Happiness is Possible (23 page)

Two years have gone by since then. Of course, I long ago took myself in hand and subscribed to a newspaper, which I now read every day. During the time that has elapsed I have had another two or three meetings with readers, but I haven't come across the man from off the street at any of them. Nonetheless, I follow the fluctuations of the stock markets regularly – just to be on the safe side.

It's back in Moscow again, that unmistakable autumn rain. I'm not alerted by thunder and lightning or the roar of a torrential downpour: it's that quiet, mysterious whispering, that subtle rustling in the darkness outside the windows. As if thousands of spiders have crept into the city on slim, sensitive little legs and are probing and tickling at every last detail. But they'll never weave together a mist. Tomorrow morning will be colder than the night: there'll be nothing left of the rain but puddles and sluggish, half-frozen streamlets. And no one will launch toy boats on those streamlets, because all the children have grown up over the summer.

Our autumn is strict: it washes the city without soap, scrubbing it with a coarse sponge of dark clouds. And Moscow has no idea what fate lies in store for it after this wash – whether it will be put to bed in fine white sheets or thrown out naked into the frost.

I recognise this rain from the rhythm, that quiet, meditative tapping. What is it trying to do, put me into a trance or remind me of something? Some writers say they work well when it's raining. Others say they sleep well. I can't make up my mind which to choose.

The outside of the window is spattered with countless numbers of tiny, undersized droplets of water, too weak to launch themselves down the dusty surface of the glass. They will hang there, trembling in the wind, until they dry out, until they evaporate back into the atmosphere, leaving behind only a tiny pockmark of mineral deposits that will stay until spring arrives.

The roofs of the various buildings, the sheet-metal car-shelters, the pavements: everything down below shimmers as if it has been lacquered. The courtyard looks as if it has been sprayed with chrome-effect paint. On the lawn directly below me a scattering of empty bottles and multi-coloured tin cans glitters. Since time immemorial this lawn under my windows has been a kind of forum or meeting-place for our local youth. Boys and girls from the age of thirteen and up drink their energy drinks, chew nuts, smoke, swear and chat about their own business in their own amusing youth lingo. Every morning the Tajik yard keepers gather an incredible harvest of litter from the lawn and every evening the indefatigable teenagers sow it again. Only rain or hail can drive them away from their favourite spot. I called them teenagers, but this definition doesn't apply to all of them. Many of the regulars have grown up and even developed pot bellies in front of my eyes. The low metal fence surrounding the lawn was bent out of shape long ago under the backsides of these former teenagers.

How many nights, especially summer nights, I have fallen asleep to the pealing of their laughter and the obscene murmur of their talk. How many times when I couldn't sleep I have wanted to douse them with water from the balcony, to deal with them the same way my mother used to deal with the raucous tom cats in our front garden. But I'm not a strong enough character for that: the rain has dispersed the teenagers for me today, and I don't even know whether to be glad or not. The cocky, back-talking, rebellious younger generation has surrendered to the elements and scattered to spend the rest of the evening at home with its PC ‘shooters'.

The young people's pitch has been left empty, apart from Lelik, our own courtyard halfwit, dancing at the very centre of it, all on his lonesome in the light of the yard-lamps. He dances on the wet lawn, stepping elegantly between the scattered bottles – and he dances well. His inspired solo performance feeds on music that only Lelik himself can hear. There are two little speakers in his ears and hidden somewhere under his jacket, close to his heart, is a music player from which Lelik is never parted anywhere.

Once upon a time this player was responsible for a great and joyful transformation that took place in both his heart and his social position. By buying Lelik this toy that was beyond his comprehension, his parents unwittingly performed a service for their son second only to the act of granting him life, which was also an accident.

When Lelik's father set the phones in his ears and then pressed the sacred switch on the player, the outside world ceased to exist for the boy. The music completely filled his head, from ear to ear. In an attempt to express the rapturous delight that had overwhelmed him, Lelik started bellowing, but was cut short by a parental clip round the back of the head. Soon even he realised that his own voice did nothing to add harmony to the music. Something – but definitely not his parents – suggested a different way of expressing his feelings: in movement.

