Toward the end of winter on a damp, tubercular evening Peters was drying his hands in the men’s room under the hot blast of air and eavesdropping on Faina talking on the telephone in the corridor. The dryer shuddered and shut up, and in the ensuing silence the beloved voice laughed: “No, we have nothing but women on our staff. Who?… Him?… That’s not a man; he’s a wimp. An endocrinological sissy.”
Adele, love my reed. Inside, Peters felt as if he had been run over by a trolley. He looked around at the pathetic yellowed tile, the old mirror, swollen from inside with silver sores, the faucet leaking rust—life had selected the right place for the final humiliation. He wound the scarf around his throat carefully, so as not to catch cold in his glands, wended his way home, felt for his slippers, went to the window, out of which he planned to fall, and pulled the blind. The window was thoroughly taped for the winter and he didn’t want to waste his work. Then he turned on the oven, placed his head on the rack with cold bread crumbs, and waited. Who would eat rice porridge in his memory? Then Peters remembered that there hadn’t been any gas all day, they were doing repairs, grew furious, with trembling finger dialed the dispatcher and screamed horribly and incoherently about the outrageous service, got into his grandfather’s chair, and sat there till morning.
In the morning, large snowflakes fell slowly. Peters looked at the snow, at the chastened sky, at the new snow banks, and quietly rejoiced that he would have no more youth.
But a new spring came, through the connecting courtyards, the snows died, a cloying smell of decay came from the soil, blue ripples ran over puddles, and Leningrad’s cherry trees once again showered white on the matchbox sailboats and newspaper ships—and did it matter at all where you start a new voyage, in a ditch or an ocean, when spring calls and the wind is the same everywhere? And marvelous were the new galoshes Peters bought—their insides laid with the flesh of flowering fuchsia, the taut rubber shining like patent leather, promising to mark his earthly paths with a chain of waffle ovals no matter where he went in search of happiness. And without hurrying, hands behind his back, he strolled along the stone streets, peering deeply into yellow archways, sniffing the air of canals and rivers; and the evening and Saturday women gave him long looks that boded no good, thinking: here’s a sickie, we don’t need him.
But he didn’t need them, either; but Valentina caught his eyes, small and sinfully young—she was buying spring postcards on the sunny embankment, and the fortunate wind, gust-ing, built, changed, and rebuilt hairdos on her black, short-cropped head. Peters dogged Valentina’s steps, afraid to come too close, afraid of failure. Athletic young men ran up to the beauty, grabbed her, laughing, and she went off with them, bouncing, and Peters saw violets—dark, purple—bought and presented, heard them call her by name—it tore away and flew with the wind, the laughing people turned the corner, and Peters was left with nothing—dumpy, white, unloved. And what could he have said to her—to her, so young, so be-vileted? Come up on his flabby legs and offer his flabby hand: “Peter-s…” (“What a strange name…” “My grandmother…” “Why did your grandmother…” “A little German…” “You know German?” “No, but Grandmother…”)
Ah, if only he had learned German then! Oh then, probably… Then, of course… Such a difficult language, it hisses, clicks, and moves around in the mouth, O Tannenbaum, probably no one even knows it…. But Peters will go and learn it and astonish the beauty….
Looking over his shoulder for the police, he posted notices on street lamps: “German Lessons Wanted.” They hung all through the summer, fading, moving their pseudopods. Peters visited his native lampposts, touching up the letters washed away by rain, gluing the torn corners, and in late fall he was called, and it was like a miracle—from the sea of humanity two floated up, responding to his quiet, faint call, slanted purple on white. Hey, did you call? I did, I did! He rejected the persistent and deep-voiced one, who dissolved once more into oblivion, while he thoroughly questioned the tinny lady, Elizaveta Frantsevna from Vasiliyevsky Island: how to get there, where exactly, and how much, and was there a dog, for he was afraid of dogs.
Everything was settled, Elizaveta Frantsevna expected him in the evening, and Peters went to his favorite corner to wait for Valentina—he had been watching and he knew she would come by as usual, waving her gym bag, at twenty to four, and would hop into the big red building, and would work out on the beam amid others like her, swift and young. She would pass, not suspecting that Peters existed, that he had a great plan, that life was marvelous. He decided that the best way would be to buy a bouquet, a big yellow bouquet, and silently, that was important, silently but with a bow hand it to Valentina on the familiar corner. “What’s this? Ah!”—and so on.
The wind was blowing, swirling, and it was pouring when he came out on the embankment. Through the veil of rain the red barrier of the damp fortress showed murkily, its lead spire murkily raised its index finger. It had been pouring since last night, and they had laid in a generous supply of water up there. The Swedes, when they left these rotten shores, forgot to take away the sky, and now they probably gloated on their neat little peninsula—they had clear, blue frost, black firs and white rabbits, while Peters was coughing here amid the granite and mildew.
In the fall, Peters took great pleasure in hating his home town, and the city repaid him in kind: it spat icy streams from pounding roof tops, filling his eyes with opaque, dark flows, shoved especially damp and deep puddles under his feet, slapped the cheeks of his nearsighted face, his felt hat, and his tummy with lashes of rain. The slimy buildings that bumped into Peters were purposely covered with tiny white mushrooms and a mossy toxic velvet, and the wind, which had come from big highwayman roads, tumbled around his soggy feet in deathly tubercular figure eights.
He took his post with the bouquet, and October poured from the skies, and his galoshes were like bathtubs, and the newspaper wrapped three times around the expensive yellow flowers fell apart into shreds, the time came and went and Valentina did not come and would not come but he stood there chilled through to his underwear, to his white hairless body sprinkled with tender red birthmarks.
The clock struck four. Peters shoved his bouquet in a garbage can. Why wait? He understood it was stupid and too late to learn German, that the lovely Valentina, brought up among athletic and vernal youths, would merely laugh and step over him, lumpy and broadwaisted; not for him were fiery passions and light steps, fast dances and leaps on the beam, or casually bought damp April violets, or the sunny wind from the gray waters of the Neva, or laughter and youth; that all attempts were futile, that he should have married his own grandmother and quietly melted away in the warm room to the ticking of the clock, eating sugar buns and planting his old stuffed rabbit in front of his plate for coziness and amusement.
He was hungry, and he went to the first friendly light he saw, bought some soup, and sat down next to two beauties eating patties with onions and blowing away the foggy skin on their cooling pinkish cocoa.
The girls were chattering about love, of course, and Peters heard the story of a certain Irochka, who had been working a long time on a comrade from fraternal Yemen, or maybe Kuwait, in hopes that he would marry her. Irochka had heard that there in the sandy steppes of the Arabian land, oil was as plentiful as berries, every decent man was a millionaire and flew in his own jet with a gold toilet seat. It was that gold seat that drove Irochka crazy, for she grew up in the Yaroslavl region, where the conveniences were three walls without the fourth with a view of the pea field; all in all, it was like Ilya Repin’s painting Space. But the Arab was in no hurry to wed, and when Irochka put it to him straight, he replied in the vein of, “Oh, yeah, your mother wears army boots. So long, sucker!” and so on, and tossed Irochka out with her pathetic belongings. The girls paid no attention to Peters, and he listened and felt sorry for the unknown Irochka and pictured the pea-covered expanses of Yaroslavl, trimmed around the horizon with dark, wolf-filled forests, melting in the blissful silence under the blue shimmer of the northern sun, or the dry, grim squeak of millions of sand grains, the taut push of a desert hurricane, the brown light through the deep murk, forgotten white palaces filmed with mortal dust or enchanted by long-dead sorcerers.