Two Cousins of Azov. Andrea Bennett
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Название: Two Cousins of Azov

Автор: Andrea Bennett

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Зарубежный юмор

Серия:

isbn: 9780008159566

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ of his rambling vegetable patch. It would have to be tomorrow, though. Night was falling, dropping with the rain out of the lowering sky.

      Usually, damp weather made Gor feel content. But not today. The drumming on the windows was making him uneasy, making it impossible for him to hear anything else. Still the rabbit lay in the fruit bowl, the cats circling on the floor below, tails raised like shark fins, their eyes disappearing as their faces creased into silent mews of desire. The rabbit would have to go now, he realised. He pulled himself out of the chair and headed for the kitchen, intent on finding some paper to wrap the body. Lightning flashed across the sky as he moved and he counted for the thunder clap: one-Yaroslavl, two-Yaroslavl, three-: a boom shook the apartment block. Only two kilometres away. It was odd to have a thunderstorm in the autumn: there had been no real heat today.

      He gathered up the body and wrapped it in the brown paper, tying up the package with an abundance of string found in a kitchen drawer. He then placed it in the long-empty freezer compartment, so that it was out of the way of the marauding cats, and safe from the effects of decomposition.

      Back in the living room Gor shut the old yellow curtains and pulled out the piano stool. He cracked each knuckle in turn, placed his fingers over the keys, closed his eyes and began a finger race up and down the notes. Today was no day for music – his quarry was the scales: every scale, every key, major, minor, arpeggios, contra-motion, two-three-four octaves. These were sets of notes that could only be one way. They held no surprises, and were beautiful in their perfection. He played until his fingers ached and his heart pounded. He played until he forgot about the rabbit, and the thunder, and the woman with the wobbly cheeks and the lipstick. He even forgot about the mewling kittens in the cabinet. His fingers burned and his hands began to shake as each scale and its every variation was practised, and mastered. He didn’t hear his downstairs neighbour knocking with a broom on his ceiling in disgust: for this was what baby-grand pianos were for.

      He didn’t even hear the phone ringing, trilling on and on as the thunder crashed. Ringing with persistence. Ringing to be heard. Ringing as if somebody was desperate: desperate he should know they were there.

       A Shiver in the Trees

      The steaming tea was placed at his elbow just as before, but this time Vlad had brought a small parcel tucked under his arm. The old man’s teeth chattered with anticipation as he pulled away the brown paper. Within, there lay a nest of honey-brown buns, fragrant with ginger and cloves. They shone in the cold glow of the strip-light.

      ‘Pryaniki!’ Anatoly Borisovich clapped his hands. ‘How I love pryaniki! So very kind of you, Vlad! May I?’ Without waiting he took a bun from the top of the pile and stuffed it into his mouth, lips stretching around the splitting shards of icing. His eyes closed in rapture.

      ‘My landlady makes them,’ said Vlad, unable to look away, revolted and fascinated by the bun-induced ecstasy as pastry crumbs writhed in the old man’s mouth. ‘She bakes every night, for no one. I don’t eat them.’ He patted a hand on his lean stomach and smiled, shrugging. ‘So they’re always going spare.’ Vlad was determined to be business-like this time. They would get to the salient points quickly: this was research, with a purpose; he was a professional, and he needed only facts.

      ‘She takes good care of you?’ the old man grunted, ‘this landlady?’

      Facts, facts, facts. Don’t get distracted, thought Vlad. ‘She washes and irons very well,’ he said. ‘And there is always good food. She’s lovely, really, but I don’t get much privacy. I can’t have my girlfriend round, for example. Anyway—’

      ‘And your family?’

      ‘Family?’

      Anatoly Borisovich’s eyes slid from the second bun, which he was now pushing into his mouth, to Vlad’s grey eyes. ‘Family,’ he repeated with difficulty.

      ‘Oh.’ Vlad shrugged. ‘In the country, forty kilometres or so from here. Mother, sister: I see them on holidays. We’re not close. They’re not like me.’

      ‘No?’

      Vlad perched on the visitor’s chair, heels bouncing against the worn lino of the floor, impatient to start. He ran an eye over his subject. He looked better today: there was less puffiness about his face, his eyes twinkled and the knobbled toes that poked from beneath the bedclothes were pink. It was a turn-around. Maybe having someone to talk to was doing him good? You could never tell with the elderly: that was one reason Vlad found them increasingly fascinating. He hadn’t imagined he would find gerontology interesting: his focus at the start of medical school had been purely the physical – the body, how it worked, how to make it stronger, how it collapsed. But the more he studied, and the more patients he met, the more absorbing he found their thoughts, their backgrounds, the sum of their lives. He hadn’t quite got the gist of how it all worked yet, but he was fascinated by the idea that he could influence those thoughts, to promote a change, and achieve a goal, through stimulation. Facts, facts, facts, thought Vlad, fiddling with his pen.

      ‘They’re farmers. They live on a collective, in the middle of nowhere. We’ve been apart a long time.’

      ‘How’s that?’

      He definitely had a good appetite: a third bun was now disappearing within his cheeks.

      ‘I went to residential school: sport and science. Up in Rostov. I haven’t lived at the farm for ten years or more. I’ve been lucky.’

      ‘Sent away to school? How fascinating! And now you’re going to be a doctor, because you must help your fellow citizens!’

      ‘Well, I suppose … I was going to go for physics, but the girls in the medicine queue were much prettier.’

      Anatoly Borisovich smiled as he chewed, and nodded. Surely the boy was joking?

      ‘But enough about me,’ said Vlad, ‘we’re here to talk about you.’

      The old man was eyeing a fourth iced bun when a loud, low howl resounded in his belly. A steady diet of soft brown boiled things had left his digestion ill-prepared for food that was rich or easily identifiable.

      ‘Drink your tea, Anatoly Borisovich,’ directed Vlad with a smile as the old man clutched at his side and winced. ‘It will help them go down. There is no need to hurry. The pryaniki have no legs, they will not run away.’

      ‘That is good advice, thank you. Are you sure you won’t have one?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘No sweet things for athletes, eh?’

      ‘I’m no longer an athlete.’

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘Injury.’

      ‘Ah, a pity!’ Anatoly Borisovich tried a different tack. ‘If oral delights don’t interest you, what does?’

      A steady green stare captured Vlad’s eyes and all other details of the old man’s face, including the smear of crumbs and the lattice of scars, melted away.

      Vlad coughed. ‘Well, you know: sport, cars, girls. Money.’

      ‘That all СКАЧАТЬ