blog — April 30

Excerpt: “Rock, Paper, Grenade” by Artem Chekh

To celebrate the release of Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh, translated by Olena Jennings and Oksana Rosenblum, we're proud to share an excerpt from this "tender, sharply-imagined coming-of-age novel, full of clarity and bleak humor" (Elaine Castillo). 

Rock, Paper, Grenade is a gritty and bald bildungsroman, a lilting picaresque of a life lived in the shadow of someone else’s war.

A realist depiction of Ukraine and the post Soviet world, this novel offers an affecting yet honest look into the life of someone suffering from PTSD. It is a story of growing up without much hope for a better future, and yet intense moments of connection and kindness persist. Just when things begin to seem insurmountably dark, a friendship begins, a kind word is said, or a hand reaches out and opens the curtains, letting in a little light.

When Tymofiy is five years old, his small family in Cherkasy, Ukraine grows by one. Not with the birth of a baby sister or brother, but with the appearance of Felix—mentor and tormentor, enemy and friend—Tymofiy’s grandmother’s sometime-boyfriend. “Who are you?” Felix screams in the depths of a confused and drunken rage at all who cross his path, his memories of the Soviet-Afghan war clouding his eyes and senses. “Who are you?” Tymofiy asks himself as he drifts through the streets of his hometown, searching for love and protection, for a better, happier way of life.

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A POLONAISE FOR FELIX

Lida had never been afraid of anything. Maybe because she did not watch TV or read the newspapers. Lida would listen to the radio and knit. She would sit in her small, cramped room on the bed under a monochrome tapestry (a naked woman on a riverbank), knit, and, of course, listen to the radio.

Lida swam in the Dnipro all year. Almost every day, fearless and hardened by nature, she went to the river, resolutely crossed the long sandy beach covered with islands of ice and mounds of snow, walked out on the frozen surface, looked for an ice hole left by fishermen, took off her clothes, but for a faded-pink and at one time red swimsuit, firmly rested her hands on the edges of the hole, and dove in. And all this happened year after year, until one February day she didn’t resurface from beneath the ice. For almost a minute, an unexpected force carried her away from the ice hole through the dark waters of the Dnipro, farther from the light and closer to death.

Felix rescued Lida. He often accompanied her when she was swimming. He walked into the distance, smoked, walked carefully along the icy quiet surface of the reservoir, looking toward the fairway, as if expecting desert caravans of dushman armed with Stingers to swim out of the frosty haze. But, of course, there were no caravans. And, of course, no dushman either. And when he looked back, there was no Lida. Felix rushed to the ice hole and beneath the murky ice he saw her gray flailing body. He threw off his jacket, plunged to the waist, slid his fingers along her body, looked for something to grab onto, finally grabbed her hair, pulled. Lida hit her head on the bottom of the ice, scratched her face and hands, had almost stopped breathing, and, as was made clear later, had said goodbye to life. In the murky crystal of the cold water, she managed to catch a glimpse of the light edge of the sky, remembered the summer and the sound of reeds in the backwaters between the villages of Chervona Sloboda and Lesky, the tall pines of the Sofiyivka Park, and the spring morning draft that swayed the whitewashed lace curtains hanging in the cottage’s summer kitchen. And most of all, she thought about how it was a pity that there was so little and that there could have been a little more: summer, reeds, sunshine, forest skirted with dried mushrooms, limitless lawns of heather, and silver poplars in the wind, pouring over the transparent afternoon splendor. And this was the most frightening of her fleeting thoughts.

After this, Lida didn’t swim in winter anymore.

Perhaps the river’s ice was the only thing that frightened her.

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Felix was discharged in ’89. After he was wounded, shell-shocked, and held in captivity, the Moscow leadership started to seriously doubt his usefulness. According to the law, while waiting for retirement, he had to work somewhere, so he was taken on as a truck driver for a pasta factory. His influential friends from the Soviet party got him the job. At first, before he got used to it, Felix wandered around the factory open-mouthed. He hardly understood anything and did not trust anyone. The consequences of the shell shock did not let up for a long time. He was allowed not to work, so he wandered between the shops, sat for hours beneath the leaky shed roof, and smoked, watching the measured flow of factory life. Curiously, he repaired the fence around the flowerbed, poisoned a hornet’s nest near the public toilet, and drew a realistic penis for the funny bear on the May Day poster.

And finally, he found his way. He joined a group of veterans of the Afghan war (some criminals among them), who drove around the grounds in a truck with black plates, while workers, those who couldn’t get away with not working, filled the truck with groceries: Soviet cognac, condensed milk, butter, sacks of flour and pasta, boxes of candies and cakes. After the truck passed the checkpoint without obstacle, it rolled in the direction of the Eastern Borderlands and finally unloaded on the right bank of the Western Bug River. The patrons of the party got part of the money, something was thrown to the director of the factory, and everything else was divided and spent on booze. At the same time, Felix collected payments at the central market. They resold purchases there, provisions bought from the villagers. The payments were small, but the market was big. Sometimes he took goods instead of the money. A silver-haired Azerbaijani with a missing ear got him sweet peppers and tomatoes. Fat-bottomed Ada specialized in meat. One agreeable old man brought eggs and farmer’s cheese directly to Felix’s apartment.

The building he lived in was right across from the market. It was a new, brick building from ’86 with large bright rooms and glassed-in balconies. The neighbors were mostly officers of the 40th Army of the Soviet Ground Forces and their families. Felix got a three-room apartment on the fourth floor. His wife, Tanya, and daughter moved in while Felix was still stationed in Afghanistan. Just like a thousand of his army friends, he outfitted the apartment with Japanese appliances hauled on donkeys and camels by caravanners from Pakistan and covered the living room with a fluffy, patterned rug requisitioned from the Bagram market. The furniture, however, was from Romania, but beech wood, a bespoke order from the factory in Baia Mare. His wife took care of decorating the apartment. In the beginning, Felix did not care about the apartment, the appliances, not even the rug, though he had taken a long time selecting it and was anxious about it, asking the seller detailed questions and bargaining for each afghani, and having reached an acceptable price, he came away with it for free. And when he returned, he still did not care. He was used to an austere life; he couldn’t care less about the cozy apartment. Then he came to his senses, looked around, but it was too late to change anything.

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ARTEM CHEKH is a Ukrainian author and soldier. He is the author of some sixteen books, including Absolute Zero, and his work has been translated into English, Polish, Czech, and Russian. Chekh is currently serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.