The Lodger. Valery Osinsky
our kindergarten pranks, current aunts and uncles: what were we doing under the covers when the nanny was leaving? Then we matured, civilization varnished our sexual immediacy! Sometimes in bed I asked women: are they shy to look at me? They usually giggled or shrugged their shoulders, and quickly looked under my belly, if I was going up for cigarettes. I think that and in fifteen, and seventy the sex instinct is dormant in a healthy woman. But how deeply it is hidden under morality, conventions, all that makes people think about sex, but not speak openly, only a woman knows. And only she knows about their secret desires.
Nature has worked hard on my appearance. Believe me without evidence: I’m not going to glue my photo here. In the army and after I kept the regime: performed the hated gymnastics under the pressure gauge of orphan songs «boyish» pop groups, drenching with ice water. Good jokers claimed: if only I’d taken care of my body and decided to shoot for glossy magazines, posters depicting Stallone and Schwarzenegger would be depreciated. In short, I was physically developed, and as they say, though not Marcello Mastroiani, but was able to please women.
At first on «citizen» I was waking up at six in the morning, how many did not swear to sleep off for two years of service. By my rise it was possible to check the clock: quarter to six the eyelids were automatically opened, and the brain continued to sleep. Kurushina also was waking up early.
On the eve we sat for a long time for chess, until two o’clock of the night, thoroughly played enough. The woman slept. The clock was ticking with a ringing in the room. The morning coolness oozed through the open window. In the drowsy silence of the house, the chirping of the sparrows on the windowsill seemed deafening. Cringe with cold, I slammed the window leaf and slipped under the blanket. I sleep completely naked for reasons of hygiene.
The sun warmed the bedroom. I threw back the blanket: I decided lying around and get up. I covered my eyes with the back of my hand and dozed off.
It’s been something about an hour. There were footsteps behind the wall. Or I dreamed. Suddenly near the sofa creaked the floor. I cautiously opened my eyelids. The woman stood hesitantly above me. She couldn’t see my eyes under my hand. Out of mischief, I changed my mind about pulling on the blanket. I imagined myself through the eyes of Kurushina: lad in sleepy bliss; the sun gilds faded chest hair; the blanket between the thighs, white stripe tan and soft, pliable in sleep male outlines; a flexible hand covers his forehead, and trembling a little. Maybe she wanted to wrap me in a blanket, like a boy. Or maybe the shameless invasion embarrassed her…
I turned around. The doorway gaped of the dawn gloom.
An hour later, I washed and came out to the kitchen for breakfast of melted in the oven sandwiches with cheese. Elena Nikolaevna was smoking at the window.
«Good morning!» she said amiably, and smiled. She smiled only with her lips. A square ashtray of glass had fresh wrinkled cigarette butts in it…
I was afraid to look at her hands and see the pale brown spots of old age on her flaccid skin. But the hand of a woman with a simple gold ring on her ring finger was graceful and flexible.
Something happened that morning. What – I didn’t understand.
6
The same evening, not yet having had time to change after going out into the city, rosy and out of breath, Elena Nikolaevna entered the room where I was sleepily leafing through the book, and said vividly: «They agree! Though, Oksana in Sochi and will return at the end of the month. Her parents will talk to her. Well, let’s wait, sweet boy!»
I have stared at Kurushina by sleepily-nightingale glance.
«Ah, these! What should I do for a whole month? Should I look for tsarina’s slippers for Oksana?»
Kurushina, offended by sarcasm, shrugged her shoulders and answered dryly: «Take a rest, look the city,» she pulled off her gas scarf and went to her room.
Mechanically caught the eye over her figure, I imagined squeamishly, touching with the lips to her flabby skin, to light yellow used the flesh, smelling sour stuffiness of old body, hugging, probably, bony, dry shoulders under a green synthetic blouse and snuggle to sluggish breast…
And here the imagination began to beat like a bird in a snare and froze.
So, obviously, a pathologist at the morgue with routine discontent washes corpse fat, accidentally caught under a burst rubber glove.
7
With enviable patience, checking my unexpected discovery, I was installing in a woman a taste for explicit nature. I was sleeping until lunch, or so. To do this I methodically «swallowed» the volumes in their ordinal numbers on spines. If Elena Nikolaevna happened to come to me, the woman invariably found a blanket perfectly crumpled at the feet of a sleepy lodger, on the floor near the sofa a wide pillow for four of my heads and a two-meter baby doll, shamelessly spread out in his sleep. A long, lazy awakening accompanied the negotiations through the all apartment. Finally, hunger has always defeated the basic instinct, I would jump up and dress in front of the open door. A cunning strategist of bed battles! Blithely chatting, I kept a sharp eye on the murky shadow of the hostess on the floor of the corridor from the kitchen. As soon as the shadow ceased to loom from the stove to the table and from the table to the sink, and quickly thickened, I usually dived into swimming trunks, and turning to the door sideways, innocently pulling them on my knees, as if I did not suspect that the woman, looking down, hurriedly slides into her room. (Where she, probably, was fainting from the grandiose tricks of the tomboy: cruel joke!) Young sclerosmatic specially was forgetting in the room on a chair towel, and after a shower, as Apollo Belvedere, for decency hiding behind the door, was asking bring, was holding out the hand and accidentally blinding a woman with nudity. I promoted shamelessness as the worldview of the modern generation, about which Kurushina knew almost nothing. Diligently teased in her a woman.
My impunity was encouraged by the almost absolute isolation of our coexistence and the age difference of almost thirty years. Of course, I was afraid to be in a stupid position. Who knows what she thought of me? But naked children we’re not suspect in bad!
I scolded myself as a nutcase. In the dark, clasping my head, I was remembering my performances the day before, and burned with shame. Every time, I swore to myself, that tomorrow I’d stop getting into mischief. But in the morning, I used to forget my vows and come up with new nudist tricks of launching a major charm attack of granny. Kurushina was accepting my tricks as I presented them: carelessness and nothing more.
In the evenings we yawned at the TV or played chess. I was messing around, clowning, amusing her with stories about my uncle’s family, street observations about passers-by. She was nodding reproachfully and repeated: «Is it possible talk about people like that?» But she liked my openness.
I always went to the grocery store myself. Kurushina flatly refused (to my secret relief) to take money from me for accommodation. Sometimes we walked in the near park by the pond.
In one of such evenings she told me how her mother was dying. Somewhere lonely cracked the cicada. Croaked the frogs. From under unkempt decorative bushes and shaggy chestnuts by muddy-light asphalt track was spreading evening gloom. And I thought: the youth of this woman ended, in essence, not so long ago. If I’d known her before, may be – on my memory. She was loved, kissed. As well leisurely, she was wandering along by the drowsy alley with someone, and they had a good, simply and sweetly-anxiously. I so clearly imagined its living, clean eyes, lush, thick brown hair, smile of her freshly lips, her light, flying gait, crumpled white flowers, flexible, young body, the happiness of her youth, that unwittingly turned around to her clear dark silhouette on the bluish-matte background of the pond. And I have not seen Kurushina’s stoop and signs of decrepitude, in which I convinced himself. At that moment, something furry tickled my eyes and chest inside, and I barely overcame desire to hug her. «Folly»! – muttered me, and the vision crumbled.