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  And Nelya would finish out her tense workday impatiently, passing the shift over to the night nurse and going off home to relax and de-stress there among the pictures. Her whole apartment was covered in them, in works of the painter's art. In pictures, that is. Nelya had cut them out of magazines over the years: from Ogonyok and Yunost. At one time, those and other magazines on society, politics and art printed inserts with masterpieces by the best artists of all times and countries. Then other publications started putting out ones that were more contemporary and better in terms of print quality. She cut these world masterpieces out, framed them, and hung them all on the walls. As a result of all this, her living room assumed the appearance of a museum of fine arts, reduced in scale. Nelya made the frames herself, with her own delicate hands. It was a sort of life-long hobby she had, making frames for pictures. In the Young Technicians store she bought cheap remnants from lumber-finishing and furniture manufacturers, small boards of all different shapes and sizes, little planks, thin strips of wood. Or she lifted whatever was lying around un-monitored or unused on construction sites. So she made frames for her pictures from all this stuff. She had a full set of woodworking tools at home, too. The last man in her life had given it to her on her birthday, presented it to her like a big joke. He'd found out from her that she made the frames herself, personally, and so he brought her a full set of tools in a special case, with little divided sections. There was nothing that wonder-suitcase didn't have in it. It really had everything. A regular plane and a smoothing plane, chisels and hacksaws, and burins, and all kinds of files, and drills and drill bits, and not one, but two hammers, and a little axe, and a bit brace. It had a folding rule, of course, a bright yellow one, and a marking gauge, and a spirit level, and other priceless equipment. This was the tool set that her dear Vasya Bratus took from work and brought to her. He brought it over and gave it to her. For fun and games. It didn't give him a bit of trouble to take a tool set from the factory where he worked as a senior foreman, and giving a woman this kind of gift, instead of the generally accepted perfume or pantyhose or something, was interesting for him, understandably so. To make a little joke, to be original. But Nelya, when she saw the present, she couldn't stop thanking him and couldn't stop kissing him.

  She said, "Nobody's ever given me anything better in my whole life." And she said that only a truly loving person could guess so exactly and hit the nail not close, but on the head, in the bullseye.

  As for Vasya Bratus, as soon as he realized that his idea wouldn't result in any happy laughter or jokes, he became annoyed, and said, "You're either sick and not feeling yourself, or you're just playing around and acting stupid. But you don't have any sense of humor in you at all," he said, "and I cannot remain for long in a close relationship with a woman who is deprived of this important human feeling," he said, "nor do I even want to." So he walked out on her on her birthday, and never came back. He didn't sit down to eat with her, didn't drink a single drop of wine or vodka to Nelya's health. Actually, he didn't even walk out, he rode off on his Kharkov Bicycle Factory bike, and the set was left with Nelya for good, as a symbol of his memory, the memory of that joking man by the name of Vasya Bratus, whom she had been hoping and counting on marrying, so as to create a family. After all, she did love him with all her heart, and always watched from the window how he'd come wheeling up to her building on his fine, light bicycle, and how rays of sunlight pierced through the wheels' spinning spokes, and how the spokes flashed silver, reflecting fans of shadow and light. The beloved man himself, though, Vasya, he sat straight and rigid in the bicycle seat, gravely turning the pedals clockwise. The bicycle transformed his legs' circular motion into forward motion and started off. And Nelya always waited for Vasya, looking at the road and thinking with satisfaction, "He really is beautiful, my Vasily, he is genuinely beautiful, especially when he's riding a bike." She also dreamed and thought secretly about how once she and Vasya were joined in marriage, she would be able to become Nelya Sergeyevna Bratus, and that that would also be beautiful. And if you made a double last name, say, Bratus-Yavskaya, or the other way around, Yavskaya-Bratus, then that would be even more beautiful and sound even better.

