Igor Eliseev - One-Two

The box contained a pile of photos; well, it took me some time to understand whom they depicted. From every picture, a lot of different women looked at us, and one feature, except for their absolute nakedness, was common to them all: each woman had a prominent defect. There were one-eyed women, women with burns, lame, one-armed, bald, scarred – a full range of abnormalities one could only imagine.

“Holy crap, you’re sick!” you cried, totally offended.

“Quiet, I’m begging you, quiet,” Ickie fidgeted anxiously, waving his hands. “I share the most intimate things, from the bottom of my heart, and you are swearing. Too bad you don’t like them. That’s what I thought, people are prejudiced. Why are you throwing them away? There’s no need to hurt them.”

I saw a glimpse of fear in his eyes and in his gesture, as he rushed to pick up the pictures you had scattered, not even trying to keep the miserable shreds of his human dignity.

“In that case, I’ll leave you,” he said as if insulted, but didn’t move, patiently waiting for our reaction. But you didn’t say a word; we had no place to go.

“Just don’t take offence,” he babbled finally, tying up the box with a ribbon. “Maybe, after all, you will change your mind because such gifts shouldn’t be wasted. I’m trying for everyone’s benefit. Believe it or not, I might pay you if you need. I want to help.”

“You have already helped,” I responded quick-wittedly, “really helped. Thank you.”

After my “thankfulness” Ickie lit up.

“Anyway, I should go. I’ll be near, behind the wall, just in case,” he twittered confusedly and poured out of the room, embracing his box.

The next morning Ickie flitted around us like a may bug, mumbling delightfully: “What a pleasure, what happiness!” And only after we had closed the bathroom door in his face – he must have peeped in at the keyhole – did we manage to obtain a degree of privacy which enabled us to wash ourselves and our clothes.

The same morning we asked Compass Legs to find housing for us. Usually talkative, this time he only hemmed gloomily and, having taken away our daily “yield”, silently made his way.

We had to spend several more days at Ickie’s. Challenges that we cannot even imagine! We who weren’t used to convenience and comfort, we who had lived a significant part of our lives in the scrap heap, found it intolerable torment to stay at his place. Driven by an impulse of socially acceptable behavior, I offered to clean up his apartment, but didn’t have much success in that endeavor. Absent-mindedly, shifting from one foot to the other, Ickie pretended that he didn’t hear me, and hid in another room immediately after. A kettle whistled on the stove, indicating that it was time to have tea and go to work. But at the last minute, Ickie crept out of his shelter and called to us:

“Please, just don’t take offence. I want everything to stay the same, the way it was when my mom was alive. I loved her so much, one and only.”

You mysteriously looked around and stared at him closely:

“I wonder if she felt the same way.”

He got embarrassed and confused, and started waving his hands in a ridiculous fashion in front of his own nose as if fanning away a cloud of mosquitoes. Freckled, lop-eared, with a puppy look in his eyes and a timid smile, he looked like an old, blowsy, forlorn child. It seemed he had not only broken his arms and legs when he fell from the flying trapeze, but had also damaged some secret mechanism of ageing. Not waiting for an answer, we quietly passed through the door, leaving him alone with his crusted thoughts and infinitely dirty and unwelcome environment.

In a couple of days, the supervisor offered us housing in a desolate attic, and before we had time to answer, barked:

“Do push-ups! I want to see it,” and added severely: “Come on, on the count of one-two.”

Bewildered, I was at a loss what to do next and felt your hand dipping into a pocket in search of a screwdriver. Or could it be lipstick?

“All right, I’m kidding.” The supervisor suddenly became cheerful. “I could force you, I have no desire. Let’s skip it. You will work off your housing in a regular way. You should be happy that I am kind-hearted.”

And we were happy that he helped us, that he didn’t beat us, that he didn’t force us to do push-ups or whatever, that he simply didn’t drive us away. There will always be someone to replace us. No one’s irreplaceable. That summer the number of beggars increased so strikingly that it seemed the whole country was begging with outstretched hands.

Yeah, we were really lucky. After the poverty, the dirt and the cold, the new housing we were provided with struck us as warm and cozy: scantily lit premises with high sloping ceilings of wooden beams smeared with pigeon dung here and there, brick walls with small windows under roofs that seemed about to fall, a heap of “accurately” laid plywood on a concrete floor and a weak, barely perceptible, unpleasant smell. A more thorough examination revealed the presence of small piles of faeces spread out carefully and evenly – not in just one corner, but literally everywhere – along the entire perimeter. We even had an urge to contribute ourselves. However, after many hours of cleaning, the attic began shining like a baby’s butt and turned into a model to follow, a dream, an unrealizable wish; in a word, a place for normal life.

Ickie took the news about our new dwelling surprisingly calmly. Only after several minutes of contemplating dark streaks on the ceiling and heaving deep sighs did his true thoughts and emotions express themselves in words.

“These are times when everything is valued,” he said with his eyelids drooping: “odd galoshes, empty bottles and even yesterday’s newspapers, but pure, sincere feelings are depreciated and thrown out like household garbage, like something shameful and useless.”

“Come on, stop whining,” you blurted out. “We saw your inclinations, and thank you very much for that.”

You sounded ironic, but Ickie, apparently, didn’t notice it. Taking it literally, he straightened and answered rapidly:

“I am so glad, so glad, with all my heart. I mean it. My inmost secrets and everything, just everything, including my humble dwelling, is from now on at your disposal.”

And his shoulders started jittering with wheedling laughter, or was he sneezing, not laughing? With Ickie, I couldn’t shake off a strange feeling that all this had already happened to us many times before, and not long ago. He reminded me of a clock hand, always passing through the same events in strict accordance with a universal schedule. When he was done jittering, he went to the opposite wall. Picking a dirty spot on his vest, he stared at us; his eyes were shining with lust for the flesh and with unspeakable triumph.

So what I did actually was, I studied the certain issue from all sides and found something quite surprising. Some people look at us with disgust because we are unnatural, while others, on the contrary, admire us because we are unnatural, an admiration that is no less deformed than we ourselves are! “Poor Ickie, his life is so sad and monotonous,” I thought, watching him go. “He is trapped in debilitating gloom and fatuity and there is no way to save him.” But only now do I understand that he was actually happy, in his own way. It is not important that his life became so fouled up, extremely boring and antisocial. Above all, he felt warm and cozy in his own world even if it was not obvious, and everything else didn’t matter. He never judged anyone and didn’t have much interest in ordinary people. He thought their lives were as pathetic and ruined as they believed his life was. But once a three-legged or one-armed person appeared, the look in his eyes changed dramatically, and life quite unexpectedly acquired fresh colors and sense. Ickie didn’t quit the dream of dedicating his life to the circus, but the whole world around him turned into a circus. And we validated it all, happening by chance to participate in some of his improvised performances, too!