The Apartment
The Hunched Cornish sits back in a massive armchair and gazes upon the snowdrops* he’d placed in a water-filled vase now set in the middle of his living room coffee table. He’d gathered them just the other day trudging a Kyiv wild, growing amid wide-spaced moss-covered trees on a knoll rising above the Dnipro River.
He looks out at the sill of his enclosed balcony. There, the potted plants have started getting more light, which has been lasting longer and getting stronger. He thinks the plants have started looking happier.
He looks up at the shelf against the wall and his eyes make out the titles along the bindings – Huxley’s “Eyeless in Gaza” – which he doesn’t know when he’ll ever be in the mood to start. And Broch’s “Sleepwalkers” in the original German: intimidating, long, really three books in one, difficult.
And next to these Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game”, also known as “Magister Ludi”. It is a Ukrainian translation of the German. There: for next reading, why not? Like the others, it is also a book of philosophy, a book of ideas, but well and lightly written, entertaining and highly fanciful, science fictional and fantastic, emanating a warm and welcoming pull.
The whistle of the boiling kettle sounds.
He rises from the chair and moves slowly into the kitchen. He pours the water over Arabica grounds he has heaped atop his own makeshift filter fashioned from folded layers of medical gauze secured over the mouth of the serving pot. He throws the used grounds and gauze into a slop pail and brings the coffee pot into the living room, where he sets it on a ceramic tile on the table.
He pours coffee into a cup from his second-best china set and stirs in some sugar. Now, the saucer and the coffee-filled cup on it take their proper place on the end table to the left of his armchair.
He goes back to the kitchen and comes back with a chocolate bar. It is a slightly darker milk chocolate of a very simple and tasty variety. The chocolate bar wrapper has a drawing of a smiling little girl on it wearing a kerchief around her head with brown hair and big brown eyes. The Hunched Cornish likes this little girl with the fondness no one should feel guilty or ashamed of when expressing a liking for an innocent child in our hearts.
He unwraps the chocolate and breaks off a piece with a dexterity of his massive digits difficult to believe were any of us to actually behold it.
The hot coffee pours over the chocolate melting in his mouth. The sun has started coming through the window, causing him to grow sleepy and nod off a few times in that pleasant armchair way.
The Hunched Cornish rubs his eyes and pours himself more coffee – still quite hot, and together with the chocolate, very, very good. He drinks some un-carbonated mineral water to wash down the coffee and flush his gullet, and then pours yet more coffee.
He gets up to turn on his player and puts in Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 2: Philippe Entremont at the piano; Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. He sits back down and closes his eyes. The music begins to soar.
If there is one thing of the very few such things in this world you don’t interrupt – categorically and without exception – it’s Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2.
There is a violent irreverent banging at the door and an obnoxiously childish ringing and ringing of the doorbell. The Hunched Cornish is livid.
“Hey, Hunchy Hunchy Hunchy – ha!”
The fucking Half Guinea. The Hunched Cornish’s jaw clenches in restrained rage, yet he neither answers, nor moves, but merely grips the rests of his chair the harder.
“Come on out of there, Hunchboy! You can’t stay all cooped up with all this life brimming out here!”
More banging and ringing of the doorbell. The music soars on; The Hunched Cornish bows his head, his eyes squeezed shut, and remains silent.
“Heeeeeyyyeee!!! Hunchboy!!! Come on! All these beautiful chicks out here undressing just waiting to get laid – they’re practically spilling over the edges of this city! Hey – Hunchy, Hunchy, Hunchy – haaaaa!!!”
He hears some obscene muffled grumbling and then footsteps stepping away from the door and then trotting back down the landing stairs. A few seconds later the metal door back into the outside world slams against the building.
The Hunched Cornish takes a deep breath, gets up and walks over to the player. He stops the music and resets it to start the masterpiece all over again.
The Hunched Cornish sits back down and the music begins to soar.
It is not the same.
* Maybe these are snowdrops, and maybe they’re not – KUSEB.
March 23, 2015