The Crab, the Dude and the Boathouse

It is March 1991, and I am in my grandparents’ village, or to be more precise, in the village pond, and I am drowning. For such a major event in my life, it goes by spectacularly fast. I see water, pitch black, bubbles, running away from me as I thrash and kick and burn, ice on top, and, as I try to dole out breath, twist, head for the opening, a giant of a bubble right in front of my eyes. I know, I just know it’s the last one. I gasp, ice snaps up my heart, and then down and nothing.

By the time they get me out of the pond, I am not looking too hot. Skin like the snow around us, lips blue, eyes washed clear of tears. I hover above, watch the divers trudge to the shore, ascend, one of them carrying me. They look like ants heading back to the anthill at the end of a hard day. Someone has forgotten to switch off the siren on the ambulance, and it wails itself blue while they load me in.

It was Pashka’s idea to go fishing.

“March,” I said, “isn’t it thawing?”

“Naw, be alright, saw someone fishing the other day, bang in the middle. And been snowing since.”

Except he was too chicken to go to the middle of the pond, afraid they would spot us from the village. So we went along the shore, Pashka carrying the rods and the bucket, me in front with the drill in my hand. It felt ok to start with. Solid underfoot. Snow covered the ice as far as I could see. Then I hit a long dark patch, where the snow had been blown off, and the ice had pores in it. I turned to Pashka, I told him; I don’t think you are supposed to see the water like that. I was about to turn back when the ice gave way underneath my foot, and I went off balance and slid right in, feet first, like a total loser. The rest you know.

Below, a black Volga flies down to the shore, storms right up to the ambulance, breaks hard, skids and nearly slams into it. The Crab jumps out, scuttles over to the paramedic standing near the open doors, asks him something, looks inside, bristles and starts yelling, real stylish.

“Do it!” the Crab hollers, eyes popping out on stalks. “Do it, I said, or I will grind all of you into powder!”

He whips his id out of the inside pocket and shoves it in the guy’s face. The paramedic begins to explain something, but the Crab has already pushed him aside and is climbing into the ambulance.

I am feeling pretty detached up here, excuse the pun. Even so, I am surprised. For a start, I’ve never heard the Crab yell. Secondly, he seems all bent out of shape, and he and I are not exactly friends.

My Mum met him two summers ago. Dad was living separately, but they were working things out and I knew they would get back together. Then the Crab appeared, and it was all over with Dad, just like that.

At the wedding, the Crab sported yellow crescents in his armpits and sleep caked in the corners of his eyes, but she kept on looking up to him, clinging onto every word, like he was a prophet, and blushing and giggling as he talked to her in a low voice. Her face and neck were all flushed.

He moved in straight after that. Arms folded across her chest, she said:

“You don’t have to accept him as a father.”

“Good,” I said, “I am not going to.”

“But you are thirteen,” she said, “and I expect you to behave accordingly.”

I hated his guts, accordingly, and avoided being in the same room with him. I had plenty to get on with. But we both had to make an effort around her. She insisted on family dinners, and her eyes, my favourite dark shade of blue, would go flat if I said no.

One evening, the Crab rocked up from work and came into my room, spouting something about taking time together, man to man, a trip to the village. I glared at him, but he kept right on: my grandparents’ house, the frost, the pipes, the generator. That guy was housewifely.

We went. He never employed his sidekicks to get the heavy stuff done, probably hoping we would bond over chopping wood and lugging gas canisters together. I kept silent throughout, hoping he would get the idea. I was so morose you could get frostbite just from looking at me. But he didn’t. Instead, the Crab donned my mother’s apron and made dinners.

He cooked well, I have to say. He’d chop up vegetables at the speed of light, narrowly missing his own fat fingers on the board, throw them into the pan with a flourish, add spices and wine, without measuring, stir violently, splashing the tiles and, all done, settle his large butt on the sideboard, humming. On the last evening he made mulled wine, Mum’s favourite, and took it with us to Moscow in our worn house thermos with a picture of a ladybird.

This time it’s the weekend of the 8th of March, International Women’s Day. The Crab has got my mother and her friend a trip to a sanatorium outside Moscow, one of those exclusive ones where they pamper women. He is working short days. His driver takes him to Moscow early in the morning and brings him back at lunchtime, and that’s the reason the Crab is here, pumping my chest as I dangle in the overcast sky.

“Do you believe in God?” he asks me one time, walking in without an invitation, and sitting down on the edge of the bed.

“Sure do,” I say.

“What do you think he – it – looks like?”

“Like Bon Jovi,” I say.

“Like Bon Jovi?” he looks at me quizzically, eyes serious.

“Blue jeans, white t-shirt, drinks Coca-Cola. He is the Dude.”

