“TALES OF GHOSTS”
about Love and Death from the Land of Mists
a collection of short stories
in the “Playing Another Reality” series
"MASTER of FATES"
12. GOOD NIGHT!
*****CHAPTER 1. Criminal
“Except for the heart, what is there to lose?
On Earth, stronger than earth
there is only a gunshot and love…”
Diana Arbenina
“Do you have Diana Arbenina’s latest CD with ‘the Night Snipers’? ” I asked the salesperson in the underpass shop.
“Is it called ‘SMS’? ” wondered the seller.
“Yes,” I nodded.
“The one just came out?”
“Yes,” I nodded again.
“CD, you mean?”
“Yes, of course.”
“NO!”
I got off the underpass and ran home. It was raining, cold, dark and scary. Usually, I wasn’t afraid to come back even very, very late, usually, but not that day. Bad thoughts stubbornly crept into my head. The road passed through a wasteland: a construction site on the left, a field with sparse trees on the right.
I frantically took out the phone, dialed Max with trembling fingers in order to talk at least to someone along the way.
“The subscriber is temporarily unavailable.”
Heck! My fear got intensified, and I wrote to him, “If something happens, find Mr. Ivanov’s phone number on my table, he’s also looking for Sackman.”
It was Friday evening. I was the last one to leave the office. Max, the owner of the factory, had left before me and didn’t even know yet who Mr. Ivanov was. I left Ivanov’s coordinates on the table. If something had happened to me, no one would have known about it. That Mr. Ivanov had called after 7 p.m. and told me a criminal story, so I unwittingly became an extra witness to Sackman’s black dealings.
I knew that as soon as Max read my message, he would immediately call me back.
Anyhow, it seemed that I was alone for kilometers around. The tinkling of my heels resounded throughout the district. Why was it exactly on that day the Nanny had been put to the hospital, and her daughter, seen neither by me nor by my child, should have picked up my son from school? What if there was a criminal waiting for him outside, and my gullible son went with him?
I turned into an archway. A small black creature that looked like a devil flashed in my eyes, cutting off the road… only a black cat was missing! There was no one on the playground either, schoolchildren usually hang out there, but it was a torrential downpour running along with me.
“Max! Come on, turn on your phone!”
The phone remained silent.
I went to the metal door of the entrance and dialed the code. The intercom habitually squeaked something like “come in” in response, and the door obediently opened, but a typical scene from a detective story was instantly projected onto the internal screen: the main character stepped inside, and the waiting killer hit her on the head with something heavy… a pool of blood and a corpse…
I went to the entrance hall and cautiously came up to the elevators. The stairs, isolated from the flats, were behind me. There were two elevators in the house. I pressed the button, but no one responded.
“Heck! What a day!!! Do I have to climb the ladder that usually has no lights?”
Yes, the elevators were definitely off-work!
“What if they have been turned off by the killer?!”
I inhaled the swampy smell of the entrance and headed for the stairs.
There were no lights, of course. I stepped along the wall and counted the floors. Having reached mine, I groped for the door handle, but I had no time to open it, since it abruptly swung open towards me, and a huge man bumped into me in the doorway.
I screamed wildly and squeezed my eyes shut.
“Good evening, Rita!” came the familiar voice of my neighbor who used to drink beer every evening in a cafe near our house.
“Uff…” I breathed out. “Good… evening!”
I rang my doorbell. No reaction.
“What if Sackman has really stolen my son? Does he have anything to lose?”
I hardly fished out a bunch of keys from my bag and opened the door. Nobody! I automatically turned on the light, flopped down on the floor and clasped my head in my hands.
“Max! Call me!!!”
The phone rang, it was Oksana the writer.
“You don’t read my messages, do you?!” she snapped angrily.
“Sorry… somehow… I didn’t get my hands on it,” I exhaled wearily, trying to figure out where to look for my son.
“Are you a stargazer or what?! URGENTLY check my compatibility with that boy!!! I’ve been waiting since morning! Don’t you understand how important this is?! I’m not the only one in the search on dating sites! There are millions of women, and just a handful of boys! He will be taken away immediately! He’s so cute! And be sure to look whether he has money according to the stars!”
“Okay, tonight…”
In my free time (oh, when did I have it the last time?), I liked to look at the stars and at people through the stars, I practiced astrology. Otherwise, I worked at Max’s factory as General manager, or Director, managing his finances and everything else…
Oksana and I had met quite recently at the cash register in the store. My astrological business card fell out of my wallet, she picked it up and … kept it for herself. Oksana had two grown-up sons, both already with girls, and she was alone. As it turned out, Oksana hadn’t worked all her life, she had been writing something and published at her ‘own’ expense, when she caught men with money, and when she didn’t, she looked for them and simultaneously wrote messages to people like me, and… called again.
“No! Look right now! I’ll stay on the phone! By the way, did you register yourself on dating sites?.. Hey, Rita!.. You don’t want to talk to me, do you?”
“Sorry, I’m… really tired… tomorrow… okay?”
I started pacing the room back and forth.
“Call me, Max! Call me!”
The house phone rang. I rushed to it.
“Mum, hello! Are you already at home?”
“Where are you?” I asked, trying to sound calm.
It turned out that the Nanny had forgotten to take (and therefore to give her daughter) the keys of our flat, so they were waiting at the Nanny’s for my return home.
