Meanwhile, all the locals, as is often the case, knew perfectly well what lurked behind those unmarked walls—the Institute of Applied Chemistry, where poisonous liquids and explosives were developed, polluting the water and soil of one of the most beautiful parts of town for decades to come. For those of you unfamiliar with our topography: here, right in the city center, is the Pushkin House (also known as the Institute of Russian Literature), and there—just across the river—metal barrels filled with sarin and soman or whatever, some type of mustard gas. Unmistakably Soviet city planning.
First time I went there, I got lost: What do you do when there is no sign and no address? “Do you happen to know where SIGMA is?” I asked the first person I came across. “Oh, the Institute of Applied Chemistry? Just cross over there and walk along the fence—that’s where the checkpoint is!” It goes without saying that I’d fold over a corner of the telegram, peek behind the safety seal, and read the secrets sent from Central Command via such insecure channels. Anybody would have done the same. Alas, it contained nothing of interest.
Luckily, on the other side of Kronverksky Avenue there was a zoo, peaceful and overflowing with white and purple lilac trees, and occasionally I would deliver there, too. First, some men had caught a bear cub in the Altai Mountains and wanted to see if the zoo had any need for it. Then, for some reason, a telegram arrived declaring that sixty blankets had been stolen. What blankets? Who could have stolen them? And from where? What did this have to do with the zoo? These were bits and pieces of other people’s stories, a scattered mosaic, a peek into other people’s lives—a little cloud of music drifting from a window, laughter coming from an open door, a corner of a room glimpsed through a slit in the drapes. Somewhere in the vicinity lived my most mysterious addressee, a certain Konkordia Drozhzheyedkina. How old was she? What had her parents been thinking with that name? Was she happy? Did she see from her window the white night outside, the alleyways covered with transparent haze and twilight-colored bushes? Whom does she love? Who loves her? And me, whom do I love?
As a post office employee, I was able to get into the zoo for free. I would wander to the farthest corners, toward the water, toward the Neva River, where only the birds were, where no one else would go: people want to look at elephants, at polar bears, at giraffes, to visit the nursery where you can pet baby tigers while they’re still harmless, but they don’t go to look at the birds. I decided to pluck a feather from a peacock and to wear it in my hair, or something; I hadn’t yet figured it out. I just really wanted a peacock feather and that was that. It occurred to me to lure the bird with some bread, and when it approached the fence, to grab it by its tail—perhaps the feather would simply fall out. Strewn over there, just out of reach, were a bunch of feathers shed by other peacocks. The enclosure was a dense chain-link fence, and the peacock, untempted by my offering, was eyeing me belligerently, when loud, mocking laughter suddenly filled the air: clearly I’d been discovered by the zookeepers.
I lurched away from the crime scene, hurriedly getting up from all fours, pretending that nothing was going on, brushing the dirt off my knees and assuming an expression of detachment: Who, me? I’m not doing anything, just bent down to read the sign—I can’t see very well. But there was nobody around me, not a soul to be seen in the alleys, while that snide, high-pitched female laughter, loud and derisive, hung in the warm air like an umbrella, like a dome or a semisphere of summer sky—Ha-ha-ha-ha! It hovered above me, above my plans to mug the peacock, above my cheapskate calculations—a kopek saved is a kopek earned—above my plans to bloom and my plans to live. It was as if the Creator had suddenly taken notice of me: So you like to spy on others, do you, you pitiful gnat? I can see right through you! Ha-ha-ha-ha!
It was a moment of truth, albeit an indistinct one: when someone is laughing at you but you can’t see who, unforeseen horizons open up, walls move, lights switch on, a vastness is revealed. I stood there, my feet rooted to the sandy walkway, overcome by a vaguely existential shame. So that’s how it will be at Judgment Day. Ha-ha-ha-ha! The woman—or was it God?—was beginning her third round of denunciatory laughter when I spotted her: light of color, with gray wings and skinny, long legs, beak open and head tilted back, she was laughing inside her enclosure—a Caspian gull, or Larus cachinnans. Go to hell, stupid bird. You scared me shitless.
