Igor Eliseev - One-Two

I tried to kiss you on your forehead, cheeks, hair – everywhere I could reach, comforting you as a mother comforts her child, but the child didn’t listen to me and wanted to die.

“Leave me alone. I hate you, I hate myself, I hate everyone,” you whined plaintively and burst out crying; however, it resembled more of a blizzard’s yearning howl than crying. I can’t tell how long it lasted: five or ten minutes, one hour or a whole eternity.

“And what if you are going the right way?” I seemed to stop breathing, struck by that sudden thought. “Both of us are so tired of resisting, struggling, surviving and failing that there is no strength left to conquer the whole damn world. I give up too.”

“First, kill me, then yourself. I’m not going to stop you. On the contrary, I will help,” I said, putting my arms under my back and closing my eyes.

It is worth noting that killing yourself and killing someone else are not the same thing. For the former, you should lose faith; for the latter, you should never have any… Faith.

“Faith,” you called to me, sobbing quietly, “tell me, why? We are not such bad people. I’ve seen worse than us. Especially this one… with skinny legs,” you said hopelessly and lit a lantern.

“What happened?” I cried, squinting against the light. “Who are you talking about?”

“About Compass Legs, of course. Who could do much more evil?” you muttered dejectedly. “Don’t you remember anything?”

I shook my head. I seemed to remember nothing.

“He started making moves on me and then, after pushing me, he stopped and said: “Oh, my gosh, I must be completely drunk if I tried to make you mine.” You reminded me of the whole story and began to cry again. Through your tears you told me that it was you who started kissing him, not knowing how else to express your feelings for a man. For a moment I saw us with his eyes and felt nausea, shuddering with disgust. There is no more repulsive thing than a physiologically ugly person. Of course, in our own eyes we are just like everyone else, only more so – approximately twice as much; but how can we see through our own eyes anybody, let alone everybody else? For eyes are not lightbulbs, after all.

“Anyway, we’re going to be dead,” you whispered almost malevolently. “I tried to strangle him. Sorry.”

“It’s OK. Where there’s life there’s hope,” I suddenly said with unexpected determination. “If we are still alive today, I don’t see why we should die tomorrow.”

And I was right. The next day Compass Legs gazed at us so intently that I felt uneasy. Nevertheless, without saying a word, he dispassionately gathered all our income, having checked our pockets for form’s sake and went away. And I sincerely believed the same as you, that he didn’t remember anything at all.

I am still trying to understand when or where our paths diverged. How did it happen and why? Failing to do away with yourself at one stroke, you took another approach – slow suicide. You drank a great deal of vodka that evening, hiding behind an upturned collar, turning away and not wishing to listen. Witnessing your guzzling, I felt an obnoxious dizziness and started shivering with rage because now you were becoming a person I hated. True, at that moment I wanted to knock you to the ground and kick you with my feet. You fell asleep sitting on the floor, and I had to drag our bodies; occasionally you helped me with your feet. Nine yards to the bed took me half an hour. As a result I couldn’t bend my aching back, my arms disobeyed; besides, I got woozy from alcohol too, along with you, and had a delirious feeling that another, absolutely unknown and uninvited person came and lay down next to me instead of you. I wonder if one of us were to go insane, what would happen to the other. The same thing, I hope.

For a long time I couldn’t sleep. In despair, I drank up the remains of the vodka. On my way to long-awaited and desired unconsciousness, I continued to think intensely about everything important and necessary, until the world fell into emptiness where universal questions were removed.

Since then, you have called vodka your best and only friend, saving your life from tough and tougher ordeals. I dare say you are partly right. Alcohol really helps us close our eyes in the face of danger, whether imaginary or real, and enables us to escape the truth as one old woman taught us once.

Little by little, we turned into two dogs hating each other and sitting on one short leash – our liver ached permanently. Feeling sick was now a normal condition. Nausea came up even more often than ever before. Our heads were splitting, bitter tastes in our mouths and painful hangovers which pursued us constantly. Many people believe that hope supports faith, but in our case, paradoxically enough, Hope was hindering Faith. It’s funny. Maybe people really do have it all wrong with our names?

I’m talking on and on; it seems I really can get to the bottom of it all, to the truth. But you should understand I need to speak while you’re asleep; this makes more sense to me than any ordinary conversation, and I can see clearly now that it wasn’t love and patience but revenge and bitter hatred that helped us get to know each other much better.

I was aware that you hated me desperately, tied to me for the rest of our lives, and there was no way to change it. Retiring into your shell, you no longer lived our shared life, but a very quiet life of your own; in other words, you rejected me like a body rejects its own disobedient hand. It made me feel insupportable pain, depriving me of understanding what the next step or move was. Instead of doing something worthwhile, I chose to do nothing at all: neither move, nor speak, nor even breathe, pretending that I didn’t exist. I stayed motionless, waiting for movement. Perhaps, I should have acted in a different way, should have anticipated your moods, softened your rages, tried to know your thoughts and to do whatever you desired. But pain, born out of hurt pride, was stinging me and I could only focus on myself and neglect others. Every day we became more aggressive and selfish, as if after leaving our mother you had caught her self-destructiveness and then infected me with it. Having turned into enemies, we hated each other more and more with each passing day. You scowled at me with hateful eyes and when you started drinking you couldn’t stop. You did it not for the sake of getting drunk but in order to plague me. Thus, little by little, our connection faded away, until the only thing we had in common and the only thing left partially unbroken was our liver.

In those days I almost gave up, not expecting anything would change, that only a miracle could save us and put us back together.

All night long you were pushing and tossing, croaking and groaning, keeping me awake. I squeezed your hands tightly – they were hot and very dry – and studied the tension that you felt. As soon as we got out of bed, you threw up on the floor something that looked like rotten gruel.

“I got sick again,” you sighed heavily and shook your head. “It’s always the same: catching a cold, nursing a cold, then catching and nursing, over and over again.”

“My bones ache,” I confessed wearily. “Maybe we should not go to work today?”

“Would you like to spend all day in this smelly attic?” you responded angrily. “No way; you may stay if you want, but I’m going outside.”

It became clear finally and irrevocably. You are something that destroys me, and there is no natural way to get rid of your existence.

In the frosty air, we felt a little better, and our spirits brightened. But in the tunnel you threw up again, though we hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday morning. You were shivering all over; I knew my condition was lousy too; I had fever and cold chills. Out of the corner of my eye I saw your head droop very slowly forward until it finally hung down with its whole weight… and soon, the same would happen to me. Very soon we would both fall down and indifferently nuzzle a cold floor. But for some reason I had no fear of death, and waited patiently, caught up in a strange and surprising apathy for people, life, myself. I was already passing out when suddenly some person separated from the crowd and made his way towards us.