The Vital Needs of the Dead by Igor Sakhnovsky

Author:Igor Sakhnovsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: modern Russian literature, Russian literature in translations, sentimental education, men’s adventure, boys, boys’ adventures, adolescents, fiction in translation, soviet union, soviet provinces, coming-of-age novel, growing up, first love, grandparents and grandchildren, provincial life, Russian Booker, Booker, Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers.
Publisher: Glagoslav Publications Ltd
Published: 2012-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Later on, during the months before his leaving, Sidelnikov struggled to remember Rosa, to recall what she looked like and what she had been saying. To his consternation and shame, he could not recall anything. For some reason, other things would surface, like his washing the floor when nobody asked him to. It was just that visiting her he noticed the fluffy coat of dust under his feet and with the words, ‘I’ll be right back,’ he went to the bathroom to get the mop and the bucket. It was not that he had some sort of a strong housekeeping reflex – more likely, he lacked it altogether, but the untidiness of the flat seemed to harbour an implicit threat. Yet is it worth remembering the way Rosa half-rises from her couch in embarrassment, as if caught red-handed, and he, care embodied, is crawling backwards on all fours spreading the dirt on the floor?

In the same nameless haze, there dispersed his final exams – the last school tribulation, the corn pollen scent of that July, the stuffiness of the second-class carriage and the enrolment competition at the philology department of Srednovsk University. Mother gave him ten green three-rouble notes and a squashed half-a-metre long jam roll. The roll got stale very soon, but for more than a fortnight it sustained the university applicant Sidelnikov at breakfast and supper. On the twenty-first of August, he left at the Dean’s office a signed form that bound him to return on the first of September in order to go to a collective farm for onion picking. He hastily packed his bag that was lighter now, thanks to the disappearance of the jam roll, and after sixteen hours of merciless jolting, this time in a third-class carriage, he returned home.

As a present for his mother, he brought a foreign detective novel purchased from a drunkard at the railway station. For Rosa, he brought the large magnifying glass she had been in need of for a long time. She would never get to use it because two days later, at eight o’clock in the morning, her neighbour Tatyana would come into her room to find her lying prone on the floor.

It is from this day, when Sidelnikov was told on the phone the words “she’s dead” and he ran to Rosa across the whole of the town, ignoring the stitch in his side and not allowing himself even a momentary wait for a tram, as if something could still depend on a extra minute and on his crazy haste – well, it is from this day that one could date the beginning of a new stage in their relationship that was ever unbreakable: a relationship before – between the living, and later – between the living and the dead.

On the corner of Lenin Prospect and Oil Workers Street, he slowed down, suddenly realising that he was not ready. That is, even if he did to some extent comprehend what he’d heard on the phone, for him it did not signify Rosa’s disappearance.

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