21

Meanwhile in the house the tables for the bereavement food were already drawn out and covered with white cloth; in the kitchen the women were making pancakes in sizzling cast-iron pans, cooking traditional bereavement sweet porridge with honey and raisins, and, chatting lively, they were carrying to the dining room stacks of plates, bottles of vodka, salads, caviar, sausages and other snacks, hot food. There also were little kids running around, crawling under the tables and popping out, stealing food from the plates and playing in the way of the adults.

“Wait till I catch ya, little buggers!” Aunt Klava snapped at them rather ostentatiously than angrily, as she gave them a slap or two with her floury hand.

Gran Zoya seemed to have forgotten how she had been wailing and wanting to follow her husband into his grave half an hour before; she now was wolfing down an enormous portion of mashed potatoes. Watching this and noting to myself this heinous hypocricy of adults, I became definitively sure that my decision to spend this day as cool as possible was exactly right. This very thought was taken right out of my mouth by one of my cemetery 'suitors':

“Even though we are here on such a sad occasion, funeral and stuff, it feels like a f*****g lot of fun, doesn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, I’ve never been to such a super fun funeral like this. New Year’s and birthday parties can go to hell!”

We were lucky not to be heard by the adults preoccupied with snacks and beverages, or we would’ve definitely been in trouble.

The blonde guy caught a toddler hanging around and lifted him.

“Can you ride a bike? No? Alrighty, I’ll teach you how to ride a bike!”

“No, wait! Let me teach him some funny little song!” I cried laughing, “Dima, do you know the song ‘o christmas c**k’?”

“Nope” answered the child staring at me with his naive big eyes.

“Well, then, repeat after me,” I said with an important air and began to sing:

“O Christmas dick, o Christmas dick,

You’re in my mouth forever…”

“Are you nuts? What the hell are you teaching that kid? Don’t listen to her, Dima!” cried Tanya putting a hand over my mouth.

But there was no stopping me, and, dodging from her and squealing with laughter, I finished:

“O Christmas dick you get so big,

As thirty dicks together…”

She chased me. I nearly knocked over the table and rushed out in the corridor. And, as I was - disheveled, barefooted and laughing like an idiot - I ran into Shurik in there - quite unexpectedly.

God, he looked just terrific!

How long hadn’t I seen him for? A year? A year and a half? I remembered, I vaguely remembered that he had been a cute blonde guy, so handsome and muscly like young Dolph Lundgren. Only there, in the dim light of the shabby wooden corridor I saw closely for the first time HOW fantastic he looked.

I drowned in his eyes, so blue and deep as two forest lakes. My head was in a whirl like a drunken person’s, and my legs shook and gave way - I probably looked like a cow on ice.

There is a perfect word for it in the English language, defining this state so exactly - to swoon. There is no analogue for it in our scanty Russian language, just like there’s no analogue for many other English words, every translation of any of them may take half a page or even more. I just swooned - I was in such a rapturous, ecstatic state on seeing him - the guy I had such a bad crush on - and I nearly lost consciousness, I was trying so hard keeping my balance and my dim eyes were all hearts. If I had been writing this story in English, all this bullshit for half a page describing the scene of my unexpected encounter with Shurik would have fit in one short sentence: I swooned at the sight of him.

At exactly this moment one of my cemetery acquaintances came up to Shurik.

“Hey! Want me to introduce this gal to you?”

“I know her.” said Shurik, looking at me and smiling.

Curtains.