Sin

Wheels

…So I found myself in a cemetery.

Once I was visiting a stupid friend of mine. We were just sitting around watching television, he yearned with the desire to entertain himself somehow, and I was lying on his musty couch.

This was in a dormitory on the fifth floor.

Through the open door covered in dents and marks, came a kitten of nasty appearance, looking as if it had lived in a rubbish pail all its life.

My friend turned to it his idiotic attention.

“Hey you, shithead,” he welcomed the squealing animal and picked it up, looking it over in an unfriendly way.

We had just had a smoke, spitting into the autumn damp, and the window was open.

When I turned away from the television, the kitten was already hanging from the windowsill with its paws, scraping up white patches of paint with its crooked claws. It was amazing that the animal did not make a noise as it slid toward its feline non-existence.

I remembered for no reason that some poet said that the other world smelt of mice. Our kitten would like it if that were so. But I don’t think it smells of anything at all there.

My fool looked at the kitten in fascination.

A second later, the kitten suddenly clutched at an invisible crack on the window sill with its last efforts, and hung there motionless, its eyes staring.

The fool made a tiny movement with his index finger — the way you touch a bell or a shot glass if you want it to make a delicate sound — and hit the kitten on its hanging claw.

When I got downstairs, after first calling the fool by his everlasingly true name, the kitten was lying on a bench, peaceful and soft. Its back paws hung off the bench like rags.

This is just the way that I was hit, with a light movement, on the claw.

But I did have merry friends.

Vadya, a handsome, smiling blonde guy, his eyes with the ruptured veins of a novice but already incorrigible alcoholic. Vova, the healthiest of us, chuckling, meaty, with a large red face.

It was the most poetic winter I have ever experienced in my life.

At that time I had finally stopped writing poems, and never did so again seriously, I quit one job but did not find another one, and then, as I say, I was hit on the claw, and I found myself in a grave.

“Are you going to get out of there, monkey dick?” Vova called, standing above me. From under his feet, earth and dirty snow fell into the grave.

I grabbed the spade, and swung it with the genuine intention of hitting Vovka on the leg as painfully as possible, and if possible breaking it. Vovka, laughing, jumped away. In one hand he had a bottle of vodka, in the other a glass.

“No, are you going to drink or not?” he asked, walking around the grave, keeping his distance from my spade.

“Why the fuck are you asking, Vova?”

“Then get out.”

“I’ll drink here.”

Vova, making sure that I had put the spade in the corner, squatted by the rectangular pit. He handed me a tall glass, half filled.

Next to Vova, Vadik squatted down, smiling his usual sincere, kind smile.

We clinked our glasses — the guys had to lean over towards me a little, and I raised my glass towards them, as if greeting them.

I stood without a hat, sweaty, happy, in a black, or rather red, pit, dug out in the midst of white snow. The snow lay on faint paths, on statues and on iron fences, on graves and on disheveled wreaths.

Vova handed me a piece of bread and a slice of sausage.

How delicious, my God. Cover me over right now, I know what happiness is.

Vova turned around to bring more snacks, and got the scoop of the spade in his backside.

“Damn you, earthworm!” he shouted happily, and didn’t do anything to retaliate.

Vadik also laughed. White unchewed bread could be seen in his mouth, and this seemed attractive to me. Vadik had good, strong, white teeth — and now there was white bread in his teeth.

“Let’s finish up now, we’ll get the coffin,” Vova said. “Who have we got today? An old woman?”

Making mournful faces, we entered the apartment.

Already on our way to the fourth floor, we had stopped talking, in order to calm down somehow. Otherwise the corpse would have been collected by three sweaty guys who had drunk two bottles of vodka between them, with teeth chattering, and with a stupid chuckle bubbling in their teeth.

Quiet relatives moved aimlessly along the walls, women in black scarfs and men in coats. At loose ends, the men went out to smoke in the stairwell every ten minutes.

“Time to take her away?” they asked, as if we were in charge in this home.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Need any help?”

“No, we’re fine.”

Until recently I had only carried cupboards up and down staircases. Now I had realized that a coffin was essentially no different from furniture. You just couldn’t turn it upside down.

