by Yekaterina Droog
(This story contains themes of war.)
Styopka woke up. His bed was shaking as if he were on the train again. He loved trains: you didn’t have to do anything – you simply sat on the berth and looked through the dusty window at the barren fields, black factory pipes, and shaggy dogs running in front of small houses, their ears flapping up and down. Styopka loved dogs. Dogs were funny. They fetched sticks. Grandma Polina had a dog. Her dog had white matted fur and fleas, but Styopka liked her anyway. Grandma named her Zhuchka, but Styopka liked to call her Cat. Cat was a funny name for a dog. Grandma Polina thought it was stupid, but the dog didn’t care.
Styopka’s bed shook again, its metal springs squeaking from the effort. Styopka sat up. A few of his roommates crouched on the floor, covering their ears with their hands and whimpering. A little boy with a big head two rows away from Styopka was giggling, his eyes skipping from one crouching man to another. All of a sudden, everything in the room started trembling — the straight rows of metal beds, the linoleum floor, the white ceiling, and the yellow walls. Styopka felt as if he were inside Baba Yaga’s izba as it was running away on its thin chicken legs. He had seen a similar scene in one of the kids’ movies once. He was not a kid, of course, but he liked kids’ movies. Kids’ movies were funny. The house on chicken legs was funny. Baba Yaga was scary, though. She baked kids in her oven and ate them. Baba Yaga looked a little like Styopka’s grandmother: she also had a dark kerchief over her hair, a sharp hooked nose, an apron, and a long skirt, but Grandma Polina was not mean like Baba Yaga. Grandma Polina was simply very tired. She often yelled at Styopka because she was tired of giving him baths, dressing him, and cooking meals. Styopka could be a very tiring man. Sometimes, he could even be an idiot. One time, he was an idiot when he had accidentally dropped his plate of borscht onto the floor. Another time, he had dumped his mashed potatoes onto the table to see if he could build a snowman. Grandma Polina had become very, very tired then, and she screamed and screamed, but she hadn’t tried putting him in the oven. Not even once.
There was another loud boom outside, and the painted cement wall behind the boy with a large head suddenly split, a long crack cutting through it like a lightning bolt. The boy with a large head turned yellow with powdered paint and stopped giggling, his eyes wide open. The window next to Styopka’s bed shattered, sharp icicles of glass raining onto the windowsill. Styopka dove towards the floor and crammed himself under the bed. He was scared of glass. Once, when he had been trying to reach for the black-and-white photograph of his mother, he had forgot that the cabinet where Grandma Polina displayed the picture had glass doors. Grandma Polina kept the panes very clean. When his hand smashed right through one of them, Grandma Polina got very tired. She ran in from the kitchen, screamed, ran back to the kitchen, returned with a dish towel, wrapped it around Styopka’s bleeding hand, ran out of the room again, and returned with a broom and a dustpan. Styopka’s hand hurt a lot. The towel turned heavy with blood. Styopka got so scared that he fell down and went to sleep. He woke up from the burning sensation in his cheeks — Grandma Polina was slapping him to help him wake up. Soon after that, Grandma brought him to this house. They took a train to get here. It was his first time on the train. He loved trains. Grandma Polina said he would be better off with other people like him. She said she would come back to visit him.
Since the fine wire mesh in front of the windowpane had shielded Styopka from the flying shards, he soon felt safe enough to crawl out from under his bed and make his way towards the door on the other side of the room. He wanted to warn Grandma Polina about this shaking house. The fat man from the bed next to Styopka’s was already at the door, pounding his head against the doorjamb and scratching at the wall. Styopka had forgotten that the room was always locked.
As Styopka tiptoed around the mooing men lying prostrate and crouching in the aisles, there was another screeching sound followed by a deafening boom. A hot blast lifted Styopka off his feet and slammed him against the metal frame of a bed.
When Styopka came to, he saw that both the fat man and the locked door were gone, replaced by a large pit in the floor. Beyond the pit, lay the remnants of the blue corridor. Styopka’s pant legs were wet. His head hurt. Something soft wriggled under his butt. Shifting his eyes down, he saw that it was the little boy with a large head. The boy’s cheeks were smeared with tears mixed with yellow paint; his lips were moving as if he was screaming, but he was not making a sound. Styopka slid off the boy’s chest and tried calling for Grandma Polina, but his mouth made no sound either, no matter how hard he tried. The whole room was eerily silent. Stunned, Styopka hugged his knees and started rocking back and forth.
There was no way Styopka could have known that, as of this morning, he and his new roommates were thrust into the middle of a war zone. There was no way he could have grasped the convoluted reasons for why his new home, which was neither a military base nor an arms factory, was being shelled by one of the glorious armies. How could he have ever comprehended the brilliant military stratagems and the fantastical lies fueling the fighting? How could he have understood that his father’s people had attacked his mother’s people in order to protect the latter from the former? Styopka was, after all, nothing but an “idiot” — a person of no value or interest to anyone intelligent enough to carry a gun and read a newspaper.
Category: Featured, Short Story