84
PARTISAN REVIEW
mind and said he would borrow the books some other time. This other
time never came because he stopped going to their apartment, with its
parquet and its slippers, in that luxury block dignified by a grand spiral
staircase and crowned by a glass dome.
As for Yura himself, he lived with his parents and his sister in two
poky rooms in a communal flat. The furniture in the rooms was old and
broken-down, the wallpaper peeling, and in winter there were drafts
from under the windows.
Yura wasn't exactly friends with Orlik, but he didn't avoid his com–
pany the way the other boys did. He liked to watch Orlik mimic their
teachers and their classmates. Orlik had a real actor's gift, and Yura had
advised him to go on, after he graduated from the eighth form, to act–
ing school. But Orlik said he would follow in his father's footsteps and
become a Party functionary in the Latvian Communist Party Central
Committee, with his own office, his own car, and his own chauffeur.
"And with my own secretary," he giggled gleefully, winking at Yura,
imitating a female walk by wiggling his hips, and drawing round shapes
in the air in front of his chest.
Thanks to his talent for acting Orlik even succeeded for a time in
becoming popular in his class. This happened after the release of the
film
An Optimistic Tragedy.
Most of the students had gone to see it, and
they all burst out laughing (the girls blushing a little) when Orlik acted
out two short scenes from the film, showing the anarchist sailor and
Alexei. In one of the scenes a female commissar arrives on a ship of the
Baltic fleet to restore order among the sailors, and the anarchist sailor
wants to rape her in full view of everybody and with their wholehearted
consent. First of all he puts his arms around her from behind and, curv–
ing his whole body over her, breaks into the old romantic ballad "Under
the fragrant lilac bough." Later on, when he starts making even more of
a nuisance of himself, she shoots him dead. After that all of them leave
her alone and even begin to respect her-including Alexei, the main
hero. But at the beginning he too had been treating her as something of
a joke, and Orlik really outdid himself in that bit where Alexei says:
"Let us get married, comrade: we'll continue our family line-and have
some fun too!"
And now once again, no sooner had Yura come up to him than Orlik
spread his arms wide, as if to embrace him, and launched into his star
turn, leering at Yura when he came to the word "fun" and milking it for
all it was worth. Yura could not resist and burst out laughing, even
though he had seen Orlik in this role many times before.
