«Job done, get off the body» – that, I think, is what people used to say back when I was a Komsomol member. Well then, I had earned my right to rest.
Terribly pleased with myself, I made it to a telephone box. Poked about in my notebook, then dialled the number of Milka’s work phone. Having waited for a languid «Hello» to appear at the other end of the line, I said easily:
– Hello, darling. I want to see you in the nude again.
The receiver snorted, grunted and said in a human voice:
– Who do you want?
– Oh, pardon moi. May I speak to Lyudmila?
– You may, – the other end of the line intrigued me with the noise of some incomprehensible bustling and giggling, after which I finally heard Milka’s voice:
– Sashka, is that you?
– It’s me.
– Where are you calling from?
– To be honest, I don’t know. But I can assure you it doesn’t look like Red Square.
– Well, all right. When can you be at «Kaluzhskaya»?
– Where’s that? And what for?
– I live there.
– I see. I’ll be there in about an hour, probably.
– Do that. We’ll meet in the middle of the hall.
An hour later I was at «Kaluzhskaya».
Two hours later I was examining Milka’s etchings on the walls of her two-room flat.
Three hours later I was lying in bed stroking her chestnut hair, spread out across my chest. My mood was of the foulest.
Lyudmila, Milochka, Milok.
Why had fate thrown us together yesterday? So that I could lie beside her now, dumbly wanting to smoke a cigarette despite having quit six years ago? So that I could die of pity for my former girlfriend, who deserved something entirely different?
There are no girls like Milok in Europe. In Moscow, I think, two or three are to be found, and around Russia maybe a dozen or two are wandering about. And that’s all. A one-off item, my girlfriend, and no fool either. As long as I could remember, from the first year of school, Milochka had bubbled over with creative ideas. As an Octobrist she used to dash off snappy little verses for the wall newspaper, spiteful little ditties about unwashed hands and bad marks in the school diary. In her red-neckerchief years she got carried away with daubing in oils and churned out landscapes, still lifes and red-eared portraits of classmates by the dozen. Her admission to the Komsomol was marked by the turning of Milochka’s enthusiasms towards «Povoroty», «Karakumy» and other «Who’s to Blame?» A school band was knocked together under the name «Burning Hearts», in which the dream-girl Lyudmila the Fair turned out cool solos on the Ionika. And in the late evenings, when the stars leapt down from the sky onto the heads of courting couples, Mila would stroll with me along the boulevards and, in a quiet, measured voice, declaim from memory the novella she had just finished, «The Galaxy Is Waiting». Some high-flown obscurity she poured out onto my empty head. And I, tenderly clamped around her waist, waged war on my hurricane libido, and my body was tormented by fear and desire, desire and fear.
The school years would have been wonderful if not for the torments of early puberty! Ah, the final year, the final year, which flew past like a fly in the muzzle of abstinence by the light of my girlfriend’s grandiose plans! Milka dreamed of becoming a writer, of bringing down on the world her clever, faintly ironic science-fiction prose «a la Strugatski Broz», but before that – a female whim entirely incomprehensible to me – she wanted to finish drama school or medical school. Which exactly – she hadn’t decided yet. Her business. I didn’t look that far ahead, I squeezed my pimples and wept standing in front of the mirror. I wanted to screw the way a cannon wants to fire, my balls were ringing like the string of a good bow, and every last one of the thoughts scurrying about in my head circled around Milka’s shapely legs and – enough to drive you mad – the tender little mound between them. And in the moments when I was wound up to the limit, I was ready to fling myself like a vulture on any person of the female sex between the ages of fifteen and fifty, and compare at last the joy and shame of night-time sheet-staining with the tumultuous happiness of possessing someone else’s flesh.
In the end nature took its course. The graduation night was, unexpectedly and out of the blue, marked by a grandiose drinking bout on a hired river boat, from the deck of which we were supposed to greet the sunrise over the Moscow river. Who greeted what there, I don’t know. As far as I recall, the rails were used only for throwing up over onto the heads of frightened carp. And I dragged into some cabin a Mila who could barely stand, got myself tangled to the point of tears of despair in catches, clasps and buckles, and then simply tore her clothes off with a rip. In a mad languor I merged with the longed-for body, which first struck me with an electric shiver and then bewitched me with the mad rhythm of the mechanics of love. I was ready to burst into tears of happiness. I loved her. I was ready to give my life for those «ah… ah… oh, mummy… ah… more… ah… ah». Mila carried me on her body to the Everest of bliss, from which I rolled down very quickly, but did not settle down, took the summit by storm again, and again, and again. All night I tormented her drunken flesh with mine and dreamed of dying for the magic moaning underneath me.
In the morning there were tears, hysterics, little fists in front of my nose and the burn of crimson shame on my cheeks and ears. I let my gaze wander over my own boots, muttered «Oh, calm down, will you», twice proposed that we get married… Then came a six-month blank. The blank contained getting a job at a factory and two cheerful girls up from the provinces on residence permits, who took it in turns to hand over the watch in my bed to each other. How my dear mother raged! How merry it was for me!