***
“I am calm, I know traitors in their faces…”
Diana Arbenina
Max called in half an hour. I told him everything I had learned from the virtual Ivanov. Sackman needed money desperately. He had been stealing it from Max as he could. I caught Sackman by the tail, but he eventually slipped out of my hands. Max reported to the police. Sackman started calling and threatening me, the way to put pressure on Max.
“He won’t do anything to you. If he does, I’ll kill him. Tell him so… Good night, Rita!”
I was about to go to bed, when I received another message from the restless Oksana.
“Well! Have you stargazed?”
Damn!.. I opened the astrology program. The boy was much younger than Oksana. Typical gigolo…
“He has no money… All the rest is possible…” I answered and fell into a dream.
***
“And again, I don’t understand,
maybe I’m still dreaming…”
Diana Arbenina
I was lying on my back, and suddenly something made me look towards the open balcony door. Death entered the room through it. In a neon gray cloak with a hood, but without a typical braid on the shoulder. There was no face in the hood.
“Well, shall we go?” in a female voice and not at all senile, Death said with a grin.
I shook my head negatively.
“Get up, come on, let’s go!”
I couldn’t move, as if paralyzed. Death read out the verdict, written on a white piece of paper.
“Either give me a million, or come with me!” Death giggled, summing it up.
“You know I don’t have that amount!”
“Then let’s go!”
Death approached me and held out its invisible hands. I tried to grab Death by the throat and strangle it, but there was no body inside the cloak! Death laughed and appeared from different sides of the bed, and I couldn’t get up.
“Well, I’ll wait for you for a while,” Death said and went to drink tea in the kitchen, turning on the light there for some reason, but soon returned again, and our struggle continued.
I woke up in a cold sweat, and in the kitchen… the light was on! I remembered I had turned it off exactly before going to bed. I looked at the clock, it was five a.m. I got up, went to the kitchen, turned the light off, came back and heard footsteps in the hallway. The door opened. Someone entered the room, stood there, sniffed and plopped down next to me on the bed. I sighed happily and snuggled up to my sleepy child.
***
“I want to give you money…”
Diana Arbenina
Monday morning in the office began with the usual cycle of everything in nature – mountains of documents, rivers of coffee and meetings, flowing one into another.
Max appeared with the head of the security so that I would sign some papers on Sackman. I sighed and signed. Max was the owner. He wouldn’t be called to court. And me…
“Remember,” Max interrupted my thoughts, “all employees are looking at us. They shouldn’t see you in a tortured state. It’s all okay, do you understand me? EVERYTHING IS FINE!”
I nodded my head. Behind the wall, my employees were laughing.
I thought, “How lucky they are! They can’t even imagine that gangster movies on TV sometimes become our reality, they are right here now, not on the screen. One phrase of the virtual Ivanov is worth a movie, ‘Well, look around going out into the street, Sackman is like a bear, you can’t help but notice him!’”
All this time I tried to calculate Sackman’s behavior, based on the scale of his black deeds.
Sackman was hiding and didn’t call anyone except me, even though I tried to explain him that it was necessary to negotiate with Max directly. Sackman knew that they could come to an agreement if he returned the stolen money to Max. Not that much, but even that, apparently, Sackman no longer had. In addition, he also had huge debts to third parties who were looking for him as well, so Ivanov contacted me in order to join our search efforts. And where could Sackman get money from? If I had it, I would have given it to him, just to make him disappear and not threaten me with the kidnapping of my son.
The phone rang, displaying the smiling face of the foxy Oksana.
“I’ll pass you another one right now! Check our compatibility, okay?! Listen, why don’t we go to that restaurant where I had dinner with Peter? They serve sea urchins there! I got their discount ad. Their urchins are very delicious! And there are a lot of men! Rich men! Let’s go, Rita!”
“I’m somehow not up to… sea urchins, really,” I breathed out wearily. “And I can’t really talk to you right now…”
“You never can! I’m talking about men with money! They’re all hanging out there! Don’t you need a man?”
“I wish I had your energy,” I thought. “How many years are you older than me?”
Oh, if I still had money after paying off all Sackman’s debts, I would have given it to Oksana as well to make her calm down and not ask me to stargaze those registered on dating sites every second.
However, Max’s factory was just starting to get on its feet, paying back numerous loans. We all lived in anticipation of a happy tomorrow and worked on bare enthusiasm…
***
“The wingman bites the throat
and twists like a rope around the neck…”
Diana Arbenina
…When I came in office not by my car, Max used to drive me himself or give me his driver. That evening, another super car, Max’s toy, didn’t make the proper impression on me, in his opinion. Max was obviously offended, but all the way he tried to talk exclusively about our happy factory future. And I obediently nodded my head in silence with a thought, “Yes, of course, however, it won’t be you to face the trial on Sackman… if I live to see that day.”
In the city center, I looked into a music shop in the underground passage.
“Do you have the latest CD of Diana Arbenina?”
“‘SMS’? ” the salesgirl asked.
“Yes,” I nodded.
“No, we don’t.”
I didn’t know why I was eager to buy ‘SMS’. I was fussy about music, and I could count the number of music albums at home on my fingers. However, I heard only one song from the disc and… was caught on…
***
“I’m playing for the bullet through…”
Diana Arbenina
I calmed down a little by evening, and at midnight I got a phone call from a crooked number. Hearing a familiar voice, I froze…
“Take your damn papers away, you fool! Don’t interfere where you don’t have to! You’ll get not me, Sackman, but a head in a sack… Do you know whose head?”
