By the time she was fourteen, Leeza had evolved into a nice-looking, slender young woman. She did not go to the head of the class and she had not become a beauty, either. The appearance that nature had given her—well-balanced, subtle facial features, wheat-colored hair, and gray eyes—presented vast opportunities for choosing a style. If Leeza had decided to become a beauty, a restrained drawing of her facial features would have imparted her appearance with a light impressionistic shading that striking faces lack. But that did not happen.
It would be incorrect to say that Leeza did not want to be a beauty. That would imply a certain purposeful will, a conscious position she had taken regarding the issue of beauty. Leeza conducted herself as if that realm did not exist for her. Knowing Leeza’s poverty, others offered to let her use their cosmetics, but she politely declined. Unlike other girls, who shimmered with all the colors available in the Russian provinces, Leeza was not the object of her classmates’ attention at school parties. The boys in her class preferred girls who had a look that was more mysterious and—considering the violet splotches around their eyes—slightly extraterrestrial. It was with these girls that they shared exhausting slow dances.
The thought of those dances flashed through Solovyov’s mind one time after finishing some homework (perhaps not the most arousing thing to do), when he felt a burning-hot erection and unexpectedly found himself pressing his whole body against Leeza. The unexpectedness had come about not because Solovyov had never imagined this sort of possibility. He had, in fact, imagined it: whenever his grandmother’s snoring began resounding in the next room at night, his fantasy painted this event in full detail. He distinctly sensed the touch of his own hands as if they were Leeza’s and fell still on the damp sheet after experiencing a blend of delight and shame as ancient as growing up. No, the unexpectedness was in the fact that his fantasy had never envisioned—as something real—everything he had just undertaken with Leeza. But now that had happened. Could Solovyov handle his arousal? Under certain circumstances, yes. For example, if his grandmother had been at home. But she was not there at that moment.
Sensing that he was shaking, Solovyov took Leeza’s hand and pressed it to his bulging sweatpants. He nearly lost consciousness from the forbiddenness of what was happening and from the union of such contradictory inclinations (it seemed to him that the highest degree of contradiction also begat the highest degree of the forbidden). In the remnants of his consciousness that had not yet been lost, there pulsated the thought of Leeza touching the most secret thing on earth. Never afterward did the differences between genders excite him so much: this sort of union of contradictions turned out to be an ordinary matter in adult life and it was unavoidable, too, if approached dialectically. What had once seemed so hidden and inaccessible to him turned out, on closer inspection, to be almost the most sought-after object. In presenting it so insistently to Leeza, the future scholar did not yet know about its role in the history of culture or even history as a whole. He was acting without looking back at his predecessors.
Standing right up against Solovyov, Leeza looked at him with a calm and slightly surprised gaze. As was the case with homework, it seemed that only she knew the correct solution. She truly did know it. Leeza lightly touched her lips to his and lay her head on his shoulder. Emboldened, he thrust his hand under her blouse. He touched her back, her belly, and what was below.
He was unable to undo a single one of the hooks hidden under her blouse. Leeza did this herself. Leeza also took off the rest of her clothes and obediently lay on the bed, where Solovyov had led her by the hand. He did not utter a word for the rest of that scene. Solovyov quivered for real and from just his convulsive movements (all he had managed to finish doing completely was undress), Leeza was always able to guess what was expected of her. All in all, not very much guesswork was required here.
Accompanied by the wretched squeaking of springs (that squeaking communicated the condition of his body rather precisely), he somehow perched himself on Leeza and froze. Unable to unite their two bodies from the start, he no longer understood what, exactly, to do next. Here, Leeza took matters into her own hands again. He felt himself being directed and, with the indefatigability of an athlete, began making the same motions his classmates had so repulsively shown him. He experienced an orgasm several moments later. This was his first time with a woman. And it was far more intense than riding a bicycle.
The absence of blood surprised Solovyov. When he examined the spots on the sheet after Leeza left, he was unable to find anything resembling blood. He could not even allow the thought that Leeza had already become a woman before their relationship. Solovyov knew, down to the minute, how Leeza spent her time. Leeza’s social circle was also well known to him. Properly speaking, he was that circle.
Everyone at Kilometer 715 knew there should be blood. Even Nadezhda Nikiforovna—who excised any mentions of a sex life—would leave, untouched, information about the blood that resulted on a wedding night. Perhaps her stern hand was stopped by the thought that the presence of blood could serve as an important restraining factor for anyone intending to enter into a sexual relationship. Under a worst-case development of events, meaning entering into said relationship, according to Nadezhda Nikiforovna’s reckoning, the possible absence of blood would disillusion the male entering into the relationship and deter him from repeated attempts.
As comfort for the bloodthirsty Solovyov, the sheet turned crimson during one of their subsequent lovemaking sessions, the third or fourth of their encounters when his grandmother was not at home. The previous times—Solovyov obviously did not understand this because of his lack of experience—their contact had been too convulsive and chaotic. When the unavoidable finally happened, there was so much blood that the sheet had to be washed immediately. Solovyov fetched icy water from the well and Leeza laundered the sheet, periodically blowing on her numbed fingers; there had been no time to heat the water. There was also no opportunity to legitimately dry the sheet, so it had to be put on the bed again after laundering. Only at night, after his grandmother had begun to snore, did Solovyov hang the sheet on two chairs and sleep on top of the blanket, covered by a jacket.
Their romps became regular. His grandmother’s trips out were fairly rare, so every now and then they had to switch to Leeza’s house when, needless to say, it was empty. The complication here was that Leeza’s mother, a railroad track inspector, could show up at any time. The length of an inspection was surprisingly varied and depended on her degree of tiredness, her mood, and some higher industrial considerations, the essence of which were familiar only to those in the know regarding protocols for railroad track inspectors. Neither Leeza nor Solovyov, even more so, belonged to those ranks and so several times their undertakings nearly failed. More than once they were saved by the clang of an empty pail they had inconspicuously placed by the garden gate, but it was impossible to count on such an unreliable and, even more importantly, attention-attracting method. And so they returned to Solovyov’s house.
As children of railroad workers, Solovyov and Leeza decided to make the fullest use of the railroad’s possibilities, something that is, by the way, often underrated in contemporary life. With impeccable mastery of the schedules for passenger and freight trains, they effortlessly discovered that train traffic through Kilometer 715 was nearly uninterrupted several times a day. In the most fortuitous cases, the unceasing running of trains in both directions took ten to twelve minutes. That was plenty for brief but torrid love. The din of the trains drowned out any sounds capable of arising under this sort of circumstance. First and foremost, the screeching of bedsprings. Solovyov’s grandmother was not in the habit of entering his room during their endeavors, but in crucial situations, the participants briefly used the hook on the door.