BREAKFAST ALFRESCO

(from Glas 6)

I woke up in August to the realisation that I was completely exhausted. The only solution was to drop everything and take a complete break for a while. I went off to a small riverside town surrounded by woods with the firm intention of doing nothing more strenuous than fishing, picking mushrooms and taking a few photographs. I got off the train, clambered on board the town's only bus, and at once fell in with a cheery old dear who offered to put me up cheaply in her home. We agreed terms and within the hour I was settled in and had even hired a bicycle. That evening my landlady and I made short work of a bottle of vodka I had bought, before graduating to some of her moonshine.

"What's your name again?" the old lady asked for the umpteenth time.

"Alexey Sergeyevich", I replied steadily.

"My name is Maria Konstantinovna", she advised me.

She talked to me about her previous house guests who were, by all accounts, persons of substance, and I noticed that the greater her respect for a person, the greater was the likelihood that she would refer to him as "Nikolayevich". All these different Nikolayeviches were a bit confusing at first, and I had to ask her,

"Which Nikolayevich was that? Nikolai Nikolayevich?"

"No, no! -- I told you -- just plain Nikolayevich!"

I soon got the knack of distinguishing between Nikolayeviches from the tone in which she referred to them, and discovered that I too had been transmogrified from a Sergeyevich into a Nikolayevich. At one point Maria Konstantinovna forgot herself and addressed me as Sergeyevich, but immediately corrected the mistake.

"Oops, what am I saying, Nikolayevich. That's my neighbour here's called Sergeyevich, and there I am mixing the two of you up."

We got on like a house on fire, and although I did not quite make it to a Nikolai Nikolayevich, a Nikolayevich I did manage, and was thus assured of cheery and friendly respect from all. I rode my bicycle all over the place, drank beer at the street-stall, was accepted by the townsfolk as one of their own, and the boys I met fishing showed me the best places for mushrooms. This was proving a seriously relaxing break.

A Ukrainian drunk in the town took a shine to me after I spoke Ukrainian to him one time he was raising Cain outside the store.

"What are you hetting so anhry about, hey?"

"What you say?", he rounded on me.

"What sort of way is that to be hoing on?" I persisted.

"Another Hukrainian!", he cried joyfully. "Mykola, where do you hum from? They told me Moscow. I'm Petro from Chernihov."

He invited me to drink with him, reproached me for having forsaken my native land, and found my rejoinder that he too seemed far from home quite beside the point. I often saw him drunk, and he would tell me crestfallen,

"Aaargh, Mykola, I've hot the blues ahain, pal. I feel really, really hrim."

I made friends with an old Jewish shoemaker. I had seen people like him when I was little but thought they had all died out. "The young gentleman is trying to hide something", he said as I was walking past his workshop.

"That's not good, dear me no, not good at all."

"What's not good?", I asked in surprise. "The young gentleman says his daddy's name was Nikolai. Nikolai -- is that ever a name for a Jew? Kalman -- that was your daddy's name. I had a friend when I was young, Boruch -- the spitting image of you, he was. And his father was a Kalman too. Marxstein, that was his surname -- not related are you by any chance?" I explained to him exactly how things stood regarding my first name, patronymic and surname, and he shook his curly grey head in amazement.

"Who would ever have thought it? You look so much like a Jew. Excuse my asking, perhaps your mummy was Jewish? No? Dearie, dearie me!"

We talked together a great deal. I was greatly taken by his parables for every conceivable occasion and his interpretations of the Bible. He quoted Pushkin and Jesus Christ at regular intervals. He invited me home one time, and his wife Tsilya served us tea with jam.

"Meet the young gentleman, Tsilya. Would you believe it, he's not a Jew!"

Tsilya was duly astonished.

"But neither is he an anti-semite," Moses added quickly.

Tsilya warmly applauded this. "I expect you know Pushkin wasn't anti-semitic either. Even wore a signet-ring with Hebrew letters. Called it his talisman. You remember the poem, "Protect me, O my talisman"?

