I express my appreciation to Tatyana Silchenko and Julia Zotkina
for their great contributions and support.
Picture on the cover is made by the author.
8th June 2013 (Saturday)
“The next station is Kievskaya…” Victoria closed her eyes, put the earphones back on her head and looked into the darkness. She had been using metro circle line for two hours already, trying to prepare for philosophy exam.
It was the beginning of summer, the middle of June. Graduation exam. Like most of the students Victoria didn’t want to learn anything. She wanted to hang out, drink, eat and sleep. Sleep a lot.
Why youths constantly want to sleep? Always and everywhere. Just sleep. It’s impossible to think about anything but soft pillow and warm blanket… okay, just pillow, not necessarily a soft one… Who cares about exams?
The lecture notebook was lying cosy on her knees, being untouched for a long time. Maybe knowledge would get into her brain solely because the notebook was lying on her knees. Later it dawned on her that none of it would crawl into her head willingly.
She went out at Komsomolskaya station and wandered. The weather was too perfect to pore over books. Victoria reached a café and bought a cup of cappuccino. Probably it would help her to cheer up and clean up her act.
It was Saturday. Mid-afternoon. What idiocy it was to drag around Moscow, hug a thick exam book, trying to prepare for philosophy… Fine.
‘Vic?’ friend’s voice on the phone slightly stirred up her sleepy head. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’
‘Me? Hanging around the centre. At the moment I’m drinking coffee. I wanted to learn Hegel’s basic concepts… and other ideas geniuses of the past. And you?’
‘I’ve just got up. Just got the hell up! Vic, I’ve slept through everything. Yesterday my boyfriend and I were going nuts and today I have no strength. And I have no idea how he’s out there!’
‘Then I’m not gonna wait for you, aren’t I?’ Vic smiled.
Vasilisa was a very active lady. She was not active in sports but in life. Her life was humming and in full swing: everyday parties, endless holidays, guys, friends. She had no clue what adulthood was, and she was supposed to grow up.
Every three months she got a new boyfriend just because the previous one annoyed her with his existence. He could annoy her with anything that other people would pay no attention to. For example, it could be a curl out of place, a mole on the back under the shoulder blade, how he smoked, the way he looked, the colour of his eyelashes… she was irritated by everything. Then Vasilisa would find a person who wouldn’t irritate her.
Every time when another “Bill” was at hand Vasilisa chirped and was insanely happy. She was sure she fell in love and that love would be till the last breath, that he was her Romeo, she’d been waiting for all her life and finally got him.
The most amazing thing was that the majority of her dates suffered terribly after she dumped them. She didn’t care but they did. They ran after her, begged to start over, forgave all her shenanigans, and Vasilisa said that she “heard some noise”.
It was impossible to wake Vasilisa up after party and make her go. More precisely it could be done, but around 6-7 pm.
‘Well, I'll probably come over tonight, okay’ the girl mumbled in a sleepy voice.
‘Yeah, I got you.’
Her answer usually meant that most likely she would not come. But some part of her character did not allow to say, "I’ll not come", Vasilisa tried to disguise her true intentions.
Victoria finished her coffee and went down the street to Okhotny Ryad. She didn’t actually care where to go and after a while she reached a massive bookshop at Lubyanka.
It was a multi-storey building full of books. All the books were carefully sorted by themes and sub-themes. That place was a real catch for bibliophiles. Victoria never thought that she was one of them. She could read some fiction or psychological thrillers. She didn’t like pulp fiction but sometimes she wanted to read heart-rending book about love or watch a beautiful modern fairy tale about a handsome guy about thirty who fell in love with a usual poor girl who wanted nothing from him but holy love and they both would savour it. She was fed up with it, but it was possible to enliven the environmental severity.
Victoria decided to enter the shop, having intention to find an absorbing book, which would touch her very rough soul by the very annotation and just make her want to read it in one breath.
Dear Lord, how many books were in that shop! Despite that some books seemed to be the same fiction type there were so many sub-styles that Victoria just lost herself in search of a suitable one.
A few hours later, streaming with perspiration Victoria finally came out having bought two books about some wenches and pucks.
The girl almost forgot about the thick middle age philosophy doorstopper. Oh, dear God, it was so hard to read what you had to. When Victoria was at school, she had a global problem: the reluctance to read what was assigned. She wanted to read what she wanted! Disagreements with her literature teachers often led to scandals of all sorts.
