No Way Out at the Entrance

“With the girls?”

Max was even frightened, “What, are you m-mocking me? You don’t kn-know my mama! And g-grandma,” he added after twenty seconds. “And a-aunt,” he said as well a minute later.

This might sound funny, but the big guy Max grew up in strictly female surroundings. Papa, once available, did not last longer than the mother-in-law’s first bout of greediness, the aunt’s first spring aggravation, and the first timid attempt to explain to grandmother that a latch is structurally provided in the john.

Max lived in the centre of Moscow, in a seven-storied building, with ceilings so high that in childhood he lured friends into the apartment and proposed to spit to the ceiling. Over the years there turned out only one, not so much a spitting but jumping comrade, and the saliva, with a good mix of chocolate, was still visible about six years later.

The apartment was old, poorly planned, with bricked-up doors leading nowhere, and a huge built-in closet, in which one could spend the night if necessary. True, to do this one had to sort out the mess of hundreds of jars of preserves so ancient that no one resolved to try or lifted a hand to throw them out.

The windows looked out onto the Garden Ring. When cerebral laziness attacked Max (and for some strange reason it always coincided with the need to get something ready), he would sit on the windowsill and watch as the cars crawled along the Ring.

Cars were always crawling along it and it worried small Max whether they could end sometimes. In the middle of the night, woken up by the roar of motorcycles, he would approach a window barefoot and check if there were cars. Convinced that they were still moving and, meaning they did not end, reassured, he would lie down in bed.

The little cafe turned out to be in the courtyard. “The place’s o-out of the way. Am…ambush!” Max stated confidently.

“Why?”

“Simpler to ar…arrange it in a cafe! You have the schnepper?” It turned out that Athanasius did not have his schnepper. Only his clms, and even that was in the knapsack.

“Let’s do this! I’ll drop in and if I don’t appear in sixty seconds, run to save me!” Athanasius said and pushed the door.

When he came out ten minutes later, Max, huffing and puffing, was breaking off an iron rod from the fence. “Why so l-long?”

“They’re right at the entrance. Chatting!” Athanasius, embarrassed, started to justify himself.

Gulia and Nina were sitting at the second table from the door. Max was presented by Athanasius as “my friend Maximilian.” He himself did not know why he blurted out “Maximilian.” When he was nervous, his tongue accomplished unthinkable tricks.

“Athanasius showed us in the window how you broke the fence! It was so amusing! Nina even thought that your turtleneck would burst!” Gulia chirped.

On this remark “the friend Maximilian” sorted out which was which girl, and began to examine Nina unnoticeably. To his amazement, she turned out to be not bad. The horse lover Max would describe the colour of her hair as “rose grey” blond.

Athanasius was also surprised. Yesterday, when Gulia said that Nina was unhappy, he imagined to himself a rather skinny girl, whom they would support under the elbow. The “rose grey” blonde turned out to be rosy, excellently proportioned, but somewhat in the style of “Why did you lose my bow?”

The lost-bow style was manifested in that she batted her eyelashes, pouted her lips, and constantly uttered, “Why did you drag me here? And coffee without cognac here? You just watch, I’ll kick up a fuss. You’ll have to answer for everything!”

She liked the strong Max. Soon she began to throw little bread balls at him, nudged him with an elbow, and repeated, “You have terrible eyes! I’m certain you’re a terrible person!” The “terrible person” listened and was delighted. He reminded Athanasius of a large dog, which no one ever patted, but now suddenly they decided to be nice to.

The cafe was comfortable, with cheerful figures on the walls and the ceiling. An amusing family sat at the first table. The father was chewing with such caricature importance, as if eating up the chocolate cake was doing an enormous favour to the cake, the institution, and to humanity as a whole. The son huddled up to the mother and was an exact copy of her.

“A child looks like the one who loves him,” Athanasius summed it up and began to gauge whether this was so. This was his internal game. He brought forth a thesis, and then chose arguments “for” and “against.”

“Hey!” Gulia hailed him. “You’ve been stirring the tea for ten minutes already! Maybe you’ll stop?”

Athanasius came to. “Don’t pay any attention! I have a fit of contentment!” he explained.

Gulia had a short argument with the waiter that she would guess all the numbers of his student card and they would not have to pay for coffee. “It’s nothing!” Gulia said modestly. “But then I lose things all the time! Here Nina just finds things!”

