The company party. Dating story no. 37

Every large company has its own dynamic, its own roles for the staff and its own office romances. And as for company parties, everyone who could be bothered has made a joke about them. Yet for all those jokes, memes and articles on pop-psychology websites, there is no avoiding it — such is human nature.

The star of every company party — and not only of parties — and the darling of every woman from accounting to marketing was Timur. And no, he was not a bad boy; on the contrary, he was an excellent worker whom everyone ran to for advice, whom everyone admired and who was held up as an example. Of course there were also those who did not much like him — how could there not be — but he undeniably knew how to find a way to any client and any colleague. As tends to happen in such cases, a little flock of especially ardent fans always circled around him: they treated him to home-made pies, shared their lunch with him, carried his papers about and hung shamelessly on his every word.

And so, all through the month before the New Year masquerade party, Zhenya was in a kind of feverish euphoria, tirelessly consulting Vika about the mask, the clothes, the make-up: should she have her hair cut, should she dye it, did this make her look heavier, did that dress make her look slimmer, and so on. Vika understood perfectly well that any advice of hers was, in truth, useless, but so as not to hurt her friend she nodded every time, praised Zhenya and told her she was doing everything right. Nobody was arguing that Timur was wonderful — Vika herself would not have turned him down if he had bestowed upon her such universal grace as his presence in her life — but to run after him quite so openly...

Vika, quietly and without telling anyone, simply got ready for the party. She had already bought herself an absolutely magical dress: indigo, made of astonishing fabric, one that turned her into a princess outright. This, no doubt, is how Cinderella felt in the dress from her Fairy Godmother: as if you were not yourself but some wondrous, unearthly diva floating above the ground. Vika had never had any illusions about herself: she simply had not been born to take part in beauty contests. What she had mastered, though, was the art of transformation — with a couple of strokes of mascara and a few sweeps of a brush she could change her appearance almost beyond recognition. It is all very well to have a magical Fairy Godmother who turns you into a princess with a single wave of her wand. Or a rich relative who does the same with a single swipe of a credit card and half a day at a salon. But when you have neither the one nor the other, you have to see to it yourself. And so now she put on her make-up, curled her hair and, with undisguised pleasure, slipped into the dress. It came with a pair of exquisite silver shoes and a matching clutch. And a no less exclusive mask, filigree, covering half her face. Nobody, not even Zhenya, knew that this outfit existed. As expected, Zhenya and the others oohed and aahed over Vika's dress for a whole two minutes — but Timur was more important after all.

Timur was mentally prepared for the extra attention. It had been the same at every company party, every team-building day and every other occasion too. Everyone knew him, everyone recognised him even behind his simple little mask, people came up to talk to him of their own accord and stopped him the moment he took a couple of steps away from his previous conversation partner... Sometimes even people he did not remember struck up a conversation with him. Luckily they would remind him themselves where they knew each other from, and he instantly built the logical connection. Sometimes he was amazed that people could be bored at company parties. He had never once been bored, and even if he had only one person to talk to, it was always some extremely funny and out-of-the-ordinary character you could then never shake off.

This time he had spotted the little flock of huntresses in advance. They were grazing by the bar, throwing hungry glances in his direction. For now they were together, but only for now — only until one of them moved on to more active measures. After that it would be every woman for herself, and him too. Glancing about without being noticed, he planned his escape routes and had already begun sidling towards Palpetrovich — the red-nosed facilities manager, a supremely clever man with encyclopaedic knowledge in his head which, alas, nobody had any use for. He was interesting to talk to, and the huntresses were unlikely to come after him there. The girls did indeed liven up, getting ready for the chase. And then Timur quite by accident caught someone's eye.

It was an unusual gaze. Delighted and beckoning, it caught hold of you and would not let go. Only after a while did Timur notice that this gaze was framed by a filigree silver mask, which gave the face a strange airiness, a touch of magic. That, no doubt, is what Tolkien's elf-women really looked like, rather than in Peter Jackson's mass-market version. Add to that the softly curling hair, the indigo-coloured fabric streaming down like a waterfall... Timur simply forgot both his escape plan and Palpetrovich the facilities manager.

