But she really did want to kiss someone, she needed some small love conquest—or, better yet, several. She coldly examined the horizon of possibility and discovered that the most attractive young man was in the third year, from the design department. His name was Zhora Beginsky, and although his appearance was nothing like Nikita Tregubsky’s, there was something in his manner that did remind her of him. No, no! Please, no! She didn’t need that again. She had no intention of ever falling in love again. Not now, not ever. Especially with another superhero. Subjects of average quality, or of no quality at all, among the future stagehands, lighting designers, and sound operators were a dime a dozen. Fairly soon thereafter, Nora had won her first minor victories. They had not cost her much, and she understood perfectly well that at this period in her life she was interested only in the technical aspects of love; she practiced her new skills on every possible occasion, with every more or less suitable partner. With each new victory, her womanly self-respect increased.
Vitya became unwitting prey in this long line of victims, and as prey he was grateful. He fell into Nora’s clutches somewhere in the vicinity of an essay on And Quiet Flows the Don. For him it was completely unexpected that there could be something in the world that afforded so much pleasure unrelated to calculus. He was prepared to lose a portion of his valuable mathematical time for the sake of these new joys, even though he was in the tenth grade, and entrance exams to the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering of the university were on the horizon—a challenge even for him, winner of the Math Olympiad year after year. They began to meet again, reviving their old custom but dramatically altering the content.
Vitya didn’t have an ounce of playfulness in his nature. Honesty, earnestness, and conscientiousness were present in everything he undertook. The question of whether she was pretty or not ceased to worry Nora when she was around him. He simply didn’t notice any of her experiments in search of beauty, style, and success. He noticed only that the way she cut her hair was different from the way other women did.
The presence in Nora’s life of the solid and dependable Vitya in some sense freed her from concern with her appearance. Even the question of whether men liked her or not lost its poignancy. Both of them were busy like never before with their studies. They met at Nora’s whenever there was a gap in their schedules; the time they spent together was light and carefree, and things always went without a hitch. There was nothing to talk about, but, then, that was not why they were meeting.
Toward the end of the school year, Nora began thinking about how funny it would be, after her scandalous expulsion from school, to show up at the graduation party in a white dress and a veil, as Vitya’s bride. It would be very, very funny! Let the old bags chew on that, let Nikita eat his heart out, while I look on! And she proposed to Vitya, suggesting they get married for a laugh. He did not consider the idea to be particularly funny, but marriage would not pose a threat to his plans in life. Moreover, his notions about society in general had their genesis in his mother’s perpetual dissatisfaction and suspicion of others, and through her he had formed a conviction that intimacy outside marriage was virtually criminal, or, at the least, very wrong.
They went to the municipal marriage registry, not telling anyone, and submitted their application for an appointment to tie the knot.
Their application was accepted, though not automatically. Nora, hanging her head solemnly and folding her hands over her belly, whispered to the woman official that she had reason to want to hurry things up. The woman smiled—it wasn’t the first time she had seen this in her line of work. She took the bait, and, full of tenderhearted patience, explained the process to them. Soon, through Nora’s efforts, all the bureaucratic obstacles facing the underage newlyweds were removed—with the active participation of one of the senior students from the arts college, who earned his living by preparing falsified certificates, IDs, transport passes, and other fairly simple documents—and at the beginning of June, both their internal passports were adorned with the necessary stamps attesting to their union.
Nora later ditched the idea of the white dress, realizing that there would be a lot of girls dressed in bridelike white at the graduation festivities. Instead, she conceived of something that was far more theatrical and extravagant.
Nora turned up at the school graduation with Vitya in tow and, as they entered, announced to the whole school that they had gotten married. She was dressed in a devil-may-care manner—that is, with extreme impropriety. In the midst of the girls in their white finery, she looked like a crow in the snow: she wore ragged black shorts and a black, completely transparent blouse, on top of which she wore a white satin whalebone corset that she had borrowed from the Stanislavsky Theater costume department. Her getup had the desired effect. The teachers, who keenly remembered the scandal from two years before, startled to life: Should we ask her to leave? Or let her kick up her heels at the event that she had deprived herself of the right to celebrate? Nora’s reputation as a libertine and hooligan was solidified.
This dramatic performance—the wedding and Nora’s appearance at the graduation—made a very strong impression on Grisha. He never even suspected that the quiet Vitya had been so successful in the romance department. Grisha’s crush on Nora had long since evaporated, leaving only the scar on his cheek. What impressed him far more was the way Vitya had kept secret from him, his only friend, his relationship with Nora. Not to mention the marriage.
Vitya, whom the teachers viewed as Nora’s next victim, didn’t even notice Nora’s outrageous attire. He was only waiting for one thing—for the official ceremony to end, so he and Nora could go home to her house, close the door, and engage in that fascinating activity that he sometimes found even more interesting than solving mathematical equations.
Nora never even glanced at Nikita Tregubsky. He was so dumbfounded that he couldn’t bring himself to approach her. He hovered at a respectable distance from her and blinked his ramlike eyes, adorned with thick eyelashes. The whole marriage charade was for Nikita’s benefit, and yet Nora derived no pleasure from it.
Both Nora and Vitya quickly forgot about this one-off graduation performance. The parents of the young couple didn’t find out about the strange marriage—which was neither exactly fictitious nor conventional—until two years later. Varvara Vasilievna was beside herself when she discovered this prank, and fumed in indignation for a long time afterward. Then that passed, replaced by a real hatred of the daughter-in-law, whom she had never yet laid eyes on. When they finally met, by chance, she didn’t like Nora one bit, and, it seemed, never would. Amalia, when she found out about her daughter’s secret marriage, threw up her hands and said, “Well, Nora, it’s impossible to know what you’ve got up your sleeve.”