* * *
—
“Please send bedpan and enema.” I went to deliver the telegram: no one was home—delivery slip in the mailbox—back to the post office. “Bedpan and enema no longer needed.” So do they need it or not? What’s happening over there? I asked the boss—she never slept, she just sat there, staring with red, puffy eyes at the uncontrollable world around her—Should I deliver these telegrams or not? They cancel each other out, and there is nobody home! Perhaps they are boating on the Neva? Maybe, to hell with them?
“Deliver both! Instructions are to deliver! Who knows? They might check up on us!”
I attempted to deliver these mutually exclusive requests once, and then again, and then for a third time, to the mysterious owners of the colonic irrigator. I walked back and forth well into the night, but the apartment was silent: nobody ever opened the door, nobody called the post office; nobody was home the next day, or the one after that.
And then I got tired of it all, and I quit.
The cripple watched me go with disapproval: he knew, he just knew I’d make a lousy soldier of the Post Office. The boss lady was already nervously contemplating her next recruit—fresh out of prison, he was as white as a drowned man; he was being led around by the hand by his beautiful young wife, who wore an enormous, puffy gold bracelet. “Do you think I can trust him?” the boss lady asked me, without bothering to wait for an answer, as she was talking to herself.
I left, taking home a whopping thirty-five rubles, the equivalent of an honor student’s monthly stipend. I feasted on black currant ice cream with syrup and then went to my parents’ dacha: July promised to be just as lovely as June had been. And indeed, it was. Only it seemed to me for a long time afterward that the world had changed imperceptibly. As if the noise and the interference had quieted down somehow. Or perhaps I’d simply gone deaf.
Nowhere
N. has died.
He and I had something akin to a flirtation, bordering on—but never quite materializing into—an affair. He was hopeful, and I, for some reason, kept leading him on. Being nineteen, it all seemed oh so fun, but not without its dangers: What if he latches on and won’t let go?
Me, personally, I was interested in the Real Thing, in Grand Emotions. But someone else’s feelings? Eh, not so much.
Perhaps he had suspected me of treachery, of playing a dirty game, but nonetheless persisted in his gentle yet tenacious wooing. He invited me to his country house, which was at the farthest end of the railway line, an hour from Leningrad. I was torn: the invitation implied a romantic liaison, and I didn’t want one. Yet one can’t just go around discarding admirers, right? You never know. And so I promised to come, thinking I’d just figure it all out when I got there.
It was the end of May, warm. I boarded the train and rode for a long time, and then walked for a long time to reach his small, wooden dacha. All the while, I was plagued with doubts—Why am I doing this? Is it the right thing to do? Perhaps it’s best to turn around? It was as if some dour, unpleasantly moralistic being had materialized from thin air to give me reproachful looks: Turn around, girl; this isn’t right, this isn’t right. It wasn’t the first time that I’d felt the presence of this moralizer, this third wheel, and he pissed me off. “What’s it to you?” I replied into the ether. “What? I’m curious. I do what I want. So buzz off!” That’s what they used to say back in the days of my youth—“Buzz off!”
A light was on in the window. I carefully made my way through the wet, versperal grass and peered in. There was a brief moment of darkness during this white night in May. He
was sitting at a table—kitchen? dining room?—reading a book propped against a teakettle and nibbling on a piece of something hanging off his fork. His face was slack and purposeless, as is often the case when someone is reading. I took in his—let’s be honest—handsome profile, his chin, his neck, his hands. I didn’t love him. My heart didn’t beat any faster, my breathing was unaffected, my eyes didn’t brim with tears. Silly, pompous words—the kinds that are embarrassing to remember later—didn’t bubble up in my brain. Grandiose, impossible plans didn’t crowd my imagination.
N. was having tea and waiting for me. I stood beneath his window, surrounded by stinging nettle; he didn’t sense my presence. I quietly moved through the underbrush and walked away—back to the station. As luck would have it, the last train for the night had already departed, and the next one wasn’t due until six in the morning. Dangerous-looking drunkards were milling about—staying here was out of the question.
