Treasury of Russian Short Stories 1900-1966

by Wassner, Selig O. ;

  A nice little old woman traipsed cautiously from the front garden, as timidly as a doe, and turned toward the boiler room. The youngsters began dropping down from the roof.

  The old woman had been the object of their mischievous pranks every evening, as soon as she’d come out into the yard to breathe some fresh air and set her wizened seat on an inflated rubber cushion. She had become used to them, however, and bore with patience the merrymaking of those quick, uncannily cruel “yard terrorists,” as she called them. She was patient though fearful, always fearful.

  And now, as the boys shot a jet of water from the yard hose across her path, amusing themselves by guffawing and leaping, she patiently stepped from foot to foot and waited for them to get tired of their game. Unexpectedly, her friend, the janitor’s wife, came to her rescue; her mouth wide open, her arms waving wildly, she attacked the boys.

  This scene, full of sound as it must have been, would have normally aroused in me anger and sorrow. But now it passed by my indifferent eyes like a silent movie.

  In the end the old woman safely crossed the yard while the “terrorists” returned to their infernal activities on the boiler room roof, probably not giving a thought to the possibility that if she died their souls might be invaded by their first, even if short-lived, feeling of emptiness.

  Trying to maintain my indifference and the life-saving lassitude, I pulled up the telephone and dialed that damned number. I tried to make believe that I didn’t care, that calling him meant nothing to me; still, on the third digit I suddenly had a sinking feeling inside, my heart, liver, spleen, everything suddenly clustered into a crazily-tangled lump … and then the busy signal saved me.

  I envisioned him sitting on a chair, or lying on the couch, undoubtedly playing with his glasses, swirling them on one finger and chatting over the phone. With whom? Sadovnikov? Voynovski? Ovsyanikov? I swore. And at that moment I heard Whale’s yelp from the kitchen. He seemed to be running amuck. Sometimes he does just that.

  “Go away!” he screamed at the top of his voice. “Go away,” he screamed at my wife, “we don’t need you.”

  Next came the wife’s excitable voice and then the click of the light switch. Certain punitive measures had been applied. Whale was left alone in the dark kitchen. He quieted immediately.

  The wife stalked into the bedroom and buried herself in a corner. They were getting her down, those squabbles with Whale, our tiny Tom Thumb, our little little-over-three-year-old sonny boy.

  I got up and thudded toward the kitchen, making merrily like a terrible elephant: “Trra-rra-rra. ‘Phant-Dad is coming. Bimbo himself from the deep jungle. Trra-rra-rra. Himself. In person!” My heart was swept by a feeling of love and serenity.

  Against the background of the dusking window I saw his round head. He was sitting on the potty, whispering to himself, raising a finger toward the window, and the first evening lights of the building across the street.

  I’d become used to Whale. That strange sensation of an illusion I used to have when he’d break into the room or roll in on his tricycle was getting dimmer and dimmer. That mysterious reverence and the alarm of the first months of his life had almost disappeared. Now it was like this: well, there’s Whale, and that’s that. Little sonny boy, little hocus-pocus fish-whale sitting on the parapet, or playing and all that kind of stuff.

  He was only six months old when I had nicknamed him Whale. Both my wife and I were bathing him in a little wash tub, as he was twisting in the soapy water, opening and closing his toothless mouth. I was holding his head, trying to keep the pieces of cotton in his ears from falling out. And he … he’d give me a blue-eyed glance and smile slyly, as if he had been foreseeing our present intricate relations. First he had looked like a sausage in a soup and I had said to my wife, “There he is, a little sausage.”

  Having thought for half a minute, my wife decided that the nickname was not esthetic. Then I had thought of another metaphor: “Whale.”

  The wife had made no reply.

  That evening after we had bathed Whale I left for Vnukovo and got into a huge plane which took off for the Far East. Later, while traveling around Sakhalin’s little port towns, as soon as I got into a hotel or a guest home I’d take out his snapshot and think of him just like this: “I wonder how my little Whale is today?”

