NINE
Page 21
«No, they don't,» Nina echoed. This was why she liked intellectual men. Because whatever they told you made it easier to understand things. You could always repeat it without fear of making a fool of yourself.
«It's time I went.»
«It's late, half past eleven. Wait till tomorrow. In for a penny, in for a pound.»
«You're right as usual.»
He grasped her under the arms and laid her, rich and creamy as well-cooked soup, on the sofa.
Next morning, after a protracted breakfast, he dialled a number but kept getting the engaged signal. Nina revelled in this sign that seemed to augur well, but eventually took pity on him and decided to help. She got through straightaway.
«Hello.»
«Please don't worry. Your husband is at my place. Nothing has happened to him.»
Her visitor leapt off the sofa and began rushing up and down, waving his hands in horror as if warding off a cloud of mosquitoes.
«Why on earth did you do that?»
«I don't know. It was all so unexpected.» Nina forgot about her resolution not to answer questions beginning with «why».
«But you could have kept quiet and said nothing, couldn't you?»
«Unexpected situations always make me say something,» Nina insisted.
«And is it always something silly?»
«Yes, it is. But perhaps not always,» she looked warily, but no shouts ensued. «Maybe it was better like that.»
«I don't think so. On the contrary, I think it made things worse.»
«She doesn't love you.» The obstinate miner's torch on Nina's forehead switched full on.
«Oh, for heaven's sake. Aren't things bad enough?»
«There's a hole in your pocket and your top button's missing.»
«Bad omens,» he mocked. «Why were you looking in my pockets?»
«I wasn't,» said Nina in an aggrieved voice. «Your key fell out and I put it back.»
«Alright, I'm sorry. But I must go now.»
«Can I see you home?»
«That's funny,» he shrugged his shoulders. «Like kids do. But come along if you like. Nobody's wanted to do that since I started school.»
As it happened they didn't have far to go. It was about a twenty-minute walk. Nina was disappointed that they got there so quickly. But glad they lived so close. They stood outside the door indecisively. He lifted his hand to ring the bell and gave Nina a meaningful look. She stood her ground, because the torch told her not to budge and not to get in a flap. Nobody opened the door.
«Want to see what my place is like?»
«Mm. What a lot of books.»
They took off their coats, and Nina perched decorously on the edge of the sofa.
«Well then?» He slapped his knee. «How about a little farewell drink?» Nina didn't like his changed manner. He was now quick and business-like. And wouldn't look at her. «There should be some fruit in the kitchen.» He began to pour them some red wine.
Nina went off to the kitchen and found a wicker basket with apples and oranges on a clean wooden table. She touched the blinds. Were they made of straw? At that moment a key turned in the lock and in came a pretty woman with a pretty girl. Unable to brake, Nina found herself moving towards them along the corridor. The woman took off her boots casually, blew a curl from her forehead, neatly removed the fruit from Nina's hands, who was now totally at a loss, and barked:
«Out you go, the pair of you. Quick march.» The command was as loud and clear as on a parade ground.
Outside he slapped his forehead and roared with laughter. Then looked at Nina and laughed even louder at the sight of her affronted, puzzled face.
«My wife,» he announced, with a puzzling air of pride, «makes up her mind about anything in twenty seconds flat. And has never been known to change it. She switches straight from question to answer, bypassing the two stages of thought and feeling, of which she in her sniper-like fashion has no need.»
«Thanks for the explanation. I'm still coming round, but I do understand,» Nina mumbled, making him chortle again.
«Don't sulk. Instead, oh, wisest of women, tell me what we're to do now.»
«Have lunch,» Nina sighed. «What else can we do if we've been thrown out?»
«Correct, top marks. I've got a concert this evening, to which I now officially invite you. Oh, by the way.» He fell about laughing again, as if a bubble had burst inside him and he couldn't restrain himself. Nina waited patiently. «I quite forgot to thank you for seeing me home.» This upset her, but he still seemed to find it all enormously funny. «So that was the plan. I'm terribly grateful to you for seeing me home. I really am. It was a brilliant idea.»
