We were eleven and twelve years old; our limbs had grown a bit taller, a few more teeth had fallen out and been replaced, our faces and minds had matured, but deep down our essence was still the same.
I didn't want to get out of bed. The view from my bedroom window predicted it to be a crisp and clear autumn morning. The tree crowns swayed gently back and forth in the wind. I imagined they were waving a sorrowful goodbye to what little still remained of my sleep.
Mjinska had already been in my room to warn me that Yuri was on his way. I had grunted and wrapped the duvet tighter around myself as a response.
I closed my eyes in protest and bargained with God to grant me eternal rest.
A small part of me kept insisting that if I complained loud enough, strapped myself to my bed and stood my ground firmly, my father and Yuri would tire of me dragging my feet. All I really wanted was for them to forget about my existence, just this once.
Light streamed in through narrow slits in the draperies and cast long lines onto the walls. The air felt suspended in the room. If in that instance, I had attempted to strain my ears I would have heard the muffled barks of the hunting dogs chained outside by the gable. But there was someone much closer who stole my attention. My father's footsteps scuffed about in the living room, getting the last preparation in place for the hunt.
The dogs belong to my aunt's husband, Mr Benofs. Yuri, I remembered, was also bringing over his mutt.
I groaned inwardly.
This predicament of mine had set into motion the prior evening, over dinner at our residence. During the course of the meal we had somehow diverged onto the topic of hunting. Mr Benofs told the table that he and my father were planning on 'catching' game early the following morning. A discussion about the health of one of the dogs followed, but by then I had successfully zoned out.
Mr Benofs said something which brought my attention back to the table. He'd said that hunting was a man's sport and that whoever failed to shoot his first game before reaching twelve would remain stuck in boyhood forever.
I frowned and looked up at him in disbelief.
- It's common knowledge, he said with a nonchalant shrug.
I looked over at my father and saw he was nodding in affirmation. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Did it mean I had to kill an animal to become a man? I felt sick to my stomach.
My father went on to tell us a story about when my grandfather had taken him out to shoot his first buck. He was an animated storyteller my father, and Yuri had fallen for all the colourful adjectives being thrown around the table. He had gotten that gleam in his eyes I knew meant he was inspired to do something reckless.
- May I join you? He blurted.
I choked on my food.
Mr Benofssimply smiled like the Cheshire cat.
- Well of course young man.
I glared holes into the side of his face. May I join you? May. I. He never spoke like that unless my father was present. Which only proved me right. He sought too much approval from him. I would point this out to Yuri at times, but he would deny it or shrug it off by saying I was just rude in comparison. I couldn't be sure what he was thinking at that moment, but seeing as my father was carefully observing the conversation, I suspected Yuri wanted to appease him, not realising that it was a trap, that all they really wanted was for me to join them.
I hated hunting. I hated hunting with a passion; had done so since the day I first laid eyes on a dead stag. I was five years old. It was around the time my mother had left, back when my father had been an unwed divorcé and his favourite pastime consisted of locking himself inside his study on the weekdays, only to reemerge on the weekends, reinvigorated to hunt. My aunt described him as a madman, obsessed with taxidermy and the art of skinning and preserving the meat of the game. A skill that had been passed down from his father.
Not realising the deer was dead, I laid a hand on its belly to rouse it. I remember it being lukewarm to the touch. It didn't move. Something about the way it lay so motionlessâits neck so slackâclued me to the truth. I deduced that my father had killed it. When I confronted him, wanting answers, my father had looked at me as if he couldn't comprehend what I was asking. Or rather, why I was asking the obvious.
I remember how he had crouched down to my level, ruffled my head, and told me not to worry about it; he had killed most of the animals we ate.
- Why do you think you have grown up as strong as you have? He asked. There was no trace of remorse on his face.
Till this day I believe that he thought he was doing it out of love and as a favour to me. He thought he was hardening me, making a man out of me, making me into his likeness, just like his father had once done with him.
