“Fuck you!” I shouted again, raising my hand with the brick in it. “Fuck you!”
She turned around and walked away. She wanted to carry her head straight, lift it up high and disdainfully — probably the way that she had held it for a long time, but fear made her sink her head into her shoulders — and so, torn between her arrogance and her fear, she twitched like a goose. I spat after her, but didn’t reach her, the wind blew my spit away.
Grenlan… Where’s our girl? I remembered, and ran into our yard, but didn’t find anyone there. Where is she?
I squatted on the grass in the yard. I felt like smoking. I squatted, twitching nervously and listening to my heart, which was pounding in my temples. I caught my breath and went to look for the dog. I walked around the neighborhood until dark. I came home empty-handed.
Marysenka slept uneasily during the night, and when I placed my hand on her chest, I felt her heart beating.
“Shall we go to Valies?” she said in the morning.
We put on dark clothing and went.
…The coffin had been carried out of the house, it stood by the entranceway. We squeezed through to the deceased through several dozen people surrounding the coffin. As we squeezed through, I heard the words heart…, heart attack and he could have lived longer… No one was crying. Valies’ face was stern. His neck, which had been so large during his life, and which seemed to preserve an unusual wealth of modulations, was sunken in. There was nowhere for his voice to fit anymore. People whispered and shuffled. I wanted it to start raining. We left the crowd.
“Shall we go to the cemetery?” I asked Marysenka.
She shook her head no. We walked farther away from the people and stood by the swings. I rocked one of them. There was an unpleasant squeak, that sounded especially harsh in the silence that prevailed all around. My heart skipped a beat. The swings continued to rock, but without any sound.
We headed home. We turned the corner of the building, hugged and kissed.
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you,” she said
“What day of the week is today?” I asked
Marysya looked at the dark gray street. There was almost no one around.
“Today is Monday,” she said. Although it was Saturday.
“And tomorrow?” I asked.
Marysenka was silent for a moment — not thinking about what day it would be tomorrow, but rather deciding whether or not to reveal the truth to me.
“There won’t be any Sunday,” she said.
“What will there be?”
Marysenka looked at me thoughtfully and tenderly, and said:
“There will be more happiness. More and more of it.”
Sin
He was seventeen, and he carried his body nervously.
His body consisted of an Adam’s apple, sturdy bones, long arms, absentminded eyes, and an overheated brain.
In the evenings, when he lay down to sleep in his hut, he listened to the words spinning around in his head and he died… he… died…
He tried to imagine how someone would cry, and how his cousin, whom he youthfully, brokenly, strangely loved, would scream. He is lying there dead, and she is screaming.
Somewhere in the hazy heat of his brain he already understood that he would never kill himself; he lived so gently and passionately, he was of a different constitution, he had warm blood, which was destined to flow easily in its course around his body, and wouldn’t escape through a vein, or a slit throat, or a punctured chest.
He listened to the inner pulsing he died… died, and he drifted off, alive, with outstretched arms. That’s how you sleep when you’re condemned to happiness, to the gentleness of others, accessible and light to the taste.
Sometimes rats would run along the wooden flooring.
Grandma poisoned the rats, sprinkling something white in the corners. They ate it at night, cursing and squeaking.
In the mornings he washed himself in the yard, listening to the morning talk: the timid goat, the lively pig, the pushy rooster. And once he forgot to close the door to the hut. He stepped in to find the stupid chickens bustling about near the poison.
He shooed them away, clucking as they went (the stern rooster in the yard answered them). Hopping, shedding feathers, and unable to find the door (the rooster crowing constantly in the yard, the feather-brained poser), the hens finally darted out into the yard.
For a long time, probably for several hours, he was worried that that the chickens would grow melancholy, just as every animal does before death, and then croak: Grandma would be upset. But the chickens survived — maybe they hadn’t eaten much, or more likely, their bird brains were too tiny to understand that they had been poisoned.
The rats survived too, but they began moving much slower, as if they were perpetually lost in thought and no longer in a hurry to go anywhere.
One night, frightened by some rustling, he tuned on the light in the hut. It seemed that the rat was running, but it just couldn’t cross the room. Looking at the unexpected light, it lost its way, and took a strange ring-shaped route, as if it were in the circus.
He grabbed the poker, stretched out his skinny body with its skinny muscles, and hit the rat across the back, and again, and again.
Squatting down, he looked at the sly, half-closed eye, the repugnant tail. He lifted the dead body with the poker, took it out to the yard, and stood, barefoot, looking at the stars with the dead rat.
Since then, he stopped saying at night …he… died…
When he woke up, he would close the squeaky door to the hut where he spent his days and nights, not bothering anyone, reading, looking at the ceiling, and fooling around, and went into the house, where Grandma had gotten up a long time ago to milk the goat, let the hens out, shoo the ducks to the river, and make breakfast. Grandpa would sit at the table with his rimless spectacles on his nose, fixing something and breathing loudly.
He would glance into the large room, see Grandpa’s back, and immediately disappear without a sound, afraid that he might be asked to help. He could take things apart, but putting them back together again… the details lost their meaning, even though just a few minutes ago it had seemed that the pattern was simple and clear. The only thing left then was to sweep away the metal trifles with his hand and irrevocably throw it all into another trash bin, ashamed of himself and smiling stupidly.
“You’re up?” Grandma would say affably, moving quietly, never fussing over the stove.
He would sit down at the table in the small kitchen, watching the winged trajectories of the flies. Then he would get up and grab a swatter — a wooden stick with a black rubber triangle on top, which crushed the flies into pulp with a loud whack.
Killing the flies was an amusement, maybe even a game. The time when he used to play games was not far away at all, he could still reach it. Sometimes in the attic, where he would go searching for old, dusty (and thus even more desirable) books, he would find metal cars without wheels, and was tortured with the desire to take them to his hut, if not to drive them around the floor, at least to admire them.
Grandma was good at keeping silent, and her silence did not require a response.
The potatoes fried, crackling and firing salutes, when she lifted the lid and stirred them.
The salted cucumbers limply lay on the plate, swimming in their weak brine. The lard gathered warmth, softening and spreading its aroma after the coldness from which it had been removed.