Very bad English / Очень плохой English

I stood at the door, unable to move. This stranger was the first dead man I've ever seen…

The spiral staircase is not the most successful invention of mankind. It rushes up, steep and narrow.

Oddly enough, I was not sick, and there were no unpleasant sensations. I looked at him like an empty vessel. Like a body that life just slipped out of…

Eva's diary:

January 23, 1999.

Saturday.

Alone. Alone. Alone…

If you ever burned to blisters, and then the skin came off, leaving moist red circles, then you can understand how painful it is! Taska probably cannot accept this decision completely.

But our parents are adamant.

Mom has her new love, father has his insult.

I really wanted to hug Taska goodbye, but she froze like a mummy… No. I literally felt her spines grow. I was afraid to approach her.

I just brushed away the tears, got into the car and no longer looked in her direction. When the car started, I looked around. It seemed to me that my sister, not believing in everything that was happening, extended her neck, looking at the trail of the departing car…

Chapter 5

Doremi

I met Doremi in September two thousand and eight. We were twenty-three, and we came to the first composition lesson of the first year of evening art school.

Doremi was a very handsome young man dressed in a white embodied sweater, which emphasized his natural attractiveness extremely. I was sitting to his right, behind the others by the window, examining the crowd, but from time to time I turned to admire the big brown curls of the stranger.

He felt my tenacious gaze with his back, stood up and, moving his chair, sat next to me. This is how our friendship began.

I believe it was friendship.

Our tastes and habits coincided. All but one… Doremi was a complete romantic and monogamous. His first love, a girl with a rare name Kira, long ago left their native Khabarovsk when Doremi was sixteen, not even suspecting his feelings.

For some time, he tried to find her on the network and did not lose hope, but so far this has not brought any results.

The girl seemed to evaporate… Perhaps, of course, she just got married and changed her name, or even used some strange nickname. Besides, she knew Doremi under a different name…

When his parents, young surgeons who worked at the Oncology Clinical Center, were expecting their first child, they asked God for one thing:

«Lord! Send us a girl. We've come up with a name for her. We'll call her Sophia! God, you will not allow our hopes collapse. And we don't have any suitable name for the boy! Unless it's Dormidont!»

God must not have heard their prayers.

Or he had completely different plans…

Or perhaps he took the appeal of future parents as a challenge or a joke, and thus he made a joke himself. Of course, we can assume that he simply liked this name…

But in due time a strong and healthy baby was born. It was a boy. A beautiful dark-haired boy!

Doremi's parents had no choice but to nod three times in agreement, when an elderly registry office employee who had seen a lot in her life repeated her question three times, wrapping it in various words:

«A very unusual name… Greek. Ancient. So shall I write: D-O-R-M-I-D-O-N-T?»

«Exactly,» the young parents answered, not at all embarrassed.

«Is this someone's honor?» The employee inquired, losing any enthusiasm in her voice.

«It means a condition of the Agreement,» young people uttered simultaneously.

«Agreement? Interesting… You know, yesterday we registered another rare name here. Not as harmonious as yours of course. Imagine a boy named Nestor! So, I shall write „Dormidont“?» Kind woman specified for the last time.

«Yes Yes!» His parents nodded.

Doremi was lucky.

When there was a roll call in the first grade of school number nineteen, a dozen ordinary names were called besides his rare name: Zakhar, Sevostyan, Ilya, Kirill, Vasily, Grigory… Therefore, the boy had no problems with nicknames. No one paid particular attention to the unusualness of his name, which had its own history, moreover, quite beautiful.

The first time young man seriously wondered if he should change his name was when he applied for physics at Tomsk State University. A young girl from the admissions committee could not even repeat it without distorting it.

Therefore, at the age of twenty, when passport replacement was required, Doremi received a new passport which stated:

Dorian Vsevolodovich Cooper.

When Dorian told me the whole story, I remembered my parents and since then no longer believed that their experiment was cruel…

Dormidont's parents were far more inventive.

However, I came up with another short name:

Doremi.

It turned out somehow very musically, and he got used to it immediately. Since we were also involved in high art, being in a good mood I sometimes called him Doremi Gray.

Like Dorian Gray…

This is the story.

In any case, his watercolor portrait painted by me on my third year of art school now hangs on the left side wall of Doremi's huge hallway, right above the large black leather sofa, reflected in the glass cabinets along the opposite wall.

Art teachers often asked Doremi to pose. From time to time, he agreed to pose during painting classes. He continued doing so even when studying at art school became a memory.

I always admired Doremi's kind of sacrifice, or desire to be useful. A rare quality nowadays, isn't it?

I like everything about him.