He sat down on a chair, tuned the guitar, and started singing for her. Katya listened as if enchanted. She couldn’t tell whether the songs were good. She didn’t understand a word of them. She just looked into his kind, bright blue eyes and was afraid to breathe.
After he was finished singing, Mitya moved to the creaking bed, set aside the guitar, took Katya’s face in his hands, and pressed his mouth to her tense, clamped lips.
At age twenty, Katya was kissing for the first time in her life. Naturally, what happened after that was for the first time, too. It was something she’d only read about and seen in movies. Before that night, it was like she hadn’t been living at all but just looking at a movie about an alien life. Everything had seemed bright and significant for other people. But for her, the nondescript, browbeaten Khabarovsk girl, nothing of significance could ever happen. She’d long made her peace with the idea that she would grow old, unnoticed and unloved, and die an old maid in dreary solitude.
A stranger, strong and handsome, had kissed her slowly and tenderly. Knowledgeably. Mitya Sinitsyn had plenty of experience with women. True, he’d never liked a woman like Katya before. He liked mature women who were uninhibited and sophisticated. He’d been attracted by the kind of women about whom he would say, “Woman exists according to a formula: legs—breasts—lips. If the legs are long, the breasts heavy and firm, and the lips full, the rest doesn’t matter.”
What he’d felt when he saw the skinny ginger sparrow on the dorm bed could have been called pity. This touching little girl was sitting reading Dostoyevsky against the backdrop of the drunken laughter coming from the next room. Her huge eyes, frightened, were also intelligent.
He felt like staying with her, singing for her—without any ulterior motive. She held her breath listening, and her eyes were full of so much admiration, gratitude, and love. Mitya felt big, strong, and good.
At first he wanted just to put his arms around those sharp little shoulders, stroke that short, tousled hair, and console the defenseless, skinny being on the bed. And the moment he touched his lips to her pursed lips, he suddenly discovered with amazement that he felt a sharp urge he’d never felt before.
Katya’s head was spinning. She’d forgotten the world outside her room—her arrogant classmates in Khabarovsk, her stern and cold mother. It turned out that she was alive, tender, and sensitive, that she could be loved and admired, too; she could have words whispered in her ear by hot lips that made shivers run over her skin.
“You’re still a virgin?” she heard his hot, questioning whisper, which to her sounded like magical, unearthly music.
This discovery that he would be her first frightened him, but it also excited Mitya. He’d had many women in his life, but up until this moment he had not been the first for any of them.
Mitya had no problem spending the night in Katya’s dorm room. Katya’s roommates tactfully didn’t show up until morning. And in the morning, they woke to a completely different Katya. In the morning she could see that she actually was very pretty and feminine. From that morning on, she stopped pulling her head into her shoulders. She walked tall and wasn’t afraid to look people in the eyes and smile—and live.
Mitya Sinitsyn asked her to marry him just two days later, on the last day of December, when the clock struck midnight, ringing in 1991. Katya had no doubt they would never be parted. It was as if they’d been created for each other.
The Sinitsyn family welcomed Katya good-naturedly. They could tell right away that this quiet, intelligent girl from Khabarovsk was no provincial angling for a Moscow residence permit. She looked at Mitya with such adoration, she was so modest and well-bred, that neither Mitya’s mother nor his sister had any suspicions about her motives for marrying Mitya.
Everything was going so well for them. At first they rented a room in a communal apartment, but soon after, Mitya’s sister helped them get an apartment. True, the apartment was on the outskirts of town, in Vykhino, and on the first floor, but it had two rooms and its own kitchen and bath.
Katya graduated with honors and got a job at a machine-building institute as a junior research associate, but she realized very quickly that this wasn’t a job, but a waste of her time. She wasn’t especially concerned about building a career. The main thing in her life was family, that is, Mitya. More than anything in the world, she wanted to give him a child. Her entire being was focused on having a child. She couldn’t think or talk about anything else. But three pregnancies ended in miscarriages, and the doctors eventually gave her a diagnosis as hopeless as death: infertility.
Mitya tried to console her. He said there were many families without children, and maybe one day they could adopt a baby from the orphanage; there were so many abandoned children nowadays. But all his consolations were useless. Katya’s inferiority complex, a feeling instilled in her since childhood, blazed up stronger than ever. She started to feel she was ruining Mitya’s life, that it was only out of pity that he wasn’t abandoning her—infertile and useless as she was.
She was so repulsed by herself that she didn’t want to go on living. That was when a lab tech from her institute who’d found her crying in a secluded corner of the empty smoking room suggested she shoot up.
“Shoot up. You’ll feel better,” he said so gently and sympathetically that Katya, without giving real thought to what his words meant, offered her arm to the needle.
“Well, how is it? Are you getting off?” the lab tech asked, looking in her eyes.
“What?” Katya didn’t understand.
“Well, the high…”
“The high? I don’t know. I guess it’s a little better,” Katya answered uncertainly.
As the drug spread through her body, she was delighted and surprised to discover that the desperate sadness that had been crushing her soul lately was evaporating. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt light and cheerful.
“What was that?” she asked tech boy.
“Morphine,” he answered matter-of-factly. “If you want more, I can get you as much as you need.”
Katya did want more. As soon as the shot’s effects dissipated, she felt terrible again, worse than before. At first she had enough money, but before too long she had to get it from Mitya by lying to him.
Soon, she was an addict, though she didn’t think of herself that way. Her life with Mitya became a constant struggle. He dragged her to different doctors, drug experts, and hypnotherapists to try to cure her, though to her it felt as though he just wanted to take away the only joy in her life.
Despite the depth of her addiction, Katya realized how important it was not to make friends in the complicated and dangerous drug world. She believed her morphine use was a temporary distraction, that she could quit at any time. Tomorrow, next week, next month—her stash would run out and she’d quit. Just not right now, not this minute. How could she refuse herself a hit when it was right there in front of her and all she had to do was slip a slender needle into her vein?
Later—tomorrow or next month—she would definitely quit. The main thing was to be sensible and cautious, to leave herself a way out, not to forget that the more druggies you have around you, the harder it is to quit. And anyway, a morphine high is such a subtle and intimate thing, it’s better to experience it alone.
Katya quit her job. She’d stopped wanting to be around people. She bought her drugs in places she knew and from people she trusted: on the Old Arbat, from a few pharmacies scattered across Moscow, sometimes at hotels and bars. She tried to buy in a different place each time so as not to come across the same dealers too often. Dealers were always trying to get to know you, to solidify the contact. They could tell at a glance that Katya was hooked, and they had an interest in making her a steady customer. But Katya held firmly to her principle and made no connections.