The Superfluous Man

by Botyakov Anatoly

  “How could not you understand that they have neither place nor time to meet, apart from this school?”

  “I do not believe in what you are saying!” Victor consciously closed his eyes to the truth.

  “Dan, Dan,” Anna was repeating the name as a mantra, “the first man in whom I have tried to see something more during all these years. So kind, cheerful, open-minded, of the same age with me for the first time. I sincerely believed that I was going to spend the remainder of my life with him, being truly happy. Yes, you are right, I am a silly woman indeed,” she muttered to herself, sobbing and rubbing tears.

  Meanwhile Victor could neither breathe in, nor breathe out. Two different natures, two opposing desires were struggling for the right of holding sway over him, but none of these two could snatch a victory.

  “And you are an idiot, mister ‘I am the cleverest’!” Anna burst out laughing suddenly in a hysterical fit, “Do you truly believe it is the right way to live? Being honest, frank, listening to your heart, trying to hear how beats…” but she failed to finish. “‘Deceive or be deceived’ it is the only law of this life.”

  “Shut up!” Victor growled maliciously, showing more and more resemblances to an animal that he promised to control quite recently.

  “Wait, maybe it is not so very bad idea? Perhaps, my dear Victor, the destiny has brought us together of set purpose? Perhaps it is a gentle hint that it is giving us right now? Maybe we suit one another as nobody else does? Two unfortunate, deceived souls that decided to try their chances once again in spite of being grown wise with experience and met their deserts.”

  “Close your mouth! It is last warning!” Victor threatened her again in a low voice, breathing through the nose furiously.

  “However, if we look at it from another angle, you are no Victor, you are just a loser who brings no good to anyone. She used you and then just threw you out. So why would I pick something like this up? There is no way it is going to happen…”

  “Wait!” Victor suddenly collected himself, “Wait a second that is it! What did she need me for then? This all does not add up, it makes no sense to me. All this just cannot be a lie, I know, I could feel everything as never before. I know it!”

  “Go find a mirror and finally look at yourself! Cannot you see that you are mentally ill?” Anna rose to her feet and made her way towards the door, indignant to a high degree, but then immediately returned and gave Victor a tender kiss on the cheek, which caused his worried look.

  Now both of them seemed absolutely quiet as if they weathered a violent storm which took place inside them.

  “I would love to switch the roles with her, to become one who plays not with body, but with soul. You may deny it as much as you wish, but the truth is that you are created to be betrayed, and your own opinion concerning the fact will always be un-regarded.”

  “Anna, please, wait,” Victor called her with absolutely different emotions, having caught her in the doorway.

  “What do you want, Victor?” she turned round and he saw that now she was her habitual self again as if nothing happened at all, “Do you want to carp at my shoes again or maybe you have decided to accept my unprecedented proposal?”

  “Help me to meet her, please. There is simply no way for me to contact her. She will not answer my calls and I do not have another week to shadow her, either. But I need to see her as soon as possible.”

  “Oh, and what happened? The things at your front are not as smooth as you would like them to be, are they? What a surprise that our couple of masked hypocrites also has problems. And let me ask you one thing, my dear. Why would I help you? Have you already forgotten one very peculiar fact about me? I am the double-faced rattlesnake, darling, a precious commodity for whoever has the money to pay!” Anna derisively pursed her lips, her face looking as a transparent mask ready to crack at any moment.

  “Stop it, please, you cannot stand this state now, and I do not want to see you acting like this, after I saw you real. It is your right to refuse, being the only person whom I can ask about help,” Victor approached her slowly, “but it seems to me that I am not the only person here who wants things to be as clear as possible. If I was wrong, you would not have come here today.”

  “And here you are gravely mistaken. I have changed more men than leather gloves, and this case is far from being an exception. If he does not want to be with me, then he may try to find someone better. However, if he thinks that it is Mari, then he is as mistaken as you are. By the way, have not you thought that maybe I came to you because I liked you?” when Anna finished her obligatory speech, she was already standing outside and waiting a little to say “farewell” with her face averted from Victor. “Tomorrow evening, 7:30, she will come to my place. You can come too and we all will arrange a lovely, friendly confession. Just do not come too early, I have some plans and these plans want me outdoors, I will return towards seven, I need to prepare a small surprise for those two.”

  At the end, Anna’s voice inevitably quavered, she nearly swallowed the last words and quickly went away, having understood that the fact became obvious for both of them. Victor hesitated what to do next, listening to the heels of her shoes going away, then locked the door, went to the kitchen, filled the teapot and began to wait for the next evening, having almost twenty hours to kill. Now it was obvious that his return home was postponed at least to the day after tomorrow. Behind the window, it was drizzling again…

  The rain kept falling the whole evening, the night, and even all the next day almost without ceasing, fouling the trails and rewriting guidelines. Once Victor went out of doors, he was immediately met by a cold wind, forestalling the autumn that was going to show her red-yellow dress very soon. Now, when waiting was behind, Victor, on the contrary, wanted to gain some time before the meeting. He was standing motionless and just looking round for some minutes, then opened a big, black umbrella and slowly went towards a tram stop, walking around broad puddles or doing it without swerving when having no other alternatives. There were just a few people outside, but cars, indifferent to the bad weather, were driving in all directions with invariable fanaticism, waves of dirty water being continually raised by their wheels.

