Happiness is Possible (10 page)

‘Isn't it time we called it a day? You never know, the neighbours might come round and raise hell.'

‘Oh, you're right!' Vasya exclaims, suddenly realising. ‘Let's wind things up.'

‘Yes, let's.'

We wind things up in due order, by drinking to our heroic exploits in Vasya's kitchen. Of course, we drink tequila, the preferred tipple of designers. Vasya shows me his designs for the future interior and photos of his fiancée. The designs are different and the fiancée is the same everywhere. But it's all the same to me what I drink and what I feast my eyes on. I'll sleep well tonight, even though I haven't written a single line. Although in fact, for me these two things are not connected – I just hope no one starts whirring away with a hammer drill.

Ludmila gets home from work at seven thirty. She could get back at seven fifteen, but on the way home she always calls into the supermarket. At that time Konstantin is only just making the change from the circle line to our radial line on the metro. He's never home earlier than eight. They are not acquainted.

But their children know each other very well, since they grew up playing in the same yard. Ludmila's daughter Masha and Konstantin's son Seryozha are sixteen. They hang out together, like the same kind of beer and have identical mobile phones. Normal young people. Masha and Seryozha are in a sexual relationship, but they won't set up a family, of course, because soon they'll swap their mobiles for different ones and their ways will part.

Ludmila and Konstantin have no chance at all – not even of meeting each other. And even if they did meet, where would that get them? If they ran into each other in the lift in the morning, for instance? Konstantin uses Issey Miyake cologne, and Ludmila uses Trussardi perfume: fine fragrances, taken separately, but just try mingling them together in a cramped lift! He and she would turn their noses in opposite directions and ride on like that, dreaming of reaching the ground floor as soon as possible.

Theoretically speaking, however, Ludmila and Konstantin are perfectly suited to each other. Not merely because he's a man and she's a woman, but in purely human terms – at the level of their preferences. Only Ludmila already has a lover who comes to her place. A decent man, married, but a confirmed masochist. When they're alone, he puts on a harness and makes Ludmila ride round the flat on him. She rides around, thinking: ‘If only Masha could see me now'.

Konstantin's contacts are not really to his taste, either, although he has far more of them. He works as a senior editor for a magazine publisher and draws his partners from among his young female colleagues. The publishing house is what is called modern and sophisticated: all the girls in the offices, without exception, are devotees of slang and piercings. Every time he encounters either or both of these things in an intimate context, Konstantin shudders. These girls can only be caressed with great caution and they constantly stain the sheets with self-tanning lotion.

All this is sad. Of course, within the bounds of the present novel I, as the author, am empowered to arrange the fates of my characters as I see fit. It's not hard for me to fix things so that Ludmila and Konstantin meet somewhere at a Housing Management Association meeting, introduce them to each other and make them fall in love. Masha and Seryozha don't even have to be introduced; all that's required is to instil in them a more serious attitude to life. And how well it would all turn out: the parents would move into one flat, and the other would be left at the disposal of their children.

Yes, I can do that. I can marry anybody I like – or you like, dear reader – to anyone. But I won't do it, and don't expect it to happen at the end of the story. Because in my art I am a devotee of the realist school, that is, I take my lead from another Author, who writes all of us. My present characters live in Moscow and as you know, while having granted Muscovites many comforts in this life, He has been rather stingy in endowing them with family happiness.

Sometimes I think: Why does it work out like that? Millions of men and women living alongside each other, all on the same patch of land, so to speak, and they can't sort themselves out into couples. And if couples do form then it's purely by chance. To walk through life hand in hand is given only to very few. I suspect that heaven is to blame here, the same heaven that is responsible for making marriages. Moscow's department of heaven is like a nursery school teacher who has despaired of ever creating a balanced group. Or a sports trainer whose bench of players is too long, so he constantly experiments with the team. But perhaps heaven is not quite as clueless as it seems. It could be that from heaven's perspective we are relatively insignificant and the welfare of the megalopolis is of greater importance. After all, what would happen to Moscow if we all suddenly found our other halves, got married and immersed ourselves completely in our private lives? The city would become lethargic and drowsy and lose its metropolitan status. Do you want that? No.

