The Black Man

March 7–8, 2020

It had no face.

Kesha tried many times afterwards to put this into words for himself, the way he put things into words for clients on parchment, and could not find the words. It had no face not in the way a person has no face when they stand with their back to you, or in the dark, or far away: there was a head, and it was turned towards Kesha, but where people have a face it was smooth, pale and even, like the palm in the photograph — no eyes, no mouth, no nose, no eyebrows, no wrinkles, not a single crease, as though someone had moulded the head out of wax and forgotten to draw the rest. And yet the figure was looking — Kesha felt it with his whole skin: without eyes, and yet it looked. And then it took a step forward, one step across the black surface, and the ink under its feet did not stir or spread in circles, as if it were walking not on it but above it — one step towards the threshold on which Kesha stood.

Kesha jerked back so violently that the chair tipped over under him, and he fell to the floor, hitting his elbow painfully, and for a few seconds lay looking up at the vaulted ceiling, across which green circles from the lamp were floating, not understanding where he was. Then he understood: the shop, the desk, the chair, the floor. "Master?" Grisha looked round the curtain. "Master, what's wrong?!" Nothing, said Kesha, the chair fell over. Grisha stared at him with round eyes, and Kesha, getting up, told him to go to her: he'd write it now.

Grisha went, and Kesha picked up the chair and sat down, and his hands were shaking. He looked at the dark screen of the phone and did not switch it on, but took a clean parchment — the old one, with "Work," had an ink blot from the pen, and Kesha did not like handing over parchments with blots — and began again:

"Work. March. You will be promoted. But not this month — in April. Your boss isn't deceiving you; he's waiting for a decision from above. Be patient."

Then he took a second parchment:

"Caution. March. On the fifteenth watch your step by your building. On the twenty-second do not leave the house. All day. Do not open the door to anyone you're not expecting. If someone calls you by name from the street — do not answer."

He reread the last line and did not remember writing it: his hand had written it by itself, as sometimes happened when he saw something clearly but there were no words in his head yet. But where had "calls you by name" come from? He hadn't seen that — or had seen it and not understood what he saw. He rolled up both parchments, tied them with thread and gave them to Grisha.

Oksana read the first and was pleased, read the second and laughed: the twenty-second? That's a Sunday — she sits at home all day anyway with this one here — she nodded at the pram — where would she go? The master writes it as it is, said Grisha. "If someone calls you by name — do not answer," Oksana read aloud and laughed again: who'd call her — the mother-in-law, maybe? Well, not answering the mother-in-law — that she'd do with pleasure.

"The master writes it as it is," Grisha repeated, because he didn't know anything else.

Oksana thanked him for the present and passed on her congratulations on the holiday to the master, and then asked whether the master was a man or a woman. A man, said Grisha. "Well then, happy belated Twenty-Third of February — Men's Day," said Oksana, laughed again, turned the pram round and began hauling it up the stairs, and Grisha rushed to help. Kesha heard her laughter from behind the curtain, and for some reason that laughter made him feel worse than the figure in the blot.

People here, generally speaking, laugh at predictions — loudly, in company, with details: the fortune-teller told me I'd marry a military man, and I married a plumber — ha ha. They laugh until it comes true, and when it comes true they stop telling the story altogether, and only avert their eyes when they meet the fortune-teller, the way they avert them when they meet in the street a doctor who once gave them an unpleasant diagnosis and turned out to be right. Kesha knew this from experience: he had had many clients who laughed at their parchments, and almost all of them came back afterwards — not laughing — and took another. But for some reason he did not wish Oksana to come back. He wished that on the twenty-second she would simply sit at home with her "this one here" in the pram, and that her parchment could be laughed at all her life.

The Eighth of March is celebrated in our town as though it were not Women's Day but a day of national reconciliation: husbands who have come home after midnight all year are by lunchtime standing at the stove in aprons, frying something that later has to be thrown away; in the schools boys give girls cards signed by their mothers; at the market trading stops at two, and then the market men push the stalls together and drink to the health of the market women so tearfully that by evening one of them is invariably wheeled home on a potato trolley. The Eighth fell on a Sunday, and Kesha, who usually opened the shop on Sundays, though not for long, this time — he had decided in the night — did not open at all. Grisha, however, came anyway: at half past seven, as always, he clattered down the stairs, came in, hung his jacket on the nail and only then, already holding the bucket, remembered that they weren't working today. "Oh, master, we're not open today," he said. They're not open, said Kesha from behind the curtain. But he'd come. He could see that, said Kesha. Grisha stood holding the bucket and decided that since he'd come he'd wash the floor: no sense letting good things go to waste — and washed it from the far wall to the door, not missing a single slab, and the threshold twice.

Then Grisha did something Kesha had not expected of him: quietly, with a knuckle, as on a door, he knocked on the edge of the curtain and, when Kesha said "well?", came in holding a little bunch of fluffy yellow mimosa wrapped in newspaper. He'd bought it for his mum by the metro, where the old women sell it, said Grisha, blushing to his ears, and there was more, and he thought: the master's always here on his own — and he pushed the mimosa onto the edge of the desk: not a woman, of course, but still — it smells nice. Kesha looked at the mimosa: it smelled sweet, springlike, childlike, and at that smell something ached under his ribs — not where the knowledge came from, but close by. "Thank you, Grisha," he said. "Oh, it's nothing," said Grisha, scarlet now: he'd go and take his mum hers — she was waiting.