Milok, meanwhile, got into the First Medical, signed up with some studio theatre and, businesslike as a shoal of Atlantic herring, swept past without paying attention to any of my «How d’you dos» and «Greetings and salutations». And in the winter – God heard my prayers – she was thrown out of the institute for failing her studies. She had understood that the offal of other people’s insides did not inspire her, and that Parnassus could be stormed in company other than Chekhov and Bulgakov. The creators from the Taganka, who at that time were astounding the public with volleys of literary exercises, seemed like decent lads too. She plunged headlong into theatrical affairs. I don’t know who put her brain on sideways there, but soon she called me at home herself. The call wasn’t by telephone but directly at the door. I was taken aback.
Milok, chirping merrily, seeped past me into the flat, made herself at home on my bed as though she owned it, then fished a bottle of red out of her rucksack and proposed we drink it to her forthcoming debut. The strange proposal I supported in silence. Two glasses were extracted from the sideboard, filled with ruby fluid, emptied and, with a clink, tumbled to the floor. My ignition may be late, but seeing Mila dreamily close her eyes and lean back, I immediately pulled off my trousers and… In short, a celebration occurred, which continued the following day. From that time on, every Saturday and Sunday was coloured into a rainbow by Milka’s presence. It went on until the middle of May – the date of my call-up for service. For some reason she didn’t come to my send-off. Had I been a little more sober, I would have hanged myself out of hurt and bewilderment: how can anyone act like that?! But I was drunk, very drunk, extraordinarily drunk. The vodka flowed like a river that evening, cascaded like Niagara into the stomachs of raucous friends and girlfriends and there, mixed with «Lyubitelskaya» sausage and Olivier salad, began working such wonders! All that has stayed in my memory of that evening: the smoke of consciousness mixed with frenzied howling to a guitar, «They’ll give me a new uniform, they’ll teach me to fire a rifle!» and greedy, insatiable open-mouthed kisses with Natashka, with Galka and with some other nameless and yielding girls… I came to only at the assembly point.
That was seven years ago.
Today’s meeting with Lyudmila, the hot, self-forgetting sex that seemed to have surfaced out of the past, plunged me for a while into a joyful youth, but only for a while. The alcohol of the champagne we’d drunk evaporated out of our heads, and Mila, sniffing, rubbing her red eyes, began to tell me, and tell me, and tell me.
Nothing worthwhile had come of the theatre. For a year she struggled with errand-girl parts, then gave up on the whole thing and took a job at a research institute banging away on a typewriter – her music school piano course hadn’t been for nothing. At the same institute she found herself a husband – thoughtful, promising, romantic and touching in the evenings. He served in the post of research fellow, worked on something global and radiated genius. They played the usual wedding, and the next day all his genius vanished somewhere. Strangely quickly, the little rays of tenderness and romance that had lit up the pre-wedding evenings went dim.
– He hasn’t given me flowers once since the wedding, – Mila sobbed. – Only on the eighth of March he shoves a wilted little bouquet at me, and that’s that. They thought up a fine bright day of the calendar, didn’t they: a festival of the sexual characteristic. Who did I marry? What sort of person is he? Work all the time, work, work. All you ever hear from him is: «Don’t interrupt my thinking, go away». He takes no interest at all in the child, Andryushka hangs on me entirely. My head swells with worries: feed them, water them, do the washing for the pair of them, and he’ll stretch out on the sofa, eyes on the ceiling. Thinking. And the child, looking at him, is growing up some sort of slowed-down halfwit too. Doesn’t listen to me at all, does everything his own way. Zero emotions towards me, you never hear a kind word. The big one lives like a hermit, and so does the little one. They’re complete strangers to me, can you imagine? To them I’m only the cook, the dishwasher and the laundress, nobody else. It’s impossible to live like that. You ask this one: «Let’s go out somewhere», and there’s only one answer: «I’m tired from work, let me rest». What’s the good of work like that? He’s gone mad on it already. Always wanting to earn money! Ridiculous! He earns some pitiful kopecks and puts on airs like a big businessman, don’t come near. My God, what sort of life is this! All my clothes are worn out, patch on patch. And he’s off daring in thought while I’m economising on bread and milk. If anyone knew how sick I am of it all! And there’s no leaving. Nowhere to go. My brother lives at my parents’ with his own family, seven people crowded into two rooms. Going there is like getting into a hen house: everybody clucking, bustling, walking to and fro, all you can do is press yourself against the wall. A nightmare, a nightmare…
She went on telling me something else, and I stroked her hair and thought: «What time does the crepuscular husband get home from work?» There was nothing I could do to help Mila. Now if I had a million, I’d buy a cosy little house on an Alpine slope, put a white grand piano in the biggest room and spend all my evenings sitting at it. I would play Chopin nocturnes, and beside me, at a writing desk, the tender and trusting L. would be creating brilliant novels, novellas and essays, trying to load onto her fragile little shoulders the burden of caring for humanity, for culture, for morality.
Only I don’t have a million. And I can’t play the piano. And who Chopin is, I have only a hazy idea.
The only thing I can do is set myself a goal and slowly close in on it. The goal is simple: earn five hundred thousand marks and clear off, far away from Hans, somewhere like Barbados. Buy a three-storey hotel there on the shore and live out my days sitting in a deckchair with a cocktail in my hand, watching the wave roll in. A dream. Ah…
– And how do you live, Sashka?
– Eh?…
– How do you live?
– Normally.
– Listen, take me to Germany.
– What would you do there?
– Help you.
«Clean out banks and shoot it out with the police,» I thought, and shrugged:
– That’s complicated.
– I can’t live like this any more. Help me, Sash.
– I’ll help.