Anya had become highly emotional when it was announced that the theatre was going to stage Romeo and Juliet. It had been namely the role of Juliet in which she had shown most promise at the final examination from the institute. And then, Anton Petrovitch gave the part of Juliet to Alisa Alexandrovna, a fortyish woman whose made-up eyelashes never stopped fluttering. True, if you didn’t look at her, and just listened, her voice was much more pleasant—Anya couldn’t help agreeing with that. Alisa Alexandrovna’s voice was deep and flexible and gave Shakespeare’s amazing poetry a uniquely full-bodied richness.
On the eve of the premiere, as Anton Petrovitch saw Anya backstage, all in tears, he first smiled. Next he said pointedly, “Your time hasn’t arrived, old lady. You’ll only be mouthing all that beautiful poetry and nobody will hear you farther than the fifteenth row. Your time hasn’t arrived …”
Then he was gone. Barely thirty, she thought, and speaking with the voice of authority. Who did he think he was anyway, a nationally known actor? It would have been preposterous to talk to him about Fedya after that.
But last night she came to the conclusion that Anton Petrovitch had been absolutely right. She was simply no good! They had included her in the cast of A Lucrative Spot, and the part was good too—Yulenka’s. No doubt she would have preferred to play Polenka, but that was beside the point now. It had been a guest performance in a mining town. The truck had been terribly rickety, the squeaking chairs in the auditorium had made her extremely nervous, in short, she couldn’t remember her part. And how she’d botched it! With a bang! And all the conning and cramming she’d done before! Inspiration, what malarkey! She could have sworn that just as she had stepped onto the stage the chairs began to squeak unbearably loudly, the kids began slurping their ice cream cones more noisily than before, and the fellow in the second row stopped watching the show and began to neck with the girl sitting next to him.
After the show she crawled into the rear of the truck and, facing the cab, she turned her back to everybody. Oh yes, they were all sorry for her and were reluctant to tell her how abominably she acted. She cried until midnight. Even Fedya’s friendly comfort hadn’t helped. Especially since he hadn’t seen the play—he had been working that evening in the hospital. Besides, how could Fedya have felt any sympathy for her when he was so happy about himself? While she was on tour the theatre in town had staged The Scuttled Escadrille, and since there had been a shortage of men, Fedya got the part of a sailor. So while trying to comfort her he was unable to get rid of his silly smirk and in the end had made her so mad that she asked him to leave. Perhaps, had there been a rehearsal next morning it might not have occurred to her to run away. But Fedya, drunk with happiness, had run off to the theatre and she had remained alone with the locked secretary, her banged-up part and the Kursk bedbugs. That was when she saw things in the right perspective: get away from here, you’ll never make it as an actress, Anton Petrovitch has no more faith in you, the town is unfriendly, and nobody will even miss you. Who needs a ham anyway?
Time was dragging on. There were still twenty minutes left to the train’s departure. Anya plodded into the square, hot and dusty. The little lindens were pitifully shriveled and bleached. No, she wouldn’t wait until they grew up and this town filled with so many people that the theatre would always be a sellout. Let Anton Petrovitch say as much as he wanted that she had a kitten’s sense of perspective …
On the billboard there was a placard announcing today’s show. Two schoolgirls stopped in front of it. From behind their neatly combed heads Anya scanned the poster. Her ears blushed! There it was, “The backstage cry—A. Shukina.”
The backstage cry! Was that as good as Juliet?
Suddenly Anya remembered her voice, the backstage cry. The opening of the second act. “Mommie, Mommie,” rings a desperate child’s cry. On the stage a mother darts about in frantic helplessness. The war has started.
“Much obliged, girlie,” Alisa Alexandrovna had told her after the rehearsal. “Your crying was great. Helped us a lot.”
As she had been crouching backstage in the dusty shadows, crying, “Mommie,” Anya remembered her despair of years past. “Mommie!” She had left that word in childhood, unuttered, lurking somewhere deep within her. The scar on her face had healed, it was hardly visible anymore, but the aching sorrow—it was as strong as ever.