It had been so ingrained in him it was a man's duty to put meat on the table that he'd failed to draw the correlation between his revelation, and the reason I had suddenly fallen ill with a high fever the same evening.
I really didn't want to go hunting.
I told Yuri this when he came into my room. He took one look at me still wrapped up in my duvet and sighed.
- You're going to have to kill an animal sometime before your twelfth birthday, why not just do it now?
Shocked, I threw off the duvet and propped myself on my elbow to get a better look at him.
- You don't really believe in that nonsense, do you?
Yuri couldn't hold my gaze. It told me everything I needed to know.
- Ugh! I grunted in disbelief. - He's completely brainwashed you. Go on then, run along. Have fun. Kill fifty birds, three deer, and why not some baby hares while you're at it! Just don't drag me into your stupid killing spree.
- Do you think he wants you there? I asked before he got the chance to interrupt. I was aware of how I must have looked to him. I was shouting, but I didn't care. Couldn't Yuri see that all this was just a trap set up by my father to get me to kill innocent animals?
- He doesn't care about you, or about me. The only person he's ever cared about is himself and his stupid reputation. He's just saying that because you're Brommian and you don't know any better.
Yuri regarded me with the level-headed cool of an eighty-year-old monk. He took a minute of silence to take in my feral appearance. It made me look inwardly at myself and take a guess at what he was seeing. I was sure my hair stood pointing at whichever direction on my head, and that my linen pyjamas were wrinkled from sleep, but I couldn't find a single cell in my body that cared about what I looked like just then.
- You know, he said, - if you took the time to get to know your father without making every single thing about yourself, you might open your eyes to the person he really is.
I plummeted back down on my pillow. He was unbelievable.
- You mean to say I haven't already realised that he's Vaboga? I stared up at the draperies hanging from the four-bed poster.
- Well, consider my third eye open now.
Yuri came around to stand beside the bed, head level with me.
- Ru, get up. His impatience was starting to show in his voice.
- It's rude. They're downstairs waiting on you, how long do you plan on making them wait? You can complain about it the way over. Just get up.
I turned my head to him.
- Yuri?
I felt drained. I could feel the weight of my bones weighing down the mattress. I felt sick at the thought of hearing the echo of a shotgun, of knowing an animal had just been killed while I did nothing to stop it.
- Do you really not care for those animals?
His gaze softened. He reached over the bed and laid the backside of his cold hand on my cheek. Goosebumps prickled on my left thigh and arm as his fingers travelled down the soft patch of skin where my earlobe met my jaw.
- Every soul belongs to God and with His permission, I see the life of an animal taken as fair. His voice was soft. So soft. There was so much remorse and humility in his eyes.
Both he and my father were equally religious, but why was it that I trusted his intentions a lot more?
- I don't think I believe in God.
I can't tell you why I told him that. It wasn't something I had up until that point thought I would ever voice out loud. I hadn't dared to, despite sometimes feeling the words jab my conscious like a fetus kicking the womb. And they weren't the only ones, I had so many, so many words I didn't dare utter.
I searched Yuri's face for a flicker of emotion, however small. But his eyes were downcast. His hair fell over his expressive eyes. His focused was on the fingers that trailed a cold path down my neck and along my collar bone.
I shivered. The corners of Yuri's lips twitched upwards.
- Isn't it a bit early for blasphemy? He asked.
I breathed a chuckle of relief.
- Come, he yanked at my limp arm. - When it's all over, we'll ride over to my place and eat ice cream.
- But it's October, I reasoned.
- You and your thousand etiquettes. It's never too cold for ice cream.
I let myself get persuaded. My heart wouldn't really allow me to deny him something he looked forward to, even if that thing was looking on while animals were being shot to death.
I got dressed while Yuri played around with my Walkman. The earphones were leaking and I could hear the instrumentals to The Smiths', This Charming Man stain over from where he stood leaned against one of the window frames. I smiled to myself. Yuri enjoyed foreign music much more than I did. He practically owned every one of my yard-sale-purchased Ramones and The Smiths CDs.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as his head bobbed along to the rhythm. His eyes were closed. He seemed to have drifted off to a universe of his own.
