April 12, 1996
Friday
Hadn’t even cleared customs when a barrage of texts hit: «How’s it going? What time should we expect you…» and other pointless nonsense.
Got to the office and ran straight into a wall of laughter. Yurik was smirking. Pashka was snickering. Even the stern receptionist girls were fighting back grins.
Went up to Zhorik, who greeted me with a baffling question:
– So, Elevator, how was the trip?
– …Elevator? – I didn’t get it.
– Elevator boy, don’t get confused, – Zhorik leaned back in his chair. – How did the negotiations go?
– Fine. Signed the contract.
– Excellent. – Zhorik clapped his hands. – Need to celebrate, but not right now! Horizons are expanding around here, projects are brewing. No time for you!
I walked out of the office and ran into Yurik, humming:
– Elevator boy… going up and down…
– Get lost!
Yurik kept walking.
Within ten minutes the whole of Proma was whistling «Elevator Boy.» Lyrics had even sprung up: «Elevator, elevator, up and down, back and forth.»
Idiots.
The nickname «Elevator» stuck to me for good. Before that my buddies used to call me «Julik» behind my back. Once, at a drinking session, I’d grilled Yurik and Pashka about where that one came from. Turned out to be simple: I supposedly looked like the actor Julian Sands, both in appearance and by name. Sands, in Russian, comes out as «Peskov» – sand, песок – and Julian, phonetically, comes out close enough to «Zhulik,» Russian for «crook.» Physics-major logic for you.
But «Julik» had been a private nickname. Only the guys from the dorm called me that. «Elevator,» though – that one went all around the office. All of Proma and beyond.
From then on, only in meetings and one-on-one conversations did anyone call me Roman Viktorovich. Everywhere else, it was «Elevator.»
A couple of days later my friends started calling me Lyova instead. Made no difference to them – Elevator or Lyova, a hundred pounds of salt already shared between us, but Lyova was shorter. Only girls I’d recently met called me Roma.
Elevator’s actually pretty cool, if you think about it. It’s a colossal structure towering over the steppe! You can spot an elevator from miles away.