Life Stories

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  They had already had plenty to drink. She was drinking champagne—just as she should be, given her profession, thought N, for no stories or polished manners could convince him that she really was just an interpreter. He kept ordering cognac, shot after shot. Meanwhile, the party had quieted down, and only a few delegates were still at the bar. Laughter and shrieks of girls less cultivated than his companion could be heard from the ballroom. But, for the first time in many years, N was conversing freely and un-self-consciously, without looking for any advantage from his conversation, as if with someone he had long known and liked.

  They decided to go back to their rooms and change into winter clothing, and then to meet on the central square, to see the mountains and snow in the moonlight. She, naturally, showed up in a senselessly luxurious ski outfit. He had merely changed from his dinner jacket into a sweater and mundane black overcoat. His feet were cold in his dress shoes.

  "If you don't mind my asking—" she suddenly asked, after they had enjoyed the view and she had sipped a fair amount from his flask to warm herself, and they were about to start back to the hotel, though they had not yet negotiated whose room to go to. "How old are you really?"

  He shivered, not just because he didn't feel like admitting to fifty-four, but also because he realized that the girl was estimating the difficulty of the job.

  "Fifty-four," he said too loudly. "But what's the problem? Everything's in good shape, knock on wood—"

  He felt nauseated by his crudeness, but she seemed not to have heard him.

  "I want to ask you as an adult," and she corrected herself again, "as an already elderly, excuse me, person..."

  He stopped walking and looked directly in her face. In the nighttime luminescence of snow, storefronts and firmament, her face seemed absolutely childlike, as if she was not twenty-five as she must have been, but only ten or twelve. How she'd found time to take off all her makeup was a mystery.

  "Go ahead, kid," he said all of a sudden, feeling a deep sadness as his heart stammered and then beat faster. "Go ahead, ask. What do you want to know? Whether I'm married?"

  She sighed.

  "No matter what I say, you still think I'm a whore—and you're wrong." He noted that she cursed appropriately, too. "That's not what I wanted to ask at all..."

  * * *

  A downpour was unleashed. It seemed as if you were driving at the bottom of a violent river; the road twenty meters ahead melted into the sky. Out of the water shone the dim yellow lights of oncoming cars, into the water flowed the red flickers of those going his way. They all passed him; he drove in the right lane, afraid to miss the turn in the dark. Finally, a narrow path opened up in the dark forest wall and he drove slower still on asphalt that was flatter than that on the highway.

  * * *

  Three years had gone by since that February night, but N was still thinking about why he was so hurt by her question, about how the two most important conversations of his life took place when he was not sober, and about how, after all those thousands of wasted evenings, the only two that he ended up remembering were when some self-satisfied wannabe floored him for decades with an awkward punch and when some clever, impudent broad asked him a question that he still didn't know how to answer.

  He never saw her again. Sometimes he thought he glimpsed her face in a crowd; he would approach, smiling, but each time had to withdraw, mumbling "Excuse me, I'd mistaken you for someone else."

  "Haven't you had enough fun yet?" that is what she asked him back then. N frequently asked himself the same question.

  * * *

  It was not a well-formed idea; it could not be called "desire"; perhaps "sensation" was the best word to describe it. Anyhow, that was the word N finally attached to what he had experienced for several years and what surfaced more and more often in the perfunctory conversations with the few contacts he still talked to in his life, scheduled as it was down to the hour and even the minute.

  "If only I could go away," he would sigh, and the conversation would die down for a moment, like the flame of a lighter in a sudden light gust of air. After a short pause, his acquaintance would try to jolly him along, smirking: "What, like Tolstoy, eh? What's the matter with you? Have you lost the meaning of life?" But N would already have regrouped and answered, also with a smirk, "Well, sure, just like Lev Nikolayevich—I too shall kick the bucket en route to Astapovo station."

  "There's no such station anymore. They've renamed it Tolstoy Station," his contact would retort.

  But he did want to go away.

  Not like Tolstoy, not from family and people; he had long left those things behind. He had seceded, putting behind him the cordon guards of habitual actions and routine words and had created inside himself something like a ministry of foreign affairs for negotiating practical matters and a ministry of defense for the protection of his borders. Any attempt to violate those boundaries was unstintingly met by a weapon of mass destruction called "money." It used to be entirely effective—he was able to pay off any aggressor, be it a woman, a relative, a friend, or a business partner. He spared nothing for his defensive readiness, expending all of his energies on ensuring his monetary preparedness.

  But this would no longer suffice. He needed to walk away from himself and he no longer had the strength to maintain border security. What is more, of late his defensive systems were failing, one after the other; something was breaking down, leading to the opposite of the intended effect: people got used to being carpet-bombed with money and started responding to his assistance with attachment, tenderness, or simply incorrigible dependence. And it was dependence that vexed him most. It wasn't, somehow, they who depended on him, but he who depended on them. He was his own fifth column. And it destroyed his psychic security, and, like a dotty capitalist who built himself a deep, fully autonomous shelter in the 1950s against Russian hydrogen bombs, N kept dreaming of self-sufficiency in some impregnable bunker.

