Disparage not the faith thou dost not know…
1
I was driving back from work in the evening at about nine, around the Ring. I kept changing lanes, but there were so many cars that this didn’t make much of a difference. It was drizzling. In the subway under Tverskaya Street two SUVs had collided – a Lexus and a Mercedes (I hate that Mercedes model; it always reminds me of a bier), blocking one of the lanes. The car crash wasn’t at all serious, but neither party would drive away. They were waiting for militiamen. Their lights twinkled beautifully, like a couple of figure-skaters at the European Championship. I thought of Beloussova and Protopopov. I had been a little girl when they were real celebrities; they had stayed in Western Europe and were nearly killed in a car accident. Sometimes the strangest associations occur to you.
I had to pop into Stockmann, but I was reluctant to use the underground parking. I looked for some space nearby, and found a vacant place near the Bulgarian restaurant. The restaurant is the only building in Smolenskaya Square which has not been restored, and in my opinion, it’s beyond repair. The building is miserable, lopsided, and oblique, with dirty windows and horrible grocery stores that haven’t changed since the Perestroika period. Once I forced myself to visit this particular restaurant, in order to properly remember a period in my past. The visit allowed me to reassure myself that I did everything right back then. And now, the place no longer holds any attraction for me.
In Stockmann, I picked up a little bit of everything, as usual – including washing powder – and queued up with my cart for the cash counter. There was a longish queue at the other cash counter, too. I recognized my old lover standing in it.
He was not really old, of course – but he belongs, in my mind, to a time many years ago, to which I have never returned. I looked at his familiar hand, now bearing a wedding ring, and at his fashionable clothes and his full cart – and I turned my head away, to indicate that I wasn’t going to acknowledge him. Nothing remained between us. The essence of our relationship was exhausted, dried up. It was like a shrivelled leaf, blowing in the wind. He happened to be in Stockman at the same time as me, for whatever reason. It was none of my business. But all the same, I couldn’t resist giving him a second, surreptitious glance. He was in front of the stand of English books, looking for something, turning over the first few pages of some of the books. He didn’t look as though he was about to leave.
I began to take out my groceries and put them on the conveyor belt.
Your permanent buyer’s card, your parking license – jabbered the cashier.
I took out my buyer’s card and my credit card as well.
No parking license, – I replied, glancing over at him again.
He was paying. After all that, he had bought a book with a red cover. And now, Sergey, you may leave the store, I whispered to him. I walked past the cash counter and began to pack everything into plastic bags, never turning my head.
Give me your passport and your driving license, please, – the cashier girl said, continuing our conversation.
I took out my driving license.
Thank you, – The girl responded correctly, just as she’d been taught.
I had three full bags. One of them was quite heavy – with water and a pineapple in it – the other two were lighter, but still big.
– Sign, please, – she gave me a check and a pen.
I signed nervously and picked up my bags, never looking back, and headed up towards the exit. Nobody was following me. At the exit I straightened my back and looked round. There was nobody behind me. He spoiled that whole shopping trip for me, I thought to myself.
In reality, he probably had no intention of greeting me at all, but I couldn’t help thinking that if he didn’t mean to say hello, then he wouldn’t have spent so much time hanging about that bookstand. Romance – that’s what he wanted. A new one. He chose it right before my eyes. He couldn’t have failed to notice me. He always took note of any female within a ten-kilometer radius. Maybe he disliked me so much he didn’t even want to say hi…? This horrible thought made me raise my eyebrows in spite of all the botox injections. But I soon calmed down – plenty of even better looking men pay me attention. Then I saw the Mercury Pavillion and remembered about the galuchat bracelets. I had to have a look. I turned round. Still no-one behind me. I didn’t want to carry my shopping bags to the jewelry shop. I turned round again. The security guards were clearly having fun watching my indecision – they can find something to ridicule even in the smallest events. I headed for my car.
I should say now that I have not seen him since this day.
I barely managed to carry all the bags to the boot of the car. Women aren’t built for grocery shopping. I was sitting in front of the steering wheel when my mobile phone rang. It was my girlfriend calling, the one who can’t get through an evening alone. She feels bored. Me, for example, I can easily be alone. Not in a forest, obviously, or on some ranch, but in the city I’m happy to be alone. This loneliness is entirely voluntary – I have been married twice and I’m in no hurry to tie the knot for a third time. Although there is a candidate – a decent, forty-five year old guy. He has blue eyes. They’re probably the best thing about his very masculine character. All men are so similar! But that doesn’t really matter. The most important thing is for a man to have appeal for some inexplicable reason, to surprise you – in a good way, of course – and to not get boring. Apartments, money, securities… those are indispensable components of attraction, but also secondary ones – though they do speak strongly to your taste, and resonate with fundamental aspects of the evolutionary process. If you can manage to work with all this a little bit, then good things quite easily happen – at any age. Incidentally, I dislike thirty-year-old men most of all: the cheeky, self-assured, sporty males. Inheritors of the family business. Worthy sons. Unfaithful, hungry, handsome, with sharp tongues. Dreaming only about toys. You can’t get through to them. By the age of forty, or maybe just after forty, men like this sometimes find another version of themselves. Some invisible shell, like an eggshell, comes off their hearts all of a sudden and they begin to really notice the world and women. Speaking frankly, I can’t take the opposite sex seriously at all. With men, you can’t plan anything – it’s a question of chance, and nothing more. When two people separate, even if they try to postpone the separation or pretend it’s not happening – because they don’t want to lose all the benefits, because they feel bad for their children – it’s still a separation. Whether the experience is painful and acrimonious or smooth, they still do it for the sake of love – for themselves, for him, for her, for their futures. They might sacrifice their health, career, friends, or simply a lot of money for their separation, but if they have strong personalities, they will always come out on top. Here again the supernatural is at work. And there is only one governing law – the law of love. Life is granted to everyone simply to fulfill this law – to the ballet-dancer, the mathematician, the banker, the doctor, the musician, the spy, the photographer, the teacher, the fireman, the clergyman, even the president. There are so many different couples out there: pretty ones, uninteresting ones, plain ones, weird ones, absurd and dangerous ones.… I often lose myself in thoughts like these. But I hardly ever tell anybody about them.
My mind is always clearest in the morning. I am not simply a morning person – I’m five morning people all rolled into one. This, however, isn’t quite to everyone’s taste. I think we early risers are definitely in a minority. In the morning I like to delve into my thoughts about life and make decisions about the day ahead. In the daytime and evening I fulfill those plans. But the evening of that trip to Stockmann was a dark one; the day was already over. I wanted to get back to my warm apartment, to squeeze into my soft slippers and read for a while – so that was what I told the friend who called me, that I was completely knackered and not in the mood to go anywhere. I ignored the hints she was dropping in an attempt to get me to invite her to come over for a cup of tea, although I do always have a bottle of good wine or champagne close at hand. I knew that she’d have wanted to stay the night afterwards. We would have had to share a bed, albeit a comfortable and spacious one. I have no other bed to sleep in. In the hall, or in the guestroom