..it wasn't enough to be necessary - it was easy for him to do it! Kostya was freely typing on a typewriter. Back in the city school, he learned to master any fonts, starting from the half charter of the sixteenth century. "Beggars for the highest name" were written by hand on expensive vellum paper, and the more elegant the font was, the more reliable was the positive decision.
It was necessary to redo everything in this dirty broken house, to become its owner, to take it into their own hands.
Thus began a duel between a sixteen-year-old boy and a lowly, sleeping, but clever businessman who not only knew life, but was part of this dirty, corrupt, inhumane life. Write under dictation his drama Kostya suddenly refused - and Fomin only grinned bitterly, but remained silent, endured. In the days of drinking, the lawyer demanded that the lightning lamp, hanging in their common room, lit up especially brightly - Kostya, going to bed, began to screw it. And so did this. He became silent, after four to five hours of work he left the house without permission, with a textbook in his hands, somewhere in the Derzhavinsky garden.
Finally, when the next binge was in full swing, there was something that finally determined their relationship.
It was at night. Bones had just screwed on a zipper lamp until midnight and was about to fall asleep, sticking a book under his pillow when his lawyer walked in, for some reason in one long nightgown. He was holding the rope in trembling hands.
Kostya covered his eyes. It was, of course, a comedy. Fomin often threatened to hang himself, and Kostya held a knife under the mattress just in case, to cut the rope. And now he was almost certain that Fomin either knew that Kostya hadn't fallen asleep yet, or was intentionally trying to wake him up.
With a rumbling he pushed a stool to the wall, which was made of a hook left over from the chandelier that once hung here. He strengthened the rope on the hook, made a loop. The lamp was flashing, and he twisted the fuse to light up the scene with a brighter light. Then, decisively, though with a trembling jaw, he climbed onto a stool and threw a noose around his neck.
Kostya opened his eyes widely and they met with looks. It was the minute he realized that everything would remain the same if he jumped up, screamed, persuaded... He did not lift a finger. Silently looking at Fomin, who was standing on a stool with a noose around his neck and seemed to be about to push him away with his skinny naked foot. Finally, after mumbling: "Ah, sheet!" He took off the noose, grabbed half a glass of vodka, and fell asleep.
Everything changed for the next day. The woman hired by Bones was soaping and cleaning the apartment, and he was looking for and finding vodka in cabinets, in Dutch stoves, in coats, hanging on a hanger, in old junk on mezzanine. He poured it into the bathroom, and Lexandra followed him and begged him to leave at least a couple of bottles secretly from his brother. Fomin himself, quiet, guilty, sat in the dining room, laying out solitaire "Napoleon" and singing a nice, quiet baritone:
I stand before you again, fascinated,
And I'm looking at the clear eyes...
Lexander, who was an excellent saddler, a specialist in carriage varnishing, who even visited America, at the first car factories, Kostya got a job. Until then, he slept in the kitchen on the stove from morning to evening and chased vodka for his brother. On the advice of Matrena's grandmother Matrena Vavilovna, a decent woman was hired to run a household.
05.01.1917.
Shurochka, you are wrong, Karnovsky is more difficult than you think. He never hid his decision not to bind himself from me. His independence is suffering (not that of mine, although it was not for nothing). It is clear that he cherishes it, otherwise it cannot be. I firmly decided to end our relationship, I return the letters to him without printing, and yet deep down I realize that he is not to blame. Neither in his coldness nor in the madness that enveloped me in one of his appearances. But quite about him. Everything is fine.
So you think I'm in love with Dmitri? If only! There is nothing to say about our spiritual closeness! We understand each other from half a word. I don't know who did more for me than he did. He has an original taste, in painting he knows how to distinguish the real novelty from the ostentatious, external. His mind is flexible, free - and if I miss him sometimes, it's my fault, not his. He wants me to be his wife, and he's talked to me about it many times. I asked him to wait, and of course he agreed.
I don't drink bromine anymore, but the feeling of emptiness remains, it doesn't prevent me from working - not in the workshop anymore, but in Gorins, who set up a real studio for me in their two-storey apartment.
I started working with Lenochka again, who seems to have finally taken up her mind.
Sad news from home. My beloved sister Mashenka, my goddaughter, died, and she was not even five years old. My father is wounded, lying in the hospital. He will be sent to the rear, I do not know where yet. I am waiting for a telegram. Brother Sasha is still on the front lines, got angry and exhausted. Dark, hard time! I kiss you. Write.
Your Lisa.
To be continued...