I walked back to N.’s dacha but decided not to knock. In the garden I spotted a large shed, and I gingerly climbed into its loft. There was some hay there—or what was left of it, anyway—gathered at an unknown time and for unknown purposes. In the corner there sat a pile of old newspapers dating back to the 1940s, probably from when the dacha was built. I lay down in the hay, lining it with the newspapers, and bundled myself up in my sweater. My legs remained uncovered, and they were feasted upon by mosquitoes. The temperature dropped; I was shaking from the cold. Never before had I slept in the loft of a shed; I was a good little homegrown city girl. My parents were probably at their own dacha and they surely presumed that I was home in the city, getting ready for my exams. My Big Unrequited Love, too, had no idea of my misadventures. Not a soul, including N., knew of my whereabouts. I was nowhere.
It’s the most important place in the world—nowhere. Everyone should spend time there. It’s scary, empty, and cold; it’s sad beyond all bearing; it’s where all human communication is lost, where all your sins, all your shortcomings, all lies and half-truths and double-dealings emerge from the dusk to look you in the eye with neither disapproval nor empathy, but simply and matter-of-factly. Here we are. Here you are. “And filled with revulsion, you read the story of your life.” And you make decisions.
From all corners of the garden, nightingales chirped and whistled. I’d never heard them before, and always assumed their song sounded more operatic—aaah, aaah, aaah, aaah. But still I recognized them. From time to time I’d crawl to peek through the cracks in the loft walls: N. stayed up reading for a long while, then the lights went out. I tossed and turned and languished till morning. At five I got up, disheveled, my hair full of hay, my neck itching from dust, reports of Soviet witch-hunt trials imprinted on my thighs and calves. Wrinkled and unwashed, with confusion in my heart, I dragged myself to the train station, to the rattling train, away from here.
Nothing happened afterward; I didn’t explain anything to him. What was there to say? And now a lifetime has passed, and he’s dead.
I thought of him late last night, while waiting for a trolley at a filthy, noisy intersection in the center of Moscow. At a construction site right next to it, quite improbably, a tree was still growing, all in white bloom—hard to tell in the dark exactly what kind of tree it was.
And in the midst of this urban stink, these dangerous drunkards, the cops nearby, and all this nonsense and hopelessness, a flock of nightingales were singing from within the white flowers.
Have they no shame? Singing as if there were no tomorrow.
Father
Father has a new habit of turning up in a rabbit ushanka and a coarse black wool coat; a hint of his torn and scratchy red-checkered scarf can be made out from under the top button. Or perhaps there is no scarf. Then it must be his prewar silk shirt, periwinkle with white stripes. They had an amusing way of sewing shirts then: in the back, between the shoulder blades, they’d pleat the fabric so one could move one’s arms more freely. The shirt would billow out like a sail—clearly a slim silhouette wasn’t the goal.
I found this shirt recently while going through old suitcases—you know, the kind with leather patches on the corners, the ones that are heavy even when completely empty, just by themselves. There were wonderful things inside, simply wonderful: pants with wide cuffs made from lovely tweed, clearly not of Soviet fabrication. Their outward color was gray, but, tweed being tweed, if you look carefully, bring it close to your eyes, then you see not only gray but also some green thread, some red dots, and something sandlike; you sense the creaking of the oars, the oily sheen on the river Thames, the sound of splashing water, and the runny, flickering glow of a streetlamp on a wave; the air is damp, and the mold on the logs of the dock is silky to the touch. But I digress.
So. Pants made from scratchy wool, and the faint, lingering smell of a mothball. Nowadays, moths wouldn’t be bothered by such nonsense, they’d simply feast on the pants and have the mothball for dessert. Moths these days are impudent and pushy, their stare watchful and harsh. But back in the years when these pants were packed away in the suitcase and the suitcase was shoved into the attic, there lived a different kind of moth—clean and tidy, meticulous, with old-fashioned manners and self-respect, and, one would surmise, concerned about the health of its young: Don’t go there, children, there’s naphthalene there! Let’s go look for another suitcase!
