I
We move as a loose group of dressed-up worker-zombies, drifting towards the strike zone where the shots begin to land. I keep my pace slow, letting the eager ones go ahead. We move scattered, three, maybe five metres between us. Someone ahead. Someone behind. No one speaks. We don’t speak. We growl, low and reluctant.
It’s Erkki who brought me here. It’s good to have him at your back when you’re in the field. When you’re in the field, anything might happen to you. Especially when you reach the kill zone. And the shooters can smell blood. They get a rush after a few hits, because they compete with each other. They often bet money on it – who can ‘take out’ the most. Sometimes they are drunk and so worked up that they flout the rules and start to assault us directly – with boots, with the butts of their guns. It is forbidden. It is explicitly stated in the contract signed by both sides: the amusement park administration and its players. We follow our rules, they follow theirs. But often the shooters lose control; they get over-excited and can’t hold themselves back. And that’s when you need Erkki. He can break into the game and sober those up who’ve got carried away. He can pull you out and give you first aid: ice, plasters, water, bandages … If the shooters see it, it usually brings them back to themselves. Not always – but as a rule, it does.
There is a bizarre kick in it, I can’t deny. You walk in a mask through a crowd of the same idiots, growling, getting into a frenzy, and suddenly, out of nowhere, you get a sharp blow to the head – paint splashes over your goggles and you fall, you fall. Dead! … dead! … just like in childhood. You lie there in the grass. You are gone. You are not there any more. It feels good, especially when the sun is shining …
It was only half a joke. My Soviet childhood wasn’t especially harsh: my father was a cop and a violent man – yes, he made our lives hard – but I’d seen far worse families than mine. When I fall asleep, I reach under my pillow and find my childhood there – sometimes the hilt of my toy rapier, sometimes a rubber Indian figure made in the GDR, sometimes the handlebars of my magnificent Salute bicycle. I was a daydreamer as a boy. In the early eighties the Soviet Union felt like a country of sleepwalkers. Everyone around me seemed to be asleep. They did not live; they shifted in their sleep and muttered, troubled and restless. I began, slowly, to awaken. Rock music and horror films did it first. Through the keyhole of Finnish television I glimpsed another world. It felt both close and impossibly far away, just across the water and yet out of reach. It was cold, even harsh, but it was open. People there carried themselves in a relaxed way, without that up-tight attitude I felt. They seemed unfettered – and that felt almost indecent to me, stirred something suppressed, a kind of buried erotic charge I was barely aware of. I wanted to understand their language – whether it was French or English, Finnish or something I could not even name – because I wanted to be that relaxed, have that absence of restraint. I kept silent. I barely opened my mouth until I was fifteen. They spoke plainly, as if nothing had been taken from them, as if nothing in them had been suppressed or cut away. Every one of them carried something of their own, something intact.
The sound on the Finnish channels would often drop out and then disappear altogether. My father never bothered to fix it. He was in the militia, and he used to tell me how they drove around the city taking down illegal antennas from rooftops – the ones people in Tallinn used to watch Finnish television with a clear signal. I could do without clarity. I watched without sound. And even without sound I could see it: rock musicians talking to an interviewer, alive in a way I had never seen, their faces quick, expressive, their hands moving, laughing, interrupting each other. I could not hear what they said, I could not understand a word of the Finnish subtitles – but I could see how they spoke. No one spoke like that on Soviet television. No one dared to open their mouth. They spoke in muffled voices, as if everything they said was in brackets. I saw street fights and strikes. Angry people with signs. Students thrown to the pavement by police. Powerful jets of water knocking skinny boys and girls off their feet, their tight jeans darkened, their shirts clinging, almost transparent. I devoured those images with greedy eyes. That was life. I wanted that life here. I wanted it in our streets. I dreamed of being swept off my feet by a jet of water, with a girl like that at my side. I wandered the streets of the Old Town, bringing those rioting youths with me, setting them loose among the stones and narrow alleys. I imagined crowds. They moved before my eyes, gathering, swelling. When I went to marches with my class, carrying a poster or a balloon because they didn’t trust me with a flag, I groaned slogans we did not own – ‘Long live the Great October Socialist Revolution!’ in October and, in May, ‘Elagu esimene mai!’ – imagining it all breaking at once, the march coming to a halt, the same people turning and shouting: no. No. No.
