We drank up our vodka and set about the tea. Nikolai Petrovich used to buy tea on the black market. He was forever blending something, pouring it from one canister to another, sniffing it. “Tea,” he would say, “must be brewed with water brought to a fast boil. Remember that, my friend. But the thing, after letting it draw for five minutes, is to immediately ‘marry’ it.... “ And I watched how, without spilling a drop, Nikolai Petrovich went about “marrying” the tea. To do this, he poured from the teapot a cupful of the thick brick-red brew and then quickly, so as to save the steam that billowed up from under the lid, poured it back. The rite was concluded.
Sometimes he would ask: “Okhlamonov? Would you like some poetry?” And to refuse would have been criminal; besides, I always liked what he wrote. Katenka inhabited his most recent poems. But remember his poetry I never could. Only once did something stick—and stuck for good—something along the lines of:
Actually, I can’t guarantee that I have these lines exactly right.
“How’s life?” asked my host, “have you taken any new pictures?” I should mention that I am a photographer. Not the sort you find in some studio on Petrovka: “Lift your chin. Don’t blink. Click. Two roubles. Click. Three twenty at the cash register.” No. I take pictures of life. As it is. Not tidied up. This is theft, of course. But not voyeurism. Some sharp-tongued lady once said to me: “You’re a voyeur, Okhlamonov, you’re always peeping. There you are right now, looking at me and wondering what I’m like under my buttons.” She was quite wrong. In any case, I don’t agree. The voyeur slips through a hole in the fence, lifts a corner of the window shade. Whereas I take pictures of puddles after rain, drunks at the Tishinsky market, people on the escalator in the metro, fallen leaves in the park. And if among the leaves I should happen upon someone’s bare knee that’s just fate. How was I to know there was a couple there. What interested me was the look of the leaf-strewn alley. And what’s more, I most often work with a telephoto lense—it flattens space, displaces things, turns everyday banalities into dream. As for that lady, let someone else unfasten her. If it were up to me I would add even more buttons. Although that’s a bit harsh.
“What’s new?” I replied. “I really don’t know. Oh, I’ve been asked to give lessons.—Have you any sugar?”
Asking for sugar for tea, I mean for the sort of tea Nikolai Petrovich made, was something akin to a crime. But what could I do? I have a terribly sweet tooth. For example, when I am sad or out of sorts, I buy an Othello, a kind of chocolate cake they always have at our baker’s, and eat it all up, in one go, with a spoon, standing at the window, always gazing out at the same thing—the streetcar stop. An Othello, let me add, weighs 450 grams. “I don’t advise you to take pupils,” said Nikolai Petrovich, getting up for the sugar, “you’ll be worn out. I once had two beginner poets. And you know what? One put the worst words in the best possible order, the other just the opposite: the best words in the worst possible order. If they’d just been Siamese twins‑‑‑‑‑”
“I understand,” I said sadly. After all, a pupil means extra cash. “But just lately I’ve been feeling sort of vague, how can I put it—like in frosty weather when the lens suddenly fogs up and you can’t see a damn thing,...”
“Yes?” grunted Nikolai Petrovich. “Well, I too...,” and briefly rising from his chair he again reached up blindly to the top shelf for the sugar, and fixed me with a look. “Something peculiar is happening to me, Okhlamonov. At first I thought it was a trap set by my age, a dead end...” He was speaking more and more slowly, and then began quite visibly to rise in the air, where he hung, about 20 centimeters off the floor. I could see his old trunk under the bed! Nikolai Petrovich rocked—I’m afraid to say it—playfully back and forth, hanging securely in midair, and waved his arms apologetically. The strangest thing of all is that I took this without surprise. Only my heart skipped a beat and out of the corner of my eye I saw the cat jump off the table and rush to the window.
“It’s really not difficult, Okhlamonov,” said Nikolai Petrovich, letting himself down again. I took the sugar bowl from him. His eyes were smiling. “Would you like me to teach you?”
A month later, when the bird-cherry was in full bloom, Nikolai Petrovich and I took a trip out of town. The train was jammed and we stood packed like sardines on the platform. Some old codger had already stepped on my foot a couple of times. When even more people got on at Chistoprudnaya and I was rammed right up against a fat hulk, I looked round, rose very slightly above the bespattered floor, and hung there. Nikolai Petrovich, smoking an acrid cigaret, immediately grabbed me by the sleeve. “Don’t play the fool,” he said, “we agreed we wouldn’t.”
The first few lessons were absolutely dreamlike. I would listen carefully to Nikolai Petrovich, try to make some sense of his words, watch him inwardly prepare himself. Then a brief spasm would pass over his face and I would see him lift off, only a millimeter at first, then moving effortlessly upward. I listened to his patiently repeated explanations, while he reclined Chagallesque upon the air and told me about the relationship between the will and the body, about the inner (as distinct from the outer) fulcrum. I would grope about for something inside myself, absolutely blind, collapse, slide down, fetch up against some ragged sinister object, surface in the light of the red lampshade, under the searching gaze of my teacher.
He would change the subject, tell me about Gogol, about Bulgakov, he would stretch out upon the air, on the blue-grey layers of tobacco smoke with a copy of The Master and Margarita, the unbuttoned sides of his jacket hung down above me, crumbs of tobacco dribbled from a hole in his pocket, or small change rang down, while in his strange voice he read out the accounts of Margarita’s flights, lines that hurtled headlong, slanted under the angle of attack. “She was a witch, Okhlamonov,” Nikolai Petrovich would say. “But that’s a whole different kettle of fish. You might say that they fly in a different capacity. And it’s not that they have a different technique, they simply move in a different dimension. If one of these beauties should fly right through you, all you’d get as a rule is a headache, or a touch of rheumatism‑‑‑‑‑But there he is, Okhlamonov, the author, you hear? He knew far more about this than he let on in his book.... Not to mention Gogol, long before him.”