Happiness is Possible (16 page)

Never, before or after, have I ever seen in the New Year in such a malodorous and friendly atmosphere. The walls of the ‘festive hall', warmed by our breath and two red-hot coil heaters, wept like holy icons. We were all blissfully relaxed, the ne'er-do-well students, the tramps and the wary criminal types, covered in their blue tattoos. Even Toma smiled timidly as she nestled against my shoulder.

Dmitrich surveyed our gathering with an uncensorious, paternal gaze. We thought he was fine and he thought we were fine, just as we were. At one point it seemed to me that our benefactor was about to burst into song, and he probably would have done, but his gaze stumbled across me, as Nikolai Stepanovich's used to do. Suddenly changing his mind, Dmitrich held out his glass.

‘Come on son, clink glasses!' he said. ‘Here's to the New Year and to you. Everything will be just hunky-dory, you take an old man's word for it.'

And then a tramp sitting nearby announced that everything was going to be hunky-dory for him and his Ninka too, because they loved each other and they were going to get married.

‘Isn't that right, Ninka?' he said, nudging the woman beside him.

The other tramps laughed raucously and all started shouting that they were getting married soon too.

As time went on the festivities became more and more boisterous, but we weren't involved for very much longer. Without waiting for the culmination, Tamara led me off to our little room, where I immediately succumbed to the wine weakness, collapsed onto the bed and fell asleep. A little while later Felix knocked on our door.

‘The tramps are already fighting,' he announced and collapsed into bed beside me

Toma didn't sleep a wink all night, not because she had nowhere to sleep, and not even because of the rats. Or, rather, precisely because of the rats, because there weren't any that night. She thought that if the rats had disappeared, it meant there was going to be a catastrophe.

But everything was all right after all. Our riotous neighbours never got around to setting the building on fire or starting a knife fight; thankfully, the rectified spirits felled them before that. The yard keepers' housing association saw in the New Year without any emergencies, thank God – if you disregard the fact that the snow wasn't cleared for an entire week. At the end of that week, just before the Orthodox Christmas, Dmitrich came running to see Tamara and me in our room. He looked badly frightened and spoke incoherently: the only thing we could understand from what he said was that some high-up had come to the housing committee and was pounding his fist on the table.

‘Talk sense, will you,' I told him. ‘What high-up, why's he pounding the table? Maybe it's because we haven't cleared the snow?'

‘I don't know who this high-up is, but he's very high,' Dmitry answered feverishly. ‘And he couldn't give a shit about the snow – it's you he wants.'

To make a long story short, this ‘high-up' turned out to be my father-in-law, Nikolai Stepanovich. Somehow, I don't know how, he had figured out where Toma and I were and shown up at the housing committee in person. And he was pounding the table because he didn't know how to do anything else but pound the table.

That very evening a black ministerial Volga with gleaming bumpers came for us. Poor Dmitrich was totally fazed by this.

‘If I'd known you were such a big shot, I'd never have let you in,' he lamented. ‘Now I've got to answer for you.'

‘Don't worry Dmitrich, I'll put in a word so they don't touch you.'

I handed back the room and its contents, the padded jacket, the felt boots and the official-issue bed sheets. We hugged each other in farewell and never saw each other again.

But I started seeing Nikolai Stepanovich regularly again. And I must say that while Toma and I had been on the run, my father-in-law had changed significantly. He had probably been doing a lot of thinking. The very first evening after our return Nikolai Stepanovich summoned me into the kitchen for a man-to-man talk, something he had never done before. When he closed the door behind us and took the vodka out of the cupboard, I knew the conversation was going to be serious, and so it was. Without any yelling or snide attacks, Nikolai Stepanovich informed me that although I was, of course, a villain and a scoundrel, now that he ‘was convinced' that ‘that little fool' Tomka was stuck on me in earnest, he also wanted to have a normal human relationship with me.

‘How about you?' asked Nikolai Stepanovich, looking me in the face.

‘Why not?' I muttered in confusion.

‘Then we'll drink to that!' said my father-in-law, pouring vodka for both of us. ‘You don't shake your own shit off the shovel, eh?' He laughed good-naturedly and added: ‘Only don't call me dad.'

We drank as a sign of reconciliation, but then it turned out that wasn't all. To make sure that Toma and I wouldn't go traipsing round any more rat-infested slums, Nikolai Stepanovich promised to register us for a flat with a housing cooperative. This news really floored me.

