Sukhanov stood for a minute contemplating the closet. When his vexation had ripened sufficiently, he walked to the living room. Nina was curled up in an armchair by the window, eating a sliced peach and gazing vacantly at the gray skies sliding over the roofs. A book lay forgotten beside her.
“Next time you decide to take my ties to the cleaners, my dear,” he said in consternation, “it might be useful to leave me one or two. I do have an office to go to.”
She looked up. Her lips were bright with the juice of the fruit, and her eyes were vague.
“Ties?” she said. “I haven’t taken any of your ties.”
In a moment they were confronting the emptiness together.
“How very strange,” Nina said after a puzzled pause. “When was the last time—”
He had last put on a tie the previous morning, while dressing for Coppelia, and had not opened the closet since. (Upon his return, he had tossed the used tie onto the back of a chair, where its subdued blue pendulum had swung for a few beats before coming to a stop, and where it hung now in rumpled solitude.) The mysterious removal of his property must have taken place between his and Vasily’s departure for the Bolshoi and his arrival home at seven that evening. Nina seemed just as perplexed as he was, and Vasily flatly denied any knowledge of the matter. Ksenya had already left for Komsomolskaya Pravda, where she was interning for the summer; but naturally, as Nina pointed out, she had no reason to venture into his closet, and practical jokes were simply not in her nature.
Sukhanov was beginning to feel incensed.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “And in any case, you were in bed with a headache all day, so no one could have sneaked into the bedroom without you seeing them!”
It seemed to him that a silvery shadow flickered swiftly through her eyes, but it must have been a trick of light, for just then a tentative tentacle of sunshine, the first of the day, probed the bedroom, playfully touching the closet’s bronze doorknobs and glittering off the belt buckles. Nina busied herself with verifying the obvious once again—checking among the socks, between the pajamas, under the handkerchiefs.
“I’m sure we’ll find them,” she was saying as she sifted through the clothes. “Perhaps you moved them somewhere yourself? Because there was no one here except me and Ksenya, and—”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Sukhanov said suddenly. “Of course, it’s that woman!”
Nina straightened and regarded him blankly.
“Well, she was here as well, wasn’t she?” he said. His mouth had grown tight. “I knew we never should have let her into the house, she’s nothing but the wife of a drunk. I bet she pinches things here and there, and he sells them on the black market!”
“Please tell me you aren’t talking about Valya,” said Nina slowly.
Breathing with an effort but looking ominously collected, he scooped up his lone surviving tie, strode into the entrance hall, stiffly stomped his feet into a pair of shoes, and began to unlock the front door. Nina flew after him but slipped on the parquet floor, shedding a feathered slipper, which flipped over in the air like a small wounded bird. He was already crossing the threshold when she grabbed hold of his arm.
“Please, Tolya”—she spoke in a rush—“there must be some explanation, I beg you, don’t do this, she’s worked for us for ten years, and I don’t know a more honest—”
A telephone exploded shrilly in the hallway, and simultaneously something heavy crashed onto the floor above their heads. Startled, Nina turned around. Freed of her imploring touch, Sukhanov marched onto the landing, slammed the door behind him, and not waiting for the elevator, which had just come to a grating halt somewhere in the bowels of the house, descended the stairs.
The stairwell split the gray monstrosity of the building in half, laying it open like an enormous, overripe fruit, with the imposing leather-padded, nail-studded doors, two on each floor, embedded in its yawning pulp like dark seeds, every one of them containing its own luxurious blossom of success. Here, on the seventh floor, across from the unhinged composer, resided a corpulent opera singer from Tbilisi who had left the stage years before but still treated her numerous guests to tremulous arias accompanied by the velvety barking of her three fat, indolent basset hounds; whenever she gave one of her homespun concerts, some mysterious arrangement of pipes would carry the disembodied barking and trilling through walls and floors and carefully deposit their echoes in Sukhanov’s study, annoying him to no end. On the sixth floor, below the composer, lived a high-ranking Party official, a jovial fellow with an amazing profusion of warts on his chin and a plump wife who looked like his sister, and on the fifth, the elevator sometimes dropped off a sad little man in tortoiseshell glasses who resembled a poor relative from the provinces but whom Sukhanov knew to be one of the foremost classics of Soviet literature, the author of the celebrated trilogy We the Miners.
