CHAPTER FOURTEEN

This pair clambered on the tram with difficulty. They stood out among the other passengers by reason of their deliberate estrangement from everybody else – it was as if they had been forced to take out a piece of enclosed space from their meagre home and carry it along like a secret little cradle through the street and tram crowds, protecting it from collisions. This way one carries an expensive rustling bunch of flowers or a fractured arm in packed public transport – this is how the pair must have chosen to carry themselves. But in fact, they were bristling and sticking out and bumping into everything and everybody.

The two, a little boy and an old woman, squeezed through the crowd to a free seat. He sat down at once and she stood next to him. The boy was about six or seven. A brief glance at his senselessly half-open mouth, the flattened bridge of his nose and the reddish crinkles around his piglet-like little eyes was enough to recognise Down’s syndrome. The old woman, who looked like a dried blade of grass, was taking a handkerchief to his face trying to wipe something off. But the boy waved her off slapping resonantly on her forearm with his chubby underdeveloped hand. Altogether, he was behaving like a Crown prince: his subjects with their lowly needs were bustling around him – they hastily packed themselves into the carriage dragging bags splattered with the autumn mud, whereas there was nothing left for him other than to gaze mournfully at the realm that was his lot and was far from perfection.

Sidelnikov, gripped by the crowd, could not take his eyes from the Down’s child, amazed by the fact that in the piglet-like little face of the child, he could indeed discern an almost regal dignity or even pride. And then something self-evident dawned upon Sidelnikov: the present and the future of this boy and his protection and his realm and all his subjects were all converged in this scrawny bent old woman who could barely stay on her feet.

He got off the tram at an unknown stop, shuffled to a bush at the side of the road and halted. He forgot where he was going; he was shaken. All he wanted at that moment was Rosa. The surrounding world was made of her absence. The banished hatchling was frantically thrashing in the thicket of his solar plexus, making his whole body tremble. These signs, sickeningly shameful in his opinion, made him realise that he was sobbing. Not having dropped a hint of a tear by Rosa’s coffin and grave, there he was, in this strange city, at long last mourning over her who had not lived to be loved by him.

It seemed that Rosa did not pay much attention to what had happened. She continued to visit his dreams, but would talk to him as little as when she was alive. But it also might be that by morning, he would have forgotten her words. Over three weeks, Sidelnikov recalled one phrase she repeated twice, that he’d better move to another room. However, he had become used to their two-bed hovel and felt sorry for those who had to share a room with another five people.

Guests with bottles were popping round sometimes frequently, sometimes hardly ever. The sharp aroma of Nadia’s perfume practically never evaporated from the El Dorado. Once, when Shtrausenko was not there and Sidelnikov had just wiped the sticky stains off the table and spread out his notes on English, Nadia appeared before him as a short-haired blonde clad in something like a slippery night-gown.

‘Is Gennady at work? That’s good.’

All of sudden, she turned the key in the door and came up to Sidelnikov, walking with the relaxed gait of a model. He could smell face powder, wine and her sweetish sweat. While he was stupidly correlating the rights of a spectator with the duties of a gentleman, the show had time to begin.

He was still sitting on his chair immersed in idiotic qualms as to whether he was allowed to watch Nadia taking her shoes off and by an impatient sinuous movement hitching up the tight black satin and freeing her naked hips from under it, opening out her legs in a sort of a ballet-or-circus split and, without taking her widely spread feet off of the floor, pulling herself like a wet glove onto the hot idol which, a minute earlier, she had extracted out to the daylight and caressed hurriedly and crossly.

In his mind, Sidelnikov compared himself with a sports apparatus that came in handy for a breathtaking gymnastic exercise. Neither of them uttered a word. The rhythmical breath of the gymnast and the resonant smack of conjugating flesh provided the only soundtrack to the scene.

The rap at the door was obviously out of tune. But the knocking was imperiously loud which meant that Shtrausenko was back. The characters in the scene feigned temporary deafness. The watchman banged at the door some more, then yelled, ‘Bugger!’ and cleared off. In a minute, Nadia left too, saying by way of a goodbye:

‘You are not going to believe it, but I like you already.’

Sidelnikov did not know what to do with himself, wet and sticking out. Sidling like a saboteur, he stole along the corridor to the shower room and got under the gushing water. His state was both delicious and nauseous.

...

On the next night, Shtrausenko was receiving his usual visitors. By half past midnight, the disposition was as follows: at the table, there were the host inspired by port, Nadia with an unfinished glass of wine, one guest blissfully sliding down off his chair into nothingness and another guest, wistful like Byron but with a wart on his brow. Sidelnikov was sitting on his bed with a newly purchased book of poetry.

The conversation was going on as follows.

Shtrausenko (archly):

‘Nad’ka, d’you need cash?’

Nadia (looking into her glass):

‘Yeah.’

‘For how much would you put out for Sergey?’

Sergey (briefly pausing in his slide off the chair):

‘How much what?’

Nadia (to Sidelnikov):

‘You seem to be reading some poetry?’

The warted ‘Byron’ (sullenly):

‘You cock teaser!’

‘What kind of poetry - hope it’s not a secret?’

‘Er… well, it’s just…’

Actually, the poetry was of the kind that made one either straighten one’s breath or stop breathing altogether: “She had come into a new virginity /and was untouchable; her sex had closed / like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands / had grown so unused to marriage, that the god’s / infinitely gentle touch of guidance/ hurt her, like an undesired kiss …”

Shtrausenko (theatrically):

‘You sat on the lap

Of many a lad…’

Nadia:

‘Please - just a few lines!’

Sidelnikov (reluctantly, in singsong)

‘ She was no longer that woman with blue eyes…’

Shtrausenko:

‘I’m some poet, don’t you know it!’

“…no longer the aromatic island in the theatre box / and that man’s property no longer…”

‘Keep it short!’

‘Shtraus,’ Nadia asked, ‘shut your mouth.’

‘Don’t you bloody shut me up! She comes here every bloody day, gets sozzled for nothing and now she’s gone all clever…’

Nadia put her glass down gingerly.

‘I’ve never seen you pay for your own drink,’ said Sidelnikov to Shtrausenko.

‘You bloody bitch!’ Byron said sullenly, to no one in particular.

‘Freeloader! Go get a job. You’ve got some extra teeth left, shall we count them for you.’

‘Is that you who’s going to count?’ asked Sidelnikov.

‘You bloody bitch,’ Byron said again and unexpectedly slapped the watchman’s face. The latter ignored it.

‘With sluts like you, I’d only count till two. One, two - fuck you!’

‘Look at the performing sheep, it can count to two,’ said Sidelnikov choking with sudden fury.

‘Shall we step outside?’ Shtrausenko offered, not very firmly.

But Sidelnikov had already gotten up from his bed and was putting his shoes on. He had never wanted to fight as badly as he did now. ‘Let him…let him start first, I’m not going to spare him.’

They paused, biding their time in the blind gut of the corridor, vacant at night. The watchman’s trick could not be simpler. Hesitating, he cast a roguish glance beyond Sidelnikov’s shoulder. Sidelnikov turned to look back and a moment later got a merciless blow smashing his nose cartilage, accompanied by a high-pitched twang like that of a snapped piece of ice, and by the sultry odour of blood. Completely blinded, he thrust his fists out several times, at the treacherous air, at the invisible stubbly mug, and when he heard the tramping of Shtrausenko’s running away, he sat down on the floor with his knees apart and hung down his head so that the salty red stream could trickle out unhindered.