He began to dance and, like all half-wits, he abandoned himself to his passion totally and completely. Lelik danced at home, while his parents were at work, he danced on the way to the shop and back, he danced in the yard to the amusement of the other, normal teenagers. But the kids on the block didn't notice that in making fun of Lelik, they had accepted him as one of their own. Previously they had driven him away, as children drive away everyone who is smarter or more stupid than they are, but now that Lelik had started dancing, it turned out that he could be useful to them. With him around, it wasn't so boring for the teenagers whiling away the time when they occasionally ran out of subjects to yak about, or when the courier sent to the shop for beer was delayed. Lelik and his dancing even became a stand-out feature of their group: other groups in other yards didn't have a crazy weirdo like him. Now, whenever our teenagers went off anywhere for a wander, they took him along, the way gypsies take their bear.

Ever since then Lelik's life has been much more interesting – he has tried all sorts of different crisps and learned the taste of beer and gin-and-tonic. But most importantly of all, he now feels that, even though he isn't the same as everyone else, he's no longer an outcast – people need him. Those people no longer kick him casually or thump him on the ear for no reason at all. If they do thump him, it's to say ‘Give us a dance, Lelik!' And Lelik dances. Even when the weather's bad or it's raining, like today, he dances – without any audience, without any thumps, just for himself.

I watch him and envy him. I envy him because I don't have a magical music player, but I've got to dance. Yesterday I got a good kick up the backside from the publishers – a hint that it's time to be finishing off my book. The problem is that I'm not Lelik and kicks do nothing to inspire me. And the rain, I must admit, makes me feel more like sleeping than working.

Sound sleep is the best preventive measure against neurosis. I know this because I read my weekly TV programme magazine all the way through. Not everyone's prepared to admit it, but I think there are quite a few in-depth readers of these magazines like me. Though no longer current, these unassuming publications continue to share our morning or evening periods of enforced solitude for a certain time before they are thrown out. The TV week has been lived and forgotten, but they carry on silently providing us with a whole range of information that possesses more than ephemeral significance. In particular, between the recipes and the horoscopes, my magazine has a medical page that offers recommendations on what to do when you have a pain in your stomach, how to protect your feet against fungal infections and so forth. The head is not neglected in this section either: the compilers of the page always pay due attention to the struggle against dandruff and how to choose the right toothbrush. The medical page contains many pieces of useful advice but, unfortunately, in my view it doesn't deal adequately with mental ailments. ‘Sound sleep is the best preventive measure against neurosis.' And that's all. They might as well have added: ‘Things will look better in the morning'.

All right then: let's talk about sound sleep. The good people who compile the page assert that sound sleep is correct sleep. And correct sleep, they say, is when a person goes to bed before midnight and wakes up naturally in the morning, that is, without the assistance of an alarm clock and not because he or she is dragged out of bed by the leg. So it turns out that if in the evening you deprive yourself of the pleasure of a good movie, which is always shown after midnight here, and in the morning you jump out of bed at the crack of dawn, that will be the correct sleep for you. Of course, the trilling of the alarm clock will catch up with you anyway, only you won't be able to shut it off, because it will surprise you in that little room where you spend time with the TV programme magazine.

Apart from that, the compilers of the medical page will help you choose the right pillow and give you tips on how to orientate your bed in relation to the points of the compass according to the practice of Feng Shui. If you apply all their simple recommendations, they guarantee you correct sleep and no neuroses. But these good people fail to take into account one other important consideration. I remember my dear departed mother used to say: ‘He sleeps well whose conscience is clear'. Conscience. She put a clear conscience above clean hands. Whatever she did, she did it with a clear conscience – even pulling my ears. But then, the compilers of the TV magazine were never acquainted with my mother, or with the forgotten practice of ‘living according to your conscience'.

As for me, I sleep long and soundly, and my conscience is as clear as is decent for any civilised individual. The reason I'm on the verge of neurosis is that I have to finish a book. I know the entire reading public is waiting impatiently for this book, but far more frightening to me is the fact that my publishers are waiting for it. One day some time ago those kind people paid me an advance and took a written undertaking from me that by a certain date of a certain month of this year I would write a book, even if it killed me. Can you imagine that? A book! I polished off the advance very successfully long ago, but somehow I can't quite manage to polish off the book. And a certain date is looming up very close already, so polishing myself off might be the only option. Only that still won't get the book written . . .

