FICTION
SERGEI DOVLATOV
Superfluous Man
To Aleksandr Gross, i"epressible Russian declasse,
superfluous man and disturber oj the peace
As
usual, we had run out of alcohol, and, as usual, I had expected it.
But we had no problems at all with the food. How could we? What
problems could there by as long as Sevastyanov had successfully cut an
ordinary apple into sixty-four parts? I remember we had gone out twice
for another bottle. Then some girls from the ice ballet showed up.
Shablinsky kept staring at them and
say~ng,
"We'll melt that ice....
We'll melt that ice. . .. "
Finally it was my turn to go for vodka. Shablinsky went with me.
When we returned the girls were gone.
Shablinsky said, "Those broads are smarter than I thought. They ate,
they drank, they retreated."
I remember Tofki Aliyev was saying, "At home I have a piano, an
alcove, silver spoons. . . . Paintings from almost as far back as the
Renaissance ... and - no sex at all. But in the garage I've got
all
sorts
of trash, old tires, a tarpaulin. . . . I laid half the student body of a
choreography college on that tarp. That's the only place they agreed to
do it - in the garage! They thought the furnishings were appropriate."
Shablinsky stood up and said, "Let's go to Tallinn."
"Right on," I said. It was
all
the same to me. All the more so as the
girls had split.
Shablinsky worked for the newspaper
Soviet Estonia.
He'd been in
Leningrad a week. Now he was taking advantage of the situation to re–
turn home. We ducked into a store. Bottles bulged from our pockets. I
was wearing a summer shirt and sneakers. I did not even have my pass–
port. In ten minutes a Volga pulled up. Behind the wheel was a morose
fellow whom Shablinsky called Grishanya. Grishanya said nothing the
whole way. He would not take a drink of vodka. I even wondered if
Shablinsky had ever seen him before. We sped quickly through the seedy
northwest outskirts of Leningrad. Then came the monotonous suburbs,