  Who could remember the number of nicknames I had given him after that? He was Nippie and Pottie and once his name was as complicated as Mushie-Plushie-Janglie-Banglie-Spoonie-Goonie—but all those nicknames had gradually faded away. Only one remained: “Whale.”

  “Well, what was all the fuss about?” I asked, sitting down beside him on a stool and getting myself a smoke.

  “Look,” he said, pointing at the window. “Little fires. One, two, three, eighteen, eleven, nine,” he went on counting the lights. Then he shouted, “Look, there’s the moon.”

  I turned to the window. A pale, frayed moon hung over the houses.

  “Yeah, the moon,” I made a poor imitation of enthusiasm and shook the ashes on the floor.

  “Tolya, there is the ashtray,” Whale shouted in my wife’s tone of voice.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I beg your pardon.”

  We lapsed into silence, both seated, he on his potty, I on my stool. The absoluteness of the silence was only disturbed by my wife’s sighs in the bedroom and the rustling of leaves of the book she was reading. Whale’s eyes shone with a mysterious light. The quietude was obviously to his liking.

  “You know,” he suddenly stirred. “Gagarin is flying to the moon.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed.

  “You know,” he continued, “Gagarin, and Titov, and Tereshkova, and John Glenn …”

  A long pensive silence. “What about them?” I prodded.

  “… and Cooper … They don’t put anything in their mouth or nose,” he completed his thought.

  The wife returned to the kitchen and picked him up from the potty.

  “You haven’t done anything,” she scolded. “Sit down again and try. You’re absolutely not trying.”

  “Tolya, are you trying when you sit on the potty?” Whale asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Elephant Bimbo always tries.”

  “And how about ’phantess Tumba?”

  “She too.”

  “And how about the little ’phant Clump?”

  “Oh, how he tries!”

  “And who else tries?”

  “The sperm whale does.”

  “Is the ’perm whale good?” Whale asked.

  “Did you ring?” the wife asked.

  “It was busy,” I said.

  “So call again.”

  “Listen,” I exploded. “It’s my business, isn’t it? It’s my business and I’ll call when I feel like it.”

  “You’re a coward,” she said contemptuously.

  I jumped up from the stool.

  “Go for a walk, the both of you,” she said sharply. “Get ready and go.”

  Whale and I left our house and went along an alley toward the boulevard. It was dark. Whale was walking with wide, energetic steps, his little hand firmly pressing mine.

  “Well, how is it?” I asked.

  “How is what?” he became confused.

  “Is the sperm whale good or bad?”

  “ ’course good. Sharks are bad, but the ’perm whale is good.”

  I wondered how little Whale pictured the sea which he had never seen? How did he picture its depth and endlessness? How did he picture this city? What was Moscow to him? How little he knew! He didn’t know the difference between a city and a state, didn’t know that the world was split into two camps. He didn’t know what “world” meant. We’ve categorized so much already—good or bad, but we’ve categorized almost all phenomena, all our surroundings, we’ve constructed our real world, but he was still living in his marvelous, strange world which was so unlike ours.

  “And who bit the moon’s side off?” he asked.

  “Ursa Major,” I
blurted out and regretted it immediately because I could anticipate the explaining I’d have to do next. From the trembling of his little hand I knew that curiosity was again the master of my little son.

  “Tolya,” he inveigled. “What kind of ah … Ursa?”

  I picked him up and pointed at the night sky. “You see those little stars? Those, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven which look like a scoop? That is Ursa Major or … the Great Bear.”

  “And what are stars? And what’s the Great Bear? Why is it hanging like that forever and ever?” Whale mockingly threatened with his finger, “You, Great Bear, why did you bite the moon’s side off? Why, huh?”

  His gaiety and his gullibility in this instance emboldened me. “And higher up there,” I said, “is the Little Bear. You see that little scoop? That’s the Little Bear.”

  “And where’s the Middle Bear?” Whale shot at me a reasonable question. He seemed to be trying to organize a bear family.

  “The Middle Bear?” I mumbled. “Well …”

  “Maybe in the woods?” he helped me out. “Hunting?”

  “That’s right. Of course, that’s where it is.”

