Solar Plexus

ONE Alik-2

For several days now his nephew had been walking round the flat in a red loincloth, occasionally pulling it away with his left hand, so that it wouldn’t touch the wound that hadn’t healed yet. Nadir couldn’t possibly be in at this time in the afternoon, but when he heard voices in the room, Alik nonetheless pricked up his ears in alarm — he didn’t want to run into his sister’s husband and his friends. As he walked into the kitchen, where his sister spent most of the day, Alik listened more closely to the conversation in the room and realised that it was his nephew who had visitors.

His sister wasn’t in the kitchen, although there was something boiling in a large copper pan on the flame of the noisy primus stove.

“Who’s there?” his nephew shouted from the other room.

He and his four best friends, who had passed through the ordeal of circumcision several years earlier, were looking at something in a photo album that suspiciously resembled the one in which Nadir kept photographs of his girlfriends at the front. But once he was seated at the table, Alik relaxed — the album contained cards from sweet packets, most of which he had given to his nephew himself (including two rare ones, with portraits of the famous American movie stars, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks).

At the age of thirteen, his nephew, who Alik’s sister claimed had been born under a lucky star, acquired the firm reputation of being someone very fortunate, and he bore the entirely justified nickname of Lucky. As far as his friends were concerned, his greatest stroke of luck was his uncle, Alik, and they took every opportunity to show their admiration for him. Now, for instance, when they saw him, they all got up off their chairs (apart from his nephew, Lucky, who always had an excuse for everything, this time it was the operation he had so recently endured).

“Sit down, sit down,” said Alik, lowering himself on to a chair pulled up by one of his nephew’s friends, Eldar, and surveyed the young lads with pleasure. The next generation had turned out worthy successors to their elders, certainly no worse than their parents. Perhaps even better.

Alik knew them well, he had known them since he was as old as they were now, twelve or thirteen, when they had been abandoned to his care by their mothers, who worked all the hours of daylight. Back then a thirteen-year-old boy had to be able to earn his own keep, so while he was telling his nephew and his friends fairytales that he vaguely remembered from his own childhood, he had to crochet women’s stockings out of the threads that his mother brought home from the factory. In the afternoon, when he came home from school, the hooks were free and it was a sin not to make use of them.

The lad he liked most of all was Marat, whose mother spent nights on end hammering away on an ancient typewriter. He liked Eldar too — for his loyalty to his own friends. Even today, after everything that had happened between his sister and Eldar’s parents, he was still here. Alik wondered if Fariz knew where his son was.

Alik’s nephew and his friends were waiting respectfully for him to begin the conversation. He knew this, but he didn’t know where to start: there was no point in asking his nephew if he was well, it was obvious from his face that the mild blood-letting had done him no harm. And he didn’t want to ask trite questions like “How are things?” or “How’s life treating you?” Of course, he could inquire about what was happening in their drama group at the Press House, but this very question, the only one that really interested him, was hard to ask. Naturally, the lads had no idea about anything, even John Agaev only knew part of what had happened; Maya was hardly likely to have told him all the details, but even so he couldn’t bring himself to mention it.

And yet he had to say something.

“Where’s your mum?” he asked his nephew.

“With Alexandra Sergeevna.”

Whenever she had a free minute, Alik’s sister went running to her solitary old neighbour on the ground floor, who worked in the doll factory.

“We’re starting work on a production of the play Snowball,” Eldar announced.

Last winter there had been a lot of talk concerning this play about a little black boy when, yielding to pressure from his nephew and his friends, Alik had attended the drama group at the Press House for several months. Now he knew that those winter months had been the very best of his life. But at the time it had seemed just the opposite. They were rehearsing Sergei Mikhalkov’s play Special Assignment. There weren’t enough actors for the adult roles, and so the leader of the circle, comrade Emil, a short, swarthy-faced Mountain Jew, had agreed that Alik could play Captain Gorkusha. That was the name of one of the officers. The other, called Streltsov, was played by John Agaev, a student at the industrial institute. Alik remembered him from school, before he had left after the seventh class. Even in those early years John had shown great promise, and at the school parties (to which Alik was dragged along by his former classmates), he was always a great success, performing the aria “Life in this World is Impossible Without Women” from the operetta Silva on an Italian accordion, a trophy brought back from the war. He was taken very seriously in the drama group. Comrade Emil even allowed John to skip rehearsals because of his heavy work load at the institute and his previous services to the group. And John proved that he deserved this trust: what took Alik more than three months to learn (the text was the hardest thing for him), John, wearing his dark-blue jacket (it was Boston wool, as one of the girls in the circle explained), was able to master in just two rehearsals.