Vova always went first, and carried the narrow end, the legs. Vadya and I clung on at the back.

We were slowly followed by a few friends or relatives. Their somber faces reflected the conviction that any minute we would drop the coffin.

But we completed our task energetically, and almost easily.

By the entrance, we put the coffin on some stools. We all took a breather.

“Could you take a photo of Grandma?” someone asked me.

“Sure,” I replied, before I could get my breath back, surprised as usual at why the hell people needed pictures of corpses. Where did they put them, did they hang them on the wall? Look, kids, that’s your grandma. Or did they put the photo in an album? That’s us at the beach, there we are at our neighbors’ dacha, and this is the funeral… It’s not a good photo of me, don’t look.

I put the instant photo in my pocket so that it would come out without being affected by the winter sun and light snow.

The bus drove up, and the driver got out, and opened the back doors of his rust heap.

The relatives had all wandered off somewhere, even the one who asked me to take a photo.

“All right, load it in,” said the driver.

Vadya shrugged his shoulders: he was smiling again.

“Listen, let’s load it in while there’s no one around,” Vova said to me. “My feet are freezing. Otherwise they’ll come out and start milling around.”

And indeed, the relatives did not come out to say goodbye until quarter of an hour later, and Grandma was already on the bus.

By that time we’d already managed to argue with the driver, asking him to turn the heater on; he looked at us as if we were idiots and didn’t turn it on.

“Don’t be sad, granny, we’re about to go,” I said quite seriously, but my silly brothers, who were stomping their frozen legs in boots that were rock-hard from frost, found this incredibly funny.

“What, aren’t we allowed to say goodbye?” a tearful woman’s voice said. The door opened after the voice, and we saw a small crying face, which was hardly visible under black lace, so abundant that it was almost indecent.

“Shall we carry her out again?” Vova asked insolently.

“Never mind now…” the woman replied.

A man came bounding up to us, evidently very happy that we weren’t taking the coffin out.

“Are you cold, guys?” he asked affably.

“Are we ever…”

Something that I can never understand is speeches by a grave. You stand with a spade and go crazy: you feel like knocking down the idiot who’s talking, so that he spills, the asshole, into the red pit. It’s embarrassing to listen to people, where does all this stupidity in them come from?

Nailing down the coffin lids with long, reliable nails is also something that I don’t like doing very much, for some reason; but this is probably because I can’t do it as nimbly as Vova. He drives the nail in with three blows — beautiful work…

Lowering the coffin is much more interesting: it has a bit of a children’s game to it, a painstaking, pointless child’s task. One of the men who has come to pay his respects always helps us out here: because we need four, not three men.

And shoveling in the earth is quite enjoyable… We take off our jackets, cheerful, continuous sweat runs down our handsome faces, and the spades fly. First the earth falls loudly, hitting the wood, then it falls with a dull thud. The sound gets duller and duller. And then just a soft hill is left, and we have made all our morning’s work on the frozen earth come to nothing.

Now there’s time to have a good smoke, while the rest slowly disperse. We smoke, licking the frozen salty moisture from our lips. Now we will be taken to the wake, at some shabby café, and we’ll get drunk.

We’re always happy when we are seated somewhere in the corner, or better still, at a separate table.

I like cheap cafés, their damp smell, as if they cooked soup there around the clock, and swimming in the soup are tired vegetables, withered potatoes, exhausted carrots, and among other things, it seems, the cook’s apron, if not in its entirety, then at least the pocket…

In cheap cafés, there are dark windows, with mist-covered glazed tiles, and dirty windowsills. When you move the chairs, they make a horrible squeak as they move across the broken square tiles, and the tables shake, drenching themselves with juice. We have juice on the table, I don’t like it, but I’ll drink it.

Initially we behave quietly, we eat everything quickly, and so they start to serve the new dishes with our table. It is always empty, our table, in two minutes there is not even any mustard on it, Vova has scraped out the jar with his heavy, chapped fingers; only the lumpy grey salt remains in the salt cellar. We’d sprinkle the salt on some bread, but we already ate the bread, before we had hardly sat down.

