— Due to the abysmal weather conditions, the flight to Tulubaika is delayed. Passengers are asked to be patient and think about something else, something unrelated to Tulubaika, for example, read a book. Please, at least for a moment, distract yourselves already.
Our heroine inhaled the stale airport air and melted into her chair. If it were a proper port, it would have smelt of ship fuel and dead fish, but instead… it smelt of halva and coffa1. Like the original “кофий / кохий”, simply a colloquial transformation of “coffee”, with a bit of a folksy / old-fashioned vibe. · Tulubaikaporia ep.4 from the quasi-café nearby.
Can’t imagine how people can read for hours, she thought. During that time, so many thoughts accumulate in my head that they simply start tumbling out of my ear canals, perch on them and — *whoosh!* — slide down as if from a hill, and they fly, fly, fly one after another, perch, slide, fly in an avalanche flow, like a crowd rushing for the festive shopping, stick together, fly, fly, fly, stick together and continue to fly and stick together, layering like a snowball, until you just furrow your brow and put the book aside. You just need to distract yourself, but not so much as to change context, do something else or clear your head, no, not like that at all — you need to distract yourself from the very act of reading because thoughts become too many and continue to become only more until you process them like that washed laundry that lies on the chair and waits for someone to fold it, but at some point it starts falling from the chair, and that’s when you realise — it’s time. The residents of the modest abode shrug and go to fold it, what else can they do? The very act of reading rather pulls you into some spiral whirlpool than helps you relax. Few things help to relax at all, and reading certainly isn’t one of them. It’s a kind of work that brings pleasure, but pleasure not in following the plot and unravelling its tangles and tangles of characters’ lives, but the kind you get from intently observing nature, the sea, a crowded street, scenes of carnal love, scenes of platonic love, stars, birdsong, tits drunk on fermented frozen rowan berries and singing their avian chanson2. Unlike its French namesake, Russian “chanson” (шансон) originated in criminal subculture and prison camps before evolving into a mainstream genre. It’s characterised by gritty vocals, melancholic lyrics, and themes of crime, imprisonment, lost love, and regrets. Now only people in their fifties and older listen to it unironically. Post-ironic or meta-ironic listening is acceptable though.. There you sit, eyes agog, ears laid bare, a wondrous feast for the sight — lo and behold, by my troth, what magnificent splendour! Each word, phrase, sentence, plot twist seems to program you for something, and you feel yourself becoming programmed. They, these units of text, units of the author’s thought, awaken in you your own uncountable thoughts, which gradually emerge from darkness, from being extras they become main characters and occupy all attention, sit on sleds and slide down the slopes of ear canals, fly, fly, fly, squinting, until silence settles in your head.
— Come on, let’s go walk around duty-free, my sun, — said our heroine’s husband, her hero.
No one has yet described our sun exactly like that — using our heroine as a metaphor for it — although it, the sun, has existed for billions of years, it was, is, and will be, described over all this time in all imaginable ways. It doesn’t even realise that once it didn’t exist and someday it won’t exist, because it exists for too long to be aware of such things, too long for such things to matter, just as those who exist too briefly don’t realise these things either — they simply don’t have time for realising anything whatsoever. There are some butterflies, their lifespan — one day or so. There are some insects that live only for a couple of hours. They don’t have time to languish in an airport and think about the eternal or read long and lingering, full-of-digressions books. Their eternity is of a completely different size.
— My arse is going numb now… — he added, fidgeting on the chair. — A new café opened here. Right there behind us. They serve waffles with black sesame cream, with black sesame ice cream, sprinkled with roasted sesame oil, probably white. Apparently the coffa comes out very tasty with sesame and cream, they say.
— Too fat, isn’t it?
— And sweet. They pour honey in there in litres.
— I don’t like sweet things, I like tasty things. When I feel completely bleh, I just want something tasty, I don’t even want to eat, I just need something tasty.
