folders, books, magazines, and paper sheets, and all that stuff splashed out and piled in heaps even on the sill of the naked curtain-less window, the only one in the room… I liked it.
And I also liked Eera's story about the Zhomnir's inhuman behavior… His family lived then in the same apartment block with Eera's parents and, at renovating his flat, he divided the floor area by the number of his family members, painted his share, placed the brush in a jar with water, wished the labor successes to the rest of the family, and washed his hands…
His wife, Maria Antonovna, a noiseless woman with her hair gray to radiant whiteness, presented me with a book of poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva and made me fall in love with her poems. Before that, I believed that poetesses were only good at lace weaving, which is adding frills to rhymed lines. Marina was not like that, she knew how to rape words, when necessary.
I remembered her poetry in the local train vestibule, coming from Konotop because I remained an itinerant passenger although not every week as earlier. I felt it my duty to Lenochka; she always was a good child and I even loved her in my own way. It's only that I was never good at playing and lisping with kids and grew bored in less than 10 minutes… In the car vestibule, I had a smoke and then, all of a sudden, started to feel the lapel of my camel-hair coat. I didn't know why.
As it turned out, a long tailor's needle was hidden in the lapel corner, stuck entirely in between the fabric layers. Getting the needle out was a mighty hard job. Everything repeated itself with the second lapel.
(…a stabbed-in needle exactly as in that early poem by Tsvetaeva…)
I threw the needles out thru the slots above the glass panes in the doors of the electric train rumbling along to Nezhyn. Where did they come from? Stuck by the jealous mother like in that poem? Or bought together with the coat from Alyosha? And (most perplexing) what made me find them?
(…there's still a lot of questions that I will never find answers to. Never…)
My visits to the Zhomnirs disturbed my mother-in-law. Her main concern and worry were if they ever treated me to cooked sausage there. Apparently, she was afraid that such sausage could manipulate a person, making a zombie of them like in the "The Matrix" movie, produced by Hollywood some thirty years later.
She didn't know that I was from a new generation of robots being zombied and formatted thru printed text. And how would you like, Gaina Mikhailovna, that Zhomnir fed me a book by Hesse, in whose prose one paragraph can flow for a page and a half?
(…the possibility to affect the mundane world putting to use the leverage of text-zombied me was more than once observed and experienced personally.
Like, in the toilet of in-laws' apartment, I find At the Steer Wheel magazine cut up for convenient hygienic use. Sitting on the potty, I read scraps of an article about big Soviet trucks. Then I leave for the institute, get round the corner of the block and get appalled! There is no way to cross Red Partisans Street because of the growling stream of KAMAZ's and BELAZ's. They are rolling in hosts!
Of course, later they tried to put me off the track by irrelevant fibs of repair works on the Moscow highway and detouring of the traffic thru Nezhyn.
So, they waited with their repair until I found the time to read a cutting from At the Steer Wheel?.)
My relations with Gaina Mikhailovna fell into the traditional "son-in-law vs. mother-in-law" pattern exactly, maybe, in part refracted by the intellectual level of the participants to the template… At first, we got along in just a bright and sunny manner, but after a week or so, she suddenly began to fasten up the collar of her dressing gown with a big safety pin. The robe was for home wear with a deep cut, but I did not even notice it until that pin popped up.
The outfit transformation robbed me of the blissful unawareness, because between that pin and the first button under the cut there formed a gap, and any gaping would, naturally, catch your eye. I did not ask her previous son-in-law (Tonya's husband, Ivan, from the other bedroom) if he had observed the like symptoms before my coming to our parents-in-law's, and with what frequency. I just had to put under control the direction of my glances. Although, what was there to see? The woman had gone seedy long before…
Once, we happened to be alone in the whole apartment, just she and I. It was getting dark outside the window. She was standing with her hands behind her back leaned against the big mirror in the wardrobe door, and telling me, seated on the folding coach-bed folded up because of the daytime, how she was being carried away to Germany in a freight-train car crammed with lots of young girls.
Clattering its iron wheels at the rail joints, the car was jostling its live load in abrupt sways. Everyone was frightened by the uncertainty of what would happen next, and they felt very thirsty. Some of the girls were crying…
The train stopped in the field. The guards threw open the doors of the cars and shouted something, but she did not know German then. In a nearby hollow there ran a stream; the guards told with their gestures they were allowed to approach the water.
They happily rushed to the stream, drank and washed their faces. Suddenly there were shouts and sharp reports of a machine gun round – one of the girls had attempted to run away and was killed.
Back to the cars they were all passed by the dead. The killed girl lay on her back with her eyes open and looked so beautiful… Dusk thickened in the room, Gaina Mikhailovna stood with her palms pressed
