The Superfluous Man

by Botyakov Anatoly

  “I’ve not said anything about my age, but I understand you very well,” Victor began to read the answer that had already been constructed in his head.

  “Oh, you really do?”

  “Exactly! You are looking at me now with these eyes full of mistrust and simply cannot calmly disclose to me details of your private life. Yes, I am still very young, but it is only what my exterior view tells you. However, the matter is that I am not that person at whom you think you are looking now. Actually, I was never young in this life; I never felt these silly youthful passions because of which a man ceases to control his acts. I never did inconsiderate deeds, which could cause consequences, unprofitable for me. All my life until this very moment, was a consecutive march towards the great, in my estimation, purposes. Therefore, I would like to ask you not to treat me as some naive boy who would listen to details of your private life with widely open eyes so as to later retell this story to as many of his so-called friends as possible. I am not familiar with joy from such actions. That is why, if you still want to deal with me, then I would ask you to tell me about your problem and about what you want me to do in order to have it solved, for there are some restrictions on what I do.”

  “It seems, now I understand what Eduard meant when he recommended you as the best option possible,” Tumenov smiled unhealthy as if he unexpectedly got a good hand in the middle of an important card game. “He told me that you were a person of an extremely extraordinary mind, that when it comes to relationship between people, all the borders are erased for you. I admit, I did not believe him then, but now I am forced to agree, reluctantly though, that perhaps I was mistaken a little.”

  “I am glad that you’ve understood the idea that I’ve tried to get across to you. But do not you mind to get to the point nevertheless?”

  “Of course, I do not mind it…” Tumenov agreed, slowly eating his victorious smile.

  “By the way, do not you find it risky – to invite me directly to your house? I am talking now about a possibility that here I can happen to meet your spouse. At similar combination of circumstances this whole thing would turn meaningless instantly.”

  “It is nonsense! And it definitely should not concern you. I am very well aware about each step that she makes, not to mention that nobody enters in here without having my permission to do so. By the way, what is your name, I failed to hear?” Tumenov asked in the habitual imperious tone, having smoothed his beard, which was abundantly streaked with grey hairs, and adjusted the glasses hanging on his nose.

  “Victor!”

  “And your last name?”

  “I would prefer not to go beyond my first one, if you do not mind,” Victor slightly nodded in response.

  Tumenov defiantly exhaled the air, hissing under the strong pressure, but decided not to insist for some reason. It was quite obvious that such form of unceremonious treatment suited him just fine.

  “As I already told you earlier,” he finally began to get to the point, “I am absolutely indifferent to your achievements in seducing anyone’s wives. Frankly saying, I do not give a damn, I simply could not care less. I told Eduard about it as well. What I need from you is your ability to come into contact with people, so to speak, to tear them up inside, pulling out from them everything that could compromise a person subsequently,” Tumenov suddenly waved a hand. “But even this only as the last resort. Mainly, I need my own faithful spy who could collect the maximum of information in the shortest time, eliminating the unnecessary and leaving only what is really worth paying attention to.”

  “But why, allow me to ask, you do not address to those representatives of this sphere who adhere to more traditional methods? I think it would not be too difficult for you to find for yourself a private detective, the best of the best here, or some skilled photographer with good equipment and clear understanding of the aspects of his work. Shadowing people is not exactly what I am strong in,” Victor estimated his own skills without ceremony, although somewhere inside, somewhere in his chest, he already could clearly sense this burning feeling persuading him to agree right here and right now. And the only thing that prevented him from doing so was his incapacity of defining the accurate reason of emergence of this desire.

  “Photographers will not do for sure. These idlers are absolutely incapable of keeping the mouth shut, and I have no desire to endanger my reputation, even though I insured myself using threats!” Tumenov turned towards a window, having left Victor to his right, keeping under his thumb a heavy, gold pen. “Talking about detectives,” he continued after a short pause, “actually there have been two. Both cadged a lot of money from my hands, and the result all the same was close to zero. Even up to now, I cannot get rid of the idea that I’ve sponsored my own deception.”

  “I have a question if you allow me… If so far you have failed all your attempts to find any proofs that could somehow compromise her, then what exactly forces you to keep suspecting your spouse?” Victor asked his employer, having made the question sound as straightforward as possible.

  “And it is a good question indeed, Victor!” Tumenov placed emphasis on the first syllable of the name, quickly turned in his chair and pointed to the guest with the same gold pen that he was holding all this time. “That’s the whole point for me! We need to approach the subject with an open mind. All these detectives and photographers seek only for facts, proofs, something that would indicate a crime directly. And I need someone who understands the human psychology, someone who understands how a brain of a person starts operating when that person realizes that he or she makes something wrong from any point of view. Someone with romantic mentality if it is what you need to hear.”

  “You consider me romantic?” seemingly, Victor was surprised to hear the word.

