Happiness is Possible (15 page)

My patience is finally exhausted.

‘You can take your budget and stuff it!' I shout. ‘I married Toma, not you!'

Then I jump up, clattering my chair, and run out, giving the entirely innocent cat a kick on the way.

Let me add that in my new family scenes like the above did not happen only on public holidays. Nikolai Stepanovich sank his hooks into me on ordinary days too if he was feeling out of sorts – and he felt out of sorts every time he ran into me as he came out of the toilet or anywhere else. No, this was not the match he had wanted for his daughter. Although Toma was too thin for Nikolai Stepanovich's own taste, he knew well enough that in society she was regarded almost as a beauty. His comrades who had marriageable sons – and there was no shortage of those – had hinted repeatedly that they would not be averse to establishing family ties. And what comrades they were! Captains of industry, Party functionaries . . . The idea that his genealogical capital had been inherited by a miserable, rootless little student poisoned Nikolai Stepanovich's life. The least the miserable little student could do was be grateful!

I must admit that my father-in-law was right. I did behave insolently with him. And not only with him. I annoyed Irina Borisovna, for instance, by reading at the table. She regarded reading as a dubious pastime in general, but at the table it was simply indecent . . . However, Irina Borisovna rarely expressed her displeasure to my face, preferring to act through Toma.

Then there were the two secondary characters – Vityok and the cat – neither of whom was averse to playing me a dirty trick now and then. But I could always get my own back on them by employing physical force in secret.

I didn't want to waste time waiting for this charming
nomenklatura
family to get used to me. I admit quite frankly that I thought more than once of slamming the door behind me and clearing off back to the student hostel. But how could I possibly leave Toma? In the first place, I loved her and, in the second place, she loved me. However, as we all know, there is a way out of any situation, even if it seems that nothing could possibly be more stupid. After yet another battle with Nikolai Stepanovich, Toma and I resolved our situation by running away together.

Our stupidity consisted in the fact that basically we had nowhere to run to. They didn't accept married couples at the student hostel, especially if they were Muscovites. Vaskovo was too far away and, in any case, that was where the terrible goat lived. Without a single
kopeck
the only place where we could take up residence in the city was a railway station or my friend Felix's flat. We chose the second option, although Toma would probably have felt more at ease at the station.

Felix lived in a small flat with just his mother, that is, in a single-parent family, which was encouraging, as far as it went. To this day the only thing I know about his mother is that she worked as a storekeeper in some printing house. An indefatigable and inconspicuous working woman, who was equally inconspicuous in her private life, she was the most suitable mother possible for the numbskull of a son that my friend undoubtedly was. I don't remember her expressing any opinion concerning our sudden appearance. Felix himself took a sympathetic view of our predicament and agreed to take us in, although he warned us that his hospitality had its limits.

‘With you here,' he said, ‘I won't have any personal life at all.'

If by ‘personal life' Felix meant the boozing sessions that he regularly held at home, his concerns were groundless. We lived with Felix for three days and throughout those three days I drank with him continuously, to Toma's absolutely horror. However, our drinking turned out not to be a total waste of time. On the third day of our session my friend had a flash of inspiration.

‘Got it!' he exclaimed, swaying on his chair. ‘I've got an idea!'

‘What's up?' I asked, half-opening one eye.

‘A most excellent idea concerning accommodation for you and Toma. A good place, and no need to pay any money. You'll thank me for this.'

It sounded improbable, to put it mildly, but it was my third day of drinking and I wasn't thinking too well.

‘Why didn't you say anything sooner, dickhead?'

‘God only knows why I didn't,' Felix replied with a shrug

To prove that he wasn't lying, Felix suggested we go there immediately – to find out if the ‘good place' had been taken and come to an arrangement if there was a chance. I was happy enough to go and agreed without a second thought, but only because, I repeat, I was drunk. Anyway, I had nothing at all to lose. Felix and I supported each other as we raised ourselves, with some difficulty, to the walking position, put on our coats and set off, ignoring Toma's protests.

