She’s woken up, my flower, and seeing her reassures and soothes me. She comes towards me shyly:
“Get any sleep?”
She’s not asking about me, but about him. Because if he was asleep, then I would also have had some dreams.
She kisses us in turn, but him first. She says tender words to him. She only smiles at me. Then she places her palms under her breasts — they’re heavy, I can see it too.
“It’s built up,” she says.
“He’ll drink it for you,” I replied. “He won’t mind.”
He never cries, not even when he’s hungry. He only sometimes starts to whine, without any tears, as if he’s complaining: I’m lying here by myself, guys, is it hard to amuse me? For example, I like to look at the bookshelves, when I’m carried past them. There are a lot of different colors in them.
When he was born, he didn’t cry either, I saw it myself, I was there; he didn’t cry at the hospital either, and during his first days at home he lay there, entranced, and looked attentively at the world. Only on the third day of our life together, when I went into the kitchen to check on the cabbage soup, I heard a baby’s offended cry.
I ran to him — and immediately guessed what was going on.
“Did you pinch him, you little bitch?” I asked my darling, hiding a smile.
“I thought he was mute,” she replied.
Although I forgot — once he did cry his eyes out.
Spoiled by his constantly good mood, my darling and I ran out to the shop, leaving the children at home. To buy sweet biscuits for mama and bitter wine for the father. When we came back, we could already hear a terrible wailing, and in two voices.
I flew up the stairs, kicking my shoes into the corridor — my younger son was bawling in his bed, already hoarse, and my elder son had shut himself in the toilet, and was screaming his head off.
“Ignatka, dear!” said the father to the younger son.
“Glebushka, darling,” said the mother to the elder son.
“Mama, help Ignatka!” Gleb sobbed into my darling’s stomach. “I can’t make him quiet!”
He felt sorry for his brother.
Soon Gleb will appear, wandering in on his long awkward legs, my luminous child.
And we will all be together, three men and one girl.
She is very pleased that there are three of us and one of her. My darling never wanted to give birth to someone in her own image. Perhaps because she herself was an eccentric and headstrong girl, until I clutched my greedy hand around her wrist and gave her my child to bear — to the detriment of her girlish lightness, but to the benefit of her human wisdom.
Now the children strengthen and build our love. Gleb often says:
“Guilt should always be divided in half.”
He sometimes runs to his mother — he kisses her hurriedly, and then rushes to me, and also kisses me. As if we ourselves had kissed in reconciliation — we weren’t sitting in different corners of our kitchen for no reason. And what to do after this? We all three laugh together and run to Ignatka’s call to prayer.
You forgot about me! he says without words, conveying his idea like this:
“Ivau! Ga!” and something else, avoiding the alphabet.
We compare how the first has grown, and how the second is growing. They are very different. The elder liked order, he ate at specific times, slept for a certain number of hours, and woke up with an accuracy to the minute. The younger knows nothing about order, no matter how hard we’ve tried to teach him. He wakes up and goes to sleep when he feels like it; he may eat fifteen times a day, or ask for the breast four times over three days. He has his own inner laws, and good on him — the main thing is that he be in a good mood.
The younger brother is friends with the elder. For example, however I jiggle him, the baby does not laugh much. But as soon as Gleb comes along, the younger brother is prepared to play and almost jumps with his stomach, as if he could make a leap like a clever frog — from the bed into the couch, and from there on to the floor. Gleb starts to turn somersaults, or knead the pillow — Ignat laughs so hard that I am afraid for him.
And most remarkably, as soon as the parents enter the room, the laughter stops: Don’t interfere! We’re having our own fun here.
Our sons are close to each other, they have an understanding as if they were from one tribe, and my darling and I were from another. Perhaps it’s a similar tribe, but it’s still another. But it’s a friendly one, of course. And it even pays a tribute. And it’s happy that it has to pay the tribute. Otherwise, what could it do with this wealth of strength, health and love of organization? Must it really be given only to each other? Then it would run out quicker.
Ignat snuffles at the milky breast.
He’s sucked my darling dry, the little white beast.
And he holds the breast tenderly with his hands, as if he’s afraid to spill something. Sometimes he jerks: Ah, the milk has stopped flowing!
“What are you worried about, Ignat,” my darling says to him, giving a welcoming nipple to the fussing child. He closes his eyes in bliss.
Now his brother has turned up. His face is sleepy, his arms are dangling, and a morning branch is sticking up in his underpants.
“Good morning, Gleb.”
“Good morning, Papa. Good morning, Mama.”
He goes up to Ignat and touches his ear.
“Shhh…” Mama says. “Don’t bother him.”
He likes to disturb us and get in the way, talk constantly, ask questions, answer them, philosophize, make comments, generalization and far-reaching conclusions — far beyond his judgment, experience and understanding.
He can feel a change in his parents’ mood with invariable precision, a slight hint of bewilderment from his father, which would inevitably turn into anger — if not for the son.
“Papa, don’t swear!”
“I’m not swearing yet, Gleb,” I say in a cold voice.
“You already are…” he says very confidently.
You can’t hide from his confidence, you can’t get around it, to jump out of another corner, carrying your cherished resentment on your deeply unshaven face. Because while you go around it, you forget what the resentment tasted like and what color it was, and from what bacteria it appeared on earth.
My darling addresses Gleb like an oracle, like a wise man, as if he were not a rosy child on long legs, but a wise seraphim.
“Glebushka, what do you think, did I act correctly?”
Or — in a woman’s shop:
“Glebushka, which gloves do you like the best — with buckles or without?”
They like him at kindergarten, and he is accepted by the boys in our yard — although they are older than him by two, three or even four years; during family excursions to the shop, Gleb is greeted by the charming young girls from the neighboring dormitory with incredible, almost playful tenderness:
“Hi Gleb! Look,” the tender-faced blond girl says to her friend “It’s Gleb!”
“Hi there, Gleb!” the second girl cheerfully says.
And they look at him as if they are almost in love. They don’t even look at me. Damn it, they don’t even look at his father.
Gleb replies to the girls calmly, taking their joy as something for granted.
“Gleb, who are they?” my darling asks, as soon as we walk away from the girls.
He tells us their names — Vika and Olesya. And that’s it, no more information but that.
I once heard them talking — at the playground in the yard. I walked past the wooden fence and saw that these beauties were laughing, looking at Gleb — not patronizingly, in the way that youths make fun of children, but quite heartily. Gleb, waiting for them to stop laughing, continued his story, and furthermore in different characters.