  "Go away, I have to go away," he kept thinking to himself, even saying it out loud when the irony of his friends did not force him to turn the insistent phrase into a joke. But as a measure of defense, a joke was puny; the only correct, dependable resolution would be to go away.

  N had spotted the place after happening to drive past it several times.

  He was on his way to his country home when a traffic jam diverted him from his usual bridge and he saw this beautiful place. On another day he drove by it again. And the third time, he pulled over and got out of the car. The church stood without crosses on its cupolas. Inside, its freshly whitewashed walls shone in the daylight, and a stack of wooden beams stood in the middle. The priest puttered about awkwardly in the empty space, at times throwing back his gray head and pointing his beard toward the object of his reflections, which clearly had something to do with construction.

  "You surely must know this," N said. He did not know how to to talk to a priest, so he talked as he would have done to anyone else burdened by the unexpected crises of building... "I just recently finished some renovations, so I am up on these things... You really need to buy all the materials well ahead of time... Because they go up in price quicker than labor... Over there, in the yard—"

  "In the garden," the priest corrected him.

  "In the garden," he repeated quickly, "there is room for an awning, to store all the materials. If you buy in bulk, ahead of time, you'll save a packet, and then, when everything's ready, you can start building. But first, you should get a specialist's estimate. And don't hire Moldavian workers."

  "We have our own workers," the priest said. "Forgive me, but we have special rules about such matters."

  Something made N feel that he had no need to defend himself from this man, whose eyes were calmly penetrating, though his billowing robes sprinkled with sawdust made his silhouette waver against the sunlight. This man was not about to encroach on him, tear through his defenses, entrench himself on the territory gained. He was indifferent to whether N's borders were open or closed, for he didn't appe
ar even to notice them.

  He would visit at first once a week, then twice, and gradually he assumed full responsibility for managing the renovation. Then he came up with a way to notify not only the old women in the neighborhood but also some conscientious Moscow collectors that the church was open once more and needed icons. Then he paid the full cost of gilding the cupolas.

  Yet he refused to be baptized, telling the priest in an embarrassed tone that he had been secretly baptized as a child and it would be wrong to do it twice. Entering the church, he would not cross himself but would only bare his head or bow slightly, as he would when meeting an acquaintance in the street.

  With difficulty, over half-a-year or so, he struggled through the Bible, skipping a lot and finding it hard to see what could possibly be holy about the repetitive passages and genealogies of the long-dead. But he read the Gospels over and over again, examining especially the divergences between the four evangelists' accounts. One day, he saw for the first time the import of a verse of Mark: "And they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh: but he received it not." He began to weep, seeing the Crucified reject the anesthetic in the smoldering sunset hour. Immediately, he felt embarrassed, even though he was completely alone, and wiped away the tears.

  After that happened, he bought in a church for a kopek a tiny silver cross on a cord, and began to wear it.

  That's how it went on, until he made his final decision, which, like all final decisions, crystallized as if by itself, so that he could not say exactly when it happened. Just a while ago, it all had been uncertain, but now nothing could be clearer or simpler. It was strange that it had not occurred to him sooner. It was so simple, exhaustive and final, that it could not be any other way.

  But something troubled him still.

  * * *

  In this condition, he now drove through a positively relentless rain.

  * * *

  The gate was open.

  The priest met him inside the gate, leaning to protect himself from the sideways streams of wind-blown rain with an old, black umbrella, its spines broken and protruding like knitting needles. In the manner of an experienced driver, he guided N with hand signals, helping him park in the garden.

  "Father!" N shouted through the rain, still feeling embarrassed by this form of address. "I've signed a power of attorney for the car. Getting it all formalized is a pain in the ass, but the power of attorney was no problem, for a fee."

  He was completely flustered by the vulgarity of his own words, but he had somehow forgotten any others.

  "One more thing," he said, hurriedly, "the funds—I've made three deposits, to the accounts you'd specified."

  They stood on the porch beneath the awning.

  "Also—" He finally dared to speak of the main thing on his mind. "About my decision. You see, Father, I made it—well—just for my own benefit. There's no sacrifice in it, you understand? It's just that I want to hide, and to get saved. I'm sick of everything."

  "Do not give it another thought," the priest replied with a smile. "Do not think about anything. You want to be saved? Rightly so. People have always come to the church to be saved from the world, and if you don't get away from the world, it's hard to save your soul. I could only save myself here. Do you know what I was before? I was in the navy. I served on a missile boat. No use talking about that now. Let's be saved together, eh? Live a minute without sin, and that shall be your salvation. Your room over there—we put some furniture in there yesterday—would you like to see it?"

  The priest opened a small door on the right of the double doors of the church, and N peered inside. He saw a bed with a chipped wooden headboard, a plywood dresser, a chair with a torn seat, and a half-opened armoire. A cast ewer was attached to the wall; underneath it stood an enameled green washbasin on a stool. Only a dark icon distinguished the place from a typical room in a municipal motel.