It couldn’t be helped. Studying at university Victoria got that reading was an important thing…too important. Surely after school graduating literature course was done and all the classical books were read. Yeah, nobody argued that some of the reading seemed to her to be nonsense, she disagreed with some, but there were interesting books too and the majority of them. Victoria realized that many books which were offered by the Department of Education, mustn’t be read by teenagers!
Vic remembered herself when she was 14. She was uncontrollable, hated to talk about love in any ways, knew nothing about respect and cared about nothing. She didn’t know what fear was! How could she understand the love in The Captain's Daughter or the most severe sense of Raskolnikov’s remorse? No, she couldn’t. She didn't care.
So being satisfied with the buying Victoria left the shop and went ahead towards Tverskaya street but she ran into an elderly woman who sold flabby, dilapidated books which were older than the woman herself.
The girl wanted to pass by, but her attention was drawn by a black book with fading yellowed pages, withered edges as if they were burnt with a lighter. There was nothing on the cover: no title, no author. There was just a black void. Nothing more.
As soon as Victoria took the book, she realized immediately that it was a rarity in her hands. It smelled of time. Here you can smell time when you open those old books.
The title was on the second page – Demonology. The girl’s heart began to rejoice. She loved supernatural stories and she wasn’t going to put the book back on any account. Although the price issue concerned her as well.
Her family wasn’t very rich. Her mum, Olga Vladimirovna, was a doctor at a city hospital. She got paid well because of her experience, years of employment, so life was liveable.
Her father lived separate from Victoria. He had a family but didn’t forget his daughter. He tried to help her on a moral and monetary level. He had a good thing going: he was an analyst of quite well-known company and the general manager’s right-hand man. You couldn’t say that he was a social animal, but he got paid enough to support Victoria and his new family. Vic never asked him to help. She had a chip on her shoulder because of her mother.
Olga Vladimirovna and Victoria’s father were in touch well. Ex-married couple managed to keep amity, but they screwed up the marriage.
Essentially Victoria was glad that there was no family feud. Despite that they lived separated they didn’t lose respect.
After having spent enough time turning and smelling the book’s pages, Victoria shifted her gaze at the elderly woman.
‘How much?’
‘One hundred roubles, dear’ the woman smiled.
‘One hundred roubles?’ her amazement was unlimited.
What is one hundred roubles in our time? You can say that this piece of paper is equal to toilet paper. It is two metro tickets or two bus ones, and you can have either metro or bus, not both. These are two loafs of bread and a milk. So, by the evening there would have been neither money nor a full stomach and the girl, surely, didn’t look twice at every penny.
Victoria was confused that the book was written in Cyrillic characters looked like modern Russian. Actually, you could get the general idea of the sentences, but some words were foreign gibberish.
Victoria wanted the rarity to be obligatory at her home, not to be sold for a song in the streets. The girl felt sorry for the elderly woman. She was under necessity of selling such rare things for trifling sum to keep on living out her remaining days. Victoria felt sorry that no one cared for old people at those moments when they really needed help financially and emotionally. Nobody cared for them: children were interested in their own lives, government was involved in infighting, assured that the whole country was well-off, and everybody was living their lives to the fullest.
Victoria paid 500 roubles for the book. She would have given more but she didn’t have more cash. The elderly woman was protesting, speaking that the sum was too much… Finally, Victoria got her to take money because the book should have cost thousands!
In an hour Victoria got to Krasnopresnensky park which was near her house. She didn’t want to go home. No one was there. Her mother was in the country, did gardening.
Victoria never understood a joy of exhausting oneself with work and then going hell knows where to pound away. Was there any rest?
The girl was sitting on a bench. She had hardly found the vacant bench which had been still warm after a couple with the baby carriage. It was good Victoria was passing by. To find a free bench in such a perfect day was likely not to happen.
The girl wanted to look the book through carefully. The book consisted of different articles describing evil creatures. There were pictures, words scratched by a dip pen on pages. There were lots of symbols and seals, some mysterious signs. All of them seemed to be freehand writing. But what was so special about it? When the book had been written there was no photoshop and designer program stuff.
It was a full encyclopaedia of demons, angels, monsters and other supernatural creatures, their complete performance, appearance description, activities. You can imagine how terrifying the book was at the time when Malleus maleficarum tractate was one of the most popular reading.