“Ah!” he says. “Do you talk to the Dude?”

“Not about you,” I say.

This cuts his sentimental mood swing short, but if he is upset, he doesn’t show it. He just nods, says he’ll leave me to it.

I do believe in God, and in souls. As it turns out, it would have been stupid to have doubts. The soul stays around for a while after death, my grandmother used to say, definitely for the first nine days, maybe even forty. The soul can’t leave and hangs around next to the body. That’s why it’s important to hold special prayers for the dead on those days, to help it cross over. If this is true, I am going to have to watch Mum find out, and that is bad news. I don’t want to see it.

The Crab scrambles out and starts pacing around the ambulance. I count ten circles. The paramedics have taken over – I can see them through the window, they are really going for it. A few onlookers huddle together nearby, talking, sharing cigarettes. Pashka is not with them; he must be at home, going mental. He is not very strong.

The Crab turns on his heels and sets off towards the waterline, steps purposeful. There is a boathouse there, storage for summer boats and oars and those stupid-looking pedalos. He fusses around with the door, opens it, goes in, and I lose him from view. Apparently, it is impossible to move around at will here, so I cannot check out what the Crab is doing.

Little by little, I start feeling kind of weird, like I am being pulled in a hundred opposing directions. I seem to be dissipating. Below, the siren on the ambulance lights up, doors slam shut, the car moves off, but there is no sound to any of it. The last thing I see is the Crab legging it from the boathouse to his Volga.

Lights, blurry, light on white. At the edges of my vision, darker shapes, circles and squares pasted together, randomly. A face leans in; eyes, blue. Mum, I think, and try to feel my mouth, form a word. A woman is talking, but it is not Mum’s voice.

“Follow my finger with your eyes,” she says.

“Blink,” she says.

It looks like I have been here a while. A needle in my arm, a drip next to the bed, stickers on my chest. Wires leading to a monitor. They unhook me, wheel my bed into a different room, adjust its height, slide me over and inside a machine that looks like a cocoon.

“Keep still,” they say.

The machine hums, hammers, spits me out. The doctors flash the light into my eyes, prod me, ask me questions, smile.

“You are going to be fine now,” they say.

The nurse who looks after me talks a lot. I am a miracle case. Twenty minutes in the freezing water, no vital signs, no initial response to CPR. They don’t know why my heart started, or how I didn’t get brain damage.

“If it weren’t for your Dad, you wouldn’t be here,” she says.

I am too tired to correct her.

When I next wake up, it is dark outside. The clock on the opposite wall shows nine.

The Crab is in the armchair near my bed, asleep, head thrown back and mouth open all the way to gold twinkling at the back. His tie is askew, his shirt crumpled, an open newspaper lies on his lap.

On the bedside table, I find the thermos with a red ladybird. I unscrew the top with shaking hands and pour myself a cup of chicken broth. It is translucent. I sit quietly and watch the Crab sleep. Under the fluorescent hospital lights, he looks exhausted, face drawn, wrinkles around the eyes deeper than I remember. I have spent two years sharing a house with this man, but we don’t know each other. I never let him get close, until the time to die came, and then he was there.

He wakes up, yawns, stretches, looks at me, eyes blank.

“Boo,” I say.

After they let me out of hospital, it takes a while for Mum to get back to normal. She follows me around the flat, sits at the table watching me eat, waits outside the bathroom when I go in, until I get unnerved and ask her to stop. At night, I hear their voices; Mum is crying. I feel bad, but I don’t know how to talk about what happened.

May is hot; for the holidays, the three of us go to the village. The pond stretches clear; bright swimsuits and hats dot the shore; kids scream with delight in the shallows. It is all a world away from the black ice, the snow. The Crab asks me if I am ok to go swimming. Mum sits on the shore, hugging herself, watching us. I get out, come up to her, kiss her on the crown of her head. Her hair smells faintly of hay.

“I am sorry,” I say. She looks up at me, a five-year old blue-eyed girl.

I lie down on my back and watch the sky, tall, clear all the way up. Birds are shouting. The Crab walks over, shaking off water and snorting with pleasure. He’s lost weight. I want to ask him about what happened in the boathouse the day I died, but I’d have some explaining to do, and it would probably freak him out. Or maybe not. It dawns on me that the Crab is the only person I can tell about floating in the sky. He looks down at me, eyes serious, and I get the strangest feeling, like he already knows.

“Apricots,” he says, looking away. “It’s the season, I am going to bake an apricot pie.”

He extols the virtues of apricots. Vitamin A, vitamin E. Just the right side of ripe, otherwise the pie comes out dry.

“I’ll come along to the market,” I say. “Help you haggle.”

Up in the tall skies, the Dude probably smiles and takes a swig of Coca-Cola.