Moses recited the poem from beginning to end faultlessly, if with a droll intonation.

Finally (how can I say this without overstepping the bounds of modesty?) a little five-year-old girl called Irochka was smitten by a wholly womanly passion for me. Everyone noticed how she would break out in smiles at the sight of me, and greet me at a great distance.

"Hello, Nikolayevich," I would hear from some way off, unable as yet to make her out among a whole group of children.

Close up, seemingly bashful but in fact flirtatious, she would lower her eyelashes and reply barely audibly to my questions. We took to giving each other presents. I would give her sweets and ice-cream, and she would favour me with a treasured American chewing-gum wrapper and, on one occasion, a rose. I don't know how she came by it, but it was a fresh, fragrant, crimson rose fit for a king. I kissed her little hand and she, I swear, blushed and made me blush as well. To say I was flattered would be an understatement. I was gobsmacked. Never had my masculine pride been so indulged. I was truly grateful to my little lady, and tried not to hurt her feelings by being patronising. My demeanour towards her was a blend of gravity and wistfulness. I think it was the wistfulness she loved me for.

My days were long and full of impressions. Nothing stood in my way whether I wanted solitude or to mix with anyone I pleased. I had no need of Introductions. Whoever I spoke to called me Nikolayevich in return and I ended up feeling I truly was a Nikolayevich, indeed the main Nikolayevich of the town. Very satisfying, and restful.

I even began to address myself in the third person:

"Well then, Nikolayevich, how about watching the sun set over the river today?"

And I would take a boat and row over to a small green island, there to remain until eleven at night in perfect solitude.

"Right then, Nikolayevich, let's have a game of football with the kids today," I would propose and, playing in goal, lead my team, it was generally agreed, to victory.

"Nikolayevich," I said to myself one day, and stopped, not wanting to go on. But I forced myself. I sat down on the bed in my room, put a book on my knees, a sheet of paper on the book, and pencilled the following letter:

"Hey, you! Here They live, and here I live. For some reason I feel a need for someone to call You. It may as well be you. You never were You for me, always only Her, a woman, with the indefinite article. When I am without you I am simply without a woman. I am happy here, and only the lack of a woman is forcing me to call you You.

I can see you starting to seethe. Take a look at yourself in the mirror. You are ugly when you are angry. Get a grip on yourself. Calming down? Go on, powder your nose and read on. You are going to read this to the end, aren't you? Of course you are. I know that.

I am enjoying myself here just like a child, and not a day passes without my remembering the happiest moment of my life. Do you know what that was? It was when I took my little son to the Black Sea for the first time. He didn't know what sea was, and the path down to the beach led through a park with goldfish ponds. When he saw those he decided this was why he had been brought, and it took me a long time to persuade him to go on. Finally he reluctantly let me drag him away from the goldfish and we came to the beach. There he freed his hand from mine, ran down right to the water's edge, and suddenly burst into song. He sang completely unselfconsciously and then, when he saw me throwing pebbles into the sea, realised that there was nothing on earth better than that, and without interrupting his song, he started throwing pebbles too.

There were no words to his song but his sense of counterpoint was better than Bach's, playing off against the sea, the sky and the trees, skipping deftly from symphony to antiphony, while uttering phonemes no one could ever hope to imitate. I felt a lump in my throat from the happiness. The next day he went down with a bout of tonsillitis... And here I am now, almost bursting into song the way my now grown-up son once did. Admittedly my present happiness isn't the equal of his. My relations with the natural world are much less intense than those I try to establish with other people. Then my happiness came not from communing with nature, but from the total contact between me (I) and my son (You). My I has met You with very few women, and then only very occasionally. Only on that one occasion with my son at the seaside was I so completely taken over and dissolved in You. I have always been looking for it, and who better than a woman to be You for a man? Only not you! I cannot imagine what force ever brought us together in the first place, or kept us in such proximity for so long. I cannot abide being with a woman if I can't sense in her at least the potential to be my You, if only for a moment. There was an unbridgeable gulf between us, with never a hint of You. Perhaps it was a different I, perhaps something else. I don't know. I knew it from the moment we met, but sinned against my nature. Not only did I have a relationship with you but I kept it going for three years, unable to find the strength to put a stop to it. It was as unnatural as homosexuality would be for me.