“Listen…” I started, but the connection was cut off.
I called Max.
“Calm down, my dear! Whoever threatens you, does nothing! Do you want me to send for you a car with my guard in the morning?”
Max hardly ever traveled with guards, he wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone.
“No, thanks, I’m fine.”
“Then go to bed, we’ll talk tomorrow, okay? Good night!”
I entered my son’s room and sat down on his bed.
“Mum, do you know what I think?”
“What?”
“I have a book in my head, it’s recording everything. And dreams, too: bad dreams into bad ones, and good into good ones. I have mostly bad ones for some reason.”
“Take an eraser and erase the bad ones!” I said, and the son laughed, and I continued, “There is a book in Heaven as well, everything is being written down in it. About everyone who has ever lived and lives now, everything bad and good.”
“Yes, I know,” the son nodded. “And when the soul flies into Heaven, God reads everything, good and bad. And he judges people, and sends the bad ones to Hell to be fried in a frying pan! That’s what the Nanny says.”
“There’s no Hell with frying pans, sunny. Hell seems to be on Earth. If a person is worthy of Heaven, he becomes an angel and no longer returns to Earth. And if a person is not yet kind and light enough, he is to be born again, but as another person.”
“Yes, you said, I remember. And I will have another mother when I am born again,” the son said sadly. “And we’ll never see each other…”
“Why? They say that souls meet, it’s just difficult for them to recognize each other in their new bodies.”
“You will never be born again, mum. God will leave you in Heaven.”
“How do you know that?” I was surprised.
“I don’t know, that’s how I feel,” he said confidently and added, “you won’t be frightening me when you become a ghost, will you?”
“Of course, I won’t be frightening you! Good night!” I said and turned off the light in his room.
*****CHAPTER 2. Workers and Peasants
“My joy! Save my shadow and let me stay alive!”
Diana Arbenina
For how many days had I been living in Excel, compiling a database of materials and nomenclature of 5,000 items almost from scratch? Then I had to put them into 1C, accounting program, with about 15,000 positions, created by the auditors, who had been keeping the accounting of the factory from the beginning of the year. About 5,000 of the 15,000 items were actually in use, the rest were duplicates. Named by the auditors with slight variations for reasons only they knew, the duplicates were logically perceived by 1C as different items. As a result, it became problematic to manage the warehouse accounting and to see the actual stock balance in real time. Six months before, I had already done the same work in Excel, but an employee, who picked up the cleaned database in 1C, turned it into her personal version, and the auditors for some reason added the old littered base to the heap. The items multiplied exponentially. The employee was successfully retired. It became impossible to work.
“Rita, well, who else but you?” Max sang plaintively. “No one understands anything here, except for you! If you don’t save us, we’ll have to close the company!”
For three days I had been putting the clean database in 1C by hand. Then the question of docking it with the garbage appeared. The auditors gave up, ‘we don’t understand anything’. Two days later, I completed the docking and showed Max a printout of the results on thirty-nine horizontal A4 sheets in small print.
“Do you love me?” I asked, not without a sense of dignity.
“I can’t help it! I adore you!” Max answered smiling, which didn’t prevent him the next day from forgetting what a titanic work I had done.
Thus, the implementation of a giant automatic complex, which, by the way, hadn’t yet been introduced by anyone in our country, was just close at hand. The technological program X had to be docked with the accounting 1C. To do this, it was necessary to assign to each item (out of the notorious 5,000) a unique 58-bit code. Each item already had an internal 1C code and an internal X code, and, of course, they were uniquely different, so one overall code was required.
The 58-bit coding system (and 58 characters could encode an elephant and the whole Earth to boot) was developed by a terribly smart system analyst from Germany especially for our factory. The coding was entrusted to the super-constructor, who was sitting in his corner for exactly half a year with a very serious expression on his face. Nobody touched him, because it was bad luck to distract a person in such a matter! However, six months later, the super-constructor silently put his resignation letter on the table. He didn’t leave any documents on the coding principles, except for an Excel printout with the codes he had already fixed. Then a 4-page translation of a German coding document was found, but it was impossible to understand anything concrete from it.
“Rita, just type the codes from the constructor’s printout into Excel for their transfer to 1C and to the X program. And that’s it!!! Who else but you? It’s a very responsible task! One number will go astray, and our factory will be ruined! Don’t you feel like we’re close to the way out?!” Max said happily.
“Out… where? Through the door or the window?” I said gloomily, imagining how I would break my eyes, typing 58 characters for each of the 5,000 items that I had in my database in a different order from the super-constructor printout!
“Come on, come on! There’s only a little bit left…!”
I started retyping the codes of the super-constructor into my Excel database. Curiosity was tearing me apart. Mechanical work, apparently, was not my forte. By about the middle of the day, I began to understand which numbers represented which information, and the surprises followed! The same color appeared encoded with different numbers, materials from different subgroups ended up in the same one; and… my hair was gradually getting up! I called the system analyst in Germany and asked for documentation on the coding principles. The system analyst said in a joyful voice that he had no docs left after transferring them to our super-constructor, and there had been more than seven versions, so he no longer remembered how it all had ended up and which version was correct. The super-constructor didn’t get in touch.
“You need to understand the principles of coding on your own!” Max concluded. “Probably, the super-constructor simply made a mistake in some places!”
The phone reported a message from Oksana.
“Do you have any connections with Canada? Visa needed, urgently! I’m emigrating!!!”
