CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Apparently, Rosa did not much need everyday memories of herself and was satisfied with Sidelnikov’s dreams, which she would enter unhindered, just like that, in order to stay a little, to see him and reassure him by her presence. Gradually their roles took on shapes as if he was a paratrooper, risking his life every second on the brink of a feat or a disaster and needing special assurance, whereas she, Rosa, was completely safe and sound. Thanks to such a perspective, the anguish of murky autumn mornings on the damp icy pillow, with pains of hunger in the pit of his stomach, became more bearable.

At the university lectures, Sidelnikov sometimes imagined that he was going mad. He was overcome alternately by fits of fear or laughter. For instance, it was scary to meet the eyes of the department’s authorities who could at any moment suspect Sidelnikov of not being the person he pretended to be, and throw the fraud out in the street, where he’d be able at last to identify his real self and hear himself out at leisure. Naturally, if this happened, he would not tell his mother anything, at least not until he’d got conscripted. But, while looking for a spare bench at the railway station to spend the night (since he would obviously be thrown out of the hostel, too), he’d be unlikely to regret his idiotic laughter at the Dean’s lectures.

The Dean, whose surname was Kulkov and who was responsible for Russian Soviet literature, drew with chalk on the blackboard a scale of writing talents that looked like a sports champions’ podium. The highest step, that of the winner, was occupied by Gorky, whereas Bunin was skulking at the very bottom, with his name unfinished because the chalk ran out.

Kulkov was very troubled by the poet Alexander Blok.

‘You see,’ he was saying with ardour, ‘These here poems about the Fair Lady, they were, like, only compose-ed during the period before the wedding! But once our friend Alex and his bride … er…’ Kulkov was looking for a better word, slowly bringing together his index fingers, ‘…got, so to speak, er… coupled, it was then that he, you understand, stopped writing them poems…’

Sidelnikov was hiding his nose in his fist risking suffocation and was coughing and sneezing at the same time. He was looking around at his fellow students, but everybody was listening with appropriate attention, and nobody was laughing.

In Sidelnikov’s briefcase, there was a faint Xeroxed copy of “The Gulag Archipelago” borrowed from somebody. Without doubt, had this outrageous fact come to Kulkov’s notice, Sidelnikov would have had to identify himself and hear himself out not just in the street but also in certain chambers. (Who could have foreseen the crazy times when Kulkov would embrace anti-Soviet literature into his fervent sphere of competence, by writing a whole monograph on Solzhenitsyn, which, however, would go almost unnoticed by his ungrateful contemporaries…)

They started to recognise Sidelnikov at the trunk call office where in the early days he went to phone Lora nearly every evening. He did not just walk, he hurried there like a wounded recruit to the aid station to have his dressing changed. As a preliminary, every time a complex mathematical procedure took place, in order to calculate a certain fraction where the fragile numerator, the cash in his pocket, was crumbling into nothing before his very eyes, whereas the denominator was swelling up comprising imaginary meat pies which had yet to be bought one way or another, and the minutes on the phone which never seemed sufficient to Sidelnikov. ‘Hello,’ he would shout, hungrily listening for her voice, ‘that’s me!’ But Lora’s reply would be always reserved. It was so cold and reserved that the precious minutes, saved with such trouble, would be enough and to spare, same as his joy. In thirty seconds, it would turn out that they had nothing to talk about. And Sidelnikov would drag himself back to the hostel hating telephone communications as such, and Cauliflower, whose presence it surely was that stopped Lora from speaking normally, and, above all, his own foolish raptures. ‘Shut up! Drop dead!’ he kept telling someone inside of him, some soft hatchling nestling in his solar plexus. He had to get used to the fact that the gift love once bestowed on him to keep forever, could be easily taken away without any explanation at all.

The hostel was inhabited by provincials. In the eyes of their provincial friends and relatives, they appeared the lucky ones who had made a bold leap into big, real life like the one shown on television. This real life in the hostel started late in the evening, towards the night time, when no shops were open but everyone felt like eating, drinking, smoking and socialising. They used to stroll along the narrow corridors of the five floors as if along village roads in their slippers, flowery dressing gowns and tracksuit bottoms. The worst vagrants would look into the rooms of more provident ones and would cadge, brazen as can be, a bite to eat or a smoke. Those who gathered around a blackened tea kettle or a bottle caused envy. The utterly despondent hostel’s “orphans” were noticeable. They did not mix with anyone, but were happy to partake of any feast. In this respect, the shabby Shtrausenko’s room represented an El Dorado because drinking went on in there nearly every evening of the week. Shtrausenko was visibly proud of the fact that his cronies kept coming to him from all over the city. However, as Sidelnikov observed, Shtrausenko’s guests were just using the premises as a landing for imbibing the liquors obtained, and were suffering the presence of their host the same way they put up with the meagre morsels, like the stale processed cheese that accompanied their drink.

Amongst the hostel’s “orphans”, the gap-toothed Nadia stood out particularly. She naturally did not consider herself an orphan, but, on the contrary, was shamelessly resplendent like an Italian film star with attire to match. Her clothes were either very long, reaching to the floor, or very short, but always tightly fitted, spangled and baring half her chest. The absence or irregularity of some of her front teeth did not impair Nadia’s beauty. However, she was usually shunned and avoided as if she were contagious or politically unreliable, possibly because for some mysterious reasons Nadia had been expelled in the fourth year and resided in the hostel illegally, like a stray cat.

Lighting her own cigarette from his, Nadia said a baffling flattering phrase to Sidelnikov.

‘I will probably like you. Somehow you seem a bit Proustian.’

He became embarrassed and inadvertently fixed his gaze on her legs that made one think of thoroughbreds. Next to Nadia, he felt as if he was in the wings of a circus or in a ballerina’s dressing room.

Normally, she would appear in Shtrausenko’s El Dorado when the first bottle was nearly finished. She would casually drink up what was left if there was only one bottle. When there was more than one, she would at first refuse but later agree to drink and in any case drank little but stayed till the very end. Because of that, Shtrausenko called her a freeloader behind her back, but in the presence of his guests treated her as a bothersome mistress. Obviously, he was certain that it was bound to happen sooner or later – in his opinion, she was a safe bet since she kept coming and sitting there every evening. Nadia tolerated such handling with remarkable meekness or, rather, pretended not to notice it.

After the conversation about skirts and pimps, Shtrausenko stopped inviting Sidelnikov to the table. Excommunicated from the feasts, he was only happy about it because he got fed up with going to bed drunk. From then on, he used to ignore the feasts, lying on top of the blanket on his bed and reading books. When his roommate went on duty, Sidelnikov took over the unoccupied table. On such evenings, the gap-toothed Nadia would call in too, for about five minutes – to have a fag and to ask a couple of indiscreet questions. For instance, she would materialise in the doorway in an enormous halo of shining black curls, though on the day before her hair was dead straight and chestnut colour. She would whirl up the luxurious mane with both hands over her head and inquire:

‘How do you like my new image?’

‘Very,’ Sidelnikov would give an exhaustive answer.

She looked at that moment like the Duchess of Alba from the film “Goya” which he had seen recently. With her arms raised, her armpits displayed unbelievably smooth whiteness.

‘And what do you like best?’ Nadia wanted him to be more specific.

‘The armpits,’ confessed Sidelnikov.

‘You shouldn’t be so indifferent, young man,’ Nadia rebuked him before leaving.

‘All right, I’ll improve,’ he muttered indistinctly.