Roma goes up to him and shakes his shoulders so vigorously that insubstantial, drunken Tolya is almost lifted up in the air along with his rucksack. “Let’s go on,” Roma says quietly. Because of the rain I can’t hear the words but I guess them. Tolya gives a sob.
“Roma, take my share of the rent out of that money,” I say when he catches up with me. “Only don’t give Tolya his, okay? He’ll drink the lot and just get kicked out of his job.” “No, he won’t. Not now.”
We go on. My trainers have soaked up all the water they can, and now with every step I take it squelches back out. “Roma! Hey, Roma. You didn’t say whether that song ever comes to an end.” Tolya catches up with us and falls into step, a figure bent under the weight of his rucksack, the same as us.
Roma gives a slight smile. We plod on.
New Spring
Hi, Julia, skinhead girl with a twisted smile, given to mild swearing. You saunter out, look your public over with that sneer of yours, hands in your pockets, clenched in tight fists. There’s just you and an audience, Julia, and who’s to say they are all on your side? You smirk, put on that husky voice, close your eyes in the spotlight, strike that guitar and sing about getting drunk on Saturday nights.
“And h-ooow I luvvit!”
After the gig you turn up your nose and tell us about sweaty guys who smell of overpriced vodka and cheap aftershave trying to pick you up, inviting you to the bar, swearing they only come to this dive to hear you and otherwise they drink exclusively at Blizzard.
“It’s your image,” Producer says. “Cut out the cussing and the songs about booze and you’ll find a different crowd around you.” You take no notice of what he has to say. You might if he were a proper producer, but what has he done for you? Nothing. He comes up with projects for albums and tours but you’re still doing the rounds in bars and nightclubs, like everyone else from the old Moscow underground scene. Julia, girl of great talent, now starring in the beer bars of Moscow. Where the hell did Sasha find her?
“Where did you find her, Sasha?” I ask, but I’m not ready to listen to his long rambling explanation about some festival and running into her in a snowstorm. Like Pushkin’s Silvio, Julia appeared out of a snowstorm but ended up in our commune.
No, Julia, you are a Moscow girl, not destined to live here with us on Yakimanka, although you’d be hard pressed to find a better place to rehearse. The walls are thick, you’ve got Roma here on bass guitar, Sasha to play any pipe or flute you can think of, and Lenka for backing. You’ve got a group! We admire your talent, and our perpetually pie-eyed Tolya crawls under the piano and holds his breath whenever you come into the room.
Those rehearsals were the highpoint of a fever which rampaged through our commune. We were like charged particles, attracted to each other, colliding, repelled, in a constant state of flux. That cruel fever blew our minds and we lived in the moment not knowing what we were doing.
But already we had a presentiment that soon it would all be over. You and I, Sasha, are on the road and have no alternative path. No traffic either, because what sort of a road is this? It’s a narrow track to a village where some people are supposed to be expecting us. How many kilometres is it to the village, Sasha? Oh, what the hell! We should make it by dawn.
Our house is full of people, all playing games with each other. They might not agree, but looking down on them from my gallery I know best. My home is full of kids, all playing at love.
Lenka started it, blonde-haired, blonde-browed, green-eyed Lenka as brazen as the devil. She introduced the bacillus of March madness to Yakimanka. Old Artemiy, our communal scarecrow stuck permanently beside the kitchen radiator, said it all the moment she arrived. “You’ve got the devil in you, girl,” he told her. “Cool,” Lenka replied.
There are things which are powerless over the mind. It is powerless, for instance, to figure out what caused two beings as dissimilar as Lenka and me, Titch, to collide. Collide we nevertheless did, in the metro where she was handing out leaflets and I was rushing along one of my courier routes, my endless routes which, starting from a particular place, are guaranteed to take you back there, again and again. So it was. Lenka and I collided again and again, a dozen times, until finally laughter spilled out of our eyes and we were bound to be friends.
“This is one crackpot city we live in,” I said, sipping fruit juice through a straw. It was our lunch break. “Right,” Lenka nodded. “And we’re doing the most crackpot jobs it could think up.” “Right,” Lenka nodded, eating chocolate with a beer chaser. She is so hooked on sweets she won’t eat anything else so as not to put on weight.
Lenka had come to Moscow, was living with an aunt, studying somewhere while doing a job, the same as me. Her aunt kept coming down on Lenka, not letting her flower. “Everybody has the right to live how they please,” Lenka protested, “But this despot has got it into her head she has to mother me. That’s not what brought me to Moscow!”
Her appearance on Yakimanka was pre-ordained. Even though we were the same age, no one ever thought to call her what they called me. “This chick means business,” Tolya said admiringly. “Look and learn, Titch!”
Yakimanka, our rented communal paradise, adopted her and here she found the nurturing environment, the saturated solution of cynicism, two fingers to the world, the permissiveness her youthful schizophrenia needed to grow and flourish. She told everyone she was schizophrenic, found a book on forensic psychiatry and compared her symptoms. “Manic-depressive syndrome triggered by alcoholism,” she proudly diagnosed her condition. But you, commune, our shared home, are never shocked and only laugh. So many people here talk like that. There’s no knowing when they’re serious and when they are joking.
It was only old Artemiy who saw her demon straight away. Later I saw it too, one night, looking down from my gallery. I love watching people while they are asleep. You immediately see something important. Lenka looked scared in her sleep and there was a restive little brownish-grey creature beside her, like a kitten. In the darkness I couldn’t see what it was. I raised myself on my elbows, the creature pricked up its ears, tensed, jumped back into Lenka’s head and was gone.
Here Sasha and I are on our way, on the road, walking along a strip of asphalt through the woods. Around us it is May, the first green leaves, the first butterflies. After the winter we crawl out of Moscow into the big wide world as blind as moles, crusted with fungus and mildew. We can’t think straight, we blink in the light, dizzy in the fresh air. When you see that first butterfly, friend, you know you’ve survived another winter. “Hey, Sasha, have you brought anything to eat?” “They’ll have food.” “I’ve got bread, and water.” “Great. We’re sorted then. They should have something.”
We have a tent and a couple of blankets. “Did you arrange where we’re going to meet up?” “Nah. Reckon we’ll find them?” I nod. Something in me clicks, and I try to see everything, looking down from above — us, the lake, the guys we are looking for. “I’ll be right back. You get thumbing,” Sasha says, dropping his rucksack and jogging over to the ditch. I put mine beside his and look into the empty distance. “Sure,” I say. “Someone’s bound to stop for me now, a chick with two bags.”
“Eh? What chick with two bags?” Sasha asks from the bushes. “Nothing. I’m just talking about myself. Hey, hurry up, a lift!” He jumps out, buttoning himself, and we raise our thumbs. A saloon car with rounded contours, foreign, like a shiny golden pie, stops. Sasha leans down, speaking in his polite, breathy voice. Being polite always makes his voice go like that. The driver is a woman and she lets us in the back, along with our packs.