Free A Russian Story by Eugenia Kononenko

running water that drives them away. They are escaping from Her who brings the milk, from Her who peeps through a gap in the fence and tells others what she has seen. From Her who brings vegetables and eggs to pay for her God-given right to peep.
    Then he returned indoors and sat down at his desk to open
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
. He read that you need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. And he felt that his soul was full of some pig-swill, not even worthy to be called chaos.
    As always in this stupid world, help came from a lie, not from a rope stretched across an abyss, not from a will to live. One day he told them he could go home and wait in the town until his right to inherit was confirmed. But his flat in Kyiv was too small, so his ailing parents were an encumbrance, though they didn’t want to be. The thing was, he was writing his dissertation; he opened the door from the kitchen to the north sitting room wider to show the Irivka women the typewriter on his desk, which then convinced them that he actually was working on something very important, something beyond their understanding.
    “So you’ll be a professor?” asked the Vegetable Woman.
    “I’ll have a higher degree, but a professor is a university teacher.”
    “My son is a student at the university in Kyiv. I think he is intending to write a dissertation as well,” said She who brings the milk, proudly.
    “If you are writing a dissertation, you have to have quiet in the house, because the slightest sound breaks your concentration,” explained Eugene.
    “But you have to cook!”
    “When I’m cooking a meal I carry on thinking about what I have written or what I have read.”
    “What’s the topic of your dissertation?” enquired Halyna Dmytrivna, the surprisingly knowledgeable deputy head.
    “Gender analysis of everyday cultural practice in post-Soviet society,” he said, without blinking an eyelid.
    “Oh, what’s gender analysis?” asked She who brings the milk, incredulously.
    “When I graduate I’ll give you a copy of the author’s summary, without fail. That will explain the whole thing quite clearly,” he replied, and the women were very pleased; they left the General’s house, pressing their fingers to their lips: “Shhh!”
    But the following day they still came round. Then he took a desperate step, offering them payment for their produce. He didn’t have much money, and he anticipated that they would refuse. And so it was. They said they would bury the vegetables anyway, so why shouldn’t they feed the future holder of a higher degree?
    Gradually, the women stopped annoying him. For one thing, they stopped coming so often, and for another he became accustomed to them, learning to shut out their nattering and replying in words of one syllable, telling them he was considering the next chapter of his dissertation.
    Wasted days were followed by quiet evenings. Dogs barked in the distance, occasionally a bird screeched in alarm, and he thought this was somehow associated with his thought process, which simultaneously tormented and comforted him. He thought about everything on earth. He thought about the people his destiny had brought him together with. He thought about Lada, with whom he had shared so many incredible minutes, hours, days, months, but it was all in the past, and he recalled her calmly, without emotion, with no feelings of guilt or anger, unfeelingly in fact! He thought about his son Myroslav. People attach so much meaning to their children; they want so badly to have them. He had nothing against that. Yet he had fathered a son without this arousing any feelings in him. When he thought about the child he was expecting in a detached way before, he was prepared to selflessly help the woman who would give birth to it. But the child was somewhere on Pushkin Street and he was here in the village, a hundred kilometres away. What happened, happened.
We have what we have
: the aphorism of the first president