How lovely it was to float and meander through time—and time meanders through you and melts away behind, and the sound of the sea keeps beckoning; time to take a trip to the South and breathe the sea air, stand on the shore stretching your arms and listening to the wind…. How sweetly life melts away—the children, and loving Fedya, and the anticipation of the white bedroom. The guests are envious; well, my dears, go ahead and envy, enormous happiness awaits me up ahead— what kind, I won’t say, I myself don’t know, but voices whisper, “Just wait, wait!” Petyunya, sitting over there biting his nails, is envious. He doesn’t have a wife or an apartment, he’s puny, he’s ambitious, he wants to be a journalist, he loves bright ties, we should give him ours, the orange one, we don’t need it, happiness awaits us. Elya and Alyosha are also envious, they don’t have any children, they’ve gone and gotten a dog, how boring.
Old man Ashkenazi sitting there, he’s envious of my youth, my white bedroom, my ocean roar; farewell, old man, it will soon be time for you to leave, your eyes shut tight under copper coins. Now Svetlana… she envies no one, she has everything, but it’s only imaginary, her eyes and her frightful mouth burn like fire—Fedya shouldn’t sit so close—her talk is crazy, kingdoms rise and fall by the dozens in her head all in one night. Fedya shouldn’t sit so close. Fedya! Come sit over here. She’s spinning her yarns and you’re all ears?
Life was happy and easy, they laughed at Petyunya, at his passion for ties, said he was destined for a great journalistic future, asked him ahead of time not to put on airs if he traveled overseas; Petyunya was embarrassed, and he wrinkled his mousy little face: What are you talking about, guys, let’s hope I make it through the institute!
Petyunya was wonderful, but sort of rumpled, and, moreover, he tried to play up to Rimma, though only indirectly, to be sure: he would slice onions for her in the kitchen and hint that he, frankly, had plans for his life. Oh-ho! Rimma laughed. What plans could he have, when such incredible things awaited her! You’d be better offsetting your sights on Elya, she’ll dump Alyosha anyway. Or else Svetka-Pipetka over there. Pipetka was getting married, Petyunya said. To whom, I’d like to know?
It was soon discovered to whom: to old man Ashkenazi. The old man, feeling sorry for Pipka’s little feet in their children’s boots, for her frozen little hands, distressed about her night-time taxi expenses, and all in all succumbing to a teary senile altruism, conceived the idea—behind Rimma’s back!—of marrying that vagrant who blazed with a black fire and of registering her, naturally, in the living space promised to Rimma and Fedya. A scene complete with sedatives ensued. “You should be ashamed, shame on you!” cried Rimma, her voice breaking. “But I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of,” answered the old man from the couch, where he lay amid broken springs, his head thrown back to stop the flow of blood from his nose. Rimma applied cold compresses and sat up with him all night. When the old man dozed off, his breathing shallow and irregular, she measured the window in his room. Yes, the white material was the right width. Light blue wallpaper over here. In the morning they made up. Rimma forgave the old man, he cried, she gave him Fedya’s shirt and fed him hot pancakes. Svetlana heard something about it and didn’t show up for a long time. Then Petyunya also vanished and the guess was that Svetlana had carried him off to Perlovka. Everyone who ended up there disappeared for ages, and when they returned they were not themselves for quite some time.
Petyunya showed up one evening six months later with a vague expression on his face, his trousers covered to the waist in mud. Rimma had trouble getting anything out of him. Yes, he had been there. He helped Pipka with the work. It was a very hard life. Everything was very complicated. He had walked all the way from Perlovka. Why was he covered in mud? Oh, that… He and Pipka had wandered around Perlovka with kerosene lanterns all last night, looking for the right house. A Circassian had given birth to a puppy. Yes, that’s what happened. Yes, I know—Petyunya pressed his hands to his chest—I know that there aren’t any Circassian people in Perlovka. This was the last one. Svetlana says she knows for sure. It’s a very good story for the “Only Facts” column of the newspaper. “What’s got into you, are you off your rocker too?” asked Rimma, blinking. “Why do you say that? I saw the puppy myself.” “And the Circassian?” “They weren’t letting anyone in to see him. It was the middle of the night, after all. “Sleep it off,” said Rimma. They put Petyunya in the hall with the junk. Rimma fretted, tossing and turning all night, and in the morning she decided that “Circassian” was a dog’s name. But at breakfast she couldn’t bring herself to increase the lunacy with questions, and, anyway, Petyunya was glum and soon left.
Then all of a sudden Svetlana had to move her things from Perlovka to some other place right away—figuring out the geography of it was useless; it had to be by taxi, of course, and for some reason Fedya’s help was absolutely essential. Hesitating a bit, Rimma let him go. It was ten in the morning, so it wasn’t very likely that anything could… He returned at three that night, behaving very strangely. “Where were you?” Rimma was waiting in the hall in her nightgown. “You see, there were a lot of complications…. We ended up having to go to Serpukhov, she has twins in the Children’s Home there.” “What twins?” Rimma shouted. “Tiny ones, about a year old, I think. Siamese. their heads are joined together. Karina and Angela.” “What heads? Are you out of your mind? She’s been coming here for ages. Have you ever noticed her having a baby?” No, of course he hadn’t noticed her having a baby or anything like that, but they really did go to Serpukhov, and they did drop off a package: frozen hake. That’s right, hake for the twins. He himself stood in the cashier’s line to pay for the fish. Rimma burst into tears and slammed the door. Fedya remained in the hall, scratching at the door and swearing that he himself didn’t understand anything, but that they were called Karina and Angela—of that he was sure.
After that Pipka disappeared again for a long while, and the episode was forgotten. But for the first time something in Rimma cracked—she looked around and saw that time kept Mowing on, yet the future still hadn’t arrived, and Fedya was not so handsome anymore, and the children had picked up bad words on the street, and old man Ashkenazi coughed and lived on, and wrinkles had already crept up to her eyes and mouth, and the junk in the hallway was still just lying there. And the roar of the ocean had grown muffled, and they hadn’t gone to the South after all—everything had been put off until the future, which just didn’t want to arrive.
Troubled days followed. Rimma lost heart; she kept trying to understand at what point she’d taken the wrong path leading to that far-off, melodious happiness, and often she sat lost in thought; meanwhile, her children were growing up and Fedya sat in front of the television, not wanting to write his dissertation, and outside the window either a cottony blizzard blew or an insipid city sun peeked through summer clouds. Their friends grew old, it became harder for them to get themselves going, Petyunya had completely vanished somewhere, flashy ties went out of fashion, Elya and Alyosha got another unruly dog, and there was no one to leave it with evenings. At Rimma’s job new coworkers had appeared, big Lucy and little Lucy, but they didn’t know about Rimma’s plans for happiness and didn’t envy her; rather, they envied Kira from the planning department, who had a large, expensive wardrobe, who exchanged hats for books, books for meat, meat for medicine or hard-to-come-by theater tickets, and spoke in an irritated tone of voice to someone on the phone: “But you know perfectly well how much I love jellied tongue.”