Chapter 6
The next day, Melekhov, in a fashionable plastic overcoat, which he made look awkward – his simple round face not harmonizing well with the futuristic product of the Riga atelier – walked into the muddy foyer of the "Komsomol" Theatre, where the Bookseller had set up his tables. He took from his case, which he had laid on its side, a time-yellowed book in a shredded paper cover, covered with tracings.
"There!" said Melekhov. "Let's start with this one. This forms the base, the foundation. Without this book the contemporary world will be impenetrable for you. If you don't understand it – don't worry. You don't have to grasp it all at once. If you want, I can then explain the unclear parts to you. You have to pay really careful attention with this book!" – And, having furnished the Bookseller with the adress of the boiler-room at which he worked, Melekhov walked off to his shift, carrying in one hand his sack stuffed with books and abstracts. Ed took a look at the book. Introduction to Psychoanalysis. S. Freud. With Preface by Professor Ermakov.
"Tolik Melekhov's a really good guy. Get to know him!" commented The Zombie, who had set up next to Ed. It was the end of the month, It was the end of the month, the bookstore was trying to fulfil the plan, so they'd sent The Zombie along to help the Bookseller. "And how well he knows books!" The Zombie enthusiastically wiped her always-moist eyelashes. "Oooo! Tolik's got a real library! But he's really poor. He assembled it book by book, out of sheer devotion. What a guy!" The Zombie even clicked her tongue. "How lucky Anka is! What a husband he'll be!" The Zombie very much wanted to get married herself, and although she was still only twenty, from time to time The Zombie lamented her fate, still unfastened by the bonds of wedlock. Meanwhile, she was seeing some Yurii, practicing for pregnancy and householding.
"Who's this Anka?" wondered the Bookseller, thinking, Isn't it that maybe-Jewish lady with the stiletto heels and eyes as sharp as her heels, to whom Borka Churilov introduced him in the "Poetry" store?
"Anka Volkova's the daughter of a very important man!" said the Zombie very significantly, and for some reason in a whisper, as if entrusting to a comrade an old secret. Her pale-blue face, like that of a chicken which has been dead for several days, shone with her particular sort of religious rapture. "Anka Volkova's the daughter of Volkov himself!" and The Zombie stared triumphantly at her workmate.
"But who's Volkov?" wondered the ex-foundry-worker.
"Are you kidding? You don't know who Volkov is?" The Zombie suddenly stood up behind the counter and firmly grabbed an adolescent hooligan by the hand. The Bookseller got up too, and together the two of them managed to get the stolen book out of the thief's spacious overcoat. Then, having given the would-be thief a slap on the head, The Zombie sighed.
"Volkov," she said, "is the director of the Kharkov Meat-Fish Trust."
"Meat-Fish Trust" made no impression whatever on the Bookseller. Secretary of OBKOM, General of the KGB – there were several titles which could impress him. But "Director of the the Meat-Fish Trust"?
"So is she pretty, this girl?"
"You mean you never saw her – Anka? She comes here often. She was in the store just yesterday. Wears glasses. Tall. Rimless glasses."
The Bookseller recalled this girl. Glasses. Surprised pink cheeks. Nothing fantastic, maybe a certain assurance in her manner… But for all his erudition, Melekhov had a simple peasant face. Even after a year the Bookseller would say, "The face of an intellectual of the first generation." But now he changed his definition: "A simple face – in fact, a peasant's face."
Obviously the Bookseller's dreams of the grandeur of the "Meat-Fish Trust" and of the daughter of its director showed on his face, because The Zombie filled in more detail on Anka Volkov. "Anka's very spoiled, and a girl of character. She loves Melekhov, but still torments him a lot. See, Anka also studies Philology. That's how they met."
The Bookseller looked at his watch and started piling his books in the sack. The Zombie didn't object, and joined in putting away the goods. It was a quarter to eight. Early. Liliya always asked them to stay in the foyer of the theatre at least til a quarter-hour after tickets for the eight-o'clock showing were sold. Director Liliay insisted that book-lovers always chose this showing. The Bookseller knew that, counting the group of hooligans who had chosen the foyer of the "Komsolol" for their headquarters, the guys who had arranged to meet their dates there among the cracked batteries, there wasn't a soul in the foyer of the theatre by eight o'clock. So what books were they going to sell? Out on the street it was snowing hard, and people had long since gone home from work.
"Anka and Tolik want to get married. Anka's Mama is on their side, but her father doesn't know about it. They're afraid to tell him that Tolik even exists. He probably won't agree to it. Melekhov has no father, but his mother's a yardworker. The father wanted to give his only daughter Anna to someone of his own circle…" – The Zombie babbled as usual and as usual put the books into the strong, durable sack, while the Bookseller, Ed, tightens the drawstring of the sack.
"They marry off their daughters, just like in bourgeois society," grumbled the Bookseller. "Who's Anka anyway… what's it to her who Melekhov's father was… 'Yardworker-Mother' – Anka, with her glasses, will look just as much like the daughter of a yardworker!"
"And what's your father?" Asked The Zombie.
"A captain," admits the Bookseller. In the past couple of years, he's grown indifferent to what rank his father holds. Before, he was embarrassed about his father-captain. Another time he would have lied, and said that his father was a colonel. Why would he have lied? Maybe in order that the effulgent radiance of a full regimental colonel might have shone its social light on him, Eduard.
"Captain of what?"
"God only knows of what now. I lived with my parents for so few years that I don't even know where he serves." This answer was truthful. Captain Savyenko worked, in his time, in the NKVD/MVD. Where he works now, Eduard has no idea.
"Guys! They sent us to take you away!" The poet Vladimir Motrich appeared in the foyer of the theatre, in person, shaking the snow from his lordly fur coat. Behind him entered a tall, stooped youth with a fat, dark face and a shiny profile. The youth stared amusedly and condescendingly at the books, at The Zombie, and at Ed. From one of the batteries in another corner of the hall, the hooligans, who until this moment had been peacefully carving coarse words into the plaster with their knives, greeted Motrich. Motrich answered the hooligans with a haughty circling gesture, hand over his head. Of course, the hooligans didn't read Motrich's verses, but Motrich lived on Rimarskoy Street, which runs parallel to Sumskaya, right past the theatre; that is to say, he was local, and and the local hooligans knew him.
"Let me introduce you, Ed – this is the painter Misha Basov," ceremoniously stepping aside in order to give the Bookseller the opportunity to see the youth with the shiny profile. By the attentive way in which he stood aside – the care, thoughtfulness, even – it could be seen that the shiny youth was his close friend, and that Motrich was proud of him. The youth stared unceremoniously at the Bookseller. It might not be fair to call his glance haughty. But an untroubled arrogance was in this glance. The Bookseller noticed that the youth somewhat resembled a portrait from the beginning of the century – possibly he looked like Aleksandr Blok, the only poet, besides Yesenin, whose work the Bookseller knew well. Borka Churilov, back when they worked together in the foundry shop, gave him, for his birthday, nine blue volumes of Blok. Borka, like Pygmalion, guided our young hero into life.