Aetherial Worlds

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  Apparently he viewed any house he came across as a potential source of building materials that might come in handy somewhere else: he did construction and repairs in other communities, and if he happened to arrive with some bricks or plywood, you could be sure that he’d hacked it off somebody else’s house to attach it to yours. If after Curly’s visit we discovered a shovel, it meant that in Vaskelovo, or in Gruzino, or maybe even in Elisenvaara, a shovel was missing; if Curly, smiling assuredly, carried away a pane of glass, it was immediately clear that it would soon sparkle in somebody else’s window. This man was carrying out a circular organ transplant, so to speak, attaching one person’s ear to another’s leg—I have no doubt he used our outhouse partition to fashion an inelegant garden table for the unsuspecting owners of a tiny plot of land in the unsavory village of Oselki.

  So, as it was, the hallway leading to the bedrooms was on the sunny southern side of the house—one obviously couldn’t live in it, as that would have been strange—while all the bedrooms faced north and thus were always cold and dark. We did have woodstoves for heating, but they fell apart and stopped working back when I was a child, and no wonder: the dampers and some of the bricks had “disappeared.” I’ll let you guess where they went.

  The upstairs hallway unexpectedly morphed into a sunroom midway through, mirroring the one below it in shape, and it, too, contained the magical rhomboidal panes of red and blue found in the downstairs verandah. I sometimes used to go there to look through the blue.

  * * *

  §

  The third shift saw the grannies—Aunty Lola and Klavdia Alekseevna—come to the dacha. Aunty Lola was our deceased grandmother’s friend. She also considered our dacha to be her home. She always sat in the same old chair, drank from her own special cup, and always slept in the same bedroom on the second floor—the dampest one—which she forbade anyone to use even in her absence, not that anyone wanted to. Anyone else would have simply succumbed to the dampness and died, but Aunty Lola was one of the “Alexander grannies”—born during the reign of Alexander III—and a very sturdy woman, who favored the cold-water cure followed by rubbing oneself with a waffle-weave towel, and so on. In Leningrad, Aunty Lola occupied a room of three square meters in a communal apartment—yes, three square meters exactly. It was originally the janitor’s closet. Her previous home had been blasted to smithereens by the German air raids during the siege of Leningrad. Une explosion d’obus.

  I’ve been to that tiny room; strictly speaking, it could fit only a bed. If one were to get up, another person couldn’t even squeeze by. So Aunty Lola used to receive people on the bed: she and her guest would sit side by side, talking. Sometimes she’d go out into the hallway to put the teakettle on—in that case, her guest would lift their legs so Aunty Lola could get past. A minuscule table was wedged in by the head of the bed, because, after all, you need to put your tea down somewhere.

  As a result, that damp bedroom in our dacha was like a palace to Aunty Lola. She’d stop by the neighbors who sold flowers and strawberries and buy herself a bunch of pink peonies; she’d spritz herself liberally with a Riga-made perfume called “Acorn,” open the door to the balcony (the very one that Curly tried to dismantle), sit in her wicker chair, and, with her bad leg propped up, she would enjoy a novel in English. Or French. Or German. She was equally adept in all three.

  Being a soldier at heart, Aunty Lola adhered to a strict schedule, even of enjoyment—as soon as her leisure time was up, she would limp down to the first floor (the creaking stairs announced her approach—run!) and grab one of us for Russian dictation, or to study English, French, or German grammar. An hour a day. That is, she’d teach one of us for an hour, and then another one of us, and then another….(Of course, we all saw this as a chore and hated it, but only thanks to Aunty Lola was I accepted to university, and only thanks to her do I still have near-perfect spelling.)

  Aunty Lola was obnoxiously honest, unbearably straightforward, suffocatingly slow. She spoke in an elevated literary language, as if she lived inside a Henry James novel, and punctuated what she said with her voice. She was a very good person. She never cheated anyone. Being teenagers, we ran from her for exactly that reason.

  Due to Curly’s architectural logic, all the bedrooms in the house were interconnected: if someone entered your room, you could quickly escape through a different door. But there were a lot of us, more than there were doors, so Aunty Lola was usually able to apprehend someone. Placing her cold hands on your waist, firmly holding on as your body tried to wriggle free, Aunty Lola would start up an empty, meaningless conversation: “When I was in the seventh grade at the lycée, we had a geography teacher who thought that the best way to learn the subject was to travel around the countries you meant to study. And I must say, I completely agree with him. Suppose you are learning about Germany or France—”

  “Auntylola!” We’d laugh, yelling into her hearing aid, as she was practically deaf from that same explosion d’obus. “What year did he say that? Nineteen fifteen? What about Alsace-Lorraine? It’s both Germany and France at the same time!”