  But her intimate dreams fell apart overnight and did not come true, because the desired Vasily, having given her the set of woodworking tools, left for the rest of his days, as they say, and didn't come back, and got married, probably, to somebody else—it's not as if there aren't a lot of willing women in the world. In any case, ever since that distant day, Nelya hadn't seen his Kharkov Bicycle Factory bicycle with the shining spokes in its wheels even once, and she also hadn't seen or run into Vasily.

  On the plus side, of course, making frames for her pictures became much easier, and in every way more convenient, and they turned out much more evenly and beautifully than before. Because, in a matter like this, one that requires precision, a set of good tools is the most important condition for success and for the quality of one's craftsmanship.

  So, in her leisure hours Nelya made frames, a lot of frames, since, over the years, she had accumulated an enormous quantity of pictures. The main thing was that these frames weren't just four narrow boards hammered together at right angles with nails; for each picture Nelya made a different frame, taking into consideration what the artist had depicted in the picture and what its color scheme was. If he'd depicted, let's say, a bright female figure, or some kind of Sistine Madonna, or something, Nelya would plane a capacious, carved frame, with ornamentation all around the edges. But if the picture was a man in severe shades, or a knight at a crossroads, then a correspondingly severe and simple frame was prepared, without decoration. And Nelya picked out the color of the frames, their tone that is, especially for each individual case, with a sense of responsibility, so that it—that is, the color—would underline the meaning and quintessence of the artworks and set them off, not clash with them.

  So Nelya's pictures hung not only in the room, like they did back when she had just begun to put together her beauty collection, but three rows high in the hall, and in the kitchen, and everywhere that space allowed and where there was lighting so you could look at them and see what was portrayed in them. Nelya kept the pictures that didn't fit on the walls in a storage closet—a repository was what it was, thanks to which she had many opportunities for changing her exhibit whenever she wanted, according to her taste and whims. When the unavoidable moment arrived and the storage closet was so full she couldn't fit one more thing in it, Nelya started taking her pictures to work and hanging them there, all over the corridor and the wards. The first time the department head saw her autonomous acts, he said, "And what are those, if I may ask?"

  But Nelya answered him, saying, "Paintings, works of fine art."

  "What're they for?" the department head asked.

  And she answered him, saying, "They're beautiful."

  So the department head left Nelya alone and waved her off, thinking, let her do it, a little extra psychotherapy won't hurt, and everything would've been totally fine if the idiot orderlies hadn't spoiled the pictures, drawing mustaches on the women's faces and horns on the men's. They even made a hole in the mouth of the portrait of Mademoiselle Charlotte du Val d'Ognes2 and stuck in a burned-out cigarette butt.

  But Nelya had countless pictures at home, and she replaced the disfigured portraits with new ones without saying a word. Just once she couldn't help herself, however; that was when the orderlies drew something filthy onto the three ancient heroes' horses.3 So Nelya called them idiots, and bastards, too. Called them that right to their faces, shouting, "Sick people understand the beauty of the world, and the department head isn't against it, but you heartless bastards trample all over it."

