Happiness is Possible by Oleg Zaionchkovsky

that looked onto the garden. The rain drummed on the tinplate window-ledge; I drummed on the keyboard with my fingers; the words dripped into the text and flowed into the horizontal rivulets of lines. I still devoted the best hours of the day to my beloved prose. Nothing distracted me and my time was only measured out by the muffled chiming of the bells of Vaskovo’s little church. But one day my efforts were interrupted by an unexpected knock at the door. I put on my trousers and went to answer it. My neighbour Vyacheslav was standing on the porch.
    â€˜Howdy!’
    â€˜Howdy!’
    I thought I heard a challenging note in his greeting.
    â€˜Are you going to let me in, or what?’
    â€˜Come in . . . To what do I owe the pleasure?’
    â€˜Nothing special. Lenka didn’t come home last night.’
    â€˜What’s that got to do with me? She’s not here.’
    â€˜I can see that . . .’ Vyacheslav muttered sullenly. ‘But what’s your fly doing open?’
    â€˜Well, I wasn’t actually expecting visitors.’
    Perplexed not so much by the visit itself as by its early timing, I enquired why Vyacheslav wasn’t at work. It turned to be a Saturday.
    â€˜Ah, neighbour, you’ve really hit rock bottom,’ Vyacheslav remarked sternly. ‘Even Mikha can tell Saturday from Friday. You need gingering up a bit.’
    Naturally, Vyacheslav had a bottle under his belt and we sat down in my little kitchen to drink it. I got the impression that, once he had set his mind at rest about me, my neighbour forgot all about his Lenka, because initially our conversation ran along abstract lines. But after the third or fourth shot, Vyacheslav’s thoughts came full circle – not to Lenka, but to myself.
    â€˜What I can’t understand, neighbour, is how come you’re on holiday all summer long. Leave in compensation for a dirty job, is it? Let on where to find work like that, will you? I forge iron and I only get two weeks off in the year.’
    So I had to let on. I told Vyacheslav I was a literary man, a kind of writer. And even though I was out at the
dacha
, I was busy all the time. And so he wouldn’t feel envious, I lied and said that forging words was no easier than forging iron. Naturally, Vyacheslav didn’t believe me.
    â€˜All right, forget it,’ he said. ‘You get by without working, good for you. But how do you get by without a woman, that’s the question. I haven’t seen that little wife of yours around for a long time.’
    I opened my mouth to say something, I don’t remember now exactly what, but that’s not important, because my reply was never uttered.
    â€˜Who’s that you’re talking about?’ a familiar voice asked from the doorway.
    It was Tamara.
    â€˜Speak of the devil . . .’ Vyacheslav muttered. ‘All right then, time I was going.’
    He started pulling himself together and a minute later he had disappeared, taking the unfinished bottle with him. Dumbfounded by Toma’s sudden appearance, I froze, uncertain whether I should approach her. I was expecting immediate castigation for drinking so early in the day, for the disorder in the kitchen and for goodness only knows what else . . . But strangely enough, Toma looked almost as embarrassed as Vyacheslav when he fled.
    â€˜You know what,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘I’d like to have a drink with you too.’
    I couldn’t believe my ears.
    â€˜But he . . . Vyacheslav took the vodka with him.’
    â€˜That’s no problem,’ Toma said with a bashful smile. ‘I’ve got something better than that.’
    She took a bottle of cognac out of her bag.
    Now I wasn’t just dumbfounded, I was absolutely flabbergasted. As I tidied up the dining table, I tried to think what could possibly be the reason for Toma’s unprecedented bonhomie. If she had