Happiness is Possible (8 page)

His face started glowing and his eyes sparkled.

‘My dear fellow!' he said, turning to me. ‘Take a look at the diners . . . Who do you see here?'

I looked around.

‘Well, over there there's a political analyst sitting with someone else. I saw him on the telly yesterday.'

‘And over there,' he said, pointing with his fork, ‘is a film director. And at that table – do you see them, embracing? – two writers, both poets. And so on – no room to spit for all these people of culture sitting here, dining in cultured fashion . . . And why is that, do you think?'

‘Why is what?'

‘Why are they sitting here at Griddle and not somewhere else?'

I shrugged.

‘Maybe you give them a special deal? A discount or whatever you call it.'

Gridlevsky nodded.

‘The discount, that goes without saying. And the basement, and the pipes – of course, that all has an influence. But what's the most important thing? The most important thing is that we believe the cultural process and the digestive process are inseparable. That's our angle!'

‘Maybe the angle is in the precise balance . . .' I tried to suggest cautiously.

‘The angle is their inseparability!' Gridlevsky retorted. ‘You can't imagine how many creative careers have been shaped in this basement . . . Director drinks with director, poets drink with each other . . . people of art come here and find each other. And you . . . I want you to find inspiration as a writer at Griddle.'

‘I'd be glad to,' I murmured, ‘only I don't quite understand . . .'

‘Ah, what a slow Joe Blow you are,' Dmitry Pavlovich put in unexpectedly. ‘Write something beautiful about all this . . . about the way destinies are defined. The establishment gets a boost for its image and you, you fool, get paid a fee. There's the balance for you.'

‘Yes, write about it,' said Irka, ‘you could do a good job.'

Four pairs of eyes gazed at me expectantly. It would have been simply indecent on my part to refuse now.

‘I'll put my best foot forward,' I promised. ‘Let's drink to inspiration.'

Irka entered my phone number into her device and we drank to the success of the undertaking. Gridlevsky announced that to celebrate he would treat us to a special dish, then summoned a waiter with a snap of his fingers and whispered something in his ear. We waited for about fifteen minutes until the dish came floating over to us in the hands of the chef de cuisine himself. It was thin slices of dusky meat, set in a surround of delicate blue flowers.

‘What is it?' we exclaimed in chorus.

Gridlevsky paused, savouring the effect.

‘Smoked antelope with orchids.'

‘Antelope – that's really something,' Dmitry Pavlovich said approvingly.

‘It looks so lovely!' Tamara exclaimed in delight.

‘Help yourselves, ladies and gents!'

Gridlevsky stuck his fork into an orchid and despatched it into his mouth. Spotting the horror on my face, he laughed.

‘Don't worry, writer, they're marinated!'

I couldn't bring myself to sample the orchids, but that didn't save me from an upset stomach. After that dinner at Griddle, I spent a restless, sleepless night. The process of digestion was tempestuous, and the process of thought quite inseparable from it. Every new jolt in my belly set my thoughts scampering off in a new direction: I swung wildly between castigating myself for being a literary prostitute and calculating how I would use the fee from Gridlevsky to go to Europe.

By morning my intestines had settled down and the tempest in my head had abated. I fell into a state resembling sleep but not, as it turned out, for long. I was roused from my bed by the trilling of the phone.

‘Not calling too early, am I?'

It was someone called Irina Kirillovna from Griddle Inc. In my drowsy state I didn't realise it was Irka from the day before.

‘We have to draw up a contract. We'll expect you between eleven and twelve. Okay?'

‘Okay,' I responded dully. ‘Where shall I come to?'

Thus began the first morning of a new life for me.

Well, there was no going back now. I consulted with my stomach one last time, had a wash and a shave, drenched myself in eau de cologne and set off to Griddle Inc. at the address provided. To draw up a contract.

How often has that word caressed my ear? Well . . . a few times. You take the metro to get to the publishing house and the wheels keep drumming it out: ‘a contract, a contract'. If you've never written books, you can't understand what an invitation to draw up a contract means to an author. It means that his creation will not be despatched directly to the noosphere, but will first tarry for a while with the public. It has been accepted by mankind as fit for consumption, approved for publication and, perhaps, someone might even read it. The typesetters at least will read it, showing it to each other and tittering into their fists.

