Siarhei Malaletkin
Daddy, I Am Leaving
Story
Dirty steps of the stairway remind me of close and inevitable Apocalypse.
I am hardly ascending up to the fifth floor and I am sending my curses to that day when I sat at the writing-table. «Why is it so?, I am thinking sadnessly, other people don't have money and everyone understands it naturally. As for me it's pretty damned different for my rugged poems or novel jammed up at third quarter. I feel uncomfortable before my familiars. Even my own wife looks at me obliquely being tired of my «images synthesizing» that has been lasting for some years. Sure, in my present situation wouldn't be harmful to get Nobel Prize but ….three quarters …. Besides it's «action» genre…»
When my ascent is about to finish it's getting quite obvious for me: I am an outsider. Loser. But this understanding doesn't stop me on the way to the sofa. Well, that means my clear ardour to reach the target.
I am exhaling loudly trying to calm down my heart raging inside the chest, and melancholically recollect those times when I used to spur upstairs all in a breath. Crazy youth and writing have made me ailing and lonely.
Like a ship captain on the bridge I'm staying on the stairhead and proudly looking between the open case. There's no wish to jump down, so it's a sign of my ill belief in the future. Accompanied by creaking floor planks I'm toddling down the corridor toward my temporary shelter presented by a small one-room flat. (I thank God, my actual wife and a couple of jewish bosses for having even this).
Somewhere I read that Emile Zola when was in bad spirit for writing tied himself to chair. Should I try too? However, what am I talking about? My wife says I've got the megalomania and my psychiatrist reckons I'm suffering of overdosed feeling of responsibility. Whom should I trust to?
There is an existing opinion that modern men need more tenderness than women. I'm disposed to accept this. An alcoholic whom I know affirms that just one tender word said by his wife would heal him. Judging by his condition on our recent meeting that word is extraordinarily difficult to be pronounced. As doctors say, prognosis is not favorable.
My look reaches the desirable door and stabs in the ripped spot down from the left of the door.
«That's interesting»…, I think preoccupied. (If some years of life wasted on writing detective novels, every smallest thing caught by sight demands to be analyzed immediately and all-roundly).
Coming closer I find out this spot is nothing else but a deposit of whitewash. I automatically look up at the ceiling and instantly confirm myself I am wrong. The whitewash layer is flat and not spoiled.
Obeying the rules of logic my sight is sliding at once at the wall. «Oh yes, sure someone …». My heart is making an unbelievable leap in the chest and falling somewhere deep down. «Daddy I was here. You were out. I'm leaving today, will write, love, Julia,» letter by letter I'm reading hardly visible graffiti. Life having finally splitted indifferently throws me to the abyss of break.
The mentioned above alcoholic, moved by impetus of untied magnanimity often asks me one and the same question: «Serge, I gonna be in some business soon, so tell me frankly: would you like me to buy a car or a flat for you?» I make a serious-like face and answer: «Flat». To deprive this lost man of his last prop,– generosity, – is beyond my skills. «Two rooms would be enough?», ascertains my benefactor trying to look business-like too. «Surely would», I confirm. «We're in deal», he bangs my shoulder and is moving to the nearest bar.
One day in a friends' company of my first family I dropped a careful hint about Henry Miller who became a celebrity being an aged person and dealt out to his friends a part of first real literature emolument (about a hundred thousand dollars). I was reasonably answered: «Serge, you'd better earn your daily bread». There's something, isn't there?
That night I even didn't try to fall asleep. Somewhere over the Atlantic a «Boeing» was sliding, taking away a huge particle of my life to a far land. There were lots of things to think of. And not only that.
…I'm thirty eight. I have never flown by airplane and for many years haven't been flying in my night dreams. Recently I have been living with a strange feeling that the separation of me and my daughter put us closer. Now she is in America, I am inside my unfinished novel. Theoretically, it's the same, far away from here.
When my son is going to be grown up I will try to explain him why it's necessary to have just only one family.