«What's all the laughing about,» Nina retorted. «You've just been thrown out.»
«That's my punishment,» he brushed it aside. «From on high. Still we won't waste any time, will we?»
Nina was beginning to see him in a new light. It occurred to her that the smutty stories were about him and not his friends. Her suspicions grew stronger when she saw him in evening dress. What a fine-looking man he was! She was hardly aware of the music, but sat worrying all the time until she had worked herself up into a state of unrelieved anxiety. All of the many doors in the theatre let in draughts, and she had nothing to keep her warm. At the end he brought over an important-looking man in evening dress, with a handlebar moustache like the one on the statue in front of the Conservatory, and said: «Nina, this is my friend, Jamil Ismailovich. He's our conductor.»
«That's all we need,» Nina blurted out, realising at once that she had put her foot in it, because the statue pursed his lips and his companion giggled delightedly. She attempted a diplomatic apology, but what actually emerged was, «Goodbye, Shamil Basayevich, do come round some time.» After which they both had mild hysterics, and the statue immediately forgave her faux pas, gasping «What a woman! What a woman!» Generally speaking it was a case of what her absent husband would have called «every one a winner», but these laid-back concert people, thank the dear Lord, did not seem to attach the same importance to it, so she had come out unscathed.
On Sunday, while Nina was sleeping peacefully, he left a note saying he had to go home. Letting himself in with his key, he found a stranger in jeans and a thick sweater sprawled out in an armchair with a score and beating time with a hairy hand. His wife was wearing a light sleeveless negligee, her long slender legs bare, and also reading a score but on the sofa. The apartment was quiet, strict and sterile. The clock ticked away relentlessly.
«I've come to get my things.»
«Feel free.»
«And the computer.»
«Go ahead,» she leaned forward, turning slightly, and pulled the plug out of the socket without looking.
«You cut a fine figure.»
«You too.»
«Like a beanpole.»
«Hog.» She yawned and put her hand to her mouth. «Fornicator.»
«I called you one name. You called me two.»
«But you hit out first and I hit back. You should always hit back harder.»
The young man in jeans looked up and gazed unseeingly in their direction. He was obviously listening to something deep down inside him.
«Do you follow me, Felix?»
«Yes, so far.»
«What's he doing here, this Felix?»
«Ask yourself.»
«But I've only been gone a week. You're quick off the mark.»
«Didn't you know? Felix, what do you value most in people?»
«Speed.»
«There you are. You're upset, but he's happy. It takes all sorts.»
«That's a fascist slogan.»
«I'm glad you've got the message.»
«But I've only been gone a week.»
«I find this conversation somewhat tedious,» said his wife with another quick yawn. «Let's have a bite to eat, then get down to work.»
She and the unusually tall Felix got up quickly and went into the kitchen. Nobody seemed interested in him
.
«So it's just as well I've been putting it about then,» he shouted vengefully into the kitchen. There was no reply.
Downstairs in the entrance he was greeted by an agitated Nina, flushed with emotion. He put a hand on her shoulder, still indignant.
«She's got herself this Felix.»
«Maybe she had him before,» said Nina, suspiciously.
«Oh, no,» he objected. «That's impossible.»
«We were told at a lecture that you can catch hepatitis through a condom.»
«What did you say? Catch hepatitis through a condom? Where do you hear lectures like that?» He smiled unexpectedly. «At the Women's Lonely Hearts Club? I bet the lecture was called 'How to restrain your partner from casual sex.' Note that my mood improves quickly as soon as I see you. In just a week, fancy that?»
«But you and me did…»
He again brushed her aside scornfully.
«That's you and I. She never changes her mind.»
This almost made her cry.
«But I like her. She's so angry, and good-looking, and slim. I'd like to be like that.»
He waved his hands like a drowning man. «For God's sake! No, it's not really anger. She's just made like that. It's a question of temperament. You are one type, she's another.»
«Which is best?»
«It's all relative,» he sniggered.
«The worse you treat a man, the more he values you!»