Blind to everything around him, he walked towards those eyes, which drew him as the sirens drew the crew of Odysseus. He came up, struck up a conversation — and time somehow imperceptibly picked up speed, raced away and flew mercilessly past, too fast to hold on to. It seemed they had only just begun talking, and it was already time to leave. The first taxi drivers were already collecting the colleagues in the greatest hurry to get home, and the beautiful stranger in the silver mask was looking sadly at Timur with her mesmerising eyes. Her cousin was coming to pick her up, and no, later was simply not possible. Their hands touched for the last time, and Timur frantically tried to memorise at least a few identifying marks so that he could recognise his elf-woman at work: a thin snake ring on her index finger, a mole on her right cheekbone, a scar on the back of her right hand just above the wrist... And her figure, her height, her hair colour and that gaze...

The Monday after a company party is a hangover of a day. All through Friday your colleagues had fun, played the fool, relaxed and looked stunning, bright and colourful. They opened up, they flirted, they showed themselves in an entirely different light. They spent the whole weekend resting too, indulging in pleasant memories, dreaming of what might have been, of who looked how, who said what and who might have said what, who stood out and who disgraced themselves, and which moments of the celebration were the most memorable. And then on Monday you have to run out before dawn into the cold and the slush, into the hot, crowded metro, then out into the cold again and into the office, which after all the brightness of the party, after the solemn bustle of the preparations, feels particularly cold and severe. And somehow quiet, as if there were fewer colours in it.

Vika tied her hair back in a ponytail, put on the minimum "standard-issue" make-up, pulled an oversized jumper over her tight trousers and stroked the silver mask on the hall mirror with regret. In the mask she had been a princess. And now she was once again an ordinary "drudge of the keyboard shop", as her uncle, a mechanic of long standing, jokingly called it. In the mask she had lived a fairy tale with a handsome prince named Timur. And now he would not even notice her again. Well, that was evidently how it was meant to be. Smearing lip balm on her lips, Vika regretfully put on her expensive but by now utterly loathed glasses and hurried off to work.

Timur flew to work as if on wings. He longed to find the mysterious stranger, to find out who she was, whatever it might cost him. In his imagination he already pictured how on the very first day he would recognise her by her gaze, how, like the prince in Cinderella, he would come up to her and go down on one knee, how her wonderful eyes would first widen in surprise and then light up with a warm, happy, delighted smile. He pictured how astonished all his colleagues would be, how the fairy tale would come true... He knew it was all daydreaming, but the dreams were so sweet that he did not want to let them go. And so, right from the start, from the moment he touched his electronic pass to the turnstile at the entrance, he began methodically catching the eye of every woman he passed, in the hope that the magic was about to happen.

Vika had noticed Timur back in the metro carriage. He stood out from the general mass of zombies buried in their smartphones because he stood upright and proud, staring dreamily into the emptiness beyond the door with its amusingly worn-away warning "Do not le....n". At his stop he fluttered out of the carriage as if the whole crowd around him did not exist and tore off to work so fast that Vika did not even try to catch up with him, noting to herself with a snort that some people have quite extraordinary work motivation for a Monday. The day began almost as usual, except that Zhenya kept fluttering rapturously around her, marvelling at how on earth Vika had managed to get Timur for herself, and refusing to the very last to believe that that was all there was to it.

— "Well, you at least left him your number, didn't you? Don't tell me he didn't give you his either? What is wrong with you!!!!"

— "It all happened so fast somehow, and then Tanya drove me off. You know yourself, she has children..."

— "And how are the two of you supposed to go on now?!"

— "Go on with what?" Vika smiled. She was rather good at dreaming herself, but she would never have dared to say it out loud. First, so as not to frighten off fate, if fate really had decided to give her a present. And second, in case there was no present, so as not to comfort herself with false hopes and not to suffer when those hopes went stale, withered and crumbled into dust.

— "But there has to be a next part!" Zhenya would not give up.

— "Only in fairy tales," Vika smiled, "that is where you get scarlet sails and lost slippers..."

— "What?! You didn't even think to lose a slipper?!" Zhenya was genuinely outraged.

— "I didn't think of it..." Vika owned up with a smirk.

— "You are such an iiiidiot!!!" Zhenya shook her head, and the two of them burst out laughing.

By the end of the day Timur thought for the first time that finding the silver mask was not going to be all that easy. Two days later he began to worry, and by the end of the week he was starting to lose hope. The stranger with the astonishing gaze was nowhere to be found. He was losing hope, but he was genuinely afraid to admit to anyone that he was looking for her — they would only laugh at him. He looked for her on the transport, in the canteen, in the corridors; he reconstructed her image every evening before sleep, tried talking to her, asked her to come back to him.

