CHAPTER NINETEEN

If not for Professor Dergunov, Sidelnikov would have never chanced upon those wonderful golden-and-purple pieces of glass that let any human see with their own eyes utterly indescribable, inordinately beautiful and fearsome things.

It is hard to tell exactly what it was that the old professor had against his student. It might be that the fatal reason for Dergunov’s antipathy was the insufficient rapture and the lack of reverence on Sidelnikov’s face during those sacred moments when the University patriarch was affectionately narrating to the green first-year students his cherished reminiscences of his years of friendship with the great Urals storyteller Pazhov. At that time, Pazhov had not yet grown a long folklore beard, he was wearing a leather jacket and carrying a gun and was granted the right to shoot on the spot at any socially dubious characters. Although the fighting past of the professor himself was not as romantic and fancy-dress, however, the distinguished snitch Dergunov helped to put away a few of his fellow university teachers in earnest and for the long haul, which was known to almost everyone in the department. Therefore, Sidelnikov, as a listener, was committing precarious nonchalance by not feigning admiration and by making no facial efforts at all.

‘Tell me who was the theorist and the leader of the “natural school”?’ asked Dergunov.

He was staring intently at the delicate baby-pink fingernails of his left hand whilst keeping his right hand under the table. The exam was almost over. Sidelnikov, who gave extensive answers to both questions of the examination paper, felt that he definitely earned a “four” out of five.

‘Belinsky.’

Dergunov nodded.

‘Belinsky was the theorist. And who was the leader?’

Sidelnikov hesitated. It was news to him that Belinsky could cede to anybody else his role as the leader of such a dull undertaking as the “natural school”. Gogol’s magnificent figure was shimmering in the not so distant background, even if he was at that time in Italy, and Sidelnikov was a bit reluctant to involve Gogol in this palaver anyway. But the delicate senile fingernails bode foul play.

‘Gogol?’’

‘Oh! Then you are not familiar with Gogol’s life, are you?’ Dergunov exclaimed, visibly pleased. ‘At that time, Nikolai Vassilyevich was living abroad. You may go. Un-sa-tis-fac-tory. And do not even hope for a good mark, until… Russian literature is not what you imagine.’

Upon coming out of Dergunov’s room, Sidelnikov leafed through the textbook in utter boredom and disgust. “Vissarion Belinsky, bla, bla, bla… refuted accusations of reactionary critics in defence of …bla, bla, bla…the “natural school”, whose leader and theorist he was”. So he was indeed both the leader and the theorist! In translation into the Prosecutor’s language of Fate, it meant that Sidelnikov was doomed to fail this test and, through this, the whole of winter exams and, ultimately, to end up on the aforementioned railway station bench for those permanently in transit or homeless. He was doomed for sure because the Professor failed him, the half-wit, on purpose, by just a single weightlessly elegant gesture. And indeed, why on earth should the distinguished brother-in-arms of the KGB storyteller be untrue to his signature elegance?

There was one week left until the end of the exams. Twice, squirming inside with humiliation, Sidelnikov came up to Dergunov in the corridor with the request to re-sit the exam and both times he was met with righteous indignation: ‘There are such gaps in your knowledge! And you are in such a rush! Well, I doubt if you can pass it at all…’

Everything was going precisely according to the evil plan, but then a flu epidemic meddled with Fate. The philology patriarch got mighty snivels and took sick leave. Pochinyaev, a youthful senior lecturer of the same subject, effortlessly passed Sidelnikov with a “good” mark, marvelling at his failed first attempt. The bench in the railway station remained vacant. However, his grant for the next six months gave up the ghost.

…

By that time, Sidelnikov had successfully mastered a sport, novel to him – namely, surviving on one rouble a day. To be achieved, this required heroic self-restraint and most accurate calculations because, for example, one day’s lapse represented by a set of postcards with reproductions of impressionist paintings cancelled all rights to the next day’s lunch. And such profligacy as tinned fish in tomato sauce or even, God forbid, in oil, threw several kilos of potatoes out of his budget.

The loss of his grant spurred on the challenge to find employment. The career of a night watchman was not to happen, thwarted by the prevalence of faster and luckier place-seekers. Sidelnikov nearly began thinking of getting a job loading freight trains when the poet Yuri, who was in his year, offered him the position of evening sweeper at a secret optics factory which the poet had recently infiltrated in the same sweeping capacity.

Sweeping the rubbish together in the deserted workshops in the evening was conducive to heart-to-heart conversations on global culture. The partners in conversation would talk to each other approximately like this: ‘You see, old man…’, ‘Yes, old man, you are absolutely right…’ Something had to be urgently done with global culture.

Being a family man, Yuri would usually hurry up with the job in order to leave early. Sidelnikov would be left on his own on the whole of the secret territory and undertake unauthorised excursions. This was how he chanced upon the rubbish bins. This rubbish deposit was different from an ordinary stinking garbage can because it was clean or, you could even say, pristine. It was because it contained hundreds of various sized glass pieces and lenses, rejected due to minuscule chips or scratches. The only time Sidelnikov had experienced a similar ecstasy was when Rosa and he used to visit the haberdashery shop “to have a glance at the diamonds”. Splashes and drops frozen in flight, polished to a mirror shine as if delicately licked by a divinity and now shimmering violet gold on the bottom of a rubbish bin – they only needed someone to rest his naked eye fearlessly against their smoothness and be stunned, dazzled by the sight of a totally different life, that is an altogether separate universe, located not elsewhere but just here.

