Page 128

[Alexandr Korol]

Then she sat down at the table next to my friend, right across from me, took a sheet of paper, drew something on it and handed it to me, saying:

– Solve this.
– I don’t know.
– Well, you’re an idiot,- she said, took the paper back, scribbled something else, handed it to me again.
– Thanks,”- I said.

I don’t remember exactly what she said — probably “you’re welcome.” But I understood that “they” had just handed me the keys to paradise through this woman, because I could feel that same force, something so unique. And yes, at that moment, my friend was laughing at her, and she told him, “If you keep laughing like that, I’ll turn your heart off for a couple of minutes. And you’ll remember it for the rest of your life, got it?” I was stunned when she said that to him. Then I remember she pulled out some kind of booklet — either a workbook or a labor book — and it had some year on it, either 1914 or 1917. And she brought it right up to my friend’s face, eyes wild, and said:

– Look, look, look!
– What is it? I don’t get it.
– It’s not in dollars, it’s in rubles.

And then she turned to me the same way: “Look.” I didn’t understand what she was doing. Maybe she was hypnotizing me. And that’s it. She was wearing some kind of pink jacket, had short hair, her name was Nadezhda, and she was the one who gave me that note.

And it’s so interesting — I didn’t mention this in the book — I walked out of that Pizza Hut, and there was an underground pedestrian crossing to the side of my house, where I lived, on Victory Square. I crossed the street through the underpass, and there was another old woman there, kind of out of it, maybe an alcoholic, and she was also yelling at the top of her lungs: “You’re all gonna die, freaks!” Just screaming like that in the middle of the street,