Something wrong with Rozanov

Slava KPSS – Osadki (Precipitation / Rainfall)

Moscow, winter 2004 – autumn 2006

After their mother’s death, Ilya and Alexey were raised to be real Russian men. In the understanding of their father, an officer and retired police colonel, a man growing up in the bleak, sullen space of post-Soviet Russia is one who doesn’t whine, doesn’t cry — even when crying is necessary — doesn’t smile or laugh much because that isn’t masculine, and works doggedly for the good of his family and the good of the Motherland. He doesn’t suffer, even when in great pain; he doesn’t lose things; he treats everything with responsibility and honor, with a detached martial coldness and universal humility, because — well, our lot is small and humble: to live this life as a decent human being. Statistically, such “real Russian men,” upon reaching the age of fifty, after pouring an even number of shots of warm vodka into themselves and smoking one last cigarette from the cheapest pack, go and hang themselves from a pipe or a rafter under the ceiling of a rusty garage. They do so without saying a word to their wives or children; without superfluous epithets or farewells, without suicide notes. They simply take with them that crushing weight of silence they carried on their shoulders all their lives, never having dared to express sincerity or the simplest, most banal, sorrowful human feelings. Living was boring for Grigory. He had never acquired a wide circle of friends; former colleagues and superiors did not strive to maintain contact with him, and to write or call them himself would mean imposing, which went against his rules and principles. Secrecy and emotional callousness — bred by a hard past that had broken him, fed him through the merciless thresher of wartime and post-war eras — along with the unaccepted burden of guilt for his wife’s death, resting on his shoulders like an invisible iceberg of black ice, led him to a single consolation: a bottle of vodka or cheap cognac, far below the station of a former colonel. Ilya had no chance to step out of his training regimen after the funeral; he stayed late at evening practices after school more often than before. Upon returning home, he would frequently see the silhouette of his father sitting at the table through the glass-paneled kitchen door. There was no one else home; his father was alone. A deadly silence hung in the apartment; only the antique clock in the corner of the hallway clicked unevenly, measuring out seconds on the ribbon of passing time. They did not speak of Irina. Ilya was terrified that they might all suddenly forget her at once — simply open their eyes one morning and not have her be the first thing they remembered upon waking. Irina’s photographs were also removed from public view, but one of them — the very one that used to stand in a frame on the nightstand by her bed, and from which the engraving for her monument was later etched — Ilya hid under his mattress, folded in two. Across Irina’s neck on the photo paper, a crease had formed, looking like a loose, messy suture. Could what Ilya felt looking at his mother’s photograph be called anguish or grief? There were no books or encyclopedias in their house that prescribed what a thirteen-year-old boy who had lost his mother was supposed to do. He simply wore his cross and continued to live his ordinary life, shuttling from school to the hockey stadium, then home, and doing it all over again, day after day. Closing himself off was the best solution he found. A school teacher once spoke to him, their homeroom teacher — a plump forty-five-year-old woman who looked into his eyes with a very anxious expression that seemed feigned and false to Ilya. She said Ilya could always talk to her if he needed to. Talk about what, exactly? Crying was forbidden. He had promised his mother that, saying goodbye to her in the church as she lay in the coffin. Promises must be kept, because men always keep their word. Mom died. Mom is not coming back, and she will never be again. She will never hug him, never pop a pimple on his forehead and cauterize it with stinking calendula tincture. She won't tell him to wear a headband to dry out the skin on his face, nor paint his sore, inflamed throat with iodine; she won't come to competitions to run out from the stands onto the ice and hug Ilya, who would, of course, be embarrassed by her feelings and warmth because the boys were watching and would laugh. None of this will ever happen again. She ended her life herself because she could no longer endure it. Something had been gnawing at her from the inside, sucking out the love, the tenderness, and the energy; she became small and lethargic, extinguished, unbeautiful, and so she swallowed twenty pills of Phenazepam. She vomited, but she swallowed the vomit back down so that everything would go according to plan — there is probably nothing more humiliating than surviving when you want to settle scores with your own life. His father, though stern in disposition, always called a spade a spade; likewise, he called deathdeath, no more and no less. He didn't explain to Ilya