Happiness is Possible (24 page)

It's a good thing that I'm psychologically robust. What she says is quite inconceivable . . .

‘Are you sure . . . sure that it's not from him?'

‘In the first place, Dmitry Pavlovich can't have children – that's a medical fact. And in the second place . . .'

The first medical fact is enough, but Tamara details everything for me with female thoroughness. I'm not listening to her any more . . . I'm trying to understand: before she left me and we started meeting again later, behind Dmitry Pavlovich's back – before all that, we were married. The two of us lived together for many long years in a marriage that was sometimes happy but, alas, childless. There's good reason for the theme of fatherhood and motherhood never appearing in my prose. Well, maybe now . . .

I am overcome by a strange feeling of undeserved joy. What can I compare this feeling with? Imagine that all of a sudden, out of the blue, your book has written itself.

. . . Meanwhile the metro carries on pulsating indefatigably. Like capsules in a pneumatic post system, one after another the light-blue trains leap out of the tunnel on the right and pause briefly before being drawn into the tunnel on the left, leaving part of their living freight behind on the platform. The belly of the station alternately swells up with the human mass and then ejects it from itself. In this little underground world everything is in motion . . . Everything except Tamara and me. For goodness only knows how long, we two are its sole invariable constant. The smoke-stained, whitewashed vaults above our heads are the colour of a December sky; the bench under us has been polished by an untold multitude of Moscow backsides. We ourselves are like two small sculptures incorporated into the decor. At the more sumptuous stations they cast the figures in bronze, so that people walking by can touch them for good luck.

October 2008

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Current and Upcoming Books by And Other Stories:

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translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield

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Title:
Happiness is Possible

Author: Oleg Zaionchkovsky

Translator: Andrew Bromfield

Editor: Bethan Ellis

Proofreader: Christopher Summerville

Typesetter: Marie Doherty

Series and Cover Design: Joseph Harries