After half an hour, the wake gets noisy, and no one hears or sees us anymore. Sometimes someone may sit down with us and say that grandma was a good person. And we drink with him without clinking our glasses, although he is eager to bash his glass against ours. He’s not used to it yet, perhaps this is his first grandma, but we’ve had so many, we don’t even remember which number this one is.

Vova, the cunning bastard, has gone to take a leak, and has already found out where the crates of vodka are, two of them, and snatches a bottle without asking — they take a long time to bring us one, and there is still a lot of food, we’re used to consuming it sparingly.

As soon as we realize that the relatives have already begun to thin out, and our young, undesirably cheerful voices sound too loud in the emptying café, we guess that we should leave.

We swallow the food, stick an unfinished pie in our pockets, and pour out the new bottle, almost a whole glass each, gulp it down and rush outside, to cool off our hot heads.

We smoke and jostle each other, and look at each other tenderly. No one wants to go home, and waits for events to take some interesting turn of their own accord.

“Shall we go home or what?” asks Vova, and I hear cunning in his voice.

“I don’t really feel like it yet,” Vadya replies, showing his white teeth, like a friendly horse.

And here Vova takes out a bottle from under his arm.

“You stole it, you bastard!” I say, laughing. “You robbed an old woman, student!”

“Student yourself,” Vova replies cheerfully; his words are not lacking in respect. In our group I am considered to be the smartest, although I have the same education: a tedious school and Cs on my report.

We need to find a place for ourselves, and we start our circling around the town, feeling the dampness in our legs and the icy drafts less and less, opening our collars, pulling up our hats, catching snow in our mouths.

We don’t find the casually mentioned friend of Vova or Vadya at home; it’s unlikely he would have been happy to see us, but he would have taken us in for an hour; Vadya or Vova’s aunt sent us away without opening the door; and the skanky girlfriend of both Vadya and Vova turned out to have left town.

“Where to?” we ask at the peephole.

“To her village,” the man behind the door replies. “She was expelled from the institute because of studs like you.”

After saying this he flapped off in his slippers, back into the depths of the apartment, without saying goodbye.

Vova rang the doorbell again, and getting a reply, pressed his red face against the peep-hole.

“Stud yourself,” Vova said clearly.

It didn’t seem likely that anyone else was waiting for us in this town, and so we settled on the steps of the stairwell, squatting down in a circle: the freezing concrete of the steps was intolerable, even if you wrapped a jacket around your ass.

Vova produced a piece of sausage from out of his coat, and a third of a stick of bread, and a loaf evenly cut in two.

My spirits rose again, and my heart started racing.

In a hurry, we drank, passing the bottle around, and tore the bread in pieces, chewing on the sausage meat in turn. The pie that we had brought from the wake proved to be useful.

We laughed, interrupting each other with every kind of heresy, that was quite worthy of the walls of this stairwell.

A key turned in an iron lock, and the man who had talked to Vova came out.

Vova was sitting with his back to him and didn’t turn around — at that moment he was drinking out of the bottle, and never allowed himself to be distracted from this activity.

“Maybe you’d like a mug?” the man asked.

“Bring us something to wash it down with,” Vova asked hoarsely, lowering the bottle, but without turning around.

I had been drinking for the fourth month now, and I drank every day.

At home — the place where I resided — lived my mother and my sister, who was divorced and had a small child.

I didn’t get up in the morning, to avoid running into my mother, who was hurrying off to work. She always left breakfast for me, but I didn’t eat it. I can’t eat in the morning when I have a hangover.

Lying on the bed, gloomy, feeling as though my head had been squashed, I ran my hands over the bed and noticed that there was no sheet on it. And the blanket had no blanket cover.

“Pissed myself again…”

Screwing up my eyes from the vile sense of shame that made my brain go into spasms, I remembered how my mother and sister had turned me over at night, taking the sheet out from under me. And then, with a gentle movement, they had covered my drunken body with another blanket, instead of the wet one.

After lying there for an hour or so, I went out of my room, saw my sister breastfeeding her baby, and quickly hid in the bathroom. I didn’t wash there, no, I cleaned my teeth, looking at myself in the mirror, with hatred, but not without curiosity.

So that’s what you can do, I wanted to say. And it’s nothing to you… Everything is nothing to you.