Why is everything so different for me? A horse steps up the pace when it senses the end of the journey; the steamship blasts exultantly on its horn at the sight of its home port. But for me it's those final few metres of that long string of words that cost the greatest effort. It's not that I'm tired of writing; on the contrary, I'd be only too glad to receive advance after advance and start book after book. No, I like writing books, it's just that I have trouble finishing them: I am a horse that has picked up all the clay of the roads on its hoofs; I am a steamship that has wound the oceans around its propeller.

Meanwhile, however, from the little magazine's point of view, there's absolutely nothing wrong with me. I get up by myself without an alarm clock. Then I take a healthy walk with Phil, but without straining myself at all. Life is beautiful until the moment I sit down at the computer. When I sit down at the computer, it's as if someone sits down beside me and grabs my elbow the moment my hand reaches out to the keyboard. ‘Think,' this person whispers to me, ‘think one more time. An ending is such a great responsibility.' I'm so sick of him! With a certain date already looming up, it's either think or write . . .

What do I really have to think about, anyway? Surely I know how books are written and how they're finished, don't I? If I want to, I can invent ten endings in ten minutes. The only thing that stops me is what I would call a strange authorial prejudice. You see, I believe that a good ending shouldn't be invented. A good ending should emerge of its own accord, naturally.

For a book, ending is like waking up for a person. That's my creative method: after churning out two hundred pages of disjointed jumble I await the ending like my redemption, like a happy awakening. It will pop up from somewhere (only not out of my head!), explain everything and set everything in its right place, and my pages will line up into a neat stack that will form a book. Then, with my burden eased, I can start another one.

Only when will this happen and where should I expect it from? Wan indeed is the face of my computer, pale and bloodless. In vain do I stare at the screen – it doesn't even reflect me. The machine waits impassively, hour after hour; it is ready to suck every last line out of me, but it won't give me a single one. Looking out of the window is just as pointless: the sky today is that greyish, off-white colour, like a blank document in Word. The rat-voiced squeaking of two women rowing fiercely in the yard wafts in through the open window frame like damp rising from the basement . . . In conditions like these only a pathological optimist could hope for inspiration.

But then, I'm not hoping: it's only fear of my publishers that keeps me at my desk . . . In fact, instead of just sitting here, I could do something useful – for instance, boil up some porridge for Phil and some borscht for myself. You know, I have learned the right way to make borscht after all: Tamara's tried it and she said it was good. She comes to see me sometimes, although mostly in my dreams. When I dream about my ex-wife, it's a good dream, although it's sad too. There's probably nothing surprising about this, but since she left me, the exciting dreams of my youth have returned. Good dreams, only they fade rapidly, their aroma doesn't linger and it can't be captured in prose. I'm yawning so hard that my jaws cramp up. Really, though, why shouldn't I lie down and take a little snooze? At this unnatural hour of the day, after coffee, why not lose myself in sleep tinged with insanity? I get up from the desk and stretch, and at that moment, in my habitual fashion, I lose consciousness. My poor brain is suddenly drained of blood; I am blinded and deafened and yet I don't fall but remain on my feet, like a samurai with his head lopped off. A few seconds of blissful, mindless intoxication, and then consciousness returns, refreshed by its brief flight. However, during my short swoon, something has changed in surrounding reality . . . What? That sound – I recognise it. That's the way the phone rings.

‘Hello-a . . .' the very word provokes a yawn.

The receiver responds with a sarcastic snicker.

‘Sleeping as usual?'

‘No, darling, I'm not sleeping. There's no time for sleep, you know I've got urgent work to do.'

But it's all the same to Tamara if I'm sleeping or doing urgent work. She needs to talk to me about something important, very important, and it's not telephone talk. She's calling to arrange to meet me – somewhere in town, naturally, close to her office, because she's a busy person and I'm not.

‘Yes darling . . . all right, darling . . . Of course I'll come, although, as you know . . .'

In my heart I'm actually glad she's called, glad of the unexpected distraction. Now I can postpone the problem of the ending, because somewhere in the real world a real problem has come up, and when I think about real problems, my mind relaxes. The Word document window is minimised on the computer screen and a game of patience hangs in its place. I click on the cards and speculate on what could have happened to Tamara that isn't telephone talk. I really ought to be feeling worried and I am a bit alarmed, but my thoughts gambol freely after casting off the yoke of my overriding scheduled priority. The plot lines swarm around in my head, each more stupid than the last. Dmitry Pavlovich has been ruined and put a bullet through his brain. Or he is under investigation for the dubious dealing that I'm sure is essential to the running of his business. Or he has simply got roaring drunk and given Tamara a beating. Who knows what goes on in these New Russian families? But then, Tamara must have known what she was getting into. ‘Now do you see who you dumped me for? Didn't I tell you . . .' – I invent our imminent conversation without interrupting the game of patience. My reproaches, Toma's belated tears – I should get it down on paper, it's great! Time spent in this kind of creative activity slips by imperceptibly and now I need to set out for our appointment.

