Happiness is Possible (21 page)

To put it scientifically, his attitude to me is ambivalent. On the one hand, I can tell that I often irritate Dmitry Pavlovich, but on the other, he is attracted to me in certain ways. Perhaps he simply doesn't understand me as a person and wants to figure me out. Well then, let him try; he's not likely to succeed, even sitting in the same boat with me. How could he understand an artist, with nothing but a westernising left hemisphere to rely on?

However, contrary to my expectations, Dmitry Pavlovich is in no hurry to make conversation. We've been sitting here for half an hour without saying a word, dangling our rods over opposite sides of the boat . . .

. . . My float has disappeared. I didn't notice it straight away, although I thought I'd never taken my eyes off it. Maybe it has simply sunk? No! The float surfaces again, pauses for a moment's thought and suddenly goes darting off to one side, listing lopsidedly and trailing whiskery wrinkles across the surface of the water. I observe its manoeuvres, entranced, for about three seconds . . . ‘Hook it!' The voice from my distant childhood sounds entirely real to me. If I can just remember how it's done . . . I jerk my rod convulsively against the movement of the float and – oh, wonder of wonders! – suddenly weighed down, the rod tautens, transmitting a live, twitching pulse to my hands. The fish resists for as long as it remains in its own element and its jerking arouses exaggerated hopes in me. But, once hoisted out of the water, it proves much smaller than I was expecting. When I clutch it in my free left hand, its entire body, apart from the head and the tail, fits into my fist.

Inanely wise, round, goggling eyes and a drop of pale, fishy blood smeared across the lips. So that's you, my first fish. I'd put you back in the river, but there's another fisherman sitting here, and we're supposed to keep count. So you can swim in the bucket for the time being.

Dmitry Pavlovich, by the way, is rather reserved in his praise.

‘That fish is bit on the small side,' he remarks, squinting sideways at the bucket. ‘What species is it anyway?'

‘How should I know?' I reply with a shrug.

In the next half hour I manage to catch another three little fish of the same species and Dmitry Pavlovich doesn't catch a single one. Having lost faith in his patented caterpillars, he has cadged a worm from me, but it hasn't done him any good. We've swapped places and rods, all to no avail: the fish continue to ignore him. For the last quarter of an hour a tense silence has prevailed in our boat; Dmitry Pavlovich is concealing the fury that is tearing him apart and I am concealing my exultation. Finally, unable to control himself, he explodes into coarse obscenity. His thunderous, aimless expletives hurtle along above the smooth surface of the river, echoing back from both banks.

‘Don't shout, you'll frighten the fish away,' I say, trying to reason with Dmitry Pavlovich, but there's no stopping him now.

‘How can I bloody well frighten them, when they're already afraid of me? I've sat this way and that way, and I spat on the worm the way you advised me to! No, there has to be some rational explanation for this . . .'

‘It can't always be found,' I remark meekly, but Dmitry Pavlovich isn't listening.

‘What I'd like to do . . .' he says, glaring with hatred into the murky riverine depths, ‘what I'd like to do is blast them with dynamite!'

I shake my head reproachfully.

‘That's what all you rationalists are like. If something doesn't submit to your explanation, you try to blast it into shape . . .'

This remark of mine could well serve as the prologue to a debate, and there's no telling what general conclusions we might reach in the course of that. Dmitry Pavlovich is clearly about to object to something . . . But he doesn't get a chance, the debate is interrupted before it has even begun, because Phil suddenly starts barking furiously back at base camp. Glancing round at the bank, we see the reason for all the commotion: a herd of cows is jostling at the top of the descent to the river, the one and only way down, which we used to get here. Ah, damn them! But we ought to have expected this . . .

