Life Stories

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  On the third floor, Nadezhda Stepanovna walked up to her classroom door and listened. The silence of the grave reigned on the other side of the door, like during a midterm exam. She was hurt that Rodygin had succeeded with such ease. She opened the door very slightly and peeked through the crack. Vekshina was fiddling with her key, and she looked rather dejected. Remorseful for having troubled her with her demagoguery, Nadezhda Stepanovna caught her eye, then kissed her palm, opened it flat, brought it to her lips, and blew. The fluffy little cloud of her air kiss sailed toward Vekshina but didn't reach her. A cheerful boy who had sat under his desk for the entire first half of the lesson shot it down with a wad of chewed up paper blown through a small tube.

  Nadezhda Stepanovna didn't see that; she had already gone out. Rodygin heard the familiar sound and understood its origin but decided not to let himself be interrupted.

  "In our country," he said, "drunk driving is punished severely by the law. Very severely, but still not the way it is in some foreign countries. Children, there are states on the planet where drunk drivers are immediately sentenced to death."

  "They should be, too, those lushes," said a chubby girl who had developed early and who had dabs of brilliant green ointment on her chin.

  "What's your name?" Rodygin asked her.

  "Vera."

  "Children, do you agree with Vera?"

  Filimonov raised his hand.

  "All right"—Rodygin was pleased—"express your opinion."

  "May I go out?" Filimonov asked.

  "I thought you wanted to answer my question."

  "I'm feeling sick," Filimonov said.

  Rodygin looked the class over quizzically, trying to tell whether he was lying or telling the truth, but he couldn't.

  "What am I going to do with you! Go."

  Filimonov went out into the corridor and headed for the bathroom, but after two steps he realized he wasn't going to make it. The tomato juice he'd drunk last spring at Nature's Gifts was welling up in his throat. He turned back, ran out on the front steps and dashed around the corner, where he threw up.

  Right next to the sidewalk the earth had been dug up and workers were laying felt-wrapped pipes in a ditch. Filimonov sat down on a step and started breathing deeply through his nose, just like his mama had taught him. There was the smell of electricity.

  3

  Nadezhda Stepanovna smelled that ominous smell suffused through the air, too, but her memory wouldn't supply the right name for it. Hurrying to get back before the break, she jaywalked and was still running late. The grocery was already closed for lunch and the entrance was blocked by a sullen, middle-aged woman in a white coat. Nadezhda Stepanovna did not feel like groveling. In search of something that could take the place of a cake, Nadezhda Stepanovna headed for the small, improvised market near the streetcar stop. More than a dozen old ladies were sitting in two rows on overturned crates; in front of them there were colorful cans of berries and paradise apples; asters and gladioli stuck out of bottles, and limp autumn mushrooms lay in pitiful heaps on spread newspapers. One granny was selling fly agarics meant either for gourmets who had the patience to cook them in seven changes of water or for ulcer patients who had lost faith in patent medicines.

  Nadezhda Stepanovna cut through the market and, in front of the last old woman, saw a chipped enamel pot filled to the brim with tiny, reddish black berries. She didn't even realize they were bird cherries right away. The woman could only have been selling them out of total despair.

  The fly agarics, even those looked more appropriate here. Bird cherries hadn't been considered a berry for a long time, and Nadezhda Stepanovna hadn't eaten a pie filled with them in nearly twenty years. And what pies they had been! The light crunch of crushed stems, the marble veins on the crust, and the fragrant violet pulp inside.

  "How much?" she asked.

  "Fifty a glass."

  Nadezhda Stepanovna took a ruble out of her purse.

  "One, please."

  "Take two, I don't have change," the old woman said, taking a crude and incongruously large cigarette out of her tiny sunken mouth, which looked like the mouth of an aged doll.