  Victor was walking at a leisurely pace with a weary hang of the head, one of his hands was holding the umbrella, whereas the second one was hidden in a pocket of a short leather jacket, black jeans and shoes of the same colour being two last components of outerwear. The tram stop was nearly empty, not counting a thin, middle-aged woman who soon left, most probably being tired of a fruitless wait. A tram kept Victor waiting within half an hour, so when its metal wheels began to lumber somewhere ahead, the hour that Victor laid in a stock going out of the house had now only one of its halves, and the long outing promised to devour it as well without choking with the bones.

  So it happened… All along the road there were the same faceless houses flashing outside the window, the stops changed one another with the strict frequency; every time the tram spat out one small group of gloomy people and then immediately absorbed another, roaring and hissing as a mythological beast. Over all this, the city was sobbing violently, shedding frequent, large tears, which no longer had room in the side gutters, jammed with garbage a long time ago. Everything around was so dark and doleful that Victor could clearly feel a wish to abandon his life; it seemed logical now to dice with death, to lose purposely, and then to return, having forgotten this boundless melancholy once and for all. When he noticed these thoughts, he came over slightly alarmed, but it was too late, for he had already missed his stop by that moment. Several minutes later, he was walking at a quick pace towards Anna’s house, running a race with the time itself; he constantly glanced at the watch as if it could help, but time just kept being in the lead, leaving not the ghost of a chance for the man to win…

  By that moment when he returned to his stop, his jeans were bespattered with mud and wet almost all the way to his knees, the summer shoes, which suddenly turned out unseasonable, l
ost any distinctive features at all. During his walk the cold wind continually strove to snatch out the big umbrella from his hands, violently tugging it in different directions and every time hitting Victor in the face with heavy raindrops. Soon, meeting anyone in the street became practically impossible. There was no one there besides Victor and ponderous, grey clouds that desperately forced themselves to creep over the city. Having reached the place, Victor accurately closed the umbrella and looked up with his eyes partially closed, too. The rain seemed eternal that evening indeed…

  Even though the time to clear all and everything was ripe half an hour ago, for some reason Victor still could not show determination that had to be shown now, and all his delays, which he had seen casual quite recently, seemed now accurately designed by a mysterious hand. He was in search of any reason capable of helping him to postpone the moment of truth once again, even if he needed to accuse himself of whatever to gain this time. However, all the spare time was already used up, and Victor was one heartbeat away from learning about it in the most terrible way.

  He barely moved forward and then suddenly heard a faintly discernible rumble somewhere high above his head, reaching his ears through the noise of rain. And right behind this unclear sound, a white human body dropped out of a window. The only witness of this horrendous sight only managed to turn away in order to save himself from seeing the moment of impact of the body with the ground, which happened several short seconds later. Without letting out a single death-cry, an unknown person reached the lower point, and Victor flinched with fear because of a dull slap, recoiling in horror from the spot where it happened. He was standing five meters away, his eyes closed tight and the head hung low between his shoulders. He did not want to turn round, did not want to be there, did not want to remember the sound that was cycling in his head now, every time playing over the same scene, which Victor inevitably began to finish, every time brining himself back to the realization that there was a dead body lying on the ground right beside him.

  When he finally mustered up courage or madness and turned round, he saw that it was a young woman. She was lying on the grass facedown, two meters from the house wall, beneath her head a small pool of blood gathered and then instantly disappeared, for there was no place for the red colour in this kingdom of water and mud. It was a dark-haired woman of average height, with beautiful long hair, fairly suntanned, virtually brown-skinned. She wore a beige business suit, one edge of a skirt being distinctly torn and turned inside out, her shoes were scattered two or three meters away from the body.

  At that point Victor turned into a little boy who saw a dead animal for the first time in his life. He was both frightened and excited, he wanted to run away but kept slowly approaching it instead, being a faithful servant of his own curiosity. Somewhere deep inside his mind, he understood that all these signs: this hair, skin colour and clothes referred to one person to whom he was closely related, but the little child was not able to think soberly in critical situations yet. All he could do was staring with his wide eyes and listening to intense heartbeat of his weak heart. When he approached her a little closer, he saw that everything looked even worse than it did from his initial spot: on the uncovered areas of the skin there were severe bruises, apparent even to the naked eye. To all appearances, it was a doing of a strong male; her clothes were all covered with small, frequent cuts from under which thin trickles of blood were oozing. Her death was not painless, and even now, when everything was over, one could easily feel this pain by taking a close look at the victim.

