Read Online Happiness is Possible by Oleg Zaionchkovsky - Free Book Online

dogs’ area we could observe a scene of unmitigated demographic well-being within the bounds of a single courtyard. Children’s buggies ploughing unhurriedly across its surface like yachts during a regatta, drifting along the pathways or swaying at their moorings beside the benches. The faces of infant passengers turned heavenward in their lacy icon-settings. Mums, nannies and grannies shepherding multicoloured herds of individuals of various ages as they master the dry land. Filled with the patter of little feet, snuffling and incessant twittering, the children’s playgrounds are like flowerbeds that have come alive. How much life and energy there is in these small creatures! One of them pauses momentarily to search for something in his nose, but then his gaze falls on a doggy pulling a comical man along on a lead. The child breaks into happy laughter, and his nose purges itself.
    A charming scene every morning, but we had no time to admire it. Phil’s pressing needs drew him on towards the dogs’ area, and he drew me along like a speedboat pulling a water-skier. The dogs’ area here is a positive paean to cleanliness. You won’t believe me, but it is possible to walk from one end of it to the other without stepping in fresh excrement even once. A box on a pole has even been placed in the corner, with special plastic bags that you can tear off, although I never saw anyone make use of them. Philip and the other male dogs used this pole as their post box. I hope to describe this dogs’ area in more detail some day and do it full justice, but I won’t show the description to Phil. He didn’t share my rapturous delight; the area beside our own building was dearer to his heart, the one I can see from my window, and which is never empty. All it has to offer dogs is an old, rotten wooden beam and a well-gnawed lorry tyre, but there are plenty of other amusements. The benches around its edge – those of them that are still intact – are usually occupied by local beer-lovers. If you wag your tail for them and raise your eyebrows expressively, you can sometimes get a small piece of salted fish. In the evening, after the sun has gone down, teenagers kiss on these benches and carve messages to the world into them with penknives. They don’t have anything edible, apart from chewing gum, but there’s a friendly word for a doggy, and the girls will scratch you behind the ear.
    Anyway, I’m waxing lyrical, and if push comes to shove, it’s possible to relieve yourself anywhere at all. Phil’s next half hour passed in honouring his debt to nature, and mine simply passed. Then we made our way back to Dmitry Pavlovich’s flat. After breakfast, there was personal time for both of us. Before he went to sleep, Philip sprawled out and licked his stuffed belly, or tested Dmitry Pavlovich’s furniture with his teeth and I . . . what did I do? I won’t even try to argue; at that hour I had been presented with all the necessary conditions for sitting down to work. My laptop glowed invitingly on the desk in Dmitry Pavlovich’s study, there were no neighbours stomping about overhead or cars whistling under the windows (as I have already mentioned). Even the tap in the kitchen didn’t drip. A sterile, distilled silence enfolded me. But believe me, while silence like that is good for the middle class to relax in and for dogs to lick their bellies, creative work in such a silence is absolutely impossible. Some people might say it’s a question of habit. Maybe so, but I’m a sensitive, creative individual. Getting me tuned into operational condition is difficult, but knocking me out of it is a pushover.
    So I didn’t write after breakfast. I smoked a couple of cigarettes by the window, contemplating my bird’s-eye view of the city, not to set my swarming ideas into order, but only to convince myself that I didn’t have any. Perhaps I was wrong