Athanasius unnoticeably sent two roubles through a hole in his pocket into his boots and proposed to Nina to say where they were. She found them, slightly screwing up her face like a math professor whose multiplication table was being checked.

Max thought for a long time what to ask, then recalled that in school they stole his phys ed form from the locker room, and asked who needed it. The rose-grey blonde smiled coquettishly. Her face was unbelievably flexible and expressive, with dimples. These pits, like shots from mortar, appeared at a new place every time.

“No one. They simply dropped it out the window. But here the little soldier in the crack behind the heater, this is interesting. Do you remember, you cried all night?” It turned out Max remembered. He also began to stutter then, although they had a popular story in the family that the neighbour’s dog frightened him.

Then they went to stroll around the centre. Max, timid at first and holding Nina fearfully like a doorknob in a public sanitary facility, gradually grew bolder and proposed to show her how to break the sentry’s neck correctly so that he would not let out a squeak.

“Look, I’m squeaking! Squeak-squeak-squeak!” Nina immediately gave voice. A happy Max grabbed her by the neck.

Gulia and Athanasius were walking behind, not too close so that the violent pair would not bump into them.

“Why did you say that she’s unhappy? I think she’s cheerful,” asked Athanasius.

“They all abandoned her. Mlada – this is our acquaintance – says that she has an aura of celibacy and can only wash it off with elephant blood!” said Gulia in complete seriousness. She pronounced with awe the name of Beldo’s servant.

“With what blood?”

“You mock in vain. We even went to the zoo, but really, how do you get to an elephant?”

Athanasius mumbled something.

Nina was talking animatedly about something, whereas Max was largely limited to gestures. Not wanting to stutter once more, he substituted words with movements of the head. He had the richest mimicry. He knew how to pucker his forehead in twenty ways. As for his nose – like the tuber of a jolly tractor driver – in general it skilfully conveyed expressions of every kind. It became a harmonica, fidgeted, or merrily breathed heavily and noisily.

At the end of Tverskaya, the hdivers had a charge marker under one of the numerous memorial boards. Athanasius recalled it when fifty steps away Nina suddenly sprained her ankle and Gulia in the same second dashed onto the road. He had noticed earlier that the concept of roadway did not exist for her.

Athanasius caught her a second before she was smeared on the side of a van sweeping past. Cars squealed with their brakes. Max and Nina, having pulled off her shoes, rushed from behind. The traffic cop, this herdsman of cars, with his stomach sticking out, stood in his booth. When they crossed the road, he whistled angrily but did not try to catch them. Pedestrians, even clearly mad, were small game to him.

“Well, and where were you rushing to?” Athanasius asked on the other side of Tverskaya.

Gulia thought for a bit, obviously trying to figure out why. “I forgot to buy napkins… Yes, napkins!” she said uncertainly.

Athanasius was surprised by the speed of reaction of the newborn ele. About five seconds later Gulia was finally convinced that she needed napkins and it was for them that she hardly remained on the sidewalk.

After mending Nina’s heel, they strolled for about another two hours and before parting they started to negotiate another date.

“Let’s meet F-Friday!” said Max.

Nina and Gulia exchanged glances. “We can’t on Friday.”

“Why?”

They did not get a clear answer. The girls hesitated. Nevertheless, Athanasius knew how to sum up from the scraps of answers that on Friday the warlocks were up to something. And it would be in the psychology school at Bolotnaya Square, on the next admission day.

They said goodbye at the subway. Nina offered her cheek to Max and outlined the place with a long nail. “I hope you don’t intend to kiss me? It’s so disgusting!” she prompted.

Max smooched her with athletic honesty, holding her head with his hands. Athanasius waited for some time to see whether Nina’s skull would crunch, but Nina turned out to be durable.

“Well now! Not enough that this terrible person meanly dragged me to a date! He even attacked me!” Nina was outraged, taking out a mirror in order to check the damage inflicted on her face.

While Athanasius was pondering whether he was obligated to kiss Gulia for the reason that Max kissed Nina and whether this would be plagiarism, Gulia got up on tiptoe – the difference in their height was large – and kissed Athanasius on the eyebrow. “Till we meet!”