I don't want to insult you. Indeed, I want not to insult you. I do not love you. I have never loved you. If you can, take this as not an insult. Don't take it as an insult, please. The more so since, if you are honest, these non-feelings you can and always did reciprocate fully.

Perhaps though it will be some consolation to you that I am writing this letter in a last attempt, doomed no doubt from the outset, to speak to You.

Forgive me.

A."

The following day I decided I would actually post this letter, but then it occurred to me that nowhere in the town had I seen a postbox. I put this down to selective memory: I simply hadn't needed a postbox up till then. Leaving the house I looked expectantly up and down the street. I walked the length of several streets before finally confirming my suspicion that there really were no postboxes. I asked several people without getting a sensible answer.

"It's at the post office, of course," they said, pulling in their horns as if I had asked something improper.

By luck I bumped into Petro. "What do you want to hoe there for?", he said darkly, and began heatedly explaining that as I would soon be leaving anyway it was pointless to send letters and he, Petro, never wrote letters himself and strongly advised me against the practice. They were worse than convict's leg-irons, and he then went on to curse "Them" and all their works in the best Ukrainian tradition. I couldn't make head or tail of it and he just made me het up too and all the more determined to find the post office. Petro sensed the way the cookie was bouncing, stopped blethering in mid-sentence, and indicated through unsophisticated body language that he would take me there. We walked for quite some time down by-ways and alleyways, eventually coming to a small square where a handful of people were standing in front of a five-storey building. I looked around, but could see no trace of either a postbox or any sign indicative of a post office. Petro responded to my questioning glance with a bob of his head, indicating a spot above us. I looked up and saw the postbox. It was attached to the corner of the building, between the third and fourth floors. The window nearest it was bricked up, but at third floor level there was a narrow cornice, no wider than a human foot. You were evidently expected to emerge from the postal authorities' office window and sidle along it to reach the postbox.

Now I could see what was so exercising the crowd. A doddery old man was trying to climb out of the window. He looked scarcely up to walking along the street, let alone balancing his way along the ledge. I angrily demanded why nobody in the crowd was posting his letter for him, but they explained that letters had to be posted by the sender in person, and there was a policeman in the post office to check documents. The old man stepped out on to the ledge and, clinging to the wall, gingerly edged his way towards the postbox. He did not make it. The crowd gasped, and gathered round his body. The official inquest found that the old man did not die as a result of the fall but, on the contrary, fell as a result of having died. The policeman in the post office came out, picked the letter up, and said: "Citizens, the text will now be made public." The crowd fell silent.

The policeman tore open the envelope, unfolded the sheet of paper inside and read with slow deliberation,

"My dear son, I am ill and will die soon. Please come, my son, or there will be nobody to see me buried. Your father, Gregory Stepanovich."

"There now, a totally unnecessary letter," remarked the representative of the law. "We would have buried him at public expense anyway."

I saw Moses standing in the crowd with his head bowed. His shoulders were shaking and tears were rolling down his cheeks. I went over to him, broke into tears myself, and said,

"Moses, you are old and wise. Please tell me what is going on. I don't understand at all, Moses."

He patted my head and whispered, "All is as it should be, young gentleman, all is as it should be."

"How can it be? What are you saying?", I protested.