Every time, as Alik strained his taut nerves, desperate to make sure that he wouldn’t, God forbid, blurt out the wrong words, he forgot the instructions that comrade Emil had drummed into his head during rehearsals. It was especially difficult in the scene where he had to invite Maya (her name in the part was Vera) to dance — at that point he became so confused that not only was he unable to smile with condescending confidence, as comrade Emil demanded, but he actually blushed, stammered and started dancing with the wrong foot. A vein as thick as a piece of macaroni inflated on comrade Emil’s forehead, his usually kind eyes bulged out of his head and his thick eyebrows that looked like Turkish swords knitted together above the bridge of his nose; he began breathing noisily, flaring his nostrils and hammering his right fist into his left palm, with the fingers spread out wide. Afterwards, it’s true, he would apologise, but at those moments he was quite unable to control himself and he seemed on the point of having a stroke.

Once John started turning up for rehearsals, everything went more smoothly, more cheerfully. He quickly placated comrade Emil and, leading Alik aside, tried to impress on him that he should on no account feel bad, he had acting ability in abundance, there was nothing for him to worry about. Emil’s neurotic outbursts were so unjust that it was simply stupid to take any notice of them. Alik knew perfectly well that John was lying, but even so his words had a calming effect. He felt particularly ashamed that Emil had shouted at him in front of his nephew and his nephew’s friends. But in any case Alik would never have left the drama group, if not for that terrible idea of John’s. It really had been terrible, there was no other word for it.

Without having mentioned anything about the drama group, that is, about what had been bothering him more than anything else in the world ever since the twentieth of February, Alik got up off his chair, told his nephew to follow him and went out into the corridor.

Before he was even asked, Lucky immediately began telling him what had happened to Alik’s sister that morning. She had been shoved hard by Eldar’s father, Fariz, so hard that she had fallen against the banisters and scraped her entire side raw. And Fariz just got into his Willis automobile and drove off to Divichi where, to judge from the car and his grey, military-style jacket, he held a position of some considerable importance.

Fariz’s younger son, five-year-old Izik, had peed into the yard from the first floor balcony yet again, and Alik’s sister slapped him on the bum for it. They had explained more than once to Izik, who was not so little that he couldn’t understand, and to his mother as well, that it was not right to go peeing on people’s heads, but she had only laughed and hadn’t even told her son off. And then the boys, with Eldar’s permission, decided to punish Izik themselves — they caught him in the yard and were going to pee all over him from head to foot, to make him realise how unpleasant it was, but at that point Alik’s sister intervened to save the boy, and had given him a gentle slap on his rear end. He started bawling, Fariz immediately came dashing out of the house and, without bothering to ask about anything, pushed Alik’s sister. No one knew what would happen now: Fariz had gone off to Divichi, Alik’s sister had been crying all day long, and Nadir, her husband, had been on duty in the hospital since yesterday and wouldn’t be back until late in the evening.

Alik calmed his nephew down and explained that their neighbour had made a mistake — no one had the right to raise his hand to a woman. And people had to take responsibility for their mistakes, no matter what position they might hold. The neighbours’ gossip about nobody being able to do anything to this Fariz was just nonsense, no one could commit injustice with impunity. The boy just had to wait until his father came back from his shift, after all he had been right through the war, in which bigger men than Fariz had been taught the error of their ways.

Lucky was completely satisfied with this explanation and even became quite cheerful. Alik stroked his curly hair and went out into the yard.

Despite the heat, Fariz’s door was closed: neither the child who was so fond of watering the heads of people living on the floor below from his own little tap, nor his parents, were anywhere to be seen. There were small particles of wool flying up into the air, glinting in the rays of the setting sun. For a moment the female neighbours stopped brandishing their sticks and gazed at Alik with undisguised curiosity.

Walking down the steep staircase into the dark front entrance and from there out into Shemakhinka Street, he cast a glance to his right: as usual at this time of day, several people had already gathered on the corner there, under the acacia. And so Alik turned to the left and walked up along the steep street. There was no doubt that everybody knew about Fariz’s attack on his sister — she wouldn’t have been able to avoid talking about it. When he reached the end of the block, Alik turned a corner, and then turned another one and walked in the opposite direction along the parallel street, towards the centre of town.

The big round clock at the New Square showed a quarter to seven when he took up his usual position by the grocery store — it was hard to spot him there, among all the people darting backwards and forwards — and began observing. In about ten minutes, Maya ought to come out of the entrance. At five minutes to seven she appeared on the upper step of the short stairway and looked towards the shop. He might have believed she could see him, if he had not been certain that she couldn’t. He involuntarily turned his eyes away and took a step backwards.