Seven Signs of the Lion

THE TASTY RUMOR CAFÉ

THE TASTY RUMOR CAFÉ

That is where Nicholas met Mr. Viktor on more than one occasion. One time on a cold February morning with the globally warmed temperature gone, right after ordering a coffee, a plate of varennyky (boiled potato dumplings) and fifty grams of Zakarpatsky (Carpathian) cognac, the lights suddenly went out. “It happens pretty often,” Mr. Viktor said. “They’ll bring out the candles soon. Funny, it happens a lot while I’m here.” The nearly completely asymmetric café was underneath the Les Kurbas Theater where Nicholas had seen a performance of The Good God of Manhattan the previous week. He was hoping to meet the black-haired actress who played the role of Jennifer in a bright pink dress. Somebody told him she was from Kharkiv. But no luck so far. He might not recognize her without the shocking pink dress she wore in the play. And she wouldn’t appear in the café nude as she did on stage for the last ten minutes of the play. Oddly, being a man of normal heterohormonal predisposition, it was interesting only for the first titillating minute or two, that is, while she was naked. Nicholas then intuitively had a mind to take his coat off and cover her because it was fairly cold in the unheated theater. “She’s cold! She’s cold! She’s shivering!” He kept thinking to himself. He suppressed the impulse to give her his coat, not wanting to become the center of attention. But his friends told him afterward that the audience would have loved it and thought it was part of the play. It’s experimental theater, of course.

The Tasty Rumor became the usual place for Nicholas and Mr. Viktor to meet. Although Nicholas had already gotten to know him well enough to call him just by his first name, the more formal way of address seemed to be more natural for him and stuck. The Tasty Rumor also turned out to be a self-realized appellation, for virtually every time Nicholas was seen with someone alone by someone he knew, particularly someone of the female persuasion, Nicholas would hear about it from his friends with a smile and a wagging finger in the fishbowl of what to many was known as Selo Lviv, or the Village of Lviv. Everyone seemed to want to live vicariously through someone else and in small or even large ways was unhappy with their own lives. Mr. Viktor explained it to him this way: “It really shows you that people care about you. If they didn’t care about you, they wouldn’t say anything to you at all. You’ll get used to it,” he smiled a knowing smile.