When they heard that I had joined the direction department (I wisely didn’t specify which one), these beauties asked me not to forget about them. They laughed as they said: “You just whistle, young director, and we’ll come flying instantly. You’ll see how affectionately we’ll thank you for a role, dear director…” they promised, laughing and glowing tenderly.
And then, inspired by my summer ecstasy and my eagerness to whistle to those young actresses just as soon as possible, I showed up at home and informed my odious Marina that I was divorcing her.
My wife responded with a howl like a police siren, which, fortunately, zoomed by as quickly as a yellow car with a flashing light. Literally one week later I was once again a bachelor and full of hope. My parents grieved for a while and calmed down, and kind Vovka said that she had never liked Marina anyway.
My memories of the next five years are bitter ones. “Producing folk spectacles” turned out to be much the same as metal studies, only in the field of art. The people studying there were all grownup and ugly—dumpy young women, pushy thirty-year-old guys from the depths of the provinces, directors of small-town clubs who simply needed a diploma to hang on the wall.
Acting skills were limited to the development of diction for the first six months: “Betty bought a bit of butter, but she found the butter bitter, so Betty bought a bit of better butter to make the bitter butter better.” The teacher of stage art taught us to bow and to deliver swingeing slaps to cheeks. The acrobatic classes would have done any rest home proud—forward roll, backward roll, half split, arms out wide.
In directing class we ran through scenes with “justified silence”. These clashes between underwater divers, spies waiting in ambush and married couples who had quarrelled—that is, characters who were logically silent—inevitably turned into series of deaf and dumb convulsions.
For the second time I took up sociology, philosophy and the forever-foreign English language. New things that were added included the incomprehensible subject of pedagogics, cultural studies and literary studies.
After my first session in the dean’s office I learned that I wouldn’t be able to transfer to drama except “on a paid basis”. This news hit me so hard that for the next three years I meekly allowed them to mould me into an entertainer of the masses with a tin bucket on my head and a carrot for a nose.
I should have offered my honest, thunderous repentance to my dream and fled from that den of putrescence, but I suddenly started lying monstrously to myself and everyone else, saying that I was very happy with my studies.
I practised self-deception. Vovka and Slavik had survived the torment of their institute and little Vanya was going to kindergarten. Soon Slavik got a good job in a company that sold office furniture and Vovka fell pregnant again and delighted us all with a second child, Ilya, so she, Slavik and my parents had even more joyful cares to occupy them…
By the fourth year of study the veil had fallen from my eyes. A belated rescue plan was hatched—to switch from the day faculty to the extramural one and immediately get a job in the old student club. I dashed headlong to the alma mater I had derided, but I was too late. No one remembered the creator of the film Our Beloved Polytech any longer. The president had retired, Galoganov had been thrown out for embezzlement and the post of club manager had long ago been occupied by a man worthy of it.
Overwhelmed by the panic of an antiquated twenty-six-year-old, I transferred to the extramural faculty and laid siege to every House of Culture in the city in my search for work. Both the “Builders” and the “Railwaymen” rejected me scornfully. I was given refuge by the local television channel, where I tacked together scripts out of inarticulate raw text. Then I squeezed my way into a smalltime radio channel, where I edited an ignominious comedy programme.
At the age of twenty-seven I was awarded my second degree diploma. In September I took part in a shoddy mass spectacle entitled Day of the City. The artistic director turned out to be shrewd and sticky-fingered. We presented the municipal executive committee with an impressive budget for all sorts of folk costumes, round bread loaves and linen towels representing Slavic hospitality and fees for the groups taking part, then made do with less and divided up the remainder among our artistic group.
The petty copecks paid by the television channel and the radio were humiliating. I was short of money. In late December I was invited to play Grandfather Frost and, casting shame aside, I pulled on the cotton-wool beard and eyebrows, flung the sack over my shoulder and set off round the kindergartens. Our pitiful trio—Grandfather Frost, the Snow Maiden and an accordion player—gathered the toddlers together and swiftly taught them to sing ‘A fir tree was born in the forest’ and ‘Merrily we stride together through the wide expanses’. The ones who “sang along together” loudest were handed presents. After the children’s matinees, having parted from the accordionist and now drunk, I fornicated with my Snow Maiden, who was perhaps not especially beautiful, but most amenable.
Thanks to my connections at the institute I was given a part in a New Year’s play for a children’s party, held in a former House of Young Pioneers. Dolled up in flared pants, a pink shirt and a tie, I shouted, “Oh!” in a hoarse voice through a hole in a papier-mâché mask that was supposed to represent a wolf’s jaws every time I saw the rabbit—this one was female—and pursued her clumsily round the stage. “Just you wai-ai-ait!” I growled, planting my feet wide, stumbling and falling flat, like a wardrobe, bruising my knees.
The plot-line had me and Old Lady Shapoklyak playing all sorts of tricks on the positive characters—we stole the trunk with the fairy tales in it, we were exposed, we repented and were forgiven, and then we danced round the beautiful New Year tree with the sticky-handed children.
The humiliation concluded with a modest buffet meal and the lovable rabbit led me away to spend the night in her burrow.
THE INHERITANCE
AND THEN, at the Russian Orthodox Christmas, the notification of Uncle Maxim’s death arrived. The police report informed us that M.D. Vyazintsev had been found dead with multiple contusions and knife wounds. A slip of paper attached indicated the row and sector of my uncle’s burial place in the Second Municipal Cemetery. The letter had reached our foreign parts only after a long delay—a month after the funeral.
We were very upset by this tragic news. My dad pressed his fist against his lips and whispered, “Oh, Maxim, Maxim.” My mum burst into tears—she had always felt sorry for my dissolute uncle. I remembered that seven years earlier she had wanted to invite him to Vovka’s wedding, but Dad tried to dissuade her: “Maxim will get drunk and make a scene.” In the end we didn’t invite him. And now my uncle was gone.
As far as we could tell, no one had found the killer and probably no one had even looked for him. My uncle’s former reputation would have suggested that he had fallen victim to his asocial acquaintances. But that was strange, after all, according to what we had heard; he hadn’t drunk alcohol for many years already. In any event the police had simply written him off and had him cremated. Dad kept planning to go to visit his grave, but the idea never got beyond words.
It’s shameful to admit it, but my uncle Maxim’s death moved on quite quickly from the stage of grief to the routine of receiving the inheritance, in which the main item was a two-room apartment. My uncle didn’t have any family and we were his only blood relatives. This was worth doing. There was absolutely no hope that I could earn enough for my own living space independently.