Voroshilovgrad Read Online Free Page B

knuckles. They were all sleeping or trying to fall asleep, so nobody paid any attention to me. All of this was accentuated by blasting, crackling Indian music that sounded like a flock of hummingbirds fluttering around inside the bus and trying to escape this sweet death chamber—but the music didn’t seem to bother anyone. I went up and down the aisle searching for a seat, but I couldn’t find one, so I went back toward the driver. The windshield was covered top to bottom in Orthodox icon stickers, and all sorts of sacred things dangled and flashed there. These seemed to be the only things keeping the bus from falling apart once and for all. Teddy bears and clay skeletons with broken ribs, necklaces made out of rooster heads and Manchester United pennants had been hung all over the place. Pornographic pictures, portraits of Stalin, and Xeroxed images of Saint Francis were Scotch-taped to the window glass. There were also maps outliningvarious routes on the dashboard, along with a few issues of Hustler that the driver used for swatting flies, and then flashlights, bloodstained knives, worm-infested apples, and small wooden icons of the great martyrs. The driver, clutching the wheel in one hand and a bottle of water in the other, was panting in the heat.
    â€œWell there, sonny boy,” he asked, “are all the spots taken?”
    â€œYep.”
    â€œStand here next to me, otherwise I’ll fall asleep too. It’s all right for them—they can pass out, but I’m the one that’s responsible.”
    â€œResponsible for what?”
    â€œThe goods, sonny boy, the goods,” he said in a confidential tone.
    He started telling me some sob stories about small-fry entrepreneurs from the Donbass region and their families. Two days ago they picked up the goods (athletic gear, Chinese-made sneakers, and other shit like that) in Kharkiv and headed for home. As soon as they got outside the city, the poor old bus broke down. “Sonny boy, the suspension is always giving me trouble—the last time it got fixed was before the Moscow Olympics, back in 1980! So we spent the night on the side of the highway.” The driver slithered back and forth between the tires while the small-fry entrepreneurs set up camp, lit a fire, sang songs, and played the guitar. They even managed to enjoy themselves. In the morning, the driver went to the closest village and brought some farmers over with a tractor. The farmers hauled them over to the train depot. They spent the next day and night there. The entrepreneurs doggedly stayed up all night, protecting their goods and singing songs on their guitar. They only ran over to the train station once to buy booze andget some new strings. Eventually, the driver fixed the suspension, loaded up the entrepreneurs the best he could, and set off on the ill-fated road back to his beloved mining town in the Donbass region. When he saw the pileup near the bridge, he didn’t lose his cool; he cut a quick U-turn and got over to the other side of the river by taking some back roads. Now nothing could hold him back—well, at least that’s what he said.
    The bus was coughing up a lung trying to crest a gentle rise. Up ahead, a wide, sunny valley filled with light-green cornfields and golden ravines stretched out before us. The driver pushed on decisively. Then he turned off the engine and relaxed a bit, letting the bus coast. It slid down the decline like an avalanche caused by a bunch of Japanese tourists shouting at the top of the mountain The wind was whistling, brushing against the sides of the bus. Bugs were smashing into the windshield like drops of May rain. We flew downhill, picking up speed amid the hovering voices of those Indian singers promising enduring happiness and a painless death. Once we had rolled to the bottom of the valley, our momentum carried us upward for a while when the land began to rise again. At that point the driver tried to restart the