The spell broke, giving way to a fury — petty, domestic, pointless. I struck the spoon against the bottom of the plate.
Bitch! Can’t even feed me properly, and doesn’t even want to! What kind of dinner leaves you hungrier than before you sat down? I straightened my back, numb from ten hours sitting at work.
— Listen, Zina. When are you going to learn to cook properly? — I shouted at my wife, stuck in the bathroom.
— When you start earning properly, — she snapped back.
Her face, twisted with anger, flashed in the doorway and vanished.
Bitch.
Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.
One answer to every question — when you start earning properly. What, exactly? Am I earning badly? No less than the other engineers, even more thanks to the night shifts. Whose fault is it the outfit’s a fucking mess, some leftover Soviet relic? Whether you slave away like a dog or sit there picking your nose, you get the same salary either way. Be grateful they haven’t laid me off. Not some trash-heap janitor — an engineer with a salary of a whole ten thousand. Hmph. Look at the prices in the shops, and it’s nowhere near luxury. Barely enough to feed us.
Angry, hungry, wound tight, I got up and walked past my wife, who was clattering basins around, into the other room.
— There he goes, off to watch TV. Could’ve washed Kolka’s tights instead. I’m killing myself here while he lies around belly-up, — my wife grumbled after me. I ignored the grumbling and sat down next to Kolka, my little boy, sharp beyond his years.
— Mama fighting? — he asked, looking at me with naive little eyes that seemed to peer straight into my soul. My wife had had the same eyes, before the wedding. I sighed and pulled him onto my lap:
— Fighting.
— Papa, make her stop fighting. I don’t want her to.
— Me neither, — I whispered into my son’s ear, and thought that, in principle, it wasn’t complicated. Just find a place that paid twice as much. Twenty thousand would mean not having to squint at price tags in shops.
— Sitting around, you villain! — my wife shrieked in my ear. — Come on, go do the laundry, you broke bastard.
— Don’t you dare talk like that in front of the kid, — I started.
— Papa’s not a bastard, — Kolka whimpered.
— What, the two of you are in it together now? Decided to drink my blood, you monsters? — Zina flared up, slapping me with a wet rag.
I flared up too, but with my little boy on my lap, how was I supposed to make a scene? And I could understand my wife. She got worn out scraping pennies together while I disappeared to work. But I wasn’t a horse of iron either, worn out earning money for her and our son. I choked back the flash of anger, swallowed my irritation, and set Kolka down on the floor: «Go play with your car.»
I headed to the bathroom. There wasn’t much to wash, and it was familiar work anyway.
I looked over the combined bath-and-toilet, sighed... tossed the stale undershirts and underwear into the basin, sprinkled on some detergent, poured in hot water, banging my knee painfully against the toilet. Irritation and anger shook through me, but I calmed down right away: «Easy, Roma. You’ve gotten jumpy. Easy. Everything’s on track. You’ll save up for a washing machine soon enough.»
I rubbed my aching kneecap. My wife, a raging, iron-clad bitch, loomed in the doorway like a prison guard. She herself was pushing me straight toward the question of «Why did I even get married, and who needed this.»
I’d gotten married because it was time. Not that it had really bothered me — two bachelor years after finishing MIPT had flown by like a bullet. I could have gone on enjoying the single life. But no. Mother got nervous. All her friends had married off their kids, and I remained the one exception, raising questions: «Is Romka sick or something? Maybe he brought back some contagious disease from Moscow? Or maybe he turned into some blue-blooded prince in the White-Stone Capital?»
The neighbors’ suspicions wounded Mother. Badly... so badly that she regularly dragged home, for «a cup of tea and cake,» young, youngish, and trying-to-look-young colleagues, her friends’ daughters, and every female specimen between eighteen and forty who crossed her path. It amused me and infuriated me, depending on my mood. The guests left empty-handed, throwing interested glances my way as they went.
As a treat for the grandmotherly instincts stirring in Mother, a graduate of the Sverdlovsk Mining Institute arrived at our department, sent on assignment.
That’s where Romka Peskov broke. Fell for the eyes, the bust, the backside. Forgot the wisdom of his elders: «Finding a good wife is like reaching into a sack of snakes and pulling out a harmless grass snake.»
Deputy department head Roman Viktorovich forgot everything. Didn’t notice his bride’s cop-like stare, patting down every man who crossed her path. Didn’t notice how Zina’s eyes tracked the foreign cars racing by. Engineer Peskov failed to diagnose that his future other half was sick with the very thing he himself had gotten over back in Moscow. And if he didn’t notice, didn’t understand, didn’t pay attention — well, put the ring on the finger, the collar around the neck, and welcome to a life sunk in the swamp of endless scandal.
No way out.
Nowhere to run, with no money and no connections. And yet there had been chances, back when he was studying in Moscow. Could’ve latched onto a good life, more than once... didn’t latch on. Never managed to hustle, to bustle around from morning to night and night to morning. So why suffer over it now?
At least his conscience was clean.
I work honestly, sleep soundly. A lie, actually. I sleep badly. My wife eats me alive. Never enough money for anything. Ah! My old classmate Vaska had offered to set up a partnership together and trade in local ores. I’d just gotten back from Moscow and landed a plum job as deputy head. They’d assigned me a microscopic salary, but in the institute’s computing technology department! A field with a future!!!
