“What a wonderful way to ignore inconvenient questions,” I thought grinning, and at this very moment a wild, inhuman yell sounded nearby.
Having woken up from their daily cares and getting caught up in a faceless stream of strangers behind changing masks, people clumsily hurried in the direction of the shouting. Driven by a weird and inexplicable impulse, we rushed after the passersby, and, having squeezed tightly in between them, froze to the spot. In front of us, lost in unknown reverie, the supervisor was sitting on the dirty floor and blinking much faster than normal. His chest was heaving with rapid breath, his lips were whistling, and were it not for an open wound in his neck, you might think he was resting or playing the fool. I stared at the pug clinging to life and didn’t feel anything: neither hatred, nor pity. Nothing. And his ripped throat kindly smiled at me, drooling bloody saliva and whispering: “Pray, bitches, you will all be punished by death.”
Meanwhile, the gathering crowd was narrowing the circle, gripping us in a huge, unfriendly embrace. Someone was exclaiming loudly, someone was whispering convulsively, but nobody was moving to call an ambulance. And only when the atmosphere was strained to its limit and in many aspects beyond its limit, did the dying man “rescue” us. He moved his shoulders, as if freeing them from an unbearable load, helplessly stretched out his hands for the last time, stopped breathing and went limp. In the depressing silence that followed there was a minute when we could hear a seller of magazines fidgeting at the end of the tunnel. In other words, in the silence there was a decisive moment when the crowd parted, letting through the most respected, trusted and valued member of society. In such cases, a solid citizen coughs with significance once or twice, taking the lead, and then starts reciting pompously: “Life has its end, but death is limitless. We live for a short while and die for ever.” God damn it, that guy is incredible; he definitely isn’t worth his salt! He created the epic scene that was worthy of being put on a big stage by a prominent theatrical director… but somehow nobody stepped forward. Nobody recited. Instead, everyone stood still for some time, shaking their heads, and then the crowd broke up silently. Curiosity satisfied, everybody plunged into selfish indifference again. That was the logical end of the performance. The curtain!
So many striking events in one day, endless, free gifts, but my question remained unanswered. Had the supervisor’s death contributed beneficially to our lives or made our fate worse? Is everyone’s life more valuable than anything in the world or, on the contrary, totally worthless? You probably didn’t think of anything, rejoicing as though the murder that had just occurred was your personal victory.
“For the first time in our life we’ve had the luck to win the game. Don’t you think so?” you asked severely.
Hope, I know, cruelty always gives rise to cruelty, anger begets hatred, but I wonder if you could really wish upon him such a death?
“Let’s say we wish only good for everybody,” you elaborated your own thought. “Wouldn’t we already be strangled, robbed, murdered by people like him?” and you nodded towards the armless man.
I perfectly understood what you were trying to say. If you think of people kindly it doesn’t mean that people think of you the same way too. But, still, I couldn’t agree with you. Call me impractical or stupid, but I want things to be different. Furthermore, we must make things different. Secondly, I consider it wrong and weird that we did not understand each other, although we saw and felt everything simultaneously. To hell with this motor adynamia.
“You’re a fool,” you blurted out. “You should be happy that someone else killed him. Otherwise you would have had to do the job yourself.”
And, having touched your broken lip, you added indulgently:
“And by the way, where did that stinky snippet disappear to? Did he really run to get some vodka?”
Indeed, hardly had we merged into the crowd again than had our “pumpkin companion” immediately dived in from the opposite direction. I thought that he would never come back, but in a couple of days he appeared and, heartily begging our pardon, handed us a bottle.
“I could only procure this sort,” he drawled in the tone of an apologetic child, baring his front teeth with a gap between them wide enough to insert a pencil, smiling in a conciliatory fashion.
“What’s the freaking difference? Give me what you’ve got,” you grumbled. “Why did you stick to us?”
His artless face instantly strained, and his fingers shuffled all over his body, so he had to clasp them to his chest.
“I will certainly explain,” he said in a mournful voice. “I will tell you everything, exactly how it is. Please don’t take offence; all my life, only a few moments have mattered.”
He had been withholding this story for so long that once he found “grateful listeners” in our persons, he burst out, telling us more than we ever needed to know. His speech was filled with clichés from beginning to end, probably taken from newspapers randomly, forming an aura of a man of education and culture. He received quite a trivial nickname at schooclass="underline" Ickie, which irritated him terribly, but one can’t be angry all the time. Soon, he got tired, then resigned himself and was finally convinced of the “truthfulness” of his nickname. With this regard, one person dear to me who preferred to die for his real name should be remembered. But Ickie was of quite a different breed, for he was ready to agree with any label in order to feel safe and unstressed. Only much later did we learn his real surname: either Poop or Poopie, which wasn’t really good. On the contrary, “Ickie” suited him much better.
I wonder whether he was nicknamed thoughtlessly, as a result of a “harmless”, childish prank, and only years later did he unknowingly start to fulfill his nickname! Did he turn a flight of somebody’s ridiculous fancy into reality on purpose, trying to please everyone, or was he a grub and a sloven initially, being Ickie from the very beginning? I guess we’ll never know what was behind that door.
When he turned thirteen, he went abroad with his parents, aerial artists, who had several performances a day. In the meantime, instead of training and gaining experience, he used to run away from the circus-troop and walk around the city. Well, as always happens in real life and rarely in fairy tales, once upon a time he accidentally wandered into a fair, and, driven by a mysterious inner instinct, sneaked into a circus-tent.
At first, the announcer appeared in the arena to make a speech about people’s destinies – how many misfortunes and gross injustices we happen to encounter in life; but it is really not our fault, and we cannot do anything about it. He didn’t want to persuade anyone to seek a reason for the surprising phenomenon that followed, but to accept it as “given”, and try to laugh together as a family. At last, the lights were turned down low and a few moments later incredible creatures, like from a scary story, one after another, rolled out onto the arena riding unicycles. At first he thought it was a freakish effect of the light or a dodgy trick, but after a closer look, he understood. These were real people in front of his eyes… very ugly people, dwarfs with big heads, giants with small ones, athletes without arms, and people resembling animals. The public was ecstatic, giving them a standing ovation that suddenly developed into a deafening squall when the leading lady, a real beauty with two pairs of legs, appeared in the arena. “If you could have seen her dancing,” Ickie admired, wringing his hands. “She flew over the rows of seats like a feather; her skirt delightfully fluttered in the air as she stretched her tattooed body, exposing two pairs of charming legs in white, silk stockings.” She was so neat and airy that he was uncontrollably attracted to her, and before she could even finish her performance, he found himself clambering up on the rope and jumping between rafters, showing his adeptness of bodily control to the four-legged leading lady. The audience, who took his acrobatic attempts as part of the show, laughed approvingly and with words and gestures of curiosity encouraged him in bravery. But the problem of how to get down solved itself: he fell down as a disobedient baby bird falls down from the maternal nest. “I’m lucky I didn’t crash to my death,” Ickie concluded colorlessly, as if doubtful of his very own sanity. “I broke nearly every bone in my body that day, but wasn’t successful in making friends with her.”