ものもの

But as Esenin turned the key, the prospect of a week off work began to weigh on him. There was nothing for it but to hole up in his little bedroom, steeling his thesis and stomach for another bout of getting sneezed on at MGU. To sleep and wake under the nymphs with some regularity. Or to call up Lyonka after all, so they could get a feel for the remaining grasses at Romanovo while Dunia was busy with the baby. The scene behind the pane now seemed sealed in, preserved for all mankind like a museum piece, The Last Day On Earth. The desks were strewn with the debris of the morning. Panteleev's had on it a glass of tea, mostly full and sweating condensation still, as if abandoned in the path of some calamity.

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The black frames were repaired at both hinges. Esenin wiped the lenses, then worried if he shouldn't have. Thudding along the tunnel under Leninsky Prospect, he put the glasses in his breast pocket. As he arranged his coat again he could feel the jut of them against his chest, with nothing to cushion it but a reworn alcogolichka and a cotton shirt. It was too public a sensation for the Metro, as intrusive as open tears. Esenin's heart pumped like he was running. He pretended the glasses weren't there. When that didn't work, he pretended they were just a piece of clothing, only strange against his skin until his nerves dismissed them. Perhaps he had gotten away with it. He couldn't have gotten away with it. Perhaps, having noticed their absence, Panteleev was going to spring full-formed from the crowd pushing into the train. Esenin chuffed at the thought, but considering a moment longer moved the horn-rims back to their original location. That all this occupied him so much more than Pear's safety would strike home only later.

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The tenements of Chapaevsky Passage had been built in 1934, the year of Esenin's conception, and as such still hearkened to a time before peepholes, when everyone was always surprised. Volunteering to answer the buzzer in 1957, their contemporary quickly became their latest victim. After a moment of staggering blankness he found himself clutching a sturdy doorknob. Then the leather cracked over his wits, to drive them boldly across a chasm between shutting the door and going for the horns.

"Nu, zdraste."

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