— That’s reasonable. Fat in food is precisely what’s tasty. That’s why sesame paste. Shall we go?
He didn’t even realise that they were flying to the funeral of our heroine’s grandmother — she didn’t tell him, it wasn’t necessary for him to know about it yet. Well, necessary, of course, but she just couldn’t structure the conversation in such a way as to tell him about it. Everyone — both he and, in his mind, her relatives — had already prepared for meeting each other, prepared gifts, rehearsed speeches and poems, dressed up and so on and so forth, and to introduce a suddenly deceased grandmother into that mix would mean destroying the blooming and fragrant idyll.
— Finally, you’ll see my native Tulubaika.
— I can’t wait, when?
— Very soon. You’ll like it. But there’s one nuance.
— What’s that? Is it too cold there? We didn’t bring along our parkas?
— No, not that at all. It’s cold there, of course, but not too much, we’ll manage without parkas. Things have changed. You see, my grandmother died, there in Tulubaika, so now we’re not going to celebrate your acquaintance with my roots, walk around the village, enjoy the ancient, almost untouched landscapes, but to a memorial service, not even a funeral, can you imagine? She was Tatar, so she was buried the same day. That happens.
It’s nonsense, isn’t it? What kind of dialogue is that? What could be more absurd? Of course, the fact that only upon arriving there, he’ll learn that he’s, all of a sudden, also coming to a memorial service.
— Surprise, darling.
— What kind of surprise, my sun?
— A memorial service! Ta-da!
Her own cynicism was twisting her up. Or maybe it wasn’t just cynicism but something else that simultaneously hindered and saved her from taking anything (too) seriously. Sometimes it happens like this: you perceive something unwittingly, hope for the best, but alas — the perceptron malfunctions. I’ll tell him later, she thought, I love consolation, especially his consolations, they would definitely help me, but not right away, for right away I wouldn’t digest them, I haven’t yet decided how I feel about it myself.
— You go, — she said to him, — and I’ll go to the bookshop. The chort3. A mischievous humanoid demon or minor devil in Slavic folklore. Unlike the sly one, the chort is more of a trickster than the embodiment of ultimate evil. He can cause household mishaps, lead travellers astray, or tempt humans into foolish decisions. When Russians exclaim “K chortu!” (To the devil!), they’re invoking this folkloric spirit rather than the big sly one. The chort therefore occupies a supernatural space between serious theological threat and annoying supernatural pest. See also: A Conversation Between A Drunken Man And A Sober Chort, by Chekhov and How Khorya and Borya Trafficked a Chort. · Tulubaikaporia ep.1 knows how much longer we’ll be waiting… Maybe I’ll buy something in the local tongue. As a keepsake.
Reading is sadomasochism for many reasons, starting, for example, with disconnection from reality, complete and irreversible immersion, away from the physical world filled with other people, into your own world where among people, apart from yourself and the author, there is no one, causing inner loneliness to become embarrassed, its cheeks to redden and it to go far away, so as not to see the two of you, you and the author, anymore. You upset it, this puritanical loneliness, with your loose behaviour, because how can one be so obsessed as to let another person into one’s temple, that is, into one’s brain, be it a man or a woman or even a thinking rock and its artificial intelligence. It’s less indecent, by the way, when you read something composed by a thinking rock, because there is no metaphysical connection of minds, but only the connection of one mind with emptiness or the thickness of emptiness that arose through the connection of many minds — the collective mind, anima mundi. It’s like hearing voices in a cemetery, which all at once, all without exception, begin to talk to you through a narrow bottleneck. Boo! Here you are walking through a cemetery and thinking, who are all these people, and why should I listen to them? They’re dead, but they all talk and talk, and then sing and dance, like in Indian films or musicals, not all, of course, but some of them, those whose voices haven’t faded, not because they shouted too loudly (although there are such ones), but because they broadcasted on their frequency, which no one has yet occupied, where there’s less noise, and neither dictators with their thought police prohibiting communication on generally accepted frequencies nor all sorts of tech bros with their social media can reach.