Around me were bodies wrapped in bandages of silence, pinned together with half-words and hidden meaning. Everything felt false, mean, unfinished, grey. Nothing belonged to anyone; when you touched anything, you were touching a vast machine you yourself belonged to, but nothing belonged to you – not even your own body – everything seemed to require permission, even the most private bodily functions, even your own skin. Around me were stunted, mutilated people, warped in their understanding of feeling, hardened or becoming hard, capable of cruelty towards themselves, those close to them and anyone else, even of sacrificing themselves and others. In our family no one embraced, no one kissed. The only kiss I ever saw was when I caught my aunt with her boyfriend – she was sixteen, maybe seventeen, and I was a child. There was no one at my side. Only the same mechanical bodies. There were flashes, though. Brief windows. They never lasted. They always ended the same way – cut short, taken away or turning into something else. I had a friend once. With him, things happened. We roamed around, we got into things, we made plans that felt real as we spoke of them. But his mother was restless. She changed men, changed apartments, changed everything around him. One day she took him away. Just like that. Years later I met him again – he was different, already jaded, like the others. I didn’t see in him what I thought I had known.
My mother kept saying she would leave my father, that we would disappear somewhere he could never find us and live another life. She said it often enough that I believed her. I waited for it. Once she took me to Tuapse. For a few hours there I believed we would not go back. That this was it. That we had crossed over into something else. It was another world. Bright, almost unreal. The sea was enormous. The surf thundered. Tall, strong men, their bodies glistening with water, walked into the waves and came back out again. I watched them as if it meant something, as if I could step into that life if I stayed long enough. We came back. And the old, dull routine resumed. I was always bored. I was always tired. Nothing meant anything. They forced me to smile. My mother wanted to see it. Each time we went to my grandmother’s, she would say: please, smile. My face would ache after the photo studio. When we came back, the skin on my face would feel painful and numb, as if it were already turning into something else – something rubbery, insensible, like now, behind the mask.
Today I went out into the field because I needed money to pay for the flat. I decided I would go out for every shoot they gave me, despite my bad leg and the weather. Today they were shooting at us in a thin, transparent grove. The trees were sparse, fragile. Clumps of wet ground, puddles everywhere. Cold. Wind. A sickly evening light. Searchlights cut through the trees. Torches burning. We move towards the light. They are already firing. Someone falls. Crawls. I sway forward and keep moving. There are still rows in front of me. The paintballs do not quite reach me yet – they fall weakly at my feet and burst into ugly splatters of paint. I still have about ten steps to go before I enter the strike zone.
They are shooting poorly today. Wide. I pass a body dragging itself past me. Can’t say his name. He gets up. Walks on. I keep limping and swaying forward. My leg hurts, but it is still bearable. When I am hit, I will bandage the knee. It’s drizzling. I’ve come apart so much lately that I checked the weather before going out. Wind: four metres per second. A gentle breeze. Still … it gets through. I catch a whiff of alcohol. It’s chilly.
As we draw closer to the kill zone the growling grows louder. Erkki and I had a history. He was the one who brought me here. We said we would take it easy, that we would stop using. Except for MMDA – it was rare, almost impossible to find, and if some turned up it felt wrong not to take it. And psilocybin – the same, especially if it was Ecuadorian or Mexican; you didn’t say no to that. And marijuana, of course. Every day. I almost quit booze. It was hard to stay sober in those days. Wasn’t I running away from my family, sitting in that café with a big sports bag under my table? Then he appeared. Right in front of me. As if conjured up. Summoned to take care of me.
One more down. And more. They are hitting us. We’re getting closer. Not so many ahead of me. I can see the rifles. One of them is going to take me down. There’s a fear of the first shot. Just like a stage fright. A jump into the pool. Same kinda fear. Just walk. Just brace yourself and walk.
And there you got it – the fucking desire to sneeze. Wearing this mask, it really is a killer. Blow your mind up from within if you do. Just walk.
