Free Happiness is Possible by Oleg Zaionchkovsky

she deduced the cause of their excitement from their dilated pupils and did not find this excitement in any way infectious.
    The music in the club was thunderously loud and her friend Katya had disappeared into the thickets of dancers long ago. But Nastya didn’t dance, she sat on her high stool at the bar and sipped at her endless long drink. She couldn’t go without finishing it – that would have been a betrayal of her squandered grant money. But everything comes to an end some time and the ill-starred cocktail was no exception. Nastya swung round on her stool and stretched out her shapely legs, intending to stand up on them and leave this idiotic establishment. And that is what she would have done if those legs had not – literally for just one brief moment – betrayed their owner. The drink had a bad effect on the legs and they buckled slightly. Nastya lost her balance, swayed on her slim heels and – who knows? – might even, to her undying shame, have ended up on the floor. But at that very moment a strong pair of hands grabbed the young lady and retained her in a seemly, vertical position.
    â€˜I beg your pardon, I must have jostled you,’ a pleasant male voice said from somewhere over her head.
    The girl looked up . . . and the words of gratitude froze on her lips. Her rescuer was a tall man, very broad in the shoulders. ‘A heavy!’ The thought flashed through her mind that it would have been better to fall.
    â€˜It’s started . . .’ she muttered in a trembling voice
    â€˜I beg your pardon, what’s started? Allow me to assist you.’
    But he has a lovely voice . . . Strange . . . And such a kind face . . .
Nastya’s thoughts, like her legs, had slipped slightly out of control. She lowered her head in embarrassment. If she hadn’t lowered her head, but said straightaway: ‘Yes, please help me out of here’ – or, even better: ‘I feel dizzy, please help me sit down’ – if she hadn’t lowered her head, but said that, then the evening – that same evening! – could have turned out to be wonderful. But when Nastenka lowered her head, she saw that her tights had laddered. How she could have snagged them on anything was a mystery; perhaps they had been defective to start with? But that wasn’t the point, as you well understand, the point was that with laddered tights, any move towards closer acquaintance was out of the question. Having made this appalling discovery, Nastya sobered up in a trice.
    â€˜No,’ she said coldly. ‘Thank you, but I’ll find my own way out.’
    That concluded her outing to the nightclub. It cost her half her grant and one pair of tights, but we could say that she got off lightly. Her roommate Katya didn’t show up until the early morning and confessed she had lost something that couldn’t be bought for any money. But then, she had been behaving all evening as if that was what she was trying to achieve and, anyway, we’re not concerned with Katya’s problems here. After that incident, Nastya didn’t go to a nightclub again. Not because she didn’t have another pair of tights, but simply because she didn’t have the time. Practical training began at the medical college and Nastya was assigned to do hers at CH – the N-burg Central Hospital. They didn’t believe in pampering students there and Nastya, with her accommodating character, wasn’t pampered at all. She often ended up on the night shift, and not in some quiet therapeutic ward but in A&E, which is the kind of place you wouldn’t wish on anyone, either patient or medic. A brief visit to A&E is enough to put you off gallivanting round nightclubs, or even leaving the house, for a very long time. In a month of practical experience, Nastya saw things that would have robbed any girl without medical training of her sleep and her sanity