Once out in the frost, however, I sobered up a bit and asked where we were going and what sort of strange place it was where you didn't have to pay for accommodation.

‘Who said you don't have to pay?' Felix asked in surprise.

‘You did?'

‘Did I? You must have misunderstood. Let's sit down and have a smoke.'

We plonked ourselves down on the nearest ice-bound bench and lit up, and Felix finally informed me that he was taking me to see Dmitrich.

‘Who's that?' I asked, baffled.

‘Dmitrich? Oh, he's a big wheel!' said Felix, pulling an appropriate face. ‘Dmitrich is our head yard keeper. Not even a yard keeper, think bigger than that.'

Felix spoke with genuine respect, but it still wasn't clear to me how a yard keeper, even a head yard keeper, could solve our accommodation problem.

‘Oh, he can,' Felix said offhandedly. ‘He can, if he takes a shine to you.'

He told me everything he knew about this genuinely unusual man. By profession Dmitrich really was a yard keeper and a registered employee of the district housing committee. Only he was no ordinary yard keeper, but a clever one, well ahead of the times in some respects. Like most of his colleagues, Dmitrich had found the broom and shovel that were the main instruments of his gainful labour an onerous burden and dreamed of being liberated from them. But while other yard keepers limited themselves to dreaming, he had found a solution to the problem. Having acknowledged his own aversion to physical labour, Dmitrich quite sensibly reasoned that he needed to get others to perform this labour for him. Not a very cunning idea, but surprising for a yard keeper. The only question remaining was where to find fools who were willing to swing the broom for Dmitrich. They were found.

Dmitrich didn't really have to look far to find his fools. The point was that half of the neighbourhood entrusted to his care consisted of buildings scheduled for demolition. It's not true that old Moscow has all been torn down by greedy, grasping capitalists: the Soviet regime demolished just as eagerly, only it built slowly. So Dmitrich's neighbourhood included ‘uninhabited' buildings. But you and I know there is no such thing as an uninhabited building in a city. Life carries on in every building until such time as its walls are crushed by the excavator and its dust is finally ground under the bulldozer's caterpillar tracks. Ghosts and abandoned cats linger in the flats with tattered wallpaper until their places are taken by homeless tramps and rats. Naturally, significant numbers of these creatures, the champions of urban survival, had populated the supposedly uninhabited buildings of Dmitrich's domain. And these Individuals of No Fixed Abode were the reserve from which the clever yard keeper drew the workforce that he needed

The way he tamed them was brilliant in its simplicity. One fine day Dmitrich made the rounds of all the INFA lairs in his sector and put locks on their doors. He handed out the keys to the locks of these ‘flats' to the inhabitants, on condition that from now on the tramps would be subject to labour discipline, in other words, that they would do Dmitry's job as a yard keeper for him. Everyone likes to have the key to his own flat and so, apart from a few ideological hard cases, the tramps took up the broom with enthusiasm.

The scale of the operation increased when Dmitrich, having reaped the first fruits of this promising enterprise, made a secret proposal to his bosses: he asked them to entrust all the territory under their jurisdiction to himself and his illegal labour army. This bold innovator suggested that the other yard keepers should be sacked as superfluous, and the wages fund liberated by doing this should be divided up in a way that was fair. You can easily understand that his bosses did not spend too long thinking about it.

So Dmitrich began ruling his INFA colony on an almost legal basis. In time his housing association was even augmented by several needy or exceptionally greedy students. The students worked harder than the tramps, so Dmitrich set aside the VIP apartment for them: a large flat with glass in the windows, a functional electricity supply and electric coil heaters in the rooms.

This was the flat where my friend Felix was intending to accommodate Tamara and myself.

‘You see,' he said, it's not free, it's in exchange for work.'

‘But will they at least provide the grub?' I asked, laughing.

‘No,' Felix replied seriously. ‘You provide your own grub.'

I thought it over for another minute or two. Of course, I didn't much fancy the idea of labouring side by side with homeless tramps, but then, I was effectively one of them now.

