The Older Brother Came Home from the Zone. Parts 1-2

The Older Brother Came Home from the Zone. Parts 1-2

I am twelve. I stand in the middle of a dusty yard, smearing hot, angry tears across my cheek, mixed with blood. The scrape on my cheekbone stings. My eye is swelling shut, and the world looks crooked, as if I am seeing it through dirty glass. Three of them stand in front of me. Fourteen, maybe fifteen. They have formed a half-circle and are watching me the way you watch a frog you have just crushed. The tall one, greasy hair falling into his eyes, still has his fists clenched. He hit me first. I never even understood what was happening before his fist met my cheekbone. The world flared and broke apart, and my legs folded under me on their own.

“Get it now? This is our court. Clear off, while you can still walk.”

The leader. Insolent, close-set eyes. He spits the words through his teeth.

I say nothing. There is nothing to say. Inside, I am shaking with humiliation. That morning I had come out of the stairwell with a ball under my arm, already tasting how I would chase it over the asphalt and kick up dust with my sneakers. I did not know that in the two weeks my mother and I had spent at the dacha, the yard had changed hands. New owners had appeared. They had declared the ground theirs. And the first to cross their unspoken line was me. I simply stepped over an invisible border and became the offering.

“What are you staring at? Move it, piss-pants.”

The third one. The smallest, rat-faced, forever sniffling. He picks my ball up off the ground. Bright red and blue, the logo worn thin. He tosses it in his hand as if weighing it, then kicks it hard. The ball flies the length of the yard, thuds against the brick wall of the transformer shed, and bounces into the bushes.

The tears rise again. I bite my lip so I will not bawl. It would be shameful. A foul, sticky feeling. I am twelve, and I already know what helplessness is.

They leave, snickering, pleased with themselves. Their new game has worked. The first victory on new ground. I stay where I am, palm pressed to my burning cheek. My mouth tastes of salt from the lip split on the inside. Slowly I walk to the bushes, find the ball, and clutch it to my chest like a life ring. I do not want to cry anymore. Something else is coming to a boil inside me. Anger. Helpless, bitter anger.

The apartment is empty. Mother and Father are at work. I go to my room, sit on the bed, and look out the window. Outside it is summer: careless shouts, the knock of a ball. Inside me it feels as if I have been rolled in dirt. The front door slams. Heavy, sure steps in the hall, the sound of sneakers kicked off. Maxim is home.

My older brother. Sixteen. Six foot one, shoulders like a grown man’s, a dark buzz cut, and a look that makes the other boys in the yard go quiet. He has boxed since he was ten. Three sessions a week. Sometimes more. He comes home soaked, smelling of sweat and glove leather, and I look at him with awe. He is an icon to me. Always.

Maxim looks into my room, and the smile slides off his face at once. He sees the scrape. He sees the bruise spreading. He sees my broken face.

“Who?”

One word. His voice is calm, but I know that calm. It is worse than any shout.

I say nothing. I turn to the window. I am ashamed. Ashamed I could not hit back. Ashamed my brother is seeing me like this.

“I asked who.”

He comes closer, drops into a crouch in front of me, and makes me meet his eyes. His face is very near. Hard, dark stubble on the chin, a thin scar above the eyebrow. The scar is from last year’s street tournament. Max won, but they still split his brow.

“Guys… from the next yard. They said it’s their territory now. That outsiders aren’t allowed.”

Max stands up slowly. I watch the muscles jump in his jaw, his fists open and close. He says nothing. He simply leaves the room. I hear him in the hall, putting his shoes on, the front door slamming. Something bad tightens in my chest. I jump off the bed and run after him.

Outside, the yard is the same and not the same. Everything doubles because of the swollen eye. I see Max crossing it in long, fast strides, heading for the neighboring five-story block, where, by my account, my tormentors have settled. They are still there. Standing by the entrance, laughing, kicking an empty beer can. Four of them now. The fourth must have shown up later. The tall one with the greasy hair notices Max first. The smile dies on his face.

Max walks right up to them. He does not run. He does not shout. He simply comes over, as if this were an ordinary errand. There is no fuss in the way he moves, only a frightening, measured certainty.

“So. Standing guard?”

He looks them over.

The leader sticks his chest out, trying to look older.

“What’s it to you, Max? This is our business.”

