Igor Eliseev - One-Two

“Let’s say we wish only good for everybody,” you elaborated your own thought. “Wouldn’t we already be strangled, robbed, murdered by people like him?” and you nodded towards the armless man.

I perfectly understood what you were trying to say. If you think of people kindly it doesn’t mean that people think of you the same way too. But, still, I couldn’t agree with you. Call me impractical or stupid, but I want things to be different. Furthermore, we must make things different. Secondly, I consider it wrong and weird that we did not understand each other, although we saw and felt everything simultaneously. To hell with this motor adynamia.

“You’re a fool,” you blurted out. “You should be happy that someone else killed him. Otherwise you would have had to do the job yourself.”

And, having touched your broken lip, you added indulgently:

“And by the way, where did that stinky snippet disappear to? Did he really run to get some vodka?”

Indeed, hardly had we merged into the crowd again than had our “pumpkin companion” immediately dived in from the opposite direction. I thought that he would never come back, but in a couple of days he appeared and, heartily begging our pardon, handed us a bottle.

“I could only procure this sort,” he drawled in the tone of an apologetic child, baring his front teeth with a gap between them wide enough to insert a pencil, smiling in a conciliatory fashion.

“What’s the freaking difference? Give me what you’ve got,” you grumbled. “Why did you stick to us?”

His artless face instantly strained, and his fingers shuffled all over his body, so he had to clasp them to his chest.

“I will certainly explain,” he said in a mournful voice. “I will tell you everything, exactly how it is. Please don’t take offence; all my life, only a few moments have mattered.”

He had been withholding this story for so long that once he found “grateful listeners” in our persons, he burst out, telling us more than we ever needed to know. His speech was filled with clichés from beginning to end, probably taken from newspapers randomly, forming an aura of a man of education and culture. He received quite a trivial nickname at school: Ickie, which irritated him terribly, but one can’t be angry all the time. Soon, he got tired, then resigned himself and was finally convinced of the “truthfulness” of his nickname. With this regard, one person dear to me who preferred to die for his real name should be remembered. But Ickie was of quite a different breed, for he was ready to agree with any label in order to feel safe and unstressed. Only much later did we learn his real surname: either Poop or Poopie, which wasn’t really good. On the contrary, “Ickie” suited him much better.

I wonder whether he was nicknamed thoughtlessly, as a result of a “harmless”, childish prank, and only years later did he unknowingly start to fulfill his nickname! Did he turn a flight of somebody’s ridiculous fancy into reality on purpose, trying to please everyone, or was he a grub and a sloven initially, being Ickie from the very beginning? I guess we’ll never know what was behind that door.

When he turned thirteen, he went abroad with his parents, aerial artists, who had several performances a day. In the meantime, instead of training and gaining experience, he used to run away from the circus-troop and walk around the city. Well, as always happens in real life and rarely in fairy tales, once upon a time he accidentally wandered into a fair, and, driven by a mysterious inner instinct, sneaked into a circus-tent.

At first, the announcer appeared in the arena to make a speech about people’s destinies – how many misfortunes and gross injustices we happen to encounter in life; but it is really not our fault, and we cannot do anything about it. He didn’t want to persuade anyone to seek a reason for the surprising phenomenon that followed, but to accept it as “given”, and try to laugh together as a family . At last, the lights were turned down low and a few moments later incredible creatures, like from a scary story, one after another, rolled out onto the arena riding unicycles. At first he thought it was a freakish effect of the light or a dodgy trick, but after a closer look, he understood. These were real people in front of his eyes… very ugly people, dwarfs with big heads, giants with small ones, athletes without arms, and people resembling animals. The public was ecstatic, giving them a standing ovation that suddenly developed into a deafening squall when the leading lady, a real beauty with two pairs of legs, appeared in the arena. “If you could have seen her dancing,” Ickie admired, wringing his hands. “She flew over the rows of seats like a feather; her skirt delightfully fluttered in the air as she stretched her tattooed body, exposing two pairs of charming legs in white, silk stockings.” She was so neat and airy that he was uncontrollably attracted to her, and before she could even finish her performance, he found himself clambering up on the rope and jumping between rafters, showing his adeptness of bodily control to the four-legged leading lady. The audience, who took his acrobatic attempts as part of the show, laughed approvingly and with words and gestures of curiosity encouraged him in bravery. But the problem of how to get down solved itself: he fell down as a disobedient baby bird falls down from the maternal nest. “I’m lucky I didn’t crash to my death,” Ickie concluded colorlessly, as if doubtful of his very own sanity. “I broke nearly every bone in my body that day, but wasn’t successful in making friends with her.”

From that day on, probably embracing us as his “twin souls”, Ickie came to see us almost daily, as if it were a fixed rendezvous. Entirely confused and disordered, he had consistently held areas that were established and limited from the very first day. Apologizing every time, he gave us a bottle of vodka, then went to the opposite wall and watched us, now one, now the other, moving his pupils like pendulums. Eventually, despite his intolerable smell and deep-rooted untidiness, I started kind of liking him and gradually getting used to his presence like some people get used to an offensive nickname.

As soon as our working day was over, we hurried home, to our old abandoned house, passionately wishing to get drunk. It just so happened that we didn’t have any glasses and had to drink straight from the bottle, taking turns. We had yesterday’s sprats and processed cheese; allow me to put this directly: not the most appropriate combination, but at that moment it was just right and surprisingly delicious! First we began by drinking with disgust, but then, sip by sip, the detestable taste seemed to disappear.

“To your health,” I said, sipping from the bottle.

“To our health!” you exclaimed emotionally. “Have you already noticed? You are drinking but I’m the one who’s got the hiccups?”

“Look, I can’t drink anymore,” I begged after half an hour.

“Then give me the bottle,” you commanded. “I’m gonna drink for both of us, and we’ll be getting drunk together, like communicating vessels.”

Unexpectedly, we found this thought very amusing and burst out laughing in unison. The evening turned out to be an unprecedented one. I perceived you not only as my sister, my other half I am attached to, but primarily as a friend and a drinking companion. I was talking incessantly, about hilarious things, I guess, which I can hardly remember now, and you were smiling contentedly to yourself without any sense to your expression of bliss. Then one of us started singing, and gradually our howl developed into drunken crying. Each of us plunged into her own, seemingly very deep, sorrow, although we had no obvious reason to cry. After finishing the bottle, we went to bed, but stumbled and fell half way. It made us laugh anew, after which we fell asleep right there on the floor.