  “Yes, and you do not interrupt me, please!” Tumenov instantly waved away from the question with some perceptible irritation. “You have no idea what person she is! Nobody knows her the way I do! We are together for six years already! I could not even imagine before that I would be able to stand at least one woman throughout such long period, but with her everything proved to be different. Perhaps it happened because when she had married me, she was still very young. At that time, it was not something difficult for me to understand what she had on her mind because she was all predictability. I could easily read everything from her countenance; every thought was reflected in her acts as if she were a child. However, year by year, the situation went changing, and soon I could no longer constrain those changes, no matter what I tried to do. Gradually she has become cleverer and cleverer, learned how to suppress the emotions, somehow she has started to scrap out from the depth of her soul a smile when normally she would break into tears. You should see that look with which she stares at me sometimes. I can virtually feel it on myself, on my skin, and when in rare instances I manage to catch her in the act… I wish I could fully explain it, at such moment I do not even have a reason to accuse her of anything. She just keeps looking at me in this way, and we both perfectly understand what that look means, but if I only try to emphasize those emotions, at the same moment she will just throw everything off; just as you would do with a dirty, wet raincoat. And if I do so, the only thing I will achieve will be looking like a fool. It has already been so several times. And now let me ask you one thing, Victor, in your estimation, can a person of my age and with the level of self-esteem I have just quietly watch someone making a fool of him? I will turn fifty next year.”

  “I understand you,” Victor summed up the whole story with a serious look.

  “Yes, she has never given me an obvious reason to doubt her loyalty or fidelity, call it whatever you like. But the thing is that I am far from being a fool and I will definitely not stand such treatment, especially considering everything I’ve done for her.”

  “May I say something?” Victor politely interrupted the owner of the house.

  “Well, try it if you wish,” having exhaled, Tumenov shook his head and granted himself a temporary r
espite after the long and emotional report.

  “You’ve provided me with the very detailed explanation and, above all, with the frank story. It is very important and cannot be overemphasized. Now I would like to give you my view on the situation because, in my opinion, your full awareness of how I see it is very important as well, not to mention that it is vital to understand if I’ve comprehended everything correctly. If as a result, we reach agreement and I undertake the task, then I, most likely, will repeatedly need your assistance. Another question of vital importance lies in the fact that I would not like in any way you to have even the slightest doubts concerning information I am going to provide you with.”

  Having described his intentions in detail, Victor waited until Tumenov indifferently shrugged his shoulders – a gesture in which the worried husband saw an appropriate form for expressing his consent.

  “You know, I’ve been engaged in this activity long enough, during a very significant part of my life, to be a little more precise. I’ve met a great number of different people, I’ve faced a multitude of different situations, but I can assure you that I’ve never heard anything similar to your story before. Your case is truly notable among others; it is dissimilar to any of those that are stored in my memory. Actually, I can imagine your current state very well, for I myself tend to trust people willingly, but at the same time I am never surprised at the next deception,” for a moment, Victor plunged into his thoughts, but was pulled out right there by a sudden phone call, which started drawing attention out of his pocket. “I beg your pardon,” he apologized shortly, got the cell phone and noted that the entering call was marked with a short word ‘Julia’.

  Without thinking twice, he switched off the phone in order to avoid repetitions of the unpleasant situation.

  “Once again, I am sorry for all this,” he got back to his last thought, “if it is possible to be expressed this way, I’ve destroyed really many families. And if I ever met a failure at least in one single case of mine, it was so exclusively at the very beginning and solely because of my extreme inexperience.”

  All the time that Victor used for giving his lucid explanations, Tumenov was showing a certain interest, however it was difficult to determine how sincere it actually was.

  “I have to confess, I’ve come here to refuse flatly, but now things are different, and I would be glad if you allowed me to help you to save your matrimony. I can see that it is a very important question for you, and that a solution of the problem will define all your life.”

  “That’s all?” Tumenov asked quite sharply; seemingly, he was tired of listening to Victor’s conclusions.

  “I think it is,” Victor hastened with the answer.

  “Well, well!” Tumenov was quickly fingering the mahogany table and staring at the same spot as if there was a pile of papers with possible answers, and he was choosing the most correct of them. “I think I could afford to say that I understand your point of view, even though I do not really believe in all this nonsense about unification of souls and meeting of minds, but I definitely can say I understand you, yes. You also seem to have apprehended everything correctly. Yes, I love my wife, I love her the way I can. And most certainly, these bonds of matrimony are of high value for me, but they are not valuable enough to make me meet the lees of life with the same disgusting feeling that I have pleasure of experiencing now. I must put this loathsome thought out of my head irrespective of a way it will happen. And in order to make it happen, I need proofs, weighty and incontestable proofs.”

  “Can I regard it as your consent?”

  “You definitely can!” Tumenov confirmed already absolutely indifferently. “Here our conversation comes to its end. I’ve already lost a whole hour here with you and I cannot afford losing another one. You can start whenever it is convenient for you, even at once if you like. However, you’ve already started as we were able to find out at the beginning of this conversation, have not you?” he stood up from the chair and made his way towards the center of the room, having stopped alongside of Victor who by that moment was also on his feet.