Max smirks. Slowly, as if trying the smile on. Then he hits. No wind-up, short and clean. The leader’s head snaps back. Blood sprays from his nose. He has not even fallen and Max has already shifted. A body shot to the one with the greasy hair. The boy folds in half, gulping air. The little rat-faced one tries to run. Max catches him by the scruff, spins him, and slaps him open-handed across the face. A ringing crack. The kid flies sideways, hits the bench, and goes down.

The fourth, the latecomer, stands frozen. Max steps in close.

“Who are you?”

“I… I’m just walking…”

Max lays a hand on his shoulder.

“Pass it on to anyone who feels like coming around. If anyone touches my brother again, they can forget about a quiet life. I’ll tear them apart.”

He turns to my tormentors, writhing on the ground. They do not look so tough now. They groan, clutch their broken faces, beg. Max leans down to the leader.

“Remember this day, cockerel. I arranged it for you.”

He comes back to me and puts a hand on my shoulder.

“Let’s go, Sash.”

We walk across the yard. Behind us, silence. Only the groaning. I look at my brother and feel my chest swell with pride. He is mine. He is for me. He is strong.

From that day the street started calling him Max the Boxer. At first behind his back, then to his face. He did not object. The name flattered him. The sport had bred a hard confidence in my brother. He stopped being afraid of anything. Not of a fight, not of adults, not of consequences. Sometimes it seemed to me he went looking for danger, just to prove once more, to himself and to everyone else, that he was the best. That no one could match him.

I copied him in everything. I studied his walk. I borrowed the way he talked. I wanted to box too. I begged our mother to put me in the gym.

“Mom, please! I’ll be like Max!”

“No. One of him is enough for me.”

She did not look up from her knitting. She was afraid I would turn out like him. And I did not understand. Why couldn’t she see how strong my brother was, how brave, how fair? In a child’s eyes he was a hero. I did not notice what she noticed.

In those years our neighborhood still had its little crews. Block-sized. Boys with nothing to do, packing into packs. They walked the streets as if they owned life itself, cracking sunflower seeds, laughing too loud. Maxim was in one of them. They called themselves simply ours. Nothing serious, as I thought then. They drank behind the garages, ran off outsiders, took small change off a passerby who happened by. Sometimes, just to show they had power, they would stop a kid from the next yard and make him hand money over to the common pot. Nothing terrible, in their view. A game of gangsters.

I was fifteen when it all came down.

Max came home late. I was at the kitchen table, doing homework. The front door closed with a dull sound, not the way it usually did. I felt at once that something was wrong. Max went to his room without looking in on me. I waited a little, then got up and went to him.

He was sitting on the bed, staring at the wall. His face was gray, as if the blood had been drawn out of it. His eyes were empty, lost. I had never seen him like that. Max, who was afraid of nothing, looked as if he had just been told the world was ending.

“You all right?”

I stood frozen in the doorway.

He did not answer. He kept staring at one point.

He had only just turned eighteen. Officially a man. On the outside he was already fully formed: broad shoulders, a thick neck, narrow hips. Right then he looked like a frightened boy.

I asked again. He was silent. Then he stood up sharply, pulled an old gym bag from under the bed, and started throwing things into it. T-shirts, jeans, socks. The bag filled fast.

“Max, where are you going?”

There was panic in my voice.

At last he looked at me. In his eyes I saw fear. Real, animal fear.

“I have to leave, Sash. Don’t tell Mom and Dad I was here.”

“Why? What happened?”

“You’ll find out later. Or you won’t. Better that way.”

He zipped the bag, slung it over his shoulder, and headed for the door. I caught his arm.

“Max! Tell me! What happened?”

He stopped. He sighed. He looked at me for a long, heavy moment.

“I’m in deep, Sash. Very deep. Just know that I love you. You’re my brother. And whatever happens, don’t repeat my mistakes.”

He pulled his arm free and left the apartment. I heard his steps fade on the stairs. Then the entrance door slammed. Silence.

The next day the whole neighborhood was buzzing. The rumors spread fast, like cockroaches from under the baseboard. It turned out that the evening before, Max and his crew had been working another random passerby. Ordinary business. They had done it before. Walk up, start posturing, demand spare change. The man was dressed for home: track pants, an old jacket, scuffed shoes. No one knew he was a policeman on his day off. And he was drunk. You could smell the fumes on him from three steps away. Maybe that was why Max decided he was easy prey.