So, pants; and then pantaloons—hilarious stuff. With ribbons, with ties! In the front—cross my heart—three white horn buttons, cracked and chipped. A boy’s blazer—poorly sewn, with a half belt in the back—also of tweed, but less fancy. Somebody’s eight-panel red wool skirt. Two shirts: one periwinkle striped, the other coffee colored, also striped.
I fell in love with the periwinkle one, although the coffee one was just as good. I fell in love with the blue, and that’s why he keeps turning up in it, I bet. Although I can’t be sure; he never takes off his coat—a coarse wool one, just like what he used to wear before his death. The rabbit ushanka is also from his final years.
He looks to be about thirty-five. It’s hard to make out his exact age in the half-light of my dreams, but this postwar gauntness and general scruffiness, this casual carelessness or, as he’d put it, “nonchalantness,” those glasses with round frames—the very glasses that were probably the first thing I saw on his curious face when I was brought back from the maternity ward and instantly loved forever—all this points to his being thirty-five. He’s younger than my children.
Of course, they only remember him as an old man with chronic back pain, saggy skin on his face, and remnants of gray hair on his head—God, how he hated this about himself! He’d look in the mirror after shaving and straightening his hair with a wet comb, angrily waving himself away—“Ah! Can’t stand to look at this!” And off he’d go, king of kings, tall and heavy, to have some coffee, followed, perhaps, by a trip outside to deliver a lecture at the university, or maybe simply for a walk in that awful rabbit ushanka of his, cane in tow.
They knew him as an old man. They thought: Grandpa. But I remember him as a young man, agile, loud; I remember him, a glass of red wine in hand, laughing at dinner parties at home with his jovial young friends. I remember how he would tuck me in and tell me all about the universe. About the orbits of electrons. About waves and particles. About the speed of light. About how, owing to the fact that all bodies have mass and that mass increases with acceleration ad infinitum, we can never travel at the speed of light. Bodies can’t, but light may.
I was around ten years old when I asked him: But what is the world really made of? From what kind of stuff? As if one could truly answer that question. Father would tell me about gravity, about energy, about the theory of relativity, about the curvature of space-time, about forces and fields, but none of that would do it.
“What is the world made of, Daddy?”
He’d patiently sigh.
“Okay. What if I tell you that it’s made out of cop
per—does that suit you? Or from cabbage juice? No? Look, there is something called the magnetic field….You asleep already?”
I remember him happy, laughing, of course, but I also remember him angry, unjust, gloomy. He was afraid of death, and the thought of its inevitability would put him in a foul mood, as if it were an execution that had been scheduled for tomorrow, with no stays granted. I was an adult by then, I knew how to express myself, and I’d tell him that there is no death, there is only a curtain, and that behind that curtain is a different world, beautiful and complex, and then another, and another; there are roads and rivers there, wings, trees that rustle in the wind, spring with white flowers: I’ve been there, I know all about it, I promise. He argued, he refused to listen, he wouldn’t believe me. He’d say: Unfortunately, I know how the universe works. There is no place in it for what you speak of. And I’d respond with what I had memorized in my childhood: Bodies can’t, but light may.
A month before his death, he decided to believe me. Somewhat embarrassed—after all, it’s all such nonsense—he told me that, since it appeared that he’d die before me, he would send me a sign from the other side. A particular kind of sign. A certain agreed-upon word. Telling me what it was like.
He never lied to me. Never. And he didn’t lie to me this time.
* * *
—
In my dreams, he appears as a young man; he arrives wearing his wool coat and his rabbit ushanka, clothes from his future, yet-to-happen final years. Apparently, he doesn’t much care. Under his coat—a red-checkered scarf, but maybe not. It could be that periwinkle shirt, my favorite. He has the gaunt, triangular face of a wartime goner, and round-framed glasses. The soles of his shoes don’t touch the ground, as if he were levitating, undulating, although I can’t be sure—it’s dark and hard to see. His gaze is attentive and friendly. I know that look, I recognize it in the living and in those who appear in my dreams; I’ll always respond to that look, get up and walk toward it.
Aetherial Worlds Page 5