In any case, he quickly realized he had overestimated his experience. Shapeless shadows moved behind the curtains; he watched for nearly an hour, but all he could tell was that there were two people in the room.
She had said an entire delegation, four of them, were going. The writer didn’t try to pin down the details.
The lights soon went out and a few minutes later his wife emerged. With her were two women and a man. Encouraging each other, the foursome headed toward Nevsky. The writer was standing too far away to form an opinion of the man’s appearance. Regardless, he was young, not badly dressed, and strode broadly, boldly, ahead of the three ladies.
They went on foot, the writer thought, didn’t even call a taxi; they were economizing.
He cursed softly and dove into the nearest café.
His wife liked noisy crowds. Business over, she wouldn’t go to the hotel to shorten the long evening away from home. Why should she if she was surrounded by a big, handsome city, with all its theaters and restaurants?
The writer drank his coffee and two shots of brandy. He would have to wait.
For some reason he’d thought he could simply peer in the windows, watch her coming out of the hotel or going into it— and immediately know. And if he got a look at her friends, he would know especially. He would pick up on the signals, waves, impulses. If there’s a connection between two people, the careful observer will scope it out immediately.
Now he was sitting there shivering, almost sober, and angry at himself, the way he’d been angry sometimes in his youth when two or three days of nonstop surveillance of some oaf was yielding no result, or, rather, a negative result: the oaf who’d borrowed a large sum of money was not visiting casinos and strip clubs or wearing a shiny new jacket, wasn’t chowing down at expensive restaurants, wasn’t blowing the dust off his vintage Ferrari hidden in some secret garage; he was just dragging out his sad philistine existence. What he had done with the money was unclear. He so wanted to go back to the client paying for the surveillance and say, “I’ve got it! He’s living a double life! He’s secretly building his own brick factory…”
At the time the writer was twenty-two and hadn’t written anything yet, but his writerly imagination was already playing nasty jokes on him.
He thought people lived interesting, vivid, stormy, full lives. Whereas they actually lived boring, languid ones.
He didn’t believe it. He spent fifteen years trying to find people who lived interesting lives and as a result discovered that the most interesting person he’d met in a decade and a half of continuous searching was himself.
Downing another shot, he turned his anger on his wife now, not himself. Had she bounced out of the hotel doors, beaming and laughing, wearing heels and expensive stones, arm in arm with someone powerful with square shoulders and white teeth, then he, her husband, would have felt pain but also admiration. This way, all he felt was irritation. Once again, nothing was happening. Once again, nothing was clear. Only shadows behind curtains, only vague suspicions.
He ate very slowly, and killed nearly an hour and a half. Killing time is a great sin, but sometimes a murderer simply has no other option.
He came out on Nevsky and was going to start wandering around, gawking like a Western tourist at the ponderous granite façades, but all of a sudden he got scared he might run into his wife by accident; he turned onto a side street and hid in the first bar he came to.
The city was gray, chilly, and indifferent, created not for people but for the sake of a great idea, though there were plenty of establishments for every taste and pocketbook. As a small boy, the writer had come here twice with his parents—to visit the museums and soak up some culture—and even then he’d noticed the abundance of cafés and snack bars. In answer to his question, his mother had shrugged and said, “They lived through the blockade. People starved to death. The fear of famine must have etched itself into their memory forever. They’re led by fear. It makes them open little restaurants in every suitable half-cellar…”
Even then, actually, the writer thought the people of the city lacked all fear. Constructed of massive stone, the city felt solid. And now, thirty years later, the local residents resembled calm Europeans; naturally, it wasn’t fear that had compelled them to create so many restaurants and bars but healthy Baltic hospitality.
The writer pulled out his laptop, but he didn’t turn it on. His vexation had the better of him. There was no possibility of actually working. It was stupid. Very stupid. A jealous man had come to follow his wife but had taken along his computer so as not to waste time. Stupid, bizarre, and ridiculous. That’s how jealous men always behave.
Go to hell, he told himself. Jealous men are all different and they behave in different ways. Are you such a specialist in jealousy? You aren’t jealous at all. You just want to know. You think it’s important to know whether anything happened or not. The very fact…
The bar was stuffy and bleak. It had begun to rain outside. People quickly packed the narrow space and the writer found himself trapped. He could get up and leave—outside it was cold and windy. If you didn’t find a nicer place you’d come back and your table’d be taken. He could stay—and breathe the sour smells and listen to Finnish, German, and English. The writer didn’t know any other languages and was now ashamed of his lack of education.
He asked for another dose of brandy and decided to relax.
It was easy. The writer never forgot that he’d been created, begat, by cheap, smoke-filled dives just like this. He’d spent half his conscious life in smoky, dim establishments where customers from the lower-middle class went to unwind in the evening. He’d eaten, worked, and held meetings in smoke and liquor fumes. He’d smoked a lot. And drank; sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. He’d always eaten very little. And written a lot.
At some point—it might have been three years ago—he realized his wife was tired of that life. She didn’t understand him. She’d ask him to go to Rome, Prague, Barcelona. He’d agree, but a couple of days into their stay in any European capital he would find a smoke-filled dive, and once he had, he would calm down. And when he had calmed down, he would realize that European dives were much more boring than Russian dives.
The rain stopped and he stepped out under the low sky.
He was considered an interesting man, and his books were full of interesting stories. Only his wife knew that in fact the writer was a taciturn, boring creature and all his entertainment boiled down to television. He drew his plots from his salad days; so much had happened that now he could write his whole life without getting distracted by anything else. But his wife grew weary, and one day he realized she had another man.
Not realized—suspected.
Surveillance requires a car. When dark fell, the writer hailed a cab. Finding himself in an oddly clean car, he asked whether he might smoke. “As you wish,” the driver replied in an even voice; it was immediately clear that this guy would not do for today’s purposes. The writer had to laugh. Usually cab drivers irritated him with their informality, dirty sock smell, and rudimentary musical tastes, but here was rare good luck—behind the wheel was a true intellectual. And so? That’s not what he needed. He needed your typical rogue, a worker reeking of gasoline. A proletarian of the pedals. It’s always that way with intellectuals, the writer thought. They always show up at the wrong time.