With a cry of ‘Save the camp!' Dmitry Pavlovich and I start paddling furiously for the bank, although we should have thought about it first. For instance, if this group of domesticated ruminants is under the watchful care of a bull, we would do better to sail away from the shoreline. Fortunately there's no bull to be seen; however, a human figure with a whip has appeared on the edge of the cliff. Dressed in a cloth jacket and tarpaulin boots, the cowherd looks a figure on a poster; the only thing that spoils the image is the baseball cap set on his head instead of a cloth one. Sizing up the situation, he swings his whip majestically and the air is split asunder by a clap as loud as a gunshot. The cows all shudder at once and start lumbering down to the riverbank, lowing as they go. Jostling and skidding on their splayed hoofed feet, they slither down the incline . . . and then stop again, as if something has frightened them. What bothers them so much? It's certainly not Phil, they've seen plenty of heroes like that back home in the village. It's the Geländewagen: the cows are definitely wary of it. They give it a wide berth on the way down to the water, eyeing its bright, shiny flanks, shaking their heads excitedly and fluttering their long lashes.

Fortunately for us, there aren't many cows, and Phil doesn't let them get near our camp in any case. He has unilaterally determined some invisible demarcation line between us and the new arrivals and now he's patrolling along it. Even so, we think it best not to do any more fishing while the cows are here. Dmitry Pavlovich and I wait for the herd to leave, and there's nothing else to do except down another half-glassful each, so we do that. However, this procedure does not pass unnoticed: the cowherd, who has so far appeared entirely indifferent to our presence, suddenly abandons his charges and moves in our direction, with a smile on his face that is pleasant, despite lacking several teeth.

‘How-do, mates!' the cowherd greets us from a distance, showing Phil the whip at the same time, just in case.

‘How-do, mate,' we respond. ‘Fancy a drink?'

‘Well now, I won't say no,' he says, blossoming even more brightly.

Who could ever have doubted it?

Another hour went by, or perhaps longer, before the cows finally sated their thirst. Paying no more attention to the Geländewagen, the ruminants, somnolent now after all the water they have drunk, start clambering up the incline one by one. After the vodka, their leader is also noticeably heavier on his feet, but a cowherd's duty obliges him to follow his herd.

‘Well, good health . . .' he says with a sad expression on his face as he bids farewell to us or the unfinished bottle.

‘And you keep well, too . . .' we reply in relief.

When he is already some distance away, the cowherd turns back towards us and says something, jabbing his great whip up at the sky.

‘What?' we ask.

‘There'll be rain, at'swot!'

We look up at the sky, but we can't see anything on it apart from a few wispy little clouds.

‘Takes a drop or two and he starts seeing things,' Dmitry Pavlovich sums up.

After the departure of the cows, the remainder of the day passes without serious incident, unless you count Dmitry Pavlovich catching his first and only fish, a tiddler. With the advent of twilight, we return to the bank, down a half-glassful each and have supper. After supper we sit there in silence for a long time, gazing into the fire. Sparks fly up and hang in the sky like bright stars and little starlets. And when the generative power of the firewood is exhausted and the time comes for a beautiful death agony to scatter it into a multitude of little grey coals – by that time the sky is already densely populated. As if in mockery of the cowherd's drunken prophecy, the sky is populated by a multitude of tiny but clear, almost unblinking stars.

‘I don't even remember the last time I saw them,' Dmitry Pavlovich says in a subdued voice. ‘Probably at young pioneer camp.'

Our faces and stomachs are turned towards the night sky. We lie there in the grass, smoking, and our cigarette smoke hovers over us, thickening the Milky Way.

‘Always work and more work,' Dmitry Pavlovich says with another sigh. ‘No time even to take a look at the sky. The only thing I know is the Great Bear.'

His sadness wins me over.

‘If you know the Great Bear,' I remark sympathetically, ‘then I can show you the Pole Star.'

‘The Pole Star?' he repeats, narrowing his eyes distrustfully. ‘Go on then.'

‘All right,' I say. ‘So, you can see the Great Bear?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then take the two stars on the edge of its dipper and follow a line straight up from them. The first relatively bright star on that line will be the Pole Star.'

Dmitry Pavlovich peers tensely up at the sky for about a minute.

‘Have you found it?' I ask him.

‘Yes, I have,' he mutters. ‘Only it's not bright.'

‘I said relatively bright.'

‘And the line's not straight.'

‘Ah, what a hopeless misery you are, Palich!'

His petty quibbling annoys me. I don't want to contemplate the stars with him any longer: I yawn and creep into the tent to sleep.

