Yana Varshavskaya - Very bad English / Очень плохой English

Doremi was lucky.

When there was a roll call in the first grade of school number nineteen, a dozen ordinary names were called besides his rare name: Zakhar, Sevostyan, Ilya, Kirill, Vasily, Grigory… Therefore, the boy had no problems with nicknames. No one paid particular attention to the unusualness of his name, which had its own history, moreover, quite beautiful.

The first time young man seriously wondered if he should change his name was when he applied for physics at Tomsk State University. A young girl from the admissions committee could not even repeat it without distorting it.

Therefore, at the age of twenty, when passport replacement was required, Doremi received a new passport which stated:

Dorian Vsevolodovich Cooper.

When Dorian told me the whole story, I remembered my parents and since then no longer believed that their experiment was cruel…

Dormidont's parents were far more inventive.

However, I came up with another short name:

Doremi.

It turned out somehow very musically, and he got used to it immediately. Since we were also involved in high art, being in a good mood I sometimes called him Doremi Gray.

Like Dorian Gray…

This is the story.

In any case, his watercolor portrait painted by me on my third year of art school now hangs on the left side wall of Doremi's huge hallway, right above the large black leather sofa, reflected in the glass cabinets along the opposite wall.

Art teachers often asked Doremi to pose. From time to time, he agreed to pose during painting classes. He continued doing so even when studying at art school became a memory.

I always admired Doremi's kind of sacrifice, or desire to be useful. A rare quality nowadays, isn't it?

I like everything about him.

Absolutely everything.

I'm already used to some of his oddities. I even start thinking that this is exclusively his zest. In general, it's a great blessing to have a friend who thinks just like you, and can tell honestly what bothers him without looking for excuses in order to evade an inconvenient conversation.

I trust Doremi unconditionally. Therefore, I inform about my long-term plans or short-term desires as they mature…

Now, standing outside the dorm, I called him and said that I could not stay at home.

«Something happened?» Asked Doremi. «It's a nightmare… I'll tell you when I come! Do you have something to drink?» I whispered in a broken voice.

«The whole bar is at your disposal!» Answered Doremi…

Eva's diary:

April 23, 2000.

Sunday.

Who invented this Odigo?

The net is full of morons!!!

Taska, don't be such a bore, ask dad for a new computer for your birthday!

Fifteen is no joke…

Mom gave me a dress, a real American Victoria's Secret!

It's so delicate, creamy with small pink flowers!!!

There are fifteen pearl side buttons to make it more beautiful…

HOORAY!!!

«So stupid! Imagine the very first thing that came to me when I saw him lying on the floor with wide open, surprised eyes was „Where are his shoes?“»

«His shoes?» Doremi asked.

«Well yes! Shoes always betray the owner.»

I looked at my black pumps with a slight condemnation and continued:

«It literally slips off the feet, like: „I have nothing to do with it!“ Once, though from a distance, I saw a young girl knocked down at an intersection… Explain how a long zipped boot could be five to seven meters away from the body?»

«I never thought of such things… I probably haven't seen anything like it! Thank God!» Answered Doremi.

At that moment, it seemed to me that Dorian's thoughts were far, far away and he was rather an answering machine, absorbed in his kind of gloomy thoughts.

«So what did he say?» Asked Doremi, still scattered, and sat next to me.

«What did he say? He said that now the thread was broken!» I repeated the words of the former resident of our university dormitory.

After a pause Dorian stood up, silently opened the cupboard and took out a bottle of cognac. Then he brought bellied wine glasses and poured cognac without disturbing the silence. He held the amber liquid in his hands for a while and shook it, and then drank, still immersed in thoughts.

I took a wooden toothpick, pierced an olive, so that it did not stick out with a sharp tip, and put it into my mouth.

«I don't understand how you can eat olives!» I was amazed when I noticed that Doremi's olive jar was almost empty, while mine was still quite half!

We almost finished with a bottle of inexpensive cognac that Doremi kept just in case, just to relieve stress, without any frills.

«All this fits very well into one of my theories,» said my incredibly mysterious friend, scratching his left hand.

And then, looking at me, as if reading the last phrase in my eyes, he said:

«It's all the same. Black and green olives. It's a typical Russian chip. The whole world knows this is the same sort of fruit.»

«Don't tell me they grow on the same tree!» I was almost indignant, knowing what will follow next if I take the wrong berry.

«Absolutely! It's only about the method of cooking and nothing more!» Dorian was triumphant and, apparently, was finally able to «return to reality»…

In any case, he was no longer as indifferent as he seemed when I came. And I got a serious hope that he would help me cope with the unexpected and, in my opinion, completely untimely experience…

«Oh well! What are you talking about, what the hell is your theory?» I almost pleaded.

«People disregard an important fact: everything in the world is calculated to the smallest detail. It is impossible for each and everyone to be on their own! The boomerang of events returns all the missing details, capturing a whole layer at the same time… Losses can vary from a minimum of one person, for example, to an entire people. All in order to return the event thread to the desired segment. Right?

„My God, Doremi! What a philosophy… You want to say that this nice man, leaving his shoes at the entrance and the open family album on the table, stepped into the Abyss just to fulfill some obscure plan of the universe?“ I asked with a note of disbelief.

„… The thread broke!“ Remember?»

«So what? I don't understand what it means!» I got up and, raising my hands to heaven, said:

«Lord, you work in mysterious ways!»

«My dear Tanya, just imagine. On the other side of our planet, or, as you say, „on the edge of the world“, somewhere in America, there is the same kind man, abandoned and completely lonely… And at the very moment of wild despair, when a thick, black hopelessness surging through almost verged on madness, he opened a window on a seventy-seventh floor of a skyscraper and also lost his shoes, but already on the first floor. In a nutshell, this is my theory of the mirror or the strings of astral twins.»

«Wait, Dor, why am I hearing about this for the first time? Well, I can understand the numerology which you are keen on. I almost love it already! Of course, not as much and comprehensive as my wonderful palmistry… But I think that today I am no longer able to accept anything else…»

I looked at the empty bottle, then at the old watch restored by my friend Doremi, and realized that if I don't go to bed now, tomorrow can come only after dinner. The hands of the wall clock in a wooden case depicted a seagull, showing one fifty. A lot of things were waiting for me in the morning…

Dorian brought a blanket. Putting my beloved gray elephant filled with small granules under my head, I lay on the sofa in the huge hallway, and immediately fell asleep.