He got the giggles again.
«How strict we are today! Dear, oh, dear.» He kissed Nina on the cheek. She melted somewhat, but did not give in, still upset by his trip home.
«Have we got anything to eat?»
«No,» Nina continued to rebel. «Only apricot preserves.»
«Apricot preserves!» He stared at her in rapture.
«I want to go home and do my hair in sausage-curls,» Nina said challengingly. She couldn't risk making a mistake this time.
«What did you say? Do your hair in what?» He jumped up and down at the prospect of hearing the word again.
«Sausage-curls,» Nina repeated obstinately.
«Ooh!» He doubled up with laughter. «Ooh!» he groaned, trying to straighten up, but spluttering helplessly. «O-o-h!» A fresh bout nearly laid him low again, but he managed to control himself. «Help! Save me! Don't mention that word again or I'll die.» His face quivered, threatening another convulsion. Straining every nerve, he somehow contrived to avoid total collapse. «A man who laughs all the time is a happy man. Don't you think?»
Nina smiled in spite of herself. People vary. One man can become furious and tear his hair, while another will split his sides laughing, and no one can say which is best, which worst. Better put it out of your mind, not think about it, for there's no knowing where it might lead. Let him have his laugh. Why should she mind?
LUDMILA ULITSKAYA
WOMEN'S LIES
Translated by Arch Tait.
How can anyone compare the big, manly lie — strategic, architectural, as old as Cain's riposte — with the sweet ad-libbing fibbing of woman — blameless, shameless, innocent of guile?
Behold the regal couple, Odysseus and Penelope. Not much of a kingdom, perhaps. Thirty homesteads. Little more than a village really. Goats in the pen, no mention of chickens. They probably haven't been domesticated yet. The queen churns cheese and weaves rugs. Pardon me, shrouds. Okay, she is from a good family. Her uncle is another king; her cousin is the Helen who launched the bitterest wars of classical antiquity. Actually, Odysseus was one of Helen's suitors until he weighed up pro and contra and married, not the most beautiful woman, not the super-model of uncertain morality, but canny Penelope who into her dotage bored everyone stupid with her ostentatious and, even then, old-fashioned marital fidelity. And this while he, renowned for his stratagems, capable of competing in craftiness and cunning with the very gods, as Pallas Athena herself attests, is supposedly wending his way back home. For decades he cruises the Mediterranean, making off with sacred relics, seducing sorceresses, queens and their maidservants, the legendary liar of those antediluvian times when the wheel, the oar and the distaff had already been invented, but conscience hadn't. In the end the gods decide they'd better facilitate his return to Ithaca for fear that, if they don't play ball, he may return to his village anyway, in defiance of Fate, and thereby put the Olympians to shame.
Meanwhile, back at home, our aging, simple-hearted deceiver unpicks her day's weaving every night, dulls with tears the eyes so bright in the days of her youth, presses to her sagging, unneeded breasts the joints of thin fingers disfigured by arthritis, and drives away all the suitors whose interest for many years now has been solely in her royal, if modest, possessions, and not at all in her faded charms. Foolish womanly stubbornness. To be absolutely truthful, she isn't even a good liar. Her deception is uncovered. Before you know it, they will be deriding this decent, elderly woman, giving her in marriage to the most lustful of studs.
In the end Odysseus achieved all his heart desired: he conned his way into the culture of mankind just as he once had into the Trojan horse; he left his traces in every sea, scattering his seed over many islands; he abandoned everyone, only to return in due course to his royal duties and beloved homeland. He deceived everybody with whom Fate brought him into contact. Except for Fate herself: one fine autumn day, a young hero moored on the coast of Ithaca in search of the father who had abandoned him and, in a case of mistaken identity, mortally wounded his own dad, leaving just enough of a gap between life and death for the final explanation. So runs one version of the myth of Odysseus. But despite the predestined ultimate misfortune which is the lot of all mortals, Odysseus has remained a hero for the ages, as a great liar, adventurer and seducer. How masterfully he contrived his deceits. He anticipated his opponents' line of thought, then raced ahead, outflanked, excelled, entrapped and vanquished them! He ran rings round the sorceress Circe herself. This is how he is inscribed in the memory of the nations, as a consummate designer and architect of lies.
