The Lovers

Юлия Добровольская

Роман охватывает период с 50-70-х годов (с отступлениями в 20-е годы) 20-го века до наших дней.Дина, студентка-отличница, тайно влюблена в своего преподавателя, Константина Константиновича Колотозашвили, красавца и донжуана, в котором она видит гораздо больше достоинств, чем просто привлекательная внешность.Однажды на экзамене Константина Константиновича она получает пятёрку «автоматом», что небывало для этого строгого и требовательного педагога, и приглашение на свидание.Долгий вечер, проведённый вместе, открывает обоим новые грани друг друга, усиливая взаимный интерес. *Перевод на английский Sofia Gutkin © 2017

Julia Dobrovolskaya

The Lovers

© 2017 by Julia Dobrovolskaya

All Rights Reserved

Translated by Sofia Gutkin © 2017

This English-language translation was funded by generous contributions from:

David G. Brown

Fred Clipton

Chris Florio

Becky Gentry

Lisa Harvey

Jim Kostopoulos

Sari Lewis

Vicki McDermitt

Mike Ricker

Tim Schumacher

Jake Valentine

Thank you to all!

Dina

The Final Exam

Dina Turbina stepped out of the university doors into an overcast day.

One could say that the colors surrounding her, washed out by the fog and the feeble rains of the past few days, and inspiring autumnal sadness, did not match her mood at all, which was upbeat and focused, as if ready to break out into song. But Dina didn’t believe in such a thing as bad or good weather. She accepted without any judgment both the bleak days with their faded colors, and the bright sun in a blue sky, without classifying them as “good” and “bad,” or “sad” and “happy.” For Dina, the world was always wonderful and surprising, and each kind of weather had its own charm. Certainly, her mood was not always so uplifted, sometimes it went downwards, but the weather had absolutely nothing to do with it. Dina was more likely to make her surroundings match her mood!

She put on her sunglasses, which transformed everything around her, making the world appear bright and gold, like the seaside in the peak of summer.

Dina loved the sea, but she still had two whole months left to wait. Two months of internship, which was almost a real job, almost aligning with her specialization, for which she would be paid almost a real salary, one that Dina was planning to spend on a trip to the seaside.

Meanwhile, it was the very start of summer. The beginning of a typical weekday. Yet her work was already done for today, and for next week too. She had passed the last, most difficult exam for this semester, for the most important subject for her future profession. She passed under the strictest and most demanding teacher. The most attractive teacher at their university. The most attractive man that Dina had ever met so far. This was a common opinion, with every female student secretly hoping for more than just pedagogical favors from Konstantin Konstantinovich Kolotozashvili. In fact, plenty of cute girls got some. That’s what people said at the university.

But that was precisely what Dina did not want to think about.

Better to think of the sea. She was hoping to visit her favorite Feodosia again this summer, once she had finished her internship and saved up enough money. Even her mom had promised to help. Awesome! This was so awesome!

Her near future definitely looked bright and alluring. Yet why could she not let go of the present?

* * *

Dina took a question sheet from the table.

The question sheet was not too hard, well, as much as it could be for a very difficult subject. Dina was not scared of any of the topics since she had studied thoroughly and was confident in her abilities. She always completed all the exercises on time and started working on them straight away, not leaving them until the last day or week. She never skipped a class, and she would attend university even if she did not feel well so that she would not miss something that was not written in the textbooks, something that only a master of their craft could tell her. The very fact of her attention to these significant, or even insignificant, details of t