So we put together money for the seventh and went out to look for it.
We found a shop and bought everything there that we wanted. The vodka disappeared into Vova’s shapeless jacket, and I put the biscuits in my pocket, feeling their roughness with my fingers.
“I don’t want to drink outside anymore,” I said with capricious sternness.
“Who does?” Vova replied. “What can you suggest?”
I didn’t have any suggestions, and for a while we walked silently, gradually losing the warmth we had accumulated in the stairwell, where at least there wasn’t any wind.
“Hey, a girl I went to school with lived around here somewhere,” Vova suddenly livened up.
“When did you go to school, weirdo?” I asked.
Vova didn’t say anything in reply, and looked at the buildings. They stood in freezing semi-darkness, with their grey sides turned towards each other, completely identical.
Despite the cold, the vodka we had drunk in the stairwell was slowly reaching us: but the drunkenness did not bring joy anymore, it had to be carried, like an extra burden, along with the cold and the darkness.
It was impossible to believe that anything could be good anymore: that warmth and light existed; you miserably wanted to lie down somewhere. But you didn’t want to go home, where you would be watched with suffering eyes.
Vova led us through yards, hunched over, silent, with our heads tucked into our jackets; our black hats were pulled down to our noses.
Vova himself didn’t care, he was still carrying his red face high and cheerfully.
“That’s it!” he exclaimed. “Here!”
And he guessed right. The door was opened by a small, dark, but already grown-up girl, and, which we did not expect at all, she smiled to us in welcome.
Vova called her something, but I didn’t catch what exactly, I just barged into the apartment and noticed right away that there was a delicious smell.
In fact, it wasn’t anything special — it was just hot borshch steaming in the kitchen. When you come in from the cold, a pot of red borshch quite rightly seems to be an aromatic miracle, or even something divine. There’s something pagan about it…
We took off our coats, moving our rigid hands with difficulty, pulled off our frozen footwear and went into the big room, where some guy was sitting. When he saw us, he immediately started preparing to leave, and no one asked him to stay.
Vova, evidently, wasn’t embarrassed by anything. He didn’t care that we had turned up uninvited, made ourselves at home and hadn’t brought anything with us.
What do you mean, we didn’t bring anything, Vova would have reasoned, if he had been capable. We’ve got vodka.
He went to get the bottle, which was still concealed in his jacket (he didn’t produce it until the guy we didn’t know had gone) and showed the vodka to the girl.
“Will you drink with us?” Vova offered, smiling insolently.
“I’ll be glad to join you,” she replied with unusual kindness, and I immediately wanted to do something useful for her, so that she would remember it all her life.
“Would you like some borshch?” she asked, shifting her gaze from Vova to me, but as I couldn’t reply, she had to return her gaze to Vova.
“Certainly!” he said confidently.
The girl went out, and we heard the clink of bowls being placed on the table.
“Why are you so lugubrious?” Vova asked me.
“What?”
“Lugubrious.”
“What does that mean?”
“Melancholy. Sour. Down in the dumps.”
I was always prepared to like a person for even the smallest act, if it was an honest one. And even for saying a word that hit the nail on the head. I had respected Vova for a long time, but here he defined the way I felt so wonderfully that the warm feeling I felt for him suddenly transformed into a full sensation of life-long kinship.
You’re right, Vova, I’m not sad at all. And not even tired. I’m lugubrious, with hanging, weak-willed cheeks, soft lips and sleepy eyelids.
Immediately, I felt happy again, and we went to eat and drink. The first spoon of borshch gave me back the taste of happiness, full and persistent.
After the second shot of vodka, we forgot about Vova’s classmate and made jokes among ourselves. We could never remember what made us happy in those minutes, especially as we weren’t really capable of associating with each other when we were sober: until the first burning gulp we couldn’t find a single thing to talk about.
She sat a little distance from the table, and slowly ate our biscuits, which I had handed her ceremoniously.
Unobtrusive music was playing, and Vova’s classmate sometimes wagged her small chin in rhythm with the music. She was not attractive at all, but this did not prevent her from being a wonderful person who had taken us in and wasn’t making us go away.
By the time the bottle was almost empty I felt that I was getting drunk again, and I went to look at myself in the bathroom, and also to rinse my face with icy water: that sometimes helped.
I couldn’t find the light switch, so I left the door open, turned on the tap, poured water into my cupped hand and presssed it to my face. I bent down over the sink.
A little light came from the corridor, and I looked around. The reflections in the dark mirror were hard to decipher, but I did notice that the bar to which the shower curtain was attached was hanging crookedly.
I’ll fix everything for you, my dear, I thought tenderly. I should ask for a screwdriver, it’s probably all screwed together… I’ll just have a look how it’s attached and… I’ll ask for a screwdriver…
Holding on to the shower curtain, I stood on the edge of the bath. Balancing on one leg, I tried to stand up straight, but the bar didn’t hold my weight, and came crashing down.
I fell off the edge of the bath, managing to grab the iron pipe of the bar before it could hit me on the head. At the same time, with a horrible swishing and rustling, I was covered in the shower curtain.
There I stood in the middle of the bathroom… with the rail in my hand… with my head wrapped in a shower curtain, like a person sheltering from a downpour…
Or perhaps it began earlier. I was returning to my suburb from the big city, the train whistled and sped through the evening drizzle, which was half snow. The moisture stuck to the windows in zigzags.
As I got out of the train, I stood on the platform for a long time, feeding on the gusts of wind, as if hoping that they would blow away all of my unexpected feebleness.
Recently I had got a feeling that was similar to the damp growing pains of boys going through puberty.
Strangely enough, in my early youth, having lived on earth for one and a half decades, I quickly passed these growing pains. The distance between a suddenly ending childhood to the moment when the most beautiful girl at school began to talk to me was imperceptible and laughable. I didn’t remember this distance.
And so, I virtually did not experience the humiliation felt by all my peers, which arose from the incompatibility of their bulging desires and the awkward opportunities of realizing them.
But now I felt as if teenage apathy and inarticulateness had taken control of me.
Some awkward wind blew me to the building on the outskirts where my girlfriend from school lived, who, I say, was very beautiful, and whom I never loved.
I got there by a feeble trolleybus, in an empty cabin, with just me and the conductor, and I squatted in the stuffy stairwell, under the staircase on the first floor, remembering without any enthusiasm how here I had first touched a vagina, and how the hairs on it had seemed incredibly bristly to me.
I remembered how we dragged our schoolbags, moving from one floor to the next to avoid the ubiquitous lift, which opened with a clatter and poured out noisy people into the stairwell.