Ten Years

Everywhere we went · Ten years · Told by Yan Ardatovskiy

In the beginning Vadim and I did everything ourselves. We were the operators and the directors and everything in between: we answered the phones, signed the contracts, chased the invoices, carried the boxes up the stairs and, on one memorable Saturday, took the printer apart on the floor with a butter knife. We had business cards printed with our names and no titles, because neither of us could decide which of our eleven jobs to put on them. Then we grew, faster than either of us had planned, and every month there were new people doing the jobs we had done on our knees the month before. We handed them over one at a time, like two jugglers passing clubs into the audience, and kept the ones nobody else wanted.

We were young enough to think all of this was temporary and old enough to suspect it might not be. We ate at our desks. We argued about fonts on presentations nobody read. When the first deal closed, a small one, the kind you would not mention now, Vadim went out and came back with a bottle of red wine that cost less than the taxi he had not taken to buy it. We drank it out of paper cups from the water cooler. It was terrible. He raised his cup and said, “To the first of many,” and I said, “To the printer,” and he laughed so hard that the wine came out of his nose, which I swore I would never let him forget. I suppose, technically, I have kept that promise.

Somewhere around the third year a flight was cancelled and neither of us wanted to sleep in an airport, so we hired a car and drove through the night. Six hundred kilometres. He drove the first half and I drove the second, and at three in the morning, in a service station that smelled of diesel and burnt coffee, we had the most honest conversation of my life. I do not remember a single word of it. I remember the strip light, and his hands around the cup, and the feeling that there was nothing I could say that he would not understand. You get that feeling perhaps once or twice in a lifetime. I spent one of mine in a service station with Vadim, and I have never regretted the venue.

We fell out once, properly, for three days, over football. I will not say which team, because the argument was so stupid that naming the team would give it a dignity it has not earned. It was about a penalty. It was not even our team. He said something about the referee, I said something about his eyesight, he said something about my eyesight, and then came three days of silence during which we sat in the same small office and communicated through a colleague called Pavel, who has never forgiven either of us. On the fourth morning Vadim put a coffee on my desk without a word, made the way I like it, and that was the end of it. That was how our fights ended. Somebody brought the coffee.

He was at my wedding and I was at his. At mine he gave a speech that made half the room cry and my accountant nervous. At his I carried the rings, and I checked my pocket so many times during the ceremony that the priest began watching me instead of the bride. Afterwards, outside in the dark, loosening our ties, he said, “Now what?” and I said, “Now we get old,” and he said, “Together, then,” in the voice he used for agreeing terms, and we shook on it. We actually shook hands. I remember thinking it was funny.

For ten years my phone rang at eleven o’clock at night. Not every night, but often enough that I stopped looking at the screen, because at that hour it was either Vadim or the bank’s fraud department, and the bank was more polite. He called to tell me a joke he had heard, or to complain about a client, or to ask whether I thought a certain man could be trusted (I usually said no, and I was right more often than was fair). Sometimes he called to say nothing at all. We would sit on the line in our separate kitchens and I would hear him open the fridge. I have come to think that this is friendship at its most advanced: listening to a man open a fridge, across a city, and finding it company.

I cannot tell you when it stopped. I have tried. I have gone back through the messages like a detective on a very dull case, and there is no scene of the crime. There is no argument. Nobody slammed a door. There is only a message of mine answered the next morning instead of the same evening. Then one answered a few days later, with an apology. Then shorter answers. “Ha.” “Yes, let’s.” “Next week?” Then a birthday message, from me, that received a small yellow thumb. I looked at that thumb for a long time, the way you look at a crack in the ceiling that may or may not have been there yesterday.

We were both busy. That is the honest answer and also the useless one, because we had always been busy; busy was the air we breathed at twenty-five, and it had never stopped us before. I told myself he was going through something. He probably told himself the same about me. Perhaps we were both right. Friends of ours still mention him to me, carefully, the way you mention a restaurant that has closed. “Do you still see...?” And I say, “Not really,” and they nod, because they know the story, and the story has no middle.

Last week I was clearing out my phone. You do this at a certain age: you scroll through the contacts and delete the people you can no longer place. A plumber from years ago. A man saved as “Sergei Airport”. Somebody saved only as “Do not answer”. And there he was. Vadim. The same number. The same photograph, taken on a boat, squinting into the sun, holding a fish he did not catch. I did not delete it. I sat at the kitchen table at eleven o’clock at night, which is a coincidence I am choosing not to examine, with my thumb over the green button.

A thumb is a strange weight. I have signed things that mattered a great deal with less hesitation. I thought about what I would say. “Hello” seemed too small, and “It’s been a while” sounded like a line from a film. I thought about the business cards with no titles, the printer on the floor, the wine in paper cups, the strip light at three in the morning. I thought that there is a word for what we were, older than business and older than both of us, a word for people who are not family and somehow are, and that in ten years I had never once said it out loud to him. Then the screen began to dim, the way screens do when they are waiting for you to make up your mind.

What sort of spirits were we, for ten years?

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people in these stories. So have some of the stories. Not all of them, and not everything that sounds invented is. Please do not treat it as a fair coin.