But on that morning when I received the invitation from Griddle Inc., I didn't have a completed piece of creative work. It might seem that nothing could be better: you haven't done a stroke yet and already there's a piece of paper waiting for you somewhere with the amount due to you clearly stated in figures and words. But somehow in the metro, on my way to the coveted meeting at that office, I wasn't exactly feeling overjoyed. The carriages rattled and rasped deafeningly as they raced along, and from time to time the driver broadcast hoots of alarm into the darkness. What the driver imagined he could see there, I don't know; but I tried to convince myself that I had nothing to worry about. Especially since I had brought the indigestion tablets with me – just to be on the safe side.

At the office I was met by Irka – now Irina Kirillovna. She greeted me with a meagre smile and led me straight through to the conference room. We had barely even stationed ourselves at the long table before a young woman arrived and set a bowl of sweets down between us.

‘Would you prefer tea or coffee?' she asked me.

I preferred coffee.

‘The usual for me,' Irina Kirillovna instructed. ‘And get in everyone we need.'

The young woman was back in a flash. Tea, coffee and everyone we needed appeared almost simultaneously. While the sugar was still dissolving in my cup, I managed to make the acquaintance of a lady designer and a lady marketologist (both shorn to match their boss's cropped style), a young culturologist, an old gastrologist and a representative of a PR agency on friendly terms with Griddle (a middle-aged man with manicured nails). Noticing that they had all come to the meeting with folders, I felt guilty because I hadn't brought anything apart from my indigestion tablets.

‘Let's talk about our book,' suggested Irina Kirillovna. ‘Does anyone have any ideas?'

The colleagues briskly opened their folders, but I merely drummed my fingers on the table. Ideas were not slow in coming: the lady designer had four versions of the cover ready, the young culturologist advanced the familiar thesis that culture and nutrition are inseparable; the lady marketologist demanded that the work reflect the positive trend in seat-occupancy rate. The man from the PR agency advised me to give artistic expression to the fact that nowadays going to visit people and drinking at each other's homes was irrelevant, old hat, just like making your own moonshine, because now moonshine was sold at Griddle.

The only ones who didn't have any ideas were the old gastrologist and me. He was obviously too old, and I, to be honest, was too frightened. It was only natural that I should be frightened when I realised I would have to work as part of a team. This was unusual for me: the last time I'd been a part of a team was when I went stealing apples with the other kids in Vaskovo. As she summed up the brainstorming session, Irina Kirillovna turned to me and said that Griddle Inc. was not expecting any self-expression from me and they didn't want ‘a novel for the shelf', what they wanted was a contemporary perspective on the culture of nourishment and the nourishment of culture. The production meeting concluded on that note. The colleagues gathered up their folders and left, each collecting a sweet on the way out. I just sat there, totally exhausted.

The young woman who had served the coffee earlier brought a stack of paper.

‘Familiarise yourself with the agreement,' Irka told me.

The lines started jumping about in front of my eyes. My head wasn't working too well, but even so I was surprised when I got into it.

‘What's this – you call me “the Contractor”. But I'm not a builder.'

She shrugged.

‘If there's a client, there's a contractor. We have a standard contract, and in your place I wouldn't nitpick over words.'

She was right, there was no point in nitpicking. I felt firmly put in my place, but the ‘Remuneration' section appeared to compensate for all the linguistic inelegancies.

In short, I emerged from Griddle Inc. no longer a free artist, but a normal employed citizen. Out on the street, I gazed around with new eyes, washed as clean as office windowpanes. Office buildings, rank upon rank of them – working Moscow encompassed me on all sides. A stream of men wearing ties with broad knots engulfed me and for the first time in my life I felt the urge to look into their hearts and ask: ‘What's
your
salary like, for example? What's
your
remuneration?' I felt the urge to bond with them, to hint that now I was no stranger, I was one of them. I could have suggested going somewhere (perhaps even to Griddle!) for a drink of something à la mode to ease the stress. Yes – I could afford that now! I could, because the envelope with my advance was lying in my inside pocket, pressed against my heart. I stood there bewildered, not recognising either the city or myself. How had it happened that I – I? – had been hired on a standard contract, like any of these individuals in ties? I wanted to go down into the metro, deafen my ears and anaesthetise my soul with all that comforting clatter. I wanted to make a quick getaway with this money that I hadn't earned, lie low, disappear completely. ‘You can go whistle for your book!' I muttered vindictively.