  Nelya Yavskaya would come home from work physically and mentally exhausted. She'd sit down in an armchair somewhere, let's say, in the middle of the room, and look at her pictures—not all of them one by one, but the ones she felt most like looking at at that particular time. Alyonushka by Viktor Mikhailo
vich Vasnetsov,4 or maybe Rembrandt van Rijn's Saskia van Uylenburg.5 She also loved examining Alexander Shilov's picture Morning6 for an entire evening. But the best picture, the one she loved the most, was a canvas by Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of the Lady-In-Waiting to Infanta Isabella.7 On the whole, it made a greater impression on her, and she liked it better, when artists painted portraits of women on their canvases. All the artists' women came out more beautifully than their men. This was probably because the actual women they chose to draw portraits of were beautiful, not scary-looking. Well, maybe they also loved these women and painted them with love in their hearts and souls. Although Nelya couldn't say anything about that for sure, since she didn't have any reliable information about it. But it was an indisputable fact of her life that she could sit for hours examining those beloved pictures down to their tiniest features and details. Especially when it was silent all around and no external sounds came in from the street or from the neighboring apartments. Which happened rarely, obviously. Maybe late at night, but even then, not every night. Because at night, too, something was constantly happening in the area: either some neighbors would be celebrating something at home with such fanfare that even a corpse would wake up and start to dance, or some other neighbors would start settling some personal issue at the top of their lungs, or an ambulance or police siren would go off, or something else loud would happen. And in the evening, it was really bad. All different kinds of noises came raining down on Nelya from all possible directions, which, of course, did not allow her to concentrate on experiencing art and receiving true pleasure from beauty. To make matters worse, she was on one of the building's lower floors, and mothers and children usually went for walks in the courtyard, under her windows, and the mothers yelled at the children while they were taking care of them, and cursed at them, for their own good, using various very bad words. The guys playing dominoes, it goes without saying, also yelled at each other and argued about whether they really were stuck in a stalemate, merging together into a general chorus, and cursed each other out with choice, flowery curse words. For no reason, since it didn't make any difference.

  At one point, Nelya used to go out into the courtyard and say to the mothers, "Do you really want to talk to your own children that way? Such bad words. Now is that really beautiful?"

  She tried to reason with the guys playing dominoes, too, tried to appeal to their conscience and their dignity as men. "Aren't you ashamed to express yourselves with curse words? After all, there are women and children all around you."

  But the mothers, walking away, didn't answer her, and roared at the children anyway, children they had given birth to, and beat them in various soft places, and the guys playing dominoes said, in their particular style, "Get out of here," they said, "Get lost."

  And then, after that, they added that she was a few cards short of a deck, they said, and that she must be part of some totalitarian sect, no doubt about it. And so the end result was that Nelya stopped going out and talking to the neighboring tenants, having become convinced that the conversations were useless, and she started to stop up her ears with earplugs.

  Earplugs are these special plugs for workers in factories with a heightened noise level. This strange name is easily decoded: "Plug up your ears." A maternity ward nurse she knew had advised Nelya to arm herself with them. The nurse put earplugs in at night so she wouldn't hear her husband and children snoring. So Nelya, using the nurse's experience in her own particular way, started looking at her pictures with stopped-up ears. At first, when she wasn't used to it, it wasn't very pleasant, because her head filled with a heaviness and sort of swelled up from the earplugs, but then she got to where she could stand them, the earplugs, and sometimes she even forgot to take them out, and would go to bed with them in, and then go to work like that. She'd only remember them as she was getting to work, because she'd hear what people said to her vaguely and unclearly. In short, those earplugs turned out to be a real find for Nelya, all the more so since they manifested and revealed another unexpected attribute.

  After Nelya got used to using them, they became a vital, inseparable accessory to her. Without them, she felt that she was missing something, and the empty holes in her ears bothered her, and it felt to her like these holes went all the way through, that gusts of wind were blowing through them. But when the earplugs were resting in her ears, everything went back to the allowable norm, and the wind died down, leaving behind a light heaviness in the area of her neck and the back of her head, a cottony kind of heaviness, a sweet heaviness. Then a low, prolonged sound would arise in her head, generating itself spontaneously, and that calm sound would hum for a little while; it would hum until Nelya tuned herself entirely to its wavelength, and as soon as she tuned herself to it, the sound would carefully begin to separate into parts and vibrate, and change its constant tone. The fact is that music would come from that soft, lonely sound and, as it was happening, it rang out inside of Nelya, not extending beyond her person. In any case, no one else who happened to be next to her could hear any music. Nelya somehow got the idea that, if she took the earplugs out while the music was sounding inside her, it would pour out for everyone to hear, and everyone around her would get the opportunity to hear her music and enjoy its broadcast, outside, in public. But, as soon as she did that, the music inside her ceased, emitting the sort of glissando that a trombone makes when the trombone player falls asleep while playing. So, not a drop of the music seeped out or penetrated to the external world, while Nelya heard the howling, whistling wind in her ears. So she quickly returned the earplugs to their places, and the melody that had almost died out inside Nelya gradually restored itself, filling her up completely and making her happy. First it filled up her head, then her lungs, and then the remaining space in her body.

