He wants to say something, but he’s not saying it; wants to explain something to me, but he’s not explaining it. He appears amused. Perhaps it turned out that the universe really is made out of copper and cabbage juice, packed away in a suitcase with leather patches on the corners and interspersed with tiny little mothballs. And that this prevents nothing—not the unrelenting light of a billion diamantine stars, not the curvature of space-time, not the splashing of waves, not the stillness of time, nor the roads, nor the love.
The Invisible Maiden
We would arrive at the dacha in several shifts.
First—once the last of the black-crusted snow had melted, usually in April or early May—came Mother. Sometimes she’d take me along to help out, but I wasn’t particularly helpful. I was fat, lazy, and prone to daydreaming; all of these attributes were poorly suited to working in the garden, much less lugging firewood from the shed, or water from the lake. Although Mother wasn’t really counting on me for the latter. In fact, she wasn’t counting on any of us; she simply did everything herself. Her silent hard work was to serve as a reproach, a lesson, and an example. But it didn’t.
We would enter the damp rooms, thick with the wonderful scent of stale linen tablecloths; of blankets abandoned for the winter; of plywood from the walls and old glue that seeped from the furniture due to moisture; of ancient rubber boots that were exiled here, to the country, for hard labor. Mother always walked in first, pointing her flashlight, undoing the latches on the wooden shutters that covered the windows from the inside; we would take off these heavy plates together and the moldy rooms would get flooded with sunlight. We’d throw the windows open, the sharp outside air would whoosh in; we’d shiver, wanting to do nothing more than to drink hot coffee in the sunroom—hot coffee premixed with condensed milk, which we had brought with us from the city.
And so that’s what we did. Mama would slice up some bread and cheese; we’d sit in the creaky wicker chairs, squinting at the garden through the clear glass panes and the ones of stained glass, of which there were two: a blood-red rhombus that made the entire world seem pale pink, like overcooked berries in compote, and a green rhombus, which in any season created the illusion of its being July.
Then Mother would get up to light the wood-burning stove, to boil water for cleaning, to lift and move heavy objects such as furniture, and I’d make pitiful contributions—open up drawers to smell the old paper lining, for instance. Or thumb through forgotten notebooks, looking among the mundane lists and business records (baking soda…sugar 5 kg…call A.F….pulmonologist for Musya…K2-14-68…brown ribbon), hoping against hope to find some mysterious name, a passionate exhale, an imprint of an unknown love.
I’d get stuck on each book on the shelf that I was attempting to sort through. And sorting after the winter was necessary, as there were rats living at the dacha, and they fed on the binders of Novy Mir back issues and the French novels written at the beginning of World War I. The rats feasted on the paste used in the old days to secure the spine; they bit through the canvas that held the binding and sucked on the light-blue ribbons that served as bookmarks. They shied away from synthetic adhesives but enjoyed starch tremendously. And so it was necessary to pick out that which had been gnawed at, to sweep away the rat droppings, to wipe down the shelves.
It was the time of the Khrushchev Thaw; Novy Mir was publishing daring and timely pieces, which, alas, did not hold my interest. But those French novels, which mysteriously found their way to our dacha shelves, spoke of eternal things: searing eroticism, nude women, deceit and betrayal perpetrated by men. When you’re thirteen, that’s all you want, really. And it encourages the study of French.
One of those novels was called Une explosion d’obus—A Shell Explodes. As I understand it now, it was a sort of metaphor: the pretty boy in white pants, his hair slicked back and his mustache twirled (illustration), has experienced an explosion of feeling for the graceful and shapely young lady in an enormous hat that covers her magnificent hair (illustration). Or maybe she experienced the explosion. Anyway, mutual passions came to a boiling point: lace, illicit embraces, two front teeth between parted lips…followed by the bitter realization, eyes cast to the ceiling—“Mon dieu, how could I have been so imprudent?”—hand-wringing and other thrilling French behavior. All this while you, in your rubber boots, are supposed to be lugging firewood.
