Novellas

My circle
I’m a tough, cruel person, always with a smile on my rosy full lips, always with a sneer at everyone. For example, we’re sitting at Marisha’s. On Fridays, Marisha invites guests—everyone comes at once, and if someone doesn’t show up, that means either the house people don’t let them in, or there are some “home circumstances,” or they simply don’t let them into Marisha’s place—Marisha herself, or the whole enraged society. Like they didn’t let long-time Andrey in for a while—he’d shown up drunk in the eye of our Sergei, and Sergei is untouchable; he’s our pride and our measure. For instance, he has long worked out the principle of flying saucers. He calculated it on the back of a drawing notebook where his genius daughter draws. I saw those calculations, then—very shamelessly—I looked at them right in front of everyone. I understood nothing at all—some nonsense, artificial constructions, a formally taken world point. Not for my understanding, of course—I’m very smart. If I don’t understand it, then it simply doesn’t exist. So Sergei must have been wrong about his artificially taken world point: especially since he’s been not reading literature for a long time, hoping on intuition, but literature needs to be read. He opened a new principle of steam locomotive operation with 70% efficiency—again, unheard-of things. With that principle, they started showing him around. From here to there, to the “capichnik,” to academician Fram, to academician Livanovich; first Livanovich came to his senses, pointed out the original source— the principle was discovered a hundred years ago and is described in an ordinary textbook on such-and-such a page in tiny print for higher institutions. And immediately the efficiency turned out to be reduced to 36%. The result: the whole thing flopped. Still, there’s a commotion here. They formed a department around Livanovich; our Sergei is appointed head, and—without any degree. In our circles, it’s a truly understanding, rejoicing sort of happiness. Sergei seriously thought about his life—maybe his values weren’t the right ones. He decided they weren’t. He decided he’d better stay in his World Ocean. And again everyone is shocked: he threw away his career for will and freedom. In the World Ocean, he’s just an ordinary junior research assistant; there he has complete freedom and an Atlantic expedition is about to happen—one that’s been planned for ages, with stops in Vancouver, Boston, Hong Kong, and Montreal. Six months of sea and sun. He chose freedom, it turned out well.

There, in his own—his bloodchild—department with 36% efficiency, they’ve already staffed it, appointed him director (and now there’s also the candidate of science—without talent—everything is blocked up; they started working slowly and lazily, drifting to the buffet, going on business trips, and smoking). For Sergei, people travel to consult him; though at first they did. Two times. Marisha laughed that in the World Ocean they no longer know whom to accept for whom: some Sergei—meneese—keeps being snatched from under their noses and dragged off for consultations. But later it quickly stopped. They got into their groove. The case isn’t simple—it's not a matter of principle, but of some different technology. For it, you don’t need electricity. Everything goes back to the age of steam. All of it is for nothing—gone to the dogs.

And then all this gets pushed through by one small unit of five people. In that unit, one acquaintance of ours works as a lab assistant—Lenka Marchukaitė comes by and brings comforting news that the candidate of science is about to have a child on the side. A letter is being prepared for him by those parents. At work he’s in full shutdown mode—he yells on the phone, and there’s only one room, and there’s no talk of any “energetics.” While they’re preparing the draft decision to transfer to them the experimental testing workbench in the basement of the institute for three hours at night time, Sergei’s will and freedom turn out to be much worse for him. It’s time to formalize the expedition—he wrote in his application that he is not a party member; and in the year he entered the World Ocean, he wrote in the same application that he was a Komsomol member (VLKSM). Both entries were compared. It turned out he had left the Komsomol ranks on his own, without even getting on record with the Komsomol organization in the World Ocean. So for many years he didn’t pay membership dues, and it turned out this cannot be fixed by anything—neither dues nor anything else—and the commission simply didn’t let him into the Ocean.

All this, when he came and told us, was told by the very same Andrey the outcast, and they left him with everyone to drink vodka. And in a burst of emotion he said that no one should tell him anything—he became an informant for inclusion in the expedition, but he was supposed to report only on the ship; on land, he hadn’t signed up.

And indeed Andrey went into the Ocean, and came back from there—he brought back from Japan a small plastic male member. Why so small? Because the dollars didn’t add up. And I said that it was Andrey who brought it for his daughter. And Sergei sat sad. Even though he’d been given full freedom, the entire institute went to the Ocean, and he, with a small staff of lab assistants, handled the sending-off, correspondence, and acceptance of expeditions in Leningrad. But that was long ago and wasn’t true—the days ended when Sergei and Marisha together pined for Sergei and held on stubbornly. All days of understanding ended too. And then… God knows what happened. But every Friday we regularly come—like magnetized—into that little house on Stulino Street and we drink the whole night.

“We” is Sergei and Marisha, the owners of the house: two rooms. Behind the wall, under the sounds of a tape recorder and outbursts of laughter, a well-raised child sleeps—Sonya, our talented, unusual beauty. She is now my relative—you can imagine—but that’s a story for later. My relative is now also Marisha, and also Sergei himself—though it’s a funny result of our lives and a simple case of incest, as Tanya put it when she was present at the wedding of my husband Kolya to Sergei’s wife Marisha. But that’s later.