CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In the dark, the river was taut and warm. It smelled of freshly washed linen, the silent work of a hundred thousand invisible laundresses.

Upon the command, “Girls to the left, boys to the right”, Sidelnikov deduced that the “tsar bathing” required stripping to the skin. The taxi drivers waiting behind the bushes were talking in an undertone. ‘That’s them Bandeets, innit?’ one of them uttered a familiar phrase.

The intimate touch of water brought goosebumps rushing on his skin. Entering the flowing darkness up to his chest, Sidelnikov pushed the bottom with his feet and dived. If it were not for the tightness in his lungs, he could have, without coming to the surface, torn along the river merging with his body and then finally flowed into the open sea, as into a non-scary and logical death. He sensed that he had swum out too far and resurfaced reluctantly. The surface was cooler than the depths. Before diving again, he aimed at the voices of the bathers, turning his back to the unattainable sea.

And once more, Sidelnikov was swimming for a long time, oblivious to everything until an underwater collision with an unfamiliar smooth nakedness made him jump to the surface, touching the shallow bottom with his toes. In the process, Sidelnikov’s stomach crushed heavily against a tall woman standing with her back to him. She uttered a startled sound and laughed in Valentina’s voice, but instantly stopped laughing and went quiet without making any attempt to move away. Thereupon Sidelnikov was powerfully dragged in by drunken desire, just for five blind seconds which, however, were long enough for pressing against the yielding and supple back and the generously proffered behind and for repeating the wild belly thrust barely hindered by the thin layer of water between flesh and flesh.

Somehow coping with trouser-legs and the sticky sand on his feet, he despised himself for the thief-like haste, but for some reason he felt that he must get dressed before the others reached the shore. On the contrary, when the others came out, they were in no hurry, joking and having a smoke as if it was not night time and there were no cab meters ticking away behind the bushes.

Dressed, Valentina transformed back into the birthday girl and the opulent haberdashery queen whom Sidelnikov would not dare approach. She came up to him herself, deliberately clumsy in her high heels over the sand, her eyes shining, full of the dark river, and leaned powerfully on his forearm.

‘Tomorrow morning, stay in bed – do not get up till everyone’s gone. OK?’

And immediately after that, without any transition, the conspiratorial whisper rose to an exclamation:

‘Lena, have you seen my necklace?’

‘I haven’t seen nothing!’ the lacy wench, still unbuttoned, replied with hostile emphasis.

The part of town they rushed to after the beach – a cluster of tower blocks amidst a boundless wasteland – was not familiar to Sidelnikov. Valentina lived in a three-room apartment, apparently on her own. In the sitting room, there was no furniture at all apart from an enormous electric fireplace and a heavy rug on the floor from wall to wall, on which the guests reclined like patricians, to round off the orgy. The choice of delicacies was reduced to smoked sausage and vodka. They were reclining for about half an hour, exchanging infrequent lazy words, almost without looking at each other, as happens in a tightly knit circle. ‘Like in a gang,’ thought Sidelnikov.

The rest of the night he spent tossing and turning in the thick of the laborious snoring and wheezing of the male half of the gang. The ladies were sleeping in the next room. It was already getting light behind the net curtains when he rebuked himself, yet again, for leading an obviously erroneous lifestyle – and then fell asleep with a clear conscience.

According to his impression, everybody was astir in about a second later, and the fat bloke asked his spouse Lyusia for some champagne in the bright voice of a boy scout. In his mind, Sidelnikov set the alarm to “complete silence” and, ever so diligent, got back to sleep. It was silence that woke him up. There was not a soul in sight. He pricked up his ears: there was the noise of water running in the bathroom.

Half a year later, having played back that day like a film, he would try to identify the ratio of accidental and inevitable in it. Could Valentina, who was practically a stranger to him, NOT offer him, a stranger, what she did offer him, risking her head? Or were the several hours in a hot whipped up bed capable of being so crucial? Could he have consented right away rather than brush it aside, engulfed, or well-nigh swallowed up by her naked and substantial charms?