what it meant, but the boy was observant enough to fill in the missing voids of knowledge about life — and death included — in his own head. It was just a pity that his father kept insisting on calling it an "accident." A couple of times a week, the Vetrovs came over: thirteen-year-old Svetlana and her mother. They helped with cooking and cleaning: they washed the floors, watered the potted flowers on the windowsill that were gradually withering from cold and lack of light, washed and ironed clothes, wiped dust from the numerous cabinets and shelves that were long out of style. Once, they even washed the large crystal chandelier hanging in the living room. Afterward, the room became bright, clean, and luminous, as if the sun had emerged from behind the clouds on a frosty winter afternoon and illuminated the snowdrifts with a whirlwind of shining sparks. While cleaning, the women would turn on a music channel on the TV or the old radio sitting on the piano; these were the only episodes when music played in the Rozanov house. Looking at Svetlana, with her attentive green eyes and a mind-blowing mop of tight curls, Ilya thought for the first time that perhaps he liked girls like her. He didn't have to do anything with this "like": the attraction was pure, sincere, stemming from the curiosity and thirst for sensory knowledge of a child gradually becoming a teenager. He and Ilya often discussed his success in hockey — Svetlana was already dreaming that Rozanov would become a high-class player with a great future in sports, and constantly said that her father thought the same. Young Sveta cooked excellently, although, as she said, she didn't particularly like it. Her mother helped her fry potatoes for the Rozanovs and make soup with chicken bouillon; the taste of these dishes was very different from what Irina used to make, but Ilya didn't complain and happily wolfed down what was put on his plate while Sveta and her mom sat nearby at the table, watching him with anxiety and pity. Sometimes it happened that Grigory had lunch or dinner with them: the women would then retreat from the kitchen to find other chores around the house, and Ilya was left alone with his father. The dialogues were short. “How’s school?” “Fine.” “When’s practice?” “Tomorrow at four.” Both fell silent, spoons clinking against plates. “What does the coach say?” “Everything’s good.” Grigory rose from the table, slowly and heavily, with a sigh that made Ilya flinch and tense up out of old habit — scenes of past punishments and the dangerous glint of the army belt buckle in the bluish light of the TV screen were firmly lodged in his memory. His father’s movements triggered a simple automatic reaction in him, a conditioned reflex like in Pavlov’s experiments, dictating:if you can't hit, run.Ilya lowered his spoon into the plate, continuing to chew the remnants of soup in his mouth, and watched as Rozanov Senior took a bottle of Ararat "5 Stars" cognac — a gift from someone for the past New Year — out of the cupboard above the stove. It was the first time his father drank like that in front of him, putting his lips directly to the neck of the bottle. Grigory drank in one long pull: Ilya saw the Adam's apple bobbing under the bumpy reddish skin of his father's neck, convulsively letting gulp after gulp pass through. “Dad,” Ilya said anxiously, almost whispering, watching the bottle gradually empty. “Maybe that’s enough?” He instantly realized that saying this was a big mistake. Grigory sniffed loudly, drawing in the tears brought on by the strong alcohol, set the bottle on the counter by the sink, and swung his arm over Ilya’s head. The younger son had enough dexterity and reaction speed to duck his father’s fist flying toward his cheek and grab him by the wrist. The quarrel was quiet but severe: they couldn't shout at the top of their lungs because the Vetrovs were on the other side of the wall; but they wanted to shout very much — at least, Grigory did. His reddened forehead was covered in sweat, and in his eyes burned either hatred or fear — Ilya couldn't distinguish which. He held his father by the wrist, squeezing his fingers harder and harder, looking him in the eye. It was terrifying to the point of impossibility; he wanted to cover his head with both hands, hide under the table, or run away, but something inside stopped him, pushed him outward to meet this quarrel, in which for the first time in his life he was trying not to be lower in rank, but at least equal, or perhaps even stronger. His father's arm under the tight grip of Ilya's fingers felt dry and thin, devoid of the firm masculine muscles on the forearms that little Ilyusha remembered when painting in his head the image of a father who was not the most affectionate, but still loved. Nothing remained of the former childhood love; Rozanov Junior felt this clearly. That evening, Ilya realized for the first time that he was a man who could fight back. This did not please him at all. His father, Grigory, was obviously becoming an old man, feeble and angry, and his helplessness only bred a malice that increasingly began to overflow its banks.

