Arkady Who Couldn't See and Artem Who Couldn't Hear (2 page)

In the old times people kept their fingernails, Artem said, like we keep matchsticks. They were buried with them, said Arkady, should they need them. I looked at the twins' fingernails, which were clipped short but looked as thick and strong as horses' hooves.

The fire began after Artem had spoken to the priest, Arkady told me later that night as his brother slept. Artem asked why despair existed in the world and the priest told my brother that God had granted him just enough despair for him to marvel at the rest of creation. Without despair, the priest said, beauty would not exist. As Artem walked home he had an illumination: he realised that only God should exist in the world, and that he had to destroy everything that was not God.

Either Arkady or myself fell asleep at that point, I remember with difficulty, lost as we were in the night and travel and the telling of tales. When I later awoke I found Artem looking at me, apparently taking it in turns with his brother to keep a vigil over their creation.

The fire began, quiet Artem told me, when Arkady fell asleep in a stupor and dropped the end of his lit cigarette into a vodka bottle. He was lucky only his eyebrows were singed.

 

They were both awake the next morning and smiled at me as I returned from splashing cold water on my face in the tiny washroom. Now we drink only tea, they said, and we do not pray. Despite their claims, I found something unconvincing in their breezy assertion and suspected that deaf Artem still felt the pull of the gleaming domes and thick incense, and that blind Arkady still dreamed of the pop of the bottle top, the peppery warmth as the spirit went down.

 

Days passed in travel, the train being frequently held up or slowed by the weather conditions. The drunk finished his oblique game of patience and grew increasingly agitated, attempting to engage us in conversations, which were incomprehensible, or equally baffling card games. Some buildings on the twins' model grew bigger yet others seemed no nearer completion than when I had begun my journey over a week ago. As I sat awake one night, reading a collection of Russian tales less fantastic than the one which was unfolding before me, I finally realised why. The brothers were indeed taking turns to keep a nightwatch over their work, but that was not all. As Artem slept and Arkady stayed awake, I saw him not adding to the model, but taking away from it. With a careful deliberateness he removed all but a few of the matchsticks his brother had put in place earlier that day, scraped the glue from them and put them back in their bag. I said nothing, and pretended to read. Later, Arkady slept and Artem stayed awake, and again, through the corner of my eye I watched him adding a few pieces, yet at the same time subtracting the few his brother had added. In this way, I realised, their model would be ever-changing and never-growing. It was never meant to be completed.

 

The next morning the snow clouds had lifted, the air was brighter and for the first time in days the train sped through the birch forests in the manner for which it had been designed. I watched the trees pass as quickly as the hours, keen to get on with my journey, to arrive somewhere.

But then, just as I was thinking of what I would do when I arrived (a hot shower in a friendly hotel, the first proper meal in ages at a good but unassuming restaurant, a sleep on a firm mattress), a squeal of brakes ripped through the silence and the train slammed to a halt. Bags were thrown from the luggage racks onto our heads, we were launched into unlikely and improbable clinches, thumps and cries were heard from up and down the carriage, the card-player's bottle slid and smashed on the floor. Yet as all this happened we each kept our eyes on one thing only: the model slid a few inches across the table until it teetered on the precipice, but it did not fall. When the train juddered back from its sudden stop we all looked upon this small miracle.

Not even an earthquake could destroy our home, said Arkady, and everyone laughed. Then the drunk picked up the stub of his bottle, raised it above his head and smashed it down into the centre of the model.

 

The train driver, it turned out, had braked so as not to hit a deer crossing the track. The deer had fled unharmed, but the train was compromised in such a way as to necessitate a termination at a dull industrial town, still many miles from our intended destination. We crawled on for a few hours before reaching an old station where a steam locomotive sat at the end of a siding, unmoved for many years, and were told to disembark.

 

The twins picked up their small cases, the polythene bag filled with matchsticks and the wreck of their memories and stood on the platform in the bright morning light, tiny flakes of slowly-falling snow shining around them. They would wait for the next train, they told me, and I watched them recede as I walked off to find a hotel.

Goodbye, they called. Remember us, and never trust a woman called Olga. They waved to me and I waved back, each of us in perfect time.

 

Recently, I was back in the city where I had last seen the brothers. I spent the few hours between trains walking its icy pavements and admiring the steep banks of snow that rose up from the sheer white river. I thought of Arkady and Artem and worried about disposable plastic lighters imported from China. Should the twins, wherever they were now, still be constructing their model, they would surely run out of their raw material.

On the way out of the city, I noticed some wooden houses, not dissimilar to the one they had begun and never finished building. Its windows were broken, some parts of it were boarded up with plywood and cardboard rather than elm or birch timber. A faded bouquet of flowers hung in the window casement and the house leaned madly, sinking into the snow like a ship running aground a thousand miles from the nearest sea.

 

 

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