I try to take out the rubbish every time I leave home. Then, whatever might await me out there in the city, I have already done one small, useful thing. The rubbish, which only yesterday was not rubbish, rumbles and clatters as it somersaults down the chute. I will come back home again, but it will not. After that, it's the usual story: the lift and Nasir are the final milestones of stable normality.

The moment I set foot outside, normality comes to an abrupt end. Before I've even looked around properly, I spy an absolutely incredible machine advancing on me with a hiss. The asphalt-spreader – or whatever they call this unbelievably complicated mechanism – is driven by a swarthy-faced Asiatic, perched on the tall superstructure with a haughty air. Ai, Shaitan! I jump to one side before he can roll me into the asphalt without even noticing.

It's a good jump – my legs are eager for action after a long period of inactivity. My step is light and springy. My gaze is keen. Mums are walking their babies in the children's playground that my route skirts. When they lean down over the baby carriages their breasts, full of milk, quiver alluringly. I should remember that . . . or have I already written about it somewhere?

It's still a long way to the metro, but I can already sense its gravitational pull. Within its field of influence, chaotic motion acquires a dominant vector. Clattering their heels or shuffling their worn soles, skipping lightly or breathing with difficulty, the people are all moving in the same direction, forming up into chains, jostling as they flow round each other. We are Muscovites, children of the metro, time and again we seek refuge in its maternal womb. We find solace and reassurance that only we can understand in this hubbub, in the perpetual, deafening peristalsis of these windy stone intestines. For us urbanites, brazen and timorous at the same time, suspicious of everything, there is only one thing we trust – the Moscow Metro, the most reliable in the world. Here under the ground is where we arrange our trysts and here, I am sure, is where we first conceive new little Muscovites in our minds. When the end of the world comes, we won't need to make a dash for the nearest caves and seal ourselves in: we'll ride down to our ready-made common grave on the escalators with no panic, with or without a prayer, and accept our fate here.

It's well worthwhile coming to meetings in the metro ahead of time. It's so fascinating to press yourself up against some column and spend minute after minute gazing patiently into people's faces as you wait for that incredible assortment of noses, ears, smiles and eyes to resolve itself into the unique image that is dear to your heart.

I like the way people in the metro talk to each other too: like mountain shepherds on opposite sides of a precipice, they choose the most important, crucial words and yell them with all the power of their lungs . . . There's a girl squeezed against the next pillar; her friend, with his slim, youthful arms wound round her, is shouting at her about his love.

‘What?' the girl asks. ‘What did you say?'

She can hear everything perfectly clearly, but she doesn't hear anymore, she read it all ages ago from his lips, from his eyes . . .

Yet another train comes bursting into the station and its lock-gate doors all open at once, releasing a new torrent of humanity onto the platform. And at last the long-awaited miracle happens: the torrent splashes out Tamara, straight into my arms. She holds out her cheek for a kiss and then straightens her little cap. The glance she gives me seems rather uncertain somehow . . . Come on, my darling, shout it out, what's all the fuss about? But Toma procrastinates, she can't do it just like that, it's as if she needs to summon up her courage, and there's still something wrong with her cap . . . It ends with the cap being pulled off her head altogether.

‘I'm pregnant!' I hear through the rumbling of the train.

Well, that really is news! I'm in shock; I slump against the column for the support I need to stay on my feet. Toma, my Toma! I think I'm beginning to realise that I've lost you completely. This child that you and Dmitry Pavlovich have conceived, it will separate us forever . . .

I must look awful.

‘What's wrong?' Tamara asks in alarm.

‘It's nothing . . . It'll pass . . .'

‘Well then, if it's nothing, listen to the rest. I'm pregnant by you.'

‘There used to be a bench somewhere round here.'

Come on, my darling, let's sit down for a moment.