***
“At the level of the sent to the Hell…”
Diana Arbenina
For several days I lived in a printout of 58-bit codes for 5,000 items, which I inherited from a super-constructor. The printout had been apparently made on a scale of 50% of actual size, but I read each code individually. My mind was already cleaning its feathers, preparing to fly off at any appropriate moment. The super-constructor had either lived without a head at all, or had made mistakes on purpose. The second assumption soon became obvious.
“Well, what to do now?” Max asked me.
“Coding all over again,” I replied sullenly. “However, for a start it would be nice to define the ‘rules’.”
“Darling, no one but you!” Max almost burst into tears. “If you do this, I will… I’ll put up a monument in honor of you here!”
The whole day I sat over the principles of coding with a technologist who was sorting out the second failed work of the super-constructor. I spent the next two and a half days in Excel, manually putting down sequences of numbers, and writing down every step on paper. Periodically, I came to a dead end, but workarounds were still found.
For two and a half days after the end of the coding, I wrote the description of my coding system, which subsequently was treated like a holy relict by them. My ‘Bible’ turned out to be two hundred pages long. The programmer checked the codes for uniqueness (non-repeatability) and delivered his verdict, “Hooray! It can be loaded!”
Max sat at the table opposite, composing a letter.
“Rita, help me with the letter!” he called out to me.
“Max, I’ve done it… the coding,” I said quietly, not yet believing my own words. “Tomorrow the accounting program will be docked with the X program, and the auditors will re-do all the transactions, and you will see all the balances in all the warehouses in real time!”
“Rita, come here! What’s the best way to write, ‘We would like to offer you the following terms’, or …”
I took my ‘Bible’ in hands, slowly walked up to Max and hit him on the head with it. Max thought for a moment and…
“Well done!” he said. “You have an amazing capacity! With you I would… I would with you… Together with you I would…” he painfully searched for words, “I would climb Everest together with you! Help me with the letter, please!”
***
“I’m so scared for you,
I see Yuga going crazy…”
Diana Arbenina
In the evening, Tata, a creative person, came to see me. She painted, embroidered, made all sorts of handicrafts, and in general, she was multifaceted. I showed her my works and rare books on beading and embroidery, combined with watercolor painting, which I dug up at the “each for 50” sale.
“Aren’t you out of your mind yet? Well, what factory?!” exclaimed Tata. “You were born to create! And obviously not 58-bit codes! At the same time, for some reason, you refused a bodyguard, but as long as the Sackman’s case is not closed, you are in danger! Hasn’t it occurred to you that the disappearance of such creators from the face of the Earth threatens humanity with the Apocalypse?”
Tata arranged a photo session of me in front of my works, and then of my works in front of me. One of the photos, taken in the hallway, reflected me in the mirrored wardrobe door. Since there were vertical and horizontal decorative strips, running across the mirror (the wardrobe was so intricate), dividing the surface into equal pieces, my reflection in the photo turned out to be ‘in jail’, behind the bars.
“What will they put you in prison for? You are an unmercenary! You can be killed, but not imprisoned! Who wants to feed an extra mouth?”
“Tata, how do you like the latest disc of Diana Arbenina?” I asked my friend at the door.
“… ‘Oh, if you were real, I’d be your friend’? ” Tata hummed.
“Yeah,” I nodded happily.
“I’ve heard this song only. As an announcement. Well, bye. Good night!”
Max called at night. He said that he had stopped by one of our units, and there was complete trash going on.
“What to do, Rita? And who is to blame?”
“Sorry, but not every Rita knows the answers to such rhetorical questions.”
“All right then, good night!” Max sighed and hung up.
As soon as I began to fall asleep, another call came…
“Come to me urgently!!!” Oksana chattered. “I’m all upset here! Yesterday I met that Canadian. Well… that is, he’s not Canadian, he lives in Canada… Well… that is, he lives in Moscow, but he wrote that he was in Canada. And I’ve already stressed everyone to help me with a Canadian visa! Well, you know, and now… imagine! He’s married! And his wife…”
***
“There’s a bullet to death in the forecasts…”
Diana Arbenina
That day I was summoned to the Investigation Department for the Sackman’s case. The streets were full of traffic jams, since it had snowed. I drove exactly two hours, although under normal circumstances I could get there five times faster. The investigator looked at me intently.
“Are you married?” he asked finally.
“Yes,” I lied categorically, not thinking that all the stamps were reflected in our passports, which the investigators used to flip through at least.
“Any children?”
“Seven years, a boy, one,” I answered the truth.
“Would you be able to prove in court that you weren’t in cahoots with your deputy Sackman?”
I was taken aback. The phrase ‘presumption of innocence’ apparently was unfamiliar to the investigator.
“What do you mean?” I wondered.
“Okay, I have no more questions. Wait for the secretary to type the text. Sign it.”
I turned my gaze to the secretary. The horror seized me almost immediately, since she was typing with one (!) finger only, looking at the source text after each word, and she had to retype the whole five sheets of my handwritten application on their letterhead!
“Listen, I’m in a hurry! Can I sign the forms before you will…?” I asked.
“No, you can’t do that,” the secretary interrupted me, reveling in my grief.
I waited a few minutes, periodically squeezing my eyes at her amazing typing speed, finally, I couldn’t stand it.
“Miss, can I type this text instead of you?”
The secretary giggled and agreed happily.
