door opened and I cried as on the bus to Romny, "I have a ticket! I have a ticket!"
"Very well. But could you be quieter? The concert is on."
The hall there began right next to the entrance, without any vestibule.
"Excuse me."
But the grudger went on to murmur in resentment.
"Wanna me apologize anew?"
And he shut up because I had the time to doff my brown raincoat of the meek-geek-in-a-deep-shit cut and disclose the brazenly proletarian corduroy bob-coat from the shocking blue slice of the specter. Any not too deeply touched porter would see it was not his chance for molesting spineless intelligentsia here. Moreover, with my secret agent hat off, a strand of hair sprang like a spring stuck up from amid my pate. There was no way to suppress it, even after the shower the stubborn strand, when it got dry, cocked up again.
(…about thirty years later, the hair style of explosion imitation became an everyday fashion. That's how gravely I was shocked by being cut off from Eera…)
So he shut up. Quite reasonably.
In the concert's first part, they played some modern atonal symphony – a tormenting screech of shredded notes from abrupt tunes smashed into sharp shards and swept up into jugged heaps… But in the second, the organ sounded the fugues of Bach…
The miracle come to pass in January… I arrived in Nezhyn to visit Zhomnir and, on a bus starting from the station, I saw Ivan Alexeyevich. He asked me how came that I had not been seen for so long.
Keeping back a sob in my throat, I replied that Eera forbade me to show up.
"Forget it! Come on, let's go!"
I still got off the bus on Shevchenko Street and later phoned from the Zhomnirs. Eera also said, yes, come. The remaining 7 bus stops to Red Partisans I rode outwardly calm but breasting the storm-churned waves of the tempest inside…
Lots of changes occurred in the months of my absence. Eera, together with you, moved to the former bedroom of Tonya's family. Her parents went over into the narrower bedroom.
The living-room was left as it was: "The Unknown Beauty" with the same contemptuous air looked from the hutch, and the rich merchant's daughter crookedly trotted from the major pinching his mustache. But in your bedroom there stood a new dressing table with a crowd of un-figure-outable but so necessary cosmetic tubes and vials. A wide yellow ring of gold lay close-by the mirror.
To my cautious inquiries, Eera said that the pier was bought by her father, and her mother presented her with the ring. And we began to live on further…
The construction site… Nezhyn… The construction site… Nezhyn…
Eera worked as a caretaker in the kindergarten 200 meters down Red Partisans Street. Her duties included registering the state of health among the kids in her group. The copybook with records in her handwriting slanted to the left, about how the kids were each day of the week, was dropped atop the dressing table.
I only once opened that copybook, and ever after I tried to not even look at it, so as not to die of jealousy. It became absolutely clear that there was no need to tread along the path of righteousness any farther, and no use escaping the inevitable because it had already happened.
(…certain thoughts are better never to be thought at all but left alone and, if heedlessly started, they’d better be dropped and not thought down the road to their harsh conclusions…)
Shame didn't let me ask Eera of how she lived those months, or what she was doing in between my weekend visits, but when I saw in that copybook that on Thursday only half of Eera's group came to attend and even that half ill with a cold I knew that on Wednesday she had a date.
I was dying of jealousy but kept silent. Life became a kinda racing thru a maze full of stenciled warnings – don't take that turn, don't look that side, don't think that thought so as to dodge the claws and fangs of anguish…
Then Eera introduced the new order of putting you to sleep next to her on the double bed, and I was bedded on the folding bed-armchair. Sometimes she came to me in the dark, sometimes not, and then I did not sleep for long after the midnight, in the bitter pangs of jealousy…
Only once I was happy about not having a sex with her. It happened after a ride on an overcrowded bus with ice-glazed windows from the station to Red Partisans. Somewhere halfway up I suddenly felt an anus penetration. I never experienced the enema, nor probe insertion in my life, so the feeling was unfamiliar and inexplicable amid the crowd of passengers in their coats and sheepskins. After the main square, the crowd drastically thinned but I still felt as if ass-raped midst a bus-load of strap-hangers.
Exactly for that reason, I did not insist on having sex that night, because I was afraid that Eera would later have it with the fucker who had fucked me on the bus. Of course, such positioning of the cause and effect might, after all, be contrary to the actual flow of events, however, I dreaded to consider such a probability and kicked away all of the anal-sadistic speculations on that point…
~ ~ ~
End February, there was a working-day Saturday, aka "black Sabbath". Each year had 6 Saturdays of that color and not only in SMP-615. However, I firmly refused to participate and after work on Friday went to Nezhyn.
I had a lonely dinner in the kitchen because Eera told you not to disturb your daddy when he's eating, and took you away to the living room. Then I went over to the bedroom, so as not to disturb everyone watching TV in the living room. Besides, there was no place to get seated because your aunt Vitta had come from Chernigov to stay with the parents for her vacation.
You also came to the bedroom and we grew