CHAPTER ONE

By Mark Krotov

Peter Belovski quietly marched through the city on his last day. He had known for months that this date would be his final opportunity to spend time in his place of residence of sixteen years, but he had largely ignored the thought until absolutely necessary. Soon, he would meet his friends for a last supper of sorts (as he was fully aware that retaining connections would be both pointless and futile), but, on this balmy evening, he wanted a few moments to experience his city in the way that he had lived it--by himself.

Peter lived in a city that lacked a name and did not need one. There were hundreds of them scattered across thousands of square miles--cities that had once shared nothing, but that now seemed to share too much. Communism had certainly failed, but its legacy--mental, political, and, in this particular instance, psychological and architectural, had remained forceful. Peter did not ponder the impact that foreign invasions had had on his country at this moment; rather, he looked around and saw something for which he would never feel nostalgic.

He was a fairly positive-thinking individual, but even he could not avoid the realization that this was very much a dead city. If not dead, then it was certainly dying. His vision encompassed three central features: drunks, huddled old women, and prostitutes. Of course, he had not chosen the legendary boulevards for his walk. He decided that he wanted to depart with a memory of reality. He wanted to be grounded in what he lived, so that he could never be compelled to come back. On his own terms, it had been a fairly decent life; but by any other measure, it was a life of shit, and his opportunity for escape would not be feared or avoided. Nevertheless, he was leaving sixteen years and thousands of memories behind, and this seemed like the perfect evening to recapture a few.

In the glory days of the nameless Eastern European city, the street upon which Peter walked had been all things to all people. The meat, fish, and vegetable vendors had gathered here early in the morning, comparing goods, making secret deals, and figuring out new ways to milk customers of their money (in this frontier town, communism and capitalism had always mixed rather organically). The bedraggled book vendors, with wispy gray beards and worn black hats, made no effort to promote their goods. Some stood, but most sat on the stone fences, and all were utterly disinterested in the proceedings until some very real money appeared in front of their faces. They sold everything, anything, and nothing, but mostly they sat.

The street had seen its share of political rallies, as well. Although impromptu calls for change and revolution were later replaced by much more forced calls for eternal change and a continuous revolution, there had once been a great public spirit on the street. Every speech made was radical and heavy, and every orator knew that in this venue, subtlety and humbleness were curses. Mostly, people flocked to the market, and not to the political rallies, but through it all, the street had retained a life force. It was not alive, but it was palpable. That, Peter could not help thinking, was then.

Now was a different situation. It was not the drunks, old women, and prostitutes that created such a different setting. Rather, it was the depressingly bedraggled nature of the entire place. Certainly, the steamy dusk light that peered through the thick opacity of the smog that now seemed inescapable in Eastern Europe did not beautify the street, which was already dark, due to the anonymous blocks of thin glass and collapsing steel that loomed threateningly over thousands of similar streets in at least three continents. There seemed to be a waterline that paralleled the street a few stories above that divided the buildings near it into pre and post (in this country, temporal allusions only referred to one regime).

As Peter walked, he could not decide which he found to be more brutally depressing: the old stone and terra-cotta department stores--once so confident in their glory and commercial prowess--that now sat in total disrepair and in direct proximity to collapse, or the so-called modernist buildings that had never had an opportunity to be glorious, whose job it was to reinforce the frighteningly universal mantra of ‘function over form.’ It was now hard to tell what function they performed, and the form was decidedly unappealing, so he concluded that he felt sorry for the newer buildings--the ones that had been deprived of architectural beauty from their first cornerstones.

This was going to be a long night, Peter realized, so he stepped into a back alley to have a smoke. He had certainly not stepped away from the street due to disrespect. He simply wanted a quiet moment without disturbances from the streetwalkers. As he lit up his Camels, a luxury that he had decided to bestow upon himself as a going-away present, he recalled the article that he had read in some local lifestyle magazine. It mentioned that smoking was frowned upon in the United States, and that people were regularly kicked out of many different types of venues simply for smoking. Peter found this to be absurd, but he quickly realized that it would be doubtful that anyone would confront him about his habits, so he remained calm about the possibility of a cigarette-free zone.

