July 25, 1993
Sunday
12:00 PM
My head was pounding, my body resisted, but at noon I forced myself up and put the apartment in order. At 1:05 PM Verochka arrived. At 2:09 PM she left. At 2:10 PM I was sitting in the armchair in front of the television.
I stared at the sky out the window, then shifted my gaze to the «Jurassic Park» cassette lying on the nightstand. Verochka had asked me to pass it along to Zhora. She’d said something else too, I couldn’t remember what.
I kept shifting my gaze from the cassette to the window and back. Digesting the merciless straightforwardness of our relationship. No illusions whatsoever. Pragmatism bordering on brutishness. A male and female dog, mating.
I couldn’t work out what category our Sunday meetings even fell into.
Nothing came to mind except the smirk of Anzor from room twenty-one back in the dorm.
Anzor had met a thirty-five-year-old co-op businesswoman, and every Friday she’d pick him up in a dry-asphalt-colored Lada Nine to take him to her dacha. She’d bring him back to the dorm Monday morning, and in the evening Anzor, puffing on a cigarette with the air of a seasoned ladies’ man, would tell his friends about the sex before lunch, the sex before dinner, the sex before bed, the sex in the night, the sex in the morning… There were more rounds of it than there were planks in a fence. Anzor talked and talked and talked...
What set Anzor apart wasn’t the number of rounds, but the fact that someone came to pick him up in a car. «They don’t send a car for just anybody» — we all understood that much. There he was, a genuine macho man, smoking thoughtfully, mulling over her offer to move in together, that is, to move to Kuzminki.
I got to thinking. Wouldn’t the guy whose girl showed up not in some clunker but a foreign car be the superhero now? Looked like the superhero was me these days. Nobody was asking me to move in, but the purpose behind the visits was the same: satisfying the needs of a woman’s body. Except every time, the girl borrowed a twenty «for gas.» I didn’t mind, and from a slightly different angle, I came out looking like a superhero who could afford to buy himself a chick with a foreign car for twenty bucks.
Hm, a poor angle of vision. Pure fantasy.
The truth was that Verochka was using me, with my own money.
A paradox.
By her account, the shipping-container stall at Luzhniki was gushing profit. She was about to rent a container at TsSKA too. Struck a deal with the factory where she used to slave away before ZiL. Would place orders there. Took the director’s wife on as a co-founder, and two workshops out in Khryakino were about to start sewing genuine American-style jeans any day now. She’d broken up with Seryoga. He wasn’t satisfying her. Moved to Khamovniki, teamed up with Seryoga’s brother on a business footing — importing clothes and sewing look-alikes. The brother had chipped in some cash. She’d driven out to Brest just the other day for imported labels and trim...
Damn it!
She got through more in a day than I did in a month. A sharp girl, unstoppable drive. And it was unclear — what did she even get out of my thousands for gas?
The door slammed, Zhorik dashed past:
— Hey there, Hoochie Coochie! How’s it going!
Dashed off, came back, noticed the cassette:
— Oh! Dinosaurs. Where from?
— Vera asked me to pass it along.
Zhorik turned his gaze on me:
— She was here? Or did you swing by her place?
— She was here an hour ago.
— Ah, the wild thing, — Zhorik smirked, tossed the cassette into his shoulder bag. Gave the order:
— We’re heading somewhere right now. Get ready!