I was hardly driving back to the office, being again blocked by traffic jams, when Max called. I told him about our meaningful conversation with the investigator.
“I’m already one building away from the office!” I exhaled.
“Oh, you can go home already,” Max allowed generously and immediately added, “by the way, what is going on in the office?”
***
“You won’t meet another bird, even a shadow!”
Diana Arbenina
And in the office, I performed part of the accounting functions, part of the analytics, part of the supply (everything related purchases from abroad), part of the production and a bunch of other parts.
“Haven’t you made a report on expenses yet?!” Max was clearly unhappy.
“As of today, on the 8th of the current month, unlike me, the auditors don’t know how much money went out of the account over the previous month! And you asked us to verify our figures…”
Max cursed. In general, he was often dissatisfied with something. “By the way, where is the monument he promised to erect in my honor?”
When I drove up to the house, for the fifth time that day, the restless Oksana called. I couldn’t have answered her before, while talking to the investigator.
“Are you ignoring me?!” she almost screamed. “Sell my jewelry! Urgent need! Didn’t you have an online store? You are the master of all trades, aren’t you? Sell mine, huh? Rita? Help me, after all! I have nothing to eat! That damn goat from Canada is a trickster! Did I tell you that his wife had called me? Anyhow, he was better than the boy I’ve met today at the sea urchins’ cafe! I mean, we’ve tasted the sea urchins. In the cafe I invited you, and you, fool, refused! So, imagine…”
I parked in front of another small shop with music. Going to the window and continuing to listen to Oksana with one ear, I covered the mic with my hand and whispered to the saleswoman, “Do you have the latest disc of Diana Arbenina? It’s called ‘SMS’, just released…”
She shook her head negatively.
***
“And I’m crawling to my flat every evening…”
Diana Arbenina
At home, the Nanny made me incredibly surprised. The art studio, where my child went for drawing and modeling, demanded for the New Year’s Eve party to make an original costume for each kid.
“It should have either screws… or wires… or something like that… mmm…”
“What kind of that?” I pondered incomprehensibly.
The Nanny spread her hands helplessly.
“On Monday, you have to report the idea of the costume,” she added, “and at school… they said that the costume for the New Year’s party, on the contrary, should be purchased from some shop…”
The task was doubled.
“And more,” the Nanny didn’t let up, “we’ve been trying to solve our homework in mathematics and logic, and… I didn’t succeed. I asked my daughter, and she failed too. As well as at the University where she teaches… So, we thought, maybe Mom could!”
The child brought me a textbook.
I was staring at the task stupidly, realizing that it was a matter of principle to solve it, but for some reason the solution didn’t come. There must have been a mistake in the wording…
“Okay, mum, see you tomorrow! Good night!” the child took pity on me and slapped into the bed.
I was already falling asleep when I got another message from Oksana.
“I figured out where to get the money from!!! We need to rob a bank! Think about the best way to do this! Let’s find a not crowded branch away from the cops! Maybe you know someone who works at the bank. We’ll split money in half. Banks rob people! Let them share money with us! They won’t get poorer, will they?!”
*****CHAPTER 3. Friendly
“And there will be funny jokes, like porn…”
Diana Arbenina
Of course, I solved the task on Saturday morning. And I went to a birthday party of my childhood friend Violetta. While my son was courting her one-year-old daughter, we recalled how we had met a hundred years ago in the countryside not far from Nikolina Gora, when I was 13 and she was 12 years old. It was funny to discover, as in “The Irony of Fate” movie, we had the same Czech furniture in the dining rooms and the same kid’s furniture “Ginger” in children’s ones.
Violetta confessed that she had been madly jealous of me as a child, because my grandfather had made me a hut in the garden. My small house could fit two folding chairs and a table, there was also a hinged window and a door with a real lock. My grandfather had put a plastic film between the layers of straw on the walls and on the ceiling, so I could calmly wait the rain out in my hut.
We remembered going to the movies together in the summer, sneaking into the military compound to swim in the lake and go shopping, drifting on her dad’s raft, playing two guitars and singing in two voices. And once (to tell you the truth!), taking advantage of her grandparents’ departure to the city, we entered their house, where a VCR lived in the summer, through a window, and watched porn movies, carefully hidden by her parents.
And then, unfortunately, we grew up. Violetta worked hard, like me, but, unlike me, she made decent money, although she was not a CEO. And I had some sort of white envy towards her, too, and not her only, but only in one fact — I’d got that small house in my childhood, and they’d got mothers.
***
“You are a city…”
Diana Arbenina
Sunday passed in the throes of creativity. Around eleven o’clock, Max called and asked what I was doing. It was difficult to explain that I was skimming the foam off the soup with my right hand and flipping through son’s maths book with my left hand, while listening to the child pronouncing English words assigned to him for Monday.
“Well, nothing special…” I answered simply.
Max listed out what we had to remember to do next week. I thought, “It would be great to write it down somewhere now!” However, all my hands were busy.
After lunch, having launched the washing machine and the child with vacuum cleaner, I ran to the shops. I bought food, handed over two finally dried oil paintings to the framing workshop for making mats and frames, and went in search of a New Year’s costume, desired by school, and materials for a home-made costume, demanded by the art studio, while thinking about symbolic gifts for my employees.
In the shop, I went to the music section.
“Do you happen to have the latest CD of Diana Arbenina?” I asked.
The saleswoman searched for it for about ten minutes.
“It seems… no,” she answered the usual.