  I let him down and we walked out into the boulevard. All the benches were occupied by elderly people and nurses, rows of fourteen-year-old girls, and behind them rows of fifteen-year-old boys. A bluish light of luminescent lamps shone upon the Humped Pony—as big as a mammoth; on the Firebird—as tall as a giant turkey; on a huge Puss-in-Boots bigger than two people—with a vicious sneer on its round face; on another corrupt-looking cat tied by a golden chain to a wavy plywood seashore; on Prince Guido, Princess Swan, The Rocket, The Queen of Spades, Gulliver etc.

  That was “The World of Phantasy,” the juvenile book bazaar spread on our Boulevard. The stands were already closed, and only here and there a yellow light slithered through a crevice in a plywood fable giant, a sign that the vendors were counting their day’s receipts.

  Whale was bewildered. He couldn’t move, didn’t know where to run first—to the Puss, the Prince, or the Swan? For a few minutes he seemed to have forgotten the tongue in his mouth, kept rolling his large eyes, making soundless whispers. Then he tugged my hand, gave a squeal, and we both dashed off toward the stands. I had difficulty in fencing off a volley of questions, in telling him who belonged where, who was good and who was bad.

  Apparently almost all the figures expressed the good and the light, folk wisdom and cunning, apart from the pitiable Vulture that swooped onto the Swan personifying the force of evil. But Guido’s arrow was already taking care of that.

  Finally my Whale got tired and leaned against Humped Pony.

  “Let’s go home, Whale,” I said. “It’s time.”

  “Tolya, you know what? Let’s take them all with us.”

  “With us?” I asked. “How? They’re too big.”

  “We can take them,” he assured me. He slapped Pony, “There, he’s ours.” He ran to Puss and slapped it. “There, it’s ours too.”

  He took all of them. And never even looked back. When we walked out of the boulevard he slowed down; I stopped too. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Look, Tolya,” he said. “There goes such a pretty auntie.”

  I saw the “pretty auntie”; she was coming straight at us. Her walk reminded me of a discreet, or what shall I say, of a barely restrained dance. By thrusts of her gorgeous knees she was tossing aside the flaps of her gorgeous overcoat, and the parasol, incredibly thin and pointed which she carried under her arm, semed to be a spare extension of an inner pivot. Her eyes, mysterious and sly, lit up brightly the moment she saw us. I hadn’t seen this auntie for three days, and now I began to feel perturbed and alarmed, as always whenever I happened to see and think of her. Especially now with Whale around.

  “Oh,” she said. “So that’s your little Whale. He’s cute.”

  She bent down to him and let him touch her parasol. “What’s this?” he wanted to know. “An arrow? A gun?”

  “It’s a parasol,” she exclaimed. A second, and the parasol sprang open. With a little snap it had canopied above her head, lending her figure an extra touch of an almost acrobatic agility.

  “Let me hold it,” Whale pleaded.

  She gave him the parasol. “It’s so nice to see you, Segnor,” she addressed me. “You look so peacefully busy.”

  “I, too, am happy to espy you, Mademoiselle,” I said.

  We could have dispensed with that idiotic quipping, the idiosyncracy of our set, and seriously broached the subject which had bothered us for the last few days. But as it was, it behooved us to show more or less a sense of humor of this sort and neither she nor I could do without it.

  Whale was orbiting around the parasol. We could talk undisturbed.

  “Why are you so sour?” she asked.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “And you’re disgusted, right?”

  “No, why should I be?” I said.

  “You think I am a bother to you?”

  “You have to be wily?”

  She said she wasn’t wily, that we needn’t quarrel after not seeing each other for three days, that she understood why I had the jitters, she understood everything and never let me out of her mind, which, maybe, helped me. …

  She was and she wasn’t lying. How easy sincerity and wile blend in a feminine heart, I thought. First serenity, then insane, disgusting vanity. Then they feel good, those beautiful dames, I thought. They are not afraid of death, never think of it; the only thing they are afraid is old age. How foolish of them to be afraid of old age.