Such were the distraught feelings with which I emerged from Griddle Inc. that day. Two or three days later, however, the tumult within had subsided. Naturally, I failed to come up with a saga on the gastric mechanisms of cultural transmission; I didn't even make much of an effort. I spent the advance, as I had planned, on a trip to the Czech Republic (a wonderful country!) But I didn't have to lie low after making my getaway. Griddle Inc. carried on for a while trying to get hold of me through Dmitry Pavlovich, then they gave up and wrote me off, like spoiled antelope meat.

In the old days, as you know, there used to be so-called ‘writers' houses' in Moscow. In fact, there were entire neighbourhoods of writers' houses. I don't intend to discuss this phenomenon here from the politico-historical perspective or from the standpoint of undiluted envy. I merely wish to mention that those buildings are still standing today and quite a large number of literary people still live in them. Of course, I'm not talking about the original residents, those Soviet writers who once had honours and favours heaped on them by the Party and the government, but who now repose in a state of eternal peace or profound senility. I mean their living descendants, who have inherited a love of literature. As a rule, these descendants write neither verse nor prose, but that's a good thing, because their second hereditary disease is dyslexia. This, of course, does not prevent them from participating actively in a vigorous literary process. They serve Russian literature honourably as critics and reviewers in journals, as editors and literary secretaries of all kinds, members of juries for literary prizes . . . and in God only knows what other capacities. They are the small screws, levers and pinions of our large, complicated literary machine, a locomotive that is kept in steam even while standing in a siding. And they live in the former writers' houses.

However, I don't mean to backbite or talk shop. I simply don't understand how they have managed for so long, all those literary people together. How they have survived without putting their philological suburbs to the torch or flooding them, or blowing them sky-high with the domestic gas supply. I know that blowing a gasket or two is the intelligentsia's favourite pastime. I even have a literary anecdote involving gaskets and the intelligentsia.

It didn't happen in some writers' ghetto, but here in our working-class district, where the literary men can be counted on one finger and one thumb. These two digits are myself and Sasha Prut, who lives in flat number 27A, three blocks away from me. Sasha (in formal terms he is Samuil Solomonovich) works for a newspaper as an essayist and literary columnist. He is the son of another, better-known Prut, who founded something or other in Soviet literary studies. So Sasha is the genuine article, a literary scion cast up in a working-class housing district by the whim of fate. Why the Soviet authorities neglected to provide his father with a worthy apartment, I don't know, and I don't ask. But I suspect that this circumstance is a source of secret suffering for Sasha.

It would definitely be stretching a point to call us ‘brothers in the pen', but Prut and I are friends, despite the difference in our origins. Simply because in the entire district we are the only men of letters, and there is no one else to gossip with on subjects that interest us. Sasha is married, with children, and so, until Tamara left me, our two families socialised on symmetrical terms. Then Prut's side acquired numerical superiority and also developed, I would say, a preponderance of interest. They – especially Sasha's wife, Sonya – imagined that I had suffered a tragedy and was devastated by my loneliness. Indeed, after the divorce I did become a more frequent visitor to the Pruts. Not, however, for the sake of their compassionate solicitude, but because as a bachelor I was lured by the home-made rissoles. A couple of times a month Prut and I used to drink, snack on Sonya's rissoles, gossip about literary subjects and drink again, this time without snacks of any kind, to the cosy accompaniment of the kitchen tap dripping. My heart was warmed by the awareness that it was not I who would have to wash the dishes.

But month by month the dripping in the Pruts' kitchen gradually accelerated, until it developed into a continuous gurgling that became an irritating factor. It even seemed to me that this trickle had begun to erode the Pruts' domestic idyll. Sonya would occasionally resort to rhetoric: ‘Can it be possible?' she would exclaim, ‘can it be possible that things like this happen in other homes?' Sasha and I tried to take refuge from the subject of the water supply in conversation, but even without Sonya the tap reminded us of its presence ever more insistently.