"The old man was very ill. I knew him well. If he had not died now he would only have gone on suffering for a few days more. His son's coming wouldn't have changed anything, and anyway he couldn't have come: he's doing time for rape. So there you are, my young friend. Everything is for the best. I can't remember who said that. Marx, was it, or Spinoza? The fact of the matter is that the post office used to have much more work than it could cope with, and then people wiser than you or I worked out the present system and everyone could see there had been no need for the problem in the first place. Young people used to get up to no end of hanky-panky by correspondence and before you knew it they had left the town to start families in some other place. What was the point? Could they not perfectly well marry here? Then they would be writing letters asking their parents to send them money, and their parents would write back to give them sound advice. We're saved all that now, and the population is growing all the time, not falling. People hardly write letters any more, and, by the way, in winter they pour water on that ledge and it freezes over, so people only send letters in a real emergency. There, now you can see, can't you, that it's all for the best?", Moses concluded. "Hey," he cried after me, "Where are you off to, young gentleman? Stop, Alexander. Wait!"

But I was already running up the staircase to the third floor. I showed the policeman my papers and the letter. Climbing out of the window, I quickly made my way along the ledge, only to realise when I reached the postbox that posting a letter in it was less simple than it appeared at first glance. You had to crouch down on your heels if you were to be able to reach the opening. I dropped my letter in, turned around and stood there on the ledge facing the crowd. They were following my every movement. It suddenly came to me that there was no need for me to retrace my steps through the post office: I could jump across to a tree growing below the window, catch hold of one of the branches and climb down the trunk.

"Aiee-ee-ee," I cried, and jumped.

"Aiee-ee-ee," shouted the crowd polyphonically, thinking they were witnessing a suicide. But my plan succeeded.

I got down easily, only to be met on the ground by the policeman, who told me severely that as this was my first offence, and since I was a visitor, he would only impose a fine (of twenty-five roubles!), but any repetition would lead to fifteen days in jail. The crowd were all for taking my side, but Authority was implacable. Then I quickly said to the policeman:

"Name!"

"What, mine?" he asked, startled.

"Yes, yes, of course yours," I snapped.

"Sorvachov, Lieutenant Sorvachov."

"Aren't you just a little bit worried, Lieutenant Sorvachov?" I asked him meaningfully, patting his shoulder with my passport.

"All right, all right, forget it," he conceded.

I walked away through the crowd.

"Sock it to them, Nikolayevich", I heard someone whisper admiringly. Later I learnt that Lieutenant Sorvachov had been acting in strict accordance with a regulation displayed on the wall in the post office which stated that the sender "must return to the counter in the same manner to register his letter's despatch".

Not only had I broken the law, but I had attempted to use my Moscow connections to pervert the course of justice. I was suitably abashed, but only for an instant and this instant of embarrassment, which I shrugged off as a momentary aberration, enabled me to shrug off the whole episode which was threatening to turn into an obsession.

"Let them all hoe to the Devil!" Petro cried rapturously.

Moses gave me a reproachful look, shook his head and asked,

"What did you have to do that for, young gentleman? You've upset me now. I'm still greatly agitated. See how you've made my flesh creep." He rolled up his sleeve, stroking his right hand along his left arm and demonstrating his goose pimples.

Irochka quite ceased to conceal her love for me and once, sitting on the steps in front of my house, I suddenly felt her little arms wrap around me. My young lady had stolen up behind and now hung on my neck. I sat her on my shoulders and gave her a ride. We galloped about until she herself decided she had had enough.

"I like you, Nikolayevich," Irochka said. "Come down here. I want to give you a kiss."

I was utterly confounded by that kiss. It had a quality of irrepressible feminine boldness which always takes the feet from me, and that tenderness to which I yield unquestioningly. There was nothing erotic in it. Irochka was a touching small child, but I was moved to find such a clear manifestation of female sexuality in this little girl.

I stayed on. My holiday leave was not yet over and I was looking forward to more rest and relaxation. The post office closed for maintenance, and there were rumours that the regulations for sending mail were being revised. The old man was buried, as Lieutenant Sorvachov had promised, at public expense and there were many people at his funeral. I did not go, although Moses later told me I had been expected. "It really is very peaceful here," I thought, looking at the river and feeling the light breeze on my face. "I should take my bicycle first thing tomorrow morning and go a bit further afield than I've been up till now." That decided, I lay down to sleep, looking forward to a pleasant cycle ride the next day.

