And so, she hated her students—just as in childhood she’d hated lumps in her cereal. In essence, they were indeed lumps in the undigestible cereal of existence. And Danaë imagined herself a lump as well—big, flabby, stale. In fact, Danaë loathed the directress Gavriushkina like she loathed fish oil or boiled onions. Yet she tried to act nice. And the more she pretended, the more she loathed—her students, her colleagues, the scantily clad woman standing in front of her in line at the supermarket—yes, that very woman with the cart full of ad-emblazoned frozen dinners.
Sometimes Danaë thought with bitterness:
Danaë Karakleva was forty-seven years old. She knew that there was nothing more to come. It was all over. All the gifts she could have received had already been received. She was simply brought into this remarkable thrift store with the breath of a violated cosmos wafting through it, and they said to her, “Pick something out,” and then they locked her in, in this thrift store where everything had already been picked over. And in this thrift store with the breath of a violated cosmos wafting through it, she had spent forty-seven years.
As regards this existence’s amorous propositions, Danaë Karakleva could say the following: “I was never certain that I loved any of those not numerous men who—each in his own time—shook their fatty deposits over my trembling bosom. If Cupid ever shot at my heart, he must have been shooting blanks.”
This thesis which she had invented herself resembled fact, much more so than the rumors about her inevitable old-maid-hood. Among the large-horned herd of her students, it was commonly said in such cases: “Oh yeah? Suck
She liked looking at the shower of pills, especially the round ones, that resembled squashed pearls. She liked to ride the tram past the hospital and look at the sapphire windows of the operating rooms and imagine the surgeon making a fatal error …
Danaë and her dad lived in a five-story building, erected under Nikita Khrushchev in the time of the artificial, government-approved destruction of the ark of communal living. There were more than enough such buildings in the neighborhood of Perovo, as there were in many of Moscow’s outlying quarters. They were built out of either panels the color of tubercular spit or gray-pink brick. Each of these residential buildings lacked an elevator. Outward attractiveness and interior comfort—all this was also lacking. It might be easier to list what was present in these buildings: the metastases of all varieties of cancer; staircases by which one might climb to the heights of despair, and if one were to descend it would be into pits of madness; guitar chords of underworld ditties oft performed by greenhorns fated to disappear in the sands of Afghanistan or the ravines of Chechnya. Also present in these buildings were walls that had been viciously fooled by promises of becoming supplementary scrolls for God’s commandments …
Every day, Danaë returned to this building, having first stopped at the market or grocery store; she returned with a feeling of a hole, a nagging pain, in the very center of her being …
From the Karaklev family’s kitchen window one could see the subway entrance. In the morning rush hour, before heading out to work in the nearby school, Danaë slowly downed a cup of instant coffee while examining the dark human mass. The mass penetrated the underground, shuffling from one leg to another in penguin fashion. The sleepy faces of those people—especially in the dusk of winter mornings—looked ominously similar to one another, lacking features, something like the heads of nails when viewed face on.
Danaë’s manner of speaking was as bizarre as her vision. Her speech was understood only by the portraits of the classics that hung on the classroom walls, and not even by all of them. She doubted Maxim Gorky, for one. As regards her pupils—they simply whimpered. Or cursed. Some quietly, others with full voice—depending on how much nerve they had. Danaë was kept employed by the school because she seemed rather like an animal that had been listed in the little red book. A wide-faced, warty roe deer, for example.