‘Thank you . . .' I muttered, blushing. ‘Thank you very much . . .'

Nikolai Stepanovich enjoyed my embarrassment.

‘No worries!' he said, slapping me on the shoulder. ‘Make the most of it, lad, now it's turned out this way. Just make sure you never do anything to upset Tomka and stick to your studies. When you graduate from college, you can join the Party and I'll take you on as chief engineer. Eh? Would you like to be a chief engineer?'

We had another drink or two as we discussed my career prospects, then Nikolai Stepanovich looked at his watch and suddenly said in a conspiratorial tone of voice.

‘Now let's have one for Christmas, but keep it quiet.'

Many, many years have passed since then. Tamara's parents are no longer with us. Fortunately, they died before we were divorced. I am writing these lines, sitting in the very same flat that Toma's father arranged for us to have and paid for, and to this day I am very grateful to him. Forgive me, Nikolai Stepanovich, for not keeping my promise never to upset your daughter. And you, Irina Borisovna, forgive me for reading at the table.

If someone from the pre-mobile phone era was relocated to our time, he would be very surprised to see every second person in the city walking along holding his or her head. As if they have just all banged their skulls together while bending over at the same time to pick something up, or they have all received a collective smack round the ear from someone or other. We, of course, would start explaining to our visitor that no one has bumped heads with anyone and these people are simply talking on the phone. But our guest would not believe us. ‘In the first place,' he would object, ‘why on earth does half the city suddenly need to make a phone call at the same time? And in the second place, where are their phones? A telephone has to have a receiver for speaking into, but they're muttering into empty space.' The pre-mobile individual would think that Muscovites had gone insane or fallen into their second childhood, and he would not be entirely wrong. Remember the way many of us – practically all of us, in fact – when we used to play in the sand-pit with our young peers, would hold a stone or a clenched fist to our ear in just the same way, pretending to be talking on the phone? We imagined our adult future, eating imaginary food, concluding imaginary marriages and dandling imaginary or, in the best cases, plastic babies on our knees.

Recent research has now demonstrated that advances in IT and telecommunications are prolonging our childhood. The researchers are at a loss to say whether this is good or bad, but I would like to think it is good because in the imaginary world of childhood our potential is so much greater than in the real world. ‘X per cent more' as the advertisers put it. For instance, at an early kindergarten age I was friends with a little girl by the name of Vera. She was about forty per cent older than me, so she liked to imagine that I was her little boy – perhaps she was already preparing for the role of a single mother. But I didn't like that role: I was my mother's little boy already, and what point was there in playing at being myself? I preferred the role of the Faithful Husband, and sometimes, indeed, I managed to persuade my little girlfriend into marriage. Then she and I became mum and dad and we had a child in the form of a doll, which Vera took out from under her skirt in a highly convincing fashion. That was the terrible kind of thing that used to happen in our sandpit, but it proves that in the child's world nothing is impossible.

In adult life, however, things are a bit more complicated. Of course, thanks to the Internet revolution we can now carry on playing into old age, imagining ourselves . . . well, it's shameful even to admit who we imagine ourselves as. Although, actually, it's not shameful anymore these days. But we can still only
imagine
. The moment we try to realise our fantasies in external reality, we run into all sorts of problems. Society is not yet ready to abandon its customary taboos.

By this I don't even mean excesses and perversions, which really should be left behind in the sandpit, and buried as deeply as possible. Ah, and now that mention of my games with little Vera has reminded me of another story that echoes some of the same themes, a rather more adult story, about something that happened to my classmate Slavik Korablin. He fell in love with our teacher of English at school, and the feeling was reciprocated.

And why, indeed, should he not fall in love with her? I suspect that apart from Slavik very many of our lads entertained secret fantasies about her. How could we possibly not have? The girls in our class had been specially handpicked, each more hideous than the last. There was no Internet with pictures yet and Maya Arkadievna (that was the teacher's name) really was a looker.

She was nothing at all like the other English teachers, who in our day fell into two categories. Some were fat, elderly authority figures who had learned the language fifty years earlier from gramophone records; the others were pale, of indefinite age and completely lacking in authority, but they held diplomas with distinction from faculties of foreign languages. In class the fat ones were heavy on discipline and, by and large, they managed to impose their will, but the pale ones came to our lessons as if they were about to be shot, although I don't understand why: we never shot a single one. In fact no one shot the pale teachers, but they never lingered at our school for long – God only knows where they all went. The result was that we had a perpetual problem with teachers of English, because there weren't enough fat ones to go round.