The phone rang. I sighed and said, “Yes…”
“Hey! So, have you thought about banks? Do you have anyone? Some acquaintances?”
“No, sorry…”
“No acquaintances or ‘no’, you haven’t thought?” Oksana asked resentfully.
“I have no acquaintances in banks… And… don’t you want to get a job?”
“Me? To work??? Get me a job! At your place. Will you take me? By the way, where do you work?”
“At a factory.”
“What’s?! Factory?!! Your business card says you’re an astrologer, doesn’t it? At the factory of stars, or what?! Okay, sorry, stargazer! But no, thank you! I won’t go to the factory! I need something with arts! However, it’s better to find a man… with a sack of money! Rather, with sacks!!! Imagine, I was at a party in the Central House of Writers today, and an old grandfather started hunting me! Then, I thought, what if he had a flat and no heirs? It wouldn’t hurt to have one more flat, would it? Yes, I opened Peter’s safe once and got money to buy a flat, but not enough! I need three! Three flats, I mean. For each of my sons and for me. I have two sons. And where will the third flat come from? And then my grandchildren will come! Do you know old people with flats and without heirs? It’s not a big deal to make potions!”
“No, I’m sorry,” I shuddered. “Sorry but…”
“Can’t you talk again? It’s weekend!!!”
“I’m just… shopping… I have to…”
…By the evening, I had painted gouache and silver acrylic balls for the Christmas tree, each employee would get a ball with his own name, the name of our factory and the numbers of the New Year. Then I completed a small beaded Christmas tree for the windowsill in the kitchen, finished knitting a vest for myself and made a costume for my son, demanded by the art studio. On New Year’s Eve, my son would come there as a real wizard in a blue cloak with yellow stars and with a magic wand, a painting brush decorated with tinsel, because a brush could turn any object into something else and even create anything from nothing. We strung on a wire chain a bunch of old and already “I don’t know which lock it is for” keys, the keys to Heaven.
The child was delighted.
“Mum, when will you knit me a scarf and finish your butterflies?”
Besides the butterflies (of the twelve, available on the embroidery panel, four remained), an unfinished embroidery of one and a half meters wide and half a meter long, which I had promised myself to finish before the New Year, was still waiting for me…
“Well, good night, Mum!” my son said sympathetically and went to the realm of dreams.
***
“We haven’t met for so long,
Hello!”
Diana Arbenina
Usually, when I felt bad, I withdrew into myself, and my conscience didn’t allow me to cry on someone else’s shoulder, since everyone had their own problems. However, suddenly my old acquaintances showed up themselves.
Sasha and I had worked together. According to rumors, he had already got his own company. He invited me to the Cinema Museum, where some old and little-known films were screened for a select audience. We watched a black-and-white film from the twenties of the last century in French with English subtitles, translated into Russian. A film about love. I liked it, really. Sasha himself was an interesting person. Some months before, he had taken me to a ‘vicious’ place, a basement in the city center, where unknown poets were reciting their poems in clouds of tobacco smoke with a hint of cognac. I remembered walking out of there shocked and mesmerized. There was some magic in it. Perhaps Sasha intuitively sensed what I was interested in, or maybe our interests were the same. At the very least, the secret of family happiness that he had discovered for himself was identical to the one discovered by me.
Max called and asked what I was doing and where.
“Just burning my life,” I joked. “At the Cinema Museum with my good old friend from a previous job.”
“Some kind of bullshit, I think, right?” Max supposed sadly.
I was tempted to ask, “Can’t you offer me something?”, but I said nothing.
After the movie, we went to a cafe, Sasha introduced me to his friends. He was going to take a skydiving course with them, since he loved extreme sports. With amazing enthusiasm, Sasha talked about the details of that process, not even knowing that one of my dreams was to jump with a parachute. Again, as if spellbound, I listened to Sasha. Then he shared a story about a river rafting trip and a trip to India and Nepal, where I had been longing to go for several years.
“Sash, have you heard the latest CD by Diana Arbenina?” I asked as we were saying goodbye.
“No. You?”
“I can’t find it… Well, bye!”
“Good night!”
Sasha kissed me almost on the lips…
From the side, it might seem strange why we were not together. I didn’t know. After all, I couldn’t know everything, could I? Oh, introverts were the culprits of their own loneliness! Anyhow, I could have stopped him, brought him back…
However, I returned home with just a smile on my face, the smile, which for a long time had been cheating on me with someone, and then …
…I got a voice message from Oksana.
“I’m in the graveyard! Are you asleep? I’m making a spell! Estimate my effort! I need to find a grave with my name and the name of the one I want to bewitch, and then to tie a ribbon around both graves! Drive in the pegs! Dig here and there, up and down… Anyway, can I call you? Or dial me yourself! Better yet! Rita! Drop everything and come here!!! Let’s bewitch someone together! And in general! Do you think I’m not scared to walk here alone?!”
***
“Don’t ask me dumb questions…”
Diana Arbenina
The exhibition was open. The largest of the year in our business sector, and, of course, we participated in it. In the morning I got up at six o’clock to cook porridge for my child, take him to school, go to the office for an hour to sign documents, then proceed to the exhibition and stand at the place until the evening, barely managing to communicate with all potential customers.
“Rita, are you there?” someone called out to me.
I turned around and saw a German representative of one of the largest factories in Europe.
“What a surprise!” he whispered, looking me up and down. “You look… tired somehow! Do you want to have dinner together on the weekend?”
