The homeless man. A short story

 
 

... I wanted to sleep, and I suddenly remembered a story from that period of my life when I was moonlighting collecting resin. I had a good job in the design institute, but there I earned two hundred and thirty roubles a month, and on resin, sometimes I could earn five hundred roubles a week. And at that time for five hundred roubles you could buy a decent motorcycle ...
And once I was carried to the place where one homeless man lived in a
hut. I went there in the evening and the homeless man, sitting at the summer campfire cleaned the fish for the ear ... They said hello. Talked. When he found out that I lived in the city, he began to ask to bring him fishing line and hooks of different sizes... Then he invited him to spend the night with him...
When we entered the hut, he warned
me.
"My cat is healthy and very angry. You try not to hurt him, or he might throw himself at you at night. Vengeful damn. When strangers without me in the hut go, he at first wool on end lifts and hisses, and if they do not listen, he throws on his chest and begins to fight with his claws.
"Now I'm leaving, and I'm not locking the doors. I have it instead of a yard dog...
I went into the house and in the twilight I saw two green, phosphorus-burning
eyes. The owner warned the cat: - His Timoshes, their own! - and Timosha was not happy to climb under the bunks...
We had no accidents and when the owner cooked his ear on the stove, they ate and drank tea. I gave him a can of stew, which I had in my backpack, which he was glad, but did not show the mind - at that time the carcass was a terrible deficit. Later he showed me a place on opposite bunks and when he lay down, he lit up and began to talk...
"I lived here until last year with a woman," he began. "In January, in the coldest, she fell ill and died three days later. To the nearest village there are forty kilometers, and in that hospital there is no ...
That's how she died here. It is not clear from what... The temperature was high, as much as the whole... But we didn't have a thermometer...
The man sighed, lit a new cigarette from the old
one.
"We were homeless in the city at first. I got out of
the camp, tried to find a place to live and get a job. But then he drank from failures, and how not to drink. We spent the night in the cellars... He exhaled cigarette smoke and scratched his beard...
"That's where I met her. She was also a drinker, but still young and nothing on her face. I still don't know how she got into this homeless man. Something there in her past was, why she fought off people and washed away ...

... Rising from the nar, the man poured himself tea, drank a few sips and continued...
"I persuaded her to go into the woods and live together. I, in the camp, was so impatient that I was glad to be any accommodation, if only not on common bunks. I, too, then the gum began to collect and money sometimes decent pricked, just drank everything. And here, like family and all that...
I was listening half-time and I was starting to snuck in.
- At first sometimes vodka was taken out here, and then somehow got used to it without it...
The hostess eats, eats lunch or dinner, and I fish or taiga shastaya ...
There are no outsiders here... The owner paused, covered
his legs with a cotton blanket...
"As she died, my main concern was how to bury her.
Frosts under thirty stood, the ground was frozen and became like glass...
I then tried to dig with a shovel, but it's off the ground as the iron
bounces. Costril two days, but only fifteen centimeters dug up ...
Then I took it out, because it had already started to smell and buried away from the hut, in a snowdrift, and poured water on top of the water, so that the ice was covered, and the rodents did not snuck in and did not eat ...
Already falling asleep, I heard a man tossing and sighing...

London. Vladimir Kabakov's

other works can be read on the Russian Albion website: http://www.russian-albion.com/ru/vladimir-kabakov/ or in the literary-historical magazine "What is The Truth?": http://istina.russian-albion.com/ru/jurnal