Phil seems to have been waiting for just this moment. He also yawns as widely as he can and as soon as I settle down, collapses beside me with a groan, snuggling his side up against me. In the two-man tent Phil and I could have spent the rest of the night more or less comfortably, but before we can nod off a third, extranumerary figure squeezes in under the canvas with a grunt. Phil is displeased but, following a brief struggle for his place, accompanied by growling and swearing, he is forced to concede defeat. Dmitry Pavlovich doesn't stand on ceremony with me either, although the assault is less furious. All three of us squirm about for a while until Dmitry Pavlovich suddenly goes limp and ceases to offer resistance – he has apparently fallen asleep in the thick of the battle.

The tent shudders from Dmitry Pavlovich's snoring and I lie there, wondering what on earth Tamara could have seen in this coarse, egotistical individual.

Meanwhile, I am gradually overcome by slumber. Through my sleep I hear new sounds added to those produced by Dmitry Pavlovich. There is greater harmony in these other sounds, but their rhythm, which resembles the beating of distant tom-toms, carries a warning message. I struggle to decipher this message, but I cannot, because the tom-toms are already beating beyond the bounds of my consciousness . . .

Meanwhile, somewhere the waters are already raging. Turbulent rivers are washing away entire cities and bewildered people, soaked to the skin, are thrashing about in search of a rational explanation. But there are no newspapers or police and the elements have disrupted the Internet connection, snapped the cable. With no one to help the people, the lamentations in their midst are most great. . . I am woken by my compassion for humanity or, perhaps, by someone shaking me by the shoulder.

‘Get up, brother! We're in a bad way . . .'

I see Dmitry Pavlovich leaning down over me. Soaking wet, like the whole of humanity, he shakes me, which makes him shake too, and water drips off him onto my face.

‘What? What's happened?' I ask in fright, raising myself up on my elbows.

‘Disaster, brother! That damned cowherd jinxed us.'

Now at last I realise I wasn't dreaming about the water. It really is raining. The rain patters densely on the roof of the tent and drums a noisy tattoo on everything out in the open. But the resonant clatter of raindrops on the flat, bald crown of the Geländewagen is especially derisive.

Evacuate! Without even eating breakfast, Dmitry Pavlovich and I hastily bundle together our bits and pieces and stuff them into the car, dumping kilograms of riverbank clay, if not worse, on the expensive rugs. ‘Right, my German friend, take us out of here!' I pray silently, although I have a bad premonition.

With a powerful roar, our Geländewagen sets off up the incline. But going up an incline, especially after rain, is not the same as coming down it. We race up about ten metres and then get stuck. After that the Geländewagen slides down sideways, right back to our starting point, still spinning its wheels senselessly. Time after time we try to drive up the incline, but only reach the same spot, which can now be termed our point of reversal. Alas, a powerful engine and computerised transmission are no help to the Geländewagen: a bond with the earth, with the soil – that's what's lacking just at the moment.

After the fifth or sixth unsuccessful attempt Dmitry Pavlovich loses control of himself. Swearing shrilly, he curses the day and the hour when he agreed to come on this ‘damned fishing trip' although, as I recall, it was his idea. Intending to wait until Dmitry Pavlovich stops banging his head against the steering wheel, I get out of the car, open the boot and extract the bottle of vodka from a heap of wet clutter.

I drink approximately one half-glassful from the mouth of the bottle, take a breath in, raise my eyes . . . and what do I see? On top of the hill, right above the incline, a bell-shaped human figure has appeared. The man reminds me of a bell because he is encased in an army ground-sheet cloak, but the peak of the baseball cap protruding from under the hood and, more importantly, the smile, allow me to recognise him as our cowherd of the previous day. I wave the bottle in the air, inviting him to come down. He doesn't need much persuading.

As he gets closer, the cowherd starts babbling something cheerfully:

‘See now, I toldya yesterday!'

‘Yes, you told us all right!' says Dmitry Pavlovich, sticking his angry face out of the Geländewagen. ‘So tell us what we can do now!'

Without answering, the cowherd takes the bottle from me and follows my example by taking a long swig. Only after he gets his breath back and wipes away the tears that have sprung to his eyes does he turn to Dmitry Pavlovich and say: