“On the other hand, if brilliant Martin can’t put two words together on paper and is tormented by creative futility, it’s a different matter altogether. The premise of our story is destroyed instantly; it has a deeper meaning.”
Wheezing, he hit me, and I struck him back. I saw before me a sheep ready for slaughter, and with every blow I was hammering the sense of life’s imminent end into him. All of a sudden, he gave a sharp start of surprise and threw his head back. I saw a fish that had fled the waters it was meant to inhabit and would end up floating to the surface with its belly torn open. I saw him as he was, weakened and made vulnerable by his own good luck, fed with its gifts to the point of surfeit and decay. His life, which had always ascended to new heights as though following a brilliant railroad track, had reached its apex and was now plummeting downward. I stood there in front of him, tempered and honed by defeat. I was used to it, just as a wolf is used to hunger and cold, and my face showed the coarseness and impenetrability of a pagan god.
“You’ll pay for this!” he threatened, rubbing his broken nose, but it sounded as though he had merely sighed. Something had happened to him that was too serious and too deep to be manifested on the surface as a cry of protest or the convulsive shudders of limbs that refused to obey. I had hit him in his weakest spot, damaging his hermetically sealed protective armor. A cosmic chill, pitilessly indifferent to the reality of any single human “I,” came rushing in through the air vents, filling my roommate’s soul with the understanding that from now on, nothing was certain. God, he implored, could this really mean that I’m one of you guys now?
After that, my roommate kept his mouth shut for a long time. And I got to smoke without leaving the room. As soon as I appeared in the doorway, he would stand up and leave. The devil knows where Tatchuk was spending so much of his time every day, but I heard some students say they had seen him walking alone down Rustaveli, past the stereotypical gray buildings, whose color leaves a sickening aftertaste of electrolytes, copper, rotten eggs, and the thick stench of burning rubber. He was out there alone in an antechamber of hell—not one with the splendor of purifying flames and endless volcanic eruptions, but one that was as cheerless and intolerably ordinary as an old cast-iron tub with a bunch of spiders crawling around inside if it.
With each passing day I felt my own life force becoming stronger as the vitality of my roommate ebbed. His female superiors at
Rumor had it that doubts had been raised among jury members as to whether Tatchuk was, in fact, the author of the novel he had submitted. It was
Next, out of the blue, Tatchuk’s parents refused to continue their generous financial assistance. It was then that the real reasons for his coming to study at our understaffed school in Novoshakhtinsk came to light. His parents had divorced. Both now had other families, and other children too.
The female students’ once limitless admiration of Tatchuk evolved into little more than the ill-concealed fear with which one notices a crazy person on the city streets. He had become timid and unsure of himself, always muttering something incoherent and foolish under his breath.
The name itself, Tatchuk, suddenly appeared no more than a mess of barbaric consonants. As though, lacking any other more suitable phonetic material, God had nailed together a magnificent church using the debris from an old wooden outhouse. How different than my own last name—Bessonov—a name that has been generally acknowledged as that of a future classic.
