I step on the Red Army Street out of the bus numbered '100'. It is embarrassing and I want to beg for forgiveness and killing every tile under my feet. It is disgusting that I am with my mother («Groveling sucker, I cannot even get to the university on the first day of student life without my mother»), because I didn’t score eight points to cross the barrier for the budget form of education. Instead of preparing for the tests, I have been reading Arthur Rimbaud and watching four or five Bergman films a day. I masturbated, anticipating dawn, peering out the window when I was done, before going to school, leaving mucus behind myself. I was trying to smoke expensive cigarettes and drink cheap wine. Now I had only one thing - to imitate arrogance, - I knew it - to be cynical, - I could do it - when in reality you are just an ingot of disgusting pus, which, like a used chewing gum, wrapped in a piece of paper, loudly protrudes a white body when it is squeezed. I know what it is. Yes. I also know that this helplessness of mine in those days was so fatal that I had only to be silent, so as not to go crazy with the useless and dead-end cries of despair.
My appearance is simple: a Louise Brooks' hairstyle from the times of the “golden twenties”, dyed black blond hair, baked purple lipstick, whitish grey of the iris of the eye, a straight nose with a crook in the hide of overweight folds, blue-white skin. Branded clothing squeezes the body, buns formed in the delta between the arm and the chest, further exacerbate the tension in the elastic of a blouse, the high waist of grey tweed trousers threatens to release rivets, causes a crunch of ripped tissue.
Passing the Officers' House (it was labelled “the Reichstag" in “The Slough”), I have something slipping in my dizzy head: “sign” - my provincial love of seven years ago comes to meet me. He has very clearly, without any preludes and hopes told me to get lost when I was eleven years old. It was all over then.
Recalling that day now, I with the same confidence utter in my thoughts: "sign."
Heart shudders, rushes down, in full flight, makes frequent bends in place, recoiling to the shells of the viscera.
The obsession that every passer-by knows my worthlessness is only intensified in the rooms of the history department, twenty people who by turn, for five years, will wrap themselves in the English three-meter jade blackness of my scarf with the onset of autumn winters, which soaked into the university walls.
After a minute of interruption, caused by the question as to who will be our headman, a person cowardly gets up and says: "Well, I can." In the wilds of the unspoken, I call him "The Sucker." If only someone stunned me at that moment with the Knowledge of Five Years, so I would see...
The herd of our group is driven to the timetable - I distinguish a dark-haired girl who, during the month of August, I was able to recognize among future students. She still doesn’t know about this natural curiosity of mine, which makes me do something similar from year to year, after myriads of the milky ways, glinting with the glow of combustible alcohol, she still does not know about it. In a few months, Natasha will become my only friend, will unconditionally follow my calls, learn to drink and run into the last trams on the fly, despite the indelible dirt and mediocrity of my nature. But now this is just a limping girl in a black dress, covering the defect of her legs, with a similar haircut and profile of the Khokhlushka[1]. I remember that then, seeing her, I envied that little bit more confidence than my own, that I found in her.
We went in disorderly column to the Aleksandrovsky Square, stood in a circle for torture-aquaintance. I got paired with a backward country girl with naive eyes that gave off light. In a year, she will become a catalyst for my deep depression. Olya smiles naively without noticing the absurdity of her village dress and shoes, and this smile envelops me with shame. An absurd smile will serve every destitute who is wrecked between her legs, as a sign of the Easy Loot stamp. She will be a provocateur and troublemaker, smoke for days and nights in our apartment, drink glasses of vodka; hors d'oeuvre - deep breath before absorption – this is Olya, whom no one among the scattered destitutes on the coast of her legs will even know.
I say something. The words stick into the gluey surface of the air and my helplessness. Someone from the stains of faceless pairs, cutting sounds, lighting a cigarette, says: "My źLiceja."[2]For the first time I saw someone of my age who would at the same confidently and stagedly light cigarettes, not hide under cover. The age that has dishonored itself with freedom instantly takes hold of me.
It was a challenge. Everyone understood this (a syndrome of fear to draw conclusions), yet could not voice it - a pause was drowning in the crowns of trees, a boy playing with a swan enthusiastically restrained it in the buffoonnade of his frozen poses.
The figures are going away from the fountain, wandering in the direction of the subway crossing. The shame of the day splashes out of all the mirror echoes of the city, the streams of sewage block breath, remind of the awkwardness of clothes, the solitude of the evening without a mother.
translated by I.
[1] Derogatory label of the Ukrainian females.
[2] "We are from the Lyceum" in Belarusian.
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