It started in December, which was unusually lacking in snow. After the first abundant, wet November snow fell, everything quieted down and melted, the roads turned black again and revolting bushes stuck out, scrawny and bent out of shape with loathing for themselves. In the morning, the puddles were covered with a crust of ice, but there was no snow.

I remember that my sister was still walking the baby in a pram, dressing him in a hundred layers of clothing and wrapping him in three blankets. He lay there, not even able to wrinkle his nose, and breathed in the brittle snowless frost.

Once I took the pram into the stairwell, without the baby, whom my sister was dressing despite his dissatisfied grunting.

After I pressed the button for the lift, I remembered that I had left the pacifier in the apartment, although my sister had just mentioned it.

I went back into the apartment, took the rubber nipple from off the bed, and as I went back into the stairwell, I saw that a man I didn’t know was leaning out of the open door of the lift and briskly rifling through our pram. He was going through the diapers, digging among the pillows and grazing the offended rattles.

“What are you doing, asshole?” I asked in a surprised voice.

“Why did you leave it here?” he replied, snarling with grey teeth.

As I ran to the lift, I noticed that he wasn’t alone in the lift — next to him, evidently, was his wife, and behind him was his daughter, around nine years old, with dull eyes.

He pressed the button, and the lift went up.

With angry leaps I flew up the stairs, and pressing my face to the doors of the lift, I yelled:

“Where do you maggots come from?!”

I saw the cable moving past in the gap in the lift; there was a faint yellow light. The lift didn’t stop.

I ran up another two floors, hoping to overtake it. I flew to the lift but missed it again: the lift went higher, although I had just clearly heard it stopping with a clatter.

“Why are you alive, you piece of crap?” I shouted into the doors of the lift.

Thus, screaming on every floor and tearing up my throat, I ran up to the ninth floor, sat down on the stairs there and cried, but without tears: I drily howled in my heavy melancholy. The lift went down.

I went back down in about seven minutes, with a cigarette between my teeth. My sister was putting the baby in the pram.

“Where did you go?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I pressed the button of the lift again.

We wheeled the pram out and went off for a walk.

As I looked at the baby, I noticed something on his cheerful red hat.

I leant down and saw that it was a thick, disgusting, pink blob of spit that had spread on the pillow.

The man had gone to the trouble of stopping the lift on the second floor and spitting into the pram.

I rubbed it off with my hand.

As we finished the bottle of vodka, we started doing what we usually did: we collected change and the crumpled, almost worthless notes in our pockets. We put all the money on the step.

This was one of our personal, almost daily repeating miracles — somehow we, who thought that we had no money at all, after shaking ourselves down to the last kopeck, put together just enough to buy a bottle every time. And we even had a few rubles left over for the cheapest and nastiest biscuits.

We had our norm, and we did not usually part until we had fulfilled it. The norm was three bottles per person. The three of us had to drink nine bottles by midnight, or a little later. And only after that did we start to go our separate ways, no longer having any words for farewells or energy for friendly hugs.

Today — still rather sober and much happier than we had been an hour ago — we drank… we gathered our efforts and counted… yes, we had only drunk six bottles.

Two while we were digging the grave. Three at the wake. And another in the stairwell.

So we put together money for the seventh and went out to look for it.

We found a shop and bought everything there that we wanted. The vodka disappeared into Vova’s shapeless jacket, and I put the biscuits in my pocket, feeling their roughness with my fingers.

“I don’t want to drink outside anymore,” I said with capricious sternness.

“Who does?” Vova replied. “What can you suggest?”

I didn’t have any suggestions, and for a while we walked silently, gradually losing the warmth we had accumulated in the stairwell, where at least there wasn’t any wind.

“Hey, a girl I went to school with lived around here somewhere,” Vova suddenly livened up.

“When did you go to school, weirdo?” I asked.

Vova didn’t say anything in reply, and looked at the buildings. They stood in freezing semi-darkness, with their grey sides turned towards each other, completely identical.

Despite the cold, the vodka we had drunk in the stairwell was slowly reaching us: but the drunkenness did not bring joy anymore, it had to be carried, like an extra burden, along with the cold and the darkness.