When you walk towards your first shot, you can’t help wanting to slip away – veer a little to the right, a little to the left. You think it’ll be easier somewhere else. The impact will be less painful there. If you can see the shooters, your imagination cranks up: that one – the skinny one – he’ll hit lighter than that brute you’re heading straight for, and you begin to zigzag. Same in life. You dodge. You try to slip around the difficult stuff, the problems. They catch up with you anyway. You get your shot. Wherever you turn. You sold market intelligence. It was hard. You thought you’d find something easier. Moved into customer support – your client got sued. You went under. Not when you lost the child. Not then. Asphyxiation in utero, eighth month. No. You went under when you lost the client. You left. Sat down at an assembly-line bench. Your sales guys closed a deal, happy, brought the order to your desk. You checked the components, the build cost – and realized they’d sold a helicopter for the price of a scooter. Absurdity caught up with you in the park. A fountain. Beautiful music. You walked through Kanuti Park with money in your hand, looking for the musicians you wanted to pay. You couldn’t find them. Because you were hearing music that wasn’t there. You just broke. Paintballs – not paint in them but God knows what – troubles meant for you, personal, precise: illness, pain. They’ll find you wherever you hide. If life wants to get you, it will get you even in a bunker. The capsules are flying. Like biblical gadflies. They’ll sting you, strike you, worry you –
Bang! Oh, shit! Sudden. Hard. Pain. Sparks behind the eyes. I go down. My legs give way. I ain’t faking it. I’m really going down. That shot drops me for real. I lie there – I don’t know, two minutes, three – can’t pull myself together. A knockout. Like in the ring. They’ve really started hitting harder. What are they doing to those guns? I haven’t been out in the field for half a year. Heard people complain. The guns are more powerful now. We tested the ones they sell. Shrugged. Somehow they upgrade them. For fun. A whistle. I hear a whistle. Move! Get over here!
I have to crawl. I don’t know which way. Everything’s mixed up. My lenses are smeared with paint. A ringing in my head. I roll on to my stomach. Wipe one lens. I can’t see.
Someone’s moving nearby. Cries out. Falls. Swears.
All right. Now I know which way to crawl.
I crawl like a worm.
II
Ariel was difficult to kill; that was the catch; hard to hit – too small, too slight, too quick, slipping easily into the shadows.
In the unstable glow of park lights, torches and the headlights of gamers’ cars angled towards the forest, his slender silhouette was almost impossible to aim at; in that light, he might even have passed for a child. Perhaps that was the problem. They rarely hit him. It meant ten euros a night, twenty at the absolute most. On a lucky night, he might take two headshots at the very most.
Meanwhile, the other zombies took five, sometimes seven hits, tumbled, rolled in the mud, then cleaned themselves off and went back into the forest or out to the field where they got killed again. Being hit five times already counted as a good night.
So what did Ariel do? Taking the advice of the more experienced zombies, he decided to stand out. He wore an oversized white eighties bomber jacket with broad shoulders and high platform boots, marching through the bushes and pine trees like a ghost come alive. The boots lent him something faintly feminine, giving his walk an awkward sway, and he moved as if performing, while the forest around him was smeared and brutalized, splattered with paint, a battlefield of colour and chaos.
It didn’t make much difference. No one was shooting at him – or maybe they did, who could tell? Somehow they never managed to hit him. When he returned from the field, he trudged in those uncomfortable boots, hips rolling, almost like a prostitute. All around him people slogged through the mud, smeared with blood-coloured paint, some of them groaning. And he was absolutely spotless. The others wore themselves out, covered in paint. They fell, hurting their knees and ribs. The strikes of the balls – gelatine capsules filled with blood-red paint – left some with real weeping wounds on their faces, black eyes, swollen bruises. Ariel had never suffered anything like that.
Back in the locker room he peeled off his rubber mask – the ‘dura’, or ‘condom’, as they called it – and his face showed irritation, confusion, astonishment. The other zombies watched him and smiled. ‘Where have you been?’ they teased. ‘Hiding in the bushes?’
He protested loudly, theatrically. ‘Missed again! Shot and shot – all misses! Morons! Clumsy twats! Idiots! Stupid fools!’
He would smack the mask against his hip, then against the wall … and it would often tear when he did that.
