach him a lesson,” Andrei said. “Tonight, as he’s coming home from the fields, we’ll ambush him behind Gregory’s barn and kick some sense into him. We’ll fix that bastard, yeah.”
“Why don’t you ask your Daddy?” Basil muttered. “He’ll fix all the bastards in the world with a single swing of an ax.”
He looked at his maimed hand, at the orphaned guitar in the corner, and then his playmates in the eyes, for the first time since the axing incident. Andrei winced from that glance and pulled Gregory by the sleeve into kitchen where Basil’s mother was frying bacon for them.
* * *
“What’s wrong with him, Grish?” Andrei asked when the two were already at the table. “He thinks he’s some sort of a prince just because he pounded my sis a few times.”
“Nah... Give him time, Andrei. He’ll come around. The boy’s not stupid. He knows who his real friends are.”
Basil heard everything they said — lowering voices was not a custom in that region where all men were watchful, loving brothers and had nothing to conceal from each other. He turned his head towards the wall and bit into the pillow, thinking of the three fingers he’d left on the kitchen table, the six strings on the guitar he would never touch again, the eighteen years of tender devotion to Andrei and Gregory, and God knows how many more years of nausea from seeing their faces while walking down the streets of that merry village beneath the radioactive Belorussian sky.
Copyright © 2009 by Marina J. Neary
