Chapter 2

She went to the kitchen and brewed a second portion of excellent Dominican coffee. A clock with croissants, which did fit the interior, where a true French lady dwelled, said just the beginning of five, well okay, six in the morning. Meanwhile Ded Morozs were long walking in the streets… Or had it only seemed to be so to our heroine? What was she thinking about when sitting by her window at that jolly time? What did gnaw away at her thoughts, at her, who looked as the one who had everything? What did the solitary woman at the zenith of her power need if a flat with a balcony in front of the Eiffel Tower was at her service? Not to mention that it was on the sixth floor… Out of the eight available. I guess that is a rhetorical question and I believe in absence of necessity for me to put in italics the world “solitary” in one of the sentences above. Or is it worth doing it? What for? She went to the kitchen and brewed a cup of excellent Dominican coffee… She sat at the bar counter, took a whole saucer of ripe wild strawberries and got down to business—started to mix coffee with berries. She turned Russian, she was (under no circumstances will you think of her age) twenty five years old. She was born in Irkutsk, in the family of one Soviet military man and, as it befits, she had lived in a military town for all her childhood. It was a good dawn to spend the rest of the days in France, was it not? Earlyborn sat now, running her cold fingers, which were coarse from life, through some fresh wild strawberries. She reminisced the time of her youth. The air of this Paris kitchen filled with a question, appeared as the yellow awning of the summer above the dark winter, “Where is better? Here, in France, with no soul and no spark for which I wished to be kicking, or there, in the childhood, in the spring of life, where there is the mother, the father, the sister, a lot of friends and plans for the future, and I was plied with wild strawberries—there were that many of them; there was no Paris only?..” Sipping real Dominican coffee and admiring her impeccable fashionable tailor-made attire, Earlyborn started to comprehend: not all is gold that glitters and it is not everywhere where there is an answer to where questions were interweaved in the same way as Podolsk workmen pull electrical cables. Well… Had she ever thought that she would see the New Year in utterly alone, but in smart clothes and a new flat like a coconut forgotten somewhere on the beach, drowned in the sunbeams? It was face to face with palms and wanted to show off in front of these trees, which (the coconut understood that just now) ignored the large nut and would never appreciate its beauty. Earlyborn had a one-bedroom apartment; the first room (not a bedroom) was not used for something special, but Earlyborn enjoyed ornamenting it according to the season that was behind the window and the heroine’s mood: there were some paper snowflakes and figures of thousands of spruce or statuettes of red deer in winter; it was full of butterflies and bouquets of flowers in summer, literally the room turned out a blooming greenhouse that time; she filled the room with herbariums and baskets of apples, chestnuts and apples… The second room was, obviously, a bedroom, yet it was not less cozy, there: for example, there was a balcony with cane armchairs, where you could sit till the morning, reading some novels under a lamp post, which stood lonely in the silence of the street in summer, and observe these Ded Morozs with a prophecy to herself that she would be cold in her dress, yet with giving no damn about it and slowly drinking coffee. There was a kitchen as well.

The day began, and Earlyborn could not sit idle in her attire, besides, the jar of coffee was almost empty. Earlyborn decided to go to the supermarket for she had always been fond of short walks, yes, short (merely five-six hour lasting), she loved roaming around snowbound streets in Paris. No sooner said than done! She quickly put on some cloth that would warm: woolen boots, a scarf made of crocodile and… Ouch! I was jabbed with a pine needle right now! So she took all her clothing on and went outdoors. Although her house entrance had nothing extraordinary itself, our lady, who was a daydreamer and, therefore, had a flair for painting the reality in bright colours (let us bear in mind Ded Moroz), played with images born in her brains that someone genius, yet, lived in her entrance and appeared to change all her life right now. It had never come true, nor had it come so this time, however, when she tackled to leave the entrance door ajar, fighting with that still nasty wind which made her go out of the balcony, she ran into one young man.

«Ouch!»

«S-s-sorry!»