The malefic trickle babbled away in the Prut's kitchen by day and by night, carrying off an amount of water beyond all measuring. But among the innumerable drops of which it consisted there was one – although by no means the last – which caused the cup of Sasha's patience to overflow. Indistinguishable among the vast shoal of its fellows, it slipped down and away through the rust-rimmed plug hole of the kitchen sink. This happened at night, when everybody in the flat was asleep. Neither Sonya nor the children sensed the fatal drop – only Sasha did. Waking with a shudder, he started listening to the familiar gurgling coming from the kitchen. Gazing into the darkness, he was suddenly filled with an inexplicable hatred for the incontinent old tap although, properly speaking, its condition was the objective result of its age. ‘I have to put an end to this!' Sasha muttered, grinding his teeth. ‘Tomorrow or never!'

And then tomorrow came. Prut woke again, this time in the usual manner. In the morning the babbling of the trickle in the kitchen was not so intrusive; it merged into the other sounds of newly woken life. But strangely enough, sleep had not obliterated Sasha's memory of the nocturnal incident. Marvelling at the strength of his own resolve, he clambered into the closet where, out of sheer sentimentality, they stored items that had outlived their time. There was an old Olympia typewriter, a Neva photographic enlarger, a Yauza four-track tape-recorder and all sorts of other things in there. From in among the other stuff Sasha retrieved a yellow pigskin case containing hand tools that he had inherited from his father the literary scholar, who had inherited it from Sasha's granddad, a cobbler from Kiev. Tipping the contents of the case out onto the floor, the scourge of the cantankerous tap selected the weapon best suited to his purpose – that is, naturally, the largest and most fearsome pipe wrench. With a tool like that even a puny man of letters is capable of wreaking havoc.

The fateful moment arrived. Having excluded all extraneous personnel from the kitchen, Prut summoned up his martial spirit and moved in to attack. He clamped his mighty weapon on the tap and heaved. The madman didn't even take the trouble to close the shut-off valve, which – as emerged later – didn't work in any case. That poor old tap! In its thick, furry coat of salt deposits, it looked like an impregnably secure stalagmite, but it proved as brittle as a rotten branch. Sasha heaved and – crunch! – the tap was left clutched in the jaws of the wrench and a hot geyser at a pressure of four atmospheres shot out of the wound in the mixer. Only then did it become clear what a destructive force the old brass fossil had been straining to hold in check. Enveloped in a cloud of steam, Prut dashed from the kitchen into the toilet to close the shut-off valve – but to no avail! The shut-off valve was the same age as the kitchen tap, it had turned downright crusty long ago and the only function it now served was as a decoration on the pipe, except that Sonya occasionally hung the floor cloth on it to dry. All Sasha could do with the shut-off valve was bend it badly and scratch it. And that was all he did. I won't paint a detailed picture of the subsequent events and what the real plumbers said to Sasha. I could never, in any case, do that more vividly than Sonya. The most significant outcome of Sasha's efforts with the pipe wrench was that he became much better acquainted with the inhabitants of the sixteen floors below his own. They had previously greeted him more or less politely when they met in the lift, but after this tragic event Prut came to know another side of his neighbours. However, I won't go into the details of that either.

Although the case of the flood that Sasha had loosed was eventually settled on the basis of compensation for costs, the incident itself spawned an entire chain of consequences. The first, and least significant, was that Samuil Prut wrote a novel, which related the bitter fate of a sensitive and educated man obliged to live in aggressive and soulless surroundings. Written in a fury in only three months, the novel failed to win the approval of his contemporaries, which was hardly surprising, since Prut had set his hand to a trade that was not his, but it was strange that he was so upset by this. He wasn't the first and he won't be the last; who can tell how many failed novelists there are in Moscow? The catch, however, is that although there are many novelists, not all of them write literary columns. Prut decided to wreak vengeance for the fiasco suffered by his novel in his journalistic capacity. His reviews became violently critical; the hot bile dripped from his pen, gathering into a trickle that soon became a toxic torrent, poisoning the sluggish flow of our literary waters. Everyone got it in the neck from Prut! They said that his criticism even gave one elderly writer a stroke that paralysed his right side, and now, supposedly, the old man is obliged to learn to write with his left hand.

