“Don’t be scared, give me your hand.”
Sanya extended his hand, like he expected her to shake it. She turned over his palm and placed it on her breast—it felt like fresh bread, warm and firm.
“You act like a complete stranger,” Nadia said with a slight note of disapproval, and turned out the light to encourage the stranger to get to know her.
She was an experienced seductress, but her animal innocence prevented her from being aware of this herself. There were no windows in the storeroom; it was as dark as a dungeon.
“Come on, Sanya! You’re stiff as a board, loosen up.”
He was stiff as a board. She took his cold hands in her own large warm ones, and started guiding them around her torso as if she were a tree. He wanted to run away and hide, but where? Where was it darker than this pitch-black darkness?
There was a rustling over in the corner, then squeaking. He gripped Nadia’s shoulder in alarm. It turned out that she was already completely undressed. Her whole body was like a loaf of fresh bread, not just her breasts.
“Don’t be scared, it’s just a rat with her babies, they have a nest. I’ll show it to you later.”
The rat calmed Sanya down, for some reason. He was afraid that Nadia would stop moving his hands around over her own body and would set her sights on him. And that’s what she did. Oh, how he wanted to run away, but now it was too late, far too late … She was already holding him in her soft palms and whispering: “My sweet boy, my sweet little one…”
Her words were, on the face of it, quite tactless, but they were in effect encouraging, and expressed an overwhelming sympathy. The seductress was full of compassion. She held his timid manhood with gentle firmness.
“See how good it is?” said the invisible Nadia with a deep sigh. She had won; that’s what she felt. Again she had won. She pressed Sanya’s head against her chest—what power she felt! This was how she conquered all of them.
No, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, Sanya told himself; to no avail. He was already inside, and there was no place else to go.
Then came a quiet, satisfied chuckle.
“See? The little animal finds its nest.”
What could have been the beginning was at the same time the end.
He seized up, then let go. Sticky and hot. And ashamed. So that was it?
Nadia sought out his lips with her mouth. He offered them politely. She licked his mouth with her large tongue, then put it under his top lip. She sucked in air, making a smacking sound.
“‘Die if you will, but never give a kiss without love,’” she whispered.
Never a truer word. Even dying would be better than this.
It was still drizzling outside, just as it had been when he went in. Ilya was waiting for him across the lane.
“Everything go okay?” he asked drily, without so much as a smile.
“I guess so. It was pretty disgusting,” Sanya said faintly, so faintly that Ilya couldn’t even guess just how disgusted he was.
They walked to Sanya’s house without speaking and parted at the entrance.
The next day, Sanya wasn’t in school. He had fallen ill. The usual thing—a high temperature, and no other symptoms. In his sleepy delirium he imagined he was dying, that he had syphilis or something even worse. But he had nothing of the sort. Three days later, his temperature fell. He lay around in bed for a few more days, while his grandmother boiled fruit compote for him, and made him cookies with cream filling and applesauce. He struggled with an unrelenting sense of self-loathing for himself, for his own body, which had betrayed him and responded to the summons of a complete stranger, against his own wishes … or not?
He lay in bed reading The Odyssey. He read to the part where Odysseus’s companions row past the island of the Sirens and pour wax into their ears, so they won’t hear the Sirens’ voices and jump into the water. And Odysseus, tethered to the mast, writhes and struggles to escape so he can throw himself into the sea and swim toward the irresistible song. He was the only one who heard their song and survived it. The stony shores were strewn with the dried-up corpses and bones of the hapless travelers who had reached the island—lured there by the bewitching, double-voiced song—and who were then sucked dry by the bloodthirsty Sirens.
“Nuta, what do you think—is the part about the Sirens about the power of sex over men?”
Anna Alexandrovna froze with a saucer in her hand.
“Sanya, I’ve never thought about it before; but I think you must be right. It doesn’t just have power over men, though—women are under its power, too. Let’s just say it has power over human beings. Love and hunger rule the world. It’s terribly banal, but that’s the way it is.”
“And there’s no way to escape it?”
Anna Alexandrovna laughed.
“Maybe there is, but I never discovered it. And I wouldn’t have wanted to. Everyone is sucked into that vortex sooner or later.”
She placed her cool, cruel hand on his forehead, and the touch was clinical and sterile.
“No temperature.”
Sanya took her bony hand, covered in rings, and kissed it.
He’s a grown-up boy. And he’s so good. But he’s too gentle, too sensitive … Anna Alexandrovna thought sadly. He’s going to have a hard time of it.
But Sanya’s difficulties had begun much earlier than Anna Alexandrovna guessed. From the earliest years, even before he started school, he had been tormented by the suspicion that he was different from the other children his age, and, indeed, from everyone else, too—and that this was due to some flaw or defect in him. Or, a less dire option, to some peculiarity. He did not doubt that it was, in some inchoate way, connected to music. Like archangels with swords, his mother and grandmother stood watch over him, protecting him from the ordinary world, which was alien to him.
In their enormous, enchanted room, all 350 square feet of it, they created a beautiful sanctuary for him, and were themselves filled with anxiety and fear: How would he cope without them, beyond the threshold of the room, and even farther afield, when they died? At first they had thought of educating him at home rather than sending him to school in the outside world; but they finally decided against such a radical measure.
Vasily Innokentievich, called in for advice, mostly so that they would have someone to argue with, rose to the occasion. He voiced crushing arguments, the most persuasive of which was that if the boy didn’t learn to adapt in childhood, if he weren’t run through the ringer at school, he would stand out like a sore thumb later in life, and was sure to end up in prison.
His mother and grandmother exchanged glances, then sent him off to be run through the ringer. The first five years of school were almost like being in solitary confinement. For some reason no one took any notice of him, as though he were invisible. And he cultivated his invisibility, insulating himself from boyish roughhousing and teasing with a polite smile. His relationship with his classmates was one of estrangement, nothing more.
A miracle occurred at the beginning of the sixth grade, however—a kitten, tormented by a dog and his classmates, laid down his life, thus laying the cornerstone of the friendship of Sanya and Ilya and Mikha. And this friendship was cemented when they revealed to one another the deepest secrets of their souls at the time.
But toward the end of their school years, new secrets grew up in them that they chose not to confess. The friends were almost grown, and reconciled to the notion that every person has the right to a private life. Sanya’s secret had no name, but he was afraid of being found out: What if Ilya and Mikha discovered in him what he himself could not even name? His future had still not managed to take root and ripen; it had not yet given way to anguished experiences, only a dull longing. They were aware of silences cropping up everywhere, yet these silences did not hamper their friendship.