[ Vasiliy, perceptive both by nature and by training, catches the little twitch to his nose; it's not hard to, primed as he is by the comment about disgusting air. It's interesting, seeing someone who seems to be from a time closer to his than the time in this place reacting to cigarette smoke with displeasure; it was such a normal part of his own daily life that nobody batted an eyelash at it.
It was acrid and chemical and foul to him at first, of course, but after the first time he'd smoked, the rush of nicotine that felt like getting kicked by a horse drowned out any concerns he might have had about flavor. His first cigarette. He'll never forget that, an honored memory framed alongside his first fuck, his first kiss, his first interrogation. It's that same spike of nicotine in the blood that he craves now—that he needs in order to have this conversation—that keeps him smoking despite knowing that the other finds the smell of it displeasurable. They are, after all, outside, although he still turns his head and exhales smoke away from the man beside him, into the empty night air instead of the space around him.
He doesn't probe about what the 'down there' is, exactly; he assumes he's using a regionally idiosyncratic way of referring to the slums, the narrow, unclean streets and cramped tenement blocks Vasiliy grew up around. ]
I know what it is to be hungry. We ate bread most nights. Or cabbage soup. Kasha in the mornings. [ He's learned quickly that he, and Kostya, and Sveta are the only people here with a real frame of reference as to what that is, so he appends: ] That is like... Your oatmeal, but with wheat.
no subject
It was acrid and chemical and foul to him at first, of course, but after the first time he'd smoked, the rush of nicotine that felt like getting kicked by a horse drowned out any concerns he might have had about flavor. His first cigarette. He'll never forget that, an honored memory framed alongside his first fuck, his first kiss, his first interrogation. It's that same spike of nicotine in the blood that he craves now—that he needs in order to have this conversation—that keeps him smoking despite knowing that the other finds the smell of it displeasurable. They are, after all, outside, although he still turns his head and exhales smoke away from the man beside him, into the empty night air instead of the space around him.
He doesn't probe about what the 'down there' is, exactly; he assumes he's using a regionally idiosyncratic way of referring to the slums, the narrow, unclean streets and cramped tenement blocks Vasiliy grew up around. ]
I know what it is to be hungry. We ate bread most nights. Or cabbage soup. Kasha in the mornings. [ He's learned quickly that he, and Kostya, and Sveta are the only people here with a real frame of reference as to what that is, so he appends: ] That is like... Your oatmeal, but with wheat.