Tea had cooled down long ago when a second neighbor peeped into the room. First of all, from behind the door appeared an examining lonely eye, then we saw a sniffing nose and then the whole head squeezed into the aperture.
“Here you are! Gennady Karlovich,” Mother exclaimed happily. “Come, come in!” she added impatiently.
This neighbor’s face, perfectly round like a pancake, finally responded to the invitation and expressed the kindest smile. Soon Gennady Karlovich Kucheryavy (Kucheryavy in Russian means “curly”; in slang dodge, agile – a person who is able to be well settled in life) entirely filtered through the doorway, squeezed in as if by miracle. He resembled a huge hog with small piggy eyes, faded eyelashes and rusty hair. Hardly had he appeared before Mother underwent the most improbable, the most unnatural change. Her face lit up like a candle-light at dinner, and she started mumbling something indistinctly, driven either by pleasure or by confusion. Furthermore, once he threw an eye on the refrigerator, she immediately sprang to her feet and began to take out sausage, beet salad and sprats.
“And these are my… come, come, sit down,” mother joyfully muttered. “Just my… well, you know.”
Actually, Gennady Karlovich didn’t, and wasn’t going to; lazily, almost unwillingly he took a seat on two chairs simultaneously, while we were huddling on one with difficulty, and quietly farted.
“Hope and Faith,” mother squeezed out urgently. “And this is Gennady Karlovich. He is such a wonderful person, unlike those menials.” And having waved her hand towards the door, she put newly-baked pasties on the table.
“Oh, how pretty they are!” he muttered cryptically, giving us a playful wink, and the sweetest smile spread all over his face.
“Come on, children, eat well!” and taking a look at us, Mother gave a tragic sigh. “You must be hungry.”
Frankly speaking, we hadn’t eaten anything since morning, our stomachs were knotted with hunger, and our heads went round giddily. But Gennady Karlovich had probably “fasted” (A temporary abstention from taking meals and drinking is referred to here) much longer than us. He was eating in such a manner as if he had been starved of food all his life, stopping only to smooth his scanty hair or to pinch the fur on his chest. His entire organism seemed to consist only of a stomach taking up the biggest part of his jellylike body; he didn’t even chew his food but like an ogre swallowed it whole. I stared at him with barely disguised horror but mother was foolish with adoration. He started on the pasties and didn’t stop until only one remained on the plate – probably, that was his particular expression of courtesy, of generosity. He then proceeded to devour the sausage with beet salad and sprats, having seasoned them with two bowls of soup, and, for “dessert”, he finished off the remaining “courtesy” pasty. He was a gourmet, he informed us, not a glutton.
Gennady possessed a picturesque appearance. Pink bald spots were already outlined on his head, making him attempt to disguise them by combing his hair sideways; his fingers with bitten nails resembled short, thick sausages. He never washed himself as a matter of principle, considering washing in water an absolute waste of time. In his leisure time, he liked to look through personal advertisements in newspapers, reminding me of a mangy tomcat ready for action at the sight of any young woman’s body. Probably, for this reason, he treated our mother very frostily but openly flirted with us, trying to make gags and telling obscene, true-life stories and gross jokes every now and again.
Somehow there was only one time when our mother entered into the conversation. Having heard hardly distinguishable singing behind the wall, she only said through her teeth, either mockingly or with excitement:
“People started singing. That’s all from desperation.”
At half past ten Gennady Karlovich got up from the table and, without even saying goodbye, made his way to the door; however, at the threshold he stopped and, after thinking a while, uttered:
“Well, you must come round to my place for a while. It’ll be so nice to see you both.”
He had hardly gone out before Mother, piercing us with a scathing look, hissed querulously:
“Did nobody teach you at school that you should hold a knife in your right hand, and scoop the soup from the front of the bowl to the back!?”
We listened to her submissively and ashamedly, being used to obeying the orders of elders. It is much easier to forgive and forget than to be obstinate and resist. Eventually, having finished savoring her absolute domination over us, she indulgently made us a bed – a real bed with real bed linen – then coldly and a little fastidiously stroked only you briefly on the head and went to sleep.
“She didn’t even ask where we came from today,” I whispered with disappointment. “Where we live.”
“Who cares, if we’re living at her place from now on,” you cut in rationalizing, and started snoring demonstratively. I’m sure if you only could have, you would have turned over on the other side.
Late night shrouded the city; a pregnant moon was sliding across the dome of the sky. My troubled sleep was interrupted by a shrill squeak of springs. I opened my eyes and saw Mother sitting on the corner of our bed and watching me very closely. Her moonlit face expressed a surprising humility and fondness as though her true, maternal essence, patient and caring, was just now showing itself while the other, false, hysterical and suspicious, was sleeping undisturbed on the couch, snoring and snuffling quietly. I wanted to shake you awake and tell you everything would be okay, but mother pressed her finger to her lips, silently asking me not to do so, then she put her hand on my head and carefully stroked my hair as if I were a child. That very moment, as if by magic, I forgave her all her sins, offences and wrongdoings, and soon fell asleep deeply and serenely. When I woke up, the dawn had already broken behind the window; Mother was still sleeping and some doubts started rising in my mind. Was that really her or was that one of my dreams last night with her in it?
The next week we took great pains to help her about the house, went grocery shopping and spent our own money on food; and mother, as she saw us paying, scolded us for unreasonable extravagance and inability to be tight with money. Finally, we decided to give her our scarce savings on moral grounds. Meanwhile, Gennady Karlovich acquired the unchangeable status of a frequent guest in our humble dwelling; working as a taxi driver only at nights and returning home at daybreak, he had all his meals at our place, always cheered our mother up, kept boosting her morale. But when he paid a bit more attention to us, at that very moment she grew gloomy and silent. Gennady, however, didn’t bother about these changes in her moods, continuing to emit an inexhaustible stream of vulgar nonsense in which he had no equal.
All our life we had been dreaming of getting through every little hole in order to enter this beautiful and unfamiliar world where parents and children love each other, not to get anything but to spite everything, where love is all-important, to plunge into a “true” fairy-tale world, to settle down and live happily ever after. So why didn’t I feel happy when it was happening for real? I realized that everything seemed to be fine but my soul, with tearful eyes, did not believe in what was happening. I just couldn’t embrace a huge discrepancy between the way I watched Mother every day and the way she appeared before me that very first night. An obvious trap was concealed in all this. Mother reminded me of a dark storeroom with numerous boxes full of old things; we go inside and move ahead into the depths, trying not to touch anything, and as long as we do it, everything goes well, but a single wrong step suffices for the burden of the past to collapse and to bury us alive.