CHAPTER NINE

He smoked “Inter” or “Stewardess”, Bulgarian filter cigarettes that were elite and rare. To get them he had to go all the way to the railway station of the Old Town to the restaurant car of a stopover Moscow train. Unlike most his contemporaries who puffed out smoke, showing off in the school lavatory or somewhere behind the bushes –invariably in the company of others – Sidelnikov felt self-conscious about doing it in public, having decided for himself that smoking was a solitary occupation. And indeed, he was solitary again, even though he saw Lora almost every day.

Those were strange encounters. Coming from the dark street into her flat, they would almost immediately go to bed, as if gravely ill. That is, not really to bed, but, half-undressed, they would cover themselves with a blanket and would lie like that for quite some time, listening carefully to something, she lying on her back and he on his left side, facing her inscrutable profile. This inscrutability had suddenly become the main feature of her behaviour.

Sidelnikov could still stare untiringly at the beloved face. He could, without permission, cross the border between the woollen and the satiny, between the dry coolness and feverish moistness; he could get up and leave, or he could come back and ask her to marry him, he could be gloomy, tender or mad, or charge into her like into a conquered country – but that would change nothing. And after happy moans, she withdrew once more as if guarding a deep dark secret, as if she were reading again the wretched telephone directory, looking for a vital number hidden from everybody else.

Winter days, indistinguishable from one another, were crowding in on them more and more, as if forcing out the freezing life while making it clear that there was nowhere to go. On the most desperate evenings, his taking leave of Lora would be like this: biting his lip, almost without saying goodbye, with a running leap-and-a-half down the flight of stairs, with portentous deceleration at the exit of the block of flats and, finally, with a funereal stiltedness at the very first public phone. He did not have to look up the number! ‘No,’ she’d say dryly. ‘No, you’re wrong. This is not the case. It just seems so to you. No. I don’t know what that noise is. Don’t…You’d better be going home.’ (By their absurdity, those questions and retorts of the caller aggravated further their already bankrupt relationship.)

All this did not prevent Sidelnikov from posing tricky questions to himself which he formulated clumsily, but honestly. For instance, “Why do women fall out of love?” As always, there was nobody to turn to for advice. The nearest source of romantic wisdom was kept by his mother behind the glass doors of the china cupboard, represented by about ten poetry books of varying degrees of shabbiness, collected according to the principle of what was available. Sidelnikov read poetry like a barbarian, searching in it for something akin to prescriptions, as if in a doctor’s reference book. Yet it cannot be ruled out that the inhabitants of the china cupbboard themselves dreamt of exactly same thing. One of them, a namesake of a Prince of Wales, stuffed with someone else’s curly bookmarks, warned sternly:

“...If your soul is pure, then you wouldn’t

Kiss each other when it’s just your fourth date

Or declare your love when it’s your eighth!”

A nearby hardback by a prisoner of a Nazi camp caused compassion but did not relate to the subject. The others mainly hinted that heroism at work was the only prerequisite of legitimate love.

Taking into account everybody’s deference to the notion of “short supply”, Sidelnikov started to suspect that really good poems (like anything really good) could not be freely available in a shop or sit on a shelf in a china cupboard just like that. They ought to be obtained in a special way. An old lady librarian, whom he barely knew, reacted to Sidelnikov’s request with a searching look, and a day later brought him a leather-bound notebook to read. It contained poems by a woman with a beautiful and refined name who committed suicide more than thirty years ago. Her poems turned out not lady-like at all. They were robust and broad-shouldered and much more powerful than a lot of the male poets’ verses taken together. The small purple letters on yellowish paper conveyed, better than any radio, the purest sound – an exceptionally distinctive voice of insatiable tenderness, loneliness and lofty life-long strife. Much later, Sidelnikov was amazed to find out that for the most part, female admirers of this poetry (which gradually came into fashion) were very successful and well-to-do damsels and ladies who clearly lacked only one thing in their life, namely, their own permanent tragedy.

The most unexpected novelty gleaned by Sidelnikov from the leather-bound notebook was himself, Sidelnikov’s own persona. Apart from confirming the reality of apparently unpronounceable and half-forbidden developments of his soul, the poems even seemed to endorse them.

