here’s how I conceived of this story from childhood: I came home from school and found no one at home; I didn’t have a key; they never gave me a key – everyone in the house (and this included Marina’s pestilent dog) was afraid of bandits, informers, thieves, and other marvels – and, thinking that a key, once fallen from Danilo’s or my satchel, would surely, instantaneously be found by someone who would destroy us, kill us, rob us blind, Jaglika and Marina used to make us wait for hours out in front of our building. The other children carried keys knotted onto string, and their mothers put the string around their children’s necks or around their wrists, but most often around their waists. Marina shook her head and said, ‘That can be broken in a heartbeat and then … that’s all she wrote’ – whenever I demanded a key from her and a string to go around my neck or wrist. Her utterance ‘that’s all she wrote’ was unadulterated magic: in the same second I would imagine a whole horde of brutal people who thanks to my key (the broken string) broke into our home, smashing windows, the door, the dressers, beating Marina, Jaglika and Danilo, kicking the dog (I, of course, was spared, and none of these people touched me, and it even seems to me now that one of those imaginary guys gave me a wink, back then). Later I’d imagine how the neighbours would carry out a completely dead Marina, a battered and thrashed Jaglika, and Danilo, with a broken leg. And so out of fear of Marina, and not of these imaginary images, I utterly stopped asking for a key and a string. I waited more times than I could count in front the door; there was one time when it was terribly long, and I didn’t know what to do, and I felt like an entire day had passed without anyone turning up. I walked back and forth, around in a circle, back and forth again, with my hands deep in my pockets. I was trying my hardest to punch through my pockets (I was angry and totally powerless); sometimes I cried, most likely, like a superstitious grownup would do, because of Marina’s ‘that’s all she wrote’, and I rode the lift up and down thinking that one of them, and it would be Jaglika, had already shown up and was now hiding in the dark. She didn’t turn on the light in the apartment, so I couldn’t see her from the street and she was doing that on purpose because I bore a resemblance to my father, and she simply could not abide him, and she was constantly, constantly saying that she knew only one complete idiot on this planet, and she’d cross herself and thank the Lord that he was no longer with us. At that age I didn’t win any prizes for outstanding intelligence; I even looked a bit stupid – and I was, for instance, convinced that there were at least five entrances to our building, but only two actually existed – one off the courtyard and one from the street, but the one through the courtyard was, in addition, seldom unlocked. Such hesitations and similar bagatelles were readily visible on my face. It seemed that I, truly, was not capable of grasping that actually there was just one single entrance, and I kept thinking that someone, Marina perhaps, was definitely upstairs; having used one of the five entrances, and now she didn’t know that I was hunkered down in the lift wiping the snot from my nose on both sleeves. It had already grown dark; I was hesitating about where I should spend the night: the lift or the stairs, just to the left of the entrance. Finally they did come, but it was only after two days. I slept in the lift both nights. And when I ran into Marina’s arms, dirty and snotty, into an embrace in fact, because of that slight, thin electrical current running out of her palms, she pinched my cheek roughly, in the roughest way you could imagine, like a bandit, actually, and she said: ‘Don’t make such a fuss! You weren’t even waiting for an hour.’ Then I started snivelling even more than before, all over the existing smeared and pasty snot on my face: ‘I spent the whole day there and the whole night and then the whole day again and a whole night I slept alone in the lift and nobody, nobody came.’
Marina looked at Jaglika (encoded family glances) and said softly: ‘This child’s never going to stop lying. We’re taking her to the doctor.’