That was why no one was surprised when one day the class teacher announced that we were going to have a new English teacher. We were surprised later, when this teacher showed up in person for our lesson. She wasn't fat and she wasn't pale, in fact she was an extremely attractive young woman. At first we even thought she was yet another of the headmaster's dolly-bird secretaries who had got the wrong door. But all was made clear when this dolly-bird greeted us in English:

‘Hello, friends! My name is Maya Arkadievna.'

‘My, my, Arkadievna!' some stupid clown joked and immediately received a clip round the back of the head from Semyonov.

Semyonov was actually quite a hooligan in his own right; all of us boys were hooligans to a greater or lesser degree, but Maya Arkadievna's beauty had an ennobling effect on us. It wasn't even her beauty, it was a certain romantic femininity that she had – we sensed it straightaway.

The new teacher didn't have a diploma with distinction, nor did she possess any outstanding pedagogical skills. I wouldn't say that when Maya Arkadievna arrived we suddenly started doing much better at English, but we loved her classes. For us they were classes in beauty: she sang to us about prefixes and we simply listened to her voice, watched the shapes formed by her lips and admired the grace of movement with which nature had endowed her. Even the girls – our poor, plain girls – devoured Maya Arkadievna with eyes that radiated envious rapture. In short, I don't know how things were in the other classes, but in 10B we developed a genuine cult of the beautiful English teacher. I think she realised something of the kind herself and, within reasonable limits, employed her charms for the good of the cause. Everything was just wonderful: in Maya Arkadievna's lessons we sat there as meek as lambs, and in gratitude for our good behaviour she gave us decent marks. Our girls tried to imitate the English teacher's manners and even her clothes, and the boys, as I have already mentioned, indulged in fantasies about her. In secret.

But not all of us. One boy – Slavik Korablin, that is – proved bolder than the others, or crazier, depending on your point of view. Or perhaps his fantasies simply filled him up to the brim and overflowed, so he decided to share them, as it were. In short, Slavik declared his love to Maya Arkadievna. When and how he did it, in written form or
viva
voce
, we never found out. It was hard enough to believe that he could have done it at all. In our class Korablin did not have a reputation for conquering young maiden's hearts; he wasn't even an early developer. He looked like a typical secret fantasist – intellectual and introspective. It was only later, after the whole business came out, that our girls discovered how fanciable he was.

Be that as it may, the fact remains that Slavik confessed his love to the teacher. Of course, he was delicately rejected . . . and, of course, he repeated his confession. Following goodness knows how many confessions, made in goodness knows what form, the English teacher's heart began to falter. Otherwise how can we explain that instead of giving the boy a piece of her mind, summoning his parents to the school and raising the matter at a school staff meeting, Maya Arkadievna entered into a series of educational dialogues with him. The intended purpose of these clandestine extra-curricular dialogues was, naturally, to cure Slavik of his fatal fascination and, naturally, they led to the teacher and the pupil becoming lovers.

I don't know about schools nowadays, but in pre-mobile times this kind of occurrence was considered rare and untypical. Sexual contact between a teacher and a pupil was regarded in a highly negative light and condemned unreservedly by the community of parents and teachers – if, of course, it came to light. And in our case the occurrence did come to light, because Slavik and Maya Arkadievna proved to be absolutely hopeless conspirators. Whether the community caught them at it red-handed or deduced the substance of the crime from the accumulated mass of circumstantial evidence, I don't remember now. I only remember that there was a full-blown scandal, Slavik's parents were summoned to the school several times, and extraordinary staff meetings and Komsomol meetings were convened. There was no stoning, but that was only because the school desperately needed a live English teacher. However, the concerned community apparently overdid things with the meetings anyway, because Maya Arkadievna, who had her pride after all, resigned and left us.

During the humiliating investigation, Slavik also felt insulted, but less for himself than his beloved. Her disappearance without leaving any address left him genuinely sick at heart. Although the pain of his grief for Maya was sweet, the sweetness could not compensate for the suffering. Gradually, however, the keen pain of his loss was blunted. Korablin finished school with quite respectable results, although he got ‘unsatisfactory' for behaviour.