  Lately, Nadezhda Stepanovna had given more and more frequent thought to her own old age. She wasn't going to have a family, that was obvious, and she probably wouldn't have the nerve to bear a child without a husband. After retiring, the ideal scenario for her would be to live in the city in the winter and spend the summer at a teachers' boardinghouse. They had a boardinghouse for deserving education workers in the north of the province, in the ancient district center, where she had taken the children the summer before last on a field trip. Sheltering in the shadow of St. George's Church was a formidable two-story house with a bay window and curved glass cold frames on the roof. At one time it had belonged to the owner of the local porcelain factory, a patron and eccentric. He'd had a pool put in where two Nile crocodiles swam and fed on fresh fish from the Kolva. As local residents told the story, one of them had quietly starved to death during the revolution, and the other was shot during a kulak riot, in which Old Believers who took no pity on foreign creatures actively participated. The first was buried in the garden, and the second, stuffed, was the basis of the district's ethnographic museum collection, but there was to be no rest there either, even after its death. Like any dumb creature, it lived outside history; on the other hand, by its death it inscribed itself into the context of the period and reflected the singularity of the historical moment. Therefore, for half a century it had been dragged back and forth multiple times between the regional history and natural history departments.

  All those years, the pool had gone empty, and all kinds of junk had been dumped into it, and snow and flax seeds had swept through the broken bays, but not so long ago those holes had been patched, soil had been lugged in, and now there was a hothouse there. The deserving education workers raised flowers and also vegetables for their board. Nadezhda Stepanovna had become friends with two of them. She sent them Indian tea, candies and cards on International Women's Day and Teacher's Day, and once, when someone was going to town, they had sent her a bouquet of marvelous white chrysanthemums that almost didn't wilt on the way. For more than a year, this modest boardinghouse surrounded by taiga, prison camp zones,and timber lots had seemed like the dwelling place of peace, the one place in the world where she could set her heart on going.

  Holding the paper cone soaked with berry juice as far away as possible from her new raincoat, and berating herself after the fact for taking a fancy to bird cherries she absolutely did not need, Nadezhda Stepanovna crossed the plank across the ditch dug next to the school. Here sat Filimonov on the step. By now, he was breathing through his mouth because he'd suddenly come down with a runny nose from sitting on the stone step.

  "I felt sick," Filimonov announced from a distance, so that she wouldn't think he'd been sent from class for bad behavior.

  "Lord! What did you eat?"

  Filimonov listed everything. Nadezhda Stepanovna and all the children had eaten the same thing in the lunchroom, but no one had felt sick, not even Vekshina with her weak liver.

  "That's odd. Why would that be?"

  "I don't know," Filimonov said, although he did have a vague idea as to the reason.

  "Does your stomach hurt?"

  "No."

  Squatting, Nadezhda Stepanovna placed the cone on the step, took a handkerchief from her purse, and started wiping the crumbs from a Kuntsevo roll off Filimonov's cheeks. She held his sweet cheek with her other hand, so his head wouldn't wobble. Then he was told to go back to class. He went, and when Nadezhda Stepanovna stuck her soiled handkerchief back in her purse she noticed that her wallet was missing from the side pocket.

  4

  Rodygin looked out the window, waiting for an answer to his question. Through the leaves of the American maples he could see the gray, five-story prefab buildings from the 1960s and the more recent white, nine-story ones. Smokestacks poked out between them here and ther
e. The closest was the oldest. Laid from what was now brown brick that had never felt the hot breath of sandblasting equipment, it curved and broadened gracefully toward the foundation, like Khiva's famous minaret of Kalyan, which Rodygin had seen when he was in the army.

  No one else had raised their hand, although he had given them plenty of time. He had to give the answer himself.

  "Well, children," Rodygin said firmly, "I for one don't agree with Vera. The death penalty is an inadmissible measure of punishment. Punishment is supposed to reform a person—if, of course, there is any hope of reforming him. Turkey, for example, found an original solution to this situation."

  He told them how in Turkey, when they caught a drunk driver, they made him walk thirty kilometers. Policemen would follow him on motorcycles so that he didn't get any ideas along the way about stopping or sitting down somewhere cool.

