Madonna from Russia by Yuri Druzhnikov

Author:Yuri Druzhnikov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
Published: 2006-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

MARRIAGE AMERICAN STYLE

‘… it is something that we, in the full strength of thought, cannot bring to full clarity.’

– Arthur Schopenhauer

1

Trying not to make too much noise, he stole down the corridor and pressed the button of the lift. The sliding door opened slowly, as if half asleep. Exiting the street door, Kharya craned his neck and ran his eyes along the dark windows. Four o’clock in the morning. It was just about to get light. The place was asleep; only the sign saying ‘3370 Grant Street’ flickered at the corner, and the light over the lobby entrance hadn’t yet been turned off.

Kharya prodded with his key, feeling out the driver’s door keyhole; he opened it, flung down the bundle that he’d been carrying under his arm and flopped down into the broken-down seat. Holding on to the open door with one hand, he started the engine, wincing at the roar. Without turning his lights on, he drove out on to the road and only then, after once again running his eyes along the windows, did he turn on his low beams and slam shut the heavy door.

Both night and air were like the top bench in a steam bath, as it always was in south Texas at the end of August. His rusting hood stuck out in his gaze; the paint on it had been burned off in patches by the sun. The car’s air-conditioner had succumbed long before, but the fan buzzed, creating a weak simulation of freshness.

The cherry-red Chevrolet moved down Bellaire Street, and after several blocks turned on to the ring road. A quarter of an hour later Kharya was merging into the string of cars climbing the flyover on to Highway Ten and sped his wagon to the west. ‘Sped’ is putting it too strongly, probably.

And he’d scarcely begun putting the tenth mile behind him when the flow slowed, although it wasn’t even four thirty yet. Kharya cursed and slapped his hand on the wheel in annoyance. His horn sounded, and the half-awake drivers in the neighbouring cars looked at him askance, perplexed.

It soon became evident that, up ahead, four police Fords were occupying all four lanes of the road, driving parallel to one another, cheek by jowl, keeping their speedometer needles exactly at seventy miles an hour. There’s no getting around policemen, so willy-nilly everyone was going at the prescribed speed – that’s just how the highway patrol nowadays disciplines drivers. Happily enough, the schooling didn’t go on for long. On the outskirts of Houston the cops obligingly slipped off on to a side road. And now a devil got into Kharya.

He cursed again and, in order to make up the time lost because of those idiots, he raced away in the old-but-still-full-of-beans gas-guzzler. A curious word, that – guzzler. Originally from the French, supposedly, in Texas the word simply meant a wino, more often than not. It’s obvious that the old mid-seventies Chevy was of the dimensions of a good-sized Russian armoured

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