Zakhar Prilepin - Sin

“Everything’s fine, Lev Borisych,” I replied, smiling. “People got a little bit carried away… Everything’s fine.”

“Nothing got broken? No one got hurt?”

“Nothing’s broken, everyone’s fine, Lev Borysych.”

And he left, looking around, but without finding anything.

“Zakhar, good on you!” Syoma acknowledged cheerfully. “Ah? That damn samurai would have wasted us. How did you guess that they had to be driven away?”

“I looked into his eyes, and realized it immediately,” I replied, also smiling.

For three minutes or so, we couldn’t stop laughing, re-telling each other how it all happened.

It’s a good feeling when you think that the worst is over. There wasn’t much time left now: soon it would be morning.

A girl wearing a dress that suited her wonderfully came out to us in the foyer, smiling. She had a large, pure face, definitely beautiful. She had high heels, calm hands and manners. The only thing is that she was not so young, around thirty-three. But can you call that a shortcoming?

“What happened here?” she asked, only looking at me.

To be honest, I had noticed her when she arrived at the club — alone. And then, when she was sitting on a tall stool, sipping a cocktail at the bar, also alone, I saw her again. I thought: She’s very beautiful, and so no one goes straight up to her. They don’t believe that she came here by herself…. And as if those kids are going to go up to her, the jerks…

Molotok immediately grasped the situation — he has no instinct for anything, but at these moments he does.

“I’ll go and look how things are going inside…” he said quietly and left. I didn’t need him to do that, but Molotok wouldn’t believe me.

“There was a fight, a bunch of idiots…” I replied, calmly looking at the smiling face.

I’m no psychologist, and not a collector of thin hands open to be read, or hot and compliant bodies — but I guessed everything from the way that she looked at me.

She looked at me without taking her eyes away — right in the eyes, with a clear smile on her occasionally trembling lips.

“Why do you always wear a beret?” she asked.

Just as I thought, she didn’t care about the fight, who was fighting whom. She had to ask me something, and so she did — and forgot about her questions straight away.

“A beret?” I asked and got a cigarette — not because I was anxious, but just because I hadn’t smoked for a while.

While I was taking it out of the packet, I thought that she had to notice the wedding ring on my ring finger.

But she was indifferent to the ring, and kept smiling, looking me over, sometimes slightly tilting her head to the side.

Grown-up women like this can hold pauses, listen to pauses, and not hurry at all. You don’t have to keep a conversation going with them, you can look at each other, as if playing a simple game: well, what are you like? You’re beautiful, right? And looking at me? Why?

And she answers all these questions without saying anything.

Her answers were also in the form of questions: don’t you yourself understand? — this is how she replied silently — you’ve understood already, haven’t you?

Yes, I had.

“I wear a beret because I don’t have hair on my head, and if I sit like this all evening, without a beret, the customers find it very interesting, and sometimes amusing.”

I took off my beret, revealing my shaven head. This was a very open gesture, almost intimate: look, you asked me to. If she had taken off her shoe and placed her foot on my knee: … look at how I’ve painted my toenails… it would have been almost the same thing.

She stretched out her hand — to stroke my head, to see if it was prickly — but I caught her by the wrist with a light, almost cat-like movement.

“You’re so… nimble. Do you really object?”

You talk so well, I thought. Many girls have talked to me here, but none of them asked me like this: …do you really object…

“Please don’t,” I said, and having held it less than an instant, I let go her hand, which pulsed in my fingers, with thin veins, warm and tender, like a bird.

If I had held it, then the melody which it seemed that we had already begun to play, listening to each other, would have continued. But I didn’t.

She didn’t believe it right away: she probably didn’t want to believe that everything had been cut off so quickly. She thought that I was a little embarrassed.

She smiled, recovering, but the smile hung in the air, as no one responded to it.

I took a long drag, and slowly breathed out the smoke. Finally, I also smiled, but with a different smile, in a different register: nothing’s going to happen, no melody, I’m not playing . And I put my beret on.

“Well, I’ll go and dance some more,” she said cheerfully.

“When you dance, I’ll come and watch you,” I replied in the same tone.

She went away, and I knew that she would never come back to me again. And I didn’t regret it. I looked at the filter of the cigarette. It was just the sixth that night. What a horrible night, it was protecting my health. Sometimes I manage to smoke a whole packet. And this was just the sixth, which I threw away, missing the bin.

I looked at the clock: it was a little after three.

No, had I really smoked so little… I took out the packet. There were only six cigarettes missing, indeed.

My head was aching. I wanted to go home, I was sick of everyone.

The waitress came running over, she was new, Alya was her name. I didn’t know what sort of name this was, Alya. Perhaps it was short for Alina.

“Listen, go and tell that prick not to touch me. He keeps touching my leg,” Alya said, flaring her nostrils.

“What prick?”

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

Why does she think it’s my job to drive men away from her, I thought lazily, sliding off the stool. She’s put on the shortest skirt you can imagine. And she shows her legs… they’re beautiful… to everyone. ‘Come on, I’ll show you’ — that’s a way to talk… after all, I don’t tell her where to go.

She has long legs, yes, only she herself isn’t attractive. But her legs are wonderful.

“That guy.”

I nodded and went up to the table where the three Moscow guests were sitting. It was their driver who had been stroking the waitress’s leg. He watched me coming over.

“Please, don’t touch the waitresses anymore,” I said, leaning over. “OK?”

The driver shrugged his shoulders.

“I didn’t touch anyone.”

“All the better,” I replied and walked away.

Silly sheep, I thought again. She should wear a more decent skirt, she’s not at a children’s matinee performance…

I had only just got back to the foyer — it was empty, which was not allowed, because someone could get in without a ticket — I had just walked in, when the tall Muscovite stopped me, touching me on the shoulder.

“You insulted my friend,” he said.

“I didn’t insult anyone,” I replied, tired. But this was a different, almost weak-willed tiredness, not the one I felt at the start of the evening, that arose from predictable human insolence, which I could break so easily.

“He didn’t touch anyone, and you insulted him, you ruined his evening.”

“What do you mean, he didn’t touch anyone, if she’s complaining?” I said. Molotok was still away somewhere.

“He didn’t touch her,” his voice was well-modulated, and as he talked he trembled with an approaching fury that was prepared to break out, which I had nothing to resist with. “I think you should go and apologize,” he said.