“You need to do it in the bathtub, in warm water . . . ,” she said, sympathizing. “It won’t work otherwise.”
“How do you know?” the boy asked glumly.
“I’m a vein specialist. I spent two years studying veins. That’s going to drip for a bit and stop. You’re better off jumping from the roof—Bam! And it’s over.”
“Not for me!” The boy smirked. “I need a machine. Understand, I don’t have a machine. But if I cut it wider, I can stick a vial inside . . . If you’re such a specialist, maybe you have a machine on you?”
Now Tanya did not understand him: “What kind of machine?”
“A syringe, idiot!” he explained.
“Oh, a syringe. I have one at home.” Wonder of wonders, she had lived her whole life being so smart, but today had spent the whole day playing the idiot . . .
“You live far away?” The boy lit up with interest.
“Far away.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I’m out for a walk. I like to walk around at this time of night.” She sat down alongside him and noticed that he was older than he had at first seemed. “Let’s go for a walk. I like to look inside windows . . .”
She pulled him by the sleeve of his checkered shirt, and he obeyed. He wrapped the razor blade in a piece of paper, stuck it in the pocket of his shirt, and hurried after her. She led him out into the street, then turned confidently into a passageway between two houses that led to a barely visible walkway toward an illuminated window. A dirty lightbulb streaked with whitewash hung naked on its cord. A chair stood on a table, and there were sawhorses as well. The room was being remodeled. Obviously, they had forgotten to turn off the light. The window was open. The first floor.
“Let’s crawl in,” Tanya proposed.
“No, I’ve already done time for a shop. That’s enough for me.” The boy scurried ahead. “What if we go to your place?”
“I lost my keys . . . And, in general . . .” Tanya was at a loss. Everything was a bit topsy-turvy.
“All right, let’s go,” the guy proposed magnanimously, and they set off to wander further.
They walked with their arms around each other, then, in some courtyard, they kissed, then they wandered about a bit longer, and then it turned out that they were standing in a large entranceway, pressing against each other with their arms and their hollow stomachs and hands that were sticky from the little bit of blood that had managed to flow through the tiny cut across his vein.
They went up to the last floor of the very same Moscow moderne building that Tanya had noticed at the beginning of her journey along Olkhovskaya Street. A light burned on the fourth floor, but beyond that lay mysterious darkness. A story above the last floor, near a padlocked entrance to the attic, there was a small semicircular window with flowing casements that cast curvilinear shadows in the strange light. They kissed a bit longer, standing at the wide windowsill. Then she sat down on the windowsill and did everything that Gansovsky had wanted of her.
“Gansovsky ordered that stepladder especially for that kind of stuff!” Tanya guessed as the boy pulled her onto himself.
With neither a thrill nor inspiration she bid farewell to her senseless virginity, imparting absolutely no significance to the event whatsoever. The boy accepted this unexpected gift in total bewilderment.
“You still got your cherry? You’re my first. And do you know how many broads I’ve had?”
Tanya laughed at his street slang and shook her bandaged hand.
“What a bloody day I’ve had today . . . And you too . . .”
Then he sat down alongside her on the windowsill. Though wide, the windowsill was too short for them to lie down on.
Ten minutes later he was telling her about some girl named Natasha who had played with him for two years—because all broads are bitches—and about his deferral—he was going to join up during the fall draft as a border guard—and some other gibberish about real men . . . Tanya had no interest in this whatsoever. She jumped off the windowsill and waved to the little chump.
“I’m out of here!”
And she flew down the stairs, clicking distinctly with the heels of her flats.
By the time he slowly figured out what had happened, she was already two floors down.
“Where are you going?” he shouted after her.
“Home!” she replied, without slowing down.
“Wait! Wait!” he shouted, dashing after her. But she was already out of sight.
3
PAVEL SENSED MORE THAN KNEW: CALL IT STARS OR whatever, but there was something beyond human beings themselves that guided human life. He was convinced of this most of all by the “Abraham’s” children, brought into this life through his, Pavel Alekseevich’s, hunch about a connection between cosmic time and the innermost cell responsible for the production of progeny . . . He allowed that other aspects of human life could be influenced by the cosmic clock—that bursts, as well as slumps, of creative energy were governed by this same mechanism. Determinism—so obvious in the development of, say, an embryo from a fertilized egg—satisfied him entirely; what was more, he regarded it as the principal law of life. But he was unable to extend this strictly predetermined movement beyond the physical course of ontogeny. His freedom-loving spirit protested. However, a human being was formed not just from certain more- or less-known physiological processes; many other completely chaotic factors interfered, as a result of which identical seven-pound sucklings developed into spiritually diverse human beings, some of whom achieved great deeds, others—crimes, while some died in birth of scarlet fever and others on the field of battle . . . Had a plan been preprogrammed for each of these innumerable millions? Or was fate a grain of sand on the seashore? What unknown law dictated that two out of three Russian soldiers would fall under fire during the war, and of those who remained a part would perish in prison camps and another part drink itself to death . . . One in ten had survived . . . Who regulated this mechanism?
As far as he himself was concerned, Pavel Alekseevich knew that his fate was headed downhill. He still worked, and taught, and operated, but gone from his life was the intense pleasure of the incipient moment, the sensation of being one with the times, with which he had existed for many years. His home life too preserved only its general designs, an empty shell of their former family happiness . . . Gone was the feeling that had overcome them in evacuation during the war and had lasted a whole decade, until 1953, that like a sunken ship with stolen gold had descended to the bottom of memory to be replaced by a monastic and laconic union built without touching and almost entirely on understanding glances alone . . . Something was happening to Elena: her eyes were covered over with a thin film of ice; if they expressed anything at all, it was an anxious and strained lack of understanding, like that of a small child still unable to speak just before it is about to start crying for some inexplicable reason.
His relationship with Tanya had fallen apart. Just as before, she was rarely at home, but earlier her absence had signified a kind of accumulative activity, a nutritional acquisition of skill, whereas now, after she had abandoned everything, Pavel Alekseevich wondered with what sort of activities she filled her day, evening, and—not infrequently—nighttime hours spent away from home. He was chagrined by what he suspected to be an empty waste of time mostly because he so valued the special quality of each young person’s time, before fatal automatism had set in and when each youthful minute was muscular, capacious, and commensurate with the acquisition of knowledge and experience in their purest form . . . As opposed to his—an old-man’s—time, which slid by, weightless and even more worthless . . .
What had once been the burning content of life—those birth mothers transparent as aquarium guppies with all their pathologies and complications, and his teaching, through which Pavel Alekseevich passed on to his students not just techniques but that tiny unnamable entity that comprises the heart of every profession—was becoming more and more automatic and losing its value, if not for those around him, then for Pavel Alekseevich himself.