I was particularly fond of one of the illustrations. The caption read “She boldly entered the sea, unashamed of her near-nakedness, as he greedily looked on.” In fact, she was wearing a full-length gown with long sleeves and a high collar; upon getting into the water she had lifted the hem, which revealed striped pantaloons reaching just below the knee—perhaps that left her “near naked”; on her head was a bird’s nest of ribbons and bows. In the background, the more timid and shy maidens were bashfully peeking out from the bathing machines, the pale lace of the waves lapping around the wheels. Publication year: 1914. The last peaceful summer before the war.
“Mom, what does les cris de passion mean?”
“The cries of passion,” Mom would reply reticently. “Leave this rubbish and go pick up a rake.”
But the picture that, according to the caption, depicted these intriguing cries had been fiercely torn out, and all that was left of Claudine and her voluminous hair was a handful of lace on the floor and a carved leg of the bed where she’d been overcome by the invisible and mustachioed Albert. As always, the most precious, interesting—the most censurable—had been removed.
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§
The second shift was Nanny’s arrival with the children to a scrubbed and clean dacha. The house was already thoroughly heated, it smelled of fried potatoes and canned meat, of hot dried-fruit compote—it was homey, cozy, reliable: All shall be fed, all shall be warm. The wood-burning stove was on; the gas stove was used only intermittently, as gas cylinders were scarce; and the impossibly slow double hot plate, imprinted with a mantra of sorts—“Left only: low heat. Right only: medium heat. Both together: High heat”—was ever ready for action.
Nanny would tote the three-liter, cheesecloth-covered jar with the kombucha all the way from Leningrad and place it on the windowsill. From the day of my birth till the day of Nanny’s death, I looked out our Leningrad kitchen window at the gray six-story building across from us, at the schoolyard with the volleyball net, at the endlessly distant matchstick-thin pipes of the Vyborgsky District peering through this symbiosis of bacteria and yeast, through this jar, through the little amber swamp atop which rested the puffy, pale, fat, layered pancake. It was alive. It needed to be watered with freshly brewed weak tea fortified with a spoonful of sugar. Three days later, this tea would turn into a stinging, tangy, yellowish drink that was allegedly very good for you. Where there is a kitchen, there is kombucha; where there is kombucha, there is caring, loving, nourishing, and anxiety. Kombucha needs to be watered! Did someone water him?
It was like another child in our family—seven of us, plus Kombucha. Us kids, who were blessed to be born with legs and arms, with eyes—and him, prematurely born, eyeless, unable to move, let alone crawl. Yet he was alive. And he was ours. Nanny’s baby. (When Nanny died, there was no one to take care of him. One of the sisters took him in, but forgot to water him as needed; he started to wither, to get murky, and soon decomposed and died.)
Nanny used to place Kombucha on the dacha windowsill; his appointed neighbor was Onion, a mayonnaise-jar resident whose fibrous, whitish roots were dipped in water. The windowsill was where the empty glass jars from the green peas were drying, along with the jars from Nanny’s favorite tomato sauce, which she insisted on calling “red stuff” and nothing else. Our kitchen was dark, sunless, and remote, because our dacha had been built by an imbecile.
All the sun, all the wind, all the flowers were over there, outside the window.
* * *
—
Over there,
outside the window, was where the neighbor’s property began; it had been like home to us, but it was no longer accessible. Over there, at the neighbor’s house, we used to rent the entire first floor until Mom bought this dacha of ours, the one built by an imbecile. The neighbor’s plot was enormous: there was a field with potatoes, another one with wild bluebells, and a “third field,” where nothing in particular was growing, it was just there. There was also an apple orchard, a lilac garden, a zucchini patch, a thicket of yellow acacia, a grove of giant knotweed, an unusually large and thick birch tree, a spruce forest that rolled down the western hill, and a pine grove that rolled down the eastern hill. In the pine grove, under a thick carpet of red needles, you could make out the faint outlines of small graves, which resembled suitcases overgrown with moss: the original property owner used to bury his favorite dogs there when they died. All this, this entire world, used to be ours, but now it was cut off by a chain-link fence and we could no longer go there.