Penelope ended up with nothing. There she had sat, recycling her yarn, weaving and unpicking, and her lying, like her handiwork, was as well formed as it was duplicitous. Yet for all her best efforts over those years, she has been allotted no place as prominent as that of her husband or her cousin. She was lacking in some special, feminine gift of mendacity. And yet the fibbing of woman, unlike the pragmatic lying of man, is a highly rewarding topic. Women do everything differently: alternative thinking, feeling, suffering — and lying.
And God in heaven, how they lie! Those, that is, who unlike Penelope do have the gift. En passant, unintentionally, purposelessly, passionately, suddenly, surreptitiously, irrationally, desperately, and simply for no reason at all. Those who have the gift lie from the first words they utter to the last. And how enchantingly, how artistically, how innocently and brazenly. What creative inspiration! What eclat! Here is no scope for cunning, self-interest, or premeditation. This is a song, a fairy tale, a riddle. But a riddle without an answer. The lying of woman is as much a natural phenomenon as milk, or a birch tree, or a bumblebee.
Just like every disease, so every lie has its aetiology. With hereditary predisposition or without. As rare as cardiac cancer or as common as chickenpox. It can have all the characteristics of an epidemic, a kind of social lie which suddenly lays low almost all the members of a woman's enterprise, a kindergarten, say, or a hairdressing salon, or some other entity, most of whose members are women.
We propose, then, a brief literary investigation of the topic, with no claims to offer a complete or even a partial answer.
DIANA
The child resembled a hedgehog, with his stiff, spiky black hair, a curious long nose which narrowed at the end, and the droll ways of a self-reliant being constantly sniffing things out; with his total impregnability also to affection, to being touched, to say nothing of a mother's kiss. But his mother too, as far as one could tell, was a hedgehog kind of person herself. She made no attempt to touch him, not eve
n proffering a hand as they were coming back up the steep path from the beach to the house. So he scrambled up in front of her, and she slowly followed behind, leaving him to clutch at tufts of grass for himself, to pull himself up, to slither back, and go straight on up again to the house, shunning the smooth turn of the road along which any normal holidaymaker would have walked. He was not yet even three, but had such an emphatic, independent personality, that his mother herself sometimes forgot he was still almost a baby and treated him like a grown man, expecting him to help and look after her, before coming back to reality and putting the baby on her knees, and bouncing him gently as she recited, «Let's go berry picking, let's go berry picking», while he shrieked with laughter as he fell between her knees into the taut lap of his mother's skirt.
«Sasha, Sasha, eat your kasha!» mother teased him.
«Mummy, mummy, big fat tummy,» he responded delightedly.
This was how the two of them had lived together for one whole week, renting the smallest of the rooms while the others, scrubbed and readied, awaited their occupants. It was the middle of May and the holiday season was just beginning. A bit cool, and too early still for sea bathing, but the southern vegetation had not yet coarsened or faded, and the mornings were so clear and pure that, from that first day when Zhenya had chanced to wake at dawn, she hadn't missed a single sunrise, a daily spectacle she had not previously appreciated. They were getting along so happily and so easily that Zhenya even began to doubt the prognoses the child psychiatrists had come up with for her boisterous and highly strung little boy. He hadn't been making scenes, hadn't been having temper tantrums, and could probably have been described as well-behaved had Zhenya had any clear notion of what good behaviour consisted of.
In the second week, a taxi pulled up at the house one lunchtime and disgorged a whole crowd of people: first a driver, who extracted an iron contrivance of uncertain purpose from the boot; then a large handsome woman with a lion's mane of red hair; then a lopsided old lady who was promptly installed in the contraption erected from the flat contrivance; then a boy a bit older than Sasha; and, finally, the landlady of the house herself, Dora Surenovna, her face carefully made-up for the occasion and fussing about even more than usual.