  “Well, of course not during the Great War,” Aunty Lola would say, starting up a new thread. “One can only talk about such excursions in peaceful times—”

  “Auntylola! Are these peaceful times? Just try getting a visa to stinking Bulgaria, Auntylola! The party won’t allow it! Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate, Auntylola!”

  * * *

  —

  Directly underneath Aunty Lola’s fortress chamber, on the first floor, there was what we called “the Green Room,” its name taken from the green linoleum that Mother had installed there—installed with her two bare hands, of course: moved the furniture, unrolled the linoleum, and nailed it down as needed.

  This room saw more foot traffic than any other room in the world. It had one window and three doors: one leading to the sunroom, one to the kitchen, and one to a bedroom shared by four people. It also had an armchair and a TV that was always on. Through this room we’d ferry pots of soup and pans of meat, salad bowls of greens and glass bowls of compote; we’d pass through to bring clean dishes and to carry back dirty ones. You couldn’t possibly live in this room, and yet Klavdiya Alekseevna—Klavsevna—did. Somehow amid the constantly opening and closing doors, the chair and the TV stand, the bookcase and the window, a narrow, maiden’s bed was wedged in. Klavsevna would sleep in it half sitting up, just as in medieval paintings.

  A quick estimate: the house had fifteen people, half of whom were children, so that’s more like twenty-five people—kids exist simultaneously in two places, the coordinates of which quantum mechanics does not allow us to identify precisely. Twenty-five people regularly taking their meals three times a day, and irregularly bursting into the sunroom for an apple or a cookie, so that’s another two times—or five in total. Twenty-five times five—I get one hundred twenty-five, what about you?—so that’s one hundred and twenty-five passes through the Green Room just for the food, not counting the TV watching, with shouting matches over what to switch on: cartoons or the evening news? And what if there’s boxing on? Or a movie, especially a crime drama? And what about adults coming and going to sweep the floor, iron the laundry, or lug firewood, not to mention all the children running, screaming, playing tag or perhaps even something more dangerous? In the midst of this purgatory, the meek and docile Klavsevna was able to exist only on condition of her own invisibility—she had perfected the art of living unseen, almost to the point of disappearing completely.

  It’s impossible to imagine Aunty Lola invisible. Her special cup—better not touch it! Her special chair—better not move it! Loud and simpleminded stories of a partially deaf person—“And then the doctor says to me: ‘Remember, you have a friend!’ And I thought: He’s talking about himself, and I was so very grateful to him. But he continues: ‘Farmer cheese! Remember that farmer cheese is your friend!’ ” Aunty Lola w
ould let her presence be known clearly and assertively. She made tracks in our lives; she was a force to be reckoned with.

  Or take Nanny, a firm and stiff-necked person who loved us but disapproved of our lifestyle, and who was constantly nagging us—she, too, was a force to be reckoned with, and her presence hung in every room like a lingering scent. During the daytime we were “god-damned blockheads” or “rotten treasures,” and come evening she’d sigh, “You are all so sweet when you’re sleeping.” When the older sisters began sneaking out on dates, she’d grumble, “You should get it all sewn up,” and we younger siblings were dying to know: Get what sewn up, and where? But Nanny wouldn’t elaborate.

  Klavsevna, however, was invisible. There was an armchair in the sunroom that she really loved, but this chair was considered to be Father’s, and when he arrived on the weekends she’d disappear into thin air as soon as he’d set foot in the house—only her shadow would flicker. I don’t remember her in any of the rooms except for the green one; I don’t believe she ever went up to the second floor; in the kitchen she’d blend in with the appliances, such as the hot plate with the “Left only: low heat” mantra; in the garden she’d blend in with the bushes. Sure, she was subdued and spoke infrequently, but that wasn’t it—she didn’t emit any interference, didn’t send out any signals, didn’t produce any energy waves.

