I didn’t go to classes and spent all day in bed. Early that morning my father came home from his shift. He was mumbling something, talking to himself, and he clattered his spoon in his glass for a long time. Then he went to bed. Mika got up and started checking on me with a thermometer, or milk, or drops of some kind or other. She tried to talk me into rubbing my legs and chest down with vodka. At last it was quiet: Mika took Roman to the professor’s for his lesson, but before leaving she brought me a plate of apples. I snaked the apple peel spirals around my arms like damp bracelets. The boiler man stopped by to check the flue. He was just a minute, but the smell of wet, broken-down boots, cheap cigarettes, and green firewood lingered all day. My father got up. The crackle of fresh newspapers and the hot breath of borscht reached me. Mika and Roman came back from his lesson. Roman started tuning the piano, all the time repeating that the instrument was fine but very much neglected. He banged on the keys until I started pounding on the wall with an ivory knife handle. They quieted down. That evening my father and Mika went somewhere, and Roman paced around the apartment silently, feeling everything as he came to it. Only the old parquet creaked. That night I couldn’t get to sleep, but on the other side of the wall they droned on. I was listening hard but could catch only snatches. Then I picked up a big glass flask that had roses in it, removed the flowers, poured the water into the chamber pot, and pressed the flask’s bottom to the wall.
What are you trying to prove and to whom? There’s no going into your place: you have a corpse peeking out of every nightstand. You’re still young, healthy, and strong. No one would dare reproach you for anything. You were a little boy then and you still are. You dug your heels in and stood counter to life, and you think you can hold out. But you’ll be swept away. You’ve got this idea that Zhenya—it’s as if she were her deceased mother and you were living for her. But that’s wrong. You know nothing about your daughter. She’s not yours anymore, she’s her own person. You keep reaching for her to keep from drowning, but you don’t have her anymore. Have you told Zhenya about her mother?
Mika and my father were silent for a long time, only I could hear the wet stems dripping from the edge of the table onto the floor. The ear I had pressed to the flask’s neck was sweating.
When she came to us then she wasn’t herself, I could tell right away. I asked, “Why didn’t you bring little Zhenya?” And she said, “Leave me alone.” I thought, Well, to hell with you. Living makes me sick even without you. If you don’t want to tell me anything, you really don’t have to. Then for some reason she stopped by at my neighbor’s, a pharmacist. His little boy used to like all kinds of experiments, and his father had made him a laboratory. The lad started showing her his treasures. “If you drink from this test tube,” he said, “you’re a goner!” All this became clear later. In the middle of the night I suddenly woke up from a scream. I couldn’t figure out what was going on because people don’t scream like that. Then it was quiet. My Roman was breathing heavily, but she wasn’t there. The bathroom door was locked from the inside. Behind the door there was some movement, shuffling, rustling. Scraping. I shouted to her, but she didn’t respond. I wanted to give it a kick to make the latch give way, but then I looked and her fingers were reaching under the door. I shouted, “Your fingers, take back your fingers!” But they kept reaching. Somehow I got across the balcony to the bathroom window, broke the window, and nearly lost my grip, though it was only the second floor. I grabbed her and picked her up. She looked at me with horror in her eyes, she was trying to say something, but there was a jumble where her mouth should have been.
Evgenia Dmitrievna, thank God I’m blind, not legless, and there is no need to grab me by the arm and push me. I just need to hold onto your elbow. Like this. Let’s go. And if you think that this makes me deeply unhappy, then you are mistaken, Evgenia Dmitrievna. I can see that you’re unhappy. I can’t see, of course, I said that wrong, though that’s not something you can see with eyes, rather I can sense it. But you’re not unhappy because you can’t fly, for instance, or walk through solid objects, walls or earth. Isn’t that so? I know you’re afraid of me, Evgenia Dmitrievna. I mean, you think you pity me, but in fact you’re afraid. Because it’s yourself you pity, not me. Thinking about me, you imagine yourself in the dark, eyeless, and naturally for you this is scarier than dying. But the point is that blindness is a seeing person’s concept. I live in a world where there is no light or dark, and that means there’s nothing awful about it. My God, you should have warned me there was a sidewalk here.
God, prankster and coward, supreme lover, insatiable sperm-hurler, who each time chooses the guard for his fevered treasure on a whim—a bull-boor, swan-sneak—or sometimes you pierce me like sunlight—you’re still a silly-billy. Remember how you kept dawdling and mumbling that you were afraid of hurting me? A god-child, even on a stolen bed, on that heavenly sheet, you wanted to be my obedient reflection, my pliant guide, and here you wanted to be my child. Here’s Europa, straddling the horned monster, driving him on with her heels, Leda enveloping her flock with rustling wings, Danae grabbing the stiff but timid ray of light with both hands. A god-bungler, you tried to snatch everything on the fly, displaying your obscene zeal, and you became reckless, surfeited, pitiless, each time collecting your tribute more and more divinely, more and more lustfully. It was both frightening and thrilling to see the squinting, blood-filled bull’s eye, to feel the swan feathers tickling my hips and the beak cropping the fragrant grass, and to see the golden rain twisting and turning as it spanked my belly and breast. Do you remember how you came to love the Mount Ida shepherd? The boy didn’t suspect a thing, the boy with the rooster, or rather, chicken leg wrapped in a napkin so it was easy to hold; we took the other leg to the hospital. The child sat Turkish-fashion, poking the air with his knees; still wet, not chilled after bathing, he gnawed the leg, sucked the bone, crunched the cartilage, and his sharp little-boy shoulder blades, reflected successively in two mirrors and so seeming like someone else’s, kept appearing and disappearing. Could this bird have flown past Ganymede? The naked adolescent jumped up, froze warily, not knowing whether to hide his nakedness from the eagle, still not understanding but already rigid from sensuous horror. The talons grabbed the boy’s arm where his pockmarks were, squeezed, pierced them painfully, nearly broke the skin. Ganymede broke away, ran off, and tried to scream, but gasped for air: the mighty black wing fell on him and crushed him. Ganymede tried to beat it off, but his hands were twisted behind his back. Fear and sweetness mingled, the boy was afraid but simultaneously urged on this suppressed squawk, and the sharp bird tongue, wetting his ear, and the royal eagle talon, which had already groped out the road to the sky. Don’t listen to me, my thinking pistil, know only that I love all of you, from your gray hair to the two hot hamsters squeezed in my hand.