It was impossible to believe that anything could be good anymore: that warmth and light existed; you miserably wanted to lie down somewhere. But you didn’t want to go home, where you would be watched with suffering eyes.

Vova led us through yards, hunched over, silent, with our heads tucked into our jackets; our black hats were pulled down to our noses.

Vova himself didn’t care, he was still carrying his red face high and cheerfully.

“That’s it!” he exclaimed. “Here!”

And he guessed right. The door was opened by a small, dark, but already grown-up girl, and, which we did not expect at all, she smiled to us in welcome.

Vova called her something, but I didn’t catch what exactly, I just barged into the apartment and noticed right away that there was a delicious smell.

In fact, it wasn’t anything special — it was just hot borshch steaming in the kitchen. When you come in from the cold, a pot of red borshch quite rightly seems to be an aromatic miracle, or even something divine. There’s something pagan about it…

We took off our coats, moving our rigid hands with difficulty, pulled off our frozen footwear and went into the big room, where some guy was sitting. When he saw us, he immediately started preparing to leave, and no one asked him to stay.

Vova, evidently, wasn’t embarrassed by anything. He didn’t care that we had turned up uninvited, made ourselves at home and hadn’t brought anything with us.

What do you mean, we didn’t bring anything, Vova would have reasoned, if he had been capable. We’ve got vodka.

He went to get the bottle, which was still concealed in his jacket (he didn’t produce it until the guy we didn’t know had gone) and showed the vodka to the girl.

“Will you drink with us?” Vova offered, smiling insolently.

“I’ll be glad to join you,” she replied with unusual kindness, and I immediately wanted to do something useful for her, so that she would remember it all her life.

“Would you like some borshch?” she asked, shifting her gaze from Vova to me, but as I couldn’t reply, she had to return her gaze to Vova.

“Certainly!” he said confidently.

The girl went out, and we heard the clink of bowls being placed on the table.

“Why are you so lugubrious?” Vova asked me.

“What?”

“Lugubrious.”

“What does that mean?”

“Melancholy. Sour. Down in the dumps.”

I was always prepared to like a person for even the smallest act, if it was an honest one. And even for saying a word that hit the nail on the head. I had respected Vova for a long time, but here he defined the way I felt so wonderfully that the warm feeling I felt for him suddenly transformed into a full sensation of life-long kinship.

You’re right, Vova, I’m not sad at all. And not even tired. I’m lugubrious, with hanging, weak-willed cheeks, soft lips and sleepy eyelids.

Immediately, I felt happy again, and we went to eat and drink. The first spoon of borshch gave me back the taste of happiness, full and persistent.

After the second shot of vodka, we forgot about Vova’s classmate and made jokes among ourselves. We could never remember what made us happy in those minutes, especially as we weren’t really capable of associating with each other when we were sober: until the first burning gulp we couldn’t find a single thing to talk about.

She sat a little distance from the table, and slowly ate our biscuits, which I had handed her ceremoniously.

Unobtrusive music was playing, and Vova’s classmate sometimes wagged her small chin in rhythm with the music. She was not attractive at all, but this did not prevent her from being a wonderful person who had taken us in and wasn’t making us go away.

By the time the bottle was almost empty I felt that I was getting drunk again, and I went to look at myself in the bathroom, and also to rinse my face with icy water: that sometimes helped.

I couldn’t find the light switch, so I left the door open, turned on the tap, poured water into my cupped hand and presssed it to my face. I bent down over the sink.

A little light came from the corridor, and I looked around. The reflections in the dark mirror were hard to decipher, but I did notice that the bar to which the shower curtain was attached was hanging crookedly.

I’ll fix everything for you, my dear, I thought tenderly. I should ask for a screwdriver, it’s probably all screwed together… I’ll just have a look how it’s attached and… I’ll ask for a screwdriver…

Holding on to the shower curtain, I stood on the edge of the bath. Balancing on one leg, I tried to stand up straight, but the bar didn’t hold my weight, and came crashing down.

I fell off the edge of the bath, managing to grab the iron pipe of the bar before it could hit me on the head. At the same time, with a horrible swishing and rustling, I was covered in the shower curtain.

