Pavlova plus one. Episode three

The real trash of pregnancy happens not to your belly, as everyone assumes, nor to the varicose veins in your legs, nor even to the stretch marks on your skin, but to your head. Here's my advice, and forgive me the familiarity — if you get knocked up, look after your head. Watch the changes in your psyche closely and don't let those changes take control of you.
People go mad slowly, gradually and imperceptibly. Take, for example, an ordinary tab of LSD and stretch all the phases of its effect out over nine months — and you get a perfect picture of the state of a pregnant woman. First you're seized by a wild fit of nerves, yawning, being unreasonable about everything. Every morning you wake up and feel as though it isn't you but someone else. Like Faina Ranevskaya or Renata Litvinova. The feeling is strong, concrete, and there's no getting away from it. Your point of view shifts, all your parameters go swimming. Your jeans suddenly become tight, even too small. And there's not even a hint of a belly yet. Maybe your arse has grown? You start feeling behind you for your arse, and right away you can't remember: what was I even looking for? My mobile? My keys? My cash? Ah yes! Cash! You start running catastrophically short of cash, even when there's nothing wrong with it. Sheer panic, but it feels like «that's it, I'm screwed, there's nothing left to cover my arse with!». Ah, yes! My arse! Your arse really is growing, and not by the day but by the hour. Because you eat and sleep all the time, eat and sleep. And what's telling is that you eat as if you were tripping too: you're dying to stuff your face, but the moment you start eating you feel sick, because there's something off with the food. Wrong taste, wrong texture, some unfamiliar smell. That baked ham isn't supposed to reek of bug spray, but it does, the little bastard.
The next stage sets in smoothly and imperceptibly. Suddenly everything becomes bright (recognise it?), smooth and pleasant, like free entry to a club where Sven Väth is playing. And you think: «Well, finally, it's letting up…» And in the same instant you throw yourself, fists flying, at your own mother, who gave you Prada shoes. «Couldn't you have just given me the money?! Are you taking the piss?! How could you! You're my own mother! Not a mother but a viper!» you scream, and burst into tears. Then you come to your senses and think: «What was that? Who was I even just talking to?». And again everything's good, carefree, rosy. Your gait is smooth, you can still wear heels. Your tits have stopped hurting and now they just grow by the day. Swelling right before your eyes. Good! Total euphoria, only there are these arseholes getting under your feet everywhere. Ugh, I'll crush the bastards, mercy me. And again: «Oh bloody hell! Why am I treating them like this? These are my friends, my mates!». You take a closer look at them — no, sure enough, complete arseholes, every last one. You alone are clever, beautiful, good and talented.
The third stage is a smooth exit from the hallucinosis. First a light bad trip along the lines of «Oh, how awful, I've driven everyone away, told everyone to get lost, screamed at everyone, fallen out with everyone, lost three jobs, found none, I'm living off my parents, oh what a failure I am, what kind of mother, aaaah!». Then you pull yourself together, spend a couple of weeks battling depression, because walking is already hard, your lower back aches, not a single dress fits, and wearing heels is utterly impossible. Someone inside is walking around all the time, pinching, tugging at the umbilical cord — in short, tormenting you in every way it can. And, as luck would have it, at exactly this moment some kind of nonsense starts up with the child's father too. Everyone gets their own: an affair, a party binge, a drinking bout, or all of it at once. It seems to me these are the death throes of bachelor life. You watch these throes and think: «Go on, twitch away! Come on, show off your firm manly character. You'll get a hiding for it later anyway…». In short, a difficult process of coming down and entering the real world of motherhood and fatherhood.
And recently a friend of mine, Arkasha, with the funny surname «Gasilovsky», told me that the first nine months are only the way in. Then there's another nine months of the way out. So I braced myself and got ready for the road back, into a sane state.

…The road was dark and unsafe. Alexey and I made our way guided solely by my intuition, which by my calculations was supposed to lead us to the right people. Agadir at night was somewhat reminiscent of a deserted, abandoned stadium: spacious squares, a bit of rubbish, and not a single soul. Ducking into a narrow passage between two abandoned buildings, we found ourselves on a patch of waste ground. Rebar and thorns stuck out of the uneven clay soil. «Just like Golyanovo!» — I recognised the landscape of my childhood, and right away I heard someone's voices. It was Moroccans dressed up as black guys. Rapper gear really suits Arabs — I noticed that long ago. And their lifestyle is rapper too: they sit around, cook up their schemes, smoke weed, say «fuck». In short, exactly the people Alexey and I were so persistently looking for. We walk up to them, pretending we're not scared. And out of sheer nerves we put on such a face that they got scared themselves. They jumped up, stepped aside, watched us. «Good evening!» I say. And Alexey goes: «They speak French!». «Ah! Bonjour!» I correct myself. And Alexey goes: «Pavlova, are you an idiot? Bonjour is for the daytime, and it's night now!». «Leave me alone, I only know bonjour and au revoir!» I whisper to him. And the Moroccans are cracking up at us, and so heartily that Alexey and I relaxed at once: if they can't stop laughing, then everything's fine, we've found the right people. We walk up to them and ask: «Do you have?». They laugh again and call someone on their mobile. They invite us to sit with them. They ask for cigarettes. We give them cigarettes. We sit. They ask for cigarettes again. We give them more. We sit and wait. «They'll smoke my whole pack of Salem!» grumbles Alexey — «And what if, Pavlova, these aren't the right people?». «What do you mean», I say, «not the right ones? Look at the state of them. You think they're out here in Morocco doing, what, surfing?». About forty minutes later a t-shirt sewn out of a terry towel gleamed white in the darkness. «Cool thing!» Alexey admired it. «Hello! My friend!» a moustachioed man spoke up in the native international language of dealers.