He looked around the alley and realized that it was not an alley at all. The street upon which Peter had walked, along with the majority of the neighboring area, had been built in the late nineteenth century. At that time, the determination of a street’s width was not a significant factor in construction. As long as it fit a couple of people and a horse-drawn carriage, there was no use fussing over such minute matters. At the beginning of the post-communist era, however, the automobile had been reintroduced into virtually every corner of this once delicate city. Its white gloves had been ripped over time, and they were now covered with thick gray soot. To be fair, it was only one soot replaced by another one, that of downtown factory buildings producing unneeded products in beautiful inefficiency replaced by cheap cars from the eastern side of Europe and an occasional demonstration of solitary wealth, in the form of an Audi with fake police lights.

The very street that had fit in so beautifully could no longer handle these new invaders--with their throbbing mufflers and shredded chrome. So, as had been common during the regime, no improvement or alternative had been proposed. The street simply lay dormant and ignored, and it had attained such a high level of unimportance that it now resembled an alleyway, with trash scattered throughout the old cobblestones and linens (that Peter rightly assumed would never get clean with this kind of air) hanging lazily on torn lines between the buildings. This street intrigued Peter, not only because he had never noticed it on his many walks, but because it quietly said everything that needed to be said about himself, his country, and the reason for his impending departure. He decided that a second cigarette could do no harm, and he quietly puffed away, wondering how much he had been destroyed by this place.

The sounds of traffic had never enthused Peter, so it was with great reluctance that he followed the alley to the main square of the nameless Eastern European city. A square that had once seen all kinds of activity was now reduced to nothing more than a McDonald’s and thousands and thousands of cars, interacting mostly through horns, hand gestures, and occasional verbal exclamations from inside them. The square used to be big. A product of the massive architectural expansion that dominated the first years of the regime, it had been built as a symbol rather than a functional building block of the city. This was very much the era prior to ‘function over form,’ when the most important men in power insisted that their political glory be imparted through architecture.

The government architects, once called the ‘city’s willing executioners’ by a dissident architectural magazine, saw it as their duty to replace the more organic city layout that had evolved over hundreds of years. They would make statements in granite and marble and concrete. They would build with only perpendicular lines and vertical ambitions and horizontal expanses. They would construct grand stories of glory with obelisks and acropolises. While the execution and realization produced horrors on all levels, the ambition was certainly present. Peter had once learned (in a clandestine manner while the regime was still alive and threatening) about the old city that had been demolished to make way for the Great Square.

The party leader had wanted a monument that would transcend beauty--it would be epic, like Albert Speer’s unbuilt Great Hall, but unlike Speer, the leader insisted that these buildings would be eternal. They would never be subjected to ruin or defacement. They would be untouched and unwavering in their presentation of the leader’s divinity. They would sit on this Earth after it was all over. Peter recalled what he had been told in secrecy--what had been torn down for the Great Square--old parks and quiet houses, streets that wove along tranquil hills, and the peaceful hustle and bustle that was the center of life in the old town. Now, as he looked around, he smiled to himself at the beautiful twist of fate. No, the old town had not been resurrected and the bombastic monumental structures had not been restored, but what had replaced them was far worse--it was smallness. It was a smallness that could not have existed under communism, and it was not necessarily an improvement on the bigness, but it was beautiful, nonetheless.

Peter was more poetic than political (although he would never admit to being either) so he gazed upon the square with a ferocious sense of almost literary irony. The square, built to honor and deify leaders that sought nothing more than absolute size, was papered over with garish billboards and various indications of a profound cheapness. This place no longer aimed for anything beyond the basest, as evidenced by the scattering of sex shops on the west side of the plaza, and the neo-Nazi graffiti that seemed to poke through the most unassuming of walls, windows, and doors. Peter was not a fan of the movement, but all of it, all of it meant that smallness had triumphed over bigness.

Epic dreams were confirmed as nothing but the bullshit that they always were. His musings were interrupted by the nearby screeching of tires, the honking of horns, and the collision between two cars that would never be able to recover from this minor fender bender. It was probably for the better, Peter thought. He looked around again, and saw that while the place was small on a literary or perhaps social scale, it was still overwhelming in its hugeness. The four enormous skyscrapers, designed with burdensome neo-Gothic brushstrokes, still loomed over the square, which was really a large concrete plaza with a scattering of benches and a pedestal that had, for ten years now, lacked a monument. The statue’s castration was humorous, but it did nothing to reduce the feeling that even in the face of so much change, this place still managed to hold a dominant power. Peter loved it.

This story is the first chapter of a larger novel which Krotov is currently writing.