But the man would not take it. Word led to word. Max was not used to being talked back to. He was arrogant, sure of himself. A fight started. A clean one-two. The same combination he had drilled for years in the gym. Left straight to the chin, right hook to the temple. The policeman dropped as if cut down. He fell badly. The back of his head hit the curb. A dull crack. The skull split. The ambulance could not help. He was dead before they reached the hospital.

Max ran from the scene. The others scattered too. But there were witnesses. They had seen a tall young man hitting a drunk. They knew who Max the Boxer was. A week later, people in uniform came to us. Mother cried. Father was darker than a storm. They questioned me. They asked where my brother was. I told the truth: he had packed a bag and left. Where to, I did not know. I was fifteen, and I really did not know.

They caught him a month later. In another city, in a rented flat belonging to some acquaintance. Found by chance. The trial was quick and brutal. Intentional infliction of grievous bodily harm resulting in death by negligence. Aggravating circumstances: extortion by a group, hooliganism. Ten years in a strict-regime colony.

For our family it was a sentence on all of us. Mother and Father aged in a week. They went to the interrogations, hired a lawyer, and none of it mattered. Everything was plain. Max was to blame. He had chosen the road himself.

I did not understand much then. I did not fully grasp that my older brother had killed a man. That he would vanish from my life for a long time. That the evening he walked out with the bag was the last day of our childhood.

*  *  *

Today. Our time.

I sit in the kitchen, tapping my fingers against a mug of tea gone cold. Outside the window, a gray morning. Rain is drizzling, softening the outlines of the buildings. I watch the drops run down the glass, and inside me some spring is trembling, drawn to the limit.

“Darling, why are you so worked up?”

Lena is at the stove, making an omelet. The pan smells of butter. I turn and look at her. A tall brunette, hair gathered into a careless ponytail, wearing my old T-shirt, which reaches the middle of her thigh. Simple, domestic, mine. Two years married, and I still cannot get used to her being here.

“I haven’t seen him in ten years. The last four, I haven’t been in touch at all. I don’t know what he’s become.”

Lena comes over and puts her arms around my shoulders. She smells of shampoo and of home.

“You were working. You found me. He’ll understand.”

I nod, but the anxiety does not leave. Memory lives in me. Memory of what Max was before prison. And the fear that he is still that man, or worse.

In ten years everything changed. Our parents are gone. A crash. They were driving back from the dacha when a KamAZ came at them. The truck driver was drunk. I had only just finished school. I was eighteen. The world collapsed. I was left alone. Max was inside, and he had no time for me. From then on I looked after myself and expected help from no one. Our parents had left us a two-room apartment. I found work, first as a loader, then as a salesman in a phone shop. There was no money for parcels to my brother. And no room in my head for them. We called less and less. Once a month, then once every two. Then the line went dead.

Yesterday he called from an unknown number. The voice in the receiver was dull, but I knew it at once.

“Sash, it’s me. Max. I get out tomorrow. Will you meet me?”

I froze in the middle of the office, the phone pressed to my ear. My heart hammered. Ten years. A whole life.

“Yes. Of course. Where do I come?”

He explained. He gave me an address. He said there was no one else to meet him, and he would be glad if the first person he saw on the outside was me. Everything in me drew into a knot. I said yes.

Lena took the news calmly. She knew about my brother. I had told her before the wedding. She did not judge. She only said that now I had one more reason to begin again. I did not understand what she meant. I am beginning to.

We married two years ago. Even then I knew she was the kindest, gentlest person I had met. I remember how we met. She was a student, working a till in a chain grocery. Quiet, quick to help. The grandmothers from the neighborhood loved her, because she pointed them toward the specials and took the expired goods out of their baskets when they put them there by mistake. I came in every day after work, bought some small thing, and always stood in her line. She noticed. She grew shy, she blushed, and, as it seemed to me, she did not mind.

It took me a long time. Three months, gathering courage. And one day, after another purchase, I simply asked.

“May I take you somewhere?”

She smiled, hiding her eyes.

“Well. You may.”

We walked in the park, ate ice cream, talked. We were surprised how much we shared. The same taste in music, a love of old films, a dislike of spicy food. She lived in a dormitory. I lived in the two-room flat our parents had left. After a few months I moved her in with me. She was uneasy. She worried I was rushing. But I was at peace with her. For the first time in a long while.

