Was that love or just abstemiousness, driven to an extremity?
It was totally unexpected. At first I didn’t like him at all, but after a while I got used to Ickie and didn’t want to lose him. He’s been there for us all this time, having actually become the third twin in our pack. Besides that, along with him, the vodka would also disappear. Before leaving, Ickie delivered so many needless, faceless clichés that if anything noteworthy was ever glimpsed there, it would remain unnoticed.
“I’ll come tomorrow,” he assured us, and his face contorted with a forced smile.
But, of course, he didn’t come the next day, or any day after that. He didn’t come in a week, in a month. It didn’t matter whether he avoided us by a whim of circumstance or willfully forgot about our existence; whatever happened, we were left alone again. However, before going away, Ickie seemed to have deliberately endowed us with bitter thoughts on love and all of its little white lies – his last gift implicating the promises of illusive happiness and its feasibility.
At some point I started noticing that you were no longer alone in the woods – Compass Legs showed a keen interest in you. From time to time he treated you with a cigarette, pinched you or made a corny joke.
“What a soothing voice he has!” you exclaimed dreamily as we went outside. “I wish I was alone… Anyway, Compass Legs is not Ickie,” you smiled sadly. “It’s a pity, but he won’t be bringing us vodka.”
Afterwards, I often thought about your words. For the first time in our life I was a heavy burden for you, or was it just the first time you let it out? I saw Compass Legs in a totally different light: a wry smirk instead of a smile, piggy eyes resembling buttons; raunchy, stupid, speaking awkwardly and always irrelevantly. But hardly had I started “unmasking” him when you pounced upon me with insults or covered your ears, shaking your head. How seldom can even the closest people understand each other.
“Am I worthy of being loved?” you asked, suddenly anxious, alluding to Compass Legs.
Deprived of everything that constitutes a woman and in general a human essence – family, motherhood, men’s attention, interesting and rewarding work – you were compelled to stand in the stinking tunnel for days, extorting the sympathy of passers-by, mixed with disgust. No wonder that yearning for love had arisen in your mind as a manifestation of natural human impulses and desires. Infinitely humiliated, you asserted your dignity through love.
Did I become your enemy then by telling you the truth? The question that must not be answered, but I found the answer! The very moment you asked this question my heart started thumping, poisoned with jealousy, and my stubborn silence spoke more than any words.
“Why am I asking you? What can you possibly know about how I feel?” You grew furious, and, unfortunately, you were right. I didn’t know anything then and I don’t know anything now! There is no museum which stores a standard of true love against which to compare your own perceptions.
“Just think about what he could give us: protection, a good job, better housing and, perhaps, even a TV,” you were cackling as silly as Ickie used to some time ago.
I believed those reasonable arguments were there to hide your true feelings. You got attracted to him strongly, right away – for some physical reason, inconceivable to me, – but were afraid to admit it. Meanwhile, having yielded to your request, Compass Legs started bringing vodka to you. Maybe he really liked you? Who knows! I saw in his acts no more than encouragement for his best “workers” in the tunnel. We had earned him so much money with our begging, and we all got a poor thank-you – vodka – but you took it as a declaration of care and love. In fact, everything started with it.
But first, something else happened.
Probably, sooner or later, every person finds himself to be disposable. He appeared before us in short, badly-faded trousers with an open zipper, with lean hands and huge bags under his eyes, all tousled like a sparrow after bathing in a puddle. He smelled of medication and something acrid, perhaps garlic or onions. His glasses had only one temple, shoes were put on bare feet, without socks, and the whole image was completed with a gloomy face and a wan smile baring mostly empty gums on top and an uneven number of metal teeth on the bottom. He approached us, dragging his body and creaking like an old cart. Leaning against a wall, we stiffened in expectation, wondering who he was and not knowing what he wanted. For some time he hesitated, choosing which one of us to look at and who to address. And when he, after much hesitation, started talking, all the futility of life was expressed in his voice. He used to work as a major chief engineer, helping to design parts for future carrier rockets. In due time, he had retired and spent the last of his savings that had remained after monetary reforms on some government securities promising enormous profit, but afterwards he went broke and lost everything. Although his entire look emitted absolute infirmity and hopelessness, he was telling us about his failures in such a tone as if they were his main virtues. “Idiot,” I thought, “if you prefer being proud of your suffering – well, please, go to church! But why are you sticking strangers with it?”
“Everything is lost and ruined, but I am still alive, being older than Byron and Lermontov put together,” he finished joyfully and a little haughtily.
“Do you at least have a wife?” I asked, out of curiosity. “Byron did.”
Instead of answering, he grew sad instantly and looked away, silently moving his lips.
“Any children?”
Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, a small, aged and decrepit person who used to be great and important nodded his bowed head. When he started talking again, his voice sounded different. It appeared that more than twenty years ago his wife had given birth to boys, conjoined twins, exactly like us! At the time of delivery he was away on business and kept putting off meeting his babies on the pretext of being busy. And when he did return, when everything was over, realizing his cowardice, his wife took the children away to an undisclosed location, but that was just the beginning – for after a few months she wrote to him about their early deaths, the small revenge of a resentful woman.
“Am I a coward?” he questioned, clamping his head between his hands. “I used to think the contrary. I had been working my ass off, sometimes hadn’t been leaving my studio for months, fearlessly looked slanderers and tale-bearers in the face. I wasn’t afraid of anything, but seeing two conjoined…” he faltered, at a loss for words, “two poor babies was beyond my power. Soon we got divorced, and for many years I haven’t heard from her. Then one day, totally unexpected, as it usually occurs only in the movies but never in reality, I ran into her in the street of just another town where she was on a behind-the-scenes tour. Can you imagine the odds of that happening?” He raised his hands, addressing the muddy stains on the ceiling. “One in a million, no, actually, one in a billion. Either way, this encounter changed my life. My wife confessed that she had lied to me. In fact, the children were alive and under the care of the government. Right after childbirth she signed documents to transfer them to the institute of pediatrics. I begged and asked her for any further information, but she refused to provide me with any more details. I filed requests to state bodies, tried to search for any documents in the maternity home, but all I found was an old midwife who told me, for a small remuneration, that they were sent to a Scientific Research Institution and she had no idea to which one. My children just vanished into thin air,” he grieved bitterly. “Since then I’ve been looking for them, unable to find them, but nevertheless have kept searching, now rather out of cowardice than for any other reason. I seem to carry on living only out of cowardice. Charity, alas, was so right.”