The Line by Olga Grushin

Author:Olga Grushin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The school courtyard was empty now, its asphalt sweating with the afternoon warmth. He stood still for some time, staring into the pale immensity of the sky. That night, he wanted to talk to Viktor Pyetrovich, but he was never alone; his friends were celebrating his return to the line and the beginning of his adult life. When the line dispersed at last, he walked home, through streets that oddly ran in many directions at once, veering off sharply, treacherously, bouncing him into walls with no warning, and across parks that were not parks at all but close, black, sinister forests filled with murderous benches leaping at him like tigers striped with planks of shadow, and a disconcerting signaling of bandits’ flashlights, which at closer quarters turned into glowing bugs and flew away, and along sidewalks that rose underneath him like rearing horses, so he had to straddle them firmly with his knees, repeating in a voice harsh with affection as he ran his fingers through their manes, “There, there, steady now!” Then someone laughed a nasty laugh above him, and the horses were gone. Picking himself off the ground, he continued to stumble through woods and fields, along train tracks, inside spirals of darkness, thinking vaguely that, maybe, taking the train east would solve nothing after all, until somehow, hours later it seemed to him, he made his tentative way into his kitchen, and turned on the light, and his father was blinded.

And as Alexander looked through the wavering haze at the man squinting before him, the middle-aged man going wide in the waist and loose in the face, he thought again—or perhaps he had never stopped thinking—of the tormenting creaking of music in the classroom, and those times when his father, younger, thinner, had pleaded with him to listen to something he loved; and the endless lectures he had endured, about time and choices and wisdom, which had seemed to him so tedious, so insincere—and somehow, before he knew it, he was saying things, heated things, surprising things, and his words were rushed, and wet, and heavy in his mouth.

Listen, I’m sorry, if you ever want me to hear some tunes you like, I won’t mind, and the ticket, you can have it, I won’t sell it, I’ll work hard, I’ll return what I owe you, I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry about your money, can’t we, can’t we just, can’t we just be—

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