Later we registered the marriage. A modest wedding in her village. Her parents were simple, kind people. Her mother cried. Her father shook my hand and asked me to look after his daughter. I promised. And I kept the promise.

Life was settling. I opened a small business refilling printer cartridges. Most of my clients were state offices. Once a year they put a tender out; I tried to win as many as I could, and with two friends who worked for me on a wage we turned the whole volume around. Lena stayed at the same grocery, but as a manager now. We had enough money. Both of us finished late, and at home we only slept. In the morning we left for work again. An ordinary life. Quiet, steady, without shocks.

From the outside we are an ordinary couple. Lena is tall, with long dark hair she now mostly ties back. I am fair, tall, lean. We dress simply, so it is easy to move and do the work in front of us. Nothing extra.

And now I sit in the kitchen thinking that tomorrow I have to meet the past. Max. The man who was my idol, and whom I do not know at all. Ten years. He spent them behind bars, among men like himself. What did he think about? What did he learn? What has he become?

Lena sets a plate of omelet in front of me.

“Eat. And don’t wind yourself up. He’s your brother. Your own blood.”

“That’s exactly why I’m worried.”

I pick up the fork and make myself eat.

The next day I fly into an unfamiliar gray northern town. The first thing you notice is the low sky, packed with heavy cloud. A cold wind cuts straight through you. Everything here looks grim. Gray panel blocks, dirty roads, people with sullen faces. The taxi takes me out to the colony. According to the locals, the zone is what the town is built on. Everyone either works there or has done time. A small place, squat, pressed to the earth by that eternal northern sky.

I get out at the gates. A fence of gray concrete, razor wire along the top, towers with guards. It looks as if it has been dropped here out of a film. I go closer. Others are already waiting. Mostly women. Older, tired, eyes gone dull. Some with children. Everyone waiting.

Everything in me draws tight. I do not know what to expect. In front of my eyes is the evening Max left. His face gray with fear. His words: I’m in deep. Now it will be different. Or it will not.

Behind the gates, dogs barking, men’s voices, the clink of keys. The door in the gate opens with a scrape. A man in uniform comes out first, then another, in civilian clothes. A cap. A short leather jacket on a stocky frame. I know my brother at once. Even after ten years I could not have failed to know him. The same broad shoulders, the same thick neck, the same dark hair, only now with gray at the temples. Changed and unchanged at the same time.

“Max!”

I wave. He lifts his head and finds me. A moment, and his mouth spreads into the smile I remember from childhood. He comes toward me in fast, sure steps. We meet in the middle of the frozen road and hold each other hard. He smells of institutional soap, and of something else, faint and foreign.

“Little brother. Look at you. You’ve turned into Dad.”

I nod. A lump in my throat keeps me from speaking. He is even bigger. He clearly never dropped the training. Through the leather I can feel how hard the muscle goes when he hugs me.

“Come on. We’ve still got the airport.”

In the car he is lively. He talks about his plans, about how he does not mean to linger in our city. I listen with half an ear, trying to get used to this new Max. He talks fast and waves his hands. Ten years, it seems, have not passed for nothing. But in his eyes there is something I do not remember. A hardness that was not there before.

We buy the tickets and go into a café. Two hours until the flight. Max orders a beer. I take coffee.

“A mate of mine got out a year ago. We were tight in there. He’s from the capital. His old man’s somebody. All three years we sat together, his father kept him warm, and the whole cell with him. We lived better than a lot of people live outside. We wanted to open a business. Cars. Buy them, sell them. You can bring wrecks over from America, fix them up, move them on. You can run parts out of the Emirates. Anyway. There’s money in it.”

I am glad he has plans to leave. The flat where Lena and I live belongs to both of us, him and me. He owns it as fully as I do. If he decides to stay, everything gets complicated.

“How long will you be at home? I’m not living there alone.”

“No? Who with?”

“I got married.”

“Well. Congratulations. Go on, then. What’s she like?”

He smiles, but strangely. I show him a photograph. He studies it a long time, eyes narrowed, then hands the phone back.

“That’ll smoke a man’s cock. You fucking her in the ass?”

I choke on the coffee.

“Max…”

“Shame. Different feeling, brother. Does she suck dick?”

I frown.

“Max, I don’t want to talk about this.”

“All right, all right. I’m done. Your nerves aren’t what they were. Never mind. You’re still young. She got any friends? Maybe she’ll call them over and we’ll mark the release. Ha.”

