Pavlova Plus One. Episode One.

Thirty-six weeks is no joke. Thirty-six weeks without cigarettes, hard liquor, sex and other amusements, so close at hand and so unexpectedly out of reach. Thirty-six weeks without stabilisers E-223, E-224 and E-307. Thirty-six weeks of the obstetrician-gynaecologist's rapturous exclamations of "marvellous urine!". Thirty-six weeks of a daily intake of calcium, magnesium, folic acid (at least one word from home!), and vitamins with the idiotic name "Materna". And all in all there are supposed to be forty of these weeks, and I'm already contemplating a caesarean, since they do it two weeks earlier.
Sometimes in the mornings I puke. I used to puke before too, and, I must say, quite often. But it's one thing to puke up whisky-and-cola to the encouraging cheers of the ladies'-room regulars, and quite another to wake up in the morning, take a refreshing shower, smear my body with a fabulously expensive anti-stretch-mark cream, take my vitamins, freshly squeezed orange juice, knock back a little calcium, eat some porridge oats, put on a pretty dress, little shoes, do my hair, put on my make-up, grab my handbag and, on the way out of the flat, ju-u-ust hurl all over this magnificence, never having made it to the toilet in time. Now that's another matter.

At first I kept asking myself: how could such a thing have happened to me? How did it come to be that I'm not sprawled, as is my custom, somewhere in a back alley near the club Mix, crawling towards the phone, groping my way through the bodies of equally tough and strong-willed lads, with one single aim - to reach the editor-in-chief in time and say that today I won't be able to come to work. Because of my blood pressure. How come?

Well, here's how. Sometime in the first days of March last year I got a call from the idol of all the club floozies and, on the side, my old friend Zorkin. "Like, Snezhnost and all that, in short, Pavlova! Come to Sobachka! Let's get plastered! We'll show those cop bitches!". How could I not come? I came. Well, naturally, a dance floor packed with floozies, and me among them. Zorkin's standing behind the decks, all handsome. Nice little music, "for the girls". On the whole, cute, but something's missing. Literally some little something. Something, as they say, "not quite there". And then, of course, there's Biven, all cheerful at the bar with a glass of the purest whisky. "Well, if it's whisky, then everything's fine, they haven't fired me from work yet!" I rejoiced, and off we went to the toilet together. And so, literally the moment everything had fallen into place, I run into Android and Balerina. Balerina immediately starts rattling on to me about her Mishanya. And, by the way, she never talks about anything else, only about her guy, I've gotten used to it by now. I'm listening to Balerina, and to myself I'm thinking: "Why am I so glad to see this Android? Something's a bit suspicious. Need to check". And I checked. And it turned out that he, in principle, was also very glad to see me. Maybe, of course, he'd already paid the toilet a visit too, I didn't bother finding out, but we left Sobachka pretty quickly. Me, Balerina and Android. And somewhere on the second day of our bender it turned out that we had absolutely nowhere to spend the night, and somehow very smoothly we ended up in the "Sovetsky" hotel. A wonderful place. That over-the-top Stalinist Empire style, those carpet runners, those portraits of the members of the Central Committee of the VLKSM (does anyone remember what that stands for?), in short, all of it looks like utter surrealism.
Especially when Mishanya, rolling his eyes, comes down the marble staircase into the foyer, staggers past the astonished porters at the desk, and rolls out into the restaurant "Yar" (barefoot and with a glass of the "Northern Lights" cocktail). At that moment you just regret not having stocked up on a video camera, because it's a historic moment: people are having lunch, and suddenly - a chameleon-man. And in his glass - vodka with champagne, and everyone can feel it.

In short, by all appearances, the conception happened precisely in the "Sovetsky". Android and I didn't know it, but our intuition didn't let us down: when we were checking out, we grabbed along an excellent towel with the inscription "hotel sovetsky". And we did it, moreover, purely out of souvenir considerations.
A month later it became clear that there would be no period. And you know, I wasn't upset in the slightest. Quite the opposite, I was somehow inexpressibly overjoyed. And so, as I was sitting on the toilet, clutching a pregnancy test in my hands, in whose little window two pink stripes shone proudly, a name came into my head. I thought: "How cool would it be to have a child called Sonya!". I didn't think "what will I feed her?" or "how is she feeling after the northern lights?", no. I thought that she was definitely a Sonya. And after several months of a kefir diet and abstaining from substances so familiar to me, like artificial colourings, stabilisers, dextrose, emulsifiers and so on, it turned out that it really was a Sonya. I rejoiced. Otherwise, God forbid, I'd have had to give a son a girl's name.
And so there came to be two of me. And now that day, when Zorkin summoned me to Sobachka, has become some kind of point of departure for me. Since then I remember everything. Since then I'm sober as a judge. Since then I've: I've put on 12 kilos! My waist has vanished without a trace and my hair is falling out. Since then, from a lack of calcium, I've gotten four fillings in my teeth. Since then I pore over the composition of my own urine, hoping for a normal level of creatinine, sugar and some other rubbish. And my main entertainment is these memoirs, because only now have I finally begun to remember at least something of what was happening to me over the last ten years. Ten years! Ten years of ups and downs. Ups on Thursdays and downs on Sundays. Ten years of calls to a friend: "So what happened?". Ten years of honed "Pavlova plus one" at the entrance and "no need for the coat" at the exit. Ten years of the most monstrous and romantic memories. Finally I've begun to remember all of it! Whereas before there was some kind of muddle in my head, a vinaigrette of scraps of dreams mixed with reality. Now all of it has started to line up into some semblance of a life in the linear flow of time. It's not out of the question that one fine day, when I've finally given birth to, fattened up and raised my little daughter, the old Pavlova will take up her old ways again. Then these miraculously recovered files will once more sink into the abyss of daily incidents and will never again be voiced aloud. So from this moment on I'm doing a hell of a favour and sharing them with you, dear visitor to the site. But only because I have nothing better to do.