— Good afternoon. Hello. Is there anything to read?
— Of course. You’ve come to the right place — a bookshop. There’s plenty to read here. Can I help you with something?
The old man behind the cash register resembled a silver-haired Chekhov, even had pince-nez that had flown in from somewhere and settled on his nose (he couldn’t be her Chekhov, for her Chekhov died young) — a wonderful old man, in a word, the kind you don’t usually encounter in life, only in Miyazaki’s films or accidentally in an airport, when life stops “being” and plops into “non-being”, like a barely-seeing kitten into a bowl of milk. Chekhov, if our heroine remembered correctly, was her first hero. She generally considered that the true archetype of a man is not a sword, but a lantern, and when Chekhov said “Ich sterbe” and reached for his champagne, she was illuminated and understood everything about this life and men. Such was she, our heroine, perceptive from an early age.
— I’m thinking and I can’t decide between reading news on the internet, looking at the departure board, keeping track of how much longer my flight will be delayed, and reading a long and lingering, full-of-digressions book to distract myself, do you know what I mean?
— I understand — you need a book.
— I can’t wait any longer, do you know what I mean? Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my whole life waiting in this airport. Or rather, not like that, but like this: right now, at this moment, it seems to me that I’ve been waiting precisely for it, this moment, and I don’t seem to remember life before it. It’s like good literature — not about what it seems to be about. All these three hundred pages that I’ve already read had actually no meaning at all, it was just the author amusing herself and entertaining us. She needed to invent these three hundred pages to somehow justify the existence of this single sentence that came to her mind when, perhaps (or perhaps not), she was feeding ducks in a park, riding the Tube, talking with a friend, listening to an absolutely shameless presentation at work in absolutely shameless corporate jargon. Do you know what I mean?
— There’s some irony in this.
— You think so?
— I’m a bookseller in an airport, miss.
— Ah, yes, I had already forgotten. I need something painful. When I read, I feel physical pain. But it’s not painful, rather pleasant. That kind of pain. I can’t read if it’s not painful in any sense. Finding joy in suffering? Basking in melancholy? I need to feel how connections are forming in my brain, if there is, of course, anything to form connections with. Like ants building an anthill — I don’t even know what it’s built from but I feel I don’t have enough of that to build mine.
— You know, I have no intention whatsoever to be rude, but this anthropocentrism is getting on my nerves, miss. I’ve seen so many people — a bookshop in an airport is bonkers — that it really seems to me that it’s not ants that live like people, but people that live like ants. Ants were there first, after all.
— You think so?
— You know, scientists recently managed to create a complete map of the brain of an ordinary fly, the one that sits on shite. They were able to find out which neurons are responsible for what when it smells the shite.
— Wonders…
— Indeed. Now when you talk about the formation of neural connections in your head, do you feel exactly where they are forming? Yogis say you only need to concentrate to understand this, and then everything will become clear. But overall I agree with you. So many people come to me, so many people… it’s like a revolving door here, miss. No book surprises me anymore. And allowing yourself to be programmed — sadomasochism.
— That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Isn’t it so lovely? Isn’t there so much joy in it? How well you understand me… But my husband is waiting for me. He understands me even better. Sometimes even without words. In such moments, when we understand each other without words and cackle like mad at how absurd everything actually is, I wonder whether all this reading is such nonsense, and these books — such drebbeden4. “Drebbeden” (дребедень) in Russian is used to denote nonsensical trivialities. The translator took courage to directly introduce the word into English. Drebbeden means something in between “drivel”, “rigmarole”, and “balderdash”. The word has phonetic kinship with English “debris” and “drab”, plus semantic overlap with “codswallop”, and, we can say, preserves the onomatopoeic qualities of its dismissive sounds like that of the Russian original. · Tulubaikaporia ep.4. He, by the way, loves everything with sesame. Sesame for him is like a drug. Halva, sesame oil, sesame brittle — all those things. What do you think, who reads more, men or women?
