CHAPTER TWELVE

Once he got to the village, he sent Lora a letter where impatient and sad words were accompanied by a cartoon with an inscription, ‘And that’s what’s happening to me.’ The picture showed a black onion field under drizzling rain and the tiny insect-like figures of students, laden with sacks and plodding unswervingly to the gigantic goal, a tractor-pulled trailer stuck in the mud.

He waited in vain for a reply to this letter – and the two following ones.

The lady of the house where he was allocated to stay, a large doughy woman of uncertain age, was observing Sidelnikov’s epistolary efforts with respect and afterwards, complaining about her broken spectacles, asked him to take down a letter on her behalf.

‘How do you do my elder daughter Lyudmila and your husband Vyacheslav…’ Sidelnikov was scribbling to loud dictation.

‘In the first lines of me letter, please be advised that we are livin’ well. Me legs are achin’. And despite that potatoes was not picked before the rain started, there’s not a thing in the house and your little brother Nikolai lies on the stove and pisses his pants…’

‘Don’t fib, that was only once,’ Nikolai, who was also present, objected limply.

“... lies on the stove and has wetted himself (once only)”, inscribed Sidelnikov with the resolute hand of a seasoned editor.

The village life filled him with bleak consternation. It was not just because the rich knee-high mud was swamping everything. Sidelnikov had almost got used to having to extract his feet like hefty tree stumps with every step when walking from home to work and in the field itself. Every new step encountered new mire, now on the left, now on the right. But even when he was asleep he remembered that he would soon go away from here, whereas in the faces of the village people, especially the older ones, in their bearing and their champing gait, one could perceive a life sentence to this place which they would be ashamed not to love, since it was home.

When the sky cleared for short intervals, the onion field began to resemble a beach. The first year girls would take their sweaters off, their colourful bikinis gleaming in the sun. In the mess of the primeval dirt, the prettily undressed girls appeared even more pretty and undressed.

All of the boys without exception – there were three of them, not counting Sidelnikov, – wrote poetry that they read to each other at every opportunity until they were blue in the face. For instance, under the cover of the rattling tractor, the hippyish poet Kostya would recite an epistle to his faraway sweetheart, “Gently! You’re entering me!” This phrase was repeated at least twelve times like an admonishing refrain:

Gently! You’re entering me!

That is to say, please enter but do be quiet; don’t make this awful noise like the tractor here...

Another poet, the bearded Yuri, unexpectedly dedicated a poem to Sidelnikov but instead of showing it to the dedicatee, circulated it around like an anonymous letter. Presumably, because the dedication contained a bitter reprimand:

Why aren’t you drinking with the beardies?

Why aren’t you joining in our songs?

They were in fact drinking diligently, though not very expertly. Once, Sidelnikov took part in a bash set up by Beslan, the son of a public prosecutor. (When meeting new people, he would actually introduce himself as “Beslan, the prosecutor’s son”.) They purchased in advance and hid the bottles of Agdam wine as if they were contraband explosives. When it grew dark, they made a bonfire by the field. The two girls invited to the party appeared to Sidelnikov extraordinarily beautiful. Efficiently, they spread a sheet of cellophane on the ground and put out the tomatoes they brought with them. All four of them were somewhat unnaturally animated but did not know what they should drink to. The prosecutor’s son started every sentence with the words, ‘Well, us in the mountains…’ Sidelnikov kept silent. The wine allegedly made from “berries and fruit” tasted a bit bitter, like burnt sugar.

The tall girl, Natasha, was smiling at Sidelnikov mysteriously, while at the same time not forgetting to supervise the short and skinny Lyuba. She snapped to Beslan who got too ardent, ‘Don’t grab my silly bits!’ When Lyuba put her mint-smelling head on Sidelnikov’s shoulder, Natasha called her up and asked pointedly in loud whisper, ‘Do you remember that it’s our time of the month today?’

That night, Sidelnikov dreamt of Rosa. They had a conversation, light-hearted and about nothing in particular. But Sidelnikov was confused and scared by the scarf on her head that was on back to front completely hiding her face as if it was the back of her head. Sidelnikov asked her why she put the scarf on like this.

‘It’s best that you do not see me the way I look just now.’

They talked a bit more, about something insignificant, and she said, as a non-sequitur, ‘On the plus side, now I know everything about you. Only please do not be scared of anything, anything at all.’

By the middle of the month, it looked like the weather had come to its senses and lightened up and strangely, at the same time the fieldwork petered out. The hefty fellow from the Komsomol committee, with his sleeves always rolled up but his hands never out of his pockets, stopped spurring and egging them on. Then the tractor broke down. A couple of times Sidelnikov was entrusted with a horse and a cart. Totally happy because of the complete mutual understanding between him and the downcast nag, he was amazed at the redundancy of the reins. Within sight of his destination, he would start mentally rehearsing the commanding intonation for the word “Whoa!” However, the trusty steed would stop of its own accord exactly when needed. On the third time, the stableman was in a bad mood and made Sidelnikov go away with nothing for his pains, grumbling something to the effect that the horse had broken down too, same as the tractor. From now on, for days on end, one was able to lie on one’s back face to face with the September sky that expressed nothing except a sense of homelessness.