He laughs, and I feel wrong in my skin. The talk. The manner. It is as if he has stepped out of the nineties. Out of our childhood, out of those same yard crews.

“Max, I don’t think that’s a good idea. We’re a family. Our friends are married couples.”

“Come on, why are you puffed up? Little brother, remember how I beat those kids from the next yard? We’re the closest people either of us has now. God, I missed the flat. The stairwell. Aunt Nina still alive?”

He claps my shoulder. Aunt Nina is our neighbor. Nearly eighty. She never liked Max, and for that he played dirty tricks on her. Smeared shoe polish on her door handle. Pissed on her mat.

“Yes. She’s alive. Very old now.”

“Right.”

We fly. On the plane Max barely speaks. He looks out the window. I can see he is nervous. His fingers grip the armrests. Coming home after ten years. It must be a frightening thing.

We land in our city in the evening. I call a taxi. On the way we stop at an all-night grocery. Max loads up on vodka, beer, bits of food to go with it. I pay. He does not object.

All the way home he tells stories, as if making up lost time.

“And right there I had Irinka in the bushes. What a time that was. You know where Irinka is?”

I know. Irina left town the moment she turned eighteen. Max had given her such a name that her parents sold the flat and simply moved away with her. I do not answer.

We stand at the entrance. I breathe out and touch the magnetic key to the intercom. The door opens with a quiet click. Inside it smells of damp, and of the stairwell I have known since childhood. The paint is peeling. The floor is the old tile that still remembers our childhood sneakers. Max breathes in deep, holds it, then lets it out slowly. For a moment his face is different. Softer, maybe. As if he has come back not only to the building but to the time when we were only two boys.

“Home. Ten years, and the smell is the same. Remember how we played hide-and-seek here? I always hid behind the garbage chute. You never found me.”

“I remember. Then you’d jump out and scare me half to death.”

“And then you’d cry and tell Mom. She’d yell at me, and I’d do it anyway.”

“Because you liked it when I cried.”

“I didn’t like it. You just cried funny. Like a kitten.”

We go up. Each step echoes in the empty stairwell. On the second floor someone is cooking; fried onion comes through the cracks of a door. On the third, outside our flat, I stop. My heart is beating somewhere in my throat. I do not know how Lena will take this. I do not know how any of it will go. I simply open the door.

The flat smells of roast chicken. Lena comes into the hall in a plain house dress, her hair down, a smile on her mouth. A little strained, but she is trying. I can see she is nervous. How she worries the hem. How her eyes move from me to my brother and back.

“Hello. I’m Lena, your brother’s wife. Congratulations on getting out.”

Max looks at her. Too closely. His gaze travels her face, her body, and stays on her breasts, on her hips. He does it openly, without shame. As if he is pricing goods at a market. As if the woman in front of him is not his own brother’s wife, but simply a woman to be looked over.

“Hello. Let me hug my brother’s little wife.”

Before I can object, he steps in and takes hold of her. One arm around her waist. The other hand on her backside, squeezing hard. Lena gasps. He lifts her and buries his face in her chest. It is his old trick. That is how he used to paw the girls in the yard. I remember him grabbing Irinka from the next entrance, how she squealed and he laughed. I remember him grabbing red-haired Marinka, how she blushed and ran. Then it seemed funny. Then I was twelve, and I did not understand.

Now I am twenty-four. I see the heat of embarrassment on Lena’s face. I see her try to pull away, her hands pushing at his chest. But Max is already setting her down. He winks at me. Thumbs up.

“Nice one. Approved.”

Lena looks at me. Confusion in her eyes. I say nothing. I only look at my brother. These ten years have not changed him at all. He is what he was. And that frightens me.

He is the same street thug he was at eighteen, when he walked out of this flat with a bag over his shoulder. Time, for him, seems to have stopped. While I was learning how to survive, opening a business, marrying, burying our parents, he sat in a cell and lived one day at a time. Boxing, seeds, talk of women and cars. Nothing has moved. Only the body is bigger and harder, and the eyes have gone dull. Inside, he is the same boy who does not think past tomorrow.

I take him to the room that used to be his. After the renovation, nothing of him is left. New paper on the walls, a new sofa, a new wardrobe. No boxing posters. No dumbbells under the bed. No old sneakers in the corner. All of it foreign. All of it new.

