A Room with a View

«A Room with a View» Étude My intentions, branching and intersecting, converged upon a single point at the very end of the endless rows of the assembly hall, upon a gap between heads unburdened by intellect, as though through the sight of a rifle… The back of a head. A side cap sat crooked upon it, as if he had only just scratched his scalp. The emblem of ceremonial dignity — the orange-and-black ribbon — had been pinned on carelessly; the knot sagged and tilted downward. It was not entirely an assembly hall at all, but rather the school cafeteria, transformed into one half an hour earlier by the efforts of thirty small-handed men. I pressed myself against the wall opposite the stage, waiting for my cue. The stage resembled a scaffold. What devil had pushed me into agreeing to this… With a sparrow-like motion I turned my neck and fired a glance toward the very back. Someone half-rose, shifted aside — and I saw the thing for which I was now about to step onto the stage and recite poems about beloved Rus’, inviting unfortunate children in side caps to perform verses alongside the “Songs and Dances” ensemble. One cannot help but agree: the ninth of May at school is hell, even for me, a tenth-grade girl. The hall was suffocatingly hot. I clutched the microphone with both hands and climbed onto the stage. There it was — my room with a view. --- My dear reader, can you understand, without deductions or explanations, how I feel about the month of December? Ah, what a pity! Everyone believes in miracles. Miracles, one supposes, have undergone certain metamorphoses. If you have ever visited our unkind little land — you will understand what I mean. Grandmother placed a heavy box filled with plush curtains beside the front door. Oh, I knew perfectly well what it was for — the nearby Ozon pickup point, besides its ordinary activities of receiving and distributing parcels from the marketplace of the same name, also sent humanitarian aid to the front, “to our boys.” Who invented such stupidity — calling soldiers fighting for the country in which we live “ours”? I wrapped myself in a leather sheepskin coat lined with wool — one of grandfather’s old things, though warm inside it as Constantinople in May; pulled on an ushanka and tied a black homespun scarf so tightly it crept into my mouth. The box was ordinary cardboard, wound in tape; awkwardly, I dragged it along the cracked, frostbitten asphalt in grandmother’s grocery cart. As I hauled it, I happened involuntarily to remember school — our village school (and today, after all, was the thirtieth of December). Lately it had acquired an unpleasant notoriety — the writer Vereysky had studied there, and now those same teachers who once hated him in unison would say, as though by way of warning: “Do you want to become as depraved as he is?” Sí, yo quiero. The thought of irregular Spanish verbs eventually led me back to the problem of the past week — I still had to finish the chapter on Lepsies, and the words would not come to describe the behavior of faunlings — “affectedly masculine.” Who writes like that? I do. And it is shameful. Shameful to realize that I am a hopeless humanist and yet intend to become a biologist, and therefore keep trying to comb and flatten my horrifically literary language. And in general — why had I undertaken to write that accursed Pocket Catalogue of Paraphilias at all? Oh, because all the paraphilias had already been catalogued, and I wanted to embellish and rewrite what existed — and invent something new besides. On the facade of the old building that had once housed the village co-op store glowed three signs — yellow, blue, and violet. Yandex Market, Ozon, and Wildberries respectively. I needed the one in the middle — not difficult to guess, since above Ozon hung an agitation poster proclaiming something about “Know Our Own!” I sighed heavily, dragged my burden to the white door with its fogged-up double glazing (they must have heated the place mercilessly), and shoved it open with my shoulder. I had guessed correctly — the pickup point was unbearably hot. The ceiling hung low as my conscience. On the little table by the window stood a bench; beside it, a white stand with the customer information corner and a bowl of caramel candies; opposite were fitting stalls with blue curtains; and in the center of all this, before the partition behind which the warehouse rested, stood the pickup counter. The line was surprisingly thin for the eve of the Bright Holiday of the New Year, consisting only of an elderly woman fumbling with her phone and, finally, me. A woman much younger approached the old one to help her — tall and heavyset, with a black mop of hair tied in a bun, dressed in a T-shirt with rhinestones that had once been black. Meanwhile I dragged my cargo toward the counter and lifted my eyes. Now I had to suppress the stupid and humiliatingly childish urge to blurt out something like: “Ah, what beautiful hands you have!” or: “Do you know people like you are called faunlings?” His dirty-blond hair gleamed beneath the fluorescent lights like a harvest moon. Ah yes, about the hands — the hands were beautiful indeed. The moment I saw them, with reddened knuckles, short nails, and bitten hangnails, I understood that before me stood one of the liveliest possible specimens from my Lepsicon. “Barcode?” His voice had already broken; the Adam’s apple was barely visible upon his neck — either it would remain that way, or else it had not yet gathered its full size. And then the eyes. The gaze of a puppy or a little jackal. No, not drifting icebergs, nor polar stars, nor blue glaciers — no, not at all as before (that one had resembled delirium tremens). Russian words vanished from my thoughts and only los ojos azules remained, and then a little rojo too — in the whites of the eyes; evidently he had not slept much, working since morning. “No… Fabric… Fabric… Fabric… Fabric…” I squeezed out helplessly. Oh God. Four times. Even worse than if I had said something about the faunling. The faunling, meanwhile, looked at me patiently. Gathering my strength, I squeaked: “I need to hand over fabric for the front.” I had already begun untying the cart when the woman with the mop of hair intervened. “Help her,” she ordered the faunling. He seized my box — his forearms, bare beneath the short sleeves of a faded mint-blue T-shirt, flashed with fine golden hairs. Oh, ¡joven pequeño y lindo! He moved that box the way a puppy drags a slipper larger than itself in its teeth — gripping it fiercely, fingers like white spiders escaping a universal flood. Had he already made the acquaintance of a razor? Judging by the two tiny pimples above his lip — yes, he had. “Accepted,” he said indifferently. I nodded and wheeled away the empty cart, not even taking a candy. Pretty, I thought. I stepped out into the snow and breathed in the frost. My soul trembled and wept at what was taking place inside my mind. Adolescent faunolepsy. First stage. Further progression expected.