I did not wake of my own accord. I realised with a start that someone was knocking at the window, got up and looked out but could see no one. Deciding I owed my rude awakening to some childish prank I threw on my clothes and went out to the porch. An unfamiliar countenance was peering at me round the corner of the house and it was not that of a child. Even before I could make out whether the face belonged to a man or a woman I noticed, or rather sensed, that there was something odd about it. Something deviant. It was an old woman's face, but I somehow knew that it did not belong to an old woman. From behind the weak lenses of a pair of round spectacles two small, expressive eyes were surveying me. I was amazed by the way they darted. They seemed to be engaged in sizing up all my parameters: each hand in turn, my nose, ears... and so on. The mystery woman's hair was cropped short and noticeably falling out. Her mouth was twisted in an expression perhaps sour, perhaps sarcastic. Strangest of all was that she did not at first seem to know I was looking at her, but when she finally did she quickly pulled her head back and did not peep round the corner again for some time.

I was perplexed. What was she playing at? At length she peeped round the corner again. Her eyes were no longer darting about. She was rolling them slowly, or rather she seemed not to be moving her eyes at all but keeping them on one spot while turning her head to show me her profile. There was something very sinister in this, the more so since her eyes were black, and gleaming with a dreadful purposefulness. She indicated some object with her head, but I could not make out what it was.

"I won't give it back," she suddenly announced, cocking a snook.

"What won't you give back?" I asked totally bemused.

"The bicycle."

"What bicycle?", I asked rather stupidly, since it was already clear she meant the bicycle I had hired. I could see now that it was not where I had left it. At this point my landlady, Maria Konstantinovna, appeared on the scene.

"Nikolayevich", she whispered in my ear, "That's Tanya, our village idiot. She's gone and taken your bicycle. Don't you stand for any of her nonsense. Go you and get it right back."

Tanya stuck out her tongue at Maria Konstantinovna and chanted, "Get it back, get it back, just you try! I've gobbled it up."

"Gobbled it up, has she", said Konstantinovna wryly. "Don't you listen to her, Nikolayevich, you get it back!"

"What use is a bicycle to you," I wheedled. "Let me have it back and I'll buy you a nice sweetie."

"Bicycle-nicicle-tricycle," Tanya teased. Her expression was mad, but I detected method. Not a glimmering of intelligence, but a deeply sinister determination. She seemed more witch than idiot, and I began stubbornly insisting that she must let me have the bicycle back. It was a fact that I really could not get by without it. I ended up grabbing Tanya's hand and dragging her after me. She had the oddest way of resisting. She did not tug in the opposite direction but tried to lean on me, and when I caught her round the waist she suddenly threw her legs in the air, the result of this improbable manoeuvre being that I had to catch her in my arms. Having successfully accomplished this she became calm and nestled against my cheek like a child. A sharp pain pierced me, her touch awakening a still raw memory. I moved my face away and gazed at her. She had fallen asleep, her twitchiness now stilled, and I gazed, recognising and yet not recognising her. Her upper lip was lightly whiskered, and wrinkles disfigured her face, which even without them would have been far from beautiful. Her body was quite incredibly thin, with breasts which were scarcely apparent. She was carelessly dressed, although her dress was not cheap, and was even modish. She had no trace of feminine allure, and yet there was a magnetism which served her as well or even better. This must have been what made me take her for a witch when she had been behaving so oddly. But what kind of witch, I wondered. An old hag like Baba-Yaga, or a bewitching young maiden? What must she have been like in her youth? Her present magnetism must have been even more fascinating then than beauty.