“Will I have the weekend, given the fact that no one canceled the exhibition on Saturday?”
The phone rang non-stop, since my employees were used to have me around from morning till night, and, apparently, couldn’t bear so long separation.
In the evenings, I staggered from fatigue due to chronic lack of sleep.
After dismantling the stand, we had dinner with Max, discussing the prospects for exhibition contacts. When we left the restaurant, I probably looked worse than a zombie.
“Sleep well, dear Rita! But don’t go to the starry sky forever, come back in the morning! Good night!” Max said, sending me home by taxi.
***
“There’s a full house in the sky,
but I’m not in a hurry…”
Diana Arbenina
That evening my classmate Alexey came to pick me up, and we went out to dinner. After school, we hadn’t communicated for a long time, and then accidentally (although what was accidental?), we bumped into each other on the Internet. As it turned out, I had been his first love in the first grade.
“If someone had said, when we were finishing school, that you and I, two CEOs, would meet for dinner tonight at a restaurant, I would have hardly believed it!”
“Yes,” Alexey laughed. “Notice that I’m even the co-owner!”
“And how are you outside business?” I asked, referring to his personal life.
“I got divorced for the second time, no more!”
I had known that he would get divorced, the day he had wrote me about his getting married for the second time.
By the nature of his business, Alexey was spinning in the highest circles of politics and show business, but he was an incorrigible romantic. For people like him and me, it was always difficult to find the own other half. Someone else’s – no problem, but not yours…
I could remain silent, and Alexey already knew everything about me by intonations and pauses, by glances and gestures. I even wondered sometimes whether it was worth talking to him out loud.
He made me be fond of Paolo Coelho, unobtrusively presenting “The Alchemist” with underlined, important to me, phrases in the text. When he drove me home by car, he used to turn on the music that suited my mood.
“Do you have Diana Arbenina?”
“You mean ‘SMS’? No, just the previous one…”
Well, okay, that evening I was overwhelmed with a long-forgotten, unusually strange feeling of lightness and calmness, when I felt good just realizing that there were friends in life, always somewhere nearby, just a phone call away.
Oksana called at midnight.
“Why don’t you ever call me? Don’t you care who I’ve bewitched? And today I’ve been at a literary party at Serge’s. And the new Madam of Peter… Have I told you about her? So, she began to assure me that she treated me kindly! What a b…! Can you imagine? I’ve been with Peter for so many years that he must support me for all my life! Well, yes, I… took his money to buy me a flat out of his safe and left him for another man for a year. And why not? Peter didn’t marry me! He didn’t make me even a registration at his place! And he would never have bought me a flat! What does he need money for? One has to share money! Am I wrong, Rita? And so, this new passion of Peter told me like that, ‘Honey, we love you!’ And I replied…”
At that moment, my phone reported a parallel call from Max, and I silently switched the line to him.
“Where are you, Rita?”
“At home.”
“Sackman didn’t call again, did he?”
“Thank God, he’s disappeared!” I exhaled.
“Well, good night then?” Max said these words, smiling, I felt it.
“Have a good night too!” I smiled him back and switched the line to Oksana.
“Anyway, I need to make a reverse spell on her urgently! Do you know how to make reverse spells? Don’t you know??? Come here! We’ll find it on the Internet! And tomorrow, Rita, by the way, I’m going to church! Would you like to join me? My neighbor told me to take communion as soon as possible. God knows, maybe I’m really spelled on! By Peter’s new passion. Or someone else did it, what do you think?”
***
“It won’t get warmer…”
Diana Arbenina
I was leafing through the New Year’s issue of the “Home Hearth” magazine: the ways to decorate your flat and Christmas trees, what delicious to cook on New Year’s Eve, etc. The last page gave an astrological forecast for the year of the Rooster, which, as promised, would have to reward with success those active, agile and hard-working.
“Oh, it’s about me!!! Hooray!!!” I thought joyfully, found the corresponding paragraph with my eyes and read the following…
“A free, carefree and romantic year is fading into the past. What a pity! It gave you so much! You felt at ease, enjoyed communication with children. The year has planted a sense of holiday in your soul, but in October the need to find a job or replace the existing one appeared urgently. If you prefer to leave everything as it is, you will find a big load, tight control and submission. In the second half of the year, a feeling of discomfort will appear also in family life… June and July will be the most difficult months – depression, illness, loneliness …”
I sat down in the chair. On the table in front of me, there were handfuls of multi-colored beads and spools of wire, a basket of thread, patterns for butterflies’ embroidering, an unfinished canvas of a huge picture, about thirty different-sized oil brushes, about ten squirrel brushes for watercolor, three unfinished canvases, seven skeins of yarn and knitting needles.
“Shall I knit a scarf?” I started aloud and silently added, “to hang myself.”
However, the phone shuddered with another message from Oksana.
“I decided to open a magic salon! It will be also a dating club at the same time! I will tell fortune, bewitch and create a bright future! But to catch real money you need to arrange the salon straight on Rublyovka! It requires solid funds for advertising. A sack of money. So where shall we take it? Come to make me a business plan!!!”