What Valentina said when she next had a chance to catch her breath after – what was it, the fourth ascent? – could be summed up as follows: was it truly Sidelnikov’s place to live among the poor and forever watch every penny? She’d rather work with him than with those dolts. The work was just taking some stuff to and from Moscow and Leningrad. And to keep mum, of course. And he could finish his studies afterwards. But at least he would have anything he could wish for.

‘C’mon, tell me, what would you like? How about a house by the sea?’

But on the screen of his memory, Sidelnikov was plainly bored when the talk was about money and seaside homes. What he was really fascinated by at that moment was the inscrutability of the naked body lying next to him, its beautifully groomed taut whiteness and fragrant folds. He was stunned by the contrast between the pampered smoothness of the groin and the just visible scarlet of the shameless wild meat. And when this handsome large woman abandoning herself to him was crying out in an unexpectedly high-pitched and piercing voice, he had to unwillingly assume the role of a torturer whose absolute cool-headedness would probably be pitied by a seasoned executioner.

Leaving, he promised to call her but she said, ‘I’ve got no phone in this flat, you can come round just like that,’ and wrote down her address on a page from a notebook. Then from her bedroom she brought a tiny parcel which looked like a tightly packed deck of cards and put it in the pocket of his summer jacket: ‘Here’s a little souvenir for you.’ When Sidelnikov was already going down the stairs, she called him back and handed him some small blue coupons, ‘Pay the cab driver with these instead of money.’ For some reason, it was then that he thought he was never to see her again.

The day, windy and hot, was languishing, swaying from side to side, uncertain of where to lean apart from the inexorable twilight. Sidelnikov crossed the wasteland and was walking along the road at random. Soon, a dust-covered taxi flew towards him as if on call.

The driver was chain-smoking and turning the controls of his radio. Through the noise, the song “Hope” was seeping through.

One just has to learn how to wait,

One will have to be calm and tenacious...

Sidelnikov attempted to adopt a calm and tenacious expression and closed his eyes. The sharply blowing draught in the back seat was ruthlessly tousling his hair, threatening to scatter his brains, but it was pleasant to have the wind on his face. The last verse of the song sounded puzzling because of its rather grim graveyard imagery:

The unknown star up in the sky

Is shining like a monument to Hope.

“If hope did not die then pray, why is there a monument to it?” Searching for cigarettes, Sidelnikov found Valentina’s present in his pocket. The bundle was securely cellotaped over so he had to tear the cover. For a few moments, he was gazing like an idiot at the bas-relief profile of Lenin, whereupon he quickly put everything back into his pocket. The “present” turned out to be a bundle of ten-rouble notes, the entire bank-wrapped pack of one grand.

His first impulse was to shout to the driver to go back: with a face of stone, Sidelnikov would ring the doorbell to Valentina’s flat and return the money. She would try to say something but he would leave in silence. Then it occurred to him that such a present appeared absurd and even insulting – unless Valentina was inviting Sidelnikov to join her in her mysterious enterprise. So it looked like she was securing his consent. In any case, he could come and visit her in a couple of days in order to return the bills and clear up the situation.

He strained his imagination, trying to animate the gigantic mass of money with three naughts deposited in his pocket but could not remember a single temptation in any shop that would have a matching price tag. Mopeds, motorbikes and other vehicles did not stir Sidelnikov. Then suddenly he recalled an account of a Mediterranean cruise he heard from a fellow train passenger. True that the narrator mostly concentrated on the foreign prices and the circumstances of purchasing some marvellous mohair, but Sidelnikov was sufficiently impressed by the geographical list heard from a live witness: Marseilles, Barcelona, Naples, Crete, Malta, Alexandria… It was not just that the names attracted him by their exotic novelty – on the contrary, to him they were very well-known and even familiar. For instance, he would repeat a hundred times the poem about “a blue island – the green Crete”, imagining in dazzling details the encounter of the two great lovers that took place in Alexandria nineteen centuries ago, but there you are, the chatter of an ordinary woman in a second-class carriage, who broke a heel of her sandal on the warm dented flagstones of the Palace of Knossos was as convincing and amazing as the testimony of ancient authors, perhaps even more so.

