‘An experiment,’ said Geiger, ‘requires money, and public interest is money.’
I was silent, pondering this pretty phrase. Its author was silent, too. The sun was shining outside and melted drops were knocking, staccato, on the windowsill. The snow’s thawing was taking place under Geiger’s engaged observation but without his participation. Approximately the same as my thawing. Geiger admitted in recent days that he still has not grasped exactly what sort of solution had been injected into my blood vessels. An ordinary saline fluid that does not ensure preservation of cells during freezing was found in them. Undoubtedly there was some other sort of chemical additive that simply evaporated during the years of my icy sleep. One must presume that I would not have thawed out so easily if not for that.
After discovering the saline fluid in my vessels, Geiger replaced it during thawing with my blood type; according to him, that process was not particularly complex. The composition of the initial solution was the brilliant discovery of whomever froze me, but for various reasons the formula for that discovery was not preserved. I did not even begin to question Geiger about the reasons, since that was not especially interesting. Knowing the peculiarities of our country, it is simpler to be surprised that anything is preserved at all.
What consoles me and Geiger in this story is that I was preserved. We consider that an indisputable achievement.
WEDNESDAY
I recalled something it is impossible not to blush about. But it is also impossible not to begin laughing. How Seva and I went to a prostitute – that could be the title for this story. Both that we went – since that’s how things concluded – and that it was one prostitute, since there was one for the two of us.
It was Seva’s idea. Not even his idea but his dream. He had told me more than once that if we saved up money we could, for example, go to a brothel. The little phrase for example remained, inalterably, in those pronouncements and that made me laugh. One could, for example, go to the circus or the movie house, but in my view, going, for example, to see prostitutes was somehow strange. More than likely, Seva thought that little phrase defused the situation. Made the proposal less, perhaps, unusual. Judging by how often he returned to this, the topic agitated him considerably.
Seva said that in essence not very much was needed, though we wouldn’t collect a sum like that in pocket money very quickly. According to his calculations, it also worked out that getting one prostitute for the two of us was far cheaper than getting two; we simply needed to arrange things properly. Based on our young age (Seva laughed a little), the girl would think we weren’t worth much in terms of bed matters, although we would (Seva made an indecent motion with his hips) simply tire her out.
The occasion presented itself at the end of yet another school year. We were celebrating at our place on Bolshoy Prospect and each of us had received money from our parents as a reward.
‘We’ll go to the prostitutes today,’ Seva whispered in my ear. ‘Be ready.’
I didn’t answer. I did not even clarify what he had in mind about readiness.
‘They get picked up nearby, on Bolshaya Pushkarskaya Street.’
I wavered, then nodded. In the end, there had been so many conversations about this that leaving Seva on his own now would have been a betrayal. And, to be perfectly honest, I, too, was experiencing, well, a certain curiosity, let us say.
And so we went. Along the way, Seva told me what exactly to do with a lady and how.
‘It might not work out today for one of us,’ Seva said, as if by the by. ‘That happens when you’re nervous.’
His critical gaze at me made it clear whom this might not work out for. He did not permit himself to gaze at me like that very often at all.
The girls were standing in the place Seva had predicted, and that raised my degree of trust in him. When Seva headed toward one of them (the largest of them, it seemed to me), I preferred keeping a distance. He tossed me an absent-minded glance but did not change his direction. After approaching the one he chose, Seva struck up an extensive conversation with her. He pointed at me from time to time and the girl shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t even glance at me in earnest because by all appearances the question hinged not on me but on money. In the end, Seva managed to come to an agreement with her and she invited us both to follow her.
‘We have two hours with her,’ Seva whispered to me along the way. ‘Meaning an hour each.’
The girl Seva intended to tire out was named Katya. Of course she was not a girl, either by age or line of work. I scrutinized Katya furtively as I walked to one side of her: she was at least thirty years old. We did not walk long at all. Katya turned into the courtyard of a wooden house and went up to the second floor.
There was nothing in Katya’s lodging that I had imagined, neither scarlet drapes nor a huge canopy bed. It was a poor lodging, somewhere Katya simply lived after she was free of clients. And Katya herself resembled a priestess of love least of all. Leaning her elbows on the kitchen table, there stood before us a tired woman not in the prime of youth.
It goes without saying that Seva was the first to enter the room with her. I stayed in the kitchen, prepared to plug my ears at the first moans. But no moans followed. Seva came out of the room a half-hour later, hands in his trouser pockets. As red as a crayfish (had he been steamed?) and already dressed. Katya came into sight in the doorway behind him, also without any particular disorder to her clothing. Her tiredness (he’d worn her out after all, the heel!) had obviously increased. She gestured, inviting me into the room. She smoothed her light-brown and, I think, not very clean hair.
‘And so. I said it might not work out for one of us today…’ Seva blurted out.
The cheerfulness of his tone left no doubt that this was a reference to me.
‘For whom, I wonder?’ I asked him, not without a challenge.
‘For me…’
A forced smile appeared on Seva’s face. That smile – along with his inexpressibly sad eyes! – made hearty laughter begin to rise from deep inside me. It came out convulsively when it reached its upper limit, and then I could not stop. I was surprised when Katya burst out laughing, too. She laughed coarsely and meanly, her entire large body shaking, and there was no longer a speck of tiredness in her. Even Seva laughed, squealing a little – there was nothing else left for him to do.
It stands to reason that I did not go with Katya. We paid her for one person. She continued laughing as she received the money. When we went outside, we looked at her windows for a long time. It was a sunny June day. A light breeze carried the smells of warmed wood and of the horse manure that lay here and there on the cobblestone roadway. It stirred the curtains in Katya’s window, behind which (I saw) Katya was standing and watching us. I did not retain her face in my memory but the smells and the swaying of the curtains in the window stayed with me. And the dull glistening of the cobblestones in the sun and the wooden houses. Later I learned that women similar to Katya resided in those houses. Geiger and I recently strolled along Pushkarskaya Street – those houses are no longer there, and neither are the women. Their bodies decayed long ago, after absorbing so much sweat and sperm.