По четвергам
On Thursdays
C2 · Proficient · fiction · 10 scenes · Premium story
A proficiency-level love story between two people in their seventies, in which nobody ever says anything about love. A retired physics teacher has organised his widowhood into a Thursday he keeps to the minute: the 8:40 bus, flowers from the same woman at the gate, fifteen minutes at the railing. Two rows over there is a woman who keeps the same Thursday. It takes rain to make them speak, a thermos to make them sit down, and a year of eleven-minute walks to the bus stop before he discovers that he does not know her surname. Every feeling in it arrives disguised as a practical detail, and the last four words are the whole story.
Characters
- Aleksandr Ilyich Gruzdev (Александр Ильич Груздев) — Retired physics teacher, 74
- Nina Sergeyevna Bakhareva (Нина Сергеевна Бахарева) — Widow, 71
- Vera Pavlovna (Вера Павловна Груздева) — His wife, 1949–2023
- The flower seller (Продавщица у ворот) — At the cemetery gate
Vocabulary from this story
- четверг — Thursday
- кладбище — cemetery
- могила — grave
- ряд — row
- ограда — railing, enclosure
- скамейка — bench
- автобус — bus
- расписание — timetable
- остановка — bus stop
- цветы — flowers
- термос — thermos flask
- навес — shelter, awning