Meanwhile, his department was given a joint project with the due-diligence people. He had little to do with them at work and knew only that they carried out some quite incredible research at the crossroads of different specialisms, without going into it any further; going into it was precisely what the joint projects were for. Their project manager was a very pleasant, calm young woman named Vika. At the very first meeting she set out the system and the principles clearly: who had to do what, and by when. The plan, incidentally, was far better thought through than the plans of some other department managers. She answered every question calmly, to the point and elegantly. A true professional, one Timur could not help admiring. Vika looked calm, yet surprisingly fragile. Very stylish, but not showy. And incredibly competent. Working with her was a pleasure. She was one of those rare women who did not try to assert themselves at someone else's expense. She listened to him attentively, admired his reasoning and supported his undertakings. He knew that he could rely on her, and gradually he caught himself thinking that he was making an effort not for the project but for her silent admiration. The image of the silver mask from the party was gradually being replaced by the image of Vika from due diligence.

Vika had decided from the outset not to take the initiative. After a few days of working together it was clear to her that Timur either did not recognise or remember her in particular, or else simply did not care about anything that had happened at the party. Either way, there was little sense in moving things from the working level to the personal one, so she concentrated on the project and did her best to make everything run at the highest possible level. If it was not meant to be, it was not meant to be. All the more surprising, then, that Timur suddenly began openly flirting with her, courting her and showing her signs of attention. More and more often he asked her to talk work matters through, to discuss their joint work, to meet for lunch and so on. Rumours began going round the company, but Vika remained unshakeably mysterious.

The project was heading for its finish and, as always, the deadlines had been set earlier than the colleagues could coordinate with one another. Timur was angry that not all of his colleagues were getting their part of the work done on time; he chivvied everyone along, threw himself into furious activity and bombarded everybody with emails, demanding to know why nobody could suddenly finish the simplest things. Vika stayed at the office late and dragged her laptop home for the weekend; the night security guards knew her by sight and all but offered to let her sleep over in their little room — she would be back before dawn anyway. And Timur swore that as soon as they delivered the project he would take Vika out to a restaurant, because without her support the project would have fallen apart long ago.

At last the report was written, the presentation given and the project officially closed. With a kind of weary detachment Vika sorted the files, deleted all the intermediate versions of the models and reports, put the archives together and wiped everything unnecessary from her laptop. By the time she had finished it was seven in the evening, even though the working day ended at six. Suppressing a burning urge to cry over the fact that work takes up such a large part of your time that there is none left for yourself and your own life, Vika began to put her coat on. At that moment Timur came into the room.

— "Getting your coat on already? Excellent. How about a Korean restaurant near Savyolovsky?"

— "Today?" Vika gasped. She remembered his threats, but she could never have imagined that he would carry them out.

— "Tomorrow is a new day and new projects, and this time not joint ones. So — when, if not today?"

— "But I'm not dressed for it..."

— "That is exactly why it is near Savyolovsky and not on Kutuzovsky. Come on, let's go! It will be fun, I promise."

This is the sort of thing they show in films. A magical prince appears out of nowhere, holds out his hand to you and leads you away into a fairy tale. All the girl has to do is trust him and say yes. And so Vika suddenly looked at Timur trustingly, threw all her doubts and worries out of her head and took him by the hand. It was the evening of her dreams. After dinner in an utterly improbable little Korean place that you would never find from the street, they drove around the night-time city, walked across the bridges and, finally chilled to the bone, took a taxi home. Vika invited him in to be warmed up with hot tea with cloves and honey. She did not have to ask twice; Timur gladly agreed. And the moment he stepped into her flat he stopped as if struck by lightning.

— "Tim, is everything all right?" Vika asked, and followed the direction of his gaze.

On the mirror by the door, gathering dust, was that very mask from the company carnival, the symbol of her magic and her aristocratic air, of the fairy-tale unreality of that evening. With the project going on, Vika had completely forgotten about it and saw it as no more than a piece of the furnishings. Now Timur could not tear his eyes away from the silver mask, and he was clearly trying but could not get out a single word. At last he turned his astonished gaze to Vika. Yes, it did look like her. And the gaze was probably the same too. And there was the snake ring... How had he missed it?

— "You know, I'm such an idiot..." he admitted honestly, "and you were right there all this time..."

Yes, that very gaze, even if the glasses had artfully hidden it. And, damn it, the very same smile. Vika from due diligence had not simply pushed the elf-woman in the silver mask aside. She was that elf-woman. Timur felt unbearably ashamed, but there was no reproach at all in her gaze. You could simply drown in that gaze. And he wanted to drown in it every single day.