The Eyes of Lira Kazan Read Online Free Page A

Voss-taniya, or the Moscow station because that was where you took the train to the capital. Tanya and Lira ran up the stairs into the fresh air and the pale night, the sky still bright with a few soft clouds at eleven o’clock. On Nevsky Prospect, the last street vendors were still hawking “very good caviar not expensive” to lost tourists. A little farther on, a little old lady sat on the pavement selling apples, flowers and socks that she had knitted. She was also begging. She seemed like a ghost left over from the days of empty supermarket shelves.
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    Lira and Tanya had lived through those days when they were little girls, and then adolescents. They could remember the feeling of emptiness in this city where the avenues and squares seemed to have been designed by giants; the tarpaulin-covered lorries which would suddenly disgorge uniformed men, the crowded buses where you put your five kopeks into an iron container, watched by the other passengers who acted as conductors. It all seemed so far away. Now the black cars with tinted windows that drove along the Neva and the canals seemed to have appeared in direct succession to the carriages of the past, without the jolts of history, without the town having ever been called Leningrad. Tanya bought a bunch of flowers held by a rubber band from the old woman.
    â€œFor my mother,” she said.
    She lived on Bakunin Prospect. The façade of the building was very fine, redecorated recently, like the whole town
centre. But it was another story once you went through the great door – black walls in the courtyard, a jumble of electric wires, cats like tightrope-walkers on the gutters and a permanently ingrained stink of urine. In the corridors flaking paint came halfway up walls on which the stories of love and hate that had passed that way were daubed in graffiti. Tanya stopped at the first floor. Her mother lived there in a kommunalka , one of the communal apartments inherited from a revolution that had outlawed all bourgeois comfort and respectability. She handed Lira her keys.
    â€œJust come in and say hello, she’d like that. And then go on up. I’ll stay here a bit while you telephone.”
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    Lira followed her. She had already gone in. In Room One Tanya’s mother, in a flowery dressing gown, was dozing on a small sofa covered in old teddy bears. In Room Two was the old blind man who had tied strings across the room to guide himself around. Room Three was empty. In the kitchen were three basins side by side – each had their own, with their own dented pans hanging above it, although a homeless piece of soap sometimes wandered from one to the other. Tanya and Lira were greeted with a cry of joy from the old lady, whom they had woken up. They edged between the objects and pieces of furniture, a lifetime’s worth, a faded and dusty collection of carpets, fringed lampshades, icons of the Madonna, family photos, a table from the early days of marriage, lace tablecloths. The mother, treating Lira like Tanya, took her face between her hands and kissed her on the forehead. Lira cooperated and then stepped back while Tanya replaced the dead flowers with the new bunch she had just bought.
    They could hear objects falling down in the room next-door. The old blind man was coming to join them; nobody ever visited him any more. He appeared at the door near Lira, who was just leaving, took her hand and declaimed in a loud voice:

    â€œA fish said to a man passing by: ‘I am the magic fish, I can make your wish come true.’
    â€œâ€˜Good,’ said the man. ‘Supposing I want a million roubles?’
    â€œâ€˜I will give them to you, and a palace, too, if you want.’
    â€œâ€˜Good!’ said the man, drawing up a list of wishes in his head.
    â€œâ€˜But you should know that anything I give you I give two of to your neighbour,’ the fish warned him.
    â€œSo the man put out one of the fishes