“But I, I did not go,” Balodis said proudly.
“Why not?” Alikhanov slammed the book shut.
“I have a sweetheart near Riga. You don’t believe me? Her name is Anelle. She’s crazy about me something awful.”
“And you?”
“And I respect her.”
“What do you respect her for?” Alikhanov asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What attracts you to her? I mean, what made you fall in love with her specifically, this Anelle?”
Balodis thought awhile and said, “I could hardly love every broad near Riga…”
Reading was out of the question for Alikhanov. He didn’t manage to fall asleep. He thought about the soldiers who had gone to the kennel, imagined the vile details of their bacchanalia, and couldn’t fall asleep.
Twelve o’clock struck, people were already asleep in the barracks. This was how the New Year began.
Alikhanov got up and switched off the loudspeaker.
The soldiers returned one by one. Alikhanov was sure they would start sharing their impressions, but they each went silently to bed.
Alikhanov’s eyes got accustomed to the dark. The surrounding world was familiar and disgusting. The dark, hanging blankets. The rows of boots wound with foot cloths. Slogans and posters on the walls.
Suddenly Alikhanov understood that he was thinking about the exiled woman. More exactly, that he was trying not to think about that woman.
Without asking himself questions, Boris got dressed. He pulled on some pants and a fatigue shirt. Grabbed a sheepskin jacket from the drying room. Then, lighting a cigarette by the sentry, he went out onto the porch.
The night had come down heavily, right down to the ground. In the cold gloom, one could barely make out the road and the outlines of the forest that narrowed to the horizon.
Alikhanov crossed the snowy parade ground. Beyond it, the kennel compound began. The hoarse barking of dogs on chains came from behind the fence.
Boris cut across an abandoned railroad branch line and headed for the commissary. The store was closed, but the saleswoman, Tonechka, lived next door with her husband, an electrician. There was also a daughter, who came to visit only during holidays.
Alikhanov walked towards the light of a window half-covered by snowdrifts.
Then he knocked, and the door opened. From the drunken haze of the narrow room, the sounds of an old-fashioned tango could be heard. Squinting from the light, Alikhanov walked in. In the corner was a Christmas tree, leaning to one side and decorated with tangerines and food labels.
“Drink!” said the electrician.
He pushed a wine glass and a plate of wobbling aspic across the table to him.
“Drink, marauder! Eat, you son of a bitch!”
The electrician then put his head down on the oilcloth, obviously completely exhausted.
“Much obliged,” Alikhanov said.
Five minutes later, Tonechka handed him a bottle of wine wrapped in a poster from the local social club.
He left. The door crashed behind his back. Instantly, his long, awkward shadow disappeared from the fence. And again darkness fell under his feet.
He put the bottle in his pocket. The poster he crumpled up and threw away. He could hear it turning over and opening.
When Boris got back to the wire fences of the kennel, the dogs again began snarling.
The kennel grounds housed a lot of people. The dog-trainers lived in the first room, which was hung with diagrams, work rosters, lesson plans, a shortwave radio band decorated with a sketch of the Kremlin tower. Beside these, photographs of film stars from Soviet Screen had been tacked up. The film stars smiled, their lips slightly parted.
Boris stopped on the threshold of the second room. There, on a pile of dog-trainers’ uniforms, lay a woman. Her violet dress was entirely buttoned up. For all that, the dress had been yanked up to her ribs, while her stockings had fallen around her knees. Her hair, recently bleached with peroxide, was dark at the roots. Alikhanov came closer, bent down.
“Miss,” he said.
A bottle of Pinot Gris stuck out of his pocket.
“Ugh, just you go away,” the woman said, tossing uneasily in a half-sleep.
“Right away, right away, everything will be all right,” Alikhanov whispered, “everything will be okay.”
Boris covered the table lamp with a sheet of official instructions. He remembered that both instructors were away. One was spending the night in the barracks. The second had gone on skis to the railway crossing to visit a telephone-operator girl he knew.
With trembling hands, he pulled out the red stopper and started to drink right from the bottle. Then turned suddenly – the wine was spilling down the front of his shirt. The woman was lying with her eyes open. Her face expressed extraordinary concentration. For a few seconds both were silent.
“What’s that?” the woman asked. There were coquettish notes in her voice, garbled by drunken drowsiness.
“Pinot Gris,” Alikhanov said.
“Come again?” the woman said, startled.
“Pinot Gris, rosé, strong,” he answered conscientiously, reading the label.
“One of them here said, ‘I’ll bring some grub…’”
“I don’t have anything with me,” Alikhanov said, flustered. “But I’ll find something. What may I call you?”
“Whatever. My mama called me Lyalya.”
The woman pulled down her dress. “My stockings are always getting unDONE. I DO them up and they keep getting unDONE… Hey, what’s the matter with you?”
Alikhanov had taken a step forward, bent down, and shuddered from the smell of wet rags, vodka and hair tonic.
“Everything’s fine,” he said.
An enormous amber brooch scratched his face.
“Oh, you swine!” was the last thing he heard.
He sat in the office without turning on the lamp. Then he straightened up, his arms hanging limp. The buttons of his shirt cuffs clicked.
“Lord, where have I landed?” Alikhanov murmured. “Where have I landed? And how will it all end?”
Indistinct, fleeting memories came to him.
…A square in winter, tall rectangular buildings. A few schoolboys surround Vova Mashbits, the class telltale. Vova’s expression is frightened, he wears a foolish hat, woollen drawers… Koka Dementiyev tears a grey sack out of his hand. Shakes a pair of galoshes out onto the snow. After which, faint with laughter, he urinates into the sack. The schoolboys grab Vova, hold him by the shoulders, shove his head into the darkened sack. The boy stops trying to break loose. It’s not actually painful…
The schoolboys roar with laughter. Among the others is Borya Alikhanov, Pioneer* section leader and straight-A student.
The galoshes lie there on the snow, black and shiny. But now he also sees the multicoloured tents of a sports camp on the outskirts of Koktebel. Blue jeans hanging out to dry on a clothesline. A few couples dancing in the twilight. A small and shiny transistor radio standing on the sand.
Boris draws Galya Vodyanitskaya close. The girl is wearing a wet bathing suit. Her skin is hot and a little rough from sunburn. Galya’s husband, a graduate student, sits on the edge of the volleyball court, in the judging stand. In his hand, a rolled-up newspaper shows white.
Galya is a university student in the Indonesian Department. She speaks words in a whisper that Alikhanov doesn’t understand. He repeats after her, also in a whisper, “Kerom dash akhnan… kerom lanav…”
Galya presses even closer.
“Can you not ask any questions?” Alikhanov says. “Give me your hand!”
They almost run downhill, then disappear into the bushes. Above them, the formless silhouette of Vodyanitsky, the graduate student. Then his perplexed cry: “Hey – hey?”
Alikhanov’s memories became less and less distinct. Finally, some spots fluttered past him, vivid points in time became clear: silver coins stolen from his father… trampled glasses after a fight on the corner of Liteyny Prospect and Kirochnaya… And a brooch, the blindingly yellow brooch in its crude, anodized setting.