"Tanya," I murmured, deep in thought and suddenly the realisation hit me:

"Tanya, Tatyana, my Tatyana! It can't be! Or is it? How could she possibly have come to this? The village idiot of these remote parts! My God, my God!" I had known her (or perhaps not her) some years earlier. I was in love with Tatyana, oh, how I was in love! She didn't reject my advances. She would go to concerts with me, but all the same behaved in such a way that any move towards closer intimacy struck even me as indelicate, and I became as gauche as a schoolboy with her. She had a way of suddenly freezing those darting dark eyes, and stabbing her intent gaze into you as if she were threading you on a needle, so that you felt a sharp pain in your chest or belly. She tormented me, but I wanted her. I lusted after her, even if a childish bashfulness inhibited my actions. I think Tatyana knew all this perfectly well but gave me no encouragement, and I knew better than to expect passion, or even simple tenderness from her. But how I fantasised about that, how it filled my dreams!

I invited her out to a restaurant one time. It was on the sixth floor of a hotel. She accepted, and I harboured lustful thoughts of getting her drunk, taking her back home and having my wicked way with her and hang the consequences. We sat down to dinner and Tatyana readily drank the wine, laughed at my jokes and was gay and garrulous. Her eyes darted over the other tables and she let her glance dwell on me at length, but without the dread intentness. I reckoned the evening was going my way, although of course I was nervous and no doubt it showed. The suave waiter serving us was attentive and had evidently instantly taken in the situation, or at least that was the impression he was giving. I could see my lady was very taken by him, and knew instinctively that if he were in my place all Tatyana's resistance would have melted like wax. This really got up my nose. I decided to finish the meal as quickly as possible.

The waiter was gliding towards our table bearing a tray, quite obviously putting on the style for Tatyana's benefit. We both had our eyes on him. As he reached our table he accidentally, and it clearly was an accident, tipped the tray. A fork fell off it and under our table. I bent down to retrieve it only to hear a heart-stopping shriek:

"Let me get it for you!"

The disproportionate emotional charge attaching to his shriek had no time to register, because I had raised the tablecloth and seen what was underneath the table. I turned round to find that the waiter, his eyes starting out of his head, was standing petrified, but literally. He had turned to stone. He had become a statue. He was dead. Only the look of terror on his face was alive, frozen there for all eternity.

I glanced under the tablecloth again. There was a chasm beneath the table in which there billowed and swirled, rose and grew, breathing and shuddering, unevenly pulsing, stirring and threatening to suck us in, CHAOS. And it was moving towards us.

"Quick!", I shouted. I grabbed Tatyana by the hand and dashed for the fire exit. There was no time to wait for a lift. We ran down the stairs, floor after floor. Tatyana's high heels held us up. She took them off and ran on barefoot, while behind us something billowing swirled, intent on catching up with us. We reached the exit but the door was locked.

"Break the glass", I decided, but immediately realised the cloud would pursue us through the broken glass. I took a run and slammed into the massive door with my shoulder. I did not expect it to budge, but it burst open and we rushed through at the last minute. The Chaos was almost upon us. I slammed the door behind us and blocked it with my body, remaining in that position until Tatyana had flagged down a taxi, although it soon became clear that the Chaos was safely locked in and no longer in pursuit. Tatyana gave the taxi-driver my address herself. We went up to my room and I collapsed into the armchair. Tatyana paced up and down.

"Omigod", she said, "Omigod!" Then: "That was Hell, that was simply Hell. It got under my skirt! It got into me!", she said, tugging at the folds of her skirt. Then she began pulling it up, murmuring something unintelligible and then, coming over to my chair, she said, quietly coaxing,

"Take me!"

I looked at her, speechless. "Take me, I said", she repeated, raising her voice and suddenly slapping my face.

"Oh, this is insufferable", she cried, raining blows on my face and repeating again and again, "Take me, take me!"

I only looked at her in silence, with tears in my eyes but unable to move.

"All right, then!" she said threateningly. She put on her shoes and went out without locking the door. She soon returned, accompanied by a thickset, cheerful young fellow. Seeing me, he whistled.

"Hello, hello, what's all this then?"

