The Lovers

It was interesting to hang out with him, as he told her different stories from his life, which made her blood run cold, and half of which, Dina later decided, were either made up or not Valera’s stories at all.

Then he moved away after completing ninth grade.

Dina remembered their farewell: her tears, which she could not hold back, his kiss on the lips, which she treasured for a long time.

“We’re moving really far away, to another country,” said Valera to Dina, making her swear an oath to keep this a secret, “so I won’t be able to write to you.”

Dina started writing to Sergey again.

The correspondence with Sergey somehow faded away on its own, and resumed only when Dina received a wedding invitation from him when she was already at university. She did not come, of course, for it was too far away and too expensive. She did not have the time either, not with all the lectures and exams. Nevertheless, she wrote him a warm letter and they continued to occasionally exchange news and photos.

Since then, Sergey had already gotten divorced and was not planning to marry again – or so he wrote in his letters to Dina. Dina sometimes imagined them meeting somewhere, and their old tender friendship blossoming into love, and then…

So she knew that a family started with love. This meant that someone she loved needed to be at her side. Love was forever. She did not take her mom’s experiences into account. Her mom was just unlucky for some reason.

* * *

When Dina was very young, she once asked her mother, “Mom, why don’t we have a dad?”

Her mother answered very calmly. “Our dad died. Never ask me about him again because it upsets me very much.”

Dina did not want to upset her mother so she did not ask any more questions about her dad. If any friends living nearby or at the kindergarten asked her, “Where is your dad?” she told them what her mother had said.

One day, her mom came home with a new man and said to Dina,

“This is Uncle Tolya. He’ll live with us now.”

Dina was very excited and asked, “Can I call him Daddy?”

Uncle Tolya was delighted by this and said, “Of course, Dinochka, call me Dad.”

Everything was wonderful at the start, they went to the movies together, to the zoo, and skiing.

Dina was proud of her dad and happy for her mom, who laughed a lot and dressed up.

Then Uncle Tolya started disappearing somewhere for a few days at a time, while Mom went around with red eyes and her hair uncombed, and told Dina that she was sick and that Uncle Tolya had gone away on a business trip.

“Dad, not Uncle Tolya,” Dina corrected her mother.

Dina’s mom would give her a strange look, not say anything back, and disappear into the kitchen or bedroom for long periods of time.

One day, Dina came back from school and found Mom in tears, and Da– Uncle Tolya yelling at her mother, also with tears in his eyes. He was holding the kitchen towel and kept wiping his eyes with it.

“Opening your legs for other men, that doesn’t count either?!” he was shouting.

He repeated those words two or three times so Dina remembered them for the rest of her life. But she did not know what they meant.

She also remembered how a strange oppressive tension settled over the apartment after that. As if Uncle Tolya’s yelling could suddenly appear from any corner, or from behind any curtain.

When she was left home alone, Dina tried to air the apartment, she opened all the windows and even sprayed the air with her mom’s perfume or Uncle Tolya’s cologne, but nothing helped. The feeling of hurt, the tears and the destroyed happiness, were stuck in the apartment like an unbearable load. Her mother laughed less and less, and Uncle Tolya took them to the cinema or the zoo less and less often. Then he did not come home for a very long time, and Dina’s mom said that he had gone away.

“Forever?” asked Dina.

“Forever,” said her mom. “Never ask me about him again, it upsets me very much.”

So Dina did not. She never had a Dad after that.

The Student Dorms

Dina stopped to think about where she should go. The girls at the dorms were preparing for the exam that she has just passed. Aunt Ira was at work, Anya and Kolya were at university. It was cloudy outside and the rain could start at any second, and she did not want to get wet. It was rather boring to eat ice-cream alone in a cafe…

She decided to return to the dorms.

* * *

The dorm rooms that were designed for two students usually housed three, and the rooms for three students housed four. It was the same in almost all the rooms, with very few exceptions.

On her floor, in the men’s half of the building, lived a husband and wife in a two-person room, Yuri Tolokonnikov, a long-haired gorgeous guitar player from Dina’s course, and Luda Zaytseva from the year above. They had gotten married last summer, and in September they were allowed to move into a separate room because they were from out of town, and they also said that they were going to have a baby soon. In actual fact, the academic year was nearly over and there was no sign of a baby or that one was on the way.

Four girls lived in the neighboring room, at least, that’s what it said on the list hanging on their door. Yet Dina had never met any of them except one, Tanya Kharitonova, from the Faculty of Mechanization and Automation. Tanya was rather odd, she could be very engaging and outgoing, or walk around with a dumb half-smile on her face, ignoring everyone. If you greeted her in that moment, she would only glance at you with a vague look and keep floating down the corridor, without saying anything. Sometimes she would lie on her bed and groan loudly, almost scream. The first time that Dina heard those terrifying sounds, she knocked on Tanya’s door, which was unlocked, and saw Tanya in that exact pose: knees under her chin, her arms wrapped around them, and her head swaying from side to side.

“Tanya, what’s wrong?” Dina asked worriedly.

“My period…” Tanya groaned.

“Do you want some Tylenol?”

“No… it won’t help… go away.…”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

Dina only realized what had really happened to Tanya many, many years later.

* * *

Dina’s classmate, Arthur Davlatyan, who came from Armenia, also lived alone in a two-person room. Dina didn’t wonder why he was so lucky – he just was.

Arthur was a generous guy and often had a group of classmates over, to celebrate a completed group project or an exam with tea. He always brought out a bottle of cognac with the tea. Not the usual cognac bottle with the factory cork and the regulation labels, but a large milky-white plastic flask, probably a liter in size. He always had incredibly beautiful and incomparably delicious dried fruits and nuts. Having once tried Arthur’s delicacies, Dina could look with nothing but pity at their pathetic copies, displayed on the shelves of stores like Nature’s Gifts.

Sometimes Arthur invited Dina to his room, to ask for her advice regarding a test or a term paper. Dina conscientiously explained all the hard parts to him, although she knew that it was hopeless since Arthur would never write the paper or project himself, so it was easier to simply write it for him. Which is what she did.

She did not like it one bit. If it had been first year, that would have been one thing, but they were in fourth year, and Arthur still had not completed a single exercise without someone else’s help… How was he going to write his thesis? How was he going to work in this field? If he had to answer at the blackboard or during an oral exam, he muttered something unintelligible, plus his accent made his answer completely incomprehensible. But his record book didn’t have any threes… not that he had any fives either, just fours. Dina was really surprised, as she knew plenty of smarter and more talented guys who the teachers were not so generous with.

“Arthur,” Dina would say emphatically, “Why don’t you study? At least memorize something, even if you don’t understand anything! Fine, I’ll write the paper and the project for you… But you’ll have to get a job in the future, and you don’t know anything, you can’t even tell an acid from a salt by its formula!”

Arthur would only smile with his beautiful Eastern lips and drop his lush eyelashes over his velvet gaze. Then he would take a large packet of mandarins or dried fruit from the cupboard, place it on the table next to Dina and say, “I will not work. I only need diploma. And you will not work. You will live like a queen!”