“What, do you work here?” he asked.
“I’m a loader,” I replied, smiling.
“Can I come in? To get warm? For a little while?” Alyosha asked hurriedly, clearly not wanting to hear a refusal. “I’m going home soon anyway, I’ve bought presents for my daughter,” he showed me a bag as proof.
“No, you can’t right now,” I replied. “Only when the salespeople and the manager leave. In an hour.”
An hour later someone started banging on the door. Alyosha was already drunk, and with a friend.
The friend, I must say, seemed to me to be a decent guy, with a childish look, healthy, taller than me, and quite charming — he had small ears on a large head, and a warm palm. He was silent almost the whole time, and did not even try to participate in the conversation, but he smiled so touchingly that I constantly wanted to shake his hand.
I showed them my bread and my trays. I took them to the little room where I’d recently been spending my boring nights, as if in expectation of some disaster, without really knowing what it looked like: since my fourth year at school, when older pupils had taken money from me, I hadn’t experienced any disasters.
The guys had brought vodka with them
“There’ll be warm bread coming soon,” I promised.
By the time the bread was delivered, we were all drunk already, and were laughing a lot.
Alyosha was showing me the presents for his daughter. First there was a strange anemic fluffy animal that I flicked on the nose, which genuinely offended Alyosha. Then the book “Karlsson” with color illustrations.
“It’s my favorite story,” Alyosha said, unexpectedly serious. “I read it from the age of four to the age of fourteen. Several times a year.”
He told me this in such a tone of voice as if he was admitting something incredibly important.
Ever since I was a child, I couldn’t stand that book… I thought clearly, but did not say it out loud.
As I stomped across the stone floor to open the window where I was given bread, I remembered how Alyosha had just tenderly slapped his new friend on the shoulder, and said:
“Drink up, boy!” — and turning to me, he added: “But you’re not a boy anymore.” And we all laughed, without understanding what exactly we were laughing at.
A minute later, laughing, the three of us unloaded the bread together. The driver — the same one, I think — kept looking at us with interest. As I took the last tray of bread, I swore at him for no reason. He responded — but without much ill-will, and even, immediately understanding the mood I was in, he tried to put the situation right, and said some words of reconciliation. But I had already given the tray to Alyosha’s new friend, and went to open the door.
“Wait there, I’m coming out,” I said to the driver over my shoulder.
On the way, I remembered that I was going to the doors without keys, I’d put the keys on the table in the little office, I thought. I went back but couldn’t find them, and for some reason moved the opened bottles and bitten pieces of bread around. I found the keys in the inside pocket of my uniform — and realized that I had felt them jabbing me painfully when I pressed the tray to my chest.
When I got outside, the truck had driven off. The smell of bread drifted out of the shop into the street.
Alyosha wandered out after me with a cigarette between his teeth. Following him, smiling gently, his friend appeared in the open door.
We threw snowballs, trying to hit the streetlight, but missed — although we did hit a window, from behind which, trying to save the street lights from us, an unknown woman threatened us, banging on the glass.
Acting stupid, Alyosha’s friend and I banged our shoulders together, and I suggested that we fight, not seriously, just for fun — by hitting each other with our open hands, not with our fists. He agreed.
We stood in position. I jumped energetically, while he didn’t move, and looked at me almost tenderly.
I took a step forward, and was immediately knocked down by a direct blow to the head. The fist that hit me was clenched.
When I came to a minute later, I rubbed snow into my temples and forehead for a long time. The snow was hard and had no smell.
“Did you fall down?” Alyosha asked, not putting any emotion into his question.
I shook my head and squinted sideways at him: it was painful to turn my head. He was smoking, very calmly, directly in the light of the street lamp, bright from the snow.
The next day I got a call from the legion office. I told them that I wasn’t going anywhere.
Wheels
…So I found myself in a cemetery.
Once I was visiting a stupid friend of mine. We were just sitting around watching television, he yearned with the desire to entertain himself somehow, and I was lying on his musty couch.
This was in a dormitory on the fifth floor.
Through the open door covered in dents and marks, came a kitten of nasty appearance, looking as if it had lived in a rubbish pail all its life.
My friend turned to it his idiotic attention.
“Hey you, shithead,” he welcomed the squealing animal and picked it up, looking it over in an unfriendly way.
We had just had a smoke, spitting into the autumn damp, and the window was open.
When I turned away from the television, the kitten was already hanging from the windowsill with its paws, scraping up white patches of paint with its crooked claws. It was amazing that the animal did not make a noise as it slid toward its feline non-existence.
I remembered for no reason that some poet said that the other world smelt of mice. Our kitten would like it if that were so. But I don’t think it smells of anything at all there.
My fool looked at the kitten in fascination.
A second later, the kitten suddenly clutched at an invisible crack on the window sill with its last efforts, and hung there motionless, its eyes staring.
The fool made a tiny movement with his index finger — the way you touch a bell or a shot glass if you want it to make a delicate sound — and hit the kitten on its hanging claw.
When I got downstairs, after first calling the fool by his everlasingly true name, the kitten was lying on a bench, peaceful and soft. Its back paws hung off the bench like rags.
This is just the way that I was hit, with a light movement, on the claw.
But I did have merry friends.
Vadya, a handsome, smiling blonde guy, his eyes with the ruptured veins of a novice but already incorrigible alcoholic. Vova, the healthiest of us, chuckling, meaty, with a large red face.
It was the most poetic winter I have ever experienced in my life.
At that time I had finally stopped writing poems, and never did so again seriously, I quit one job but did not find another one, and then, as I say, I was hit on the claw, and I found myself in a grave.
“Are you going to get out of there, monkey dick?” Vova called, standing above me. From under his feet, earth and dirty snow fell into the grave.
I grabbed the spade, and swung it with the genuine intention of hitting Vovka on the leg as painfully as possible, and if possible breaking it. Vovka, laughing, jumped away. In one hand he had a bottle of vodka, in the other a glass.
“No, are you going to drink or not?” he asked, walking around the grave, keeping his distance from my spade.
“Why the fuck are you asking, Vova?”
“Then get out.”
“I’ll drink here.”
Vova, making sure that I had put the spade in the corner, squatted by the rectangular pit. He handed me a tall glass, half filled.
Next to Vova, Vadik squatted down, smiling his usual sincere, kind smile.
We clinked our glasses — the guys had to lean over towards me a little, and I raised my glass towards them, as if greeting them.