  There was only one small inaccuracy in this duplicate, and Victor cut it fine. The left shin of the woman was decorated with the tattoo in the form of a rose, and the longer he looked at it, the quieter became his breath. It was not Mariam… Here, right before his eyes, feeding the earth with her young blood, Anna was recumbent facedown, her appearance being that very surprise that she had promised to present for the guests. There was no sorrow in Victor’s heart, and he did not even know when and where he had lost it. Something completely unclear was happening in his head now, and there was no one nearby to help him to come to his senses. Nevertheless, a few more seconds of inaction finally put an end to his severe shock; the sight of the dead young woman suddenly ran over the imaginary dam, and Victor averted his face, having begun to cough heavily.

  Only then, he at last collected himself and dashed for the main entrance, but the door was closed. Then he began convulsively knocking at it and crying something in the speakerphone, begging to let him inside. Mariam was the only thing that was in his mind at this moment, for she could easily be in danger, too. As was expected, no one answered his prayers, not to mention that there was no one aware of his hooting at the door. All the while, his cell phone was furiously quivering in his pocket, but he did not feel it until the very last moment. When he nevertheless took it out of the pocket, the call already ended, but there was the name that he longed to see and hear. He quickly dialed her number and began praying for her being safe and sound.

  “Yes!” she answered, worried to the highest degree.

  “Mariam! Are you all right? Where are you?” Victor began to out voice the rain, having closed one ear with his free hand.

  “It is unimportant now, listen to me very carefully,” Mariam interrupted him, “You have to leave immediately, otherwise they will come for you.”

  “Who will come? What are you talking about?”

  “People that work for my husband. It was Alexander there that night, watching us, and now everybody knows everything. They will kill you if you stay at home.”

  “I am not at home,” Victor answered quietly and hastened away from the crime scene.

  “And where are you then? Do you have a place to go?”

  “I am near Anna’s house now, they killed her, Mariam. I saw it.”

  “What did you just say?” Mariam did not believe her ears.

  “She fell through the window right in front of me, but I believe she was already dead by the moment when it happened.”

  “Oh, my God!” Mariam covered her mouth with a hand, judging by her voice that began to die away.

  “I am almost sure that they missed and you were their real target. She dyed her hair and wore the same beige suit you had when I met you for the first time,” Victor quickly maneuvered between buildings, distracting himself by constructing different hypothesis for want of something better.

  “Who are you talking with?” a male voice was suddenly heard.

  “Who is it?” Victor stiffened with astonishment, wondering about the third participator of the conversation no more than a couple of seconds, and then found the answer without her help, her silence being the best confirmation that he was right.

  One instant needed for him to give way to despair, as if a knife buried itself in his back, and its handle was held by the hand of the only person in the world for whom his was ready to sacrifice his life. The cell phone nearly dropped out of his hands when he angrily hit a wall of an innocent building. In the meanwhile, Mariam was quickly saying something, but only senseless scraps of words reached Victor’s ears. When he brought the cell phone to his ear again, she was silent again.

  “So all this is true? It is true that you are with him…” Victor hardly made himself to say it.

  “It is not how it looks. Everything is not so simple!” Mariam began to justify herself, hurting Victor’s heart deeper and deeper with every word she enunciated.

  “And how is it then?” he asked in a feeble voice, sitting at the building’s feet, soaked to the skin.

  “We need to talk in person, and then I will explain everything to you.”

  “You must understand that I will never wish to see you in my life?” Victor muttered, shaking his head in support of these words.

  “I am going to wait for you in the café where we met! Whether you will come or not, I will be there!” Mariam began repeating the same; it might seem that she did not understand what she was saying at all. “I will be waitin
g for you there!”

  “No! You will not…” he answered shortly. “Come to the park behind the music school, there is an old bench there where we will meet.”

  They bid farewell silently, with almost no emotions that seemed inappropriate now as if Victor and Mariam became strangers to each other in a flash. He got to the meeting place in the same way he had done here: by missing his stop and coming back afoot. He did not worry about being shadowed, for there could scarcely be anyone capable of tracking him down, but Mariam was a different matter. She was reckless and intimidated. To the last minute, he was afraid that she would not show up, which would mean just one thing. But she came nevertheless…

  She was slowly walking down an old footpath, dressed in a long, leather raincoat. It already stopped raining by that time, so her umbrella was folded up. Having thoroughly examined her from head to toe, Victor disappointedly averted his face, crossed his fingers before himself, and stared at the park. She approached him silently. Having said no words, she sat down right next to him on the second half of his jacket, which he had put on the wet bench.

  “Are not you cold?” Mariam guardedly touched his shoulder when the silence minute ended.

  Victor looked at her again, but his look was empty and did not linger on her longer than a second.

  “How did we come to all this?” he asked himself, looking somewhere into the distance.

  “I…” Mariam made a vain attempt to say something in a feeble voice.

  “You know,” Victor quickly interrupted her by reason of not being ready to hear the truth from her lips, “I would not say that I am a lucky person. I used to try to convince myself that life might be happy if I just accepted it as it was, if I pushed away all unrealizable goals, forgot all dreams, and reconciled myself to my fate. What nonsense!” he smiled bitterly and buried his face in his hands.

  All the while Mariam kept holding her hand on his shoulder.