Page 26 - WTP Vol.X#1

Iwas taking a nap when there was a furious banging on my door. I opened it to Slava, standing there, holding a wooden bushel basket filled with colored eggs, I thought at first. He pushed the basket into my arms, and then shut and locked it behind me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was resting my eyes.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m going to use your bath- room now.” He raced through my kitchen to the bath- room beyond.
“It must be an emergency,” I said and set the basket down on the little table at the kitchen. I picked up one of the eggs, thinking it was a painted pysanka. But they weren’t pysanky, which are carved from wood, with a certain dull weight to them. The one I was holding felt lighter, and had a kind of metallic fleck to it, like the gold leaf of an ikon. I shook it be- side my ear, but it didn’t reveal any secrets. I set the egg, whatever it was, back into the basket. “Hey, you all right in there?”
Slava came over to my house sometimes. He’d bring sausages and cheese that we’d eat from a charcuterie board, taking turns spearing things with one of my three knives. Other times, he’d bring a couple beers, Trappist ales, really, that he got from someone he knew, and we’d open them on my table and let them breathe for at least ten minutes before he’d let us de- cant them into glasses and drink. “It’s very important,” he said, “to let them breathe.”
Lately, he’d been looking for pods I could feed to the Keurig I brought with me when I moved to this country six months ago. When I first saw Slava in the doorway, I’d decided that he’d finally brought pods of single-brew coffee, the most wasteful and decadent way in the world to drink coffee, and therefore the best.
I heard a noise from the bathroom. It sounded like something fell over, but there was hardly anything
in there that wasn’t screwed into the floor or the
wall. “Slava,” I said, “I’m coming in. You better be OK.”
I cracked the door and heard nothing, so I slowly walked in, looking around at the ceiling and the walls before I looked where I thought Slava might be, on the toilet or maybe curled up on the floor by the bathtub he sometimes came over to use when the hot water was cut off at his flat. But Slava was gone, and the little window that looked over my courtyard was open.
It was small. I couldn’t imagine a child climbing through it, but then Slava was small, like he’d stopped growing sometime before high school. I tried not to mention it because who wanted to talk about pediatric malnutrition. But if he wanted some- thing from you, or thought you had something he wanted, you’d think he was much taller. Six feet, or at least five ten.
He was small enough to slip through my window, it turned out. I stood there and noticed the toilet seat had come loose, probably when Slava stood on it to reach the window; it falling on the floor was what made the sound in the first place. I craned my neck out the window to look for Slava. It was maybe three floors to the courtyard below, half grass and half dirt. There were a couple ledges, parapets that connected to other buildings that you could jump to and scale, if you were a cat or knew parkour. I didn’t think Slava knew parkour.
Slava had been part of the small delegation the de- partment sent over when I first arrived in L’viv on
a train; he showed me this apartment. There were a couple other places we looked at first, bedrooms with barely a curtained door for privacy, where you couldn’t help but be in the way.
He lived in student housing, though he’d already graduated, in a furnished room with one power out- let and a medusa’s-nest of power cords, with three other men. They were all entrepreneurs, he said, and hustlers. The other guys were techies, making apps and so they spent most of their day coding. He was supposed to help them with the technical writing and to meet with venture capital guys when they were ready. But none of them had got that far yet, so he freelanced for the translation department, which meant mostly he got paid for being my friend. He
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Pie Crust Promises
Matt Dube