Salim Babullaoghly

IN A RAINY EVENING

Translated by Esmira Serova a short story

Miracles happen when they are dreamed of. Dreamed of much... He was at last face to face with the three-month-old baby of his enemy he wanted to take revenge on. Tête-à-tête: the woman is sleeping wearily after calming the child, and the man isn’t in being at work at that time and will be late – he knew it in advance. Having decided at first to carry out the long-prepared rite of revenge through killing the woman, he however changed his mind. Now he realized better the greatness of the thirst for vengeance he had been concealing for many long years from everyone, fearing to give it away even in the delirium of sleep: blood for blood, only a baby for baby! And the baby did not feel the danger; smiling carelessly again in half slumber it threw off with a slack and clumsy movement the mother’s jacket laid over it for the child to breathe in her odour and sleep calmly. He averted his eyes so as not to see the scene. The pulsation in his temples was increasing; drops of cold sweat were gathering in the wrinkles of his forehead and streaming down his face. His hands were cold as ice. To stop shivering he crossed his arms and thrust them into the armpits. He pricked up his ears. He realized that if a bit more time passed his nerves would not stand it and later he would regret his cowardice. “Deuce take it, I mustn’t be late!” stretching his hands to the pillow with these words he tried to imagine the baby’s last helpless convulsions: he did not want to leave room for hesitation and nervousness in his vengeance. The sound of rain that just started tapping on the tiled roof of the house awoke the baby and it fixed its eyes wide open on the ceiling searching for the source of the sound. And then it smiled as if repeating hand movements of someone invisible and began to talk to that invisible man in a language intelligible only for itself. And he thought it was even better and made the work easier. He stared at the baby’s face with eyes full of anger like it was the last way to raise his courage. His look came across a couple of shining eyes full with love and wide with wonder. “Dear Lord, how sweet it is!” Stretching its plump hands forward, the baby passed them over the face of the man it saw for the first time, with the movement resembling that of a blind man trying to recognize who is opposite him. It smoothed his eyelids, eyelashes and plucked his thin moustaches. And he shrank back feeling the milky smell of the tiny hands. The baby’s hands remained in the emptiness for a moment and lied wearily down to the sides. Not paying attention to what was happening it seized with two hands its bended leg it was dangling in the air and thrust the big toe into its mouth. He felt that he was wearing himself out, there was a buzzing in his head. Besides, the woman could wake up. Trying to define what there was more in that buzzing: the pulsation of his heart beating in harmony with the ever increasing sound of the rain, or the weeping of the baby which wasn’t like any natural sound, he remembered his son. On such occasions he would certainly take the boy into his arms to calm him. But now… Long ago he came to the decision to describe two incidents he witnessed in the childhood. Having written the last sentence ending with dots, he nevertheless realized that he confronted another failure and that it mustn’t be this way any more. First, even if it’s not ruled out that the incident the end of which he had never seen once happened or will happen in reality, it violated the main, basic principle. The written has nothing to do with himself, with his childhood. And that means all he had written until now was well far from reality, he wasted time, at least he hadn’t watched the movie to the end. On the other hand,

friends, his first readers, could express just thoughts like “…what’s that? …what a subject?”, they would regard him a man with morbid imagination trying to picture the murder of a baby. And another thing: one cannot go far only with his mind, only with mathematic formulae; miracles happen when people do not dream of them, do not see them, or rather do not realize them. Then, he had been mistaken from the first sentence. But even thinking in such a way he could not get rid of anxiety. He could not understand the reason why, having sat down to write about completely different events which he had been nurturing in his mind for a long time and had thought through right up to the minutest dialogues, which he had experienced in fact, he suddenly went in this unhappy direction from the first sentence. Perhaps, he was confused by going into another room because after writing the first sentence he could not find cigarettes close at hand… Two minutes in all? He tried to bring back in his memory what had happened then: I went into the other room. Mother and Father were watching a movie. Exactly… I even greeted Father as I hadn’t been home all day long… Father kind of said, “An interesting movie…” And I? Hum… And ex comitate I leant my elbows upon the sofa they were sitting on, watched the TV for some two minutes standing upright… Then I took a pack of cigarettes and returned to my room… That’s all”. Giving a start to the squeak of the door and thinking that he would be reproached again for not having lubricated the hinges, he turned and saw the father’s smiling face. “Look, it’s growing”, he meant the rain; “You’ll shut the windows then!” he said. It was felt that it was hard for him to speak. “But you should have watched it, it was an interesting movie. He still had heart, didn’t murder the baby.” The rain was tapping on the tiled roof of the house.