InsaneJournal

The Russian

The Russian is named Yuri, that much I have learned in the three years or so I have known him. His surname I will never know now, because soon he will lie dying in the street. I am nineteen years old, almost to the day, when they come in the night like thieves and drag him from the house. It takes every man they have to bring him out - the Russian is built approximately like a bear. He is shouting in his native tongue, one of the few times I have ever heard him speak it. They are perhaps only taking him at first to be arrested, or for questioning. I do not know, and I am too frightened to come from hiding to ask. I creep out the window of the Russian's parlor, where I have been living on and off since I have known him. In the shadows I watch as he breaks free, growls deep in his throat, ready to fight, turns to court his death instead of running from it. Though he is unarmed, they fire. He laughs as he falls, and they are unnerved enough that they hurry away on other 'official business'.

He is dying in the street. I do not go to him - I am frozen to the spot I stand, having never witnessed a death before. Even my Grandfather Adi who died had the good grace to do it out of sight, in the middle of the night in his room. I think how like the Russian, to die in the street he ruled with his booming voice and boisterous ways. Everyone on the block knew him as 'The Russian' , and he knew each of them by name. He worked in the cabaret cleaning up and keeping things in repair. It was he who taught me to repair things, to work with my hands.

He took me in the first time when I was sixteen. "Why do you let these men touch you?" he said, as he drove off an overly familiar 'gentleman' who was buying me drinks. "They use you. Like a handkerchief." I slept on his couch, the first good sleep since I had come to Berlin. From then on, I chose who touched me, of desire not desperation. He still did not approve of these temporary attachments, but he never turned me away from his door. Nor did he ever accept from me any money, or my body, or anything else I sought to offer in trade.

And now here he is, dying in the street, with only a first name. I will not be there to bury him. He would not have wanted to see me crying anyway- a weakness, to be crying for this stoic man who had left his homeland when the Bolsheviks came. How ironic that he was taken out by another upstart regime.

I am gone from the city by the time the sun rises.