Genka is no beauty. He is lanky, skinny, reddish, and with a face affected by smallpox. Also, he is remarkably jovial. It’s fun to be with him. He is always lucky. Everybody likes him, even our dean, Barbara Dubinina, who doesn’t sympathize with the students of French who, she believes, for a number of cultural reasons are unreliable slobs not to be trusted, especially in politics. But she trusted him even the post of a commander of our student construction team. Working with Genka, I noticed that he would never take up the heavier tip of the log. Don't you look for him in dirty work, either. Search him where life is clean and easy. Where students sing a song to the guitar and where port splashes in glasses. Genka has a pleasing baritone and sings in French like Aznavour, no less. And still, despite such an impressive package of assets, he was to Zhenya just a fellow-student, one of many. Almost like others.
In the fall, as per usual, we were sent to pick up potatoes on the collective farm. Genka was appointed deputy of assistant professor Sapozhnikov, head of the group. My gosh, what a big deal! But Genka took his appointment in real earnest. With an air of importance he walked between the potato beds, picking up the missed potatoes. He did this all the more often and with marked assiduity when Sapozhnikov was in sight.I moved along the potato bed, picking up and throwing potatoes into the bucket. In front of me, on a parallel bed some twenty meters away, was Zhenya, doing the same job. From time to time her figure in a blue jacket unbent and she looked at me. It was as if she was asking, why are you dragging behind, boy? I decided to catch up with her. I forced the pace and soon overtook her.
“Salute to heroes of the communist labor!” I greeted her. "Salute to slaves of ancient Rome!” she jokingly replied to my joke.
“You work well, you get white bread!” I said with a German accent, imitating a Nazi officer.
“You are very sweet, comrade fascist.”
No, the Lord has definitely not denied her of sense of humor.
“Aren’t you tired, Zhenya?”
“Who do you take me for? An old lady in need of rest and care?”
“By no means! It’s just that I myself am pretty tired. And you are a damsel, a creature of frail constitution.” (I imagined that she, as “a French girl,” would hail these words of obviously Latin origin.)
“And what is your constitution? Robust?” she inquired.
"Pretty normal," I said and added in Latin "Homo sum."
She thought for a split second and said “Homo res sacra. Jam satis est.” She thought for another moment and added: "Dum vivimus vivamus."
“What does it mean? I don’t know this proverb.”
“It means Let’s live as long as we live. Don’t cut classes in Latin, mon cher ami!”
“What’ is it all about” I heard behind my back. I turned around. Standing behind me was Genka.
“Who’ll pick up potatoes for you? Cicero?”
“Don’t I pick them up?”
“What’s that, then?” Genka held out his hand with two small potatoes in it. “I’ve picked up these two while you talked away. Work properly, you learned chatterbox!”
This tone of Genka’s was too much for me. Is he jealous?
“Easy, easy, Mr. boss. Mind who you’re dealing with!”
“What?!” Genka came close to me. He is almost a head taller than me. But I am “a secret bodybuilder”. I juggle with a 32 kilo kettlebell like a ball. Genka knows this. But obviously, he wishes to put on frills in Zhenya’s presence. He clutches me by the breast of the jacket. See, Zhenya, how brave I am. I grip his forearms. Felling him and tying up in a knot would be the easiest thing in the world for me. At home, by way of a workout, I twist and untwist a steel poker. Zhenya wedges in between us.
“What are you doing, boys! You must be mad! Stop it immediately. I order you!”
I push him away and adjust the jacket collar.
“OK, dear sir Gennady. Just you wait. We’ll sort it out tonight.”
The evening, it seemed, would never come. So, when it did arrive I headed resolutely for the farm hostel where Genka stayed. I opened the door without knocking. Genka and a pair of other students were sitting on the beds, talking.
“Good evening, my good man!” I said. “Let’s walk out for a talk.”
“Talk here,” answered Genka.
“Not a suitable place with witnesses. Let’s go outside and talk like man-to-man.
Genka is silent.
I insist.
“Let’s go out! I shall beat you heftily, but neatly. The beating traces will look quite esthetic.
“Showing off your strength, eh?”
“Showing off what I have. You are a wretched coward. Brave only with girls around. A trashy thing! Can’t respond even to an affront!
“I will,” said Genka. “But later, when we come back home. That’s where we’ll take off a bit of your health.”
“How? With other boys’ help? A pack against a loner? What about one on one? Afraid?
Here I added an epithet which would have honored a Roman orator, and slamming the door shut I left the room.