"Pay no attention to him," Tatyana replied, "We do it all the time."

"You do?" the boy guffawed. "What's with you then, pal," he enquired. "Can't get it up? Or are you a weirdo?"

"Impotent", Tatyana said curtly, adding,

"Leave him alone."

He nevertheless gave my shoulder a pat before starting to strip off, glancing artfully first at me then at Tatyana.

I sat there totally drained, unable even to turn away or close my eyes. For some reason I recalled the tale in The Decameron where a priest demonstrates how to drive the Devil back to Hell.

At last Tatyana pushed her young buck off and watched him dressing with some distaste. When he had done up his trousers he pulled out a five-rouble note and held it out to her.

"Piss off!" she said imperiously.

"Cool it," he rejoined. Tatyana got up, took his jacket and flung it out on to the stairs. "Piss off!", she shrieked, and he did. Tatyana slammed the door behind him and stood there for a moment, naked, leaning against the door as I had when we had rushed from the restaurant. Then she came over, knelt beside me, and whispered very quietly, "Please, please forgive me." I stroked her hair, not daring to touch her naked shoulders or breasts. She wept, clasping my knees and repeating: "Forgive me! Forgive me!" We never saw each other again. And now here I was with this crazed Tanya asleep in my arms. Was she or was she not Tatyana? A madwoman? A witch? I did not know. Maria Konstantinovna gave me directions as to the where-abouts of Tanya's house, warning that it was quite some distance. Tanya lived in the outskirts. I lumbered right across town bearing her in my arms. We had almost reached our destination when I realised Tanya was not asleep but eyeing me through half-open eyelids. I put her down and she walked beside me perfectly normally. We made our way in silence to the half-ruined hut, long abandoned by its previous owner, where Tanya now lived.

In the yard there was a small awning over a table and bench sunk into the ground. I was horrified to see a child of five or so sleeping on the table. Tanya motioned me to the bench and I sat down gingerly. A minute or so later my madwoman came back out of her hovel carrying a plate, which she placed on the table beside the child. On it were two forks and a long, thin chop. "Have some", Tanya said, cutting the chop in two and pushing half in my direction.

"No thanks."

"What do you mean, no thanks? What did you come here for then?"

"My bicycle."

"Ho, ho, ho!", Tanya roared, her eyes rolling. "This is your bicycle! Eat it up!"

She started laughing again, impaled her half of the chop on her fork and started chewing at it.

What could I do? I too took my fork, stuck it in the chop and cautiously took a bite. To my surprise it was very good. When I had finished eating I knew that what I had just eaten was, without a shadow of doubt, my bicycle, or more exactly, half of it.

And more exactly still, the back wheel and saddle. The bicycle was now within and a part of me. Tanya observed my meal, her crazed eyes rolling. When I had finished she said quietly,

"Off you go." I did not move.

"Go on, push off!", she shouted. I left, then looked back. Tanya had got up on the table beside the child. There they lay hugging each other. She had turned her back to me, but the child had woken and was looking at me with its small but expressive black eyes. It was looking at me with a totally unchildlike intensity.

I had only gone a few metres from the hut when I ran into one of the village boys who said, "Nikolayevich, Maria Konstantinovna is looking for you."

"Where is she?"

"There, past the hut..."

I turned in the direction he had indicated to see my landlady signalling. I went over.

"Nikolayevich", she said, "Your bicycle is here."

"I don't have a bicycle any more," I replied.

"Whatever are you going on about? Look, that's it there!", insisted Maria Konstantinovna.

The bicycle was leaning against the wall of the hut. I bent over and checked the registration number. It was the same as the one I had hired, but I didn't believe it.

"Someone is having me on," I thought to myself. "Otherwise what did I just eat for breakfast? Either this is a trick, or I'm seeing things." Whatever the truth of the matter, my hallucination was accepted back by the bicycle shop later that day.

And the next day I went back to Moscow without saying any goodbyes.

In Moscow people call me Alexey Sergeyevich.