Loneliness descended like a chill, straight down my spine. The poet had never been here in the first place. I crumpled down into a seat by the window in this deserted restaurant and waited for a waiter who would never come. I drew my finger across the table, covered with a thin layer of dust; the light from the window caught the trail of my fingertip, making only that place shine as if wet. Hearing a loud click I turned around, but the door at the back was closed. If that door were to suddenly swing open, who would walk in? I imagined her coming toward me, and at that moment, feeling warm, moist breath on my cheek, I looked up with a start. Mayakovsky was sitting beside me. Utterly impossible, but here he was.

“The door opens, and he appears,” Mayakovsky mumbled.

“No, he won’t. You’re just wishing he would.”

“The door opens, and he appears.”

“Who appears?”

“A man named Osip, a close friend of mine who’s also Lilya’s husband. Osip, Lilya, and I were three. We weren’t fooling around on the sly. We didn’t hide anything. We opened our hearts to each other, then stood in a circle, our arms around each other’s shoulders, and cried out loud. And in the end, we swore to spend our lives loving each other.”

“So that was your futuristic project.”

“But it didn’t work out. When there are three, one person is always a third wheel.”

“What made you fall in love with a married woman? Was it the sorrows of young Werther, maybe?” I’d meant this to sound light and teasing, but my voice came out terribly serious.

“I probably wanted to free her from the trap of her bourgeois life. But there was a contradiction in this desire of mine. I was aware of it myself. I believe it was her physical warmth and the sense of security she gave off that attracted me in the first place. She was the sort of person who, no matter how upset she was, would never go out, get blind drunk, and then fall down and freeze to death in the street. She was never going to ask me to commit suicide with her. But then again, maybe she was only able to keep that sense of warmth and stability because she was protected by bourgeois society. That’s a contradiction, wouldn’t you say?”

“But she herself wasn’t satisfied with that stable life, was she?”

“She had apparently been suffering from insomnia. There was nothing specific she was dissatisfied with, but even so she was always irritated, feeling she couldn’t go on with her bourgeois life. That was when we met. Lilya thought she had found something in me that was lacking in her husband. But he was a close friend of mine. A friend as important as a lover. Besides, she never considered divorcing him. She didn’t have the slightest intention of leaving him to wander the streets with me and me alone. And so the three of us decided to live together.”