After that, more than thrice removed from his own eighth-floor domain, the inhabitants grew anonymous. As he reached the fourth floor, he heard children’s cries seeping out from under a door, and on the third, after a particularly long flight of stairs, punctuated by the comma of an orange peel spilling out of the trash chute, he leaned against the railing to steady his trembling legs and thought he detected the sweet fragrance of lilies and the light tinkling of a piano in the depths of apartment number five. The fleeting combination of sounds and smells reminded him that once, in a predawn hour, coming home from a New Year’s Eve party, he had encountered a tantalizingly reticent, elegantly perfumed woman with features of Nefertiti, pearls swaying fluidly in her ears, stepping out of the lobby and disappearing into a chauffeured automobile as gray as the sky—but before he had time to glance curiously at the door, the wintry recollection turned and escaped him, and his thoughts, in chasing after it, inadvertently stumbled upon a vision of another chauffeured car, another perfumed woman.
He found himself thinking of the past Saturday evening, of his father-in-law’s retrospective at the Manège. And then, as if merely waiting for their chance to intrude, a multitude of unnecessary, uncivilized associations crowded his mind—the offended Minister, the unbearable encounter with Belkin, the indignity of the near-mugging, the loss of the blue-eyed Nina presiding tranquilly over his work, the subsequent invasion of his sanctuary by the shameless swan-loving nude at the head of a flock of disturbing dreams and irrelevant suspicions... No matter, the nude was gone, he reminded himself quickly—and in any case, these were all minor occurrences, to be forgotten in another day or two—and certainly no reason for him to be standing here, on an unfamiliar landing, feeling as unsettled as he did, no reason at all. And murmuring angrily (What nerve the woman has, can you believe it, stealing like that!), he purposefully walked down the remaining flights—was that a plate breaking in apartment three?—and arrived in the lobby, with the sun, now fully out, splashing brilliantly on the marble floors.
Here he hesitated, not knowing where the caretaker lived; but the concierge was already rising from behind the desk with a cloyingly respectful, insincere smile, and, suddenly embarrassed, Sukhanov nodded coldly and hastened down another staircase, markedly narrower and darker, which disappeared into the obscure strata of the building. Before he knew it, he was staggering through the uncharted territory of the basement, crisscrossed with low-ceilinged, cramped, poorly lit corridors. The smells of cabbage stew and detergent clung to walls the color of sickness; an ill-looking striped cat slunk past him, its invisible tail bristling; shapeless objects cringed in the corners, briefly suggesting rags, pails, brooms, a rolled-up poster, a three-legged chair, a doll with a missing arm, then sinking back into the shadows.... After the sparkling expanse of the lobby, the building’s faintly unclean, unsavory underside jarred his senses, and he felt a dull oppression descending on him, as if all nine stories of human existence above were weighing heavily on his spirit.
A metal door stood ajar at the end of the hallway. When his first knock went unanswered, he knocked again, louder this time
, and hearing some remote rumble in response, walked in—and stopped, assailed by a sharp, multilayered, terrible smell. A mammoth pile of garbage towered in the murkiness above him. He took an involuntary step back, and as his foot sank into something pulpy—an apple core, perhaps, or a banana peel, he did not want to look closely—the gigantic body quivered, shedding a fish head with oily eyes, a soiled paper bag, a swarm of potato skins, creeping a little closer to his immaculate shoes, an inch, another inch, seemingly on the verge of disintegrating completely, of swallowing him up in its noxious horror....
He stood still for one long, stupefying moment, then, seized with panic, flew outside, threw the door shut behind him, and pressing his hands to his temples, thought confusedly, What is this, how can this be, in my own house... And all at once the idea of confronting Valya began to seem disgusting, indecorous, mean, as if it too belonged to this underground world of rotting, malodorous refuse; and he was overpowered by a squeamish desire to leave, leave immediately, return to the light, to the air, to his familiar reality. Almost running now, he turned the corner and stumbled against the wall, and the wall, strangely yielding to his touch, let out a wail and leapt off into the darkness. He stared after it, instinctively groping for his heart in the folds of his jacket. Then, seeing nothing but the cat he had encountered earlier in this labyrinth of corridors, he swore nervously and resumed walking, more slowly now, when a door he had not noticed opened in front of him, and there was Valya, her hands glistening wet, peering into the gloom with her slightly cross-eyed, amiable look.