Now there… Genka’s jealousy was perfectly groundless. As I mentioned before, she was to me like a morning star, an object from another galaxy. Something infinitely distant and unattainable. That star was only for admiration as she rose in the morning over the horizon.
As it happened, I had a new love affair on that farm. After all, I was young, very amorous, and there were no end of pretty girls around me. One of them was Tania. She was small in stature, gray-eyed and very risible. First she poured a mug of water on me from the second story of women’s hostel. She stood in the window opening and, looking at me wiping myself, laughed merrily. And then in the morning, as I was washing myself to the waist at the water tap on the street, she repeated the procedure from behind, pouring cold water from the same mug into my trousers. And she laughed again. What was that? A very special sign of feminine sympathy? I had a closer look at her (which I did not do previously). A nice-looking and cheerful girl from the French department. It seemed, something clicked within me and the “process got under way”. I made her a present of a badge in the form of the Eifel tower on a short chain (a souvenir from French tourists). In the evening at the collective farm club I danced a waltz with her. As I held her by the shoulders I was looking into her eyes, thinking – is she becoming my girlfriend? I’d never had girl friends before. She was actually my first one.
Now, on the field I tried to join her to work in a pair. At the farm mess where we had our meals and where free milk was allowed as much as one could drink, I always asked her if she wanted another glass. She didn’t mind. It seemed to me, yes it did, that she too had some feelings for me.
One evening, as I went out of the hostel, I saw Genka and … Tania walking hand in hand along the village street. I stood rigid like thunderstruck. I couldn’t believe my eyes! I rushed back to the hostel, grabbed a concrete slab, which we used for scrubbing off dirt from our boots in rainy weather, and kept lifting it to utter exhaustion. Coming into the room I collapsed on the bed. Oh Tania! Why did you leave me for Genka? I neither drink nor smoke. I’m strong like a bull. And I've never had girls. I am not a Lovelace or Don Juan. I’m willing to love you tender, love you long, purely and till the end of my days. As for Genka, he will quit you soon. Wait and see. Don’t I know him? Next day, I bought a bottle of vodka at the village store and got dead drunk for the first time in my life.
On return from the farm we learned with surprise that several of our students had been chosen for a lengthy tour of duty to Africa in English- and French-speaking countries. Among the chosen few were Genka and me. In those times any outing from the country was a big affair. The elect of the land had been double-checked and treble-screened. Back then a trip to Africa was almost like a flight to the Moon. Having completed the term, two of my comrades and I flew away to the Sahara, the oven of Africa. We had spent more than a year with a team of geological prospectors, making way to places where no living things lived except snakes and scorpions and where neither white nor black people dared to set their foot.
Genka went to another part of Africa (he’s a lucky dog not by chance). A warm climate (rather to the excess), riotous vegetation, exotic wild life. Monkeys jump in palm trees and a lion's roar is heard at night. Work on the farm. Breeding the elite types of horned cattle. The job duty is monitoring the health of pedigree bulls and pregnant cows plus keeping documents on the subject of animal mating. A bit of a paradise on Earth with fertile soil. Stick a toothpick into the ground and it will grow into a date palm.
Before the departure to Africa, Genka put the question before Zhenya point-blank. I’ve been dancing attendance on you for so long. Let’s marry. We’ll go abroad. This is an opportunity. There’s a chance in it. Zhenya consented. A wedding took place, followed by a honeymoon that lasted two years.
We couldn’t hold out in the Sahara more than a year. We counted each day. Meantime, Genka on the farm, as his contract expired, signed a second one. Why not with good living and a high salary? It’s unwise to miss the opportunity of squeezing as much money from business as possible.
The African climate disagreed with Zhenya. She fell ill and stayed a long time at a Soviet hospital in the capital. Somehow she recovered, but did not go back to the USSR. She did the entire stint fully and completely. Upon return home, Genka “got some new things”. He bought an apartment, furniture, a car, and posh clothes.
I didn’t see much of him after his return, and, truth to tell, did not wish to.