  Klavsevna had a distinctive appearance. She was close to seventy, but her face was lively and she must have been very pretty in her youth. A sleek turned-up nose, blue eyes that sparkled with laughter, peach fuzz on her otherwise bald head, impressive height—it was possible to picture, by straining your imagination, how svelte and comely she had once been. Klavsevna wasn’t blessed with brains, however, and this was for the best: thinking would have been a hindrance for her; she believed only Jesus and her doctor, who told her to put yellow drops in her eyes twice daily, to sleep propped up on a big pillow, and to avoid looking in the dark.

  Avoid looking in the dark! Klavsevna took that literally, and it was impossible to dissuade her. She made her bed, which was situated at the intersection of all roads, in such a way that at the head was a fortress of pillows and props that precluded her lying down. She’d turn on the lamp and sit in her bed amid the horde, looking straight ahead with the tactful smile of one who doesn’t want to disturb anyone else with her presence, until Morpheus finally would descend to dim her sight. This somewhat unnerved her, for when you close your eyes all goes dark, and the doctor had advised against that. When venturing out to the far corner of the garden to relieve herself into Curly’s brainchild—the communal two-holer—Klavsevna was afraid to look into the darkness there as well, and so she’d use the pit of her choice with the door wide open. This allowed her to see from afar who was approaching with similar purpose via the walkway, and to immediately disappear before disturbing them.

  Before her retirement, Klavsevna had been a typist at a company that sold loose face powder (White Nights, Carmen, Lily of the Valley), floral perfumes (Red Poppies, Chypre, Lilac), and other sweet-smelling womanly toiletries. Our neighbor from across the street, a sullen, greedy man by the name of Mikhail Bernig, used to work at the same company as a bookkeeper, and at some point, soon after the war—we were still living in the White House then—he told all his colleagues about the wonderful pine trees in our lake region, about the empty beaches of Hepojarvi, and suggested our slice of heaven as a place to take salubrious strolls with parasols. Klavsevna, then a not-so-young and lonely maiden, came to our community with some friends and, while walking, caught a glimpse of my sister Natasha, then four. Klavsevna’s heart skipped a beat. Everyone’s heart skipped a beat when they saw Natasha. All blond curls and gray eyes—she resembled a magical, sad doll, with a lost gaze, as if all her relatives are gone but she’s not complaining, just quietly grieving. Even those with several children of their own wanted to scoop her up, cover her with kisses, and adopt her. Klavsevna was gone.

  She started coming to Hepojarvi just to look at Natasha, who used to go for walks with Nanny. Klavsevna struck up a friendship with Nanny. Nanny was strict—she saw right through Klavsevna’s foxlike cunning, keeping her at arm’s length. But Klavsevna was quiet, harmless, meek, and enraptured; it was the right tactic—Nanny relented, deciding to let Klavsevna be.

  A year passed, then two; it was time for Klavsevna to retire, which she did obediently. Her pension was thirty-two rubles for life. In the early 1950s that must not have been so bad, but every year prices went up and her pension remained the same. Being an experienced typist, she was able to find a bit of work at first; she’d take odd jobs home even though she was terrified of getting audited. But then her eyes began to give out, and her doctor prescribed the yellow drops and forbade her to look in the dark. And she couldn’t really see that well in the daytime, either.

  Another ten years passed, our younger brother and sister were born, and now they needed someone to take them for walks. Nanny was by then too old, and so she suggested to our mother her (by that time) dear old friend Klavsevna: she wouldn’t be able to manage in wintertime, but in summertime—easy as pie. And so in exchange for room and board as well as a small stipend, Klavsevna began taking the little ones on their walks.

  My sister Natasha was no longer that sad doll; she’d grown up, taken up sports, her favorite being the shot put. She was a girl of marriageable age, but Klavsevna still saw in her that erstwhile lost little girl, and when Natasha would come to the dacha, Klavsevna followed her like a shadow.

  * * *

  §

  People in our family are divided into two camps: those who were stung by the White House and those who were not. I’m in the “stung” camp. Whether I’m walking down the street or lying in bed awake, whether my eyes are open or closed, at any moment can I walk up the wooden porch stairs into the back sunroom, open the door, pass through the narrow hallway with its random boxes, summer coats—called “dusters” back then, a forgotten term now—hanging from hooks, and breathe in that air: the infusion of flowers, children’s tanned skin, household soap, and boiled milk; I can touch the railing of the staircase that leads up to the loft, feel its gray balusters, and then take a left into that room with the green-tiled Dutch stove, the one with the two errant blue tiles. It’s July. I’m five years old. Nanny says our new little sister has just been born, her name is Olya, and we’re going for a walk now to meet Mom and Dad, who are driving in with this new addition.