“Max, this is your room. Nothing’s left from before the work.”

He looks around slowly, carefully. He runs a hand along the wall, as if checking it is real. Then he smirks.

“Yeah, brother. Everything’s different. The body gets used to eating on a schedule, you know. My stomach’s already turning itself inside out. Lenka, you going to feed us?”

He speaks to my wife with a kind of contempt. As if to a servant. As if she owes him service. There is envy in the voice. Maybe he envies that I lived an ordinary life while he was inside. Maybe he envies the wife, the home, the work. He has none of it. Ten years behind bars. A bunk, prison slop, and a daily fight for a place in the sun.

“Yes, of course. It’s ready. Come through.”

We sit down to mark his release. Lena has laid the table. Chicken, potatoes, salad, salted cucumbers. All of it good, all of it made with care. She tried. She must have been cooking since morning. She wanted her husband’s brother to feel welcome. And he looks at her like meat.

Max pours and drinks it off in one go. A full shot for himself, one for me, a splash for Lena. She only wets her lips. The talk will not take. I do not know what to say to him. He does not know what to say to me. We sit, we eat, we drink. Silent, except for the clink of plates and the tick of the clock, and the creak of the stool under Max when he leans for the bottle.

When his eyes have gone properly clouded, he starts to talk. Loud, with a challenge in it. As if he wants the whole flat to hear. As if he wants me to understand how hard it was for him. As if he wants me guilty.

“You know, Sash, not everyone lasts ten years. You lived out here. You enjoyed yourself. I fought every day for my freedom. Every day. For a place in the sun. So I wouldn’t break. So I’d come out the other side.”

I listen, and something starts to boil. He talks as if I am to blame. As if I ought to have suffered with him. As if I had no right to an ordinary life. As if all these years I had been living fat while he rotted in a cell. I had not been living fat. I had been surviving. I buried our parents. I worked three jobs. I lay awake counting bills. I did not marry out of some easy love and then forget him. I married because Lena was the only person who did not turn away.

“Max, you did it yourself. Why did you hit that man?”

He goes quiet. He looks at me. Anger flares. He wants to answer rough. I see his jaw set, his fists close, a vein stand out on his neck. But he holds it. He knows the man beside him is his own blood. If he starts, everything breaks. He does not want that. Not yet.

“Sash, it was the times. We were young and stupid. I’m not saying you should have been in there with me. But you stopped sending parcels.”

I drop my eyes. That much is true. The first two years I sent them. Every month. I scraped the money together, bought cigarettes, tea, sweets, posted the lot. Sometimes I wrote. Short, clumsy letters. Then our parents died. Everything fell in. I was alone, and I was eighteen, and I did not know how to live. Three jobs, so I would not starve, so I could keep the flat, so I could simply stay upright. The parcels slipped to second place. Then to third. Then I stopped.

“Max, after they died I could barely keep myself. But you’re right. I don’t know why. After they died, something changed.”

He looks at me a long time. Then he sighs, and his shoulders drop.

“Ah, little brother. Never mind. We’ll start over. Soon I’ll go to that mate of mine and we’ll open the business. We’ll ride around in serious cars. We’ll get your Lenka one too. Len, what do you like?”

Lena startles. She did not expect to be spoken to. She looks at me, then at Max.

“I like the G-Wagen.”

Max laughs and slaps the table. The glasses jump. Vodka slops onto the cloth.

“Listen to her. A G-Wagen. Sanya, you hear that? Yours isn’t simple. She wants a G-Wagen.”

He is hard with her, and I cannot see why. She is meeting him for the first time. She has cooked. She has tried. And still he is like this. Maybe ten years have knocked the knowledge of women out of him. Maybe he never had another way. There were no women in there. Only men, men like him. He got used to roughness, to swearing, to putting people down. He does not understand that out here it is different. That a brother’s wife is not a yard girl you grab by the ass and feel up.

I do not understand it. And still I am glad he is free. Glad he is here. Glad we are together again, the way we were when he stood between me and the boys from the next yard. The way we were when he was my hero.

“You still box, or did you drop it?”

“Every day. It was the only thing that kept me in shape. Look.”

He pulls his T-shirt off and starts showing how well he has kept. There are tattoos on him whose meaning I do not know. Letters, numbers, skulls, prison domes. All of it foreign, all of it frightening. But the body is powerful. Broad shoulders, a cut chest, arms like rope. He flexes a biceps. His stomach is flat, not a fold on it. Along his side runs a long scar he must have taken in a fight.