One day I dropped in at a bookshop to look for new dictionaries. In the gift-book department, I encountered Zhenya and Genka. They looked gorgeous. They were wearing costly fur hats. Genka had a luxurious sheepskin coat on, and Zhenya a coat of some fancy animal. They were young and good-looking. Genka had put on some weight and his face didn’t seem so affected by smallpox. We exchanged standard greetings. I didn’t feel like talking to them at any length. It would be that old crap. Where and how you work, how much you make. I work as a teacher in a rural school. This is a job which we, in student days, took as a curse and a nightmare. I've got only a stake at school and a niggardly salary. Hearing their sympathies about how you, an excellent interpreter of the international caliber are vegetating in a wretched village was not what I desired. And then my looks too were ungainly and didn't match theirs. I wore an overcoat which I had been wearing since my first year and a crumpled hat remodeled by Mom from uncle Nikolai's fur collar. I mumbled something by way of adieu and made for the exit. I had to go to the bus station and from there off to my village for "sowing the wise, virtuous and eternal." Turning back, I saw them leave the shop, get into a shining crimson Zhiguli and go.
Time went by. I did my stint as a teacher, served in the army, knocked about Russia's towns and villages with the English, Germans, Italians, Swedes, Japanese… With them, I built chemicals production factories and breweries, grew carrots and black chokeberries (the Italians built a small plant for making juice for children). In the meantime I've been married a couple of times. I knew how Zhenya and Genka were doing only from our mutual friends. They said Genka had sustained a road accident. Mishandled the car at a high speed and crashed into a roadside post. He got off lightly with just a few scratches (his good luck never failed him), but Zhenya had a late miscarriage…
One day I met Zhenya by chance on the streetcar. She had changed very little, if at all. Just as thin and frail. We had a long way to go together. We talked about many things. She had no children and could not have them any more. Gennady is slotted in a well-paid job at a university as an associate professor. Now he is in Paris taking a refresher course. She went to see him there several times. I too sketchily related my doings to her.
In summer, I saw them together. I was traveling on a streetcar. As it stopped when the traffic lights showed red, I looked out the window. Next to the streetcar stood a white Mercedes. On a passenger seat sat Zhenya. Genka was at the steering wheel. He raised his head and our eyes met. He looks assertive and cocky. The green light came on and Genka, winking at me, stepped on the gas.
Time went on and on… It reached me that Genka had embarked upon a flirtation. Had an affair with his girl student. It was so serious they said he had parted with Zhenya for a time. Anything happens…
One day I was hastening towards one of my jobs. Back then I worked for some murky firm of sharps and swindlers, translating tricky contracts by means of which we tried to outsmart our German partners (which they disliked very much). In addition I rendered boring manuals on how to use pressure cookers and juice squeezers. Being with my superiors abroad, I ran their fetch-beer errands. On the street, next to the puppet theater, I encountered Zhenya. We stood for a while, talking.
"How do you get on," I asked her a virtuously meaningless question. "I hear, it didn't work out with Genka for you?"
"Genka is scum," she said. "He's leaving for France with his new flame for permanent residence. Good riddance! He's really sucked the lifeblood out of me…"
"Don't you grieve over him so," I said. "He's not worth your little finger."
"I know, Sergey, but … Life has generally gone wrong." She sighed.
My bus showed up and, taking a hurried leave, I headed for the bus stop. Before entering the saloon, I looked back. Those large and sad hazel eyes of hers were watching me…
A month or so had passed. Lydia Ivanovana, our storekeeper, returned to the office from a hospital. Her desk butts my chair so that she watches my back all day long. Lydia Ivanovna is a plump woman in the retiring age, a former seller in a sausage store. She says she can, if necessary, slice off twenty grams of sausage from a piece using a big knife. When I get bored with watching the monitor, I turn back to her for small talk.
“Sergey,” she addressed me once. “Do you know Zhenya Zhukova from the French department?”
“Very well indeed. Why, Lydia Ivanovna?”
“She was in the same ward with me.”
“Oh, really? This is a small world!”
“We talked a lot with her, Sergey.”
“What about?”
“About life, of course. She was very sick.”
“What was the matter with her?”
“Some African ailment opened up on account of nerves. She remembered the student days often. And how you picked up potatoes. She told about you with warmth.”
“Oh, did she?”
“Yes, she did. So one day she said she wouldn’t utter another word and wouldn’t want anything. She turned round to the wall and was heard no more. I talked to her, but she didn’t reply. I called the nurse. She looked at her and said that Zhenya had stopped breathing.
A lump rose and stuck in my throat.
“You don’t say so Lydia Ivanovna!”
“Yes, Sergey, she died… And what a woman she was! Smart, good-looking.
My head swam and vision blurred.
“IT CAN'T BE TRUE, Lydia Ivanovna!!!
“Also, she told me, Sergey, that she was always fond of you. But you were so unduly bashful…
Hardly realizing what I was doing, I got up from the desk, and made hurriedly for the door, clenching my teeth tightly not to burst into tears…
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