Dima Aleksandrovich Petrov awoke to the sound of something metal hitting the hood of his car, followed by a drunken yell and the thud of what could only be a human body against the passenge side door. He leaned forward to look through the ice-bitten glass and recognized the furious, spit-flecked face of one of the neighborhood’s homeless regulars, illuminated by a yellow streetlight. He was looking downwards and stomping a steel-toed boot into the gut of some poor fellow who remained unseen behind the car door. Reaching across the passenger seat, Dima rolled the window down to call to the assailant.

“Go to the doorway, fight there, get away from my car!” He didn’t receive a response. Agitated, Dima started to open the door on his side, bracing his arm against the seat and kicking the bottom of the door to dislodge it from its ice coating. He breathed on his hands to warm them up, then slipped one into his pocket, putting his fingers through the holes in his brass knuckles. “Hey! Do you need the hospital tonight, brother? Get yourself away from here!” Dima rounded the hood of the car and shoved the drunk into a frozen snow drift, prompting him to scramble over the heap of snow, and start stumbling away, towards the darkness behind the adjacent apartment building. He looked almost comical, like a cartoon, swearing into the unforgiving cold and waving his ragged arms to balance his gait.

A faint “A - ank you, friend” escaped the torn lips of the man who was currently stuffed between the curb and the car’s fender. Dima turned to face the speaker, whose face then bore a striking resemblance to a bowl of freshly ground beef. Choosing not to answer him, Dima returned to the car to steal a few more minutes of rest from the quickly dying night.

Feeble threads of sunlight wove their way through the tree branches and, piercing the windshield, gradually extricated Dima from his dreamless sleep. He brought himself to an upright position and pulled his new wristwatch from within his coat, angling it against the light so that the digital face was visible to him. Dima hadn’t asked for anything when he called his friends to tell them he was coming back home from the zona, but Prinz insisted on the watch -- “It’s a Seiko, brother, Japanese craftsmanship! Take it, it’s yours.” A figure passed in front of the car, casting a shadow across the dashboard. Dima leaned forwards somewhat and, grinning as he saw a familiar grimace, sat back and waited for its owner to notice him. As the man failed to look back at the car, Dima turned the ignition, letting the recently-installed tape deck roar back to life, blaring the Nagovicin album that Dima’s uncle had brought from Perm for his nephew’s twentieth birthday. The man spun around, his face lighting it up like a holiday candle.

“Dima?” He seemed excitedly lost, trudging through the dark slush on the road to the discolored door of the car. Dima opened the door and stepped out, seeing his younger brother’s face for the first time in a year.

“Yeah, who else? I never gave dad the keys to the car.” He laughed and slapped Vova on the back. “He upstairs?”

“Yeah he’s still asleep.”

“Behind the couch and with half the tablecloth under him, I imagine?”

“About right.” Dima reached in his chest pocket and took out a pack of Primas he’d scrounged from the bar at Prinz’s club just before he’d left to drive home.

“You smoked yet?”

“No, I’m playing football for the neighborhood team, remember?”

“Ah, yes, skipping-school-and-going-into-the-army-ball, I remember.” They both cackled at this allusion to their father’s standard, usually slurred threat -- that they would skip and drink their way through school and end up like him, drinking away memories of sandy battlefields and exploding tank shells.

“Better than stealing-cars-and-getting-twelve-months-ball, though.

“You’re right there.” He paused to light his cigarette. “You got work today?”

“Yeah, at the Domodedovskaya. I gotta be there an hour.

“Alright, you go to work then. I’ll go check on the colonel.” He tossed Vova the keys to the Moskvich and walked through the entrance to the apartment building, passing the busted door-phone and wrestling the door away from to the paint chips that had wedged it in place. Off-white tiles lined the walls of the staircase for the first three floors, bringing to mind the freshly scrubbed halls of a hospital, certainly a departure from the building’s otherwise uniform squalor. Reaching the second floor, Dima shuffled over to third door from the left and knocked, putting his cigarette butt on the doorframe. He hadn’t expected an answer, and was surprised to hear the click of a turning lock from the other side. A beam light shot through the cracked door, quickly obscured by half of a bearded, swallow face.

“Ah Dima. Come in, Son.” Aleksandr Romanovich’s mind hadn’t quite yet registered the significance of his eldest son’s return and, to Dima, this was positively hilarious. He entered the apartment and slipped his shoes off, hanging his coat on the back of a metal chair.

“Should I set the kettle, Dad?”

“Kettle? No, no. No, I want to eat something first.” Dima’s father was wearing his usual daytime uniform: a white undershirt, tucked into a pair of dark green trousers, complemented by a pair of wool slippers. A bottle cap was stuck to his shoulder, surrounded by an imprint that conspicuously matched the pattern of the wood tiling on the floor.

“What’ve we got to eat?”

“We’ve… We’ve got pickles and the beet salad that svetlana Gennadyovna brought over yesterday. Dim--” Aleksandr stopped and turned to face Dima. His left eye was bloodshot, and he raised a hand to point towards his son. “Dima? Dima… Dima!” He grabbed Dima’s arm firmly. “Dima!”

“What, Dad?”

“Dima, you… you were gone for a while.” His countenance broke into a smile and he shook Dima’s shoulder vigorously. “Dima!”

“Yes?” Dima was restraining his laughter now.

“Dima, you’re back!”

“That’s right, Dad.” Aleksandr half-stumbled, half-collapsed into a chair that was situated behind him. Dima sat down across from him. His father’s bewilderment started to fade, and he sighed, leaning forward onto the tabletop.

“That’s good. It’s good.”

“You mind if I nap on the couch? I slept in the car last night.”

“Yeah, that’s no problem, son, go sleep.” Romanovich gestured towards the sofa, waving his hand gently, like the director of some absent orchestra. Dima lay down on the patchy brown threads of the couch and gazed through the window at the icy football field outside, which had blue stripes cast across it by the morning sun passing through the birches.

“Good night, Bataya.”

“Good night, Son, good night.”