  While she was full of sympathy for me I was making up my mind not to re-enter her world—there wasn’t enough of me for that. I thought of one thing which had nothing to do with adventures or amours—I yearned for serenity, the kind of serenity I felt among those plywood monsters of “The World of Phantasy.”

  “Honey,” the pretty auntie said to me, “I understand how humiliating it must be, but you must find the courage to call him up. You ought to explain everything to him and even if you make it worse, it may still turn out better in the end. I’m sure of it.”

  She raised her arm and her palm touched my cheek. She stroked it. As she did Whale edged in between us. He tugged at the pretty auntie’s sleeve.

  “Hey, take your parasol and stop touching my daddy,” he said. “He’s my daddy, not yours.”

  We took leave from the pretty auntie and went home. For several seconds we could still hear in our ears the ring of her barely affected, ostentatiously kindhearted, perhaps bitter laughter.

  We stopped at the gate of the bus depot. Huge buses were coming out, medium-sized buses, and teeny-tiny buses.

  “Daddy-bus, mama-bus, little baby-bus,” Whale laughed.

  At last we came home. While Whale was eating supper and telling Mother about his walk, I was tottering around, glancing at the telephone, getting so nervous that I was at the end of my rope.

  I hate that telephone! I’m always astonished to see how the wife can talk on the telephone with her friends for hours, how she can establish personal relationships with people through that telephone. Maybe her affection for her friends is transferred to the receiver, and perhaps then it is the receiver toward which she feels an attachment.

  I lose a lot of time because I don’t like to talk over the telephone. Instead of picking up the phone and giving a “buzz” I travel all over the city, losing time and money. Perhaps it’s because I’m looking for a life of reality, and when you hear a voice in the receiver, you think it is something imaginary, that everything is imaginary, and nothing is as it appears to be.

  Perhaps that is what I ought to do now. Perhaps I shouldn’t ring him tonight and instead go and talk to him tomorrow. I’ll see him, look into his face and by looking into his face I’ll be able to show him in a facial expression—a subtly fine facial expression—that I’m not a Humpty-Dumpty that can be easily humiliated, and I’m not a nincompoop, but a man, and that my calling on him is also
a manly act, and that I can sneeze on the likes of him. On the telephone, however, he has a tremendous advantage over me—the same as talking to a supernatural power.

  The telephone rang. It began to rattle, the snake. I took off the receiver. It was the voice of my so-called friend Stasik. “I’m mad at you, you’re mad at me. I’m a pig, you’re a pig.” Stasik babbled on. …

  When his spiel was finished I asked him why he had called.

  “I called to tell you that you shouldn’t be an ass but call up that politico immediately. I don’t have to tell you how much depends on him. I saw Voynovski today and he had met Ovsyanikov who talked last night to Sadovnikov. They all think you should do it. I’ll call Ovsyanikov right away and he’ll get in touch with Sadovnikov, and Sadovnikov will call you back. You know Voynovski’s number?”

  I hung up. The receiver cradle gave a nasty click. For fifteen minutes I sat at the silent apparatus, almost able to feel in my body the telephone hullaballoo my friends were raising, and visualized those words, scurrying smoothly like mice back and forth through the cable. Finally Sadovnikov rang and promised to get in touch with Ovsyanikov who would give him Stasik’s telephone number and Stasik would help him get in touch with Voynovski.

  The wife entered the room. “Did you get him?” she asked.

  “No answer,” I lied.

  “No wonder,” she chided. “You’re simply irresponsible.” She was gone, leaving me fully distraught, confused, and that’s how I was when beaming Whale came in with an armful of books.

  “Want to read, Tolya?” he asked.

  He had a book of poems by Marshak, another by Sapgir, as well as folk stories. We began to tackle the folk stories. Whale nestled on my lap, listened attentively, and when the action became tense he tweaked my ear.

  He snubbed the Indian story about a little elephant. When we had come to the spot where the crocodile grabs the elephant’s trunk, he pulled the book out of my hands and hurled it on the floor. “It’s a lie, a lie,” he shouted, getting red on the face. “It’s not true. It’s a bad story.”

  “Listen, Whale,” I began. “It’s a good story. It ends well.”