C4 antho - Chamber Four

~80~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
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Loud singing wakes us up before dawn. We cannot recognize
the male voice whose pitch ranges amply from peacock
to goat but we know the female one by heart and to the
marrow of our bones. The walls of the hostel rooms as thin as
a calico curtain are being dissolved by the sulphuric acid of
voices. Thank God we woke up to the allegro vivace part,
which usually precedes the presto culmination with a final
fortissimo out of the full breast of the diva and the breathless
tenor losing its virility in falsetto heights.
The singers harvest their storm of applause from the listeners
in adjacent rooms along with a loud account of their
performance.
“Six times!” heralds the neighbour downstairs.
“No, seven!” argues the neighbour upstairs.
Andrey addresses me meaningfully, pointing in the direction
the singing has been coming from, “Learn, Semolina,
learn!”
The diva so praised is notoriously famous in the
labyrinths of the United Hostels of Donetsk University.
Nourished on raisin buns and peasant butter, now almost in
possession of an intellectually unobliging diploma in English
philology, Tanya spends her nights in cockroach-teeming
cells not out of bitter necessity. Her parents are, for
Donetsk standards, well-off. They live in a high-ceilinged
flat in Artem Main Avenue where Tanya disposes of a whole
room. If Tanya were asked to explain her behaviour she
would say that she is just enjoying her student life before
stepping into all too early adulthood, skimming cream from
the thin milk of the toppled times. She would also imply that