Here was a bench. Anya sat down and put the suitcase beside her. So today’s backstage cry won’t be A. Shukina’s. Whose will it be? Nobody knew she was leaving. What if they forgot to call on her and waited until the last minute? What cry will it be, a cry with no experience or no cry at all? And then Alisa Alexandrovna will be waiting for the cry, alone on the stage, facing a huge, dark auditorium. In fifty minutes from now! What’s going on, Alisa Alexandrovna will wonder. The audience will begin to snicker, make noise, get out of control. The young people in this town aren’t used to theatregoing yet. They haven’t had time for that yet.
Anya had a mind to walk toward the theatre. No, no she can’t do that. Everybody there knows of last night’s flop, they’ll laugh at her or even worse—pity her. But Anton Petrovitch, he always goes home for dinner before the show, she’ll go and tell him everything …
She knew where he lived—in a house like all the others with one exception: two tall fir trees grew beside it. They remained from the time this place was a forest. They gave the house a cozy, lived-in look. Whenever she passed this house she felt a little envious. Anton Petrovitch, he’d always show up in the theatre so fresh and clean-shaven, smelling of eau-de-cologne, with an immaculate clean shirt—as if dressed for a festive ocasion. He probably had a doting mother to fuss about him and give him his samovar-made tea after the show, and she probably made sure that flowers were on the table and she probably dusted his favorite books and his chest of drawers that was never locked. His wife, true, was still traveling around. He had said the other day, “There’s people who just don’t click character-wise, but my wife and I we haven’t clicked occupation-wise.” His wife was a geologist and she had to go where there were no towns! Anton Petrovitch’s place was where a town had grown up and had a theatre in it.
Still, Anya thought, his wife comes to see him from time to time and keeps writing to him. It’s easy for him to berate young, defenseless girls who are all alone in the world.
A little boy opened the front door for her. “You came to see Anton Petrovitch?” he asked. “There’s his room.”
She knocked. No reply. She knocked again and softly opened the door. The room was clean and empty. Never before had Anya seen such an empty room. Rooms might be temporarily empty during repairs when furniture had been removed, but the emptiness of this room was an actual, permanent emptiness. An accurately made cot, a tiny table, and a stool, in the corner a pair of pants on a hanger—that was all! That was the room of a man who had no time to think of himself, of a man who for twenty-four hours a day was absorbed by very important things he loved to do. Only the walls in this room were alive. An attractive feminine face leaned over the bed. There was the Romeo and Juliet placard. Besides it leaflet upon leaflet fastened with pins to the wallpaper—thoughts that are brought to life when a man rambles at night, thinking and working. The walls had been converted into a desk. Notes like: “Don’t forget the opening of the third act.” Or, “Catherina, the main thing is force and purity of action, no hysteria.” Or, “Try Fedya the electrician.” Those paper slips were alive, astir, irate. “Fourth act—miserably done. Do it over.” These were thoughts one musn’t forget. An incessant creativity. The last thoughts before sleep and the first thoughts after consciousness returns.
So that’s how he lives. Without a samovar, without a mother, without a wife!
On an electric plate in the corner stood a tea kettle—so tiny it could hold just a cup-and-a-half, at the most two. It must have seen plenty, that tea kettle—banged around, a wire instead of a handle. But it wasn’t pitiable by any means. On the contrary; it seemed to snub its chipped nos
e, as if asking: “Why’re ya starin’ at me? Can’t ya see, we go, boil, an’ heat?”
Once again Anya glanced around the garrulous walls. There was the placard she’d seen outside a while ago. Next to those offensive words, “The backstage cry—A. Shukina,” was a plus sign and an exclamation mark. A plus sign indeed! Here’s a man thinking of it, praising it, inserting it into the placard while that “plus” has gathered its few rags and is about to run away. Anya nodded cheerfully to the tea kettle and went out.
So. And there she was thinking everything would remain the same here. Anton Petrovitch would go on shouting in his sleep and fixing on notes with new thoughts, her associates would go on having rickety truck rides on dirt roads to bring relaxation, amusement and smiles to miners, and Alisa Alexandrovna would go on changing in cold club dressing rooms and ask anxiously the moment she returned from the stage, “Well, how was it tonight?”