More often they couldn’t hit him at all, which meant nothing for the night, nothing at all – except cleaning up, which Ariel hated, the slow, grinding work in the forest after the shift, when everyone else drifted back to the barracks to wash off the paint and sweat, while he followed them anyway, untouched, waiting until the cars rolled away, the fires went out, the night’s noise sinking back into silence, and only then, with two or three other strays, would he return to the battlefield, shuffling through the dark with a torch, the black plastic bag whispering, something tinkling faintly in his pockets as he walked. He tidied up, swept the forest, ran across the battlefield collecting spent paintballs, torn clothes, forgotten shoes or boots – and sometimes things no one ever really forgot, objects that didn’t belong there at all.
The forest often bored him at that hour; he would stop, light a cigarette and stare into the ravine where fog slid down in the pale morning half-light. The ravine was dangerous – people fell in there, broke their legs – and he approached it with care, because he was often sent to check to make sure that no one had tumbled in. He would edge up to the brink, look down cautiously and whistle, again and again, pausing between whistles, listening. Somewhere at the bottom a stream ran, murmuring faintly, although not always – sometimes it vanished completely, swallowed up by fog and leaves. It was autumn then, a persistent drizzle, the leaves whispering in the dusk, the wind bending the yellow grass and worrying the black plastic bag in his hand. Branches scratched his face; cobwebs stuck to his skin. The cigarette he tried to light kept breaking. Pulling back from the ravine, he went to check the fire pits, stamping out those the guests had forgotten to extinguish. The forest was thoroughly fouled, and Ariel didn’t consider it his duty to clean it up properly – it was pointless anyway: they would be back the next night, and everything would begin all over again.
III
That year, by some cruel twist of fate, the guy in charge of the barracks was someone by the name of the Dread Serpent. He was cut from the old Soviet cloth – an Afghan war veteran, or so he claimed. The Serpent never felt the need to prove anything to anyone; he never backed up his stories, never stooped to explanations. When it came to the job, he cut things short with a word, severed them clean off. Fact, he would say. That’s a fact. You hear me? He was tall and savage-looking, his body lean and angular, moving with an awkward stiffness, like a large insect; his face grey, with sunken eyes shadowed by heavy bags, drooping eyelids and yellowed temples lined with deep creases. He was a greying, dying old man, yet he carried himself as if he were thirty-five, and it was clear he would never accept old age. He had terminal cancer. He had quit chemotherapy, hoped for nothing and was simply finishing out his days in the barracks because there was nowhere else for him to go. His stomach had long since given up on him; he vomited constantly, retching into buckets and drains, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Ondansetron no longer did anything for him.
If he wasn’t lying – and with him you never really knew – he’d been locked up at the end of the eighties for some dark business and sent to work the shale mines. He had spent a quarter of his life homeless, living off women who would support him as long as he could still get it up. That life was over – he ruled the barracks. Diazepam didn’t calm him down either. He was constantly wound up tight, as if there were nothing left in him that could be quietened. They issued the oxycodone only in extreme cases when the pain became unbearable – and never without precautions. There were addicts roaming Põrgumaa, even within the units, men everyone knew, feral enough that if they caught a whiff of it they’d be on to you. Fentanyl only when things became truly bad – when the pain twisted him so violently he howled through the bunker and rolled on the bed boards, clutching his stomach, drenched in sweat. Then someone from the Serpent’s squad would come running to me in the Tools Room. I never refused. Any hour, any weather. The route was always the same: the administrative block, explanations, signing for the ampoule, the handover, a guard at your shoulder and then across to the First Unit. And then the needle. The route never changed. The Serpent must have hated me more than anyone else there, because he needed my help so badly. He never allowed himself to show weakness.
Even then he looked surprisingly solid. He did not look like someone about to die. When I came up to his bunk he did not writhe or toss around any longer. He stayed conscious. He gritted his teeth and watched me approach. I can say with certainty that his eyes were perfectly clear – frighteningly clear – and that clarity was filled with hatred: towards me, towards the bunker, towards every living thing still breathing around him. Hooking those dry hands over the upper frame of the bunk, he would haul himself up, and for a moment he resembled some large insect clinging stubbornly to a stalk. Finding a vein was never easy. They slipped under his skin like thin frightened snakes, slithering away, hiding from the needle point. His arms were ruined first. Then the backs of his hands. Sometimes I tried the veins in his ankles, sometimes along the inside of his calves, once even the top of one of his feet, while he cursed me through clenched teeth. His body always seemed to offer some worse alternative. The moment I approached with the syringe, he began to sweat heavily, a sticky chemical sweat with a strange sweet-rotten smell, as if something inside him had already started decomposing and was pleased about it, triumphant. The whole room filled with it. I tapped at the skin, searching for a vein that had not yet vanished.
