The Librarian

By the fourth year of study the veil had fallen from my eyes. A belated rescue plan was hatched—to switch from the day faculty to the extramural one and immediately get a job in the old student club. I dashed headlong to the alma mater I had derided, but I was too late. No one remembered the creator of the film Our Beloved Polytech any longer. The president had retired, Galoganov had been thrown out for embezzlement and the post of club manager had long ago been occupied by a man worthy of it.

Overwhelmed by the panic of an antiquated twenty-six-year-old, I transferred to the extramural faculty and laid siege to every House of Culture in the city in my search for work. Both the “Builders” and the “Railwaymen” rejected me scornfully. I was given refuge by the local television channel, where I tacked together scripts out of inarticulate raw text. Then I squeezed my way into a smalltime radio channel, where I edited an ignominious comedy programme.

At the age of twenty-seven I was awarded my second degree diploma. In September I took part in a shoddy mass spectacle entitled Day of the City. The artistic director turned out to be shrewd and sticky-fingered. We presented the municipal executive committee with an impressive budget for all sorts of folk costumes, round bread loaves and linen towels representing Slavic hospitality and fees for the groups taking part, then made do with less and divided up the remainder among our artistic group.

The petty copecks paid by the television channel and the radio were humiliating. I was short of money. In late December I was invited to play Grandfather Frost and, casting shame aside, I pulled on the cotton-wool beard and eyebrows, flung the sack over my shoulder and set off round the kindergartens. Our pitiful trio—Grandfather Frost, the Snow Maiden and an accordion player—gathered the toddlers together and swiftly taught them to sing ‘A fir tree was born in the forest’ and ‘Merrily we stride together through the wide expanses’. The ones who “sang along together” loudest were handed presents. After the children’s matinees, having parted from the accordionist and now drunk, I fornicated with my Snow Maiden, who was perhaps not especially beautiful, but most amenable.

Thanks to my connections at the institute I was given a part in a New Year’s play for a children’s party, held in a former House of Young Pioneers. Dolled up in flared pants, a pink shirt and a tie, I shouted, “Oh!” in a hoarse voice through a hole in a papier-mâché mask that was supposed to represent a wolf’s jaws every time I saw the rabbit—this one was female—and pursued her clumsily round the stage. “Just you wai-ai-ait!” I growled, planting my feet wide, stumbling and falling flat, like a wardrobe, bruising my knees.

The plot-line had me and Old Lady Shapoklyak playing all sorts of tricks on the positive characters—we stole the trunk with the fairy tales in it, we were exposed, we repented and were forgiven, and then we danced round the beautiful New Year tree with the sticky-handed children.

The humiliation concluded with a modest buffet meal and the lovable rabbit led me away to spend the night in her burrow.