But Vaska hadn’t made it past three years at the Urals Polytechnic, with an army stint in between. After his discharge he went to work a mine, hooked the mine boss’s daughter at a nightclub, twice his age, three times his weight. Rose in the world. I remember him talking me into it: «You’re honest, Romka, and smart. That’s exactly the kind of partner I need. I’ve got the connections, the money’ll come. Don’t be a pussy, it’s a sure thing, we’ll be up and running in a year. We’ll trade anthracite. Beats you playing around with computers!»
More than once or twice I’d scratched out a resignation letter, but never submitted it for signing. I was scared. Sketchy times. Businessmen got picked off like squirrels on a hunting reserve, and here I had a decent spot lined up. My boss went off to the States to push a project cataloging Urals mineral deposits on computer, and vanished, sending back the occasional irregular fax. I, a solid candidate for acting head — young, promising, educated, motivated — clung to the hope of climbing onto that warm seat to skim foreign grants. My young wife grumbled too: «Stay out of business. Wait for them to make you head, it’s more money anyway. A bird in the hand!»
So I nursed the hope of becoming a local big shot, right up until my little bird died under the blows of privatization. The institute was abolished, the building leased out as offices.
Vaska’s profit went from twenty percent of turnover to three hundred percent. Why keep a partner around when there were managers on salary plus bonuses? I went to work as a programmer for the co-op that leased out the institute’s floor space, learned to run cable under desks and teach the accountants which button said «Print.» The accountants were the same old aunties from the institute’s own bookkeeping department. In fact, the whole institute stayed put in every way except the sign out front, and dead little birds got swept out by the dozen every day. And Vaska’s crane soared back and forth between Moscow and London, and never once remembered me.
Yeah. Listened to his wife, that’s what happened. Now she nagged and whined about not having enough money. Idiot. Her own fault.
— Who wrings it out like that, idiot? It won’t dry by morning! — Zina remarked.
— Go to hell, — I snapped back.
— I’ll give you hell! — she shrieked. — You’re the one in hell, you broke-ass loser! Who did I even marry? Other people have cars, dachas, and this idiot’s poking around in a computer. Lenka Matrosova’s husband brought her a fur coat from Moscow, and I’m walking around in rags. Nothing to even cover my ass with!
Clear enough where the wind was blowing from. Her friend’s husband had just come back from a job. Matrosov was a bold guy, afraid of nothing. He’d taught himself to build radio-controlled bugs, and now he made regular trips to Moscow to tail someone or other. He kept inviting me to join him, but the business was shady. Nothing serious — catching a cheating wife or exposing a thieving manager. Not for me — no license, no permits, dealing with god-knows-who. Nothing but spying and informing. I didn’t need money like that, though I respected Sashka Matrosov — smart guy, and brave. He’d been shot at, beaten, hauled in by the police, and none of it fazed him. He just kept right on sniffing out other people’s secrets.
— Mashka Kozlova drives to work in a car! — my wife kept shrieking, working herself into hysterics now. — And we’re in shit!
— So what?
— You, you’re the one who put me there!
True, I’d dragged her down there with me. But there had been other chances, and the memory of them stirred a fury:
— You, you bitch, wouldn’t let me go to Vaska’s when he called!
— You didn’t go yourself, chickened out like a coward, and now you’re dumping it on me! — my wife wouldn’t let up.
— Me? I listened to you.
— You’ve got a head of your own! Are you a man or a rag doll? Dog shit! Just look at him, oh, I can’t even, — my wife burst out laughing in a nasty, booming voice.
— Shut up!
I felt sick.
What for?
What was the point of these daily fights, this mutual kicking at a raw nerve? It would be simpler to cut the knot with one stroke.
Divorce!
But Kolka? Zina wouldn’t give him up, out of pure spite. She couldn’t feed a child herself, not working anywhere. Fact. No connections meant no way to get by in this city. Every other parking-lot security guard around here had a graduate degree. Would she go back to her parents? Absolute last resort. In their village, alcoholism and poverty had long since become the norm. What could she give a child there? But living together, we couldn’t raise him properly either. God, I was sick of scraping by on bread and water with zero hope of anything decent. Life was a stupid, merciless thing! It sucked you down into the sewer, spun you around in the filth, and never let go.
I threw the rag aside and punched my wife in the face. Without meaning to, I put into that blow all the hatred and anger built up over years, the whole weight of hopes that would never come true.
— A-aah! — my wife shrieked.
— Take that, — I growled, not even aware of what I was doing. Through eyes shot with blood, I saw the leering grin of fickle fate itself, the fate that had fed me on promises and illusions, whispering fairy tales about good happy days just about to arrive. I struck that grin! I kicked it! I shoved the limp body out into the hallway:
— That’s what you get, bitch!
— Papaaa-a-a! — Kolka’s shrill scream stopped me cold.
The haze of fury lifted from my eyes. What had I done?
I stepped over the mass of flesh that had been my wife, slipped past Kolka, wailing uncontrollably, and out onto the balcony, looked down — fifth floor, should be enough — climbed over the railing, and pushed off.
— Why? — came, soft and insinuating, through the whistling wind and my own screaming.
