Ulcer

Tatiana Tatarchevskiy

Yana didn’t remember when she started going to Dima’s apartment. That autumn it seemed like everyone did. She didn’t have to ring the doorbell – it had long been broken. All she had to do was to pry the heavy dark wooden door open. There, across the tall window, she would find his slightly hunched silhouette, a marker pen in hand, his black hair clipped, like a sheaf of seaweed, in the back of his head.
Dima made his sketches right there, on the walls of his apartment. Yana loved following the charcoal lines as they gradually emerged from under the tip of his pen on the old wallpaper. Above the gilded ivy vignettes rose a stern Amazon with a bow and arrow; next to it sat a bulky sea captain in a striped shirt, a pipe hanging off his lower lip. Dima’s art was like the beginning of a long-forgotten children’s story. This must have been why Yana kept coming - she wanted to see where the story would end. 
There were other women, too. Very beautiful, more beautiful than she was. Once, Yana stumbled across a slight-framed brunette in a black leather jacket sitting in Dima’s swiveling chair. “Ciao!” the woman turned towards her, and the light glimmered on her oversized silver earrings. 
It was 1994. Foreigners were still rare in their town. As Yana was studying English in college, she thought this encounter would be a good chance to practice. 
“How is you? What you like it here?” Yana blushed, feeling her teeth grind on the rough grammar. 
The woman was friendly. She said, “I want to marry Dima to get him out of this place. He’s such a rare talent. Galleries in Milano will compete over him.” That’s how she said it, Mila-ano, as if she was singing.  

***

Back home, Yana’s parents pickled. Every time she entered her apartment, the concentrated sour smell of dill and vinegar hit her like a punch in the face. In the kitchen, bulbous 3-liter glass jars full of jellyfish-like tomatoes simmered in large pots on the stove. Condensation flowed down the tiled walls. Her parents worked like a conveyer belt: mom, in her crumpled bathrobe, was halving cucumbers, and dad, wearing nothing but a pair of seasoned knee-long underpants, sealed rubber lids on tops of the jars. 
“Acid is magic!” Yana’s dad would exclaim occasionally, licking the sweat off the upper lip. “Acid keeps the vegetables intact all winter. Acid keeps death at bay!” 
He was a chemical engineer. That spring he had been laid off, as his factory was pronounced bankrupt and closed. For the last forty years the factory had been making components for chemical weapons. Rumor had it that now it would be bought by an oligarch to produce a dishwashing solution instead. 
Yana preferred to stay in her room, listening to music on her portable cassette player. Her favorite those days was the band named The Cranberries. Dima had made her a mixtape with their songs. She would whisper-sing, Zo-ombie, Zo-ombie, after the singer, trying to imagine what a woman with such a startling voice looked like. She wished she was an artist too. Standing in front of her tall wardrobe mirror, she would create different artistic looks for herself. Some days she would perk her hair up with a thin comb and pour clouds of hairspray around it. On other days she would pull the strands of her curly hair backwards and hold them tight with her fingers, imagining what she’d look like if she shaved her hair completely. But then, she thought, if you are an artist, you also need to have sophisticated clothes. She had none of those. Just a couple of prudish knee-length skirts, an angora wool pink jumper that her mother had bought her at an outdoor market, and then her coat… It was a thick brown drape cloth, the color of mud, with a dull strip of faux grey fur attached to its collar. Yana was dreading the upcoming winter because then she would have to wear the coat all the time. 
“If Dima married this woman,” she thought that night, “he’d go to Milano or Rome. It’s warm there. No one has to wear ugly coats in Italy.”

