Philip, the father of the twins, was pacing back and forth like a panther in his small apartment. Christmas Eve was an especially difficult time for him. Numerous friends had invited him for dinner with their families, but all invitations had been declined with the made-up excuse of an engagement elsewhere. In the week before Christmas, he had tried repeatedly to get in touch with someone at his wife’s house, but the phone had rung in vain. Now he was trying to resist the urge to go out, and only the hope of a call from one of the children, or Maria, stopped him. Why the hell hadn’t he gotten an answering machine? He knew that, at the end of the day, he would leave the house and bury himself in one of his regular haunts.
He should have accepted one of the invitations, like he had done the year before. But he had decided not to for some unknown reason, and had thus painted himself into a corner. He could not understand why he felt such indomitable rage — which he knew to be the source of his misery. Yet, he was convinced that if he subdued his anger, if he became humble, he would be finished.
He downed another small glass of vodka and continued pacing his kitchen. A distant sound of inconsolable weeping always accompanied him, and after each moment of forgetfulness, Philip returned to his internal restraint, the stake next to which he lay like a chained dog.
Of course, he could “work on himself,” as his doctor used to say, words one would expect from a communist youth leader at a high school party meeting. But why work on himself, why try to become other? In order to feel better, was the inevitable answer. At times he felt like he was crawling, squeezing his shoulders through a tunnel too narrow to turn back. It’s possible to go back, everyone said, but Philip didn’t want to. He wanted to have it all, now and here. He wanted Maria, he wanted his children, he wanted himself with his children and Maria. He could picture himself being with them. Whenever he fell into drunken reveries — the only moments the emptiness around him became animated — he surrendered to such dreams.
He banged the glass on the kitchen counter with sudden determination, grabbed his coat on his way to the door, and rushed to the car waiting faithfully for him downstairs.
33. Revolution and the Head
Mr. V. stirred and felt that he was barefoot. Pleasant warmth was coming from the fire and he opened one eye. There they were, his pink feet heated by the flames. Someone had taken off his shoes and socks, and Mr. V. realized that he had been sound asleep. The lights were out and the door was closed. He was probably alone in the room. He could hear steps and voices and music on the other side. The smell of delicious things awoke his senses.
His next thought made him jump. Madame, Christmas Eve, and everything else. He gave a snort that sounded like a perfect imitation of a horse, a liberty he took only when he was alone.
But then he noticed that he was not alone. He could feel a presence by the massive desk in the corner. He turned toward the noise and made out a dim shape on the desk. The thing was alive and getting to its feet. A cat, Mr. V. guessed. Pavoné, Fanny’s cat, Fanny’s notorious, misanthropic cat.
The creature had fixed its glimmering eyes on him and was slowly rising, which made Mr. V. very uneasy. His bare feet stayed where they were, but the yellow irises kept rising and rising above endlessly stretching paws. Good God, that’s not Pavoné, but some nightmarish beast a devil has bred for some hellish purpose!
At this moment the clock on the wall struck the hour. The cat continued to uncoil its body, bigger and bigger with each chime…
After what seemed an eternity, Mr. V.’s head filled with silence, the cat stopped growing, and its mouth opened into a gigantic yawn. Fanny came in and wished him Merry Christmas.
Mr. V. braced himself for a battle. He searched around for his socks and his shoes and was very soon surrounded by people laughing and talking excitedly. Everyone was searching, but the socks and shoes were nowhere to be found. Mr. V. remained irrevocably barefoot. Suddenly he realized he was starving.
They led him into the kitchen, where he enjoyed the most revolutionary feast in his life. He was eating ferociously, as if in a struggle to change the entire world order. He threw himself on the innumerable plates and glasses with a force that gathered in itself everything he would have to later explain to Madame. An onlooker would have thought that, instead of taking energy from the food, he was expending great amounts of it by chewing and swallowing, all the time oblivious to his bare feet.
At some point he caught sight of his chauffeur, who was walking with a wet towel around his head and a glass in his hand. The chauffeur smiled apologetically and Mr. V. responded with a shrug of his shoulders. War is war, nothing to be done about that.
34. Kids
Philip settled for one of the crowded bars where he was a regular. He was known by a name different from his real one, like most people in the bar. Girls flew by his table, stopping for a moment or two — Tonny, Rallie, Bunny, Stephie — all of them second and third-year students at the university. They worked as waitresses. Girls from “the countryside” who lived together in a rented apartment in the city, in the neighborhood of Suhata Reka. Their native towns, Radomir, Pavlikeni, and Pleven, were brought together in Suhata Reka by what appeared to be a distortion of geographical space, but the girls dealt with it fearlessly. Philip knew that they juggled their shifts and replaced one another when classes conflicted with their working hours. He knew that they rarely got enough sleep and often starved. That they fought, insulted each other, and thought of separating. Every now and then he would see traces of things he was hesitant to interpret. They called him Doc and would talk to him for hours. Sometimes they told him incredible stories, and he couldn’t tell whether the stories were true, or taken from a movie. He knew for a fact, however, that Rallie was a drug addict and he avoided saying anything, afraid to widen the generation gap between them. He felt ashamed for his lack of courage. Once, he brought a female friend to the bar and the girls were delighted. They liked the woman very much and even met with them after work to go to some nightclub together.
He wondered how these kids could live such a life without making a drama out of it. They managed to slip the tragic moments somewhere in between the day’s passage into night. They knew everyone and, as far as he was concerned, they seemed to accept his presence as the most natural thing in the world. Philip could not wrap his head around it. They felt for him when he was suffering, but their grief, if that’s what it was, resembled weariness more than anything else. Then they would tell him about the most dreadful things without batting an eyelash, and he didn’t know whether to believe them or not. And what were they telling their parents? That they were working to pay their way through college, so that the whole family, down to distant cousins, would be proud? Probably all of them had been A-students in their town high schools. Could you call it work, this painful shuttling back and forth between the tables and the bar, wearing tight black skirts, with their little faces white like moonlight? Were these girls the playthings of some inexorable reality, or were they themselves playing, trying out roles to see if they were good for this movie or another? If a disaster was just a matter of time?
Philip turned these questions over and over in his mind like coffee beans in a grinder. At first they would spill with a deafening sound, then they would patter around, lullingly, until ground to a fine powder that covered everything inside. Then the machine would stop turning. Until the next time.
Meanwhile, he kept ordering drinks, knowing that sooner or later he would reach his Rasputin phase, when he would buy a round for everybody and suggest moving on to the next bar.