P.S. When I was writing these lines I didn't know that my two novels would be published in book series «Russian bestseller» and my daughter wouldn't write for almost two years. But it is absolutely another story…
I am hardly ascending up to the fifth floor and I am sending my curses to that day when I sat at the writing-table. «Why is it so?, I am thinking sadnessly, other people don't have money and everyone understands it naturally. As for me it's pretty damned different for my rugged poems or novel jammed up at third quarter. I feel uncomfortable before my familiars. Even my own wife looks at me obliquely being tired of my «images synthesizing» that has been lasting for some years. Sure, in my present situation wouldn't be harmful to get Nobel Prize but ….three quarters …. Besides it's «action» genre…»
When my ascent is about to finish it's getting quite obvious for me: I am an outsider. Loser. But this understanding doesn't stop me on the way to the sofa. Well, that means my clear ardour to reach the target.
I am exhaling loudly trying to calm down my heart raging inside the chest, and melancholically recollect those times when I used to spur upstairs all in a breath. Crazy youth and writing have made me ailing and lonely.
Like a ship captain on the bridge I'm staying on the stairhead and proudly looking between the open case. There's no wish to jump down, so it's a sign of my ill belief in the future. Accompanied by creaking floor planks I'm toddling down the corridor toward my temporary shelter presented by a small one-room flat. (I thank God, my actual wife and a couple of jewish bosses for having even this).
Somewhere I read that Emile Zola when was in bad spirit for writing tied himself to chair. Should I try too? However, what am I talking about? My wife says I've got the megalomania and my psychiatrist reckons I'm suffering of overdosed feeling of responsibility. Whom should I trust to?
There is an existing opinion that modern men need more tenderness than women. I'm disposed to accept this. An alcoholic whom I know affirms that just one tender word said by his wife would heal him. Judging by his condition on our recent meeting that word is extraordinarily difficult to be pronounced. As doctors say, prognosis is not favorable.
My look reaches the desirable door and stabs in the ripped spot down from the left of the door.
«That's interesting»…, I think preoccupied. (If some years of life wasted on writing detective novels, every smallest thing caught by sight demands to be analyzed immediately and all-roundly).
Coming closer I find out this spot is nothing else but a deposit of whitewash. I automatically look up at the ceiling and instantly confirm myself I am wrong. The whitewash layer is flat and not spoiled.
Obeying the rules of logic my sight is sliding at once at the wall. «Oh yes, sure someone …». My heart is making an unbelievable leap in the chest and falling somewhere deep down. «Daddy I was here. You were out. I'm leaving today, will write, love, Julia,» letter by letter I'm reading hardly visible graffiti. Life having finally splitted indifferently throws me to the abyss of break.
The mentioned above alcoholic, moved by impetus of untied magnanimity often asks me one and the same question: «Serge, I gonna be in some business soon, so tell me frankly: would you like me to buy a car or a flat for you?» I make a serious-like face and answer: «Flat». To deprive this lost man of his last prop,– generosity, – is beyond my skills. «Two rooms would be enough?», ascertains my benefactor trying to look business-like too. «Surely would», I confirm. «We're in deal», he bangs my shoulder and is moving to the nearest bar.
One day in a friends' company of my first family I dropped a careful hint about Henry Miller who became a celebrity being an aged person and dealt out to his friends a part of first real literature emolument (about a hundred thousand dollars). I was reasonably answered: «Serge, you'd better earn your daily bread». There's something, isn't there?
That night I even didn't try to fall asleep. Somewhere over the Atlantic a «Boeing» was sliding, taking away a huge particle of my life to a far land. There were lots of things to think of. And not only that.
…I'm thirty eight. I have never flown by airplane and for many years haven't been flying in my night dreams. Recently I have been living with a strange feeling that the separation of me and my daughter put us closer. Now she is in America, I am inside my unfinished novel. Theoretically, it's the same, far away from here.
When my son is going to be grown up I will try to explain him why it's necessary to have just only one family.
P.S. When I was writing these lines I didn't know that my two novels would be published in book series «Russian bestseller» and my daughter wouldn't write for almost two years. But it is absolutely another story…
Belarus, 2000
Up |
|