Killed by longing, I wandered along the Moscow River embankment.
What to do?
No idea…
The goal I’d been striving toward turned out to be a dud. For as long as I could remember, my mother had drilled it into me: “Study for straight A’s, Roma! You’ll graduate, land a good job, and live well. And whoever studies badly will be swinging a crowbar and unloading train cars in the freezing cold.”
I believed it. Vladislav Arkadyevich stood as living proof, an icon of it. According to office gossip, the general director had graduated with honors from MGIMO — where they don’t take fools — then went on to advanced courses at the Foreign Ministry, where they only take honor students, and now ran a successful firm importing consumer goods. He was even about to buy a Volvo 940 from a dealership. Damn it all!!! While Vladislav Arkadyevich was still saving up for a foreign car, the gym-rats were prancing around in a foreign SUV tougher than a bulldozer!
Back in childhood I’d known kids who didn’t waste time on books, who lifted iron instead, pumping up their delts, biceps, triceps… In my hometown it was simple. The bookworms sat in libraries reading Tolstoy and Dickens to prepare for a bright future. The failing students grew their muscles in gyms, aiming at the exact same goal.
Crystal clear now that as a kid I’d been going to the wrong places. Running around libraries and clubs for nothing, listening to my mom for nothing. What I should’ve done was skip school, shake down first-graders for pocket change, and pump, pump, pump — tediously, wearily, sweating out my biceps, my lats, my shoulders, my core, and everything else.
I walked, sighing, not noticing how I’d ended up in the road. I came back to the real world with my kneecap jammed against the bumper of a white Mercedes, to the screech of brakes.
“Almost ran me over!” flashed through my head. My leg split in two! I gasped, gritting my teeth against the pain.
The Mercedes door flew open. The driver leaped out onto the road, furious as a chained dog in a mother-in-law’s yard, and bellowed at the top of his lungs:
— You bowling pin! Watch where you’re going! Tired of living? We’ll arrange that right now!
— Romka, is that you? — from the passenger seat unloaded a guy who looked outrageously like Valerka Roslavsky, my dorm roommate from two years back. Valerka, it really was him! He waved the driver off and wrapped me up in a bear hug.
— Whoaaa! — I exhaled, stunned all over again. — Handsome as ever!
We slapped each other’s backs and shoulders. Buried each other in questions: what’s up? how? where? since when? and so on…
A minute later I was sitting — no, enthroned — in the back seat of a Mercedes 600. In one moment Valera flipped my mood a full hundred and eighty degrees. First, with a gesture that brooked no argument, he pulled a stack of cash out of his briefcase and pressed it into my hands. Then he promised that the moment the weekend was over, he’d get me a job. And finally, he announced that we were going to go get dinner.
