Vladimir Orlov - Danilov the Violist

Once outside, Danilov thought: "Well, this will be a lesson to Klavdia not to be so stingy!" Still, he felt injured, even angry, as if they had moved him instead of Klavdia to the end of the line.

He called Klavdia from a phone booth.

"Danilov, darling!" Klavdia purred into the receiver like a gurgling brook. "Did you show up?!"

"I showed up -- " Danilov began.

"Terrific! I always knew that you were a marvelous, sweet man. Listen, yesterday I was knitting wool socks for Professor Voinov, you know how hard that is for me, and I managed to do a heel! And managed to keep up a cultured conversation with him ... And in the morning -- just imagine, he likes carrot jelly and bouillon with meat balls -- I cooked it all!"

"She never knitted me a pair of socks," thought Danilov and said grimly: "Fire me. I'm not interested in heels, or meatballs, or Professor Voinov, nor your probationary work experience under him!"

"Oh, Danilov ..."

"I showed up, all right, but they didn't count you, and they put you at the end of the line."

"I knew it! I just knew it! You were too cheap?"

"You shouldn't have put me in that ridiculous position. You could have warned me about the payment and given me the money."

"What a nuisance! You're absolutely heartless! Why couldn't you have paid or borrowed it from someone?"

"Thanks for the advice."

"What am I supposed to do now?"

"I don't know... And who are these futecons? These confutes?"

"Quiet, quiet... it's a secret... This is not for the telephone. Where are you?"

"On Gorky. I'm about to go into the grocery store."

"All right, I'll be there in twenty minutes!"

"Just what I need!" thought Danilov, a little later as he stood in the coffee bar at the grocery store and chewed a sandwich with choice sausage that was so greasy it could have been used to fry other things. It was all so absurd! Here was Danilov himself on the brink of the abyss; whirlwinds of inner music and music he had yet to conquer tormented him; Natasha, despite all his desperate attempts at self-control, would not budge from his heart and his soul; the viola might be gone for good, which drove him to despair. And still he was bothering with this nonsense, as if he were once again bound to this woman who belonged to someone else, this empty and crazed female who was no one to him. And as far as she was concerned he was nothing but the means to an end -- a gaff to a deckhand or a can of worms to a fisherman on the Neva River. "No! I'm getting up and leaving!" Danilov told himself. But just then Klavdia, as beautiful as a cookie with chocolate and cinnamon, appeared. She was wearing a fox coat and a red fox hat.

"As for Voinov," she said, "don't worry. Everything's all right there, knock on wood..."

"I'm not worrying..."

"Now, about the line ... How could you? ... You didn't have fifteen rubles?"

"I didn't," Danilov said. "For a change."

"Well, all right," Klavdia said. "It's my fault. But you understand -- not a word about the line to anyone. It's an experiment... And it can be jinxed, understand?"

"No," admitted Danilov.

"You're so ... Remember those poor, hungry, unknown actors who spent nights and mornings rehearsing, shouting, arguing? They believed, and suddenly, bang! -- Live Forever! The Sovremennik Theater! Sold out! Their own cafe! And now even the Moscow Art Theater has taken them to their bosom! That's what our group is like. In their off-hours, civic-minded -- "

"Wait a minute -- what about the fifteen rubles? That's private funding -- "

"Oh, pooh! But at least they're not poor or unknown. On the contrary! They are all people with futures, and that means there's a guarantee for us..."

"Who are they? Who are these confutes?"

"Futecons," Klavdia corrected him. The Scientific Initiative Group Concerned for the Future . Rostovtsov's the one who came up with futecons."

Here she looked around and began speaking in a terrifying whisper. That is, not really terrifying, more ominous. No, wrong again. Klavdia Petrovna was incapable of speaking terrifyingly or ominously. She spoke in a rustling, mysterious whisper. Klavdia Petrovna had unfastened the brass buckles of her fox coat, and on her tender neck Japanese cultured pearls glimmered with a strange light. The Scientific Initiative Group Concerned for the Future, Danilov learned, was filled with brilliant minds. People in today's key professions. Actually, the cyberneticists from the Luzhkov Institute were needed only for background work, related to calculations, accounts, and other math. Higher and lower. Otherwise the nucleus of the group consisted of sociologists headed by the famous Oblakov, futurologists, lawyers, psychologists, philosophers, two private psychoanalysts, specialists in economics and international issues, and God knows who else, even a writer. In secondary roles, for consultations and practical actions, the group planned to use -- and was already using! -- people from all walks of life: superintendents, propagandists, railroad conductors, physicians, hunters, dog breeders, hairdressers, chiropodists, horologists, plastic surgeons, technical-school teachers, police-sketch artists, detectives, chairmen of local Party committees, you name it, as long as these people were serious and important, and neither ill nor old, preferably under forty, so they could last at least two more decades at their jobs.

"Well, all right," Danilov said. "But what's it to you?"

With her delicate, slightly plump fingers that bore two lovely rings -- one a carnelian, the other a diamond -- Klavdia Petrovna brought her Winston over to a clean plate and lightly flicked the ashes onto the porcelain.

"It's a complicated question," she said. "It's a philosophical one. It's impossible to put it into words, it calls for struggle. Yes, struggle... A special intuition is needed. You are not capable of understanding..."

"But nevertheless?" Danilov said. "What if I do understand?"

"Every decent, self-respecting person," Klavdia Petrovna said, "wishes to live well and even better than well. And wishes to hold a position that suits him -- say, to move from last place to first. Well, not first, but say to eighth. What a difference that makes!"

"And with me you were in last?"

"Not the very last... but, Volodenka, alas, close to last... Don't misunderstand ... I'm satisfied with my present position. And if everything works out with Voinov, I'll be completely happy... but only for a while... After all, you have to live for your passions!"

"Passions?" asked Danilov.

"Yes," said Klavdia Petrovna, "passions. You live for your feelings, but I need passions. I didn't invent it, it's the fashion lately."

"I know you didn't invent it -- "

"And now I have everything, or will have, with Voinov. I'm an ordinary woman, but I'm worth something. I'm in my prime. And I'm beautiful. I am beautiful, aren't I, Danilov?"

"You're beautiful," Danilov agreed.

"What does a woman want? Fame? Success in public life? I can live without them. I'm emancipated as it is. I certainly don't need professional fame, it's not for me. I look at a job as liberation from housework, which is demeaning for women; it makes them dull -- take a look at your friend, the wife of Muravlyov. She's mired in a lack of spirituality! All you can see sticking out is a braid. And it's not even dyed, poor thing... So let's forget fame and glory. That leaves love. And my first rule here is not to be unhappy in love. Nor make the man unhappy. Or the men."

"Naturally, you're not thinking about men like me," Danilov said.

"Judge for yourself, Volodenka, you are unstable and frivolous. You could interest an inexperienced, naive girl with a vivid imagination and without a decent wardrobe, but as for a woman with a forceful and businesslike nature, you are incapable of making her happy... Take those fifteen rubles, for instance... even though I have no regrets about the past and I'm grateful to you for the apartment... but Professor Voinov is a powerful no-nonsense man, while you, Danilov, are an orchestra player. Voinov will give me everything... I mean, I couid achieve it all without him, but when Voinov takes me by the arm, I become a different person... We sit in different seats ... and they don't make us change to worse ones. And then, of course, we'll have to live abroad. Voinov's already agreed to take me for at least three years... He needs it for his work. Naturally, not to Turkey ... What does old Turkey have? ... All they do, those Turks, is drink coffee all day in their harems ... There are other countries, after all -- Italy, France, even England. Voinov can look at Turkish problems from there."