Everything was easy and fun, and she didn’t even see her friend wink at her conspiratorially when they parted.
In the morning, Andrei rose early, took a shower, dressed, then came and sat down at the edge of the bed, kissed Mashenka, and asked kindly:
“Did you have a good time?”
“Of course!” Mashenka reached to touch him, but Andrei politely guided her hand aside.
“And you know all good things come at a price, don’t you?”
“Of course. And what’s the price?” Mashenka asked readily, going along with this new game.
“300 rubles.”
“All right, go ahead and grab my make-up case. There’s three hundred in there exactly, I was saving it to buy a coat.”
She watched him as he opened her purse, dug in her make-up case, pulled out and counted the money and put it in his pocket.
“Well, then – Ciao, principessa!”
And he left.
Lyudka found Mashenka at the edge of her wits. Who could blame her – a part of her still waited, hoped the joke would play itself out in some surprising, beautiful way, that he would come back... but another part knew what happened.
Lyudka assessed the situation on the spot. She hugged the wailing Mashenka and shoved her, almost by force, into the shower. Then she packed them both quickly, and led her fooled friend out of the hotel. Lyudka hailed a cab, and they rode somewhere for a while, until they were in a shashlyk cafe in a small park somewhere. Only there did Lyudka allow herself to laugh.
“So, Prince Charming cleaned you out, didn’t he!”
“Stop it!” Mashenka wanted to jump up and leave, but her friend held her down.
“You silly thing!” Lyudka just couldn’t stop laughing. “Look at this!”
Next she produced out of her purse the super-computer watch Andrei had showed off the night before.
“I got up early in the morning – I wanted to give it back to him, but now – oh, Mashka! this is just too funny! – it’s like he sold it to us. Don’t you worry about a thing, we’ll sell the watch – I know the people – and get a coat like you’ve never had before! Furs! I bet we’ll get at least six hundred for it!”
Afterward, they went on a long walk around Moscow and Lyudka comforted Mashenka as best she could, and by the time they boarded their train it seemed she had succeeded.
On the train (Lyudka traveled only first-class, sleeping car), the girls had tea with biscuits and then turned off the lights. In the dark, they sat together on one birth, hugging each other, Mashenka whispering breathlessly, in a happy voice, and Lyudka giggling, and then they fell asleep.
4. Vladimir Gilyarovsky, a journalist, best known for his reminiscences about life in the pre-revolutionary Moscow, Moscow and Muscovites, published in 1926 (in English from Russian Life books, 2013).
Clever Elsa
Really, it’s enough to make us laugh. Picture this: just the other day, these two girls show up at our doorstep, fresh-faced students from the Moscow State University Slavic Department, in Stargorod for the first time; they stayed with us for the night. A friend of mine had arranged this, and sent us a package, much appreciated. They brought the usual things: some sausage without too much fat, three packs of Indian tea, and a whole kilogram of buckwheat. That’s nothing to sneeze at, especially the buckwheat – we’ll do it up with some onions, and a bit of garlic, and some bacon fat, and a tiny drop of oil so it doesn’t burn, and “It’s a treat, for those who know!” as our mother-in-law puts it. The metropolitan maidens enlightened us that, beside familiarizing themselves with Stargorod’s many historical sites, they wished to collect folklore, because... well, suffice it to say that upon hearing their nonsense, my wife and I saw the urgent need to talk them out of this project, because what kind of folklore could the poor things possibly find in our city? They’d just perish, vanish off the face off the earth, and no high-placed friends would help you find them. Long story short, we rerouted them to Kargopol. We hear people there are nicer, and an old lady storyteller lives there – for ten rubles she’ll sing to you about Eruslan Lazarevich until the cows come home. You’ve never heard such folklore.
The girls got excited, bought new tickets, and, basically, we haven’t seen them since. And thank God for that. We know plenty well what Stargorod is like, and they’d never end well here. And this way, they probably wrote long papers, and nice ones too. The girls were smart and cute, not the kind you could let roam Stargorod on their own. Well, “any serious pursuit requires a habit of intellect” as our boiler-room stoker Mikhail Nikanorovich used to say, God rest his soul, you don’t find people like that these days.
There’s hardly any folklore to speak of: our gusli ensemble Russian Skomorokhs and the Birch spoon-players from the Red Proletariat factory spend all their time touring places like Finland and Sweden these days, you hardly even get a chance to hear them at home. So we have to admit that whatever folklore we had is all gone to seed, so to speak. But we do have stories every once in a while.
People around here are for the most part not especially rich; the co-op guys – they’ve made a pretty penny,5 and did the Intourist-type moonlighters, but you know their kind – they spend more in one night at the Riflemen Izba than they make in a month. When your money’s quick, it’s work holding on to it. We have our misers, too, of course, who doesn’t? Now, a friend of ours – a lieutenant at the detox that’s housed in the White Monastery on the hill, Anatoly Kretov is his name – told us that he is personally aware (this is through his old connections at the Criminal Unit) of at least two old ladies in town who have 300,000 and 500,000 rubles in their savings accounts respectively. You’d think they’d live a little – and you’d be wrong. Instead, both beg about, look for bottles to turn in for small change, spend their entire days combing through the Victory Park, and haunt the bathhouse. They live in two tiny holes under the merry-go-round on Jolly Hill and pay nobody no mind. Anatoly said they are under secret surveillance – they’ve no family, so it’ll all go back to the government when they croak, but they seem to have plenty of life in them yet...
Or take Stolbyshev, Matvei Semyonovich. You’ve probably heard of him already, only you didn’t know his name and where he came from – we ourselves heard his story in Moscow and Leningrad presented as a genuinely local tale. I wouldn’t be surprised if people in Tver, or, say, Arzamas, soon followed suit and laid their claim on Matvei Semyonovich, but do not let them fool you. We know this for a fact: Stolbyshev is ours, born and raised in Stargorod, and a widely known nut, who’s been to the clinic many times, but was always ultimately let out to return to his usual pursuit – going to the dump to collect various pieces of trash, such as old galoshes, smashed pots, dead birds’ wings, ratchets, padded blankets, and soiled railroad workers’ vests. He wasn’t above picking up a handful of nice dry dirt or some moldy bread crusts either. He dragged all this loot into his tiny room, where he stomped it nice and tight until he packed the entire space up to the ceiling, even blocked out his only window and only left himself a narrow path and a bit of space to set up his cot for the night. The neighbors, finally, caught a whiff of it – you can imagine the smell. Terrible! They sued. They won, of course, and brought in a marshal. This made Matvei Semyonovich very happy: “I’ve been waiting for this for so long,” he said, “I want to make sure the assets are transferred to the government in a proper and legal manner.” By then he’d chained himself to the radiator, so they couldn’t drag him out of his room. “The assets in this room,” he declared, “are worth more than a million! I wish to turn them all over to the government, and in return I would like very little: a room in a first-category retirement home and a military funeral.” And how are you supposed to fight with him, if he’d hidden the key somewhere and you’ve got a court order to clean the place out anyway?