***

Ilya, having turned fifteen, was drawn to where all boys his age are drawn. The episode from the summer of 2003, when he first tried drinking beer and smoking, still lived in his memory — he hadn’t liked it then, it was scary and shameful, but now everything was completely different. During short breaks between classes, he and his classmates would run out onto the porch, taking the stairs two at a time, fly down the steps, and rush between the lilac and hawthorn bushes toward the electrical substation that stood at the very end of the schoolyard. There, they smoked blue Winston or Kent, sharing one cigarette among two or three, hiding from the PE teacher who sat in the far wing of the school building, the windows of his cramped cubbyhole facing directly onto the substation. When the bell rang from the open windows of the school, they would push the bravest one (chosen at random) from around the corner to check that no one was in the PE teacher's window, and then rush back to class in a noisy crowd. They were late, they were scolded for the stench of tobacco on their school shirts, threatened with parents being called to school, but Rozanov was cut some slack knowing his family situation and his success in sports. He was growing up handsome, stately, tall, and strong due to exhausting physical exertion, and he was forgiven much for his mistakes and bad grades: allowed to rewrite important tests or retake a poem recitation after school. This state of affairs suited Ilya, though it annoyed his school buddies. In September 2006, when Ilya entered the ninth grade, he was "called out" (for a fight) for the first time. There was no special reason for the fight, nor was a reason needed: the boys' environment lived by its own unspoken laws, following the erratic challenges of hormonal aggression. Those who felt strength showed strength, and at their age, this moved to a new level: harmless thumbtacks placed on the chair of the most downtrodden loser in class were no longer interesting to anyone. They needed entertainment of a different order — for example, knocking out each other's teeth, tearing shirt collars soaked in blood, tackling each other to the ground, and kicking ribs. The crowd demanded bread and circuses; the pack needed a leader whom everyone lacking in strength or intellect would follow, to feel protection and belonging to at least some social circle. They agreed to fight in the schoolyard after the eighth period, when most of the teachers had already gone home and there was no one to stop their duel. Ilya and his schoolmate paced around an imaginary ring outlined in a square of four crooked lines the boys had drawn with a stick on the fine, prickly gravel. “Because of your dead mommy, they let you rewrite tests, but not us,” Ilya’s pal, who had challenged him to the fight, suddenly blurted out. He wanted to rile Ilya up and provoke him. “Think you’re the coolest guy here?” The reaction was instantaneous, faster than all the victorious passes with which Ilya hammered pucks into the opponents' net on the ice. Rozanov didn't have to exert even a percent of his effort to lay his opponent on the ground — they tumbled into the dirt together, raising clouds of dry gray dust around them. It was his first time fighting like this; his whole body moved intuitively, at random, holding as a guide scenes from the oldRocky Balboamovies Ilya had watched in childhood with his older brother. He grabbed his enemy by the lapels and threw him onto his back, sitting on top, pinning the other boy's ribs with his knees. It was hot — the sun, still bright in a summer-like way, shone on the back of his head; his back quickly became soaked, gluing his white school shirt to his skin on a thin layer of sweat. The torso under Ilya bucked and twitched, showering him with obscenities, trying to throw him off, but he squeezed his legs tighter and tighter, holding the person down right beneath him. Rozanov swung from the elbow and landed a fist first on the jaw with a hook, and then, without pausing, on the bridge of the nose with a short, quick blow. The knuckles on his fist, stained with someone else's blood, ached, and for some reason, this seemed pleasant to Ilya. Feeling the body of another rival beneath him, writhing in pain and resisting the blows with his last strength, was pleasant too. “Don’t get up,” he said in a deliberately low voice, watching scarlet blood gush from the nostrils of his now-former school friend, shimmering under the bright sunbeams. The body beneath him moved, but not as actively as before his blows. “I’m telling you, fucker, don’t get up.” The fight ended quickly. Ilya left the battlefield without visible damage, except for scratches on his face and neck and a torn sleeve on his shirt. The crowd watching the battle met him with triumph — they patted him approvingly on the back, which flattered him, but overall, he didn't care. He quickly grabbed his things from the pile of school backpacks lying on the ground, took his MP3 player out of his bag, and walked away, untangling his headphones as he went. Because of the fight, which he had to wait an hour and a half after classes to start, he missed an important practice and, on top of that, tore his shirt. The feeling of deserved victory was stifled by anxiety growing as he approached home — his father was waiting there — and a vile bitterness in his heart that Ilya felt because this