Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Naum Vaiman

a leg and good luck!” “You can go and take a flying...!” she yelled in reply, laughing nervously. I returned later, hoping to intercept her after the defense, but luck had deserted me; to make the rounds of her classmates, all the more while trying to pump people for information, implying thereby some sort of a special connection to her... I didn’t dare do that. I called in the evening, you know, just to be friendly, to find out how the defense went. Vera Petrovna’s voice was joyous: “She did it, she did it! Thank you for calling! I will definitely let her know you called.” Well, so let’s say she spent a day “getting soused,” and then another day sleeping it off. In the evening, I tried to get myself invited over to Pyotr Naumovich’s, saying that I wanted to return his Delbrück. But to my astonishment, Pyotr Naumovich said that he was feeling under the weather. “And how’s Lena,” I asked, “still sleeping?” “Sleeping? She’s been gone two days already.” “Gone?!” I was stunned. “She left just for a week,” Pyotr Naumovich calmed me down. “Where?” I asked numbly, almost mechanically. “Tallinn, some sort of a class trip.” Finally, it dawned on me that I was being avoided. It doesn’t matter for what reason. And, grasping onto the scraps of my manly pride, I decided that I had enough. This helped me to barely pass my own remaining exams and avoid being expelled from the damned institute. I didn’t call for two weeks, and in that time, the war happened, “our side won,” and I was itching to call Pyotr Naumovich, to share our thoughts, to pick his brain on

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