Monumental Propaganda by Vladímir Voinóvich Page A

all they were pretty civilized.
    The newcomer ate his pies, washing them down with tea. She looked at him and for some reason felt like crying. Once she even bent down under the counter and brushed away a tear.
    Encouraged by the cheap prices, the newcomer took another four pies, this time with jam, and another glass of tea and asked her if she knew anyone who could offer him temporary lodgings around here. And since she had a room in the station residential block, she said she could. Without giving it a second thought, he lugged his suitcase over to her place and they began living together.
    She addressed him formally, using his first name and patronymic— Mark Semyonovich.
    â€œYou’ve got a big head, Mark Semyonovich,” she used to say sometimes, pressing his head against her equally big chest.
    â€œBig and bald,” Mark Semyonovich would elaborate jokingly.
    â€œIt’s good that it’s bald, there’s nowhere for the lice to breed. And if anything does try to live there, it’ll slip off, because you’re as steep around here as . . . well as I don’t know what.” And she would fall silent, unable to find an appropriate comparison.
    She looked after him like a little child. From the time he moved in with her, the shirts he wore were always clean, his socks were darned and his trousers ironed. In less than three months his cheeks had filled out and he was beginning to develop a belly. Mark Semyonovich, once reduced to skin and bone in the prison camp, frequently glanced at his own belly and stroked it respectfully. Everything Antonina did to take care of Shubkin, she did unselfishly, without demanding either love or a visit to the church or a wedding certificate or faithfulness in return. She just looked at him often, happy that he was there and sad because she realized he probably wouldn’t be staying for long.
    Antonina understood that she was no match for her roommate. What she didn’t know was that this suited him very well. He had a match once. She was called Lyalya. She called Mark Semyonovich “Markel” and had no regard for his talent, but she loved glad rags, restaurants, operatic tenors and generally putting on the style. It was impossible to imagine her standing at the stove, darning or even sewing on a button. Fortunately for Shubkin, Lyalya had proved unable to withstand the test of a lengthy separation, concerning which he had been informed by the arrival in the Khanty-Mansiisk taiga of a telegram:
    SORRY STOP IN LOVE SOMEONE ELSE STOP VERY BEST WISHES
STOP FIRM HAND SHAKE STOP LYALYA STOP
    Â 
    And so Antonina’s position was actually far more promising than she could have imagined.
    Having spent many years of his life building socialism in particularly difficult conditions, Mark Semyonovich Shubkin now attempted to make up for lost time. He bought himself a secondhand German typewriter, a Triumph-Adler with a large carriage and several missing letters (the Russian letters had been welded over the German ones, like on like, but the Russian alphabet had more of them). With his own hands, which he admitted were incapable of drawing a straight line, he put together a shaky table without a single straight line in it from badly planed planks and plywood, on which he stood a table lamp constructed to his own design from aluminum wire, with a shade made from the newspaper
Izvestiya,
and under this lamp he spent the greater part of his free time. But he didn’t have very much free time. He worked from morning till late in the children’s home, where he also held rehearsals with the Meyerhold Drama Club (he had chosen that name for the club himself) and classes with the Brigantine Literary Club and edited the wall newspaper “Happy Childhood,” and when he came home, he dashed straight over to his Record valve radio and listened to “the voice of the enemy” as he lit up a High Tide cigarette and immediately, wasting no time,