CHAPTER SEVEN

On the Saturday night, they forgot all about the cinema tickets because the two of them sitting at home in the kitchen was a fate just as enviable as sitting in the dark auditorium. It turned out that it was possible, without waiting for any reason or permission, to drink, between the two of them, a bottle of wine with the manly name of Riesling. (For want of a corkscrew, the cork was pushed inside.)

It turned out that getting ravenously hungry at that time of night was not anything out of the ordinary for either and it was all right to fry a whole pan of potatoes precisely by midnight in order to polish it off together.

For no apparent reason, it was appropriate to get into a bathtub together and wash each other from head to toe, without feeling self-conscious about kissing, or soaping with four hands at once all that was dizzyingly feminine and exaggeratedly masculine. ‘Here, listen…’ Sidelnikov would start, or rather, continue a thousand-and-first kitchen conversation. ‘The Department of Culture is listening,’ she would reply shaking water out of her ear. And at that moment, nothing seemed funnier to both than the combination of words “the Department of Culture”. It turned out that it was late, half past one, and the trams would have packed up for the night – but that he could stay. (Elated, Sidelnikov recalled that it was a Saturday and that meant he was not expected at home, supposedly staying overnight at Rosa’s).

All of a sudden, they fell silent, both at once. She was laying out something warm on the floor whereas he, with his forehead burning the windowpane, was trying if not to muffle, than at least to slow down the booming beats inside his left ribs. Lora said, ‘Don’t stand there, you’ll catch your death,’ and turned off the lights. Making four long steps into the darkness, he nearly trod on the pillows of the bed he was to share with her. And when, after gentle discomforts caused by noses and chins, kneecaps and feet, they managed at last to embrace one another in such a match that it seemed that their clinch could not be closer or more precise, then very slowly she opened yet another embrace, hot and terrifying like a wound that came apart. It turned out that he was able to become a boat, light yet powerful, which was speeding in the narrow riverbed, rocking the pitch darkness where an inadvertent cry and the glow of some wild lightning forestalled a quake of almost astronomical proportions.

Before they fell asleep, when it was nearly morning, Lora for some reason confessed that it was the first time in her life that she was spending a night with a man. Yet Sidelnikov did not understand straightaway that she was referring to him in such a fashion and even asked, rather stupidly, ‘With whom?’ She was also whispering, hiding her face in the little hollow at his collarbone, that someone handsome and strong made a gift of himself and made a certain foolish woman happy. The woman with a misty tear-stained face was sitting on the conductor’s seat in the second car of the very first tram and he, ticketless, could not come up to her and pay her the three kopecks for a ticket because he was stark naked, and the covers all got twisted towards their feet, and his shoulder, to which the sleeping Lora had taken fancy, had gone numb.

The Sunday’s Sidelnikov was noticeably different from the Saturday’s one. For instance, he instantly became a few centimetres taller. He discovered this in the morning when, running down the stairs, he peeked into the opening of the flower box, that is, the mailbox, which had been a bit too high for him to look into even yesterday. (This iron messenger suddenly became redundant. Events of the past night gave Sidelnikov some hope for the lifelong right to give Lora flowers in person.) This precipitous augmentation of Sidelnikov’s person might have been, from the point of view of Dr Pavlov the physiologist, the consequence of straightening his posture which in turn, from our non-scientific point of view, was caused, let us say, by his internal unbending. As to Sidelnikov himself, he did not bother to look for the cause and believed with confidence that a sublime promise that had always been floating in the air was now beginning to come true. It could not be an illusion. He attained the feeling of belonging, of being admitted to the secret innermost chambers, where, essentially, everything that’s most important was being determined.

Furthermore, he felt unconquerable pity for the passers-by who somehow managed to exist through their weekdays, high days and holidays without possessing what Sidelnikov had. Could even a single one of these blokes standing in the endless queue for beer have been kissed on the lips when leaving home and told, ‘Come back soon, I’ll miss you’? In short, he felt genuine pity towards every man who had no Lora, and every woman who was not at least a little bit like her.

What was bound to happen after two months of daily dates and weekly nights spent allegedly at Rosa’s, happened at last. One evening, from a payphone, the worried Rosa rang her daughter-in-law, with whom she had very little contact, and inquired why Sidelnikov had not been showing his face for such a long time.