  Without doubts, the discovered difference in their height gave to Tumenov some mysterious content, and he emphasized this distinction without ceremony.

  “You will be able to get all details that you might find interesting from my driver, whose name is Alexander, today I am going to leave him to you.”

  “I would not like to have between us the third person, especially in such delicate business, if you understand what I am talking about,” Victor did not agree.

  “Please, cast aside these countless doubts of yours, my friend. Do you seriously think that I have time to meet you every day personally or to make with you long conversations solely to learn in what cafe my wife stopped to drink coffee before or after her work? I need real facts and it is entirely your task to get them. I am definitely not going to facilitate your job by an excessive expenditure of my personal resources. Angelina Pavlovna!” he cried out suddenly a woman’s name, looking towards the door. “Alexander, quite the opposite, is the best solution for both of us; you may freely tell him everything that you will manage to find out. He’s been serving here for more than a decade and has already proven his loyalty. However, when you learn something really noteworthy, I will certainly meet you personally as soon as possible.”

  At that moment, without knocking, in the room entered that elderly woman who had met Victor on the threshold.

  “What took you so long anyway?” Obviously, Tumenov was indignant with her delay, but the woman did not seem to care much, nor did she answer anything, having shown nothing but proud silence in response to his question. “Ah, all right, all right,” he waved his hand, angrily, “I am leaving now, tell Alexander that he has a day off today. I will take the wheel myself. And this young gentleman,” he pointed out at Victor without looking at him, “is going with you, he will stay here for a while.”

  Having attentively listened to the order, the woman immediately disappeared behind the door, and Victor for his turn hurried to ask the last question, “Does your wife drive a car? Or she has a driver maybe?”

  “No,” Tumenov began indifferently, “I’ve advised her to pick out one several times, even though it would be a woman, if it comes to that, but despite all my efforts she remained adamant. So it makes me think I’ve already done trying. She has her own car but she scarcely uses it. Usually she calls a taxi or a friend of her gives her a ride.”

  “By the name of Anna?” Victor asked with confidence.

  “Yes, so you know this too?” Tumenov answered with surprise, having mistrustfully shaken his head. “Perhaps, your abilities are truly unique. By the way, this Anna is another reason of my mistrust toward my wife. They suddenly became friends approximately one year ago, although before that, as far as I can remember, Mariam had not even used such word as ‘friend’. In fact, this Anna… You should be extremely careful with her, for the maiden will be stopped by nothing to get what she wants. By thirty years of age she has already had three husbands, and now, apparently, is about to marry another naive victim. Now I must ask you out because I have no time to waste anymore,” with these words Tumenov politely but at the same time with notable force directed Victor to the door and quickly went out of the room as well.

  Behind the door, the housekeeper was patiently waiting for an opportunity to fulfill her duties.

  “I am leaving him to you, Angelina Pavlovna, and you, Victor, do not worry about money, it will not be a problem overlong, even though it will be solved without my direct participation.”

  After that Tumenov quickly, virtually running, came downstairs and once he disappeared, the housekeeper and Victor proceeded in the same way. Having left to the yard, they went round the house and soon found themselves in front of a tiny ‘lodge for servants’ as Angelina Pavlovna called it in response to Victor’s question about where they were actually going. However, servants could only inhabit this structure if by servants was understood a single working un
it only. The small, five by five meters, lodge was built of thin boards, which had an indefinite black-grey colour and faithfully kept the secret about the last time when any paint had laid down on them. Thickets of low growing trees and various bushes covered this ugliness with a dense green blanket and were the only applied decision allowing to connect somehow this lodge with the main house, however in the same way could not completely fit into the main idea of setting of the yard either.

  Having approached this garden shed, Victor carefully knocked at the door several times and then entered inside to the creak of the badly oiled hinges. It was very gloomy there, which was not surprising, for the only window was covered by wild-growing bindweeds from the outside. That is why first Victor failed to notice a huge man that was talking by phone, leaning against an old dresser. Nevertheless, once the owner of the lodge saw that he had been finally noticed, he pointed at the phone with his free hand, trying to explain with this gesture that Victor needed to have a little patience. The theme of the conversation and its second participant did not raise any doubts for Victor. With a very strong probability, he could bet that it was Tumenov explaining the situation in his habitual form of an order.

  “Everything is understood, boss, do not worry, I got it,” confirming Victor’s guess, the man began to enthusiastically convince Tumenov of the maximum readiness to start fulfilling his special assignment, but having suddenly recalled that he was not alone, cooled down as if feeling ashamed of something. “Okay, okay,” two more consents, which were reserved this time, marked the end of the conversation and then the man instantly took a giant step towards Victor with an outstretched hand, “Alexander!”

  “Nice to meet you, Alexander, my name is Victor,” the guest could not help getting surprised by the size of his new friend, who had all chances to be even taller than Tumenov was, not to mention his frame.