At the top of the hill stood the house itself—“the White House,” as we used to call it. The apocryphal story goes like this: Many years ago, at the end of the nineteenth century, a certain Mister Dmitriev paid a visit to this narrow isthmus—a tongue of land between two lakes—on a hunting trip with his son. The younger Dmitriev so loved the pine grove and the sandy lakeshores and the thickets of willow herb and blueberry bushes that he said to his father: “When I grow up, I’ll build myself a house here.” Junior grew up, became an engineer, got rich and bought the isthmus; on one of the pine hills he built a hunting lodge (it was still there in my childhood but later burned down), and on the other—the White House. The hunting lodge was entered through a small porch, and there were deer antlers hanging over the front door. The White House had two entrances: the back one, through the porch, for routine comings and goings and deliveries, and the front one, through the portico with the white columns; the columns were of wood, covered with stucco. The second floor was a loft with slanted ceilings. They say that the façade was a replica of Tatyana Larina’s house in the 1915 staging of Eugene Onegin.
If you’re a young lady with a braid, of an age of yearning and expectation, and it’s a white night June evening of unfading light, and no one is sleeping, and there is no death, and the sky seems full of music, it feels right to go stand on this portico, hugging a stucco-covered column, watching the sea of lilac bushes cascading down the steps, and breathing in the scent of its white misty foam, the scent of your own pure flesh, the scent of your hair. Life will deceive you later, but not just yet.
We used to live there on the first floor, and I remember the mysterious shadows of the common rooms, the Dutch stove with plain dark-green tiles, smooth and monochrome. Owing to someone’s blunder, or whim, perhaps, two of the tiles were dark blue, and this imperfection evoked a certain pity—or, in other words, love. I remember the basin perched atop a washstand along with a timeworn pitcher, and the arched windows of the upstairs loft—those bedrooms weren’t ours, they certainly didn’t smell like us; when invited, we used to walk up the grayish-blue staircase to get to them. Up on the second floor, between the window frames, there were small shot glasses filled with dark-burgundy and dark-orange liquid; I used to know what they were for, but I’ve forgotten. They’d say it was some kind of poison—either to kill the flies, or to prevent the windows from freezing over in wintertime. When I was a kid, I feared the word “poison,” and I don’t like it now. I used to imagine poison to be the color of port wine, with the stifling, sugary smell of cough syrup.
They also had a trumeau mirror; I was dazzled by this nocturnal-sounding word—“trumeau.” On a wall hook was Aunty Vera’s robe of pale lilac, the color of sighs and murmurs, of white nights, whispers, and otherworldly emotions. Its scent was so enchanting that it nearly stopped your heart. It smelled of the White House, of 1914, of faraway, virginal, immaculate woods.
The hill upon which the White House stood poured down, if you will, eastbound and westbound. At the east side, surrounded by pine trees, stirred a large blue lake with the Finnish name Hepojarvi, still unspoiled and unlittered: the worst one could find at this wonderful lake were thickets of alder—a nasty weed of a bush, the back of its leaves covered with red dots, like warts.
To the west—down a steep path from the top of the hill—was a quiet little black lake, or, more precisely, the bay or a bend of the big lake, though we used to call it “the Little Lake,” considering it the independent younger sibling of Hepojarvi. Growing in it were yellow water lilies that smelled like mermaids. If you dangled your arm off the edge of a boat, submerging it deep enough, and then yanked at just the right moment, you could pick a water lily by its two-meter-long stem, and then, provided you tore the stem apart correctly, you could—and absolutely should—make a cold, wet necklace out of it. In the evenings, the black-mirrored surface of the Little Lake reflected a long-blazing yellow Finnish sunset and fir trees seemingly carved from black paper. A couple more toadstools underfoot and you’d have an Ivan Bilibin illustration. In the daytime the firs retreated, disappearing somewhere, and the waterside was golden-green again, happy. There were leeches in the lake; we used to catch but also fear them. There were water striders that ran across the smooth plane of the water, dragonflies that hovered above it, and on the shore there was a bathhouse where Dmitriev Junior used to bathe—the nineteenth century was slow to leave these shores; it hesitated, showing us how it was before the First World War: the green, blue, sunny world of the not-yet-killed.