Her daughter-in-law started, in a pedagogical voice, ‘What is it, aren’t weekends enough for you?’ but suddenly stopped short. It was a Saturday and Sidelnikov was appropriately absent.

...

It was as if by the way and spontaneously, maybe even too much so, that his mother told him to drop by on Aunt Valya Shevtsova. Aunty Valya asked you to drop by. You ought to drop by.

Snow fell early, even before the November holidays. It was being speedily removed from Lenin Prospect by being swept away to the curbs as something alien to the forthcoming demonstration of toiling masses. Shevtsova lived within five minutes of a light-hearted walk. On the way, Sidelnikov was calling to mind his parents’ talking of the legendary youth of the lady inspector who, as rumour had it, single-handedly conquered gangs of bandits. The stench of cat piss and the darkness in the entrance provoked conspiratorial fantasies. He felt like raising his collar and shoving his hands into his pockets.

Shevtsova with scanty permed hair, dressed in a flannel housecoat materialised behind the door chain.

‘Take your coat off and go into the room. I won’t be a moment.’

The room was dominated by an orange lampshade looming over the dining table. Plastic carnations were blooming on the mirrored dressing-table. A man’s heavy snoring persisted in the next room.

‘Sit yourself down.’

Shevtsova had already donned a police tunic with all the buttons done up but underneath it, her maroon housecoat was puckering in her sleeves and on her chest. She sat down across from him at the table and cast a look that hit Sidelnikov straight on the bridge of his nose. Then she said,

‘It came to our knowledge – ’

At the same moment, the snoring next door stopped abruptly. Someone’s animal-like voice said with reproach, ‘Val’ka, you stinking… bitch!’ Shevtsova’s face went blotchy.

Sidelnikov presumed that it was one of the bandits that she caught and gave shelter to in her home for corrective purposes.

‘It came to our knowledge that you … Taking advantage of the trust…’

‘I say, Val’ka, cut this crap!’

Evidently, the correction was making a slow progress.

‘Anton,’ shouted Shevtsova, ‘will you stop it at once!’… ‘That you have repeatedly spent the night away from home.’

Sidelnikov kept silent.

‘We must needs know where you have been. Who you was with. And what you was doing together. Don’t even dream of lying, we will find out anyways.’

Sidelnikov kept silent. The snoring next door recommenced.

She sighed and started to speak in a softer tone.

‘You see, you don’t realise what importance the teenager problem plays at this present moment…’

Bored, Sidelnikov was peering into the looking glass that reflected her round back and a small bald patch amongst her meagre curls.

‘You see, at present, a lot of teenagers smoke and indulge in disgraceful goings-on. And some of them even engage in dirty relationships. Might it be,’ she raised her voice, ‘that you have been with a woman?’

Sidelnikov lowered his eyes and started to free his fingers which had become entangled in the tablecloth fringe.

‘Ah-ha, that’s it, isn’t it!’ suddenly, Shevtsova was pleased. ‘Now, you’re going to tell me her name. And her surname. And what you two was doing together.’

Shevtsova was practically beaming.

‘And if you clam up, we’ll find her ourselves. And summon her to the proper quarter. Tell the truth.’

Straining, Sidelnikov took his eyes from under the table and uttered his ultimate truth:

‘Our relationship is not dirty.’

Whatever appeared in her face was greater than disappointment. She looked as if in front of her was a wretched cripple and a complete imbecile into the bargain, who did not even suspect how greatly he was stinted by Nature.

However, the “lady inspector” still had some hope left. No longer soliciting the name out of him, she asked him a question that sounded like a swansong:

‘But you have a romance with her? Tell me honestly, is it a romance?’

He fell into a conscientious deliberation, in particular concerning characteristics of the genre. It was not the easiest of questions.

‘No,’ said Sidelnikov at last, ‘I think it is plain fiction.’

A minute later, he hastily departed from the place, leaving behind a monstrous knot in the tablecloth fringe, the lampshade hit by his head rocking as if at sea, and a bitterly disappointed woman, who hated her own life for the reason of years-long absence of what she called “a dirty relationship”.