blog — April 16

Excerpt: Artem Chapeye’s “The Weathering,” translated from Ukrainian by Daisy Gibbons

We’re excited to share an exclusive excerpt from author and essayist Artem Chapeye’s debut novel, The Weathering. The novel follows two struggling freelancers who return from a relaxing country vacation to find their home city of Kyiv transformed into an apocalyptic dystopia. As they contend with the aftermath of an earth-shattering event that they didn’t witness, the couple is must align themselves with the rest of the survivors to retain their humanity and forge a new world in the ashes of the old. As award-winning author Kalani Pickhart (I Will Die in a Foreign Land) says, The Weathering is “[a]n empathetic, emotionally raw account that is as darkly humorous as it is horrific, [and] balances the universality of humankind’s survival in a post-apocalyptic world through a uniquely Ukrainian perspective.”

Below, you’ll find the first chapter of the book, which introduces the aforementioned struggling freelance couple and sends them on a relaxing vacation full of car troubles (the car is named Raquel), dusty roads, and rumbling trucks.

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CHAPTER ONE

The two of us, Zoïa and I, were dog tired.

For the past few years, we had been working two-and-a-half jobs each. An office job, a work-from-home job, and another side gig. All of our temporary and unstable work we referred to as freelance. Because, you know, we practically do it for free.

“Almost sounds dignified, the word ‘freelance,’ even if we are really scrabbling for scraps,” Zoïa said.

We had both left our humble beginnings in the Ukrainian countryside to make new humble beginnings in the capital, Kyiv, where we entered university. We started working alongside our studies to save for our own flat. Rent ate up most of what we’d set aside. We comforted ourselves with rumors off the internet that, in some cities, people live their whole lives this way.

“What did you expect? Kyiv’s the new Berlin,” said Zoïa, then snorted into her coffee.

One day, we decided to count how much we had saved up since we were teenagers. Our sanity perished with the realization.

Zoïa perched on the balcony, rocking and making an ‘O’ with her fingers.

“One does not simply get a flat in Kyiv. Not through honest work. You need someone else’s money, an inheritance or help. And associating with Ukrainian banks is practically taboo. We’re not in Europe, tsenk you very mach, even if we are the new Berlin. You know, when one of my friends from university hit thirty and we asked him what his greatest achievement was, he just said, ‘I’m not in debt.’ We’re still young but we’ve lived through crisis after crisis—national and international. One just rolls into the next in those terrains.”

What would happen next? The two of us, Zoïa and I, were unprepared for that. We had to take a break.

We had to recalibrate, as Zoïa put it.

In the beginning of June, we both took unpaid leave (as dictated by the chivalric code of the realm of the freelancer), went to our landlords in their nice downtown neighborhood and paid for two months’ rent up front, turned off our gas and water, and before dawn one day we got in our car, the trusty Raquel—a second-hand gray Daewoo Lanos that ran on the cheapest gas—and set off towards the Carpathian Mountains.

Raquel, the old mare, got into her stride after we passed Zhytomyr. But then the acceleration cut out. A dull thud and we lost power. No matter how hard I pressed my foot on the gas, the revs kept falling, and Raquel died.

“What, again?” said Zoïa, apathetically.

“Christ’s sake. We haven’t even done a thousand k yet.”

“Ah yes! Didn’t you say last week, ‘Funny, the car hasn’t broken down in a while’?”

I laughed, nervous.

I climbed out and lifted the bonnet. Ah. As expected: The O-ring had come off. Piece of shit. It’s this little rubber ring that covers the mixer system connecting the engine to the fuel tank. I think. It had been less than a month since it was last changed. Maybe there really was something wrong with my driving. The ring had pinged off so many times that even I knew what to do: seal the joint up with a bandage from the first aid kit, then drive to the nearest garage.

“Is that safe?”

“Devil knows.”

Nowhere was open yet. Only the birds in the forest lining the road were awake with a busy twittering.

We stopped for repairs in Radyvyliv nearly 300 km later. A young lad in oil-stained coveralls silently installed a new rubber ring. A routine procedure.

“What you doin’ that it keeps comin’ off then?” he looked at me with pity, as practical guys look at helpless intellectuals.

Then, when we passed Stryi another 180 km later, the damn drive shaft came loose. This is the part that connects the gearbox to the wheels. I think. This time, I was most certainly to blame for maiming our dear Raquel. I had been stuck behind three trucks on a winding road and there was no way in hell I could get past; I trailed them for half an hour until I finally lost my temper and, while conducting a flash overtake, I must have shifted into a lower gear too abruptly without pressing on the clutch or taking my foot off the gas. I might even have switched the gearstick into reverse while moving. I’ve done that before: muscle memory kicks in and I act without thinking. The old mare’s ball joints started to grind and come loose; then, her bones started rattling terribly, poor old Raquel shuddered with pain and limped onto the hard shoulder—and that was the end. She lay there, not breathing.

Thank God we did not cause an accident.

Zoïa said nothing. I knew this state of hers, what she called her ice-cold fury. I just sniffed and kept silent, to avoid an argument.