V
The year is 1960-something; summer vacation in the Adriatic town of Poreč: Marina and her new husband (a very tall and insufferably suntanned guy, no great intellect, but, thank God, of very gentle disposition; when these two little things come together, when one giant meets another, although they are terribly at odds, the result obtained with gastronomical, that is, divine, skill, is dullness, a minor dullness or optimism, things that are six of one and half a dozen of another, in an unpleasant dosage) along with Danilo and I, of course; what a group! According to Marina’s amazing plan, after our stay in Poreč we were supposed to make a four-part (there were four of us) hop over to Ljubljana, where Jaglika had moved after the arrival of the new husband; to live with God knows which relatives. The most straightforward exchange on God’s green earth: Jaglika there, and the new fellow here. On the fifth day of the vacation, however, an incident took place that dispersed us in three different directions. The fault for our first (in our new composition) multilateral quarrel (all against all) lay in equal measure with two things: Marina’s fantastic ass and the book Netochka Nezvanova – bound in navy blue linen with the title in gold letters; plus a man’s hand, the one and the other like intervening factors in a large number of visible, invisible, and half-visible important and trifling phenomena. Actually, Marina and her new husband had a predilection for readerly perversions: one of them would read books aloud to the other, in the most varied situations, in varied bodily positions, weather conditions, or various states of mental anguish (it was way better than any of those ridiculous pills or psycho-relaxants). Accordingly, it was in one such circumstance (positioning of the body, weather, time) – the preparation of lunch in the kitchenette of the rented house in Poreč, with Marina’s husband reading the aforementioned Dostoyevsky, when he let his other hand slowly work its way across Marina’s fantastic ass. Her husband with Netochka, bound in blue covers, in his hand, and his other hand in exactly the right spot, as far as literature and the book were concerned, and life, too, Both hands in the right locations; the large oval protruding surfaces beneath the thin fabric of her bathing suit, coupled with Dostoyevsky; Marina, however, was gainfully preoccupied, focused on stirring with a wooden spoon, and holding dishes, which meant that the stove was on – besides the heat of the summer, electric heat – and, to be sure, listening to what her husband was reading, loudly and distinctly: ‘Yes – said B. thoughtfully.’ But no: he will wake up immediately. His madness is stronger than truth, and he will think up some excuse or other, right away. I was already in the kitchen, to which I had come not because of the reading or my mother’s rear end: which was truly the whole event, but because I was terribly hungry, having just woken up a few minutes earlier. ‘Do you think so? – remarked the prince.’ (I was being completely quiet, enraptured with this scene; I hesitated in confusion for only a moment, and with both hands on my mouth: Oh, God, they’ve got a little burlesque thing going on here, how witty of them). The husband, appearing to skip over part of the book (Dostoyevsky, such a bore), continued reading in a raised voice: ‘At last, Karl Fedorovich came running up, out of breath. He was carrying a sign. I tried very hard to hear everything…’ Danilo came in (straight from swimming) and interrupted the magic. At first he was fuming with rage, and in the next moment he said very loudly (it was not screaming quite yet): ‘Whore.’ Marina’s husband shut the book (secret sign) as if to catch a tossed ball (first gesture-reaction) and calmly placed it on the table and just as calmly (if not even more so) exited the kitchen (second reaction-protest). Then Marina (she was always last at everything) started towards Danilo (you could tell by her face, her extended fists, and her gait) with pugilistic intentions. Meanwhile I threw something out there – I’ve forgotten what, but at any rate it was something minor, a word of no consequence, but judging from everything it must’ve been in a nasty voice, for Marina, who had not noticed me at all up to that instant (it only seemed that way) turned around and hissed: ‘It’s always you…You’re at the root of allllll of it!’ Danilo, I presume, thought that all of Marina’s pugilistic fury was going to shift to me, so he boldly, incautiously (doubtlessly) said through clenched teeth: ‘You whore.’ Then Marina’s blow landed, from the side – on his neck, his ear, his temple. Everything was wrong: this whole trick: Marina had a right to her life, to her husband’s hands, to Netochka, and, to be sure, to her own ass. But in the very next moment the two of them were going at it for real, yanking each other’s hair and shoving each other towards the stove (what fiery desires!): I wasn’t needed; but I, apparently, was affected: I dashed out of the kitchen to look for Marina’s husband; I found him down at the beach (getting a tan) and for the next half an hour I tried without any success to convince him that