There was a ghost of self-interest because he was still too immersed in his love to read love poems disinterestedly. For example, if he encountered in the notebook an intrepid confession like this:

“I am so insatiable that

Everybody is fed up with me”,

he would be desperate and silly enough to clutch his head cursing himself. It meant, of course, that “everybody”, meaning Lora, who was everything and everybody to him, had had too much of him. And in this case, only feigned coldness could save him.

He would at once recall Pechorin, the “superfluous man”, brutally crucified during literature lessons but whose behaviour Sidelnikov admired. Besides, nobody had yet called off the classic maxim, “the less we care for any woman, the easier she falls for us”, also from the school curriculum. The point was, Sidelnikov did not have to worry about being “fallen for” because he had accidentally skipped that stage. And his admiration for Pechorin was rather speedily replaced by respectful boredom. Sidelnikov did not feel like imitating Pechorin because it was unbearably dull to waste his time and musings in order to merely appear someone.

...

Towards the spring, it became impossible to meet up the same way as before. Lora’s second removed cousin from some regional town came to stay with her. With her curls and pale greenish pudginess, she reminded Sidelnikov of cauliflower. Cauliflower got herself a job at a food-processing factory and was, correspondingly, planning to enter a technical school for food processing. When seated, she had a habit of splaying out her arms and legs and wiggling her twenty plump digits all at once. At the very beginning of their acquaintance, when she and Sidelnikov were left on their own for a moment, Cauliflower asked him, simultaneously waggling both her manicured and pedicured extremities:

‘What’s between you and Lora? Are you going out together?’

‘Yeah,’ Sidelnikov said with disgust. ‘We’re going out on a limb. Me and Lora Nikolayevna.’

‘Wow, you’re just so cool,’ Cauliflower was charmed.

During that time, he kept repeating to himself two lines of a poem that stayed with him like an obsession:

“My joyless passion has gone

Past the third watch”,

believing that “third watch” meant “almost the limit” of the heart’s endurance. The tricky questions remained unanswered, but he was not far from the truth when he sensed that the mechanism of events determining his fate had already been triggered somewhere behind the scenes.

Some evenings, Lora was late and Sidelnikov had to wait for her in Cauliflower’s company. Recently, Cauliflower had got into the habit of undoing, as if by chance, the two top buttons of her dressing gown, at the same time observing her interlocutor with the air of a naturalist. She might just as well not have bothered undoing the buttons because her copious flab started directly below her neck. The guinea pig would gaze upon her disparagingly and go to the kitchen for a smoke. On one occasion, she strode after him with the air of a proprietor.

‘Hey, why are you being so precious, like you’re some virgin? Are you scared that Lora’d find out? Don’t worry! Or would you rather I tell her that you’ve been hitting on me?’

Finishing his cigarette, Sidelnikov was pondering whether he should leave straightaway or, before leaving, bash her on the mousy curls with something like an ashtray. At this moment, there was a click of the front door lock and Cauliflower went to the hall without doing up her buttons. Lora, all icy crystals and pearls, in her fox hat that was his favourite, was looking at him in such a way that it was not clear whether she was really longing for him, or, was, on the contrary, sick with his being there. ‘Go home, it’s late already,’ was all he ended up getting from her that evening. The rest was so hideous and pathetic that it hardly deserves being in this chronicle. Perhaps, it would be more appropriate in the “Accidents” section of a newspaper. The freezing to the public phone in an iron booth (his second home!); the unpleasant insolence masking his plea for a single tender word; the slamming down of the phone; the robbing of solitary passers-by of the sum of two kopecks exactly only to add more rude words from the booth, and a firm promise to kick the bucket that same day. (‘Please stop. Get this out of your head … What?! Are you saying this to me? What a smart Alec… Well, keep in mind that women don’t care for failed suicides’ – ‘Which women? You don’t care for me anyway!’). The journey back, observed by the dark rows of windows and scarce trees, indifferent to their own squalor. And at home, creeping past his slumbering mother to the fridge where she kept imported sleeping pills, obtained with much effort. Then, the last supper of his life consisting of a glass of unsweetened tea and a handful of pills. Because it was a no-brainer that it all had gone beyond the third watch, with nowhere else to go. But to crown it all, he was forced to torture out his own death, in the next grade of darkness, in an undeterminable time of day or night, hugging the toilet bowl in spasms of uncontrollable vomiting.