July 11, 1993
Sunday
2:40 PM
I remembered I’d wanted to do something useful. Vacuum, wash the dishes, start some laundry. That’d be nice!
Got up off the couch, surveyed the sites of my future heroics, and spotted a stack of bills on the nightstand. Hm. My salary?
A hundred thousand rubles, the wholesale price of my signatures. Time to live it up!
Tried to stuff the wad into one of my pockets. Didn’t work. Got fat, swollen: seams straining on my trousers and shirt. Nothing to be done. Broke the wad apart, distributed the bills here and there.
A wonderful start to the day!
Stood in front of the mirror, grew glum. Money bulging in my pockets didn’t change my fate one bit. I was still the same old loser, capable of neither heroics nor honest labor. My lot was to be an obedient calf on a rope. A sorry lot, no arguing that. Or… change life and fate all at once? Spit on the orders from above and… and… What could I actually do, standing tall, defiantly, no matter what?
I had it!
I had to save Verochka from certain death!
A fit of clairvoyance came crashing over me, brief and painful. The fit struck the back of my head, knocked me to the floor, hurled me out of the apartment through the window, spun me around in a white void, and stuffed me into a trolleybus, which carried me to a pond and unloaded me by a bench. I stood there a moment, gazing at the smooth water, sat down on the bench and… came back to the apartment.
«Heh,» I smirked. «I’m not taking a trolleybus. I’ll grab a cab and go see Vera. Now’s exactly the moment to act on my own reason, not some outside spirit…»
Rubbing the back of my bruised head, I went down from the sixth floor by the stairs. Ignored the elevator, just in case.
Once outside, I spent a couple of minutes working out where to look for Verochka. If she was at the apartment they’d swindled off Seryoga, no problem, I remembered the address. But what if the real owners had come back and kicked Vera out to the dorm?
Er… then no saving needed. Everything back to normal. So, off to Turgenevskaya!
I walked to Strastnoy Boulevard, stood at the edge of the sidewalk, and raised my right hand parallel to the ground. In that same second, a steel band clamped down around my skull, and a deep ache shot through my whole body.
Defying the pain, I kept flagging cars down, stoically holding my body in a roughly vertical position, and got what I wanted. Flagged down a coffee-colored Lada 2108, filthy, dusty, as plain as a car ought to be once it’s stripped of any idle illusions — four wheels, an engine, a transmission, and a driver.
I mumbled through the open window:
— Two thousand to Turgenevskaya.
— Get in. Just buckle up. Police are handing out fines today, — the driver answered.
I wedged my body into the car, fastened the seatbelt, and set off toward Verochka, full of anxiety. And there were grounds for anxiety. The driver turned out to be a reckless speed demon. He tore along like a maniac, passing everyone left and right, cutting people off, weaving through, slipping past red lights. I fought back spasms, barely holding myself together to keep from throwing up right there, right then, right into my own lap. Some inexplicable force kept pushing, driving me to get out of the car, but I held on… bam! ba-bam-bam-bam! boom!
Asphalt, sky, asphalt, sky, asphalt, sky spun by like a kaleidoscope. After a few rocks back and forth, everything froze upside down: sky underneath me, asphalt above. I hung there head-down in the seatbelt, scratched by shards of glass that had been a side window just a moment before.
While they pulled me out of the car, while, surrounded by gawkers, I waited for the traffic police, while they filled out the report, while, whole and unharmed, three scratches notwithstanding, I rode the trolleybus to the Post Office, got off, dragged myself along past the benches… I don’t remember… while, while, while… I don’t remember any of it…
I couldn’t understand or remember what had happened, what had gone wrong. Stepping out onto Chistoprudny Boulevard and sitting down on the first free bench, I understood: the vision that had visited me had come true. I was looking at the smooth surface of the pond I’d seen in my mind’s eye an hour before.
What did it mean? Was someone watching over me? Steering me onto the righteous path? Not letting me stray from some predetermined road?
I turned my head this way and that, recognized the building. Same as last time, the structure announced that it hadn’t been built to solve any utilitarian problems, only to delight. The building’s purpose was to spoil its residents with living space and to impress. Built for the bourgeoisie under the tsar, hm…
I got up and headed for the building, wrestling with the central question of my current life: was I a man, or a trembling creature? Did I have the right to warn her of approaching danger, or didn’t I?
Time to cut through the knot of questions. Forward!
