As we approached the bench, he would say with relief: “Well, here we are…” In the sense that everything had worked out fine, despite my clumsy, noisy behavior, and annoying advice about buying at least something to chew on.
He always put the vodka away in his bag, and poured it out when he thought necessary.
We threw the rubbish off the bench, laid out sheets of newspapers, and joked quietly. The jokes already sounded in a different register: the throat quieted down as if it was saving itself for the burn that was soon to come, and did not effervesce so loudly and cheerfully.
We lit cigarettes, and sat for a while in silence, looking at the smoke.
Then Alyosha poured out some vodka, and I sat with my head inclined, watching the gentle flow of the clear liquid.
After the first shot, he would start coughing, and coughed for a long time, with a look of unusual disgust. I chewed on the stem of a fallen leaf, good-naturedly cursing myself for not taking a little money from Alyosha to buy myself some food.
From time to time, out of the crooked yellow building, young people would come out, hunched over, with stupid faces, wearing leggings rolled up to the knees and flip-flops; they talked loudly, tirelessly swearing and spitting on the ground.
I scowled and didn’t take my eyes off them.
“Just without any excesses, Zakhar, I beg you. No excesses,” Alyosha would immediately say, looking to the side, as if he did not want to catch the disgusting youths with his gaze.
“I won’t do anything, I won’t,” I would laugh.
When I’m drunk I have a tendency to start fights, be rude and do all sorts of stupid things. But no matter what disorderly state I’m in, I would never involve this heavyset, hulking man, who probably has a diseased liver. He couldn’t fight or run away — why should he have to die there because of my foolishness?
“I won’t do anything,” I repeated honestly.
The young guys were shouting something to their girlfriends, who appeared at various windows on the second or third floor. The girls plastered their faces against the glass; the faces displayed a strange mixture of interest and contempt. Having grimaced and given unintelligible replies, the girls went back into the depths of their nauseating apartments with an abundance of metal dishes in the kitchens. Sometimes, after the girls, the irritated faces of their mothers appeared at the window for a moment.
Finally, the guys would disperse, taking away the blisters on their knees and the nasty echo of foul, stupid swearing.
After the second shot, he cheered up, and drank with increasing ease, still with a sour squint, but no longer coughing.
As we began to feel warmer, Alyosha’s terrible face turned pink, and he began to talk. The world, it seemed, had revealed itself to him anew, and was child-like and surprising. In every monologue by Alyosha, there was always a lyrical hero present — he himself, a calm, friendly, kind, non-envious person, worthy of tender love. How could you not love Alyosha, if he was so touching, soft and cheerful? So I thought.
Sometimes, out of forgetfulness, I tried to tell some story out of my own life, about my job at the bar, about the crazy things that happened there, though I had never been beaten up, and was never humiliated; but Alyosha would immediately start to fidget impatiently, and in the end he would interrupt me without hearing me out.
Having smoked again, both of us feeling extremely satisfied and tender, we would once more set off to the kiosk, looking back doubtfully at the bench: we didn’t want anyone else to occupy it.
We had a tradition: we always went to a bookshop after the first bottle, but never bought anything. Alyosha only bought books when he was sober, after he had been paid, and I took them out of the library.
We simply walked around the shop, as if it were a museum. We touched the covers, opened the first pages, and looked at the author’s faces.
“Do you like Hemmy?” I asked, stroking the attractive blue tomes.
“You get sick of his hero very quickly, this annoying strong guy. A beer bar, a boxing bar. Tigers and bulls. Tigers’ habits, bulls’ balls…”
I looked over Alyosha’s figure ironically and didn’t say anything. He didn’t notice my irony. It seemed to me that he didn’t notice it.
Alyosha himself had been writing a novel for five years now, with the fine but outdated title “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” I never could explain how I knew that it was outdated.
Once I asked Alyosha to read the first few chapters, and he didn’t refuse. The novel featured Alyosha himself,renamed Seryozha. For several pages, Seryozha suffered from the stupidity of the world: peeling potatoes in the kitchen (I liked the “starched knives”) and even sitting on the toilet — next to him, like a boil, there was a basin hanging on the wall; I also liked the boil, but not as much.
I told Alyosha about the knives and the basin. He grimaced. But after enduring a small pause of several hours, Alyosha unexpectedly inquired in a dissatisfied voice:
“You write something, don’t you? And you even get published? I don’t know why you need that… Maybe you’ll let me read your texts?”
The next day he returned the pages to me, and mumbled, looking to the side:
“You know, I didn’t like it. But don’t be upset, I’ll read some more.”
I laughed whole-heartedly. We got into a shuttle bus, and I tried to cheer up Alyosha, as if I was guilty of something towards him.
It was a foul and sweaty summer, exhausting to itself. It smelt of gasoline inside the shuttle bus, and all the opened windows and hatches did not make it any less stuffy. We were driving over a bridge, hardly moving in an enormous, harried traffic jam. The river flowed beneath, looking as though it had had oil and gasoline poured into it.
The shuttle bus shook, overcrowded with people, who hung on to the handles with suffering faces. My Alyosha, heavy and soaked through, crushed on all sides, felt especially faint.
The driver had some loud, hoarse-voiced music playing on the tape-recorder. He was obviously keen to acquaint the entire bus with the grimly zealous gangster music he liked so much.
Stupefied by the heat, by the stuffiness, by other people’s bodies, but most of all by the ghastly racket that was booming out of the driver’s speakers, shutting my eyes I imagined that I was whacking the singer over the head with a heavy chair leg.
The traffic jam was steadily getting worse. Cars honked angrily and incessantly.
Alyosha stared vacantly at a spot somewhere above my head. Sweat kept pouring down his face. You could see that he was also listening to the performance, and it was making him feel ill. Alyosha chewed his lips, and said distinctly, almost syllable by syllable:
“Now I know what hell looks like to Mozart.”
We couldn’t bear to stay in the shuttle bus, and long before we reached the place where we worked we got out, and decided to drink some beer. My friend panted and rolled his eyes, gradually coming to life. The beer was ice-cold.
“Alyosha, you’re great!” I said, admiring him.
He didn’t show that he was very happy with my words.
“My fine friend, let’s not go to work,” Alyosha suggested. “Let’s make up some lie.”
We rang the office, lied to them, and didn’t go to work, but sat in the shade, swigging beer.
Then we went for a walk, virtually holding each other by the arm, fully aware, but not saying it out loud, that we would be outrageously drunk by the evening.
“Look, it’s our bookshop!” Alyosha said, enraptured. “Let’s go and commemorate the books that we could have bought and read.”
We once more wandered between the rows of books, brushing against the beautiful covers and touching the spines of the books, which, I always remember, gave out an acrid odor.
“Gaito, the magnificent Gaito… Look, Alyosha! Have you read Gaito?”