One of the passengers asked a down-to-earth question about the cost of the cruise. The woman said that the price of the package was eight hundred roubles and the wonder immediately acquired the enormous factual equivalent, namely, twenty times Sidelnikov’s monthly grant (or his mother’s salary for more than half a year), and on top, he’d have no money for food and accommodation!

When Komsomol Square came in sight, Sidelnikov asked the driver to pull in and gave him the little blue coupons that had got all sweaty in his palm. The driver nodded with discernible respect.

Before returning home, he felt he had to relieve somehow this unmotivated surge of energy – to cross the square with a light step, to circumvent, almost at a run, the lifeless bulk of the Drama Theatre, to go deep into the park without hiding his idiotic grin. “A blue island – the green Crete” was the most accurate name of and keyword to this bliss. The park was still immersed in its grass-and-berry evaporations, not a bit different from the previous evening, as if a night and a day had not passed, but the same evening was still continuing. It was Sidelnikov who had befallen a change, and he was struggling to grasp its elusive nature. ‘One would think it was because of this somebody else’s money…’ – the thought was clumsy and a bit shameful. He shoved his hand into his pocket once again and froze.

The money was not in his jacket. Not in any of the pockets. Nor in his trouser pockets, except for his own six roubles and twenty kopecks. Dashing back, towards the square, was necessary to set his mind at ease, more than for anything else. The cab would have already gone, with the money on its back seat. Possibly, another passenger would find it. There was an icy logic in what had happened and the only thing it dictated to Sidelnikov was that on the following day he would have to go and see Valentina.

His mother met him in silence and did not offer him any supper.

He drank some cold tea and got undressed, then was re-reading Wilhelm Hauff’s fairy-tales till half past midnight.

A stranger in a red cloak, his face was completely hidden, was waiting for the wretch by the parapet of the Ponte Vecchio. Slowly, he said, ‘Follow me!’ The campaniles of Florence struck the irreversible hour, and the spring of the tale, about a chopped-off hand that did not offer any clues or outcomes, uncoiled with a hiss.

Rosa appeared most hurriedly as if, preoccupied with an urgent matter, she had been waiting for Sidelnikov to finally get to sleep. At last, as he appeared in the domain of sleep where she could reach him, she told him with greatest clarity and firmness, ‘Don’t even think about it! Neither tomorrow, nor at any other time…’ He had never seen Rosa so worried and hastened to calm her down. He said, here in Florence we have no other options, everything has already happened, that is, it’s already too late, I am the one to know, the circumstances are absolutely fatal… But she interrupted him almost rudely, ‘Look here, stop beating about the bush. This is not what I’m talking about!’ It was implied without further explanations that she was talking about the woman called Valentina, and nobody else. Even though Sidelnikov slept till quite late, almost until noon, the only substantial remnant of his dream was Rosa’s warning shout that gained the strength of an order, ‘DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!’

When he was washing his face, he spotted his shirt, newly laundered and hung on the line in the bathroom. He felt with his fingers in the wet breast pocket – and found nothing.

In the kitchen, his mother was sealing jars of raspberry preserve. Before asking her the hopeless question, Sidelnikov stood by the window for a little while, dipped his glance into the enamelled basin filled with raspberry mash and watched a little fly resting on its syrupy edge.

‘Have you seen a piece of paper with an address?’

‘Whose address?’

It seemed to him that the question did not surprise her.

‘Well, there was that little piece of paper. In my shirt pocket…’

‘Well, whose address was it?’

He no longer wanted to ask her. He did not feel like sharing the fate of the little fly that came to a sticky end.

After two empty days, he left for Srednovsk.