Ashley Keyser
Looking for Scythians, we crossed a black field and found a slick of rock, only the rock, unimportant, smooth to touch. Sergei swung his limbs in the sun, glossy pink like a very large, muscular baby. Barrows dot the south of Ukraine, he said, the horsemen buried with horse bones, with griffins wrought in iron tearing each other’s throats. Asthmatic, monolingual, I struggled to keep up like the trip’s distracted schoolchildren whom I was meant to amuse and teach some English. The three girls always lagged, brushing reams of gold hair wasted on the little group’s boys, oblivious as cats. Only sweet, fat Vanya trailed at my heels, asking in his Little Lord Fauntleroy English, “What is your favorite flower?” Meanwhile, Sergei portioned fields groaning with my favorite, sunflowers, into which battle or German bomb made them notable. Once, in the tent, he woke with a start from a dream of his wife. We stretched out, not touching, side by side like broken boats. He called me sonishka—little sun, or sweetie—but his anxiety when I tottered under my knapsack (“Be careful, you must have children one day”) wasn’t personal, merely fear of race suicide. So I didn’t know for whose benefit he badgered Vanya, if not for mine or Vanya’s, like an apoplectic dad. He scolded the boy’s dawdling, or his trembling at the pond’s edge, as the others splashed, in his body still like a zygote’s, part girl. Sergei tossed him into the dirty water, then told me, “He’s got to be a man,” stripping in the reeds, illustrating his point with ruddy muscles. He washed, talked politics: “If civil war’s coming, I’m ready, even to die.” He spoke with a passionate tremulousness that longs to be amplified. I kept quiet, but such public and quotable voices, like a riding cloak adorned for a warrior and long buried, seek no reply. He wore camo like a soldier but wasn’t. A few years later, at home, I scrolled through photos of winter boots and naked stomachs peeping, almost shyly, from plastic tarp on the concrete of Maidan Nezalezhnosti, dead men barely out of adolescence, where I used to sulk in beer gardens. Under the article, another reader posted: “I put on the Les Mis soundtrack, ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ So inspiring!!” If that was Sergei’s healthy, lusty chest smashed on the ground, I couldn’t know. I last saw him in 2012 at a battle reenactment. In a crowd of drooping mustaches and sunburns, knives tucked into sashes, he modeled Cossack pants, his second wife in a peasant blouse. They stood on a bridge, and I took a photo for them on the bank: their fresh start, tossing their parents’ house keys to the river. They grinned as cannon smoke blew in their faces.