This is it, it’s over. Here no grass grows. The soil is frozen, the earth is narrow and stony, and ahead only one sign glows: exit.
But Vassily Mikhailovich was not willing.
He sat in the hallway of the beauty shop and waited for his wife. Through the open door he could see the crowded room, partitioned with mirrors, where three… three women his own age squirmed in the hands of mighty blond furies. Could he call what was multiplying in the mirrors “ladies”? With growing horror, Vassily Mikhailovich peered at what sat closest to him. A curly-haired siren planted her feet firmly, grabbed itby the head, pulled it back onto a waiting metal sink, and splashed it with boiling water: steam rose; she lathered wildly; more steam, and before Vassily Mikhailovich could cry out she had fallen upon her victim and was choking it with a white terry towel. He looked away. In another chair—my God—long wires were attached to a reddened, albeit very happy head, with protruding diodes, triodes, and resistors…. In the third chair, he realized, was Yevgeniya Ivanovna, and he went over to her. What at home appeared to be her hair was now wrinkled up, revealing her scalp, and a woman in a white coat was dabbing at it with a stick dipped in a liquid. The odor was stifling.
“Take off your coat!” several voices cried.
“Zhenya, I’m going for a walk, just a quick circle,” Vassily Mikhailovich said, waving his arm. He had felt weak in the legs since morning, his heart was thumping and he was thirsty.
In the lobby stiff green sabers grew hilt-down out of large pots, and photographs of bizarre creatures with not-so-nice hints in their eyes stared from the walls under incredible hair— towers, icing, rams’ horns; or, ripples like mashed potatoes in fancy restaurants. And Yevgeniya Ivanovna wanted to be one of them.
A cold wind blew, and small dry flakes fell from the sky. The day was dark, empty, brief; its evening had been born with the dawn. Lights burned brightly and cozily in the small stores. A tiny, glowing, sweet-smelling store, a box of miracles, had grown onto the corner. You couldn’t get in: people were pushing and shoving, reaching over heads with their chits, grabbing little somethings. A fat woman was trapped in the doorway, she clutched the jamb, she was being carried away by the flow.
“Let me out! Let me get out!”
“What’s in there?”
“Lip gloss!”
Vassily Mikhailovich joined the jostling. Woman, woman, do you exist?… What are you?… High up a Siberian tree your hat blinks its eyes in fear; a cow gives birth in suffering so you can have shoes; a lamb is sheared screaming so you can warm yourself with its fleece; a sperm whale is in its death throes; a crocodile weeps; a doomed leopard pants, fleeing. Your pink cheeks come from boxes of flying dust, your smiles from golden containers with strawberry filling, your smooth skin from tubes of grease, your gaze from round transparent jars—He bought Yevgeniya Ivanovna a pair of eyelashes.
…Everything is predestined and you can’t swerve—that’s what bothered Vassily Mikhailovich. You don’t pick wives: they simply appear out of nowhere by your side, and you’re struggling in fine netting, bound hand and foot; hobbled and gagged, you’re taught thousands and thousands of stifling derails of transient life, put on your knees, your wings clipped; and the darkness gathers, and sun and moon still run and run chasing each other along a circle, the circle, the circle.
It was revealed to Vassily Mikhailovich how to clean spoons, and the comparative physiology of meatballs and patties; he knew by heart the grievously brief lifespan of sour cream—one of his responsibilities was destroying it at the first signs of mortal agony—he knew the birthplaces of brooms and whisks, distinguished professionally among grains, had in his head all the prices of glassware, and every autumn wiped windowpanes with ammonium chloride to eradicate the ice cherry orchards that planned to grow by winter.
At times Vassily Mikhailovich imagined that he would finish out this life and begin a new one in a new image. He fussily selected his age, an era, his looks: sometimes he wanted to be born a fiery southern youth; or a medieval alchemist; or the daughter of a millionaire; or a widow’s beloved cat; or a Persian king. Vassily Mikhailovich calculated, compared, deliberated, made conditions, grew ambitious, rejected all suggested possibilities, demanded guarantees, huffed, grew tired, lost his train of thought; and, leaning back in his armchair, stared long and hard in the mirror at himself—the one and only.
Nothing happened. Vassily Mikhailovich was not visited by a six-winged seraph or any other feathery creature with offers of supernatural services; nothing burst open, there was no voice from the heavens, no one tempted him, carried him aloft, or hurled him down. The three-dimensionality of existence, whose finale was ever approaching, suffocated Vassily Mikhailovich; he tried to get off the tracks, drill a hole in the sky, leave through a drawing of a door. Once, dropping off sheets at the laundry, Vassily Mikhailovich stared into the blossoming clover of cotton expanses, and noticed that the seven-digit notation sewn onto the northeast resembled a telephone number; he secretly called, and was graciously welcomed, and began a boring joyless affair with a woman named Klara. Klara’s house was just like Vassily Mikhailovich’s, with the same clean kitchen, although the windows faced north, and the same cot, and as he got into Klara’s starched bed Vassily Mikhailovich saw yet another telephone number in the corner of the pillow case; he doubted that his fate awaited him there, but, bored by Klara, he called and found the woman Svetlana with her nine-year-old son; in Svetlanas linen closet, clean folded linen lay with pieces of good soap in between the layers.
Yevgeniya Ivanovna sensed that something was up, looked for clues, rummaged in his pockets, unfolded scraps of paper, unaware that she was sleeping in the pages of a large telephone book with Klara’s telephone number, or that Klara dreamed in Svetlanas telephone numbers, or that Svetlana reposed, as it turned out, in the number of the accounting department of the social security office.
Vassily Mikhailovich’s women never did learn of one another’s existence; but of course, Vassily Mikhailovich did not pester them with information about himself. And where would he have gotten a surname, a job, an address, or say, a zip code —he, the phantom of blanket covers and pillow cases, born of the whims of chance of the laundry office?
Vassily Mikhailovich stopped the experiment, not because of the social security office; it was just that he realized that the attempt to escape the system of coordinates was a failure. It wasn’t a new, unheard-of road with breathtaking possibilities that opened before him, not a secret path into the beyond, no; he had simply felt around in the dark and grabbed the usual wheel of fate and if he went around it hand over hand, along the curve, along the circle, he would eventually end up with himself, from the other side.
For, after all, somewhere in the bustling crowd, in the thick tangle of back streets, a nameless old woman was tossing a sack of worn linen marked with a seven-digit cryptogram into a small wooden window: you were enciphered in it, Vassily Mikhailovich. In all fairness, you belong to the old woman. She has every right to you—what if she makes her demand? You don’t want that? Vassily Mikhailovich—no, no, no—didn’t want a strange old woman, he was afraid of her stockings, and her feet, and her yeasty smell, and the creak of bedsprings under her white elderly body, and he was sure she’d have a tea mushroom growing in a three-liter jar—a slippery eyeless silent creature, living years very quietly on the windowsill without splashing even once.
But the one who holds the thread of fate in his hands, who determines meetings, who sends algebraic travelers from Point A to Point B, who fills pools from two pipes, had already marked with a red X the intersections where he was to meet Isolde. Now, of course, it was quite some time since she had passed away.