— I can’t know, but I believe that men should read only women, and women only men — that’s when harmony will come to the world. I’ve been doing so all my life. I read only women.
— Amazing. And I read everyone. Indiscriminately. When I see a foreign name, I don’t always know or care if it’s a man or a woman or both or none.
— What haven’t you seen in women’s novels, and what haven’t I seen in men’s? It’s like living in a changing room — swinging genitalia of your own kind all around. By the way, have you chosen something yet?
— No, my eyes keep sliding over the covers, over the titles, but they can’t catch onto anything.
— You won’t believe it, but I worked in a hospice once, in the library, and I was engaged there in recommending terminally ill people their last book. Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing the same thing now.
— What are you hinting at?
And indeed, everything here is somewhat half-dead. People, being here, seem to live a few lives, like butterflies. You live in the cocoon of the airport for several hours, then suddenly discover in yourself a talent for flying, fly, fly, fly, and find yourself on the other side of the world. And so, this new life ends as soon as you step from the gangway onto the earth. Butterflies, by the way, don’t emerge from caterpillars, or rather, caterpillars don’t turn into butterflies. Caterpillars are actually building material, food for the future butterfly. The caterpillar dies — the butterfly is born. No inspiring transformation, just the death of one for the sake of another.
— Maybe you’re right, — our heroine said quietly to the old man, almost whispering.
— I would ask you to be a bit more precise. In my life, I’ve been right about many things, and I’ve been wrong about much more.
— About this damned anthropocentrism. Someone crawls and fights like an ant, someone doesn’t fly like a dragonfly, someone lives like a butterfly, and someone thinks like a rock with a brain of a fly that has sat on shite and smelled, smelled, smelled, smelled. And only now, after all these years, we are beginning to understand this…
— Here, — said the old man, — I reckon this book will suit you.
And he took out from under the counter a volume of a thousand and one pages, soft cover, and handed it to our heroine. She showed her boarding pass, paid, thanked the non-Chekhov, went back to the waiting area, to wait.
People around were either arriving or departing — two modes of being (a revolving door). In order not to be distracted by their presence or absence, our heroine sat facing a huge window overlooking the runways, where, accompanied by rain, colourful little planes were either arriving or departing, butterflyly. She looked at them, without opening the book, because she had changed her mind about reading. The flight is eight hours, I’ll read on the plane, she decided and sat watching the figures of little planes manoeuvring around, as if she were only a couple of months old, lying in a cradle, and someone was playing with her. Though, sometimes, when a particularly sombre predicament occurs, 8 topples sideways and becomes ∞, for in such moments, the waiting time is often prone to certain dilations.
— We regret to inform you, — a speaker yelled right above her ear, — that the flight to Tulubaika is still delayed and will most likely continue to be delayed. But don’t grieve and don’t mope! This is normal, because along this route something is constantly delayed. Just wanted to remind you, good luck, and have a nice day!
— Well, fuck… — whispered our heroine.
Here, right in front of her, a hand extended a paper cup with a latte.
— Sleeping? — asked her hero.
— Nope. How’s the sesame?
— Sesamely.
Our heroine tried to smile and took a sip of coffa.
— Tired?
She nodded, swaying with her whole body, as if she didn’t have enough strength to nod with just her head.
— Sleep.
— I’ll sleep on the plane.