Sasha did not spare my modest creative efforts either. True, I didn't suffer a stroke, but when Prut discovered unjustified social optimism, a compromise with reality and something else of a similar kind in my work, I stopped going round to his place for rissoles.

We hadn't seen each other for some time and only met by chance at a buffet meal after some literary event. He was drinking alone, in a Byronically sombre mood. I didn't pretend, as many others did, that I hadn't noticed him, but made an effort and walked over with my glass.

‘Hello, Sasha!' I said. ‘Why so gloomy?'

‘What's there to be happy about?' he replied. ‘I stand here and observe the insignificant nonentities. I'm an outsider at this Vanity Fair.'

‘You've become very strict with the human race,' I protested. ‘These are your fellow professionals. Not great talents, perhaps, but good-hearted people. Or is it true what they say, and you've got a bleeding ulcer?'

Sasha laughed darkly.

‘It's nothing to do with an ulcer. You try flooding these people's flats, then you'll discover just how good-hearted they really are.'

‘Maybe you're right,' I observed, ‘but you behave as if you were the one who was flooded.'

I don't remember how he answered. Our conversation didn't lead anywhere in any case, like all conversations at buffet meals. And then the buffet meals stopped, because summer arrived and literary life came to a standstill. Summer is a time of hibernation for those who write – this is what differentiates us from the rest of the animal world. Creative hibernation, that is, of course. Men of letters spend these three months trying to heal their haemorrhoids and their nerves and rid themselves of the fatty deposits that have accumulated in their buttocks as a result of their sedentary work. Then in the autumn, refreshed, they gather at the familiar places and recognise each other again, like school classmates after the holidays – with the difference that writers don't grow over the summer.

Only one sub-species of writers has a hard time in summer – literary columnists. The paper must come out, complete with the review. Columnists conjure up subjects out of thin air and write nonsense that they feel ashamed of for the next year. And no one invites them anywhere to give a talk and have a drink. Literary reviewers wander through the summer like lost souls, they shamble about like insomniac bears. During this period their psychoses are exacerbated.

In saying this I am hinting at Sasha Prut, who seemed to be finally broken by the summer. In late August I met his wife Sonya in the economy-class shop and found her in a state of emotional distress. When I asked how she and Sasha were getting on, she replied that things were bad and she thought Sasha had gone to pieces.

‘Has he started drinking?' I asked, puzzled.

‘No, I didn't express myself correctly,' said Sonya, shaking her head. ‘Sasha's flipped his lid. He's gone round the bend,' – tears glinted in her eyes. ‘I'm afraid – he's not all there!'

There are numerous popular expressions for what had happened to Prut – the people know how to diagnose such problems. But Sonya was not a woman of the people, and so she got her terms confused. Prut was there all right, all of him, including his misery, and that was what was driving her and the children round the bend. He had got into the habit of lying down the whole day through, with his face turned to the wall, and then in the evening he would suddenly become agitated, leap up and walk out of the flat without even combing his hair, sometimes in his slippers. He rambled round the neighbourhood, scaring solitary passers-by and courting couples, and even the packs of freaky teenagers made way for him . . .

As I listened to Sonya, I asked myself a question: What really was the cause of Sasha's mental breakdown? And I couldn't find an answer. My extensive wisdom could come up with no more than a single phrase:

‘These things happen . . .'

She would have carried on pouring out her sorrows to me, but it was too awkward in that place. As I have said, Sonya was not a woman of the people, so she felt embarrassed tattling in the middle of a supermarket.

‘I'm sorry for not inviting you round,' she told me as we said goodbye. ‘We don't make rissoles anymore, you know, because there's no one to work the mincer.'

And Sonya set off with her burden of groceries and untold woes. Naturally, she forgot about me instantly.

We hadn't seen each again other or had any kind of contact until yesterday, when Sonya phoned me in a terrible state. From her disjointed monologue, I gathered that Sasha had been missing for more than two days. She had already run round our neighbourhood and all the others nearby, rung all the morgues and loony-bins and alerted the militia. And now she was calling me, without really knowing why. Concerning the militia, I thought she was deluding herself about their alertness, but as I listened to her, I blushed bright red in shame.

‘Forgive me, Sonya,' I muttered. ‘I didn't think he had left without saying anything. You reassure the militia and I'll get him back to you soon without fail.'