He grew huffy and took the cup back.
“Of course, you have to believe people.” Galya stepped on Yura’s foot under the table. “An amazing thing happened to me, too. Remember, Yura? I bought a wallet, brought it home, and inside were three rubles. No one believes it.”
“Why not, I believe it. It happens,” Alisa mused. “Now, my mother…”
They talked about the amazing, about premonitions, and dreams. Alisa had a girlfriend who had predicted her entire life ahead of time—marriage, two children, divorce, division of the apartment and property. Yura told in great detail how a friend’s car was stolen and how the police cleverly figured the thief’s identity and caught him, but the real trick was—he couldn’t remember it right now. Filin described a dog he knew that unlocked the door with its own key and heated up dinner for its masters.
“Really, how?” the women gasped.
“Easily. They have a French oven, electric, with a control panel. Push a button, everything goes on. The dog looks at the time: goes to the kitchen, works there; well, warms something up for itself, too. The owners come home from work and the soup is on the boil, the bread sliced, the table set. Convenient.”
Filin talked, smiled, turned his ankle, glanced over at satisfied Alisa, the music died down, and the city made itself heard through the windows. Dark tea steamed in their cups, sweet cigarette smoke curled upward, the roses gave off their scent and beyond the window the Sadovoye Ring Road quietly squealed beneath tires and people cheerfully plowed through the streets, the city glowed in wreaths of golden street lamps, frosty rainbow rings, multicolored crunchy snow, while the capital’s sky sowed new charming snow, fresh, just made. And just think, this entire feast, this evening of miracles was created especially for this completely unspecial Allochka, extravagantly renamed Alisa—there she sat in her vegetable dress, mustached mouth open, delightedly staring at the all-powerful gentleman who with a wave of the hand, the flicker of an eyebrow can transform the world to the point of unrecognizability Soon Galya and Yura would leave, crawling back to their outskirts, and she would stay, she was allowed…. Galya grew depressed. Why, oh, why?
Filin’s tower nestled in the middle of the capital, a pink mountain, ornamented here and there in the most varied way—with all sorts of architectural doodads, thingamajigs, and whatnots: there were towers on the socles, crenels on the towers, and ribbons and wreaths between the crenellations, and out of the laurel garlands peeked a book, the source of knowledge, or a compass stuck out its pedagogic leg; or, if you looked, you’d see a puffy obelisk in the middle, and standing firmly on it, embracing a sheaf, a firm plaster woman with a clear gaze that rebuffs storms and night, with flawless braids and an innocent chin…. You kept expecting trumpets to sound and drums to play something governmental and heroic.
And the evening sky above Filin and his curlicued palace plays with light—brick, lilac—a real Moscow, theatrical sky.
While back in their outskirts… oh my God it’ll be nothing but thick oily cold darkness, empty in the cool abysses between houses, you can’t even see the houses, they’ve blended into the night sky weighted down by snow clouds with an occasional window burning in an uneven pattern: gold, green, red squares struggling to push aside the polar murk…. It’s late, the stores are locked and bolted, the last old lady has rolled out, carrying a packet of margarine and an eggbeater, no one is walking along the streets just for the fun of it, no one is looking around, strolling; everyone has slipped into his own door, drawn the curtains, and is reaching for the TV knob. If you look out the window, you see the boundary road, an abyss of darkness marked by doubled red lights and the yellow beetles of someone’s headlights…. Something big drove by, its lights nodding in a pothole…. Here comes a stick of light—the headlights in the bus’s forehead, a trembling nucleus of yellow light, live roe of people inside…. And beyond the regional road, beyond the last weak strip of life, on the other side of the snow-filled ravine, the invisible sky slipped down, resting its heavy edge on a beet field—right there, on the other side of the ravine. It was impossible, unthinkable, unbearable to realize that the thick darkness extended farther, over the fields that blended into a white roar, over badly constructed fences, over trees pressed into the cold earth where a doomed dull light quivers as if held in an indifferent fist… and farther once again, the dark white cold, a crust of forest where the darkness is even thicker, where perhaps a pathetic wolf is forced to live: it comes out on a hill in its rough wool coat smelling of juniper and blood, wildness, disaster, gazes grimly and with disgust at the blind windy vistas, clumps of snow hardening between its cracked claws, and its teeth are gritted in sadness, and a cold tear hangs like a stinking bead on the furry cheek, and everyone is the enemy and everyone is the killer….
For dessert they had pineapple. And then they had to get out. And it was so far to the house…. Avenues, avenues, avenues, dark blizzardy squares, deserted lots, bridges and forests, and more lots, and unexpected not-sleeping factories, light blue inside, and more forests and the snow in the headlights. And at home—boring green wallpaper, the cut-glass lamp fixture in the foyer, the dull cramped feeling and the familiar smell, and the color cover of a woman’s magazine tacked to the wall for decoration. A rosy, disgusting couple on skis. She’s grinning, he’s warming her hands. ” Chilled?” it’s called. “Chilled?” She’d tear it off the wall, but Yura won’t let her, he likes things sporty, optimistic…. So let him find a taxi.
Night had entered the deep hours, all the gates were closed, joyriding trucks zipped by, the starry ceiling hardened with the cold. The rough air had formed into clumps. “Hey, chief, take us to the city line?” Yura ran from car to car. Galya whimpered and switched from foot to foot, hopping on the side of the road, and behind her, in the palace, the last lights were going out, the roses plunging into sleep, Alisa babbling about her mother’s brooch, while Filin, in his tasseled robe, tickled her with his silvery beard: ooh, darling. More pineapple?
That winter they were invited once more, and Allochka hung around the apartment as if she belonged there, bravely grabbing the expensive dishes and smelling of lily of the valley and yawning.
Filin demonstrated Valtasarov to his guests—a dreamy bearded muzhik, amazing in his ventriloquism skills. Valtasarov could imitate a knock at the door, a cow being milked, the rattle of a wagon, the distant howl of wolves, and a woman killing cockroaches. He couldn’t do industrial sounds. Yura begged him to try, to at least do a trolley, but he refused flat out: “Fraid of busting my gut.” Galya was uncomfortable: she sensed in Valtasarov the degree of noncivilization from which she and Yura were a stone’s throw—over the city line, beyond the ravine, to the other side.
She must have gotten weary of late…. Just six months ago she would have actively pursued Valtasarov, invited him and a group of friends, served cracked sugar, rye cakes, and radishes—and whatever else the old peasant liked to eat—and he would have mooed and rattled the well chain to general excitement. But now it suddenly was clear to her: it wouldn’t work. If she were to invite him, the guests would laugh and leave, but Valtasarov would stay, ask to spend the night, probably—and she’d have to clear the room, and it was right in the middle of the apartment; he’d go to bed around nine or something, and it would smell of sheep, and shag, and haylofts; at night he’d stumble to the kitchen in the dark for a drink of water and knock over a chair…. A quiet curse. Julie would start barking, their daughter would wake up…. Or maybe he was a lunatic and would come into their bedroom in the dark… in a white shirt and felt boots… rummaging…. And in the morning, when you don’t feel like seeing anyone at all, when you’re in a hurry to get to work and your hair’s a mess and it’s cold—the old man would sit in the kitchen making a production of having tea, and then pull out illiterate scraps of paper from his pocket: “Girl, they wrote down this medicine for me…. It cures everything…. How can I get it?”