“Why, it’s you, Anatoly Pavlovich!” she said in surprise. “I thought I heard Marusya cry out just now. Marusya is my cat.”
“I saw it,” he said, taken aback by her sudden appearance. “I also saw a room full of garbage.”
“Oh, that’s our trash chute dump,” Valya explained. “Kolya keeps it locked, only he forgets sometimes. I’ll tell him.”
“Yes, please see to it. It’s most... most unhygienic, you know.”
A short silence hung between them. Then Valya smiled in her shy, dimpled way.
“I was going to come up in half an hour as usual,” she said, and wiped her hands on her apron, “but I’ll be glad to start earlier if you need me now, Anatoly Pavlovich.”
He looked at her, the big, homely woman in an unbecomingly tight blouse, her hair untidy, her round, kind face anxious with a desire to be useful, and his conviction of her guilt faltered. “Just give me a second to check on a couple of things, and I’ll be ready to go,” she was saying, ushering him into a tiny hallway crowded with bundles of freshly washed laundry. A little girl of about six, so blonde her eyebrows and eyelashes were invisible, emerged from somewhere and regarded him seriously for an instant, then wandered off. A telephone started to ring, and a sharp smell of burning porridge began to spread through the apartment. Valya shouted to someone named Stepasha to switch off the stove and to Annechka to answer the phone, then turned back to Sukhanov with a flustered smile.
“I’ll just be a second,” she repeated. “I have my hands full with these children.”
Mechanically his eyes fell on her hands, large, carrot-colored, almost manly, hanging loosely by her sides like two independent creatures briefly asleep—and suddenly an unexpected vision of these hands greedily handling his ties, his lovely silk specimens collected like rare butterflies on his infrequent European sojourns, made his insides dissolve in irrational fury.
“Actually, Valentina Aleksandrovna,” he said shakily, “don’t bother coming up today. Or tomorrow. Or at all. In fact, I came to inform you that you are dismissed.”
The burnt smell and the hurt look in her eyes were the last things he remembered clearly. The ensuing scene was brief and revolting. Trying to keep his voice steady, he told her that the black-market proceeds from her loot would no doubt exceed tenfold what they owed her for the month of August, but of course she was free to keep the difference, they would not prosecute.
She stood still, pulling on her apron, blinking rapidly, her kind face crumpling.
“What... What do you mean?” she said finally, and her words were moist and heavy, almost trailing into sobs. “Do you think I stole something from you?... Dear God, how could you... I would never... And for you to come here and talk to me like that... How could you... You call yourself an educated man...”
The little girl came into the corridor, looked at her crying mother without emotion, and announced that some lady urgently wanted her on the phone. Cringing, Sukhanov escaped into the dimness of the basement, nearly tripped over the mangy cat once again, and rushed up the stairs, taking two steps at a time and bursting into the lobby so abruptly that he startled the concierge out of a nap.
When, hours later, Vadim delivered Sukhanov to his front entrance, the mellow August dusk had already suffused Belinsky Street. The staff meeting had been unpleasant, full of inexplicable lacunae of small silences and awkward glances exchanged on the periphery of his vision, and he was feeling exhausted, tense, and hungry. Tilting his head back in some trepidation, he was relieved to see that the kitchen windows were bright and welcoming as usual, with signs of shadowy activity transpiring behind the cheerfully checkered curtains, and for the whole duration of his slow ascent along the building’s vertebrae in the creaking elevator he indulged in the hope that in his absence his ties had been found, Valya reinstated with due apologies (Nina always knew how to handle such matters), and now another delicious supper awaited him, still smoking, under the merry orange lampshade, on the table scintillating with glasses of wine and surrounded by his understanding, caring family.