Mind-blown, Sidelnikov seriously contemplated plundering a few bits of the precious garbage with the aim to further the rapture, but he was thwarted by the honest and defenceless eyes of the armed security guard by the name of Sofia Karpovna whom he had to pass at the exit, as well as by the memory of a strict paper signed hastily that obliged the “auxiliary worker” G. F. Sidelnikov to keep the defence-and-optics secrets safe.

Soon the sweepers’ night shift was changed to daytime and pensioners replaced the students. Sidelnikov had to part with the glass treasures but by no means with rubbish tips. He became an orderly at the trauma unit of the First City Hospital where they already knew him and accepted him as one of their own. They even allocated to him a personal office (in the bathroom) and entrusted him with a numbered mop, a bucket and plastic bags for all sorts of rubbish.

The word “orderly” was only pretending to have any order in it. Anything within the official duties of the newly appointed medical worker reeked of stale blood, ammonia and iodine, spittle and cigarette butts floating in urine. From an orderly’s point of view, the patients were doing nothing but fouling. Some endeavoured to make use of Sidelnikov’s “office” at the most unsuitable times. For some reason, women almost never bothered to hide their pale nakedness and sometimes, Sidelnikov imagined himself a voyeur in the deliberate disguise of an orderly.

Outside in the cold, running out of the hospital building with the fifth or sixth huge bag of rubbish, he caught himself feeling insensitive and numb, as if under narcosis. After work, in the crowded tram on the way to his hostel pillow, this narcosis continued to work, obscuring, like a heaving wave, the nest of the forbidden hatchling who was destined to suffer. In this state of mind, at the crossing of The 8th of March Street and Decembrists’ Street, Sidelnikov nearly got run over by a car with Nadia in the front passenger seat wearing a man’s black hat with a lowered brim under whose shadow only her lips could be seen, outlined in bold lipstick. Or maybe it was not Nadia, but someone who looked just like her... In the grocery shop, he bought a jar of tomato sauce, to put on bread for breakfast and supper, and walked two blocks, struggling to recall Nadia’s phrase that got stuck in his mind like a splinter. The wind was blowing into his back as if pushing him to do something self-evident. The faces of passers-by walking against the wind all had an identical expression of suffering distress. Finally, he remembered. Nadia had said, “You will never have any money”. He wondered if this was written all over him.

When Sidelnikov was unable to sort things out within his own soul, he applied a self-made remedy that he deemed infallible. One only had to listen carefully to one’s very first morning thought when only just awake, with the eyes still closed. At such a moment, his secluded soul would blab, being only half-awake, and it was possible to seize the end of the tangled thread. To his surprise, in a few winter mornings, Sidelnikov caught Valentina in his thoughts. He was thinking of her as a woman, with keen desire but without any perceptible symptoms of the love anguish he was inured to by Lora. In one of his morning visions (on the theme of Turkish janissaries for some reason), the inflamed sabre steel was piercing – however, bloodlessly – a submissive European slave woman, moaning in the high-pitched voice of Valentina’s… All of a sudden, effortlessly, her surname surfaced in his memory – Likhter – even though he had only heard it once when Valentina mentioned her ex-husband: her “old pot and pan” had suddenly gone to pot, leaving behind nothing but his surname.

Now Sidelnikov could find her address. All he needed to start the mechanism for the change of his lot (not necessarily for the better, but some change for sure) would be a mere sixteen hours on the train and a short wait at the inquiry office.

Yet he did not let himself to hurry. He waited out four cold weeks, endured an hour-long queue to the railway ticket office, thriftily spaced out three cabbage pies and a Garcia Marques novel over the whole journey, gratified his mother with a summary of his inexhaustible accomplishments in studies, stayed at home for two days without budging out and at last, halfway between the bakery and the greengrocer’s, honoured the inquiry office with his visit.

He was staggered by the thick crowd of visitors, clearly his fellow hopefuls in the change of fate. The girl at the counter had ink-stained fingers and the sad little face of a diligent underachiever. Upon passing to her the form with the full name of his quarry, Sidelnikov did not make a pest of himself, peeping under her hand as everybody else did while she was leafing through her thick registry volumes – instead he turned away with a look of boredom. He could not risk revealing his pursuit to Fate.

The girl was leafing through the books, then was telephoning somewhere but he had his eyes glued to the wall painted lifeless green, until suddenly he felt a gentle tap of the ink-stained little fingers on his hand – the way someone would touch when they do not wish to startle you or draw the attention of the people around.

On the scrap of paper that was handed over to Sidelnikov in considerate silence, a crooked single word was scribbled, non-existent in any language but brought forth by the solecistic labour of the underachiever, the diabolic omniscience of the office and, perhaps, the immutability of Fate:

IMPRIZEND.