The Lodger. Valery Osinsky
me. I like you. And this is not a fable about a rooster and a cuckoo. I do not presume to analyze your merits. Although you might be curious to hear it. You know something about my past. I haven «t always lived here…» she thought for a moment, as if remembering. «You’ve backed yourself into a corner. You are blinded by the brilliance of my former life. You are blinded by the desire to touch her. Wait! I’m just an ordinary aging woman. I live, as many do, in the present day, and perhaps a little in vain memories. Let’s say I liked you, as you put it, as a man. But this is not enough. Didn’t you meet just good people? Maybe I’ll feel awkward later, but frankness for frankness. If you think that in a woman under fifty, for you – an old woman, dies interest in a multi-faceted life, you are mistaken. I don’t get many the guests now. And your appearance is an event for me. Young, handsome! But my youth has passed. Humble ourselves! Don’t put us in a hopeless position. This is not worthy of people able to find a compromise. And thank you for your recognition! It’s nice to feel a little younger than what you are!» Kurushina smiled conciliatingly.
«Chewed up like for baby. Like – don’t like!» I said through my teeth, and asked stubbornly. «So you like me after all?»
«Surely!» there was no irony or coquetry in her tone, her face was tightened to the smallest features again, and her piercing eyes flashed.
«What to do now?» I asked in a deathly voice.
«Go sleep! Tomorrow I go to people who agreed to help us. Their girl has returned the other day.»
I nodded resignedly and sat for a while with my hands dangling from my lap, staring blankly at the floor.
Laying down to sleep, I knew this was only the beginning! And fell asleep with joy and fear.
12
We tried not to notice the memorable evening loitering between us. But you might as well walk barefoot through spring puddles, suggesting that there are warm, impenetrable boots on your feet.
I sent a dry «notice» to my mother about my health and lied that I had been hired as a handyman. There were a few small bills and coppers left in my leather «bumblebee».
Two days later, Elena Nikolaevna woke me up in the morning and showed a gift to my bride. I lazily drew back from under the covers in the morning coolness of September and, yawning, bent close: Kurushina sat at the table. A golden snake with tiny diamond eyes coiled in a double spiral on the white tablecloth. The magnificent jewelry work was striking in the fineness of the finish of the smallest fused scales and resemblance to some small arboreal original.
«Not sorry to give?»
I picked up the bracelet to get a better look at it.
Kurushina folded her hands into a fist and rested her chin on her shoulder, glancing sideways at the snake. Then she sighed decisively, as if saying goodbye to the bracelet, and straightened.
«Go today, meet them.»
Grayish-blue clouds-lambs had frolic racing with the cold wind. Future relatives lived near the Paveletsky railway station, in a yellow five-story building with a fractional number and shabby courtyards. I was given the name of an old bathhouse as a reference point. To go to strangers with a recommendation of the groom from a woman to whom I had confessed my love a few days ago – is not this the stupidest grimace of circumstances!
If, climbing the stairs, I doubted whether to give the benefactors the jewelry of a loved one, then outside the apartment, after the visit, I confidently showed a weighty thumb to the fish-peephole of the door.
The bride’s daddy, thin, sharp-faced and leggy as a grasshopper, with a slicked-back hair comb after a shower, in training trousers and leather Slippers on his bare feet, was sprawled in a chair, absently kept saying» uh-huh» to his wife, and was picking soundly by his tongue between his teeth. Maman, a perfectly ordinary wife of «grasshopper», in a long robe, in front of the TV turned on, was flipping through the magazine «Moscow». Phlegmatic, moon-faced daughter with black curly hair and red eyelids with big kind eyes, as if serving a sentence. When I entered, the women stared at me as if I were a ferocious rhinoceros in a menagerie, with respect and fear. It seems that the family of «pygmies» was rarely visited by giants over one hundred and sixty centimeters tall.
I sat on the couch under cross-examination of future relatives: who are my parents, circle of hobbies, do I suffer from indigestion…
After the first answers, they became wary.
«If Elena Nikolaevna’s recommendations are enough for you, what is your price for the service?» I cut short the daddy’s curiosity.
He shifted in his chair, his wife glared at him, and daughter stared at me.
«I am not going to appear at your place again. All expenses are my matter. The main thing is that you do not change your mind. Otherwise, it will be a pity for the lost time!»
Crimson spots covered dad’s face. He seemed to be turning boulders of thought in his head. But I didn’t let him pin me down with them.
«Elena Nikolaevna needs your … „I paused, barely perceptible,“ … friendly help. There is nothing shameful in reward. Isn’t that right?»
Dad frowned. Eh, you have no merchant grasp, grasshopper! There is no luxurious, self-righteous daring in you! Didn’t trained to bargain!
Of course, if I were older, I wouldn’t risk teasing people who were already scared. But I could not tolerate their condescension to Elena Nikolaevna!
In the hallway, dad coughed into the fist and named the amount. Two thousand rubles, at the then rates for registration of one and a half thousand.
«What have you told them?» Attacked me Elena Nikolaevna, as soon as I crossed the threshold of her apartment. «Alexey Vladimirovich (didn’t even try to remember!) just called me. He’s shocked! Says you’ll gobble me up in half an hour. He told me not to contact you. He said, «you’ll survive…»
«Isn’t it?»
Kurushina left abruptly, but returned a minute later with a lit cigarette. Her eyes swelled with tears.
«You put me in an awkward…» She sniffled.
«I haven’t placed you anywhere!»
I gave her the conversation in detail.
«Let them chat! Fatherless and a yard boy me! Quite good for nothing! And your friends are trash!»
Kurushina heaved a sigh. She sat down next to me on the sofa, wrapped oneself up in a shawl. Then she snuggling cosily to my shoulder.
«Thank you, my sweet boy! This is the first time I encountering this. Heavy!» And after that. «You’ll be lost because of your character! You don’t like people!»
I was ready to sit with her forever under the drowsy ticking of the clock. I wanted to kiss her hands, hair, lips. But the fear of breaking the solemnity of the moment, frightening away the happiness, restrained me.
13
Even now I can’t say why, besides my youth, Lena liked me. To impress the imagination of an experienced, intelligent woman was unthinkable to me, a half-illiterate guy. She easily distinguished tiny spots on my conscience. My presumptuous judgments about life, about people were stained by two opposite colors. I read a lot and haphazardly. My hasty conclusions amused her. For example, I despised Turgenev’s Rudin. The non-resistance of the intolerant Tolstoy was considered a farce. Dostoevsky, in my opinion, treated his mind damaged by the shooting down by writing gloomy novels. I found modern national literature biased and boring. And imported literature I called the fantasies of the well-fed. But I didn’t know her well. Fresh spots of childhood: Hemingway, Remark, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, London and others – they appeared in our country