Igor Eliseev - One-Two

“Just think about what he could give us: protection, a good job, better housing and, perhaps, even a TV,” you were cackling as silly as Ickie used to some time ago.

I believed those reasonable arguments were there to hide your true feelings. You got attracted to him strongly, right away – for some physical reason, inconceivable to me , – but were afraid to admit it. Meanwhile, having yielded to your request, Compass Legs started bringing vodka to you. Maybe he really liked you? Who knows! I saw in his acts no more than encouragement for his best “workers” in the tunnel. We had earned him so much money with our begging, and we all got a poor thank-you – vodka – but you took it as a declaration of care and love. In fact, everything started with it.

But first, something else happened.

Probably, sooner or later, every person finds himself to be disposable. He appeared before us in short, badly-faded trousers with an open zipper, with lean hands and huge bags under his eyes, all tousled like a sparrow after bathing in a puddle. He smelled of medication and something acrid, perhaps garlic or onions. His glasses had only one temple, shoes were put on bare feet, without socks, and the whole image was completed with a gloomy face and a wan smile baring mostly empty gums on top and an uneven number of metal teeth on the bottom. He approached us, dragging his body and creaking like an old cart. Leaning against a wall, we stiffened in expectation, wondering who he was and not knowing what he wanted. For some time he hesitated, choosing which one of us to look at and who to address. And when he, after much hesitation, started talking, all the futility of life was expressed in his voice. He used to work as a major chief engineer, helping to design parts for future carrier rockets. In due time, he had retired and spent the last of his savings that had remained after monetary reforms on some government securities promising enormous profit, but afterwards he went broke and lost everything. Although his entire look emitted absolute infirmity and hopelessness, he was telling us about his failures in such a tone as if they were his main virtues. “Idiot,” I thought, “if you prefer being proud of your suffering – well, please, go to church! But why are you sticking strangers with it?”

“Everything is lost and ruined, but I am still alive, being older than Byron and Lermontov put together,” he finished joyfully and a little haughtily.

“Do you at least have a wife?” I asked, out of curiosity. “Byron did.”

Instead of answering, he grew sad instantly and looked away, silently moving his lips.

“Any children?”

Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, a small, aged and decrepit person who used to be great and important nodded his bowed head. When he started talking again, his voice sounded different. It appeared that more than twenty years ago his wife had given birth to boys, conjoined twins, exactly like us! At the time of delivery he was away on business and kept putting off meeting his babies on the pretext of being busy. And when he did return, when everything was over, realizing his cowardice, his wife took the children away to an undisclosed location, but that was just the beginning – for after a few months she wrote to him about their early deaths, the small revenge of a resentful woman.

“Am I a coward?” he questioned, clamping his head between his hands. “I used to think the contrary. I had been working my ass off, sometimes hadn’t been leaving my studio for months, fearlessly looked slanderers and tale-bearers in the face. I wasn’t afraid of anything, but seeing two conjoined…” he faltered, at a loss for words, “two poor babies was beyond my power. Soon we got divorced, and for many years I haven’t heard from her. Then one day, totally unexpected, as it usually occurs only in the movies but never in reality, I ran into her in the street of just another town where she was on a behind-the-scenes tour. Can you imagine the odds of that happening?” He raised his hands, addressing the muddy stains on the ceiling. “One in a million, no, actually, one in a billion. Either way, this encounter changed my life. My wife confessed that she had lied to me. In fact, the children were alive and under the care of the government. Right after childbirth she signed documents to transfer them to the institute of pediatrics. I begged and asked her for any further information, but she refused to provide me with any more details. I filed requests to state bodies, tried to search for any documents in the maternity home, but all I found was an old midwife who told me, for a small remuneration, that they were sent to a Scientific Research Institution and she had no idea to which one. My children just vanished into thin air,” he grieved bitterly. “Since then I’ve been looking for them, unable to find them, but nevertheless have kept searching, now rather out of cowardice than for any other reason. I seem to carry on living only out of cowardice. Charity, alas, was so right.”

His story was growing like a snowball, releasing more and more details which little by little came together. His former wife, a leading actress plus the number of maternity homes which we had learnt from our mother plus the year of birth, the same as ours, and so on and so forth. Only one thing was confusing: his conviction that he had sons. But could it be possible that everything else, even our mother’s name, was a total match? As he said, the odds are one in a billion, no, one in a billion billion! And the aerospace engineer should have realized it like no one else, but still he couldn’t or didn’t want to see that we were his children. For us, the truth was much more obvious: this pathetic, skinny, silly, smiling man was our father .

Sometimes it seems to me that even chance events are rather predetermined. Our father had been looking for us all his life – he couldn’t stop searching, tormented by his conscience – and, of course, he found us or, to be precise, stumbled upon us by chance like a moribund person stumbles upon a gem that he is no longer in need of. True, it was too late to change anything – his age was not good for major undertakings – and his dreams had not come to pass, mired in a swamp of nightmares. But nevertheless his fate winked at life in parting. Finally, in one last effort he had come across us to make sure once again that we were too great a challenge for him, too tough a nut to crack!

He died long ago, way before his time, on the same day we were born.

He didn’t ask any questions, afraid to speak out unwittingly the major one: Are we those he has been looking for? Refusing to trust his own eyes, disregarding the evidence, he hid in his turtle shell in order not to reopen old wounds, in order to keep his mind sound. But did we have the right to blame him? Is there at least one person on earth who isn’t afraid to face the truth and is capable of diving into its very heart, accepting it wholly? Are there people who don’t lie at least to themselves?

We only saw him three times in our whole life. And every time, having caught sight of us, he rubbed his eyes as if chasing away a bad dream, and only after making sure we were real, did he approach reluctantly, keeping silent and dismally picking the floor tiles with his foot. At that moment, he felt no interest in absolutely anything he did, having lost his fire, his grip, his sense. And every time I saw him I wanted to cry, stamp my feet, run up to him and confess everything. But what is the point of doing something that is not correct? Our appearance undoubtedly hurt our family. We’ve been through it with our mother, and now our father’s time has come. Should we push our luck for a second time? Actually, it was high time to bring an end to a wearisome connection with the past and turn into ordinary observers of another human tragedy. Pretending that we are not them , we withdrew from his life. Of course, we felt sorry for the father, but it was more compassion than love.