There I stood in the middle of the bathroom… with the rail in my hand… with my head wrapped in a shower curtain, like a person sheltering from a downpour…

Or perhaps it began earlier. I was returning to my suburb from the big city, the train whistled and sped through the evening drizzle, which was half snow. The moisture stuck to the windows in zigzags.

As I got out of the train, I stood on the platform for a long time, feeding on the gusts of wind, as if hoping that they would blow away all of my unexpected feebleness.

Recently I had got a feeling that was similar to the damp growing pains of boys going through puberty.

Strangely enough, in my early youth, having lived on earth for one and a half decades, I quickly passed these growing pains. The distance between a suddenly ending childhood to the moment when the most beautiful girl at school began to talk to me was imperceptible and laughable. I didn’t remember this distance.

And so, I virtually did not experience the humiliation felt by all my peers, which arose from the incompatibility of their bulging desires and the awkward opportunities of realizing them.

But now I felt as if teenage apathy and inarticulateness had taken control of me.

Some awkward wind blew me to the building on the outskirts where my girlfriend from school lived, who, I say, was very beautiful, and whom I never loved.

I got there by a feeble trolleybus, in an empty cabin, with just me and the conductor, and I squatted in the stuffy stairwell, under the staircase on the first floor, remembering without any enthusiasm how here I had first touched a vagina, and how the hairs on it had seemed incredibly bristly to me.

I remembered how we dragged our schoolbags, moving from one floor to the next to avoid the ubiquitous lift, which opened with a clatter and poured out noisy people into the stairwell.

Why am I remembering that? I thought without irritation.

Sometimes people came out of the stairwell and didn’t notice me, and this seemed humiliating.

Then I had a smoke, slowly inhaling and examining at the cigarette. This is the way people look when they have only recently discovered tobacco.

I was naïve enough to believe that the spirits of my youth were still alive in the stairwell, and I was pleased that I was indifferent to them, and that they were probably also indifferent to me, perhaps they didn’t even recognize me, just sniffed me over and flew away.

Neither was I recognized by a large dog, which was being taken for a walk by a sullen-looking person. They entered the stairwell, bringing into its musty silence the damp smell of the street, the noise of clothes, the banging and squeaking of doors. The dog immediately saw me and lunged at my legs. Thankfully, it was on a leash.

It barked emphatically, right at my face, stretching out its neck, and it did not seem as if its master was making much effort to restrain his furious monster.

“Call off your dog! Call it off!” I shouted. “It’s going to bite my head off!”

I pressed my head against the wall and felt the stench of the dog’s snout, saw the roof of its mouth and its wet tongue.

The man was in no hurry and deliberately pulled the dog towards himself slowly. The dog struggled and sprayed spit.

“You’re sick!” I shouted, shielding myself with my sleeve.

“Get out of the building,” he replied. “Go away, you tramp!”

Holding the dog on the leash and showing that he was prepared to release it, the man waited for me to get up and go out.

He shouted after me, but his words were inaudible over the barking.

Not without horror, I imagined that I had carelessly torn the rail out of the wall, and now, above the bathroom tiles, there would be two gaping holes in the crumbling plaster and whitewash.

What will I say to Vova’s classmate? What have I done!

Somehow freeing myself from the shower curtain, I looked at the place where the rail had just been, and with a feel of incredible relief realized that nothing terrible had happened.

The rail had been fixed on plastic hooks, one of which had simply turned over, thus making the iron pipe fall on me, together with the shower curtain that was attached to it.

I put the rail in its place and went out of the bathroom. No one had heard anything.

Vova was asking his classmate for a loan, but she replied that she did not have any money.

I didn’t have the energy to talk. I sat at the table in silence, completely stupefied.

In the bowl, with red froth around the edges, lay a leaf of boiled cabbage.

My friends started getting ready to go, but I couldn’t pull myself together to stand up.

“Hey, cripple, get up!” Vova called to me after a few minutes.

His classmate started taking away the dishes.

For some reason I wanted to tell her that my friends and I had not been with any women for a long time, almost three months. And before that I hadn’t been with a woman for a long time either, perhaps a whole month in addition to that. But back then I still remembered them, and now I had completely forgotten all about them, and I felt much better.

We never talk about women and never pay attention to them if we’re walking along the street. We’re always going somewhere.

