Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Naum Vaiman

irresistible pull of our mutual attraction for each other. Unexpectedly, the “physical” had displaced everything else. She would say: “I depend on your body...” And I was dependent on her body no less. Crawling home and into bed, and moving away from my wife, I didn’t sleep at all during the night, still sensing her presence, and the longer it went on, the more often I would say to myself: that’s it, it’s time to wrap this up, but after another day had passed, I would call and tell her: “I love you,” and she would whisper back to me: “And I love you too. I am happy...” But no, she was not happy, even though she would always arrive at our meetings smiling, and we often convulsed in laughter on her old, uncomfortable couch – God forbid, Pyotr Naumovich might hear us. “I want to penetrate you,” she would say. “It’s not fair: you can penetrate me, and I can’t do it to you! I sometimes want to split your chest open and climb into it, and lay there besides your heart, rolled up into a ball.” And then she left once again, this time for France. Pyotr Naumovich was gradually fading; the color of his eyes had dimmed and they teared up, so that it became unpleasant to look at him. I stopped visiting him: at that point, we had moved to the other end of town, and in general, life was pulling me in a different direction, drawing me into the dense whirlpool of

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