I thought to myself, “Everyone’s life around me is bubbling like water in my Sunday soup when boiling! People in their prime years go to the cinema, to theaters, to exhibitions and concerts in the evenings, read packs of smart books, jump with parachutes, go rafting and hiking, do yoga, swim in pools and hang out at dances. And I’m constantly at work from early morning till late night, just changing my location from Excel to 1C and back, and at home I have the same porridge with Sunday soup and compote, washing, ironing, cleaning the flat and first grade tasks from school…”
I hadn’t watched TV for a long time, I got so detached from political events that only that day, from the conversation of my neighbors in the elevator, I found out what a mess was going on in Ukraine, and that the elections in America had already taken place long ago. The only news I could find out myself, getting stuck in the traffic jam on my way to the Investigation Department, was the arrival of winter in our city.
I felt very sad… It was a shame… I was sick and tired of it… I had to change something. Urgently. Cardinally. But what exactly?
The whole life at once?
*****CHAPTER 4. Wolf
“Idiot, who invented, that time heals…”
Diana Arbenina
December 21st is the longest night of the year, and it was also a leap year… My mother died that day, but so long ago that the segment of my life in which she had been still alive already seemed to me a fragment of a previous incarnation, not erased from my memory at the moment of the current one.
As always, I was in a hurry to work, afraid of being late, and as soon as I flew into the office, I heard the familiar phone trill.
“Hi, where are you? How are you?” Max asked.
“Hi, everything is fine, I’m in the office,” I answered quickly, opening the e-mail with a pile of new letters.
“Okay, I’ll be there for dinner. Call me if you need anything.”
In the evening I ran into the store and bought a couple of photo frames, took out my parents’ black-and-white photo album from the last century, pulled out the best ones and put them already framed on the bookshelf.
The son pulled my sleeve.
“Mum, let’s speak English!”
“Okay,” I agreed.
“How to ask about one’s wishes?”
“What do you want?”
He repeated and, assuming my answer, started going through all the words he knew in the English language.
“Nope,” I answered smiling every time.
“Aah, I know what you want!!!” exclaimed the child, nodding at the framed photo. “You want to be with your mum, right?”
My heart clenched, but the ringing phone call brought me back to reality. Oksana… That time she was pondering about the potential of the next portion of men she had been picking up on dating sites for a long time.
“Well, in brief,” she finally came to the summary, “are you my friend or what? On Saturday, I’m waiting for you at the Holy Spring in your Bitza park at one o’clock in the afternoon! Just try not to come! I’m exhausted summoning you! The spirit of Pushkin appears even more often! Swear by your mother that you will come!”
“I swear…” I sighed to end the conversation.
***
“What happened to me?
The fields are plowed ten lives ahead…”
Diana Arbenina
On Friday evening in a beauty salon, I dyed my hair black for the first time, thus deciding to start changing my life for the better.
Suddenly I got a phone call… It was HIM. He asked me what I was doing on Saturday evening. Who was he? Did it really matter? I just felt that it was HIM. I remembered my promise to meet Oksana in the afternoon, but that evening was still free. He told me the place and the time he would be waiting for me. I didn’t ask anything, whether we were going to have dinner or just a walk…
However, Max didn’t call me for a suspiciously long time, that suddenly caused me a strange feeling of the lack of something vital. Was I really so accustomed to his constant calls ‘about nothing’?
Oksana, who had been bombarding me with reminders of our meeting all week, suddenly fell silent as well.
The world seemed to be stopped the night from Friday to Saturday…
…And on Saturday the thermometer froze at minus 25.
I walked to the park and headed for the Holy Spring. The snow creaked underfoot. Hardly anyone walked there in winter, especially in such a frost. And it wasn’t a park at all, but a forest, known for its maniacs.
Hurry, the evening! How long had I been waiting for HIM to appear in my life?! I wondered the way our meeting would end!
I reached the Holy Spring, but Oksana was not there. I glanced at my watch. It was five minutes past one. I took out the phone to call in case she had forgotten about me, when I suddenly felt a sharp blow to my back, and I lost consciousness.
***
“You’re a wolf, I’m a wolf, too…”
Diana Arbenina
I looked at my helpless body, lying in the blood on the snow nearby the Holy Spring, and I couldn’t believe my eyes – I was dead! My God, I had wished in my hearts ‘to change the whole life at once’…
I cried inconsolably into the void, because there was no one around, and even if someone had passed by, he would have hardly heard me!
The sniper had disappeared on skis in the forest, and I rushed back to the entrance, where there were stalls and parked cars. Sackman came out of one of them, and Oksana came out of another. Sackman gave her the money…
***
“You can’t even invent
something like that
on purpose…”
Diana Arbenina
In the evening I came to meet HIM. HE was waiting for me, shifting from foot to foot because of the fierce frost and periodically calling me, but my phone was hopelessly blocked. After an hour, HE went to the waste bin near the cafe, took out two tickets for Diana Arbenina’s concert, tore them up and threw them away.
I hugged HIM and cried from the inability to change anything. So Death happened to me just like that, instantly, at once, at the very moment when I finally felt my own upcoming HAPPINESS!
HE went home…
I threw myself into the snow and lay on my back, with my eyes in the black Sky, completely disoriented…
“What to do next? Where to go? And, in general, how to live then? Where are the promised angels? Demons? Stairs to Heaven? Or, on the contrary, the Non-Existence, in which we are no longer? Where is all that?”
Suddenly someone called out to me. I turned around and saw… Max…
“Why? How?” I whispered in disbelief.
He nodded and held out his ghostly hand to me.
“Me too… yesterday, yes… I just thought… you wanted to listen to Arbenina, didn’t you?”
I took his hand, and we flew away…
2005