The beginning was sour, in general and in particular.
It was June of nineteen ninety-three. I was finishing my fourth year at MEPhI. Every third night I worked as a night watchman on Prechistenka.
Life ran on the rhythm of exam season: exam, night shift, cramming, cramming, exam… I’d squeaked three exams through on a “good,” the fourth ended in a bare pass. My shot at the increased stipend — worth about a couple of Snickers bars — waved me goodbye. Fine. What mattered was moving up a level — to my fifth year. And there, according to the old hands, a different life began, a grown-up life…
I grabbed a bottle of Moskvoretskoye beer and an MK at the kiosk and headed off to my shift.
It was Saturday.
The heat swam.
I arrived at the office late.
Not good.
Stepan Fyodorovich, the colleague I was relieving, reacted like a kettle with a narrow spout. He hissed, he bubbled, and — op! — boiled over, started raising a racket, spiraled into a screaming-shrieking hysterical fit. Ai-yai-yai! He’d been planning to catch the afternoon train out to his dacha, and now, thanks to some good-for-nothing slacker, he’d have to wait three hours for the next one! Saturday, shot to hell!!! Every which way and then some!!! Ugh! Argh! And up the other end too!!! Next time he’d leave an hour early, to hell and back and every which way through and through, here, there, and down your throat!!!
The verbal boiling water bubbled right past me. I was doing a crossword. Waiting for the pensioner to calm down and clear off to his garden plot. About five minutes later I filled in the last square and rejoiced: Yesss! Ain’t I a clever son of a bitch!
Time to think about work.
Like Goldilocks in the bears’ house, I wandered around the office. Tried on the general director’s chair, the chief accountant’s chair, the head of security’s chair.
Nothing was right.
Uncomfortable. Not cozy. Not serene.
With the bang of the door slamming shut behind Fyodorych, I crashed to sleep in the secretary’s office. I fell asleep instantly, slept without dreams, and was extremely surprised to find myself on the floor. It was Pasha, the head of security, who’d knocked me off the couch.
Oop-la!
It took about two seconds to come to and properly wake up. Pasha had vanished, replaced by the office director, Vladislav Arkadyevich, and some stranger. The stranger wore a black leather vest, a black t-shirt, and black tracksuit pants with triple white stripes down the side. A mobile phone in a holster swung from his belly. Whoa!
Both stood over me in silence. Thinking about something. I couldn’t think of anything at all.
My head buzzed. My arms and legs coexisted with the rest of my body on Yeltsin-style terms: they’d swallowed as much autonomy as they could get, but weren’t doing anything useful with it. My eyes, at least, denied separatism and stayed loyal to my brain. Not that they were seeing anything good.
My inner voice confirmed it: “No shit, I swear! Brace for a reprimand straight to the ribcage and a fine equal to a month’s pay. In short: adios, amigo!”
Grumbling one last time, “There’s no happiness in this life!” my inner voice vanished somewhere down around my heels.
Pfff-fff. Oh-hhhhh.
I was fully awake now. From the look on the director’s face I understood my inner voice had undersold the situation. The worst possible outcome awaited me — getting fired. Springing up in a half-crouch, half-curtsy, I shot out of the secretary’s office, laser-beamed down the corridor, and landed, at the far end of it, at my post: on the little stool between the front door and the window.
