Swaying in the hinterland between sobriety and drunkenness was highly unpleasant… And to think that right now, or in no more than half an hour, she had to pull herself together and find a reason to leave. Or just secretly slip out – that would be the most sensible thing because it seemed that no one in the party as it was now would pay the least attention… She was sorry – everyone else seemed to be happy. They weren’t thinking. They weren’t worrying. Why did she have to worry all the time? And why wasn’t she happy? Why did she enjoy completely different things? She didn’t even like dancing with others, but at home, on her own, she could move and writhe exactly as she wanted… It was ridiculous to think that anyone like her would ever begin to deliver speeches…
She went to the window. Beyond it was the great, black sky, and far below, eight storeys down, dots of light moving, dot-like lanterns cleanly puncturing the darkness, the burning eyes of the windows of buildings lining the road, the lights of cars travelling along the long boulevards – twinkled and dotted roads flowed up into the sky and back… Like rivers. It was a real, large, unfamiliar city, not Lasnamäe but a city that stretched to the edge of the sky… And then she noticed amidst it all an eye glowing in the deep, dark sky, an eye that was staring into her, as if seeing through her…
She quickly realised that it was her own eye. It was reflected in the outer windowpane – upon studying it an indistinct face complete with two eyes, a mouth and nose appeared. But if she focused her gaze elsewhere, there was only a single, large, clear eye somewhere in the middle, opposite the bridge of her nose. It was as if that eye looked down from the sky above, over everything, over the roads, the buildings, the crawling twinkling bugs on the roads… It was her eye, and yet it was not, as if from heaven above, omniscient, staring right into her…
It was then that Tolik and Venya arrived – that was how Zhanna introduced them. They were probably friends of hers, although they looked older than the others here.
Venya was tall, sturdy, slow. He didn’t talk at all, merely smirked to himself, but he was able to find a glass on the table and drain it in one… Tolik was small, thin and very nervous – his eyes burned, he spoke rapidly, excitably, as if forever having to prove something, persuade someone, protect himself against someone. He reminded Sofia of the members of the communist youth from one of the old Soviet films, a Young Communist League figure working for free on one of the Great Construction Projects of Communism, the type who campaigned zealously and actually believed everything they said, the type who sprayed machine-gun fire or galloped on fiery steeds, budenovkas on their heads. They were ready to die for their ideas…
Tolik suddenly began talking about something that was apparently close to his soul – he tried to explain that young people were being messed around – people said that drugs would kill you, make you drop dead straight away, as soon as you tried them you’d be ill forever. He’d tried everything, more or less everything, and there was nothing that he couldn’t do without if he needed to. LSD and weed were completely harmless – the whole world smoked weed. He grabbed his silent friend’s glass, as if in passing, as if it were a perfectly natural thing to do, and drained it completely. Venya didn’t so much as flinch, and merely turned to the next glassful.
“There’s no way I’m going to start injecting myself,” said Zhanna, “I reckon it’s completely stupid to get AIDS just for a high.”
“You don’t have to inject at all,” objected Tolik hotly. “That’s just for people who like injecting. People who want to inject, inject; people who want to snort, snort… There’s all sorts of stuff you can snort, if all you want to do is get high.”
“What do you get out of it?” said Andryusha sceptically. “You snort, it’s okay the once, and afterwards you’re left with the shakes your whole life…”
“Am I shaking?” yelled Tolik.
“So what do you get out of it?”
“I get everything. It’s a completely different world… You just have to be in that world once, and everything turns upside down… It’s like you’re free. In it you’re completely free.”
For some reason the conversation made Sofia sad – both sad and uncomfortable – somehow very uncomfortable… The boys seemed to be the type to talk them all round: Tolik was nervous and jumpy, Venya was slow in comparison, yet there was nothing placid in his sluggishness, instead it was heavy somehow, and they worked together like some kind of mesmerising machine, each knowing how to complement the other… And then that thing that Tolik said – it’s like you’re free, completely free… No one had ever talked like that about getting stoned. All they’d done in school was terrify them in health education classes, but no one had given them chapter and verse like this, yet perhaps this was the most important thing about it all?
To Sofia’s right, on a little table by the window, Johnny began rattling about in the coffee box and hurried out. He always did everything in a hurry – he even yawned hurriedly. He abruptly jumped upright on to the cage bars and looked at Sofia questioningly, his nose quivering. He had a sharply pointed nose, sensitive and restive like Johnny Depp’s – like the one he had in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow; the little paws with which he clung to the cage bars were just like human hands with their little pink fingers. Not that they were really human hands; they were hands with long, sharp claws, more like Edward Scissorhands’s… And then there were his eyes, bulging in surprise… those eyes and that face that couldn’t laugh…
For some reason Sofia began to feel very sad for the rat, well, not sad so much as afraid for it. The creature was here and completely at their mercy, as it happened, they were supposed to be responsible for it but they weren’t by any stretch the kind of people it thought them to be: it trusted them, but they could be very dangerous. What would happen if someone more drunk than Sofia were suddenly to get it into their head that rats should be destroyed? She should really let it out of the cage; it had to escape. But it wouldn’t have anywhere to go, would it? It was a situation with no way out, and Sofia felt tearful because of it.
It was all stupid, this way of thinking. The reason, it appeared, was that Sofia was pretty much wasted: the rat was not in any danger from anything, no one was paying it the least attention. High time to fetch her coat from the pile of clothes in the kitchen corner and set off home. The time it took from here, at least half an hour in the cold, would be enough to sober her up. And perhaps blow away the stink of smoke too…
But Tolik and Venya and Zhanna herself had settled down at the kitchen table together with others from their class.
Tolik was knocking something up, turning a roll-up between his spidery, nervous fingers…