* * *
Train sped away, leaving you alone forever.
Only your ego was left, being infused with icy hellish 'nothing'.
Gan returned to the carriage, to his former life, leaving is sentence in effect.
He still felt unbearable to people, and, as it turned out, it was even more unbearable without them.
And, as always, he found his way out and salvation only in his own exceptionality and in his creative work.
Let the world does not make sense, but there is, after all, beauty.
Though Ignatius was bad and selfish, though he was incapable of love he had a sensuality and sharpened desire for female beauty, coupled with panic to it. To possible ties in general and to a dark element of the sex that made his love affairs short-lived and painful.
But beauty designed to 'save the world', remained to be his a single faith.
In the most seemingly hopeless moments frosty scattering on glass, pristine purity of snow, graceful steps of cats and cries of gulls over the river of Neva, a lake full of heavenly blueness in the gap between houses showed an unknown light mystery, which was enslaved by the evil world.
As if she were a bewitched princess, from time to time Beauty sent her smiles to her subjects - smiles through tears.
She was tortured, bound and doomed.
Now he wrote to the lost Beauty.
Which as eaten by time, vanity, corruption, vicious predatory civilization and monsters, which he tried to banish from himself during a failed two-week self-improvement.
He wrote young faces and bodies. They were touched, mutilated by corruption, whether it was physical deformity or fantastic translucent, sprouting from the bodies of animal, teeth, claws, fur, machine parts and devices.
The same helix and bolts screwed and bit into the Neva, into the smooth Gulf of Finland, into trunks of trees.
Smoky-black colors were dissolved in greenness and blueness.
It was a destructive beginning in him and in the whole world, the omnipotence of the beginning and the inability to withstand it.
It was an unequal struggle with the death of beauty, no matter what Ignatius wrote now; this theme became his obsession and curse.
It was his exceptionality, which formerly was a kind of elitist creative refuge from insolubility of life, turned into a trap, choosing this very insolubility as a subject of creativity.
Having escaped from the world, he could not escape from himself.
He crucified himself with monsters and nightmares on a stretcher and passed his canvas to the world as in the old days fever was passed to other people to get a relief.
It was not a very noble role but since that time Ignatius Darenov became a celebrity.
The world gave him its monsters, Ignatius returned a hundredfold of them.
'He ia also hopelessly ill,' a viewer comforted himself, 'as I am. As we all are.'
'They like it, this means they need it,' Ignatius thought, and he felt easier.
In the world, as we know, the death is beautiful.
* * *
Something like this was her notion about Ghana, when they announced boarding her train.
Her notion was obtained in an unknown way during their strange and surreal whirl around the city, sitting on benches in public gardens and at tables.
He then said that it was he who spoke all the time. And she was silent.
There were no more people in their compartment.
Ignatius suddenly said that he would also go to Moscow, and disappeared before she could react.
He returned in a few minutes, saying that everything was in order and that girls would inform about the place when the train would begin to move.
'Girl' apparently were conductors.
Ignatius shut the door and it was the first time when they were alone in a fragile box of the compartment.
Their external separation from the world was more purely symbolic, plastic-plywood, but it still was.
The space was closed.
They kissed each other irresolutely.
The kiss was completely innocent, but both made another stunning discovery: in that kiss there was no chaining sharpness of novelty.
Their lips, hands and bodies seemed to know each other a long time ago.
And now they just remembered, closing their eyes and not breathing, like separated blind lovers who again touched each other many years later.
Other passengers stormed into the compartment: three southern men smelling of wine and barbecue.
They brought their shiny cheeks, whiskers and eyes, full suitcases, white-toothed smile and that restaurant smell like some kind of a triumphant banner of an epicurean.
A kissing couple sitting in the compartment was clear and close to them.
Southern people instantly raspihali on the shelves, suitcases, lay a bed, and presenting the conductor, had informed Ghana that his place in the last compartment, the tickets have gone "smoke for an hour - another."
Apparently, those same girls with the conductor.
The space around again closed, the train picked up speed.
And whether from ambiguous care Epicureans, or from the left by them on the table in a burst of solidarity mandarin orange placer, or from the heating - in the coupe was suddenly electrified and stuffy as before the storm.
Mandarins smelled the new year and the stars.
In paradise, I remember, were the apples ...
Jan got up to remove his coat. Gan - to help it hang.
It it too ambiguous black knitted dress with a zipper from the French magazine "El" - a masterpiece of her friend Nina. Such a modest, but immediately come unfastened from the gates of the deaf to the knee by one wave of his hand ...
Gan again drew her to him, his hand fell on the gates of dress, and John realized that he did not release.
She barely had time to turn off the lights and the dress had fallen at the feet of the frog skin.
Both broke out instantly and at once, as the two dry stack - from the very first spark. Separated once lovers, whose bodies were in a thousand years to find each other again.
And, finally, delightful touch of heavy wet strands of hair Ganin, into which dipped her fingers ...
Wagon mercilessly dangle. It seemed the earth itself opens up with a frenzied greed swallowing them woven in the unconscious body, crushing and perelamyvaya.
In an instant, tore into the darkness of the station lights volant John saw over a huge Ganin, chernoUgolnye, all eyes, the pupils.
Maybe she screamed.
Ganin hand clamped her mouth by pressing her head into a well-worn empeesovskuyu pillow.
And in her crying, and in his hoarse triumphant moan was something deep, primal, echoed from the dark ages echoes of some primordial universal catastrophe.
End and beginning, freedom and slavery, life and death.
Black holes of his pupils relentlessly rushed at her, and she perished in their fatal attraction, in the Antiworld. In the last blissful agony of being sprawling into pieces ...
When everything was back to square one again, and they sat shoulder to shoulder on the bottom shelf number 14, John listened to, to discover that absolutely nothing has changed. No qualitatively new step up or down in their relationship.
Continue their new "I", one and indivisible, filled to the brim with happiness.
Stop time in flying to Moscow on a closed box belonging to them the space to limit saturated with silence, which was not good no words.
Discordant with the snoring of the Epicureans of the South seemed magical music, smelling of tangerines, wine fumes and the stars.
John went out, and when she returned, she found that Gan was asleep. She sat apart, so as not to interfere, but then he heard the discontented:
- Come to me ...
So they sat there until dawn, sometimes falling asleep.
But the dream of a place number 14 in the dwelling in eternity compartment, filled to the brim with snoring, starring the smell of tangerines and happiness.
They have nothing agreed and there was no intention for the future.
She could not imagine Ganya as a full-time lover, thieving periodic visits at random angles.
She considered herself a modern woman, but with Ganey legalized adultery society seems totally impossible.
But even more impossible - legalized marriage, so-called marital routine.
Why?
Simply, it was an axiom requiring no proof.
Their "I" from the very beginning was in a sort of supramundane reservoir being. And now everyone had to return to their everyday reality, where they were together there was no place.
He looked very tired.
Jan said that he had to sleep off somewhere - maybe in Regina? Without a trace of jealousy.
And he was not surprised at her suggestion, not outraged, but said that should the evening of blood from the nose to be in St. Petersburg, and sits on the first train back.
And no good-bye kisses. Just let it out, like an incantation:
- John ...
Took her hand and put it to his lips.
The warm amber glow slid down her face, neck and heart.
- Well, go.
And she walked away without looking back.
"Your eyes, the falcon, that honey in the mountains ... and the light and dark. And the sweet and bitter ..."