Fedya? He’d go on reading Hamlet soliloquies to somebody else and act his first part, and they’d finish building this house and that, as well as the one for which they’re digging the foundation now. More and more people would come to live in this town and fewer and fewer empty seats would be in the theatre with each show … And the lindens would bloom … And here she thought she could do without all of that …
A fine drizzle was coming down as Anya started on her dash to the theatre. The little lindens looked clean, their large leaves rustled boldly, stirring in the rain like round green baby chicks. Through the open windows she heard applause, voices, noises. The end of the first act. She was in time!
“Your cry tonight was disgusting,” Anton Petrovitch told her after the show. “Disgusting,” he mumbled to himself. Because he was at a loss to understand why this girl had such a happy gleam in her eyes.
1963
What’s in a Glass?
by V. Kaverin
Venyamin Alexandrovitch Kaverin, born in 1902 in a musician’s family at Pskov. Wrote poetry before graduating from the Institute of Oriental Languages in 1923. His first story, The Eleventh Axiom, was published in 1920, and was well received by Gorki. His novel Two Captains, translated into English, was awarded the 1946 State premium. During the Second World War Kaverin served as war correspondent for Izvestya. Several times he was elected member of the Presidium of Soviet Writers.
Petya Uglov, the long-legged, young scientist who knew more about complex physiology than anybody else in this world (apart from one African and two Australians), crawled up carefully onto the upper berth without even poking his fellow traveler, and fell asleep shortly after the train pulled out of Perm. As a rule Petya did not dream, but this time he saw people through a milk-white glass pitcher. Why are they coming at me, Petya asked himself, and why are they so happy? Then he knew—behind them was Leningrad.
A happy sigh escaped Petya’s sleep. He had never been to Leningrad before though he had read up all there was about it—and not only in Russian. If there was a Lenfilm movie in town he had to see it (those Lenfilm movies were usually shot on location). Not too often did Petya have money to spare, yet he could not resist buying from time to time those gravures showing finely drawn greyish or dove-colored buildings along the Neva River. Oh, how he loved Leningrad!
Then Lady Luck had smiled at him: along came this assignment—a trip to his beloved city. I’ll spend no more than half a day on it, Petya had thought, and the other two-and-a-half days I’ll devote to sightseeing: The Hermitage, the Senate Square, the Islands, then Pushkin’s Statue. … Of course, Valka, his best friend and old school buddy would have to take him to Akimov’s Theatre and the Spartak Ballet, and Tamara, his wife, might join them too …
Leningrad, as it turned out, unfolded rather disappointingly. The only view Petya was able to get from his hotel window was a narrow barnyard and a few roof tops. True, there was something of that Leningrad charm in those dingy barn walls that made up the yard well, Petya decided, but after enjoying the view for a while he made up his mind to call the Glass Institute for an appointment.
2
Petya Uglov sat in the office of the institute’s research director, his head pulled into his shoulders, and listened attentively. This tenth-generation Frenchie, he said to himself, with his bow necktie and fancy handkerchief in his breast pocket, looks like a nineteenth-century actor but he knows what he’s talking about. The director, Igor Lavrentyevitch Croizé was quick to pick up every thought of Petya, develop it nimbly, then turn it into another direction. They had been discussing the recently deceased acadamician Tshassov, the inventor of that “certain type of glass,” which Uglov considered a “must” for finishing the apparatus he had constructed. Tshassov had written a magazine article about that glass, but having been unable to arouse any interest in his invention, he had called it quits. As far as Uglov was concerned the old man had played a mean trick on him by dying at ninety, a few months too soon.
“Young man,” Croizé said, patting his bald, handsome head crowned by a whisk of grey hair, “I like your project.” The director’s suggestions on how to use the Tshassov glass were of dubious value, but Petya was pleased by the interest this influential man, unquestionably an expert in his own field, had shown in him. Later, however, when they began talking about technical matters, Petya found that things were far from rosy. Tshassov’s glass existed—but in theory only. Apart from a little sample in the possession of Yevlakhov, there was none.
