“Yes,” Alyosha grimaced. “I’ve read him”.
“And?” I raised my eyebrows, with a premonition of something.
“He’s not a bad writer. But all these uninteresting, pointless descriptions of exercises on the chin-up bar… this character who is only concerned with his bravery, although it would seem that he also solves metaphysical problems… the same guy from novel to novel, who discreetly flexes his triceps and always knows how to break a person’s finger… It’s a secret aesthetic of violence. Remember how enthralled he is when he watches a gigolo getting beaten up?”
“Stop it, Alyosha, you’re nuts,” I interrupted him and left the shop, angry for no apparent reason.
My friend followed, without looking at me. He was in the mood to drink vodka and looked keenly at the kiosk, as though it might go away.
“And what about the Russian American, the butterfly enthusiast? What about his books?” I asked an hour later.
“It’s strange that you know your literature,” Alyosha said instead of replying. “You’d be better suited to throwing knives… or spears… And then shave your head with them. With blunt blades.”
“His Russian period is especially unpleasant,” Alyosha replied a minute later, pouring out the rest of the vodka. “Although I haven’t read anything from his American period, apart from the novel about the little girl… But then, many Russian novels are revolting because of the narrator. A sport snob who despises all…”… — Alyosha searched for a word, and not finding it, added, “all the rest…”
“A person like you,” Alyosha suddenly added in a completely sober voice, and immediately started talking about something else.
He sat on the bench, enormous and corpulent. The sides of his white, flabby body bulged out of his shirt. I smoked a lot and looked at Alyosha attentively, sometimes forgetting to listen to him.
For some reason, I remembered a story that Alyosha had told a long time ago, about his father. His father was an invalid, he did not leave the apartment, and had been bed-ridden for many years. Alyosha never visited his father, although he lived nearby. Alyosha’s mother looked after the invalid, her former husband, from whom she had been divorced a long time ago.
“I last saw him when I was twelve years old, I think,” Alyosha said. “Or eleven.”
It was quite unclear whether he was ashamed of this or not. I thought a little then about Alyosha, about his words and his father, but didn’t come to any conclusions. I don’t like to think about such things generally.
Alyosha was soon fired from his job, because he had completely stopped going there and doing anything on time; as it happened, some time later the same lot also fell to me.
I didn’t see Alyosha for a long time. It seemed that he felt seriously resentful about something, but I wasn’t interested in his resentment.
I still got no call from the representative office of the foreign legion.
I didn’t turn the light on in the room, and rolling the black dumb-bell with my frozen-toed foot, I looked out the window, dreaming of having a smoke. I had no money to buy cigarettes.
I got the strange, inexplicable feeling that the world, which lay so firmly beneath me, was starting to strangely float away, as happens when your head spins and you feel nauseated.
Against my usual custom, unable to stand it, I once went to see my neighbor, whose telephone number I had left at the representative office when I was interviewed. I asked my neighbor: “Has anyone been looking for me?”
That time no one had been looking for me, but a few days later, my neighbor knocked on my door: “There’s a call for you!”
I ran across the landing barefoot, and grabbed the receiver.
“So, are you still working? Idiots like you stay afloat everywhere,” I heard Alyosha’s voice. He was undoubtedly drunk. “Aren’t they taking you into their… what’s it called? Pension… Legion… Do you miss manly work? You want to shoot someone’s head off, don’t you?” Alyosha laughed deliberately into the phone. “The cannibal poet… You, you, I’m talking about you… A cannibal and poet. You think it’s always going to be that way?…”
“Where did you get this number from?” I asked, turning to the wall and seeing my annoyed reflection in the mirror, which hung by the door, next to the telephone.
“Should that be the first question?” Alyosha asked. “Maybe you should ask how I feel? How I’m feeding my family, my daughter…”
“I don’t care about your daughter,” I replied
“Of course, all you care about is your reflection in the mirror.”
I hung up the phone, apologized to the neighbor, and went back to my room. I went over to the bed and haphazardly kicked at the box of letters — I hit it. The papers spilled out, some pages flew from under the bed and settled on the floor with a gentle rustle. There was no rug on the floor: just painted boards, between which coins sometimes fell when I took my pants off and laid them out. Yesterday evening I had pointlessly wiggled an iron ruler, left over from previous tenants, into a gap, and barely resisted the temptation to break one of the boards. There was a coin with the number 5 there, I thought. A packet of Korean noodles. Even two packets, if you bought the cheaper kind.
For the first time in years, I was furious.
Throwing on a light jacket, in the pocket of which several coins had clinked yesterday, or to be precise two, I went to buy bread. On the door of the small, quiet shop, there was a sign: “Loader urgently wanted.”
The next evening I went to work.
Loading bread was a pleasant task. Three times a night, there was a knock on the iron shutters. Who’s there? I was supposed to ask, but I never did, I just opened up — simply because a minute before I had heard the sound of the bread truck approaching. A gloomy driver stood on the other side of the window. He handed me a form, I signed it, the pen was always in the pocket of my grey uniform.
Then he opened up the doors of the truck, which he had backed up to the window of the shop. The truck was full of trays with bread. He gave them to me, and I ran around the shop with the trays, putting them in special stands — the white bread went with the white bread, the rye bread with the rye bread.
The bread was still warm. I bent my face over it, and every time I could hardly restrain myself from biting off an aromatic piece of it as I ran.
Once, in the morning, the driver put a tray of bread on the window before I came back. Without waiting for me, the driver went back into the truck for the next tray, and the tray that was on the window fell off. The bread scattered over the floor, and a few buns were covered in the dirt that had been tracked in by my shoes.
“What the fuck are you doing?” the driver was quick to blame me for my sluggishness, although it was his fault.
I didn’t say anything: to punch him in his stupid face, I would have to walk through the shop to the exit, open the iron door with two locks on it, fumble with the long key that didn’t always go in right away…
The truck shortly left, and I turned on the light in the shop, and gathered the buns off the floor. I wiped them with my sleeve, and put them back on the tray. Two pink buns wouldn’t get clean — the dirt only smeared over them, so I spat on their pink sides several times — that was a much easier and better way to clean them.
Alyosha appeared by the shop quite by accident, and I still can’t fathom why he was made to cross my path this time.
I was on my way to my shift, finishing a cigarette, taking the last drags and throwing the butt in the ash-bin, and Alyosha came towards me out of the open doors of my shop.
Not seeing any reason to still be angry with him, I greeted Alyosha, and even gave him a small hug.