  Now Nelya did everything to music. She built her frames, and looked at her pictures, and worked at work. And while she was doing this, a multitude of melodies, as it turned out, lived inside her, and they all took turns playing, depending on what picture Nelya was admiring, and depending on her mood, and on her general condition, and basically just on everything in the world. Even on what color dress Nelya was wearing and what the department head had said to her that day and on whether the orderlies had made fun of her handmade deafness and aloofness. Because Nelya eventually quit taking her musical earplugs out of her ears both at home, and in the ward, and everywhere. She learned how to understand what people said to her by the motion of their lips, like mute and deaf people understand it, although it wasn't as easy as all that. But she learned how. Having learned that, she acquired the ability to listen to the music inside her practically without ceasing, and the more she listened to it, the more she wanted to. That is, Nelya conceived a passion for her own internal music that was almost stronger than for preparing frames and for viewing the grand masters' pictures. Of course, she felt the best, the most superb, when her eyes were contemplating the eternally new paintings while the music rang out inside her. The most elevated and harmonious effect was achieved in this confluence, and Nelya very quickly realized and became convinced that this confluence was true beauty, Beauty with a capital letter, as they say. Without her music, she would simply no longer have been able to live among people and be a member of their society. Because, if she ever had to take her earplugs out, the music inside her went silent, and Nelya's fingers almost immediately started trembling, and her mood got worse, and, under the influence of external noises and the whistling of the wind, her body was stricken with one big aching pain that was unbearable even for a woman's patient constitution. So that now, even if Nelya had suddenly started wanting to live like she used to, in the general human clamor, she wouldn't have been able to, because of the condition of her soul. What a terrible thing almost happened to her, then, because she bought those earplugs in the drugstore without any extras, just one single box. She bought so few of them because she was being stupid and not thinking about the future. And then they went and disappeared from the shelves, for no
reason—just disappeared into thin air. There were probably just a lot of people who wanted to defend themselves and save themselves from all kinds of noise.

  So, although Nelya used her box sparingly, replacing her earplugs only when it was absolutely necessary, let's say, when she washed her hair and couldn't avoid getting water on them, still, nothing in this life lasts forever, no matter how long you try to drag things out. What could she do? Just wash her hair less often; people say that it's not good for your hair to wash it frequently, anyway. So the issue of hygiene, at least, didn't worry Nelya very much. Instead, it was the mysterious disappearance of earplugs from the local and regional drugstores that exceptionally and severely worried her. She turned to the International Red Cross and various philanthropic foundations, and personally approached the representative of the director of the regional governmental administration. Naturally, without any results: the much-vaunted representative didn't even see her, while the Red Cross and the foundations didn't give her any real answers. So Nelya, despairing of and disappointed in the official avenues for getting what she wanted, lowered herself to the point of asking the department head for help. After all, he had connections and personal relationships in the world of medicine and pharmacology. But the department head told her, "Just stop up your ears with cotton wool, and you'll be fine. What do you need earplugs for?"

  Nelya explained over and over to him that she couldn't use cotton wool to do it because cotton wool only protected her from the whistling of the wind, and didn't give her any music. But, like a talking parrot, the department head asserted that it was good that it didn't, that's the way it should be, he said, since music was just one step away from trouble, one short step. And about the earplugs he said that each and every person could exist just fine without them, that there was no special trick to earplugs. So he suggested to Nelya that she start living again like everyone else does, like how she herself used to live, that is, without plugging up her ears with some damn stuff, but just the opposite, listening hungrily to her habitat, which was full of sounds and music for all tastes, full of everything your heart could desire.