His coffa smelled of halva, as if he was drinking liquid halva — la dolce vita, as the Italians say, though in Turkish it’s tatlı hayat. Everyone’s life is somehow sweet, both Italians and Turks, so sweet that even flies stick to it — fly, fly, fly as if to jam — but in Tulubaika it’s not sweet, and has never been sweet, yet flies still fly and stick. Why such injustice? In Italy, Spain, Greece and other Mediterranean destinations for permanent and temporary life, it’s always sweet. You arrive, enjoy, fly away, or maybe stay for longer, but from Tulubaika you only want to fly away, yet you still fly back there. Such a marvel, isn’t it? You walk along these semblances of half-empty streets, collect all the puddles, all the shite of stray dogs (“Should have worn black boots, not white…”), listen to Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 8, allegro molto, breakcore rendition, and don’t understand whether you’re in the proverbial “home”, which you can never wash off your boot and for some reason, after all these years, continue to call it so. Or whether you’re on the set of a Tarkovsky film, and right in front of you in the field, a gathering of local men is about to start burning the village’s last remaining cow5. A reference to a notorious scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1966 film “Andrei Rublev” where a real living cow appeared engulfed in real flames during a Tatar raid. Though Soviet censors objected to the scene’s brutality, Tarkovsky insisted no animals were harmed — the cow wore an asbestos coat., and the gossip-mongering old women will sing along something folksy, or maybe simply read Dostoevsky aloud, as you did in the sixth grade. The cow will moo in despair, howl echoingly, suffer from fire in hellish agonies, for the men, and the old women too, need to listen to it, the cow, listen to how it sings. Such a sound can’t be found anywhere else. Afterwards, it can be put on the radio for everyone to enjoy. Russian misery porn, in a word6. From the original Chernukha (Чернуха), literally “black-stuff” in Russian, a term for the grim naturalistic aesthetic that emerged during perestroika (1980s) as a reaction against enforced Soviet optimism. This literary and cinematic movement focused on depicting societal decay, violence, sexuality, and moral collapse without offering solutions or judgments. Its roots go back to Dostoevsky’s portrayal of urban decay, crime, and psychological torment. In “chernukha”, every character suffers their own suffering or they all suffer the Eastern European form of collective suffering to the point of it becoming an aesthetic (misery porn), be it literature or film, as if it’s a national self-humiliation contest. The question is whether such depiction is exaggerated sensationalism or is indeed just “naturalism” and “realism”, an authentic documentation of social collapse or its artistic exploitation. Having some lived experience in those parts, one might say: ¿por qué no los dos?.
— “The blow landed right on the crown of her head, facilitated by her small stature”, — read our heroine in a voice trembling from an unclear emotion. — “She cried out, but very weakly, and suddenly sank completely to the floor, although she still managed to raise both hands to her head. In one hand she still continued to hold the “pledge”. Here he struck with all his might once and again, all with the blunt side and all on the crown. Blood gushed, as from an overturned glass, and the body fell backwards. He stepped back, let her fall and immediately bent down to her face; she was already dead. Her eyes were bulging, as if they wanted to jump out, and her forehead and entire face were wrinkled and distorted by a spasm.”
— Thank you, our heroine. You may sit down, — said Tamara Alexeyevna to her, a teacher with a very soft, almost cosy appearance, but a very firm character, not at all cosy, tempered by eternities in Russian schools.
Our heroine bowed, closing her eyes. The class applauded her. She read naturally, with expression, very literarily, literariestly, but she didn’t want to see this applause. She was already perfectly aware of her literary ability and the magic of her voice trembling from an unclear emotion — another routine reminder of this was not digestible. She would have covered her ears too, but that would have been completely improper. Ah, if Fyodor Mikhailovich had lived in Tulubaika, thought our heroine, he would have written something even more intense, he would have written something that would have made the whole world turn black upon reading. And so they wouldn’t worship him in the West, but fear him, but would still read him, for he is a great Russian writer, and the Russian soul is mysterious, and everyone loves mysteries, simply adores them, but they would be afraid to discuss him, not from fear and horror (sadomasochistic pleasure can’t be eliminated) but because such things are not discussed in polite society. Thus Dostoevsky’s ghost would continue to torment the population of his mysterious homeland and squeeze from them the cries of cows engulfed in flames. Indeed — mysterious it is, the homeland. But our heroine never liked such mysteries. You can solve them yourselves, sit down with your family one evening and solve them, like jigsaw puzzles, a million pieces, if you fancy that so much. The further our heroine moved away from her homeland, the less became her desire to solve those puzzles, and the more idealised became her image of it, until it turned into something ephemeral, if you will, into a meme and a myth, a mythical Tulubaika that she invented and created for herself, seized by something like literary nationalism — love for the literature and hatred for everything else. In her new Tulubaika, everything was not as bad as in that old reality from which she fled, although neither that nor this Tulubaika had much to do with actual reality. The same was true of relatives. As she physically and temporally moved away from them, they began to marbleise alive.