But I didn’t talk about that, having remembered another story, which was very touching. How once, this winter, at the very beginning of it, I left the apartment building and saw a little girl on the swings.

I wanted to push her on the swings. This is what I said, looking into the bowl and enunciating the words with intolerable difficulty: “I… wanted… so… much… to… push… her… and she replied…”

She replied:

“Don’t touch me. You’re ugly.”

After I said that, I finally got up and went to put my coat on. I took a long time to pull on my shoes, listening to the splash of water and the sound of dishes being put away in the cupboard.

Then I searched for the arms of my jacket, for some reason finding only one arm, or three at once. The guys were already smoking in the stairwell, waiting for me.

After she had washed the dishes, she went to close the door after me, but I didn’t go out, and silently looked in her face, which I couldn’t make out, and would never remember later if I wanted to.

“I’ll give you my phone number, and you can ring me,” I said firmly, feeling as if I was going to be sick.

She shrugged her shoulders, tired.

I fished around in my pocket and took out a firm, square piece of paper.

“Give me… a feltpen… I’ll write it down.”

She took a pencil from the table by the mirror and gave it to me.

I wet the pencil with my saliva and wrote down the number, realizing that I had forgotten it somewhat and had probably got three numbers wrong out of six.

“There,” I gave her the square with crooked numbers on it.

“What is this?” she said in disgust.

On the other side of the telephone number there was the instant photo of the dead old woman. The woman’s lips were firmly closed. You could clearly see her brown eyelids and her white sunken cheeks.

“How disgusting,” said the girl in revulsion. “Where did you get that from? Why do you carry it in your pocket? You’re mad. Take it away!”

I don’t know where we found money again: I think we came across it after a fight by a kiosk at night.

I remember that Vova, endowed with incredible strength, knocked down two guys, grabbing them by the collar and throwing them onto the asphalt as if they were completely helpless.

We drank vodka in an underpass, and our hoarse lalughter was continued by a distorting, broken echo.

Vadya had disappeared somewhere, and Vova and I drank almost the entire bottle together. To chase it down, we had only a tiny toffee, which I found in my pocket, covered in specks of tobacco and fluff — from the lining.

I bit the toffee in two and gave the other half to Vova. As we swallowed the vodka, we would nibble a tiny piece of the sweet, crunching it between our teeth and grimacing.

“Vova, have you ever thought… that every year… you live out the day of your death?” I asked. “Perhaps it’s today? We live it out every year… Vova!”

Vova shook his head, not understanding a word I said.

Then Vadya came back, and we drank some more, but I just had a little bit. I took a few gulps into my mouth and spat almost everything out.

I went outside and soaked the iron wall of the kiosk with steaming urine. As I did up my pants, I saw a woman crouching nearby. She got up, pulled her pants on and returned to the kiosk, closing the heavy door behind her. We weren’t at all surprised by each other’s presence.

Forgetting about my friends, I wandered off home. I had no money for a taxi, the trams weren’t running at this hour, and I walked along, barely aware of where I was going, only sometimes coming to my senses and recognizing familiar objects in my part of town.

My path home went across the railroad tracks. I still don’t remember how many of them there are, three or four: they’re smooth, heavy rails, which come together and then diverge.

At one place on the rails, there was a battered crossing platform.

As I walked towards the tracks, I heard the rumble of an approaching train, a freight train. Sometimes I’d get the idea of counting the wagons of freight trains, but once I reached fifty I got tired.

Unless I cross the tracks now, I’ll fall down before it’s gone by, it’s heavy and long… I’ll fall down here and freeze! I realized, without saying this, and gathering my strength, I ran.

The rumble was getting nearer.

Tripping over the rails, not finding the platform, I ran diagonally, sensing the approaching iron mass, the burning smell and the heat.

In my right pupil, a lamp with a long white light was reflected.

My foot slipped, and I fell on my side, on to the gravel bank, and immediately, at that very second, I saw the black shining wheels steaking past with a terrible roar.

I gathered gravel in my palm, I felt the gravel with my cheek, and for a few minutes I couldn’t breathe: the huge wheels burnt the air, leaving a feeling of hot, stifling, mad emptiness.