Tough on himself, he was triply ruthless with others, ruling his underground realm with an iron fist, although his grip often faltered, his strength ebbing away until he slid into hysteria, and the barracks beneath him became something like a prison cell, governed by an order no one truly understood. He would erupt over nothing, over the smallest deviation: any object out of place was enough to unhinge him, as if the world itself had shifted against him. No one argued with him; no one even raised their voice. His closest associate was Sledgehammer – a criminal from his past, the Landlady’s lover – and that explained everything. The Landlady herself was in the depths of one of her worst alcohol binges, sliding from one to the next, losing her mind, imperious and capricious as ever. That year she had crossed all boundaries, gone completely off the rails, truly chaotic – and the Serpent thrived on it, the third captain on a storm-tossed ship with no need to explain himself to anyone.
The barracks helped him. Buried deep in a low, damp bunker built during the Cold War as a shelter against nuclear threats, it was reached by a long staircase from the outside – in winter the steps were glazed with ice, and people often slipped, tumbling down into the darkness. At the top stood a massive door that groaned and screeched with every push, noisy, rusty hinges, squeaky locks and hatches, its voice echoing through the entire barracks and waking the few residents who stayed there permanently – never more than seven at a time. The rest preferred to wander into the city or sleep in dormitories above ground. The door, the hinges, the locks, the ventilation that gurgled and hissed like the snoring of a sleeping troll – all of it seemed to be an extension of the Serpent’s own angular, wizened body, a labyrinth of metal and stone that reflected his harsh, unpredictable will.
The zombies slept in stacked bunks like those in train sleeper compartments, hanging up sheets or towels to afford them a little privacy; some went further, creating enclosed beds out of their bunks and crawling into them like boxes, like medieval lits clos, sealing themselves off from the rest of the world. Underground was always damp and oppressive, cold even in summer. The ceiling pressed down on the skull, low and uneven, striped with layers of shale as if the rock itself had been flayed; the floor was slick with moisture, rows of rusty metal lockers lining the walls, bare unshaded lightbulbs, frost blooming on the doors in winter until the locks seized shut, the walls of rough stone and patched concrete wrinkled and folded like the insides of a gigantic whale. (I felt utterly swallowed by it.)
Every night, rain or snow, he drove his zombies out into the forest and the field, barking orders, kicking doors, herding them like livestock. For this, he received food vouchers and decent money – real money, dough. What he did with it, no one knew. What did money matter to a dying man? After he finally croaked, they tore open his locker, certain they’d find a stash. There was nothing. Some swore he’d buried it somewhere in the forest. A few even went looking for it. No one found a thing.
But for now, he was alive – and screaming at Ariel, ‘Why is this the second time tonight you’ve torn your mask?’
His voice snapped, cracked, rebounded off the concrete. Then he clicked his fingers in the direction of the corridor, his tone slipping into something uglier.
Ariel sat slumped on a metal chair, filthy, still in the mud-stained clothes he’d worn in the forest. His face was grey with exhaustion. The Dread Serpent paced in front of him, back and forth – all bone and angles, feverish eyes burning in a face carved from spite. He moved with a twitchy sharpness, like a man running on raw nerves and cheap speed.
‘We’ll run out of rubber because of you!’
He kicked the leg of Ariel’s chair. A metallic sound screeched through the bunker.
‘Take your condom and get your arse to the Tools Room. Let them fuck you there.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrei Ivanov (b. 1971) is a prose writer whose novels and stories, written in Russian, return to exile, alienation and the rougher fringes of post-Soviet life. He has repeatedly received Cultural Endowment recognition in Estonia, and his books have also been shortlisted for and won major Russian-language literary prizes.
The three excerpts published here were written in English by the author and come from a novel in progress, the first impetus for which grew out of Estonian film director Indrek Spungin’s request for a film script. They may also be read as an example of necrorealism, the Leningrad-based late-Soviet underground aesthetic associated with the filmmaker Yevgeny Yufit, where dead bodies and grotesque physical comedy become a way of estranging everyday reality.