Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Judeophile

wiping my face with a wet towel with his shaking hands (he suffered from Parkinson’s) and was screaming something, showing me how I should be dealing with my opponent: use the hook, a hook from below, he’s holding his hands too high. Indeed, my broad-shouldered and skinny-legged opponent was holding his hands too high; I understood that myself, but he was bobbing his noggin so nimbly that I kept missing him, and besides, I had trouble concentrating on what it was that Nikiforov was irately screaming at me; my head was ringing, both from the blows and from some sort of inebriated inspiration, akin to the poetic one, as though there was an entire stadium full of roaring people, and there’s just no way you can fall on your face before them... After the fight, Nikiforov told me that, if I continue in the same spirit, after another half a year or so, he would begin to use me in serious tournaments. I quickly-quickly rinsed myself off in the shower, looked over my swollen lip and the bruise under my brow – I’ll have a black eye – waved my hand (overall, I got off pretty easy) and ran out of the locker room, but she was no longer there. I immediately “swooned,” like the boxers like to say; I still hadn’t learned how to hold a good punch, but on the next day, she rewarded me in a queen-like manner: she approached our group, greeting everyone, thanked me, saying she hadn’t thought that she would be so interested and, well, more in a similar vein. If it was suddenly announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, my stock among my friends

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