Полёт фантазии, фантазии в полёте - [72]

Tanya, for it was her whom David identified as Snowwhite, neatly folded the paper and put it on the seat by her side. Now her face acquired that special placid expression, serene and quiet, which is thought to be characteristic of the Slavs.

«She must be a foreigner», — reflected David. He couldn’t exactly say why, but there was an unmistakable air of foreignness about her. Romanian? Polish? Yugoslav? At least he could swear she wasn’t English.

Oxford Circus. Snowwhite stood up, leaving the paper on the seat and walked to the doors. As the doors opened she unexpectedly halted for a moment and looked back, flashing at David a bewitching smile. So quick. He didn’t even have the chance to smile back. He tried to follow Snowwhite with his eyes, but the huge black guy blocked his view, and in a second the multinational crowd of London underground swallowed up the young woman. Damn. Now he would never know why she had smiled at him like that. He felt really irritated. He wouldn’t have been so annoyed had Snowwhite’s smile been just a meaningless masque of politeness people in the West are so much used to. No, her smile was thoroughly meaningful, as if she wanted to tell him something, something really important, something like — «I know you wanted to ask me what I was dreaming about, and I would have certainly told you, but how could we break the rules of a civilised society? A strange man should not ask a strange woman what dreams she has just off hand…» Damn. Now he would never know. David sighed, reached for the paper that Snowwhite had left and began looking through it.

The crowd carried Tanya to change for the Northern line. Friday afternoon, rush hour, so many people on platform one waiting for the train. Tanya looked at an electronic information board: three minutes for the train, it said. How clever of the English to introduce such electronic boards that give useful information and advice. Don’t leave your bags unattended, for example. Thanks, she won’t. Her eye fell on the advertisement covering the wall of the tunnel. It looked like a clipping from an enormous newspaper. Something about child abuse and that any of us could be one of the poor kids. Another puzzle of the Western society: they discuss openly things which in Russia people prefer not to talk about. She strained her sight, trying to read small letters and involuntary moved to the very edge of the platform. What does it say? An eight year old girl raped by her stepfather? How disgusting! Poor kid.

«Next train approaching», showed the letters on the electronic board. Tanya never noticed that black guy in funny glasses and big boots who was passing by in a swinging walk. He brushed her with his shoulder only slightly but it was enough to send her slender body off balance. The next moment she was flying from the platform onto the rails right in front of the approaching train. It all happened in a fragment of a second. The cream coat turned red with a bloody mess as the young woman’s body was ruthlessly smashed against the front of the train. Tanya didn’t even have the time to realise what had happened for she died almost instantaneously. Her consiousness fizzled out with a curious sensation: she felt as if she was falling down the bottomless cellar like Alice in Wonderland, only the cellar she was falling through wasn’t dark but dazzlingly white, like that fantastic snowfield in her favourite childhood memory.

As David was looking through the paper Snowwhite had left his eye fell on a big cartoon: a black man sleeping on a bench with a bulldog by his side, the latter chewing ferociously the sign «No dogs, no Irish, no blacks». He grinned. Cute, as his American friends would put it, cute. So perhaps, that’s what made the young woman smile. Suddenly an exquisite fragrance reached his nostrils. What is it? Oh, the paper. The newspaper still kept the smell of Snowwhite’s perfume. He tried to discern what it was. Something fresh and natural, like freshly cut grass or watermelon, very pleasant. He felt the newspaper sheet with his fingers as if trying to absorb the warmth of the young woman’s touch still lingering to the smooth surface. Her skin must be also smooth, at least it looked like that.

David closed his eyes trying to evoke Snowwhite’s face in his memory, but the image somehow eluded him. He could see everything separately, like bits of a jigsaw puzzle: rich chestnut hair, bright vivacious eyes, sensually carved lips curved slightly at the corners as she smiled at him. Yet he failed to put these pieces together. Damn. Snowwhite kept eluding him. As a highly qualified specialist in computer graphics David boasted an excellent visual memory, so he made another effort straining his inner sight. Gradually the blurred contours of Snowwhite’s face transformed into a strange vision: a vast expanse of the white snowfield glistening brightly in the rays of the winter sun. David saw himself walking across this field from the edge of the forest to the lake, his feet going deep into snow. The white snow glistened so brightly that it nearly dazzled him. Suddenly he saw a butterfly, a painted lady, it’s wings fluttering in the air with yellow, orange and red, floating right before his nose. A feast of summer colours amidst perfectly white winter.