The book was funny: very thick, full of information, a perfect thriller could be made out of it! But despite all the jokes you could feel a kind of greatness.
Suddenly Victoria noticed a two-fold blotter-like paper between 800 pages. There was a drawn circled triangle. Some symbols were depicted at each corner of the triangle. Inside the triangle there were three circles intersecting in the middle. Each of them had a picture of a sign inside. The numerals were placed around the circle framed the triangle in shape of a pentacle. Those weren’t just ordinary numerals. It was just a set of numbers which made no sense for Victoria. But she had a funny feeling that for a person who had drawn that geometry, every comma and dot had a vital meaning.
There was an inscription above the circle – Kharon. The girl had no idea what a curse that was and whom to put it on and why. Text in a shape of a verse, written in Latin didn’t clarify the situation.
Turning the note in her hands, the girl put it back into the book and decided to keep on preparing for philosophy.
Victoria dedicated that day for philosophy, she left home as it was impossible to be focus there: there was a constant wish to walk.
Then she was outside, trying to get into the basis of philosophy, having left only a week and a half before final examination. That was no big deal! Victoria was just like most students: I wanna do nothing, learn nothing, read nothing, just give me my diploma and leave me alone this beautiful summer.
The girl was sitting in the park for a long time, surfing through logic of luminous intellects. Then she sorrowfully went home: she couldn’t remember anything! Should she panic? There was a week and a half left…before the exam. No. It was too early to panic.
Her boyfriend – Daniel came to Victoria in the evening and drew her attention away from thinking of studying.
They’d been dating for two years already. They met when Vic was a third-year student and he was a final-year one. They walked together twice, drank, woke up in the same bed couple of times without destroying friendship with passion. Then they thought that couple of times could be turned into a horizontal eight and allowed passion and love to crawl under their wing.
Daniel came to her more often, trying to woo her and it wasn’t easy during the studentship. Victoria was blooming and was like a dog with two tails. As her mother was happy, too, because she liked the young man. Even at that time her mother considered Daniel a promising flower which wasn’t going to wither after graduating. So, it happened.
Daniel got a job and in a year he was promoted and waiting for a new promotion. Victoria was very happy for him – at least someone had something nice out of life.
Everyone said to Victoria that Daniel was a gold boy, they were going to have a great future. The girl agreed with them, but she was never sure about her feelings to him.
She liked Daniel doubtlessly, but Victoria still couldn’t get if she loved him, wanted that great future with him which was described so perfectly by her mother and friends.
They were drinking tea when the girl remembered her medieval buying. At once she wanted to show it to the young man.
‘Why do you buy this stuff?’ Daniel looked accusingly at the girl, ‘There’s no information in these books just fairy tales about demons. Is that what you believe in?’
‘No, I don’t’ Victoria was upset with her young man’s attitude, ‘I just want to read and comprehend how mysticism and scepticism were accepted at those centuries. You can’t reject it at all, just because there’s nothing about accounting and Russian Federation codes articles’
‘What does it have to do with that, Vic? You’re wasting your time. Your exam is about to happen, you’d better prepare for it’
Victoria kept silence and stared at the man. At those moments she didn’t even want to think about sharing her present with him let alone speaking about future.
‘Jesus, how could you be such a perfect bore?’ the girl asked hiding annoyance under the smile.
‘That’s it! Vic that was you who brought it to show and ask…’
‘No, I brought it because I wanted you to be happy for me not to accuse me and tell about my examinations’
Daniel was looking at his girlfriend and tried not to smile. Seeing those attempts Victoria smiled, too. She decided to turn the page.
‘I’m happy for you. Really. But I still don’t get what this book has so special about it. Well, if you like it then read it, comprehend, go ahead.’
Victoria shook her head in response. She saw mockery in his eyes and, probably, misunderstanding. The girl didn’t get him. His tender lips distracted her from the book. No matter what she thought but she liked kissing him. He was second to none…
‘I’m going on business trip the day after tomorrow. For a week and a half’ Daniel said, embracing the girl.
They were in the bed and it seemed that five minutes ago there’d been nothing but their bodies and souls, entwined with each other. She felt everything stop, letting them enjoy each other, without paying attention to anything. Reality rushed back very fast not letting you lose control completely.