...I'd left the car somewhere on the roadside wandered a couple of houses away — and got sucked in. Now I can't quite work out which lane the poor thing is standing in. I move from house to house hoping to sort out whether the windows here are alike, or just seem so at first glance.
It's not that there are especially many of them, but you photograph one, look up, and catch sight of another off to the side. And from that one a third... As if something is leading you from house to house. The chimney pipes here are trimmed with carving too — quite special. And fences made from stamped metal scrap — remnants of some factory. I raise my camera and hear it — the creak of a window being pushed open in the brick house immediately to my left. Out of the corner of my eye I catch some movement.
"Step away from the window!"
I don't particularly need anything more: I've already photographed the nalichnik, the decorative valance, and even the unfurling chestnut buds — but the rudeness freezes me for an instant and I start moving as if through molasses, struggling, apparently four times slower than usual. And memorising everything.
"Step away from the window, I said! Do you not understand?!" The woman's voice rises into a shout, and I have to stop myself from looking her way. I turn the dial on the camera, dial back the exposure. Raise the camera again, the rubber eyecup grazing my brow.
Again, I more sense than hear some movement behind that window, then the woman's voice delivers something short and unexpected:
"Sit down!"
At that, I give in and turn my head toward the window. Some corner of my mind insists I should stay unruffled, but my face probably shows more curiosity than anything of the sort right now. Nothing to see through the curtain. I stand bewildered for a moment, but the moment I raise my camera to photograph the carved drainpipe I've only just noticed (and, if I'm honest with myself, to provoke some further reaction) — the woman behind the curtains, shrieking again and plunging me into bafflement, cries:
"Sit down, you little wretch, I said! Are you deaf?!"
I back away, glancing around just in case, not knowing what to think — maybe there really is some chair there that I somehow missed...
And after me, from behind the billowing curtains, flies:
"You little wretch! Sit down, I said! Sit and read the problem! Are you stupid?! Why are you so stupid?.."
And the dull smacks of cuffs to the head, and a child's crying.
*****
P.S. The photographs are from yesterday's Mikhailovka, Volgograd Oblast.