useless piece of shit, who got what he deserved, had dared to open his mouth about his mother. It didn't matter anymore. He lit a cigarette, standing right by the entrance to his building. If his father tried to raise a hand against him again, Ilya could stop him — he definitely could; they had already established that. “Why aren't you at practice?” came the voice from the living room, interrupted by the sounds of the news report from the TV. Ilya didn't answer and walked silently into his room, which he used to share with his brother, but Alexey had recently moved in with his new girlfriend, so the room was at Ilya's disposal. He threw his jacket onto a chair and collapsed onto the bed without taking off his school uniform, dirty with dust and blood. Heavy fatherly footsteps were heard outside the door. “I asked you,” he continued when he entered the room and stood half a meter from the bed where Ilya lay. “Why aren't you at practice?” “Get off me,” Ilya answered briefly and sat up on the bed, leaning his back against the cold wall. He looked at his father from under his brows, hiding his eyes under his long curly bangs, and realized that his father saw the bruised hands, the stains of dust and blood on the shirt, the sleeve burst at the seams, and, moreover, definitely smelled the tobacco emanating from his clothes and hair. Grigory himself hadn't smoked in the last twenty or thirty years, so he could smell the stench of tobacco a mile away. “What did you say?” Not a single muscle twitched on Grigory’s face. He had a distinctive feature: when his anger reached its apogee, his whole face seemed to freeze; he almost didn't blink and compressed his lips so tightly that they turned into a thin line, hardly capable of letting sound through. “I said: get off me.” In the next second, Ilya received a ringing slap. Under the blow of Grigory’s lashing palm, his face turned sharply toward the window, as if there were a freshly oiled hinge in his neck. From the surprise, the pain, and the heat in his cheek, he went almost deaf for a moment and didn't notice that his father was about to land a second blow, silently, without uttering a single word. The second slap landed on the other cheek, and Ilya’s head jerked in the opposite direction, toward the wardrobe standing against the wall behind his bed. Sparks showered from his eyes. The blows were unexpectedly severe and strong; his jaw ached on both sides, making his head feel swollen from the inside. Grigory placed a chair in the center of the room and said, barely unclamping his teeth: “Sit.” Rozanov Junior slowly slid off the bed, frantically thinking whether to continue the fight or stop. This time, there was such unbridled strength in his father, as if he had become a young, vigorous soldier again, as he was before. Scarier than the blows was his voice, cold and metallic like a sharpened blade. “Sit, I said.” Everything hinted that he should obey the order. The breath in Ilya's chest beat in time with his racing pulse; he was instantly soaked in sweat, just like an hour earlier when the hot September sun shone on his back: his shirt stuck vilely to his spine again. Footsteps were heard behind him: Grigory walked out the door, surprisingly unhurriedly reached the bathroom — judging by the sound — something clattered there, and then the steps headed back toward the younger son's room. The steps landed on the old worn parquet with heaviness and a creak. Grigory slowly walked around Ilya and stood right in front of him: Ilya only had time to notice that a home hair clipper lay in his father's hand, then a heavy hand with calloused skin on the fingertips took Ilya by the chin and tilted his head up — so that his father could look him in the eye. He spoke in such a disgustingly calm tone that Ilya’s guts clenched: “Now listen to me carefully and remember what I tell you for the rest of your life.” The rough hand pressed painfully on his gums and teeth through the thin skin of his cheeks, which were already burning with pain. Grigory continued: “You don't have to love me. You can even hate me. But you, you filthy little pup, will respect me.” Grigory’s eyes looked like two transparent, empty pieces of ice dangling on the surface of his red-rimmed eye sockets. With his thumb, he switched on the clippers and, continuing to hold his son forcefully by the jaw, landed the blade on the hairline right above the forehead. With a sharp movement, Grigory drove it from Ilya’s forehead to the crown, then moved the clippers to the left, shaving strip after strip. Ilya, lost in fear and the incredible resentment he was choking down in his throat, only saw springy light-brown locks of his own hair falling from his head to the floor. His father worked the razor confidently, clumsily, and carelessly. He finished when he shaved the last strip of hair from the back of his younger son’s head, and said before walking out the door: “I told you a long time ago to get a haircut. You look too much like your mother; it prevents you from being a human being. Now at least you look like a man. Maybe with time, you’ll start acting accordingly.” Looking at the shaved curls scattered on the parquet and over his feet, barely holding back tears, Ilya took away one elementary truth: even if his father was becoming physically weaker, he was still capable of crushing him with authority and humiliation. The balance of power at home was restored.