It’s a Cold Place

"Vodka?"

"Comrade Hennadyi. A true Soviet. Please pour me a shot and let’s drink our sorrows away," said Nazar slumping with hazy eyes.

Hennadyi poured the drinks while chain-smoking. He took two serious shots before Nazar took a sip with lips of scar tissue from his beating that night.

"And Lyuba. Where is she?" Demanded Hennadyi.

"Ha." Nazar laughed as if sighing. "You still don't understand do you? You work so hard comrade. In the cold, you work harder than all us Russian peasants put together. Your Father a hero who saved us all. Only we don't want to work so hard Lyuba and me. We want to be stars in Hollywood. We live our dreams until the drugs are gone. Then we get some more. What's the point? Did you really think you would marry Lyuba and have children?"

Hennadyi drank some more. Smoked some more. All in silence, as he watched "The Spaniard" begin to doze while outside it snowed.

If they were playing chess then Hennadyi couldn't find his next move. Only that’s when the pigmy goat walked in from the kitchen. It’s short stature with bugged out sideway eyes caught his attention. He’d ate some goat earlier, the fresh meat still ensnarled in his teeth.

He laughed about the scene to himself, not sure where to take it. That’s when the cook walked into the seating area with a butcher knife in pursuit of the goat determined to bring it back into the kitchen to prepare for another order.

Now thoughts began to spring from the well in his mind only instead of water, the dry liquid of vodka. Hennadyi finally thought of killing Nazar. Inspiration to cut him into pieces in order to hide his body in the snow. Only he’d always been a hard-working Russian.

The Spaniard’s drug filled lifestyle living at night with Lyuba in back alley’s across Moscow seemed more likely to fit that character. It wouldn’t surprise Hennadyi if Nazar had killed before. His life must be filled with such experiences.

The cook held the pigmy goat by a hindleg. It struggled as it swung through the air making cries heard. It wanted to live without a home or knowledge of what took place on the streets outside. Just a small hairy animal about to be slaughtered for someone’s dinner.

The truth had been told about Hennadyi’s Father, a hero in the days of Communism, saving many poor villagers from Soviet purges. There’s always that bond between the three of them, Hennadyi, Nazar, and Lyuba. Just some local Russians near where they’d been born. Yet Hennadyi had beaten Nazar badly before scaring his lip. Still the thought to murder and butcher him had never surfaced in his mind until the cook came out of the kitchen in pursuit of the goat.

Could this be some form of propaganda plaguing his mind? A chance suggestion to setoff homicidal thoughts while an authoritarian figure lurked in a darkroom watching his actions closely. He couldn’t distinguish the truth from the reality.

Slurred thoughts, the slurred speech of his mind’s vocabulary running though words trying to make meaning of an encounter while in the interrogation room of this dive bar on the outskirts of the city far from any foreign foot traffic.

Hennadyi rose from the table throwing a cigarette at the now sleeping Nazar who didn’t budge. He put another cigarette between his lips and lit it. In the end, he just wanted to know where Lyuba could be found at this moment.

“Bastard,” he muttered putting some rubles on the table. He left the brooding oppressive low ceilings of the smoke-filled room for the brisk cold snow-covered street. The moon creating a glow on the soft mounds of ice that littered the gutters. He had to be at work early the next day.