— Long, of course, very long, — said our heroine, finishing her coffa. — While you wait, while you fly, while this, while that, no relatives will remain.
— That’s for sure, — added her hero.
— You know, there are advantages. In your head, they’re as if always alive and will remain so, like statues.
— As if they just went to winter at a resort. Like in childhood. Did they tell you that?
— What? — she asked, as if having lost the thread. He constantly spoke in fragments and hints — riddles, emerging from his mysterious soul. They, although sometimes irritating our heroine, were a convenient tool to continue the dialogue.
— Where does the budgie go, or the cat, or the budgie “unalived” by the cat? Or Uncle Epiphan?
— Also “unalived” by a cat?
— Well, no one would say it like that, of course. They would say, “He moved, moved on. He lives there, happily, without us.”
— “And will he write letters?”
— “Maybe. But budgies can’t write, can they?”
— “And send photographs?”
— “That’s unlikely. They don’t have cameras there. Probably.”
— “And where is it? Where did he move to?”
— “Far away, love, very far away.”
— “And will we go to him?”
— “I hope not, daughter. Later, when we get old, like him, each of us at our own time, then maybe we’ll go see him. Maybe we won’t go if transhumanism goes far enough. All sorts of things happen in life.”
— “But maybe he hasn’t left yet, maybe he’s sitting in the airport, waiting for his flight, that Uncle Epiphan. Let’s go, let’s go to the airport. What if he’s still there? Please…” — finished our heroine and lay on her hero’s shoulder.
— Looking at how everything is arranged here… — he smirked, stepping out of the role.
— You know, we’re not just going there for no reason. There’re a few reasons, in fact.
— Of course, I wouldn’t go there without a reason.
— Actually, I wouldn’t go there without a reason either. No one goes there without a reason.
Grandmother had long ago become a statue texting her awkward messages. One doesn’t yearn for statues, one looks at them and marvels. She didn’t know if other people understood what it was like to feel that you don’t feel, to be sad that you’re not sad, to mourn that you don’t mourn, because it simply physically doesn’t happen, even if you really want it to, while the obligation to feel something sits and watches you.
— That geezer is staring at us, — he said to her.
— Which one?
— That one.
— This one? — our heroine’s gaze fell on the old man standing behind the bookshop counter.
Her hero looked at her eyes and calculated the trajectory of her gaze.
— Him, yeah. Standing and staring at us.
— At me. Why would he stare at you?
— I’m handsome, that’s why. Prince Charming, my arse.
— I was in the bookshop. That’s why. He’s strange. We were talking about all sorts of insects, ants and flies that sit on shite.
Her hero frowned.
— Want me to go and fuck his face up?
— Go ahead.
— Seriously?
— Of course not. So that they kick us out? Then we definitely won’t fly anywhere.
— I’ll go anyway.
— Stop it.
— I’ll just look at the books. Tell him not to stare.
— You won’t say anything, I know you.
Her hero for some reason always wanted to get into some fight, not to start one himself, but in such a way that this “some fight” came to him, for he himself would never get into any fight or hurt anyone.
— We can just move, — she said.
— Where? Our gate is here. I’ll go stretch my legs.
