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 driven off like an importunate Uriah Heep.
Not good, damn it, and not comprehensible. And why does she take me for a sycophant? What kind of word is that, what does it mean, and where did it come from in 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 and drank nothing – incomprehensible, but that is exactly how it was – and never went anywhere for either the large or the small need. She dozed on the couch and stared in my direction or at the ceiling. Sometimes she drove me off like a stray cur. She behaved like a Nordic corpse, and what was I 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 fell off the sofa in surprise. At last – Glory to the Almighty! – I heard the girl’s voice. An ordinary girl’s voice. Subconsciously I had imagined some honey-voiced sound-making to which, after long centuries!, only the chosen would be admitted… Anything was expected, so long as it was other – a hiss, a snuffle, a rasp, a sob, a wail, an old woman’s coughing rattle or a languid mezzo-soprano, a thin little voice or a bass that tore at the ears and the soul. Much was expected, but the ordinary timbre proved to be a bomb going off dead ahead. I felt 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.