‘Oh, what the hell!' I exclaimed, slapping myself on the knees. ‘Take me to this slave driver of yours.'

A little while later I was talking to Dmitrich in person. From the inscrutable expression on his face it was impossible to tell if he had taken a shine to me or not. But he probably must have done, since I received the key to a room and even a set of bed linen with the official stamp of some medical detoxification centre.

‘Take your woman round, settle in, and tomorrow I'll show you what's what and where your patch is,' said Dmitrich, favouring me with a handshake.

In this way Tamara and I were granted the right of citizenship in a strange little state of non-citizens. Certainly, this state was almost completely lacking in creature comforts, it was undemocratic, unrecognised in law and condemned by history to demolition. But even so, after decades have passed, I still recall it with affection. The month we spent living illegally was an entire epoch in our life and, believe me, by no means the worst.

That month was December. Back in those days no one had heard of global warming yet; winters in Moscow were just as they were supposed to be: frosty and robust. In December an entire communal army waged a defensive war against the elements of snow and ice. And we, Dmitrich's partisans, were part of that army. Without any chemical agents, with just an ice pick and a shovel, we scraped and pounded the Moscow pavements, not even for grub, but just for the key to a room. As an apparently conscientious soldier, I was entrusted by the commander with an important sector of the front. I cleaned the area round a mysterious structure that Dmitrich assumed must belong to the Committee of State Security. Who else could a building like that possibly have belonged to, with no signs, brightly lit by streetlamps from the outside, but always dark on the inside?

‘Give it a thorough scraping, especially the entrance,' the boss ordered me. ‘You never know, what if some general shows up and his Chaika gets stuck on the ice? Then they'll shut down our little business.'

What general and what Chaika? There weren't even any footprints near the building . . . But nonetheless I scraped away with a will, in order to keep warm.

It was very cold. At nights, huddling under two coats and wrapped in the detoxification centre's sheets, Toma and I kept warm by making love. And as soon as we quietened down, the rats came. They wanted love and warmth too: inspired by our example, they started chasing each other across the floor, across the table, all around the room, squeaking and thumping their tails. The rats ran riot until morning came; they could afford to, they didn't have to take any end-of-semester exams or chip away any ice.

But I had to. Roused by the alarm clock or, more accurately, by my own incredible effort of will, I woke up, quietly freed myself from Toma's sleepy embrace and got out of our wretched but blissfully voluptuous conjugal bed. And then, having subdued the rats' bacchanalian tumult, I put my feet into the one-size-fits-all felt boots issued to me by Dmitrich, pulled on my municipal-issue padded jacket, set my weapons across my shoulder and sallied forth long before daylight to clean that passage into that yard for that non-existent general once again.

Tamara couldn't sleep after I went. When she discovered that I had gone and she was left alone with the rats, she couldn't close her eyes again. Before she lowered her feet onto the floor, Toma clapped her hands for a long time to frighten away the long-tailed monsters surrounding the bed. But the monsters were less afraid of her than she was of them. The rats merely withdrew reluctantly into the dark corners, from where they observed Toma with their glittering little eyes and laughed into their whiskers. Constantly gazing round and shuddering from fear and the cold, she set the icy kettle on the rusty three-legged electric cooker, huddled up in her coat and sat down to wait for me to get back. My poor, wonderful Toma! I don't think that this was exactly her idea of domestic bliss. But during that whole month I never heard a single complaint from her, and not once did she ask to go back to her mum.

We saw the New Year in at our slum, in a large unoccupied room. The role of hosts was played by Tamara and me and our flatmates, two rather strange students; I don't remember what college they were from. In a fit of employer's largesse, Dmitrich had brought a bald, crooked little fir tree, which we stuck in the housing committee's bucket of salty sand. And then Felix showed up, already drunk, with a whole jerry-can of rectified spirits from the printing works. The smell of the alcohol started attracting tramps and other inhabitants of the uninhabited building.