The sun is high. Tourists cruise by, like fish, in schools. In couples. Half-naked metropolitan tourists and foreign tourists, with hairy legs, in foreign shorts, in streaky, bleached denim, in bright, sexy T-shirts.
Pishchutin ignores the species known as “tourist.” Today is his day off. He has come to the riverfront promenade. To rest. To think. He thinks a lot, and then spends his evenings writing into the small hours. Pishchutin is a writer.
He is dressed in a navy blue, velvet suit: Pishchutin abhors modern populism. He may have just one suit in his wardrobe, but this suit is fashioned from serious fabric – Finnish velvet, real Finnish velvet from the discarded curtain of the local theater.
Out of the corner of his eye Pishchutin notices people noticing him. He knows that the extraordinary figure he cuts draws attention. He understands the people, and he pities them – they are wasting their lives, with no thought for the eternal. He forgives them. He tries to love them. But he doesn’t always succeed. Because still, they are the unwashed masses. Small souls. Sometimes at night he cries at his desk, unable to write – his pen is merciless, but he is not.
He has a gold-tipped pen from China – these are the most comfortable, easy on the hand. After all, what is Russian literature? It is love, plus pity for the oppressed and the aggrieved, plus the fierce chastisement of the plebeians and the burgers. The real literature is all in the past, and it is aristocratic. The task today is to bring it back. One could spend a life at such a task. This is why a writer must be above the fray, above the crowd.
Pishchutin takes a seat in a terrace café. Today he will have some champagne. But the waiter does not come – he is a local, that eyesore; he knows Pishchutin, and one must be patient and wait with a disinterested attitude. Patience is the most important thing in life. A real writer is always lonely and poor in the beginning. Sometimes, his entire life.
Now, when his fame comes, then he’ll donate to the church and orphanages. And, of course, he must donate something to the City Parks department; it’s intolerable how dirty the city is. The riverfront is the only place they care to maintain; they make a Disneyland out of it for the foreign tourists. For shame. He’ll have to give them a hundred thousand or so.
The calculations consume Pishchutin. In half an hour he orders a bottle of champagne, casually, and a bar of chocolate. He drinks slowly. He enjoys the drink. He nibbles on the chocolate delicately and rolls it around inside his mouth, submerged in champagne. But he maintains a disinterested attitude.
He sits, one hand with an intentionally cultivated long pinkie nail draped at his side. He tries not to look at the tourists.
Not to yield to the moment, not to relax – to think, think through the myriad plots and stories he has in his head. It is amazing what imagination can do. What his imagination can do. It’s too bad he won’t live long enough to write everything down, everything that daily presents itself to his gaze. He must work, work!
Today is off, comp time for tomorrow’s working Saturday, followed by Sunday. Today he is looking for the plot, he finds it and polishes it. Tomorrow, after a trip to the market (he needs potatoes; life is prosaic), he will sit down to write the story he will conceive today.
But plots, too many plots swirl and flit about him, like tourists.
Champagne disappears irretrievably, like time (that’s a great simile – he must remember it!), but he mustn’t drain the bottle. He’ll leave some at the bottom. And he won’t finish his chocolate.
No, life is beautiful, like his trusty Finnish velvet. It sparkles, full of stories, and his soul catches its breath, and pities, pities them all…
“Are you crying, pops?” asks an overly-friendly tourist, but Pishchutin wipes his tears and proudly turns away.
“Leave him alone – he’s our local nut, a planner from the museum. He always comes here, once a month, like clockwork: drinks, cries a little and leaves,” the waiter explains as if Pishchutin weren’t sitting right there.
And that’s when Pishchutin rises, puts money on the napkin – with a 70-kopek tip – and leaves.
He walks along the waterfront; he does not see the crowd. He mutters: waiter… tourists… knife… policeman, no, better a retired colonel… and he sees it all so clearly, it is all so alive to him that he cannot stand it anymore and again begins to cry.
“Again, again,” whispers Pishchutin, stunned. “I wanted to take revenge, to satirize, but I instead I pitied them… again tragedy comes instead of laughter.”
Where does this come from? Where? It is a mystery. He does not know. He walks home, not seeing the tourists, or the crowds that hurry home from the bus stop, past the empty stores. He walks, almost to the other end of the city, to his five-story cinder-block apartment building.
He has a small, one-room flat. A closet stuffed with manuscripts, and a large ledger where he records the stories, novellas, and novels that he has sent out to various magazines. He likes order. He cannot take the humiliation of sending someone the same thing twice – that’s why he needs records. He keeps them accurately and he does not despair.
He is not married. He is only 52 and there are so many unwritten stories ahead of him. And the Fame, too, somewhere out there, in the distance, where he cannot yet hear the call of its trumpet.
Twenty Years
“Would you believe it, it was only at his funeral that I learned he used to be the school’s star, 20 years ago. He danced! Can you believe that? He was an officer, you know, he’d seen fire. I can’t even picture it – him, dancing, with his military posture. The school was famous then, not like now, the students from those old classes went places! Sashenka Stroyev sails a merchant vessel on international routes, he’s a Captain; Lenochka Korneva married a Moscow diplomat, last year she sent me Teacher’s Day greetings from Prague; Lyoshenka Stepanov is the party organization secretary at the Kirov plant. Pavlik Boldin – he’s in outer space somewhere, all I know is he prepares our Soyuz rockets for launch. Those old classes don’t forget – they come to their reunions every 10 years; it’s the newer crop that don’t care for the school that much… I only knew him after he’d already started drinking. Sometimes he even showed up tipsy to teach, and the kids didn’t pay him any mind, did whatever they wanted. He buried his first wife 10 years earlier – his son now teaches, also geography, in School No. 2. It was at the funeral that the thought really struck me, for the first time perhaps: here was a man, and now he’s gone – and nothing is different. Of course, in those last years he only kept his job because of the School District Head, Kirill Georgiyevich – he used to be our principal. They started together. They retired from the army together and took the entry exams for the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute at the same time; when they graduated, they got their assignments together. Only Kirill Georgiyevich had the party streak in him, and the other one wasn’t a real fighter. Whenever I chaired the party meetings, he’d always sit in the corner, quietly, but if there was any task to be done, he’d wrinkle his face like so, and sigh – but would complete it conscientiously, with military precision. Eventually, I only charged him with political information sessions for the teachers, but soon he wiggled his way out of that, too. He’d started drinking by then, but I don’t think it was a regular thing yet. But I’ll tell you a secret – Kirill Georgiyevich himself goes on binges as well. The ladies and I worried that he’d lose it after the funeral. And he’d just come out of the hospital, his heart is worthless. They were friends, he and the old geography teacher, you know, real, wartime friends. And another student of his, Sashenka – he cried. His widow stood there like a rock. If you think about it – what’s she got left? They couldn’t have children. Just lived, you know. And the school – it was the school, of course, that did him in. He always carried a big load; he had to work. His second wife is a restoration technician – you know what they make, something between 105 and 120. But to imagine him – an officer! I wouldn’t have believed it. Women couldn’t keep their hands off him, apparently, he was their pet. I never knew him to be like that in all my ten years at the school…”