12-10-2025, 03:40 PM
Dmitry Bushuev
What does Harlequin look like?
...The phone rings, but just like yesterday, I don't pick it up—let the answering machine answer. Let the answering machine answer for everything in my life, but I'll answer only for you, Denis.
Denis, Denis, Denis. The name has long since become music. Can you imagine, I still write you letters. I write letters to you, to you, to you, but you'll never receive them. Long, starry letters, as Gelka says. Our constellations sparkle with frosty opals and amethysts (October and February: Libra and Aquarius), even Rafik's piano is covered in frost. What's left? Candy wrappers, programs from forgotten performances, dried roses, a leather jockey's whip, and drafts in the rooms. There's still a pile of your school essays, but how can I possibly reread them?
I beg you, leave me alone, leave me alone, you all-too-clear phantom of a provincial schoolboy with a battered schoolbag: Is it raining outside? Rain in my letters, rain in my diaries and alleys, but it's rain through the sun—a real warm mushroom rain with a rainbow, with bubbles in the puddles, with the music of drainpipes and windowsills.
Do you remember that rainbow in the park where we wandered after school? It's classically simple: "Teacher and Student. Walks in the Park"—that's an unconventional title for an eighth-grade Russian language course. 8 is an inverted infinity sign, your and my lives turned upside down, full of fire and the tragic shadows of the inhabitants of the school corridors. So, "Walks in the Park. Introduction." One way or another, schoolchildren initially encounter resistance to the learning material caused by new terminology—the most convenient thing is to immediately start a dictionary of new terms, where you can also write down rules and tables of endings. I immediately acquired such a dictionary and burst into your fourteenth autumn, too noisily, too wildly, with a retinue of mythological boys who aped and clowned in every mirror. Oh, my! All the Antinouses, Gavroches, Oliver Twists, Huckleberry Finns, Adonises, Narcissuses, Sebastians, young drummers, and mischievous Dombeys flitted around every corner, winked from bus windows, licked lemon ice cream, dripping onto their short shorts, skateboarded near fountains, performing such gyrations that even Nijinsky couldn't dream of. The boys wobbled on their bikes, flirted, and measured their weights in the showers and locker rooms. And I somehow wasted my spring, squandered and squandered my youthful impulses in pursuit of my kite. But my poems could fill the sky.
What happened that day? Autumn, which covered me with a light gilding, the goldfish of a saxophone from the school orchestra, diving in the dim light of the stage: A skinny high school student played "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" – he played abruptly, hopelessly briskly, and Argentina clearly didn't mourn him. Then an acrobatic duet of identical twins, the eternal rumba and tango, some Moldovan dance (on Transnistrian coffins?), a gymnastics routine, a school choir: all received heartfelt applause, since the audience was one of their own, at home, and therefore unpretentious. A routine program, routine carnations, and from this evening's performance I can give you only one successful memory card (oh, my joy, where is that photo, yellowed, soft and autumnal, blurred by the shortsightedness of the spectator in the eighth, and again, eighth row? A photo for which all frames will be cramped and comments dull. Rain through sunny foliage and your whisper, trapped in a humming ocean shell. You weren't among the performers that school night; you simply helped light the stage, manipulating the spotlight while remaining in the shadows. Like you, the spotlight was playful and absentminded, often darting offstage into the auditorium or up to the ceiling, trying to blind me or set my wool sweater on fire: You blinded me, sunbeam from 8B.
Quote:All the subtitles I've worked on are in my opensubtitles account:
.en/search/...9/a-mysqld