On the eve of the new year, Oksana invited me to her place to acquaint with her parents.
In the corner of the room stood the Christmas tree, and in front of it, right on the floor, sat Oksana dressed like a toy from a Department store.
“Well, you look okay, ” I told her, not even daring to sit nearby. Her red hair and a resolute face were reflected in a mirror. It rained outside.
“The New Year with a thaw?” I asked as I noticed her father, a truck driver, sitting in a chair, drinking and smoking, emitting an unnatural odor.
I must confess that I did not know whether to join Oksana and decorate the tree or to start drinking like the rest of Oksana’s relatives.
“Why are you so shy, boy?” asked their grandmother. I picked up a glass filled to the brim with the real stuff, drank it, and that very moment, an evil spirit left me. I felt great. But I was a little annoyed with Oksana because she promised me to be alone with her. But there were other people in the small room, not counting her younger brother, a snotty idiot.
And when I was drunk tightly, I told her everything I thought about it, standing beside her uncle dressed as Santa. “Be quiet,” she whispered, the dressed up cutie. “When everybody gets drunk, we will go to the Barbara. You know the barmaid at the railway station?”
Well, they laid the table in the center of the room, spread tangerines, hot potatoes with canned fish in tomato sauce. Everybody took a large glass of vodka and we drank to a year past and a happy, healthy new year.
Oksana seemed to be obsessed with one idea in such a wonderful night.
“Look, Rotten,” she told me time and again as she drank more and more, “if you cheat on me, all you’ll know this new year is regret.”
I caressed her neck reassuringly. “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine, dear.”
They turned on music and distributed masks. I got the one of a red commissar with a large mustache and big gun. Oksana’s dad was now a rich peasant with a shotgun—my fucking class enemy. Oksana became a dog, and her brother, the snotty degenerate, was a fox. Their grandma didn’t want to play with us. She was sitting on the stove, counting the years spent in prison. She was also muttering about evil spirits that possessed her. As for the mother, she had been drunk since morning and was sleeping in the closet. Nobody knew for certain when she would wake up to freshen the nip.
We put on masks and became alien. The dog was chasing the fox and eventually began to tear her apart somewhere behind the scenes. I grabbed the gun and started firing at the chandelier, but somehow hitting constantly yellow shade on the ceiling. Father was shooting like crazy, without stopping and any sense, until he hit the old woman on the stove, who flipped over in the air three times and sprawled on the floor, breaking all her fragile bones. Then I got mad at the parasite, and without aiming, knocked out his brains out with one good shot. He cursed for the last time, then fell right on the floor and was still forever.
Now all was quiet. Only the Parrot was hanging and dangling in his cage. He was the only sober witness of these strange events. He took a cigarette butt, considering himself to be an avid smoker and a very smart bird.
“Now you two will go to jail,” he shouted and put down a glass of vodka.
The clock struck midnight. We kissed and danced a waltz. We circled and laughed like recovering patients, clutching each other in a heated embrace.