Nonetheless, you must agree that all this is rather sad. This is what happens or, rather, used to happen in pre-mobile times if someone gave free expression to his fantasies. But I must tell you that this is not yet the end of the story – either literally or metaphorically. Of course, many years have gone by since then: all the boys in our class – all the Slaviks, Toliks, and Voviks – have been scattered throughout life and lost sight of each other. But when you lose of sight of someone, he doesn't cease to exist. Here is what happened recently at a certain art exhibition. (By the way, I enjoy going to art exhibitions. With the exception of certain of its more ultra-modern forms, visual art has the advantage of being silent.)

Anyway, this is what happened. Just recently I was wandering round a certain rather conservative art exhibition. It was quiet – either the mobile phones had been silenced by this encounter with the beautiful or I was alone in the hall. I moved from stand to stand, enjoying other people's art and thinking about my own . . . Suddenly my eye was caught by a small portrait of a woman. I took a closer look and couldn't believe my eyes: there was our English teacher, Maya Arkadievna, staring out at me from the canvas! The name of the artist meant nothing to me; the age of the model was impossible to guess. But it was her, there was no doubt about it. I backed away to the nearby bench, felt for it with my backside, sat down and became immersed in thought.

Exactly what I was thinking about is hard to say, but just then three other visitors arrived. The first was a man of my age, balding and cultured-looking. Like me, he fixed his gaze on the portrait . . . then he gasped, clutched at his heart and staggered back. He too would probably have been glad to sit down, but I had already occupied the bench. And then who do you think walked in? You'll never believe it! It was Maya Arkadievna herself. She wasn't alone, she was walking arm-in-arm with some gentleman, but that's not important. I must say that the former English teacher was looking superb. The balding man turned his gaze from the portrait to the original and . . . but here my pen fails me. Scenes like that have always been better portrayed by painters of the old school than by writers.

‘Hello,' the balding man said in a faltering voice, ‘don't you recognise me?'

‘I beg your pardon?' she replied, raising one eyebrow.

‘Never mind, it's nothing,' he said, embarrassed.

Maya Arkadievna and her impressive companion stood in front of her portrait for a short while and then withdrew, but the balding man carried on hanging about, looking lost. I felt sorry for him and was even ready to give up the bench, but I was afraid of offending him with the offer and, in addition, I was desperately keen not to reveal my presence. I really ought to have got up quietly and slipped out, but I must admit that my curiosity is a match for my modesty, and I like to be the last to leave. I somehow had an inkling that the action of this little play would be continued, and I was not mistaken.

About ten minutes later the silence of the hall was broken by a hasty clatter of woman's heels – Maya Arkadievna had come back. She walked quickly over to the balding man and thrust a scrap of paper into his hand. He held out his card with a trembling hand and she immediately tucked it away in her handbag. I realised that they had just exchanged telephone numbers. This was followed by an exchange of glances, the depth of which once again defies my powers of description. The whole scene lasted only a minute or two. Then Maya Arkadievna suddenly blushed, swung round and set off with an uncertain wave of her hand, almost at a run.

The high-heel drum tattoo faded away. The balding man mastered his agitation and took his spectacles out of the inside pocket of his jacket. Setting them on his nose, he took the little piece of paper that Maya Arkadievna had given him out of another pocket and read it attentively. After that he put the piece of paper back in his pocket, closed his eyes and moved his lips soundlessly, evidently repeating the telephone number to himself. Then he took the piece of paper out again to check himself . . .

At this point I got tired of spying on him. And apart from that, I sensed a certain vibration in my own inside pocket, on the left, close to my heart. I know, I know – talking on a mobile phone at art exhibitions is most discourteous, the same as in the theatre or at a funeral. But it was Tamara calling me. The day before she and I had agreed to meet at this very exhibition – what would I have been doing there otherwise?

Toma phoned to say that she was delayed. I sighed and went back to thinking about Maya Arkadievna and Slavik Korablin. After they met completely by chance at that art exhibition, their mutual feelings were resurrected. But once again any relationship between them lay beyond the bounds of the socially acceptable. Maya Arkadievna had been married for a long time to a member of the Union of Artists – the same gentleman I had seen arm-in-arm with her – and Slavik was married to someone as well. Fortunately, the years that had passed between their two meetings, those years that had carried away their youth, had left them and the whole of mankind something else in exchange. By which I mean mobile telecommunications and e-mail. Maya Arkadievna and Slavik Korablin now stay in touch with each other via the Internet and meet surreptitiously at art exhibitions, and no one in the whole wide world knows about their affair.