«Pavlova, we've been had!» Alexey wouldn't let up a few hours later, lying on the bed in the hotel. «Alexey, you can't even stand up anymore, look at yourself! You look like a man who's had sulphuric acid splashed in his eyes!» I reassured him. «In the eyes — yes. But something's not right. We've been had after all!» he muttered, slowly fainting. The air was thick with the heavy smell of Moroccan incense.

The next day, having slept through the morning, we rushed off to Vasilisa. Vasya had gone and bought an expensive five-star package, and we urgently needed to drag her out of there. Her room was gorgeous, but after hearing about the fishing village «Taghazout», the Spanish fort «Essaouira», about camels, pink flamingos and endless sandy beaches, Vasilisa uprooted herself from her cosy spot and courageously came with us to the bus stop.

«This is how the simple Moroccan people travel around their homeland!» I exclaimed when, at one of the stops somewhere up in the mountains, a passenger on our bus who had not yet outgrown the «schoolboy» age bracket offered us a drag on his roll-up. «Non, merci!» we politely declined, because in that kind of heat it was simply impossible anymore…

«So what's the date today?» Vasilisa asked languidly, turning over on her sun lounger. «Meaning?» Alexey asked back just as languidly. «The date?» I wondered, «August is over now, I think… So it must be early September…». «I just wanted to work out how much longer we've got left» Vasilisa explained. «We've still got a decent amount left here, don't stress!» Alexey reassured her. A string of camels moved slowly along the beach. Two lean Arabs led them into the ocean and started bathing them. «Guys, you know, I think this is the sunset» I said. «How time flies!» Vasilisa pronounced profoundly.

«How much tuna can a person eat?» I fumed, — «Let's find some place where the Moroccans eat. I'm sure that's where the real cuisine is, not this tuna for European tourists!». Lyosha and Vasilisa shrugged and ordered another half-litre of orange juice.

The taxi driver finally understood our request, delivered in broken French, and drove us off into some monstrous slums. My gourmet heart was aflutter. «And what? Are we supposed to eat this?» Alexey fumed. We were sitting in some café for taxi drivers. All the buildings around looked as though they'd been bombed, but this café had miraculously survived. Outside the window a boy stood peeing into a drainage ditch. «There's no drainage ditch there, he's just pissing under our window», said Vasilisa. The food was tasty, but it was completely unclear what we were eating. Maybe that was for the best.

On the day of the flight I woke to Alexey's groans. Feeling his head and his stomach, I realised he could never become a Moroccan taxi driver. Vasilisa and I could, but Alexey — no. His stomach, and indeed his whole body, flatly refused to accept genuine Moroccan cuisine. The entire way home Alexey hovered on the brink of half-death. At one point we even thought he had appendicitis. While waiting for our flight, we spent our last money in Duty Free on a bottle of whisky. «Disinfection!» we said each time we put our lips to the neck of the bottle, because there were, alas, no cups. By the time our plane was called, the word «disinfection» was coming out disgustingly badly and unintelligibly. I'm afraid that apart from Vasilisa and me, and Alexey dying of stomach pain, no one could make out what toast we were proposing.

When the tipsy failure, furious at the whole world and dressed up as a stewardess, asked me for the fourth time to put the whisky bottle away, I loudly told her to get lost, as I love to do with pushy women. Cheap plane tickets always put me off with their «Matrosskaya Tishina prison»-style service. The stewardess forcibly took my unfinished bottle of whisky away from me, after which I finally passed out. When we landed and got off the plane, I was met by a polite police detail. «What happened?» the officer asked me. «My bottle of whisky was taken away» I answered soberly, because I'd slept for four hours. «It's her! She's the one who told me to get lost!» the deranged stewardess shouted, twitching drunkenly. «Here's her bottle, uh… I don't need it anymore!» she proudly declared, after which she dropped her head onto her chest. The officers smiled and handed me the bottle. «She drank half a litre!» Alexey butted in, fighting through the pain. «I wasn't asleep and I saw it all! She stole our whisky… That's an indictable offence…». The pilot hurriedly led his stewardess away. The detail and the passing crowd roared with laughter.

«Babouches, babouches!» Alexey remembered a few days after we got back to Moscow. «I forgot to buy babouches!».
My doctor always told me that a stomach pumping clears your head and restores your memory.