He went to the door, took his jacket off the nail — and suddenly stopped and said he'd completely forgotten about yesterday: that one, from back then, on the first, in the coat… Kesha felt his fingers go cold and asked: what about the one in the coat? He stood here all day yesterday, over there, by the tower, Grisha said simply: Grisha saw him through the window when he went for water, and when he carried Oksana's pram out, and when he ran off for lunch, and in the evening when he left — standing there. He'd thought: he'll freeze, standing in the wind all day — but the man was fine, just standing.

"And you didn't tell me?"

"I'm telling you — I forgot," Grisha shrugged guiltily. "You were sort of… well, with the chair, yesterday. So I didn't. And then I forgot. And now I've remembered."

Kesha asked whether he was sure it was the same man. He didn't see the face — it was too far, Grisha said honestly, after thinking — but the coat was the same, and he stood the same way he'd sat on the chair that time: not moving, as if he'd been put there, like a post. Kesha was silent, and Grisha went on: in the evening, when he walked past to the bus stop, the man asked him something. Asked what? "Is Grigory at home?"

Kesha did not notice himself coming out from behind the curtain; he was simply all at once in the shop by the door next to Grisha, holding him by the sleeve of his jacket: how did he ask, exactly — how? Well, said Grisha, flustered, he was walking past the tower, the man was standing there, and Grisha sort of nodded to him — he knew him, after all, a client — and the man said quietly, like that time: "Is Grigory at home?" — and that was all. And what did Grisha say? "I said, 'I'm Grigory,'" — Grisha looked at Kesha in bewilderment. "I am Grigory. Grisha's Grigory. Didn't you know?"

Kesha knew, of course — he had simply never thought about it, just as he had never thought about the fact that his grandfather had also been called Grigory: Grisha — and Grisha, Grandpa Grisha — and Grisha, two different Grishas who had never met. Grandpa died in two thousand and eight, Grisha was four then; they lived in the same town but could not have met, and they had nothing in common but the name. Kesha had never thought about it, and now he did, and he felt cold.

Names in our town, it must be said, come in waves, like fashions in hats: in the fifties nothing but Vovas and Galyas were born, in the seventies Sergeis and Natashas, in the nineties Denises, Kristinas and, for reasons unknown, Arturs, and nobody named anyone Grigory, because Grigory is a grandfather's name, heavy, with a beard and boots. And if a Grisha did turn up in some class in the two-thousands, the teacher would invariably ask at the first assembly whom he was named after, and the mother would blush and say "no reason" — and that "no reason" sounds more suspicious in a small town than any explanation.

He asked what the man said when Grisha told him he was Grigory. Nothing, said Grisha, wrinkling his forehead: he looked at him — that is, Grisha didn't see the face, it was dark — but sort of looked at him, a long time, and then said, "No. Another," and turned away. So Grisha went on: he had a marshrutka to catch. "No. Another," — Kesha let go of Grisha's sleeve.

"Master," Grisha asked carefully, "and who is it, this Grigory he's looking for? Maybe he needs help? Maybe he's lost? He's sort of not from round here — what if he's got the address wrong?"

"No," said Kesha. "He hasn't got it wrong."

He went to the half-basement window at pavement level, from which little could be seen from below — a stretch of Krivaya, dirty snow, someone's legs passing by — and, if you bent down and looked up and to the side, the edge of the water tower. Kesha bent down and looked: there was nobody by the tower, only grey snow, rusty tin at the top and a crow on the cornice. The water tower on Krivaya has stood since nineteen-hundred-and-something; there has been no water in it for forty years, and they're always about to pull it down but never get round to it, because it's pretty, brick, with little battlements, and because under it, according to Granny Tosya from Oktyabrskaya, the merchant who built it lies buried together with his money. There's always someone standing at its foot: waiting for the bus, smoking, arranging dates, and in summer old men sit on the bench by it and discuss who has died — so a man who stood all day by the tower would not have aroused anyone's suspicion on Krivaya. No one's but Kesha's. He's not there today, said Grisha behind him: when he came, he wasn't there. Good, said Kesha — let him go: his mum was waiting.

Grisha stood for a while looking at him, then put on his jacket, took his mimosa in newspaper for his mum, went to the door and on the threshold asked whether the master knew this Grigory: he knew everyone round here, after all. Kesha did not answer, and Grisha left, and Kesha heard him climbing the stairs, echoingly, ironly, step by step, and heard the door of the building bang upstairs.

Then Kesha went back behind the curtain and sat down at the desk, where the mimosa lay on the edge, giving off its scent, and thought about the fact that Grandpa's name had been Grigory, and that in this town there must be hundreds of Grigorys — Grishas, Grishkas, Grigory Petroviches and Ivanoviches — and that the man in the long coat had come not to them but here, to Krivaya, to the half-basement of house seventeen, where Grandpa Grisha had received clients for thirty years. "Is Grigory at home?" — no, Kesha would have liked to tell him, no, he's not at home: he hasn't been for twelve years, he's in section three of the town cemetery, under a granite slab, and you're too late. But for some reason Kesha was not sure that the man in the coat did not know that.