“Who is Yevlakhov?” Petya asked.
Ivan Pavlovitch Yevlakhov, the director explained, was an associate of this institute, a scientist who used to be the inventor’s close friend. “If need be, of course, we can issue an order to manufacture the glass,” Croizé said, “but there’re several considerations why we shouldn’t do it without Ivan Pavlovitch’s say-so. Of course, I can pick up the phone and buzz him, but it’s better, Comrade Uglov, if you see him in person. Besides,” the director went on, “he may have some valuable information for you … By the way, you’ve never heard of Yevlakhov before?”
“No.”
“Tst, tst. In that case you’re ignorant of the fact that the history of the Russian glass stretches from Lomonossov to Yevlakhov?” There was a shade of irony in Croizé’s voice.
“I’m afraid I am,” Petya said.
“You see, that’s your specialization age,” Croizé said, flapping his arms in mock despair. From a tube on the table he pulled out a sheet of paper and drew a line in the middle of it. On the left side he printed YEVLAKHOV, on the right UGLOV.
“It’s good to have a plan of discussion,” Croizé advised. “ ‘What can I do for you?’ he’ll ask you. Don’t worry if he sounds brusque. You just tell him what I told you but try to be brief. Then he’ll say ‘Good, but where do I come in here?’ Then you say, ‘I can’t see how this work can be done without your participation, or at least consent.’ He’ll mutter something, like ‘Fiddlesticks,’ but you don’t give up. ‘I still can’t see …’ you repeat and start rolling out the big guns … And don’t try to soft-pedal …”
Petya was listening, his long arms firmly anchored between his knees. He always loved clarity, yet this apparently clear-cut plan was somehow fuzzy. Why had Croizé taken such an interest in him? All right, as far as he was concerned the glass was important, but why should the institute care? Then why was Croizé sending him off to Yevlakhov instead of having the glass made right away. No, Petya decided, there’s something elusive here which has nothing to do either with him personally or with his apparatus. Should he mention his suspicions to Yevlakhov? Still, Croizé was a likeable fellow—smart, maybe even brilliant. …
3
The whole morning Petya had tried in vain to reach Valka. No answer. At last a stern feminine voice asked, “Who? The Koloskovs? No, they’re not home. He’s out of town and she’s at work.”
“Out of town?” Petya asked in a deflated voice. “When’s he coming back, you know?”
“No, I don’t,” she hung up.
Hell, that’s why he didn’t m
eet me at the station, Petya fretted. A good friend he is, Valya Koloskov! Wrote it was O.K. then left without a word. Well, perhaps he couldn’t help it.
However, while waiting in Yevlakhov’s reception room, Petya couldn’t get Valka out of his mind. Maybe he’ll come back, he thought. I’ll call Tamara in the evening.
It took quite some time before Yevlakhov asked Petya in. Ivan Pavlovitch was a moon-faced man of silghtly above average height with a few unruly strings of hair on the top of his head. “What can I do for you?” he asked (as Croizé had predicted) in an expressionless hoarse voice, patting his hair. The sarcastic look on his plump face made Petya uneasy. Yet, while forgetting the prepared plan of discussion the young scientist felt his thoughts flowing with spontaneity.
He had begun to talk. Yevlakhov listened at first in silence, a gleam of irony playing in his grey eyes; then he began to shoot out sudden questions. What does he think, this is an exam, Petya peeved? When he in turn asked a question, Ivan Pavlovitch didn’t reply immediately.
“There’s Tshassov’s glass,” he said at last, pointing carelessly at a tiny stand between two windows.
“May I see it?” Petya asked.
“Help yourself.”
Tshassov’s glass looked no different from any other glass—a matte little circle on a velvet background. “Now you see for yourself,” Yevlakhov said, “I just can’t see where I come in here.”
There was no doubt in Petya’s mind that the right thing to do would be to tell this man that he was sent here—sent by Croizé. But he couldn’t say it; instead, blushing up to his ears, Petya uttered the “planned” phrase.
Treasury of Russian Short Stories 1900-1966 Page 19