As is frequently the case, Vladik was derailed by love. Cupid, that pesky, bare-assed troublemaker, took aim at Vladik right after the first exam session. Admittedly, he was not alone in his misery; moreover, consumed by his work on Cato the Elder, Vladik was the last of his classmates to become aware of the Varya K. phenomenon – by the time he finally noticed her, others had already had time to get over the charming yet unyielding art historian. Even the sailor Dyakovenko, blown from the North Sea Fleet decks into the marble halls by the stormy winds of the night-school quota enrollment, once, being significantly inebriated, complained to his friend Zhenya Rayev who came from distant Usol-Sibirsk, “I took her by the ass once, and you know how she hissed! That’s a rotten shrew right there, but I’d still do her.”
“True that, Sailor – she’s out of our league, that one,” Zhenya Rayev thoughtfully agreed.
After reaching this remarkable conclusion, the two friends set out for the dorms of the Soils Biology Department, where their visit produced a legendary series of events with broken windows and their pursuit of Aunt Klava the door-lady, performed naked and with a fire-extinguisher that had been previously discharged into the wall. The events, naturally, engendered quite a stir; in the aftermath, sailor Dyakovenko, since he was not involved in the unauthorized handling of fire-fighting equipment, got off with a reprimand, and Zhenya Rayev, to his own stunned glee, was expelled and sent back to his native Usol-Sibirsk, where we lost track of him forever.
Still, because we do not want to resort to citing, on rather questionable grounds, the even-more questionable fetish of liberal intellectuals, Dr. Freud, we will simply say: It was all Varenka K.’s fault.
She came from an old Moscow aristocratic family, whose name resonated just so with her given name – the simple Russian Varvara – which had become rare by the late 50s and was loaded, of course, with secret anti-Bolshevik sentiment, but which today has lost, unfortunately, its signifier. We, much to our own chagrin, do find ourselves employing, on occasion, the high-flying academese, not – as we’re sure our reader will understand – due to any shortcoming of our magnificent native tongue, but rather compelled by our stubborn pursuit of the resulting musicality), the name, then, which in our own time... But you already know what’s going on, without all this scholastic nonsense, don’t you?
Varenka K. Her hair redder than a flame, trim, athletic, a brilliant gymnast, a bit of a ballerina – she was a creature that captivated the imagination and tempted the heart with coy green eyes, and, of course, she was fluent in French and played the piano. With a memory like a steel trap and her awesome natural talent, she beat Vladik 17 times in a row at Word Squares and thrice at Battleships one day when she ended up sitting next to him during a History of the Communist Party lecture.
Vladik was cut to the quick. Varenka was triumphant. Vladik followed her about like a puppy-dog. He carried her book-bag. Yes, exactly like a fifth-grader. He helped her into her coat. He pawed at the ground and haunted her large, professorial home until dark (and later). He was never allowed inside.
Was he truly suffering? At the time, several hypotheses circulated among his classmates; there were some who, because they envied him, said Vladik was merely seeking more cheap popularity, but we believe otherwise. Especially when one remembers the countless pages of Kuznetsov’s love poems that were passed around the class and, of course, landed in Varenka’s pretty hands. Did you notice that their initials were the same? This, for some reason, inspired in Vladik great confidence.
The number of poems rose in geometric progression. Sharp-tongued aesthetes found special delight in “Oh, you, whose hair is a fire’s blaze” in which “blaze” rhymed with “craze,” “maze,” “braise,” and “malaise,” as well as “Like a general, valiant on the eve of battle,” and the late-period “Oh, Roman courtesans...” (It is worth noting here that Vladik appears to have possessed the gift of foretelling: Varenka, after she married Vittorio Macini, a left-wing radical, now lives in Rome where, rumor has it, she teaches Russian grammar at the Jesuit collegium.) Sailor Dyakovenko was one of the sympathetic few, and found his poems pretty but worthless.
“She won’t give you any, mate, trust me,” he would say to Vladik, suggesting he instead come along to visit the soil biology girls.
Vladik refused every time, and instead went straight to his post outside his Muse’s windows. He appeared not to notice when people made fun of him. He knew how to handle public opinion and worked at it patiently, until everyone, or almost everyone, got accustomed to seeing things his way. So it was that when another lost soul replaced him outside Varenka’s windows – someone from mechanical mathematics, who was equipped with his father’s Volga, and was also, to be fair, eventually discarded without ever having been allowed inside the house – most of the class mourned together with Vladik.
That’s when Kuznetsov threw himself into his work, buried himself alive in the library with Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura and produced the above-mentioned four hundred and fifteen brilliant pages.
✵ ✵ ✵
The summer after Kuznetsov’s first year passed in the shadow of The Newspaper Story.
Vladik’s class was sent to an archaeological dig, where, according to witness testimony, Vladik had earned the honorable moniker “Bulldozer” for his incomparable ability to raze, stratum after stratum, ancient grave mounds. There was no job that he would refuse. He enjoyed climbing the piles of dirt and moving more dirt by shovelfuls, and it was there, in the trench one day that Vladik, lost in the rhythm of the work, brought his shovel down on his bare foot and sliced off a bit of skin. This happened in the middle of a workday, so there were plenty of witnesses. There was very little blood, but it must have been Vladik’s own sudden, treacherous negligence that frightened, or rather, stunned him. At first, as was his custom, Kuznetsov blushed red like a poppy, but in almost the same instant he began to turn pale, then completely white, and then he suddenly fainted. This disgusting weakness lasted mere seconds, but it was enough for Vladik to bear its shame forever. His resilience, his vigor, his stamina – all that failed him, and, utterly destroyed, he fled into the bushes and, it appears, even cried bitterly, because when he came out at the end of the day to board the truck back to the base-camp, Kuznetsov was described as having puffy eyes, bright purple cheeks, and a beaten-down expression.
From that moment, a new Vladik Kuznetsov begins.
From that day on, no one, not even sailor Dyakovenko who was a professional at the art of drinking, could ever outdrink Vladik Kuznetsov. By the end of the summer, Vladik’s face acquired a distinct purple tinge, but that was it; every morning, Vladik rose before dawn, brushed his teeth, did a series of stretching exercises and went on his run. His hangover was purged by sweat, and afterwards Vladik swung his shovel just as methodically as before; only now he was really careful about his feet and wore his grandfather’s cow-hide boots. Vladik’s special affection for military style was not the same as the contemporary fashion fad indulged by his classmates: for them, uniforms were stylish only in a kitschy way, worn with a special carelessness that made the wearer resemble a carousing hussar. Vladik would not have any of it. When he put on his green shirt, it was also with a belt and a shoulder-belt; he was a whiz with foot-cloths (he thought socks a decadence), and, since the day of his shameful bloodletting, did not part with the heavy boots that his frugal grandfather had shod with cavalry-issue metal horseshoe taps.