Forty Rooms Read Online Free PDF

cuckoo calls out “Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” in the hoarse voice of my earliest childhood memories, and the man with the face of a thwarted angel jauntily sidesteps the bird and disappears inside the clock, which is when I know that I am asleep, just seconds before I know that I am awake because my father is shaking me.
    “And what is the meaning of this?” my father asks with severity.
    My head has fallen on the Requiem typescript. I can hear Orlov roaring with laughter in the doorway.

5. Dacha Bedroom
    Nineteenth-Century Porcelain, or The Meaning of Life
    My fingers are still sooty from the bonfire, and as I pick up my cup, I watch them leave faint smudges on the trellised flowers. We use simple cups at the dacha as a rule, thick and earth-colored, which remain rattling in the cupboard after we return to the city; but this morning my mother packed her best porcelain into starched nests of napkins, to be brought to the country along with cold chicken cuts and her famed apple pie.
    I notice Olga studying the cups as well.
    “Pretty,” she says. “Are they old?”
    I nod. “Nineteenth-century. Mama collects them.”
    “It suits you, you know. Ballet dancers, gypsy ancestors, family jewels, old porcelain. You’ll be reading by candlelight next.”
    I laugh. “Are you saying I’m anachronistic?”
    “I was thinking romantic. But I suppose it comes to much the same thing.”
    “I see what you mean. A seventeen-year-old maiden sitting on the balcony at dusk, drinking tea made with water drawn from the village well.”
    “With a full moon rising,” she says.
    “With a nightingale singing in the bushes,” I rejoin.
    “With facilities in the yard,” she says.
    “Oh, now you’ve gone and ruined it! That’s hardly romantic.”
    “But true,” she says, laughing also.
    “Which is my point precisely. Truth can’t be very romantic.”
    “Well, in any case. Nice cups. Sorry about the fingerprints.”
    For a while I sip the tea in silent contentment. I can feel the dacha’s peaceful darkness behind my back. After driving here in the morning, laden with provisions, my parents have gone back to the city, to return three days hence; this lull of solitude is my graduation present of sorts, a foretaste of adulthood, a short spell of freedom between two anxiety-ridden stretches of last-minute cramming: the high school exams ended last week, the university entrance exams will commence next month. The June evening is blue and clear, the roofs at the end of our unpaved street stand out with crisp precision against the pale breadth of fields merging with the pale depth of the sky, and the world feels marvelously light, and I feel marvelously light too, as if I might take off at any instant, sail away in the small boat of the balcony into that luminous distance, the sweet smells of grasses and clover, the exhilarating expanse of the never-ending horizon—and splash through the slight chill in the air as through the waters of some cool, delightful stream, and catch the bright yellow moon like a leaping fish in my hand . . . But the balcony is moored to therickety house by tenacious tendrils of ivy, my mother’s precious porcelain cup feels dangerously fragile in my fingers, and Olga is talking again.
    “You know, I almost wish we hadn’t burned the old history notebooks. Chemistry is one thing, but all those transcriptions of Marx’s Capital , all those triumphs of the five-year plans—twenty years from now no one will believe it without the physical evidence.”
    I can still smell the fire in the air. I planned it for a long time, for months, at first merely groaning in the school corridors between classes, thinking how good it would be to forget everything meaningless once and for all, wipe it all away, burn it to ashes—until slowly my futile frustration gave way to a secret purpose. This morning I stuffed my bag full to bursting with years’ worth of accumulated assignments, tests, compositions, a decade of