Lucky for Junior, he wasn’t killed in that war, or during the purges that followed. They said that he was a VIP in the world of energetics, that he participated in the GOELRO plan, which sought to bring electricity to the entire country, and that this is what saved him. Russian Wikipedia says that in April of 1937 “the main engineer of GOELRO, G. A. Dmitriev, was arrested. Death by firing squad on September 14th.” But this must have been some other Dmitriev, perhaps from Moscow. Neither the age nor the place of residence matches up with ours. If this had been Junior, then they would have come after his heirs, killing them or sending them to work in the uranium mines; the White House would have been turned into some kind of state-run tuberculosis clinic for the bigwigs of the trade unions, and they would have been hacking their profsoyuz snot all over the lilac garden.
Before the Revolution of 1917, Junior installed an electric generator on the shore of the Little Lake, and subsequently the White House had power. When I was a kid, you could still see the limestone slabs, a platform of approximately two square meters, upon which he placed the generator. The grass of oblivion—little three-leaf white clovers—was already forcing its way through the cracks between the slabs. It was sweet, we used to eat it.
Now I alone remember where the generator stood, where the nostrilled limestone slabs disappeared into the ground. The new folks don’t need to know this. And I won’t tell them.
The other thing that was left behind by Dmitriev Junior was a large, yellowing collage: photos of boring mustachioed faces in ovals—engineers, no doubt, who had graduated with distinction (or without) from some Polytechnic Institute and who were burning with desire to apply their knowledge for the glory and benefit of the Fatherland. A carved black frame, dead flies, glass. All those faces in ovals were most probably arrested and executed.
Junior’s heirs held on to both houses for a long while, but then the government started closing in—it was forbidden to have multiple properties—and so they sold the hunting lodge, and then one little piece of the land, and then another. Meanwhile the house grew too small for our clan—there were seven of us by then—and so mother bought the dacha next door. With a view of the White House. Few are so lucky.
* * *
§
A carpenter nicknamed “Curly”—the aforementioned imbecile—built our dacha. One of the kids gave him the moniker. “Mommy, Curly is here!” Finding it endearing, the carpenter started calling himself “Curly” after
that. No one remembers his real name. He’d built the house right after the war, for the previous owner, a pharmacist named Yanson, who was planning to rent out the rooms. Curly’s stupidity manifested itself variously; for example, all the rooms on the first and second floors, save for one, faced north, and not a single ray of sunshine ever found its way to them. And so the house grew moldy and rotten, all the quicker because Curly, unable to refrain from stealing building materials, constructed the dacha with no foundation. In the faraway corner of the garden he erected a roomy Finnish outhouse with two seats—a two-holer—but as he absconded with the partition wall, an interesting opportunity presented itself: you could now visit the shitter in pairs. Curiously, no one ever took advantage of this.
Curly was a jack-of-all-trades, gardener as well as carpenter, and he loved his work. Hammering, tearing things apart—he found it all equally interesting. After building our crooked house that listed to one side, he began to feel a sense of ownership: he’d come visit from the city uninvited; he’d enter without knocking, toolbox in tow, all his nails and pliers, and, with the mysterious air of an artisan, he would get to work on senselessly improving something. Sounds of hammering and the wheezing of a hacksaw filled the air, until he emerged from the basement or from the attic, or climbed out from the shed, squinting in the sunlight, and with a log or piece of plywood in his hands and that mysterious artisanal smile still plastered across his face, he’d take it all home. If you weren’t on high alert you could end up losing a balcony: Curly was once caught removing the support beams that held ours up—the very same support beams he’d attached to the wall ten years earlier. We didn’t notice, however, when he managed to disassemble the roof over the firewood shed.
Aetherial Worlds Page 6