Closing his eyes, he would see Rosa who was at that moment lying in the same way, supine, only there was no sky above her but two metres of clay and a board covered with red sateen. However, in his dreams she was alive and smiling, but almost never speaking. By all her behaviour, she let Sidelnikov understand that really there was nothing to grieve for and everything was all right. Thus he would wake up heartened – and if somewhere in the background of a dank morning he stumbled in his memory upon the recent funeral, then the latter appeared as an incomprehensible blunder attributable to no-one.

Soon afterwards, one of the first year students had a brainwave and applied to the hefty fellow from the Komsomol committee with a private confession of dysentery symptoms. The applicant averted his eyes and shyly bit his cuticles, and was dismissed from the collective farm to the four winds. Instantly, the disease acquired the nature of a bandwagon. Sidelnikov fell the ninth victim of the epidemic.

...

In the city, the early autumn was still observing some decorum prior to collapsing face down in its own dirt. The young provincial was not interested in settling down on the few square metres surrounding his hostel bed – he was drawn to the avenues and parks at the very least. He also liked to simply stand waiting at public transport stops, where he could think of any of the approaching trams and trolleybuses as “mine” or “not mine” on equal grounds since there was not a single address in town where he would be expected. The way such addresses appeared in one’s life seemed to him now a crucial mystery of nature.

Without knowing why, he would enter the hairdresser’s, which labelled itself a “salon” but smelled like a combined bath-and-wash-house. Sidelnikov would secure a place in the queue, even though he was in no way intending to have a haircut. From the half-open door of the “ladies parlour”, from its mirrored insides, a steamed-up young empress in a white turban looked at him haughtily. Under her throne, he could see her round foot in an opaque stocking take itself out of its high-heeled shoe and rub its small semi-transparent heel against the other foot. A courtier asked him, ‘Would you tell them that I’m next in the queue after you?’ ‘Certainly,’ Sidelnikov replied obligingly, clearly already admitted to the high society circle.

This city, founded a few years after St Petersburg, was guilty at first of a slightly daft imitation of its elder sister, the “Northern Capital”. Even their names rhymed. However, over a couple of centuries, as the times grew ever more cruel, it stopped caring about any family likeness; it changed its name and, after a short stint of leftist inclinations, set off on the rocky but straight path to military and industrial classicism. The pediments of Houses of Culture accommodated a tense pile of workers, soldiers and sailors with expressions of such intimidating righteousness that, passing by under their stony gaze, Sidelnikov felt out of place and in the wrong.

On these streets, under the eye of official signboards, he started to experience something like fear of being exposed, even though he could not imagine what it was that he had to hide. For some reason, he recalled Mekhrin with alarm, although he had only met Mekhrin once and never thought of him since. It seemed to him that the whole city was under the command of hat-sporting stony crags like him. But he would find adequate comfort in two warm meat pies wrapped in greasy paper, purchased in the street and consumed in understandable proximity to the tin stall selling the delicacy in question. That was his lunch. As a rule, he forgot to have dinner.

He was lucky with the place at the hostel. Everybody else was shoved into six-bed rooms, whereas he got a two-bed one, to share with one Ghena Shtrausenko, who was the hostel watchman and looked like a shepherd and a sheep at the same time.

‘So,’ Shtrausenko said, with affected sternness, ‘let’s live reciprocally. I bring here whoever I want and you bring here whoever you want. When in Rome… ya know. Is it okay with you?’

Sidelnikov did not mind and steeled himself to become a live witness to wild debauchery. However, in reality the secret drama of the twenty-eight year old Shtrausenko was the complete disregard of him by girls and women who were not in any way tempted by the sheep-like appearance of the watchman and his shepherd’s manners, perfected in combat with a herd of students.

At night, Sidelnikov was woken up sometimes by the strange shrill sounds produced by his roommate’s bed. It seemed in the dark that Ghena was trying unsuccessfully to saw the wire springs of the bed…

When Sidelnikov started to get visits from the girls in his year (for lecture notes or a ciggie), Shtrausenko decided that he was dealing with a ladies’ man and completely changed his tone.

‘Right. You’ve loads of skirts, haven’t you? Now then, pick one and arrange it for me. Got it?’

‘No,’ Sidelnikov replied, ‘I haven’t got it. I am not here to pimp for you.’

‘Well then, you’re not gonna last here,’ summed up Shtrausenko and went off to work to keep watch.