  "I personally think that in this case we could learn from the Turks," Rodygin said, and he looked at Filimonov's empty chair.

  This was said in that confidential tone that had once invariably bewitched him in these kinds of situations—the tone of someone who not only had access to privileged information but who, out of respect for this particular audience, was permitting himself to say what he would, of course, never tell another.

  A terrible Turkish heat coalesced in the classroom; scorching air rose from desks to ceiling in quivering streams. Directly ahead of her, Vekshina saw the rocky road, white from the terrible heat, receding beyond the horizon. Dragging himself down it, staggering from exhaustion, was her papa. His shirt had stuck to his back and his hair was gray with dust. Sweat was running into his eyes, which he raised to the skies from time to time praying for rain, hoping to discern, far away, that tiny cloud which, as tends to happen in southern countries, was bound to turn into a storm cloud before long. Right behind him, mustached policemen in claret fezzes were riding huge motorcycles with curved horns that bellowed and glittered under the merciless Turkish sun. They were trying to nudge her papa with their front wheels. Schnell, schnell!

  Biting her lip, Vekshina took her pencil case out of her book bag, and from the pencil case a piece of chalk, and imperceptibly whitened the ridge on the desk. From time to time, Rodygin leaned up against that ridge, and she had hopes he would get his trousers dirty.

  The lesson plan had been exhausted, but Rodygin made it a point of honor to finish strictly on the bell. The noisy thanks of little listeners released to their homes ahead of time did not warm his heart. Also, since they had begun talking about drunk drivers, it would be useful to talk about how they were dealt with in Singapore.

  "Now in Singapore . . ."

  Rodygin stopped because Filimonov was squeezing through the door sideways.

  "May I come in?" he asked.

  Without answering, Rodygin turned to the class.

  "Children, what did he forget to do?"

  "Knock?" Vekshina's neighbor guessed.

  "Did you hear?"

  "Uh huh."

  "Then go out and come in the right way."

  Filimonov went out, carefully shut the door behind him, and knocked three times from the corridor.

  "Come in," Rodygin responded hospitably.

  The door opened and Filimonov crossed the threshold and froze.

  "Well, go on," Rodygin encouraged him. "What should you say now?"

  "May I come in?"

  "You already did."

  Filimonov heaved a sigh of relief and headed for his desk, but Rodygin, like a hypnotist, kept him back at a distance with a held up palm. Filimonov could feel something invisible and stiff poking into his chest, like a stream of air from a fan, only narrower and harder. He took a step back toward the door.

  "Now you need to ask permission to sit down," Rodygin hinted.

  Filimonov was silent. He could tell the bell was going to ring soon. The bell always started with a tickling in his stomach and then rumbled in a weak echo from floor to floor.

  "Why don't we start all over from the beginning," Rodygin suggested. "Go out one more time and knock."

  "I felt sick! Honest!" Filimonov said.

  "Please," Vekshina pled, "let him sit down!"

  She knew from personal experience the infinite loneliness that can grip you when something starts to hurt in school—your head or your liver. Recently, in history, her nose started bleeding. Nadezhda Stepanovna had her lie down on the couch in the teacher's lounge, and she lay there the whole period looking at the ceiling and thinking about death.

  Now, to keep from crying, she had to think of something good immediately. Vekshina started to think about New Year's. For the school holiday party, her mama had sewn her the prince's costume from Cinderella, and her papa had bought her a glass ashtray in the shape of a slipper at the Gifts store. The party was held in the gymnasium, and the tree stood on an old turntable and was starting to turn at 33 rpm when Father Frost struck his staff on the floor. Nadezhda Stepanovna, dressed as the Snow Maiden, sat right down on the floor, removed one felt boot, took the crystal slipper from Vekshina, who had been carrying it idly back and forth near the wall bars, and made a hilarious attempt to put it on her foot. Everyone around was laughing, only Vekshina for some reason felt like crying and, as always, the bitterer the source, the darker the tears that rose inexplicably in her throat.