Thus he left. Meanwhile, the cuntastrophe on the display board was approaching biblical proportions, and the inaudible abysmal weather conditions outside intensified. Planes were becoming fewer and fewer, and people around more and more dissatisfied, beginning to cackle like geese, quarrel like dogs, howl like cows.
— But wh-y-y-y-y!
— How is this po-o-o-o-ssible!
— It’s impo-o-o-o-ssible!
— Miss, is this seat free?
— No, my husband sits here.
— I’ll sit until he returns. My knees hurt.
— Well, all right, but he’ll be back soon. There, you see? He’s standing talking with that old man over there.
— I see. He’s talking quite actively.
— He’s a good communicator, my one. He can talk anyone’s ear off. Even me, he’s constantly talking me into things. Look, he talked me into marrying him. Can you imagine? Now I’ve talked him into going to Tulubaika as revenge. Taught me to his own detriment, silly.
— Oh, you’re going there too.
— I am. And you?
— Me too. Taking my children to see their little homeland. Where their roots grow from.
— And troubles in the head.
— Oh, don’t get me started. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t go anywhere. But one must.
— I agree, if it were up to me, I’d prefer to forget it in its entirety.
And her hero stood there, talking with the old man, talking and talking, rehashing some topics. Oh, he laughed. That means he won’t fuck any faces up, although it would have been hilarious, and she wouldn’t have had to explain the funeral situation to him. He would have punched him, even after laughing, but he wasn’t a psychopath, far from being a psychopath, although he himself sometimes tells our heroine, more often when they’ve been drinking something, that in childhood, when everyone was being dealt out character traits, they didn’t, unfortunately, dole out psychopathy to him. They shortchanged him, cheated, or maybe they simply forgot, but in the end, they didn’t give him any at all, though a little, at least a tiny drop of psychopathy would have been handy, so he said. She took out her phone, wrote, “so when r u fucking his face up? waiting”. He saw the notification on his watch, looked away from the old man, hunched for half a moment, holding back laughter. And he talked and talked and talked, the chatterbox. And he took out his boarding pass, paid for something. A familiar notification came — nine ninety, the recommended price. And he returned, happy as a Labrador.
— Can this woman sit here? She has knee pain and troubles in the head.
— Yes, please. Hello, woman. Do you really have troubles in your head?
— Who doesn’t these days?
— That’s true, — he said to the woman, then turned to our heroine. — And I, um… bought a book. Look at this one.
And he thrust before our heroine a volume of a thousand and one pages, soft cover.
— I’ll read too.
And the woman blinked her whisker-like eyelashes and then took out of her bag exactly the same volume with exactly the same thousand and one pages, soft cover.
— Oh, I have the same one. What a coincidence.
— And I do, — added our heroine.
— Popular reading, it seems.
— Quite popular, indeed.
— One can hardly buy any other in the airport. It will help to pass the time. No one knows when they’ll make an announcement.
— Oh, don’t mention it, it’s awful.
— A nightmare.
— The world’s bonkers.
Thunderstorm, hurricane, whirlpool, volcano eruption — this must have happened, the weather became completely unsuitable for flying, if one were to believe the announcement over the loudspeaker:
— So-so-so, passenger A go there, passenger B come here, and, by the way, today’s plane to Tulubaika is cancelled. Alas and alack! There will be no more flights to Tulubaika at all. The last one was a week ago, and the one before that was two weeks ago. That’s how they used to fly — once a week, and now, from this moment, all because of the abysmal weather conditions, they stop flying. That’s how it is.
— Well, fuck… — our heroine murmured.
She sighed, shrugged, stood up and went to fold the laundry from the chair into the wardrobe. Immediately her hero followed her and began to help. And suddenly she up and told him everything. Just like that. Up and told everything. Absolutely everything. In complete calmness. Without hitches in breathing, without a throat clenched and stale air in the lungs, without extra weight on the heart and electricity wandering through the fingers. And her hero immediately understood everything, as Chekhov would have understood, only better.