What does it matter that our urban life does not facilitate the creation of enduring ties, when on the other hand we have so many momentary, fleeting contacts that we don't even notice! In the metro, in the shops, in the streets, everywhere where there are many of us – and there are many of us everywhere – we are woven, minute by minute, into a web of countless lines of communication. Contacts spark constantly and we feel no shortage of adrenalin without love or hate or any of that old provincial drama. The sparking of contacts of this kind doesn't produce children, but it does generate a great sense of community. These contacts are the soldered joints that hold together the universe of Moscow, and each of us is a tiny bright lamp in the sky of that universe.

We each move in our own orbit, sometimes colliding, less often forming twin star systems. This, however, does not happen simply according to someone's whim, but according to the objective laws of urban mechanics. And we must also bear in mind that not only our bodies move in set orbits, but our thoughts as well. Ludmila is not destined for Konstantin not only because their work timetables don't match, but also because it is very unlikely that he would ever set his sights on her. His dating profile – as life has moulded it – is sophisticated girls with slang, tattoos and piercings. Even in the metro, when he gazes around because he has nothing to read, he only notices girls like that. And when he looks through the end windows into the next carriage, he finds the same thing there. He wouldn't notice Ludmila, he wouldn't appreciate her attractive, natural appearance, her well-rounded, womanly forms. Everything that is truly feminine – soft breasts, cabbage soup on Saturday and conversation without slang, with long pauses between thoughts – none of this has existed for Konstantin for a long time. It fled from his life about twelve years ago and ran off to Europe, where, of all things Russian, naturally rounded femininity enjoys the highest demand.

But then Ludmila would hardly be likely to pay any attention to Konstantin in the metro either, even if they were put in the same carriage, facing each other. She has got used to switching off in the metro and focusing on her own thoughts. On the way to work all her thoughts are about Masha and household concerns, and on the way back her head is full of work matters. Ludmila tries not to think about her lover any more than necessary: she's fed up of his whims and of having to hide his idiotic masochistic paraphernalia from Masha. And in general she thinks it's time she finished with him, and if he turns up next time without champagne and flowers, that's what Ludmila will do.

Of course, I feel a little bit sorry for both of them. Ludmila and Konstantin have been two separate pages since they were born, but I have become quite fond of them. However, to be quite honest, I don't very much want to help them in their affairs of the heart. Are they themselves even ready for an encounter with what people call ‘a great love'? I'm afraid not. Konstantin wants a girl with more curves and no piercings, and the limit of Ludmila's dreams is a lover with flowers and no insane streak. They can find that kind of happiness without me.

They don't want a great love; and nobody wants one, as a matter of fact. I'm not talking here about Masha and Seryozha, they have their own interests, the concerns of youth, I mean those of us who have long ago developed mature personalities. We assume, of course, that we
are
these mature personalities; we cherish them and try to maintain their integrity. But love is always ‘hi-here-we-go-again'. We know from our own experience, or from books, what profound psychological and even hormonal consequences love brings in its wake, and we hide from it. This is like the instinct of self-preservation: it is pointless even trying to make us see how paltry our mature personalities are.

And then, why should I sort out the lives of some characters when I can't even sort out my own? Only last summer I was involved in an episode that was almost a love affair – and what came of it? As was only to be expected, nothing came of it or, rather, it came to nothing. Not even my family know about this story, if Tamara and Dmitry Pavlovich can be considered my family. Even I sometimes think that it's a story I wrote. The first thing I find hard to explain is why I was in the flat in the city on that day; after all, it was summer outside, and my place was in Vaskovo, at the
dacha
. The second thing, of course, is that I opened the door. I think I've already told you how our main entrance is arranged – basically the same as all the 17B series high-rises. There's a TV camera outside it, somewhere under the canopy of the porch, and the concierge Nasir sits inside and watches two television sets. The first set has nothing to do with the camera, it's needed to prevent Nasir falling asleep on duty, but the second one is a monitor, on which Nasir can see who wants to come into the hallway of the stairwell. And let me tell you, getting in is no simple matter, because there's a strong iron door with an entry phone and an electronic lock. If a resident is sober and he has one hand free, that's okay, because he takes the key with the round tab on it out of his pocket with his free hand, presses it against the right spot and the door squeals, inviting him to come in. If the resident's hands are occupied or his key has got lost somewhere then Nasir swings into action. He has a button of his own under his desk. He presses it, the door squeals, the resident comes in and thanks Nasir. But that's if it
is
a resident. Not for anything will Nasir let in a stranger – that's why he's been put there. It's simply unthinkable for an outsider to infiltrate our entrance, so it's a total mystery to me where these strangers in the stairwell come from. But every single day there they are walking about, people delivering promotional trash or selling potatoes, sociologists with questionnaires and God only knows who else. They trudge from floor to floor and ring all the doorbells, one after another, looking for some fool who'll open up for them. Only there aren't that many fools among us. As a rule, in such situations we lie low and pretend we're not at home. I personally open up – that is, not open up but go and look through the peephole – only if the person ringing the doorbell demonstrates exceptional stubbornness. So I absolutely cannot understand why on that occasion I started and hurried straight to the door.

