Free Calligraphy Lesson by Mikhail Shishkin Page A

turning the lamp on, then off. What now? I mean, is the light on or is it dark? Not that that matters, Evgenia Dmitrievna, because I still hear you sitting.I’m a nocturnal animal, you might say, Evgenia Dmitrievna, and we don’t need light. One night I’ll up and pounce on you. I’ll sneak up and pounce.
    It’s been night for a long time, my kind Alexei Pavlovich, it’s past two, and I wanted to sleep, but I can’t, and my thoughts are all of you, or rather, of me—actually, they’re one and the same. Can you hear the beetles droning in the fogged-up kill jar? Do you remember? You were lying in the spotty birch shade, covered with yesterday’s newspaper, and sunspots and crooklegs were running across it. The fidgety daughter of your aging classmate, with whom you set out to assemble a collection for the dacha nature museum she’d just devised, was playing shaman around you, scooping up anything that flew, crawled, or stirred with her swift net. Having caught some pointless creature, the novice insectarian brought it over for identification. A piece of an article had imprinted itself on your wet forehead mirror-image. For a long time you examined the find under your magnifying glass, listened closely, eyes shut, to the droning in your fist, and finally announced, “Congratulations, child! This is the rarest stroke of luck! What a marvelous example of Dungus flyus.” That was enough for this ninny to double up in the grass in fits of cascading girlish laughter. After she caught her breath, she badgered you about your wart: the girls had showed her a house where an old woman lived who bit off warts and licked the wound; she had some kind of special saliva. You were embarrassed and didn’t know where to hide your hand. Later, on the cliff, she found a mighty, primordial swing: a very long rope with a stick at the end had been tied to a huge oak. There you were, sitting on a stump and reading a newspaper, though they’d long been expecting you for dinner, while the bundle of mischief swung and swung, and you, tearing yourself away from the letters, watched her rise up on tiptoe and clumsily pull up her foot to finally get one end of the bar under her,watched her freeze for a second, take a step, in the pose of a boy galloping on a pony, and then pull up her other leg, take a hop, lean way back, and fly off, spinning slowly, into the clouds.
    I didn’t go to classes and spent all day in bed. Early that morning my father came home from his shift. He was mumbling something, talking to himself, and he clattered his spoon in his glass for a long time. Then he went to bed. Mika got up and started checking on me with a thermometer, or milk, or drops of some kind or other. She tried to talk me into rubbing my legs and chest down with vodka. At last it was quiet: Mika took Roman to the professor’s for his lesson, but before leaving she brought me a plate of apples. I snaked the apple peel spirals around my arms like damp bracelets. The boiler man stopped by to check the flue. He was just a minute, but the smell of wet, broken-down boots, cheap cigarettes, and green firewood lingered all day. My father got up. The crackle of fresh newspapers and the hot breath of borscht reached me. Mika and Roman came back from his lesson. Roman started tuning the piano, all the time repeating that the instrument was fine but very much neglected. He banged on the keys until I started pounding on the wall with an ivory knife handle. They quieted down. That evening my father and Mika went somewhere, and Roman paced around the apartment silently, feeling everything as he came to it. Only the old parquet creaked. That night I couldn’t get to sleep, but on the other side of the wall they droned on. I was listening hard but could catch only snatches. Then I picked up a big glass flask that had roses in it, removed the flowers, poured the water into the chamber pot, and pressed the