Story 4 - Person under construction. Part 1.

The bar.

She woke up and saw a bold young man feeding a huge copper-coloured rat little pieces of what looked like an apple.

The night slowly emerged in her memory but not the part of her falling asleep on a couch right in front of the bar counter. How does one even fall asleep when there are people dancing around to Russian rap set so loudly the walls of the small one-storied building vibrate vigorously to the rhythm? Studying for the Latin exam a few nights long, between working and going to this bar every day, must have done the trick.

She carefully stretched her arms and legs under the blanket, which someone kindly tucked her in. Andrey surprised her yet again with this out-of-place for this bunker-like little bar, gesture - covering her with a big semi-clean blanket and forming his jacket into a pillow. She knew it was his by the smell she woke up to, of his cologne and strong cigarettes he always chain-smoked during a busy night.

The place looked even dirtier in the unforgiving light of the morning. The bold man, Eugene, tilted his head. “Well, you can sleep through a cannon fire!” He gently pet his rat, which was now comfortably settled on his shoulder, giving him a slight flair of a pirate who chose for a more extravagant pet instead of a parrot. “Andrey is gone, he left you breakfast”.

She slowly lifted her head carrying it carefully as a jar full of water, feeling the hangover headache slowly blooming in the temples. What did they even do last night? She thought of the patchy start of the night, people filing the bar with their rowdy loud voices and laughter. Later, they played novuss, this strange Latvian game, a hybrid of snooker and enormous checkers, which the boys made themselves and set in the middle of the dance floor. She was both just competitive by nature and feeling Andrey’s eyes on her all through the night, which made winning taste even better. Dancing, dancing till her feet hurt so much the shoes came off and then dancing some more. At some point she was mixing drinks herself, she realised, spilling vodka on the counter in a generous movement, and putting only Oasis songs on. Andrey knew every word of the songs without speaking any English, which seemed somehow extra charming.

“They were the first thing he saw when he woke up,

and he searched for the silhouettes of her tilted head and fiery waterfall of hair on the images in the dark right before closing his eyes to go to sleep”.

Andrey.

Everything he did seemed charming, maybe because of their age difference, or his sincere unapologetic way to carry himself. He also had a car, which seemed to her 19-year-old self a luxury so incredible, she had to smile to the thought of it. Two weeks before they drove along the Neva, on the embankment, the car jumping on the small hills and her laughing from the seconds of free fall and freedom. They watched the bridges go up against the blood-coloured sky and the oil-coloured dark surface of the water, and talked. Talked for hours and hours and hours. About the political regime, and which Beatle was the best (there was no best Beatle, it is the combination of the men that made the best music, he concluded), about what to do when she graduates, about their bunker self-made bar, which was packed every evening and where she had had the best nights in St.Petersburg.

Then he took pictures of her. He captured the strangest, seemingly dull moments, and the photos turned out interesting, but not too artsy, and very real. She felt the pictures reflected not so much her, but the way Andrey saw her, her image through the lens of his eyes, on the verge of falling in love with her. The idea of capturing that in a photograph excited them both, and they carefully printed the images and hung them in his small room. They were the first thing he saw when he woke up, and he searched for the silhouettes of her tilted head and fiery waterfall of hair on the images in the dark right before closing his eyes to go to sleep.

“… she felt like all the masks she very carefully

carved for herself, peeled off like leaves of an artichoke”.

Peeling the artichoke.

For the first time (and those times will come again and again, with different people, at different places), she felt like all the masks she very carefully carved for herself, peeled off like leaves of an artichoke, emerging the soft middle, which was vulnerable but beautiful and unseen by anyone else before, which made it even more special. Andrey was drunk on her, recognising the colours she would one day become, but was not quite yet. He felt the strength of her opinions just starting to form, the character only beginning to harden in places where it would one day become rock-solid. She was a person in making, and he could feel already what the result might be and wanted terribly to be around when it happened.


She was drunk on his love for reading and hunger for knowledge in any form, on how he had a tattoo of a fighter plane on his forearm, Lavochkin La-5, the same type of plane his grandfather flew in during the war, and had his last day in. On how he thought things through, how details mattered. How he looked at her like a treasure that he found hard to believe was given to him. How he smiled and traced her collarbones with his fingers when they watched black and white movies. Her bony structure was even more pronounced back then, and the collarbones were sharp and defined, as if they did not fully belong to her body. As the days passed by, the same evening returned again and again, bringing peace and structure to their feelings, and it seemed, all he wanted was to spend hours tracing her collarbones. They allowed each other to linger under the impression that this is how it would always remain to be.