I walked up, looked through the peephole and saw a young woman. Have you ever looked at a young woman through a peephole in a door? What can you see there except the nose? But, believe it or not, my heart immediately skipped a beat; it was a very long time since anything like that had happened to me. The young woman outside the door could have been a promotional agent for a perfume company, or a thief's ‘finger'; she could have been absolutely anyone apart, perhaps, from a potato-seller. And yet I opened the door for her, Instead of quietly lowering the cover of the peephole and tiptoeing back into the room, I opened the door for her without giving a thought to the consequences. And I realised that my heart had not skipped that beat in vain.

The young woman was charming, so charming that she couldn't possibly be a ‘finger' – for some reason I decided that straight away. We can attribute that decision to my unregenerate romanticism, but she was genuinely good-looking: red-haired, slim, wearing a flowery summer frock. And she had such touching pink slippers on her little feet, like a child's gym shoes.

‘Hello!' the young woman said to me happily. ‘I'm so glad I found you in!'

‘Me?' I asked in surprise.

‘Yes, of course. For some reason there's no answer from your phones.'

‘You know my phone numbers?' I asked in even greater surprise.

‘Well, naturally,' the young woman said with a slight shrug. ‘But perhaps you'll let me in?' I invited the young woman into the hallway, where Phil was already whimpering in his desire to meet her.

‘Ah, what a lovely dog!' she exclaimed. ‘Are you a boy or a girl?'

I gave them time to decide that question and express their mutual liking. However, there was something I wanted to find out too.

‘Pardon me,' I enquired eventually, ‘but who are you, miss?'

‘Ah yes,' she said, slightly embarrassed, and held out her hand. ‘My name's Marina.'

‘Pleased to meet you,' I replied, quite sincerely, and introduced myself too.

‘Me too . . .' Marina replied. ‘But . . . it's strange, I've got another name written down here.'

It was only then I noticed she had an office file with her – pink, like her slippers. Marina opened the file and took out a sheet of paper.

‘Here, read for yourself: Vladimir Anatolievich Kozlov.'

A minute later we were both laughing merrily. As you have already realised, a perfectly ordinary misunderstanding had occurred. Marina wasn't any kind of salesperson, but a representative of an estate agency. She had come to take a look round the flat of a certain Kozlov with a view to selling it, but got the address wrong and ended up with me. She apologised, again offering me her little hand, this time in farewell . . . but I kept hold of it in mine.

‘Since this has happened,' I suggested boldly, ‘perhaps you could take a look at my kitchen too – with a view to a cup of coffee.'

To be quite honest, I wasn't really hoping that she would agree. But she did – perhaps Phil helped there. Marina scratched him behind the ear and smiled.

‘Well now, I won't say no. Only I'll just go and wash my hands.'

At that moment I realised that fate had presented me with a challenge. There was only one thing that I wanted in all the world: to persuade this charming estate agent to stay with me, by any means at all. To win her away from Vladimir Anatolievich Kozlov by seducing her immediately, right now, while we drank coffee. Time was tight, but a desperate plan matured instantaneously in my mind. In effect, I had to play Marina at blitz chess, so I did – and I won.