Without doubt, it was impossible just to picture that our wonderful heroine would come across with so not less wonderful a character as Ded Moroz, given that it would happen in her very entrance, when she would dare go out to purchase a jar of coffee, was it not? :) Do you think I am so naive?? Well, obviously, our heroine met Ded Moroz since it was morning, January 1^st, but who, who told you, pray, tell me that he was exactly that Ded Moroz, whom she imagined? And why was she supposed to make up a figure of Ded Moroz, not a firefighter sitting by the window that night on the sixth floor? Single women, I dare to say, are likely to love courageous Paris firefighters. Thus, there was somewhat particular in her mind, which led her to dream about Ded Moroz. So we must have someone unique there. Who was he? Right! It was her darling brother whom she was waiting for there, in France, to see the New Year in, but who, seemed, could not come due to family circumstances. And yet he was here, taking off his furry cap with a pom-pom, then, a cotton beard, scrupulously attached to his real one; Earlyborn was bewildered and scared since her thoughts which she cherished suddenly were brought in life. There was a sensitive conversation between siblings, then came tears, embraces and screams. Hearing all that, an old sleepy lady who lived on the first floor came out and explained in French, with no slight accent, if they were not about to stop making noise, she would call the police squad. Well, when the brother and the sister started whispering to each other in a bit abusive Russian, with no slight accent, it dawned on her that those people were her compatriots. Of course, after a frank talk lasted for an hour, they understood everything, and they three came to the old lady roughly at 7 a. m. to try her new cake, which, according to her words, was prepared of custard, a mash of mango, mint and a blend of berries, and an informal speech started. Oh, I know all that! Like I face these family and not scenes in the entrance of my house! It looks as if I, myself, live in France and buy fried chestnuts and acorns every day while my morning walks. Oh, all this is so familiar to me as those woolen boots or a crocodile scarf. The case did not stop with the cake, moreover, it was only the beginning, and Earlyborn’s brother, let us call him Zhenia, with no idea of what to do next, took off his shoes in order not to soil the table, stood on the table and gave her a present: the New Year trip to nowhere or anywhere Earlyborn wished and a ticket for a cruise to Antarctic. Earlyborn waited for that gift so long since it was her only dream, as a consequence, she started squealing (for a romantic person cannot switch to things at once), and that old lady who invited them and accepted their peculiarities, yet gripped the hem of her dress and was nearly to call the police. There was something in the air. Zhenia felt a shiver through his body; it was that shiver which appears when a person either surmised something or turned out very lucky, and now he was so to speak twice cheerful: individually and for oneself who was perplexed. This was in the air. As to the old lady, she put up with oddities of her guests and the wish to call the police, and she got red in face and the youth touched her wrinkles; she even began sharing the stories from her childhood. The New Year Eve is the time of miracles, that is why Zhenia and Earlyborn immediately felt like little kids, and their mood flew far away as was with characters from Esenin’s poem: “What’ the matter? Speak and speak!” And the granny spoke! She, as it befits not a young woman, gave her speech at ease, with the confidence in voice and, besides, with interest, like a good teacher who is young and full of his creative powers. There were not any fairy tales or Heaven forbid! simple recollection of irretrievable adolescence and the baggage of lectures, but there were worth listening intelligent memories, which nearly constituted a difficult to understand parable, formed a whole thing, as already fallen snow in February did with drifting snow; people could get it only given that they were bright enough to make some speculations… The old lady spoke:

“Well, surely, I cannot conjecture what was the reason for that unprecedented story to happen, however, I say, why unprecedented? Have I never seen what the human brain can reach together with the progress? What can the human language reach? For my long life, I have seen stranger things occur, yet that time the stars formed not so usual constellations that they made me ponder this way… Imagine: the USSR, fields around, rivers, groves, lakes, Gorky, 1965… Summer. If I am not mistaken, it was June, or, perhaps, July – anyway, all that happened sometime between the first and the hottest months of the summer… Here came the night, crop fields, just fields… The air was filled with warmth and, seems, moths were flying or stars falling… I, maid, stood on a hill awaited a tryst with my sweetheart, which was arranged at 3 a. m. precisely there and everywhere; he promised that he would show me literally everything, and if I wished, we would go to the sea… And there, elsewhere far away, few cows were put in pasture, a cowherd was sitting on the grass and flicking his cigarette lighter as if he was playing with the night: he winked her, and she, as he thought, should have sent him something in return… Silence! It was so quit that if I were not Liubava Sergeevna, but a popular Soviet poetess, I would definitely be famed for a poem about that silence… It was so quiet that I managed to hear the Volga river rippling, sturgeons and carp splashing around and a lost tractor mourning his last hope and aim in life. It was so quit that I started singing my song. That song was a song of pure love, and it even calmed down the tractor, so that he moved forward and roared; as to me, I saw my beloved and experienced those sweet feelings, which now Zhenia had when he guessed with the present, Earlyborn. And the morality of such a parable is that if you are unhappy or exhausted and reckon that you simply cannot get down to business—just walk a bit and wait; there is power in waiting—come out and gaze at the stars if not in the sky, try to find them in your imagination and inner world. It won’t take happiness much to appear, then. So you got this joy today: you, sad, went to buy some Dominican coffee, yet at heart you were waiting for you dreams to come true. You’ve met your expectations, and any day now you are going to Antarctic… So did you, Zhenia, you were getting here, to sister’s, with no knowledge of how she would welcome you, but you travelled, travelled and waited, and the morning, January 1^st, could not be better than it is now. Either way, I assume, if it wasn’t like this, it would be so tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or it would be already like this yesterday; all this keeps the secret of life—to wait, to live and wait, and try to see the beauty everywhere. The case was that I didn’t go anywhere with my sweetheart, moreover, we didn’t marry, and everything happened not according to the plan, but that day gifted me the idea of the importance of waiting, and my life never lost the meaning…”

The cake was delicious, and the brother and the sister spent all their time almost till lunch sitting at her table.