  "And the toilet is not far off, near the market," said the voice of the father from behind him. "And we have a fine banya in the village. It's open every other day... That's it. Before matins, clean up a bit in the garden. And at night, keep your ears open. Although we have a security system, it is safe here. Make yourself at home."

  He turned around. After a momentary confusion, the priest backed out through the door to let N out of his room. Again they found themselves on the porch recently covered with slippery faux marble tiles bought with N's money. He made a step toward the half-opened double doors and raised his hand to make the sign of a cross.

  Early the following morning, it was damp as he was sweeping in the garden, and he thought how the rain always washed the builders' rubbish across the path, and that this broom and dustpan was stupidly ineffective. I'll have to come up with a more rational way to do this, he thought.

  And he thought of nothing else.

  Translation by Anna Seluyanova

  Earplugs

  Alexander Khurgin

  Nelya Yavskaya1 lived by the beauty of the world and of her environmental habitat. By nothing else. And if beauty hadn't existed and been present in the world, she would probably have died. Because she wouldn't have had anything to live by. If she'd had a pure, grand love, she could've still lived like a woman, in terms of sexual relations, that's just inherent to women; but somehow love, in the exhaustive sense of the word, hadn't come her way for a long time. Love gave her a wide berth, both the grand love and the pure one. So, after a certain point, Nelya had stopped waiting for love to happen to her, because, in the first place, she lived by beauty, and, in the second place, she understood through her own common sense that there was no use waiting for love to come into her life, since there was nowhere for it to come from. She worked in a purely female collective, where all her co-workers and all the patients were women of varying ages and diagnoses. With the exception of the department head and a few idiot orderlies, of course. But the department head was a jack-assed jerk, both on first impression and in his deepest essence, while the orderlies, well, they were even worse. As if you'd even want to fall in love with people like them. Nothing will come of it, no matter how hard you try, because, of course, love is cruel, you could even fall in love with a jerk, nobody's going to argue with this piece of wisdom. But there's still a limit to what love'll do to you.

  Earlier, however, in her early childhood and when she was young, there had been a few specific men and Nelya Yavskaya had experienced certain elevated feelings. So, thank God, she was no old maid. That is to say, she was neither old, nor a virgin. But lately she couldn't honestly brag about the feeling of love, either; she couldn't show it in its finest form to what they call interested parties.' She didn't have the least bit of that feeling, in zero of its permutations; or, to put it plainer, she wasn't loved by any of the men, and she, reciprocating the men's feelings, didn't love any of them herself. So Nelya lived, taking pleasure in unadorned beauty itself, since beauty—you can make beauty independently, and with your own two hands. In contradistinction to love.

  Nelya, she used to talk about it like this: "Every person," she'd say, "is the blacksmith of his own individual beauty." And, "I don't know, each to his own," she'd say, "but, for me, beauty is more than sufficient for the fullness of life and the satisfaction of my spiritual needs."

  Apart from that, she was unshakably convinced, and loved to repeat, that someday, all over the world, beauty, and beauty alone, would save the world. In this, she was entirely on the side of the classic writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

  Lots of people objected, saying, "What does it save the world from?"

  And Nelya answered them: "From everything."

  But they kept objecting, asserting, over and over, not without justification, that by now nothing can save the world, and where is it, this beauty of yours, they'd say, who's seen it around here? So Nelya would say, "Come on, what do you mean, beauty is present everywhere and all over. Wherever you look."

  "There's the human being, for example," she'd say, "you could even take me. My face and hai
r, my body—all that is the highest symbol of beauty, its incarnation in earthly life. Everyone else is, too."

  "Our department head?" said those who entirely disagreed with her. "Or the orderlies?"

  "The department head," said Nelya, "I agree, is a jack-assed jerk, and the orderlies are even worse. But the rest aren't like that, are they?"

  "What are they like?" they asked her, and she answered, "Beautiful. How else could they be?"

  Of course, people who knew her laughed at her for such talk, and for her entire womanish worldview, hinting that working in that particular department was influencing her, and not in the positive sense. And Nelya even noticed something like this about herself sometimes. Something superfluous and extraneous. For example, she loved examining the bruises left on patients' bodies after they were given shots. She would go and get lost in contemplation of them, especially when a lot of patients accumulated them during their courses of treatment, and the bruises ran together into patterns, with fantastical shapes and various colors of the rainbow, from red to violet. And sometimes there'd be bruises the shade of the sea at morning or of the sky just after sunset. It wasn't unheard of for Nelya to give a shot of the same old droperidol and then to just stand there, enchanted, enjoying the sight of the pattern. Then she'd come to, look around and say, "Oh my goodness, now what was I doing?" and tell the orderlies, "Take the patient to the ward, let her rest."

  And they'd lift the patient up from the examination table and lead her away, while Nelya was thinking, "I've got to get hold of myself," she'd think, "because after all, work is work, and my personal aesthetic passions and notions might be out of place here, regardless of the fact that beauty has a place everywhere and in everything."