I had a dream.
With a rouble clutched in my little palm I was running up to the ice-cream woman – kind Auntie Faya – and spending the whole fantastically enormous sum on «Eskimo» bars. My hands went numb with the cold. Chips of ice sparkled like diamonds in the sun. Passers-by bestowed all-understanding and slightly envious smiles. And I, struck dumb by a dream come true, was running across the soft green lawn towards someone invisible. That someone was calling me: «Sashka!» The voice was kind, so dear it made my throat cramp, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t see who was calling me. I ran towards that voice, hugging the ice cream to my chest. I ran, and the ice cream melted, turning into a cold sticky mush, running down my little shirt and leaving a sweet trail – the trail of a serene childhood.
This dream, tender and incomprehensible, came rarely and left behind it a restless, frightened swarm of guesses in my head. If I dreamed it – expect trouble.
I dreamed it that Mediterranean morning too, in the third week of my stay in a shabby hotel with the proud name «Excelsior». A filthy stuffiness, sticky as kebab grease, rolled into the so-called luxury suite, tore off the sheets, doused me in sweat and settled on me like a suffocating mass.
I flung my eyes open, remembered what I had just dreamed and punched the wall. Damn it! The broken air conditioner caused me less annoyance than the muddled message from childhood. What would happen? What was coming? What nasty little trick would fate send? I was used to all the dirty tricks – in my spare time I’d even numbered them. Every time after that accursed dream I would run the possible calamities through my head and wait, trembling, with an inward shudder, for the events that would come crashing down on me, twist me into a ram’s horn and leave me helpless, wrestling with hardship.
I lay on the wet bed, suffocating in the heat, and prepared myself for… For what? There were twenty-eight possible unpleasantnesses, divided into four groups.
The first, the most spiteful, was a little heap of sexual unpleasantnesses, for example: the substitution of cheerful sex with a lively, springy professional by a monotonous push-me-pull-you with a bodybuilder woman of indeterminate age. I paid no attention to these petty nuisances, what of it…
In the second group crowded sweaty red-eyed viruses and assorted illnesses, which occasionally got the better of me and constituted the group of problems connected with health. Those I bore stoically.
The third group… Not so much a group as a rank of tidy pettifogging officials, each of them a small nagging snag: «loan not repaid», «negative balance on the account», «next instalment not made», and so on and so forth. Financial unpleasantnesses, let us be honest, I was somewhat wary of, but they never frightened me. I was frightened of something else.
I was in a blind panic about the small nastinesses accumulated in the fourth heap. They all had one name – Bad Luck. Sportsmen, card players, criminals and everyone else who fits the definition of «gambler» will understand me. Let the rest try to guess what it is – to see, instead of Fortune’s smile, that part of the body which is only pleasant on appetising young girls. Ah…
I lay on the wet bed, suffocating in the heat, running the possible misfortunes through my head…
– Sorry, sir. Please, go to phone.
What? The phrase from under the door shoved the thoughts aside in my head, pushed me out of bed and dispatched me to the reception desk and the telephone.
– Hello.
– Hi, Arbalet. Enough sunning your belly. Pack your rags and get to the airport. There’s a flight to Frankfurt this afternoon, the last one this week. Ticket’s at the check-in desk. Tomorrow I’ll expect you at seventeen hundred. Same place. Have a pleasant flight and be careful.
Beep-beep-beep.
The scatter of short tones set the contents of my skull white hot, a headache twisted my consciousness, shook the remains of my thoughts out somewhere onto the floor and – click! – vanished. I hung up, shook my head and looked around. All around milled natives with alien faces. Not one kindred soul shone out among them. Alas, there was no one to slobber on my shirt front. Nobody would press my poor head to their velvet waistcoat and stroke the sun-bleached curls of a stray fellow. I was alone, entirely alone.