‘Concessions’

“On quiet days we’d wade through the streets like a dream of drowning.”

Some days Alma and I spent quietly, occupying separate corners of our narrow apartment, sipping tea or coffee or gin and gazing out separate windows on separate vistas – hers an enormous hotel of glass and steel; mine a ruined neighborhood of shanties and improvised housing, broken streets, serpentine alleys, past which the city collapsed into long flats of grassy rail yards and unfinished highrises.

On quiet days we’d wade through the streets like a dream of drowning. In the elevator we never spoke. In this first and remotest district of the old Russian concession we forded our way past strata of all the occupations and liberations that had come and gone and come again in ever-repeating currents. Development had swept over these neighborhoods like waves of architectural nausea, and most traces of the original settlement were long washed away – huge concrete tenements in their stead, monuments to grief, forgetfulness.

Now winter was full in swing, and the sky, heavy with coal smoke, hung low to the street like a vaulted ceiling. Every surface was blackened and gritty, and the smoke left lumps in our throats. Squadrons of elderly city workers hacked away at ice with picks and garden hoes and whenever the wind blew they covered their mouths or hacked black globs on the pavement. It was maybe thirty, thirty-five below, and already our cheeks were turning gray. Icicles formed at our eyelashes and we constantly wiped them so our eyes wouldn’t freeze shut.

Alma strode through the snow as if she were skiing, and sometimes the sound of her humming crested the wind.

We passed an administrative building of Czarist provenance, a colonial railway station, then the architecture suffered a violent shift in narrative – I could see revolutions reenacted in the angles and brickwork of all these subsequent developments, the rubble of former governments, brief occupations, rebellions that failed, all of it legible in the increasingly simple masonry, austere ornamentation, the desolate symmetry of poverty, none of it meant to be permanent yet standing here still.

Before us opened a neighborhood of long four-story apartments, red-bricked and black-roofed, open balconies sagging under many decades of snow and ice. Some of the doors were pilastered: these homes were built long enough ago that the designers had allowed a concession or two toward aesthetics. The first floor of each building was either given over to shops and takeout restaurants or simply abandoned.

For a moment Alma and I stood beside each other, and her face was nearly lost to her whipping black hair, and maybe there was a smile behind it but it was impossible to tell. We kept our silence, our distance, for just a second longer. I wrapped my arm around her waist and we walked on.

On our left an apartment building was covered in white graffiti. Though it looked fresh, it was difficult to decipher. Finally I gave up and asked Alma.

“This one says—” She stopped, squinted. Even she was having trouble. “—it says ‘this is our home.’ That one says ‘we still live here.’”

Another graffito, just below, was a touch more legible: We’re not leaving.

“The government wants to take down these buildings, something,” she said. “That one over there says they have nowhere to go. The government will give them some money, but…” Her voice drifted off to a sigh and finished with a shrug.

To warm up we ducked into a shop in the We still live here building.

“Do you think they’ll leave?”

“There is no choice.”

We edged our way through the foyer, squeezing past an unplugged freezer and sooty crates of empty bottles. The air was full of dust and smelled of many smokes – cigarette, creosote, coal. Three people gathered around a little charcoal brazier near the cash box. Some old men played chess, and a woman was slurping up noodles and half-watching a soap opera.

Alma and I pretended to peruse the shelves, and one of the men greeted me, which I reciprocated.

“Just pretend you don’t understand,” Alma hissed. “Don’t be stupid.”

She separated herself from us and moved to the back of the room and started picking through a rack of potato chips. I made small talk with the men at the counter, and the conversation followed the usual script. Alma, meanwhile, did her best to remain invisible. But when I moved to join her the old woman tugged my sleeve and motioned toward the curtained doorway separating the shop from their living quarters.

Her nephew was sick, she said, and gravely so, but by then she was speaking so quickly that I missed the illness’s name. I waved Alma over to help translate.

“Blood sickness,” she mumbled, not really looking at me. “Blood cancer, something.” She sighed. “I don’t know. Stop talking to them.”

“Leukemia?”

She shot me a hateful look and went back to her corner.

I struggled to follow the conversation. Something about an American pharmaceutical company, an experimental pill – and could I contact the company about clinical trials? The grief in her voice was palpable now, and visible too on her leathered face. The men sat at their chessboard and listened softly, sadly.

I agreed to look into it, and the woman shook my hand and grinned and scribbled the medicine’s name on a scrap of paper, along with her phone number. I couldn’t read an inch of her handwriting.

Alma returned with a bottle of juice and a package of cookies. She tossed her money on the counter without saying anything, snatched her change, left. A breeze sliced through the shop from the open door. I caught the back curtain in its billow, a brief reveal of a kitchen table, dirty dishes, a dying houseplant. The men grumbled and rubbed their hands together and leaned toward the brazier.

We exchanged a few more words, and I stuffed the note into my pocket and followed Alma into the frost. The wind seared my face and stole the air from my lungs as soon as I stepped through the canvas flap; I rushed to get my hat and gloves back on, rewrap my scarf.

Alma stood near the tenement’s far corner, her back to me, just a swish of black in the gray haze. She gave me a pitying look when I caught up with her.

“You’re stupid,” she said, and she repeated it in her own language to underscore the point.

We came aroundside the building. Here the brickwork was thoroughly covered in graffiti – so much so that it had lost its intended purpose and become illegible, as if the physical act of creating the messages were more important than anyone receiving it. Had any of those shopkeepers written this?

In places the writing was partially covered with tobacco ads, city notices, movie posters, anything – but it was a barren effort: the taggers just painted over them.

“They probably won’t get their money now,” Alma mused, studying the labyrinth of messages. She shook her head, though whether in sympathy or condescension I couldn’t tell. “You can’t help these people.”

This cacography was already a testament of loss. These were not messages of defiance, but of lamentation, and those ads and posters a sigil of destruction.

“They’re hopeless,” Alma murmured.

I pulled the note from my pocket, and it felt heavier now, warmer in my hand, and I held it up to the wall and compared the script. Somehow the scrap was a fragment of this enormous whole, though where it fit in I couldn’t begin to guess.

“Let me look at that.”

I gave it to her, and she squinted at it a moment, tracing the scrawl with her index finger.

“I can’t translate this,” she said, and with a shrug she tore it to pieces and let the wind have it. The fragments drifted away and turned to apocrypha in the sky. Soon they were indistinguishable from the snow, and then invisible.

Already my cheeks were numb from the cold and I couldn’t tell what kind of face I was making. Alma looked at me strangely.

“I told you not to talk to them,” she said. “They are, how to say, impossible. You can’t help them.”

She stuffed her hands in her pockets and started off again, taking comically wide steps and sliding around on the ice – weary of the neighborhood but happy enough in her boredom, happy enough that she herself was still there to enjoy the day and watch everything behind her disappear into blinding white.

Soon enough we were back at our windows. No sound at all but the wind outside, Alma sipping her tea, the ice in my drink. I’d lost years at this perch, just looking, waiting. But the cranes never moved and the highrises remained unfinished, weaving a patchwork of involuntary parkland and dismal cityscape that disappeared over the horizon like an ellipsis – an unfinished thought passing from speech into memory, repeating itself breathless before collapsing into an endless weary silence.

‘Concessions’ is part of the story cycle Moon Tenements, which will be published in chapbook form in late 2018. Originally published in The Magnitizdat Literary, No. 1.