  Rodygin gave Filimonov a wink.

  "Vekshina is petitioning for you. Understand, you nearly ran her and her baby down in a state of drunkenness, and she's already forgiven everything. That's a woman for you! Come on now, go out, knock, and speak up like a real man."

  Filimonov went out again and the door shut. Rodygin got ready to give him a friendly pat on the head when he walked by. The soft burr of Filimonov's hair would tickle the skin of his palm.

  A minute passed and no one knocked. Rodygin strode to the door, opened it cautiously, and then flung it wide open. Filimonov had vanished, the corridor was deserted in both directions, and it was growing dark outside, getting ready to rain. A broom was propped up at the nearest window, and Alevtina Ivanovna the janitress was slowly sprinkling light-colored sawdust on the floor from a bucket.

  "I don't know," she said when asked where the boy who had just been there had gone.

  It got dark in the classroom all at once, too. Rodygin turned on the electricity and returned to his interrupted topic.

  "So you see, children, in Singapore drunk drivers are treated in an even more original way than in Turkey. . . ."

  5

  Returning to the little market, Nadezhda Stepanovna asked loudly, "Did anyone find a wallet?"

  The response to her was silence. The old women sat motionless on their crates, trying not to meet her eye. She understood perfectly well and moved between them, asking each of them individually. Walking alongside her was some old man wearing an officer's scarf. He was inquiring as to the prices for mushrooms, vociferating and praying to God—in the sense that it would do no harm to fear him a little at his pension age.

  "But He's on vacation now," the old lady selling fly agaric said.

  This boded no good, especially since Nadezhda Stepanovna had asked her, "You didn't happen to find a wallet, did you?"

  "No," she'd replied, and she'd looked away.

  At last that same old woman with the bird cherries spoke up.

  "What's it like?"

  "Black," Nadezhda Stepanovna said.

  "And what's in it?"

  "Ten rubles in bills. Receipts."

  "And that's all?"

  "And some change."

  "What, isn't change money? How much was there?"

  "I don't remember."

  "She doesn't even know how much money she has," the old woman told another sitting on the next crate in front of a three-liter jar with colorless fall gladioli sticking out of it.

  The other woman willingly expressed her solidarity, saying, "Everyone's so rich now, they don't count kopeks anymore."

  "Then she's going to say I took it," the old woman with
the bird cherries added along the same lines and only then turned back toward Nadezhda Stepanovna. "Come, dearie, try to remember. If you remember, I'll give it back. Lots of you come around here. Maybe it's not yours."

  She was wearing a black plush jacket that had bald spots and men's boots. Her head was wrapped in a well-laundered scarf with a picture of Sacré Coeur and the Eiffel Tower.

  "Their savings book has more in it than ours," said the old man in the officer's scarf, who was standing back a little, and he fell silent, biting his lip dolefully.

  The city had quieted in anticipation of the storm. Passersby were glancing upward and picking up their pace. Nadezhda Stepanovna was about to give up and leave, not giving a damn about the stupid tenner, when suddenly she heard, "You just have to understand me right, young lady. I'm shaking all over now."

  The old woman took out the wallet.

  "Yours?"

  Her eyes were shining.

  "Why don't you say something? Cat got your tongue?"

  "Yes," Nadezhda Stepanovna softly, feeling a shudder start to run through her as well.

  She took the proffered wallet. The old woman didn't let it go immediately; their fingers touched for a moment, and Nadezhda Stepanovna felt the moment's solemnity with her whole heart.

  "Ten rubles, eighty-four kopeks. Count it."

  "What for?"

  "Count it, I say, before witnesses!"

  Meanwhile the witnesses were fewer and fewer. Concerned about the rain, the old ladies were hastily gathering their wares and leaving. The little market was being pulled down before her eyes. It was quickly growing dark, and the wind was bearing litter down the street. Small columns of dust were eddying up in the chilling air, like springs from a river bottom, and a line of torn newspapers and streetcar tickets was dancing around the empty crates.