Lena looks at him with something like fear. She has never liked the swaggering kind. They come into the store where she works. They make scenes, they steal drink, and they will curse her when she catches them at it. She is afraid of them. But there is no anger in the way she looks at him. More like regret. Regret that a life can go like this. That ten years can be thrown to the wind. That a man who might have become someone became no one. That instead of learning a trade, working, making a family, he sat in a cell and fought for a place in the sun.

It is late. I hint that it is time to sleep. Both of us have work in the morning. We clear the table and go to the bedroom. Max stays to finish the vodka. I hear him pour another. Bottle on glass. A mutter under his breath.

“Is he staying long?”

Lena asks it quietly, once we are in bed.

“I don’t know. You understand. He has the same right to this flat as I do.”

“Yes. He’s just strange.”

“Ten years is a long time. But he’s all right. There’s no malice in him. He talks to you like that because he doesn’t know how to talk to women.”

We sleep. The drink carries us off fast. I wake because the bed creaks. Lena must want the bathroom. I turn onto my side, ready to go back under, and then I hear a noise that is wrong. More like a struggle. I listen. Nothing else. Sleep is gone. I wait for her to come back. She does not.

I get up slowly and go after her. At the half-open door I look down the hall, hoping for the bathroom light. What I see is my brother’s back. He is standing close to the doorway, his back to me, swaying with the drink. I am about to ask what he is doing there when I hear a sound I cannot place at first. A wet sound. Sucking. I drop my eyes. His trousers are down. His buttocks clench in a rhythm. Someone is in front of him. On her knees at his feet is Lena. She has him in her mouth. My wife is sucking my older brother.

Everything in me turns over. And then I am afraid. Afraid I will not manage it. Afraid he will beat me if I say a word. I stand behind them and listen to the sounds she makes. She is doing it. She is not fighting. Only his right hand holds her head. That is all.

“Mmh… let go. Sasha will wake up.”

“Suck it, bitch. I’m about to come.”

“Please don’t tell him. Please…”

“Be a good girl and I won’t.”

His voice is blurred. He is very drunk. He is not in control of himself. That does not excuse it. Nothing excuses it.

I stand a little longer, and then I barely manage to get back to the bed. My heart is ready to come out of my chest. From the hall, a held-back rasp. He has finished. The bathroom door opens, and I hear Lena being sick. He came in her mouth. I lie with my fists clenched and I can do nothing. The same as that day in the yard, with the boys from next door. Only now the cause is my brother. My older brother, who has just fucked my wife’s mouth.

Quiet steps. Lena gets into bed and presses against me, and I feel her hot tears on my back. It was not willing. She never would have. He forced her.

In the morning I wake before the alarm. Lena is beside me. Yesterday comes back in pieces, and for a moment I try to make it untrue. A nightmare. Too foul to have happened. Then the knowledge of what is real, and of how trapped I am, comes down on me. Why did he do it? I am his brother. His own blood. We grew up in the same rooms.

I go out into the hall and stand where I stood in the night, and the details come back. I look down and see that I am hard. The body answers on its own. Vile, sickening, and still it answers. I start the breakfast and keep an eye on the clock. Today is a hard day. I have to drive out to a neighboring settlement with a load of cartridges, swap them, and bring the empty ones back. I am afraid I will not make the time. Afraid Lena will be home before me. Afraid she will be alone with him again.

Lena gets up and goes to the bathroom. To my surprise, Max comes out of his room. He is in a bad way. Red eyes, an uneven walk: a heavy hangover. In the kitchen he opens the fridge without a word, takes the bottle, and pours himself a glass of vodka. He is dressed as he was in the night, in nothing but his underwear, and I can see he is hard. I remember, from when I was ten, how different we already were. I am sure of it still. I do not see the detail, but the shape of him is considerable. Remembering Lena on her knees, I picture that thing in her mouth. It sickens me, and it hurts. He does not care. He drinks, eats my eggs, and goes.

The bathroom door opens. Lena comes out and tries not to meet my eyes.

“Sit down. I made eggs.”

“Thank you.”

She eats fast, nervously. She wants out of this flat.

“Len, till what time?”

“Ten, I think. When will you be back?”

“I’ll try to make it by then. I might be held up on the road. There’s a lot on today.”