***

Next time Yana went over to Dima’s, he was drinking vodka. An open official-looking envelope was lying on the floor. “It’s the summon to the Army service,” he took another shot. “The autumn conscription has begun.” 
Then, in jerky motions, across another empty square of his wallpaper Dima drew two parallel lines. “A human bone,” Yana guessed.  
The room filled with his friends. Someone said, “Why, you are an artist, artists die young anyway!”  The other one played a pretend trumpet, “Hail to our military hero!” They all read the headlines. There would be no mercy for the newly conscripted: their young blood would be dispatched to the border towns of Northern Caucasus to feed into one of the many voracious military conflicts flaring up since the fall of the Soviet Union. 
Dima kept quiet, working with his pen on what appeared to be the crown of pelvic bones. 
A girl that Yana hadn’t seen before said, with a laugh, “My mother is a gastroenterologist. She could help you waive the summon. But you have to show her that you are very sick.” 
“How sick?” Dima was suddenly interested. 
This girl had blue eyes and dark hair. The hair was cut short making her eyes look big, artistic. 
“A stomach ulcer would do it! It’s not that hard to get, if you eat lots of really spicy food,” she said.  
By now the bottom part of the skeleton was finished. Dima had drawn large apples inside the pubic girdle, turning it into a basket. 

***

The next day was payday at Yana’s college. She collected her monthly student allowance and took a tram to the Supermarket. It was the first store of this kind, and the most expensive one, in their town. Built in the open field in the outskirts, a slick block of glass and plastic, it towered over the barren steppe like an enormous ice cube. 
Yana found it echo-empty inside, except for a bored security guard in the dark blue uniform of a prison warden. 
“Do you have spicy food?” she asked him. 
“What?” He looked down at her drab coat, not convinced about her solvency. Then sighed and waved, reluctantly, “It’s row 9.” He went to follow her, ready to catch her shoplifting any moment. 
The Supermarket rows were endless. Dozens of types of foreign coffee, cereal, shampoos, chocolates, ham. Bright wrappers. Garish fonts and intense colors. Yana thought this is what Europe looks like. She felt dizzy. 
“Spicy stuff is row 9,” the guard repeated with impatience. 
Yana plucked a can of red paste off the shelf. It looked especially ferocious, small fires burning all over its label. Then she saw the price. 
“No, I need something spicier. Even more spicy. The spiciest!” she said and walked away, the heels of her boots drumming loudly on the marble floor. 

***

Dima’s appointment with the gastroenterologist was in two months. He had to ruin his stomach by then. Yana started bringing her parents’ jars of pickled vegetables to help him. 
“Acid is magic!” she would repeat her father’s words, making Dima laugh. 
They would sit around his kitchen table, recounting what he had done that day to burn a hole in his stomach’s lining: ate nothing, smoked a pack. 
“These tomatoes are bright red, the color of love,” Dima smiled, filling his mouth with meaty pulp of a zesty vegetable. 
Often, after that, she could hear him vomit in the bathroom.

***

The day Dima got his news, they met at the town’s embankment, their favorite spot. By now the winter had set in. The park by the pier looked like a snow-layered cake. The sticky icing wrapped the spare park benches, lined the drooping tree branches, covered the shoulders of the plaster Soviet pioneers dancing in a circle in the middle of the embankment fountain. The cold left Yana no choice: she had to wear her detested drab coat to keep warm. 
Dima pulled a stamped grey slip of paper out of his side pocket, “It’s official now: peptic ulcer disease!”
She stepped to hug him, “So, no Army?”
Dima’s cheeks were hollow, she could feel the edges of his bones under his thin jacket.  
“No Army,” he nodded, yet his mood wasn’t cheerful. She could sense something aloof about him.  
“Listen,” he said and tried to rub some invisible speck off Yana’s fuzzy sleeve. “Listen…” 
Then he told her that they wouldn’t be celebrating the New Year together. He will be celebrating it with Elena, the gastroenterologist’s daughter. She had invited him to celebrate it at her dacha. Just an hour’s drive away from town. Across the river. Dima smiled awkwardly. Yana noticed that his eyes were now the color of the frozen water. 
A flock of gulls rose off the railing, releasing disappointed squeals. A loose rope was banging somewhere on the flagpole with a monotonous, bell-like sound. Thin sheets of ice were floating on the surface of the river, pushing into each other, crumbling, breaking into uneven chunks that looked like some exotic distant islands, and then disappearing, carried away by the current.  “It will still be long before the river freezes,” Yana thought. And then, she thought, how silly, how silly! How could she have been so wrong? It was not about the coat, after all.