Only why wasn’t he here yet?
All of a sudden she remembered and actually staggered. How could she have forgotten? Well, yes, she could have because yesterday it was said through laughter and drunken eyes… The girls from the theater all lied, they were insanely jealous, but yesterday they dropped blatant hints that he’d found some other dancer—some corps de ballet louse, a pale moth… with freckles to boot… third in the back row… What if it were true? Was her life ruined? My God, oh my God… though why, why was she getting herself so wound up, why was she blowing things out of proportion?
Masha grabbed the railing of the bridge and jerked her hand back—cold, nasty metal. Just as she loved to touch granite, she hated metal. Her hands would smell of it for hours.
The round lamps lit up and shone on the turbid, swirling water. Here it was, the canal’s icy ripple. Only now it was summer and it was still icy… A pleasure boat rammed through the water and the laughing, tipsy tourists waved to her. Masha turned away. Why did Seva want to meet here? Now she had to jut up on the street like a column, to the amusement of the rare passersby. On one side of the Kryukov Canal loomed the Mariinsky; on the other, a ridiculous construction site that in the uncertain future was supposed to be the theater’s second hall. When the Mariinsky was still her theater, she’d waited anxiously for what would happen when they moved to the new building and renovations began in the old. Day after day she’d watched them clear the ground for the new one and wreck the First Five-Year Plan Palace of Culture, a fairly dismal example of Stalinist empire style. For a while, like a graphic illustration of the empire’s fall, only the huge czarist columns rising out of the mountain of wreckage and debris were left standing. Masha imagined that before she knew it they would be putting in stone benches here, like an amphitheater, and instead of actors they would bring in captive gladiators—and the new theater would be ready. But they dynamited the columns, razed a couple of other old buildings, and for a long time the construction didn’t even begin; they probably hadn’t been able to find the money. Still, in that time, the time of Masha’s maturation, an eternity passed! The building put some meat on its bones and was gradually transformed into a boring concrete box with the bare ribs of its framework poking out indecently. Instead of captive gladiators, migrant workers showed up and scurried from floor to floor like ants from morning until night. And now, despite the late hour, the figure of some detained construction worker stuck up in a window. He might be sleeping right here. He might have nowhere else to go.
People just keep coming, as if the city is totally elastic, so you can’t walk calmly down the street anymore, Masha thought with irritation.
But if you hire someone like that, you don’t have to pay him a lot, and when this moth leaves the theater he’ll push her off the bridge and no one will notice… What thoughts! What evil thoughts! But it was true, no one would see. At night… but he’s just the kind you shouldn’t get mixed up with… he’d spill the beans. But if this young lady were to walk up… She rented an apartment a little ways down, on Masterskaya… maybe she just rented a bed, not an apartment… and if no one were around then, Masha herself could ask her for a light… Oh, what nonsense. After all, if the girl were pushed, she would cry out… and then—stop. After all, Masha didn’t know for a fact whether Seva had anything going on with her. Insanity, that’s what passions lead to. She closed her eyes and thought she could see that pale freckled vixen go flying into the cold water—a split second, and that would be the end of her.
Masha leaned slightly over the railing. Why, it was so low… No mesh whatsoever, just two crossbars… Yes, yes, my life is ruined… Take Dima, for example. Where is that Dima now? Before him there’d been someone else, Sergei Pavlovich. She’d forgotten all about him until now, all of a sudden… She wrote something about him on Seva’s orders, back at the very beginning, when they’d just met, and that Sergei Pavlovich—no, Konstantinovich, definitely Konstantinovich, like her prodigal father—jumped out a window… Enough! If she didn’t go to-morrow and get a decent pedicure and if she couldn’t pay Lastochka for her hair, then she couldn’t go on living. She had to find a way out somehow. Lastochka charged so much now. The nerve of her! On the other hand, you weren’t going to find anyone better… Seva had no idea how she put herself together every day, starting early in the morning, her weekly purchases were expensive—or did he think she washed her hair with rosemary and covered her hands with sunflower oil?
She’d promised to stop by her aunt’s a month ago, but no, she wouldn’t go. Those visits sunk her into an awful depression, she felt like hanging herself, and then it took so much time, and Masha didn’t have any money for the psychologist now. The psychologist would squeeze her dry. Her aunt could sit there alone and fancy herself a widowed duchess. When Uncle Pasha died, she’d exchanged the apartment at the favorite niece’s wish. Masha got a room, which she now rented out, while she herself rented a decent separate space, and her aunt got a room too. It was her own fault for ending up in a housing project. Masha had tried to talk her aunt into agreeing to an apartment outside town, where she would have fresh air to breathe and could lead a circle at the club. They were easing her out of her job anyway. No, she clung to her city, but why? Here, they wouldn’t even let her pick up her instrument; her neighbors immediately started making a fuss.
Masha found all this depressing. No, nothing like that was going to happen to her. She would age beautifully, maybe have a child—one—not that she was particularly eager, but men needed that… Why wasn’t he here? Where was Seva!
Maybe he was with that mangy vixen and had forgotten about her altogether. Lord, my God, my heart’s really beating… No, I can’t leave it like this.
“Look, there’s water coming in under the door. They shut me in but forgot to turn off the tap. There wasn’t any hot water for a couple of weeks so the taps were all left open. But if I’m not going where my Masha is now, where the rivers meet, what’s the big surprise if the water’s running like this, flowing like hot blood, turbulent, and the little boats darting this way and that through it, like the needles in the neighbor boy’s veins, the needles he pokes into himself in the kitchen, thinking I don’t notice. I wanted to ask him, but I was scared of frightening him. What do I need a needle for? What about lighting this airshaft—what if it lit up all of a sudden? Somewhere where there’s no light at all, just a wolfish-gray longing… This is how I dreamed of helclass="underline" I’m sitting in a deep but narrow hole looking up the whole time, at a dim light very high up… but I’ll never get there. Never.
“Dreams are the only reason I’m still moving, because I started having terrible dreams. Once I dreamed I was in a well, not an airshaft like this one, but a real well, only without water, and up above vampires were reaching for me with their long feelers. But I’m not afraid. I know if I start playing it will all pass, but the neighbors say it’s too loud. I could now—no one’s there… but today I actually shouldn’t play. Under no circumstances should I, since someone else is already playing, and playing beautifully. I just don’t know who… somewhere, up above…