Two days went by. I grew weary.
The girl was a beauty. She lavished smiles on me. She wouldn’t let me onto her half of the room.
Baffling.
If she were indifferent to me, she wouldn’t notice me at all.
But no — signs of attention kept raining down from her side. Now she’d stick out her tongue, now she’d smile, now she’d pin me with an unblinking stare until I blushed. It seemed she was transmitting signals I was supposed to respond to. But how?
Dozens of times I tried to approach the girl, and every time I was chased off like a pestering Uriah Heep.
Not good, damn it, and not understandable. And why did she take me for a sycophant? What kind of word was that, what did it mean, and how had it gotten into my head?
On the third day I decided to give up on the girl’s twists and turns and take care of myself instead: wash my clothes and try everything I hadn’t tried yet.
Said and done!
I finished the first part of the plan — the laundry — in half an hour. I hung the clothes on the partition, patted my belly, and sat down at the table. I bit into exotic fruits, washed them down with juice. I stuffed myself like a little pig, and an hour later nature called, urgently.
Oh.
It’s a catastrophe — squirming on the toilet with two goals at once: getting done what needed doing, and not making a single sound. Agonizing, impossible. The girl could hear every sound rumbling from behind the partition.
What did she think? That we’re all only human? More likely the opposite: behind the partition, some little creature grunts, huffs, lays eggs, and befouls the air.
She herself ate nothing, drank nothing — inexplicable, but that’s how it was — and never went anywhere for either need. She dozed on the couch and stared either my way or at the ceiling. Sometimes she chased me off her territory like a stray dog. She behaved like a Nordic corpse, and what was I supposed to do?
I knew it was nonsense, even laughable, but I sat down on the toilet as if it were an instrument of torture.
And right now I was weighing whether to head behind the partition or hold out a little longer. From her half came the words:
«Don’t torture yourself. I can’t hear you.»
I nearly toppled off the couch in surprise. At last — thank Heaven! — I’d heard the girl’s voice. An ordinary girl’s voice. Subconsciously I’d been picturing some honey-throated instrument of sound, one that, after long ages had passed, only the chosen few would be granted to hear… I’d expected anything, so long as it was extraordinary — a hiss, a sniffle, a rasp, a sob, a fit of crying, an old woman’s wheezing rattle, or a languid mezzo-soprano, a thin little voice or a bass that tore at the ears and soul. I’d expected all sorts of things, but the ordinary timbre struck like a bomb going off dead ahead. I felt bitterly disappointed.
The voice I’d heard could have belonged to any girl I’d passed on the street, and it shattered my heart to pieces. The girl had seemed a mysterious, perfect envoy from other worlds. Countless times, closing my eyes, I had wrapped her image in mists and reveries, and, kneeling, lighting the lamp of my sighs, I had raised her to the heavens on translucent watercolors of daydream, to set her there, breath held, above the magic crystal at the summit, at the very apex of my absurd life. I had grown used to the thought that she was the one and only in this whole world, its queen and goddess — and now this disappointment…
«Go on, go, or you’ll mess yourself,» came the voice from the other half of the room.
True enough.
I went.