  There is a long trek upward—it’s a serious hill, a few years later a competition-sized ski ramp will be built up there. You can see forever from the top—even the faraway shore of the blue Lake Hepojarvi is visible, the far, empty shore. No one lives there and no one can, because of the shooting range where once a day thunder is heard—l’explosion. An invisible canon fires so loudly that the house shakes and the windows rattle, and afterwards we need to invite Curly to spackle. No one has been to the shooting range but everyone knows that it’s there, beyond the hills and the valleys, beyond the marshes with the white mist, beyond the sea of fireweed, and the raspberry and blackberry bushes. We are standing at the top of the hill, looking ahead, blocking the sun with our hands: in the distance, in the outlying forest, is a remote meadow, and there, two trees side by side, like two siblings. That’s where Eden is.

  Nanny leads us past the teahouse with its inebriated men, past the kiosk where Mom buys the kerosene for the Primus stove—this is still the age of firewood and kerosene, they aren’t selling gas stoves yet, and the silly mantra of “Right only: medium heat” hasn’t been thought of. We walk into the pharmacy, and there—herbs, herbs, herbs—it smells of sage, chamomile, and dried linden flowers. This is where our Yanson used to work; we don’t yet know that we will be buying his house, leaving the White House forever. Nanny picks out some kind of herb for herself, and we walk out onto the main dirt road. It’s dusty.

  Here they come, here is our Pobeda coming to a halt, and inside th
e car are Mom and Dad, and a satchel that is our new sister; Mom moves the lace away from her red little face. This is Olya. Thirty-six years is all she will get on this earth.

  * * *

  §

  If you look through the blue glass long enough, someone will die. Not completely, not hopelessly—after all, death doesn’t really exist—but they will no longer walk among us. You will no longer be able to touch them, kiss them, to inhale the scent of their hair and neck, to take them by the hand, to ask them a question, to look them in the eye—none of this will be possible any longer. They leave us for that gray, twilit land beyond the blue glass. By bringing my face close to it and looking long enough—through the rustling and the undulation of the garden, the swaying of the branches in the wind, through the melancholy bloom of gray jasmine and the sea of gray lilac—I seem to be able to make out their faces, their hands: they are looking at us and waving, they’ve noticed us. Perhaps there, on the other side, it’s fun for them and bright; perhaps they are playing ball or simply sailing on airships above our gardens—submerging their arms deep into the warm air and yanking flowers by their long stems, and picking petals one by one to tell fortunes. Why wouldn’t they try to tell fortunes? Perhaps from this side of the blue glass we appear to them gray and wistful, locked away and unattainable—I don’t know. But the blue glass is the window of heartache, and one oughtn’t look through it intently or for long.

  * * *

  §

  A tragedy befell our friends, the upstairs neighbors at the White House, the ones living in the loft with the poison and the trumeau and the lilac robe: their housekeeper drowned. She went for a dip in Lake Hepojarvi, swam out into the open waters, and was sucked in by a maelstrom. I remember the frightful commotion that this news created, tearing through all the houses on our pine grove isthmus like a great gust of wind. Some of the grown-ups rushed to the lake; others, blocking the view, wouldn’t let us look. I never saw the drowned woman. Of course, that was the right thing for the grown-ups to do—I wouldn’t have let children of mine see the lifeless young maiden—but because I didn’t get to see her then, now I see her always. I don’t remember her face, I don’t know her name—there were many of them back then, young ladies looking for jobs as house staff after the war to escape the villages they detested, where there were no young men; girls yearning for love, kisses, and freedom where only barnyard work was to be had. I remember these young girls only by the smell of their maiden skin, their sweat, the cheap pink loose powder they used. Men had a different scent, they smelled of motorcycles, you couldn’t confuse the two. Young ladies would go on dates with soldiers from the nearby military base and then inexplicably dissolve into tears, quit their jobs, and disappear. There were Ninas and Valentinas; there was a Liuba, who liked to sew; a Klavdia; and a Zoya, who left behind a pink semicircular hair comb; and the beautiful Marusya, who stayed the longest—she had no suitors because of her withered leg, stricken with polio.