The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov

director…”—and they winked at me cunningly, as if to say, “The best is yet to come.”
     
    My new purpose in life eventually robbed me of my “solid profession”. From the second year I hardly studied at all, but worked on the CJI. I was granted most of my course tests and exams as a gift, thanks to the vice-president for cultural affairs.
    My own gift for compilation, which had previously manifested itself in the writing of reports, came in handy in my new position. It was easy for me to design programmes for all the amateur concerts and celebrations devoted to the institute’s anniversaries, and I became an indispensable assistant to our club manager.
    A half-hour film about the institute was shot under my supervision. We timed the presentation just right, combining two round dates: the president’s sixtieth birthday and the institute’s sixtieth anniversary, and we said it was a modest gift from the student club.
    The film was called
Our Beloved Polytech: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
, and it was pompously eulogistic. For several years the flattering video was always shown to high-placed guests from the ministry.
    The president was very touched by his present and money started being allocated to the club. Following these subsidies Galoganov, who bought himself a new television, a video player and a music centre, really doted on me.
    The institute’s petty bureaucracy invited me to its parties as one of its own. Sensing imminent promotion, Galoganov, in his drunken generosity, started predicting more and more frequently that I would be his successor in the post of club manager and was genuinely offended because I wasn’t ecstatic at the prospect.
    At the time I couldn’t understand that life had handed me a perfectly tolerable little pattern for a career—a calm, swampy haven. I indignantly rejected these gifts of fate. Instead of consolidating my friendship with Galoganov and the vice-president forcultural affairs, time after time I informed my benefactors with a condescending smile that I intended to take up art seriously and couldn’t give a damn for a future as a petty functionary in a college.
    My parents, of course, tried to change my mind, but I replied harshly that I had promised them a “solid profession” and not a life obliterated by boredom.
    Vovka kept quiet, because she had been morally compromised. She was a second-year student then, and I can’t remember which came first—the melon-shaped bulge of her stomach or the words about getting married soon. And so Vovka didn’t butt in with any clever advice, but devoted assiduous efforts to cajoling passing marks for her exams out of her lecturers, in order not to lose a year of study. For our part, we tried to like Vovka’s fiancé Slavik, a member of her study group. This didn’t prove too hard; at the very first viewing the defiler of virtue won us all over with his meek and obliging manner. He seemed really to love Vovka. They soon married and moved into our old folks’ empty apartment. In June Vovka gave birth to a boy, whom they called Ivan.
     
    In two years pride had blinded me. I associated freely with the vice-president of the institute and had my own desk in the office of the club manager. I wasn’t writing any diploma thesis at all. At Galoganov’s request an old diploma work entitled ‘Casting from Lost-Wax Models’ was extracted from the archives and the title page was changed.
    What else was there? In summer, at the end of the fourth year, I got married. At that time student marriages had assumed the proportions of an epidemic. My wife was called Marina. She had a rather pleasant appearance, with features so generically regular that she looked like a statistically average model of an attractive girl. That was the way the propaganda posters used to depict the striding ranks of Young Communist League girls, all with that same collective prettiness. After the first day we met, I wouldn’t have recognized her in the street.