…and I know that if you take a decision, and it's genuine and honest, the world will adapt accordingly, and you can lie down on the world and float as on water, and it will support you… but how can you know if it's genuine or not?..the dark yellow sound of the saxophone vibrated in the twilight, oozed among the tables in the cafe, soared up to the ceiling, crept among the chairs' people's legs, reminding one of something well-known and obvious, yet hidden in the warped fabric of the space-time continuum, of something that you can now define only by touch and by smell, like a blind man discerning the approach of a stranger in the village… and I felt that all these people could laugh and smoke and chat and drink juice and whisky and argue and flirt only as long as this sound continued, holding up the earth in one demiurgic tonality, you can never know it by thinking and proving, you can only start to feel it… «So you're staying with me today?» «No, I don't want that, I don't want to see you once a month, I don't need your promises and obligations, but I do want to feel that what we have between us is real» «You know, I couldn't forget you, you touched me somewhere very deeply, and I didn't want that, I didn't want to ring you, understand, I'm at a point in my life now when I can't allow myself these serious relationships» «But for God's sake it was you who rang me, and not the other way round, you'll never allow yourself those relationships, you'll always be waiting for something that will never happen, because everything is already here and now» «That's not true» «And what is true? That you're happy?» «No, but I want to reach the situation where no-one can tell me what to do or where to go» «And so basically you'll never go anywhere, because you'll be an everlasting slave to your precious stones and your cell phone, and your wife will stay at home missing you, because someone at least has to produce your heirs, and your girlfriend in Moscow will miss you, as will a couple more girlfriends somewhere if you have the energy, and…» «You sound just like my mother, but how little you understand…»
I was gazing through the window, as I had before, and saw a cloud that looked like a dragon made from poplar fluff, and an empty road winding round a corner, and lights on the bridge, and on Avenue Foch a street lamp blazed and went out after convulsively winking its dying light, and a raven hovered low over the bushes of tangled brushwood, and I noticed for the first time the dry old freckles of leaves on the tarmac, and Nijinsky danced his last dance in honour of the baby born to the Yaje woman in the House of the Waters in the lower reaches of the Vaupes river, while floating over the city to the tune of the dark-skinned saxophonist angel, and my head was spinning, and when I looked down I saw a man and a woman by the window talking to each other, holding hands, and he sat with his back to me and the woman had half-turned to the window, and when our glances met I didn't know where I was, and when I sailed away between the spires of the new hotel and went out onto the empty road and round the corner, I saw a man in a spot of light by the hotel entrance and I knew that the fakir had made a fool of himself, he had lost to me there, on the corner of Jampath Lane and the Tibetan Market, he was wrong: there was no America…
LUDMILA PETRUSHEVSKAYA
WATERLOO BRIDGE
THE HOUSE WITH A FOUNTAIN
WATERLOO BRIDGE
The reader may recall the British film «Waterloo Bridge» starring Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh. It was extremely famous in Moscow in the 1950s when the story takes place.
Translated by Sally Laird.
These days — in the street or on the bus — they'd call her «aunty» or «gran».
And she was in fact Granny Olya to her grandchildren. Her daughter, a big heavy woman, a full-grown geography teacher, still lived with her mother, while the daughter's husband, a small-time studio photographer (a misalliance stemming from a holiday romance) — this husband of hers came and went, sometimes appearing, sometimes not.
Granny Olya herself had long lived without a husband; he kept going off on business trips, and finally returned — but not back home; said to hell with it and chucked all his possessions, clothes, shoes, his film books — left her all this stuff she had no use for.
So she and her daughter drooped, the two of them, and did nothing about returning the things to the runaway; it was painful to start phoning, searching for so-and-so, let alone meeting so-and-so face to face.
The Dad clearly wasn't too keen either, it was obviously awkward — the happy newlywed husband, complete with little son, turning up to claim his property at the nest of his grandchildren and granny-wife.
Maybe, reckoned Granny Olya, it was HER, the new wife, who'd said to hell with it, we'll buy what we need in the morning.
Or maybe she was rich, unlike Granny Olya, who'd got used to potato salad and vegetable oil and bought her boots at the orthopaedic shop for the handicapped — poor, childish things with laces, extra-wide to allow for bunions.
She was shabby, Granny Olya, meek and goggle-eyed beneath her glasses, with a bit of down for hair, full figure and stout legs.
She was, however, a remarkably kind creature, forever taking care of somebody, staggering off with shopping bags to mouldy old relatives, wending her way round the various hospitals, even making the journey to tend the graves — and always unaccompanied, mind you.
The geographer-daughter lent no support in these enterprises of her mother's, though she'd lay herself out to assist her so-called friends, feeding them, listening to their tales but not Granny Olya's, no way.
In short, Granny Olya was always out and about — she'd cobble together her potato salad, fry up a bit of cheap fish and be out of the house, while the geographer-daughter, a stay-at-home type like many family people, would summon her friends round for wide-ranging discussions of life, involving many examples from personal experience.
The geographer's husband, the man from the studio, was generally absent; as a rule he led his existence on the side, under the red light of the photo lab, where all sorts of things might be happening. Once upon a time the geographer-daughter had passed through this red light herself — she'd returned swell-looking from holiday, a hulking great wench in glasses with puffy eyes and a mouth that looked somehow frozen, then went and brought home this photography worker (divorced to boot, with no home of his own) to her respectable Mum, and in those days Dad, in their three-room professor's apartment, the fool.