We left the puppies to play together, and went to the shop, where we bought cheap treats, annoying the saleswomen with the huge amount of spare change that Marysya dug out of her bag, and I took out of my jeans. Often, the irritated saleswomen didn’t even count the change, but disdainfully scooped it up and poured it into the angular cavity of the cash register, not the section for the copper coins, but the “white” coins — the ones worth one kopeck and five kopecks, which had completely lost any purchasing power in our country, as it cheerfully slid into poverty. We laughed, no one’s disdainful irritation could belittle us.
“Notice how today doesn’t seem like a Tuesday,” Marysya observed as we left the shop. “Today feels like Friday. On Tuesdays, there are far fewer children outdoors, the girls aren’t dressed so brightly, the students are busier and the cars aren’t so slow. Today time has definitely shifted. Tuesday has turned into Friday. What will tomorrow be, I wonder?”
I was amused at her intentionally bookish language — this was one of the things we did for fun, to talk like this. Later our speech became ordinary human speech — incorrect constructions, interjections, hints and laughter. None of this can be reproduced — because every phrase had a story behind it, every joke was so charming and fundamentally stupid that another repetition would kill it dead, as though it was born a fragile flower that immediately started to wilt. We spoke in the normal language of people who are in love and happy. They don’t write like that in books. I can only single out a few individual phrases. For example this one:
“I visited Valies,” Marysya said. “He proposed that I get married.”
“To him?”
What a stupid question. Who else?
…The actor Konstantin Lvovich Valies was an old, burly man with a heavy heart. His heart was probably no longer beating, but rather sinking.
His mournful Jewish eyes under heavy, caterpillar-like eyelids had completely lost their natural cunning. With me, as with a youth, he still kept his poise — he was bitterly ironic, as it seemed to him, and frowned patronizingly. With her, he could not conceal his vulnerability, and this vulnerability appeared as a bare white stomach under a badly tucked-in shirt.
Once, as someone who does anything to earn money as long it’s legal, including writing the stupid rubbish which usually serves to fill up newspapers, I asked Valies for an interview.
He invited me to his home.
I arrived a little earlier, and blissfully smoked on a bench by the house. I rose from the bench and went to the entranceway. Glancing at my watch, and seeing that I had another five minutes, I went back to the swings that I had just walked past, and touched them with my fingers, feeling the cold and roughness of the rusty iron bars. I sat on a swing and pushed off gently with my legs. The swing gave a light creaking noise. It seemed familiar to me, reminding me of something. I rocked on the swing again and heard quite clearly: V-va… li… es… I rocked on the swing again. “Va-li-es” — the swing creaked. Va-li-es. I smiled and jumped off rather clumsily — at my back, the swing shrieked out something with an iron hiss, but I couldn’t tell what it was. The door of the entranceway muttered something in the same tone as the swing.
I forgot to say that Valies was a senior actor at the Comedy Theater in our town; otherwise there would have been no reason for me to visit him. No one asked me who I was through the door when I knocked — in the best of Soviet traditions, the door opened wide, and Konstantin Lvovich smiled.
“Are you the journalist? Come in…”
He was short and thick-set, his abundantly wrinkled neck showed his age, but his impeccable actor’s voice still sounded rich and important.
Valies smoked, shaking off the ash with a swift movement, gesticulated, raised his eyebrows and kept them there just a tad longer than an ordinary person, who was no artist, could. But this all suited Konstantin Lvovich — the raised eyebrows, the glances, the pauses. As he talked, he deployed all of this skillfully and attractively. Like chess, in a definite order. And even his cough was artistic.
“Excuse me,” he always said when he coughed, and where the sound of the last syllable of “Excuse me” ended, the next phrase would immediately continue.
“So then… Zakhar, right? So then, Zakhar…” — he would say, carefully pronouncing my somewhat rare name, as if he were tasting it with his tongue, like a berry or a nut.
“Valies studied at the theatrical academy with Yevgeny Yevstigneev, they were friends!” I repeated to Marysenka that evening what Konstantin Lvovich himself had said to me. Yevstigneev in a dark little room with a portrait of Charlie Chaplin by his squashed bed — the young and already bald Yevstigneev, living with his mother who quietly fussed behind the plywood wall, and Valies paying him a visit, curly-haired, with bright Jewish eyes… I imagined all this vividly to myself — and in rich colors, as if I had seen it myself, I described it to my darling. I wanted to surprise her, I liked surprising her. And she enjoyed being surprised.
“Valies and Yevstigneev were the stars of their year, they were such a cheerful pair, two clowns, one with curly hair and the other bald, a Jew and a Russian, almost like Ilf and Petrov. Just fancy that…” I said to Marysya, looking into her laughing eyes.
“What happened after that?” Marysya asked.
After he graduated from the academy, Zhenya Yevstigneev wasn’t accepted into our Comedy Theater — they said that they didn’t need him. But Valies was accepted immediately. Also, he started to appear in films, at the same time as Yevstigneev, who moved to Moscow. In the space of a few years, Valies played the poet Alexander Pushkin three times and the revolutionary Yakov Sverdlov three times as well. The films were shown all over the country… Valies also played a harmless Jew in a war film, together with Shura Demyanenko, who was famous at the time. And then he played Judas in a film where Vladimir Vysotsky played Christ. Although, truth to say, work on this film was stopped before shooting ended. But on the whole, Valies’ acting career got off to a very lively start.
“…But then they stopped putting Valies into films,” I said to Marysya.
He waited for an invitation to appear in another film, but it never came. So he didn’t become a star, although in our town, of course, he was almost considered one. But theater productions came and went and were forgotten, and his obscure films were also forgotten, and Valies got old.
In conversation, Valies was ill-tempered, and swore. It was good that way. It would have been very sad to look at an old man with a sinking heart… The smoke dispersed, and he lit another cigarette — with a match, for some reason, there was no lighter on the table.
His time was passing, and was almost gone. Somewhere, once, in some distant day, he had been unable to latch on, to grasp something with his tenacious youthful fingers that would enable him to crawl out into that space bathed in warm, beery sunshine, where everyone is granted fame during their lifetime and promised love beyond the grave — perhaps not eternal love, but such that you wouldn’t be forgotten at least for the duration of a memorial drinking party.
Valies crushed the next cigarette into the ash tray, waved his hands, and the yellow tips of his fingers flashed by — he smoked a lot. He held in the smoke, and as he slowly exhaled, he became lost in the smoke, not squinting his eyes, throwing his head back. It was clear that everything was fading away, and now the whites of his eyes were shining amid the pink veins, and his big lips were moving, and his heavy eyelids were trembling….
“Do you feel sorry for him, Marysenka?”
The next day I typed up the interview, read it over and took it to Valies. I handed it over and scurried off. Valies saw me off tenderly. And rang me up as soon as I was barely home. Perhaps he had started ringing earlier — the call arrested me just as I entered the apartment. The actor’s voice was trembling. He was extremely angry.