|
tatarsky hadn't had any news of him for
several years, and he was astounded at the style of the clothes he was
wearing - a light-blue cassock with a nepalese waistcoat covered in
embroidery worn over the top of it. in his hands he had something that
looked like a large coffee-mill, covered all over with tibetan symbols and
decorated with coloured ribbons. |
despite the
extreme exoticism of every element of his get-up, in combination they
appeared so natural that they somehow neutralised each other. none of the
passers-by paid any attention to gireiev. just like a fire hydrant or an
advertisement for pepsi-cola, he failed to register in their field of
perception because he conveyed absolutely no new visual information.
tatarsky first recognised gireiev's face and only afterwards began to
pay attention to the rich details of his appearance. looking attentively
into gireiev's eyes, he realised he was not quite himself, although he
didn't seem to be drunk. in fact he was calm and in control, and he inspired
confidence.
he said he was living just outside moscow in the village of rastorguevo
and invited tatarsky to visit him. tatarsky agreed, and they went down into
the metro, then changed to the suburban train. |
| they travelled in silence;
tatarsky occasionally turned away from the view through the window to look
at gireiev. in his crazy gear he seemed like the final fragment of some lost
universe - not the soviet universe, because that didn't contain any
wandering tibetan astrologers, but some other world that had existed in
parallel with the soviet one, even in contradiction of it, and had perished
together with it. tatarsky felt regret at its passing, because a great deal
of what he had liked and been moved by had come from that parallel universe,
which everyone had been certain could never come to any harm; but it had
been overtaken by the same fate as the soviet eternity, and just as
imperceptibly. gireiev lived in a crooked black house with the garden in
front of it run wild, all overgrown with umbrellas of giant dill half as
tall again as a man. |
| in terms of amenities his house was somewhere between
village and town: looking down through the hole in the hut of the outside
lavatory he could see wet and slimy sewage pipes that ran across the top of
the cesspit, but where they ran from or to wasn't clear. on the other hand,
the house had a gas cooker and a telephone.
gireiev seated tatarsky at the table on the verandah and tipped a
coarsely ground powder into the teapot from a red tin box with something
estonian written on it in white letters. |
| the smell of mushroom soup wafted round the room.'
he said it as though it was the answer to every conceivable objection,
and tatarsky couldn't think of anything to say in reply. he hesitated for a
moment, until he recalled that only yesterday he'd been reading about
fly-agarics, and he overcame his misgivings. the mushroom tea actually
tasted quite pleasant. 'you'll be drying them for
winter yourself. |
| '
half an hour passed in rather inconsequential conversation about people
they both knew. as was only to be expected, nothing very interesting had
happened to any of them in the meantime. only one of them, lyosha chikunov,
had distinguished himself - by drinking several bottles of finlandia vodka
and then freezing to death one starry january night in the toy house on a
children's playground. |
|
'why are you so sure?' tatarsky asked; then he suddenly remembered the
running deer and the crimson sun on the vodka label and assented internally.
he reached for his notebook and wrote: 'an ad for finlandia. based on their
slogan:
"in my previous life i was clear, crystal spring water".
variant/complement: a snowdrift with a frozen puddle of puke on top.'
meanwhile a perceptible sensation of relaxation had
developed in body. a pleasant quivering rose in chest, ran in
through his trunk and his arms and faded away without quite reaching his
fingers.. .. |