We waited on the roadside and we watched the trucks. Every time I bypass Stryi on the motorway, I am always struck by the reams of dust thrown up by caravans of heavy vehicles. The trucks seem to congregate here, gaggling into herds that stretch on and on like the great migration on the African savanna I saw on National Geographic. Only these cows never stop flowing past, on and on and on.

A nice man in an old-school, cherry-red Lada towed Raquel to a garage, then refused to accept any money. By then it was lunchtime, and the repairs took the remains of the day. The kind old uncle at the garage phoned around for new ball joints, drove to Stryi, bought them, and then kept working until the car was fixed, which was after dark. We gratefully slipped him a few extra notes when he gave us the bill.

“Enough. We should relax now and spend the night here,” Zoïa sighed, then stroked my neck. I flinched from the unexpected contact to my clammy skin, but I was grateful to Zoïa for this deliberate, even forced, sign of tenderness.

“Sure,” I replied.

The word “relax” was said with tension. We needed to recalibrate—again. We were suffering from chronic fatigue. The kind of fatigue you can’t overcome with a good night’s sleep. You can’t recover from it over a weekend, or even a week of rest.

Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow we would travel slow and steady, just like that: slo-o-ow and steady. Meditatively. Just breathing deeply if something goes awry.

Besides, tomorrow we’d no longer be driving on paved road, and it’s best to avoid the dirt roads after dark, which is why we made a healthy detour around Stryi to stay on the tarmac for as long as we could. A while back, I attempted to turn off at Dubno for Kolomyia, going via Ternopil and Horodenka out in the sticks of western Ukraine, my home. A risky business. As one of my old schoolfriends put it, “Just picturing the roads there is enough to send me in the other direction.” That one time, caught on a dirt track in a deep, thick fog, I encountered a magnificent mechanical farm beast that looked like a diplodocus, melancholically chewing plant stems and lumbering across the beat-up track from one edge to the other. I was extremely lucky to push through at 20 km after that, meandering around the potholes in the fog. No, not again. Better the dusty detour. Even if the detour means being lost among the herds of trucks around Stryi.

We spent the night in a tacky “pay-by-the-hour-chic” motel, as Zoïa put it. The room had a mirror covering the whole wall, sequined wallpaper, and three condoms in pink wrappers on the bedside table.

“Ooooh!” cooed Zoïa, reaching after them in pure jest: we were already fucked without the sex.

The trucks rumbled, honked, and hissed outside the window. Its exterior glass pane was coated in a thick layer of dust.

We left at four thirty in the morning. We could hear the scream of lung-bursting birdsong in the lulls between trucks. We drove on in a melancholy mood, taking our time, listening to Tom Waits, and did not hit a single pothole. Raquel didn’t start sneezing or limping or sagging, and so Zoïa and I could turn our attention to the beauty of the misty blue mountains on our approach. They parted before us and closed behind us, and by noon we arrived without incident.

“Praise Jesus! I was expectin’ yous yesterday.”

The gruff voice with its highlander accent belonged to Uncle Vasyl. He greeted us as he came out the gate.

“The car broke down.”

“Agh no, let the devil eat ’em both,” Vasyl sympathized abstractly, not putting much feeling into the esoteric expression. “But still. Yer made it.”

“Yep, wer made it,” I replied.

Vasyl opened the gate of the fence made from long, narrow, smooth planks of pine stacked horizontally. Or were they spruce? A shaggy, dirty-white dog that looked like a polar bear from a video about climate change jumped out to greet us, but was restrained by the thick chain around its neck. Vasyl shooed him away.

“Oi, Overko, back in the doghouse wit yer!”

Around the hut, in a radius the same length of the chain, the grass was trampled “to nowt,” as they say in these parts. Well-trodden paths led from the house to the barn, and to the road.

The rest of the grass in the large yard was a juicy green, neatly mowed. The horse and livestock grazed further up the mountain.

“Wer made it,” Zoïa said. Stepping on the soft grass, she inhaled deeply and held her breath. A pause. “And . . . exhale.”

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Award-winning Ukranian author Artem Chapeye’s new novel follows a young couple who escape city life to the mountains in Ukraine, only to discover an altered reality upon their return.

As in Ling Ma’s Severance and Emily Mandel’s Station Eleven, the survivors must seek ways to retain their humanity and help to build a new world in a post-apocalyptic dystopia.

After a young couple return from their summer in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine, they discover that the world as they once knew it no longer exists. Survivors are forced to adapt to the harsh conditions of their new reality: a place where erosion floats in on a breeze, and ceasing to exist comes with a deceptively joyous capitulation. Overcoming deeply rooted fears, they try to forge another world, uniting with those who continue to fight the darker urges that can emerge when a society must rebuild.

Will the couple be able to survive, make alliances with others, and give birth to a new generation? Will the insidiousness of human nature manifest itself in this new, post-apocalyptic world? Filled with beautifully melancholic and black humor, The Weathering becomes a kind of study of behavior in critical situations when everything that once seemed stable falls apart.