Every year Yuri grew several centimeters taller. The added height evened out his awkward posture and leveled his body proportion. He had always had nice facial features, but time had taken its sweet time perfecting the contrasts in his face till it brimmed with character. His prominent eyebrows against the unblemished, pale skin of his cheeks. The disciplined lines of his nose against that of his unruly hair.
It took longer to get dressed than usual. My mind was scattered all over the place. There was the music which lyrics were nagging at the forefront of my mind, but not only that, the question of how one got dressed to kill animals weighed my thoughts. Was there a dress code that I needed to avoid? Would jeans make enough noise to scare them away?
My hands felt awkward and fidgety, making getting the clothes on my body more laborious and uncool. Especially, when I was aware of Yuri being in the same room, perhaps even watching me as I floundered.
I found myself sneaking glances at him. Sometimes our eyes would catch, but he always looked away. During one such time, I caught his gaze just as he hastily shut his eyes. Without a second thought, I walked over and plucked an earphone from his ear.
His eyes flashed open in surprise; azure blue like sunlight reflecting on the Caspian Sea.
My heart dipped in that uncomfortable way it tended to do around him and stirred my tummy awake.
I grinned and plugged the earphone into my ear. I stood closer to him than was actually necessary; it was childish. I can't reason it now any more than I could back then. Did I want to evoke a reaction? I think I liked to pretend that I wasn't aware of how strange it was that I would be so aware of him. It got easier to pretend when a third person was in the room with us. At least then I was distracted some way or other. But every time it was just the two of us, it was as if I had antennas extending out from my head which bounced frequencies around the room, and fed them back to me as information. I was hyperaware of the spatial orientation of our bodies. I couldn't say when it had gotten like that. I didn't like it. I didn't like the irrational way I was behaving. But I was powerless, the same way a moth was to the pull of light.
Standing next to him, listening to the croon of Morrissey, was one of the few times I let myself acknowledge, for a sliver of a second, that it was hard to pretend to not be aware of him. Of his scent, of the coarseness of his woolly shirt, his warmth. All of which invaded my senses.
I wanted to touch him, but how would that not be weird?
He allowed me to listen to the song for a short snippet before he snatched the earpiece back again.
- Get dressed, he said, louder than he had meant to. He couldn't hear himself over the music. He closed his eyes again and rested the back of his head against the window frame.
I walked back over to my bed and grabbed the t-shirt that lay there and pulled it over my head. I pulled a warmer knitted sweater on top.
- What shoes should I wear? I asked Yuri from my wardrobe.
He shrugged. I looked down at what he was wearing and saw that they were his usual boots. Looking at my wardrobe, at the row of shoes before me, I opted for comfort and agility and pulled out a pair of boots as well.
- How does it take you three songs to get ready? Yuri asked me when I finished lacing up my shoes.
- We can't all roll out of bed looking like you.
A slow grin appeared on his face. - What's that supposed to mean?
- You really have gotten cocky, I remarked.
He threw his back and laughed.
We made our way into the corridor.
- I can't believe he won't even allow me breakfast, I muttered as we trudged downstairs.
Yuri's arm snaked around my shoulders, and he pulled me into his side.
- We wouldn't want you puking it all out now, would we? His long hair which was in desperate needed of a trim tickled my ear. He was so close I could smell the pine soap on his body. Reflexively, I shoved him away.
Yuri's laughter drowned out the roaring in my ears caused by the sudden rush of blood to my face.
- I can't believe you're joking about this, I said, trying to hide my embarrassment.
He just kept laughing, and eventually, I joined him. But I couldn't quite shake the growing unease tightening my stomach. This beautiful boy had no idea. He was laughing now, but knowing my father, he always had to have the last laugh, and this time wouldn't be any different.