As soon as he stepped inside, however, he was met by a charred smell and the resentful banging of cupboards, and instantly his vision of a cozy domestic evening put its tail between its legs and scurried into a corner, to remain there, cowering unhappily, throughout a strained, tasteless meal. Glaring at him over a bowl of burnt rice, Ksenya announced that both she and her mother had spent the afternoon begging Valya to forget the incident, but Valya had only shaken her head and cried, and even a discreetly proffered envelope containing thrice her monthly wages had proved of no avail. He kept prudently quiet for a while, aware, even without looking up, of Nina’s wordless presence at the other end of the table, of her lowered face, which seemed not so much stern or upset as infinitely tired, with deep lines tugging at the edges of her pale mouth; but when Ksenya repeated, for the third time, that she was sure of Valya’s innocence, he could no longer contain himself.
“If you are so sure she didn’t do it,” he said bitingly, “I suppose you can enlighten us as to who did?”
“All I’m saying is, you mustn’t jump to conclusions like that,” she said with less assurance. “You can’t just go around accusing people of stealing without considering every other possibility first!”
“Oh, but I did,” said Sukhanov, allowing himself a dry smile. “I considered the possibility that a little green man was flying past our bedroom window and took a liking to my ties. Frankly, this seemed unlikely.”
Ksenya started to reply, but Vasily interrupted her.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he said in a bored tone. “I think Father was perfectly in the right, we’ll just hire someone else. Honestly, must we spend our whole evening talking about some janitor’s wife?”
“Vasily!” Nina exclaimed in a shocked voice.
Wishing his son would have found some other way to express his solidarity, Sukhanov hastily looked down at his plate and in feigned concentration probed a beef cutlet whose middle shone with a suspect pink. Of course, Nina had never shown much culinary promise, but this was rather worse than he would have expected, reminding him, in fact, of the miserable fare of his early childhood—the many barely edible meals that his mother had set out before him day after day in a corner of their crowded Arbat kitchen. Actually, the kitchen had been quite spacious once, but now an invisible line divided it in two, and each half was crammed to the full with a herd of mismatched chairs stum
bling around a limping table. The Sukhanovs shared their table with Zoya Vladimirovna Vienberg, a dowdy music teacher of indeterminate years with a shadow of a mustache above her upper lip, and an old soft-spoken couple who always dressed rather formally for supper and sat picking at their food like birds, smiling sadly at each other. The wife had a pink and wrinkled face, like an apple left out in the frost, and bluish hair; its color fascinated me to no end, and I would often stare at the tight, shiny curls for a full minute at a time, until my mother would reprimand me for my rudeness in a dramatic whisper.
The other table, situated advantageously next to the stove, belonged to the Morozov family, consisting of a husband, a wife, the husband’s unmarried sister, and two sons, indifferent brutes three and five years my senior. The sister, Pelageya Morozova, an indolent, slightly overweight young woman with sleepy eyes, a bright red mouth, and an alluring mole above her upper lip (in another few years she would start passing, smiling coyly, heavy breasts swinging, through many of my adolescent fantasies), prepared all their meals, and was so much better at it than my mother that tasteless clumps of porridge or sticky macaroni would often wedge themselves in my throat as I listened to the appetizing hiss of chicken from Pelageya’s pan and, tortured by the loud, satisfied guffaws of the Morozov boys, agonizingly imagined the succulent taste of the meat in their mouths.
The only thing that made these measly repasts in any way bearable was an ever-present hope that tonight, against all expectations, my father would return home early. Hearing the jingle of a doorbell in the hallway, the obnoxious Morozovs would instantly lower their voices, for he inspired even them with respect. Shouting, “Papa, Papa!” I would leap from my seat and fly to let him in. In a minute, my hand in his, he would enter the kitchen, smiling broadly, sit down at the table with us, ask me how I liked school, gently tease the poor unattractive music teacher, who never failed to blush dark red in his presence, say something kind to the old man and his wife, and then take my mother’s face in his hands in that casually warm, special way he had—and his strong, confident, handsome presence would lend a sense of completion to my fragmented, boisterous, inconsequential day.
Olga Grushin Page 8