The next morning Yulia woke up with a hangover and a nasty taste in her mouth. Her head was spinning. Oleg wasn’t next to her. Yulia rose with difficulty and walked into the bathroom. The shower brought her back to earth. She moved into the kitchen and sat down on a stool.
Life was quietly returning to her—the street noise, her neighbor’s scratchy radio, and the sound of the boiling kettle. Yulia drank plain hot water, then she went out on the balcony to clear her head. The casino-ship had turned out its lights and no trace remained of its nocturnal grandeur. Yulia smiled. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a crowd of people below. She took a closer look.
On the asphalt, in an unnatural pose—his hands and legs turned out like a marionette—lay Oleg. Naked. Yulia blinked. Then she mechanically stepped back.
Yulia struggled for breath. She went back inside. Here they were, Oleg’s clothes. Here were his shoes. Here was his briefcase. With trembling hands Yulia unlocked it.
The briefcase was packed with bundles of euros.
Jacob smiled.
THE POINT OF NO RETURN
BY SERGEI SAMSONOV
He acted as though he had received a divine certificate verifying the fact of his brilliance from birth. While the other inhabitants of Literary House on the corner of Dobrolyubova and Rustaveli were plunged in a state of despondency that comes from the sense of a wasted life, my roommate, Tatchuk, lacked even a hint of that overpowering feeling of hopelessness.
Surfacing to earth out of Lucifer’s cowshed, otherwise known as the Moscow subway, on our way back to the dorms, I felt, as always, dejected, stunned by defeat. He seemed, as ever, pampered by good luck, an immutable, victorious smile on his lips. I hated Azerbaijanis, Russians, Moldavians, Jews, Tajiks, Ukrainians, blacks, and all other earthlings, forty thousand of whom passed through the vestibule of Dmitrovskaya station every day (with marble facings the color of a dried blood blister). He seemed to take no notice of the riffraff, cutting right through the crowd as though it were just a hologram image of a human herd.
“What’s with the gloomy face?” he asked as we were coming out of the underground crossing on Butyrsky Street. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“No, but I can tell from just looking at you that you think it is. Honestly, though, you can’t blame me for the fact that you didn’t have a single manuscript in your file! That, my man, is just plain bad luck.”
It was like this: the head of our university was approached by the organizers of a certain literary prize, who had requested a few examples of the more interesting manuscripts that the student body had produced. All of this (reading and submitting the text) had to be done in a matter of hours, because the deadline for novels and stories had almost arrived. They chose Tatchuk, myself, and one other student. They checked our files, but mine was empty. Unlike Tatchuk’s, which was stuffed full of work. So I missed my chance. A month later, I found out that my roommate was a nominee for nationwide fame, and a tidy little sum of money to boot.
The 29-K trolley pulled up to the stop and we squeezed into the coach, filled with scum and lowlifes.
“Cut it out,” he said, hunching up his shoulders squeamishly, shoving away the people crowding into the trolley. “If you want, I can help you get a job at
“What about you?” I said.
