Aetherial Worlds

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  I don’t remember which one of them drowned because the one that did—that invisible maiden, lying on the lake’s shore, on the grass behind all the grown-ups fussing, leaning over her, and blocking the view with their legs—was all of them: Nina, Klavdia, the other Nina, and Zoya. She was all of them—lying on her back, on her side, and facedown; propped up against a tree, covered with a blanket, naked, wearing a blue wool swimsuit, or a cotton one with orange dots or tiny flowers; in her underwear—pink satin or white cotton—or, for some reason, with a long nightgown clinging to her pale young body. She was the sister Alenushka from the fairy tale, calling out from the water’s depths: “My brother, Ivanushka! Heavy is the stone that pulls me down, silky is the seaweed that binds my feet, yellow is the sand that covers my heart!”

  Afterwards, the grown-ups explained to us about the bottom of Hepojarvi: at first, everything is smooth and shallow, and then boom! A sharp drop-off, and not just a drop-off but a vortex, with a deep hole, a cave. If you swim above the drop-off, you can get sucked in under its smooth edge, as if under a roof or an awning.

  * * *

  §

  Between the world of our parents—books, science, common sense, encyclopedic knowledge and education—and the world of the nannies—fairy tales, myths, fears, superstitions, things that go bump in the night—was the world of the children, who were trying to understand it all, and who didn’t know how to talk about it.

  Puzzling things, puzzling people. A soldier, for example. Say the kids overheard rumblings from the grown-ups’ world about how one of the Ninas went out with a soldier late at night and how, uh-oh, nothing good can come of that. Nanny, in an effort to scare us, would say that a soldier was coming to carry us off in a sack if we didn’t behave. This was alarming, and confusing, but alas, there was proof that this practice of carrying off children in sacks existed: illustrations from the folktale “Masha and the Bear,” in which, as we all remembered, there was a bear walking upright and carrying a little girl through a dark forest in a woven basket full of savory pies.

  What horror! The soldier, treading slowly, would enter from the back porch of the White House and gingerly take off his sturdy shoulder bag. Where would he take me? And why? What would happen afterwards? Would he throw me in the lake so that I’d get sucked into a maelstrom, my feet bound by silky seaweed? Would he start sharpening his knife? Or maybe, having mysteriously descended from the large, flyspecked photo collage graduates of the Polytechnic Institute, with their mustachioed faces framed in ovals, would cover me in stifling yellow paper so I would start to choke and kick and I’d wake up with my heart pounding, crying, “Nanny! Nanny!”

  The room with the dark-green stove tiles and the two errant blue ones had no curtains. I remember that autumnal morning—gold and translucent—when I woke up from the light and, climbing up to kneel on the windowsill, looked out. The world outside was just as it must have been originally conceived: made of gold, quiet, and kindness. A leaf softly fell to the ground. I was around five years old. I had no thoughts. But I did have—from that morning when it appeared, and staying with me till this day—a sense of self, separate from the others.

  And therefore what should have followed was an expulsion from paradise, and that’s exactly what came to pass: we left the White House, and the gates that led inside it slammed shut, the way there blocked to us forever.

  * * *

  §

  Of course, we all loved our crooked, damp, and absurd dacha. It belonged to us and we could do with it as we pleased. For example, Curly started building—though never quite finished—two more rooms in the attic. Each room did have a door and a window, and some sort of ceiling lining—we needn’t dwell on the imperfections. I claimed one of these rooms and for some reason chose to paint the window frame bright red; the result was quite hideous, and I quickly repainted it white, but the red color still showed through, and so I kept covering it with more and more white paint until the window would no longer close.

  I found that I enjoyed painting, and so, until I ran out of supplies, I painted everything I could: window frames, doors leading to the sunroom, thresholds. Even the black prerevolutionary cupboard—an heirloom from Yanson—was painted white, to my mother’s dismay.

  Every day we used to buy milk—a big, three-liter container—from one set of neighbors and strawberries from the other set. Initially Mother tried to plant some strawberries herself, but soon gave up on the idea. Yanson had left behind a great farm: it had everything from gooseberries to geese; it had chickens, a piglet, an apple orchard, cherry trees, and even a plum tree, which, for a long time, we considered to be some barren, useless alder tree until it went crazy, as trees are wont to do every few years, covering itself first in beautiful flowers, and then in fruit—inedible fruit, but fruit nonetheless.

  He even used to have a cow—Yanson, that is—and so the house had a cowshed attached to it. But by the time the house was in our possession, the shed had long been turned into a large storage space with closets and shelves all along the walls, and there was no sign of it—the cow, that is—she had been forgotten and we don’t even know what she looked like, what color she was, what her name was, if she had calves, and what happened to her: Did she end her days ground into meat patties or did she die of an illness or old age? Only on humid days before a storm, when scents begin to rise from the earth, could you smell the presence of an animal, as if blown in from pastures beyond Lethe, the river of oblivion. Through the small window a ray of light would shine, dust floating in it, neither taking off nor settling, but eternally there, eternally circling, as the cow’s shadow would walk from one dim corner to the other, sighing and treading heavily.

  There was a time when basically every house in the community had a cow—aside from the White House, which kept no livestock. But at some point the authorities once again imagined something or other, and directives were issued to chop down the apple trees and to surrender all the cows to the collective farm. The dutiful folk shed some tears, chopped up the trees and the cows—you wouldn’t just hand them over to strangers, would you?—but some, deciding that the monarchy’s rage would subside and that the dark skies would clear, kept their animals on the sly. One neighborhood woman, who truly loved her cow, ferried her by boat to an uninhabited island on Lake Hepojarvi—we used to call it “Lily of the Valley Isle”—and the cow would ramble there, chewing the flowers, confused, while the woman would go every day to milk her: in the morning fog over calm waters, and in the evenings, by turbulent waves out of Turner paintings, with a bucket and clean cans for this white, lily-of-the-valley-scented milk.

  * * *

  §

  Yanson didn’t have any children, just a wife—I remember a picture of her with a milkmaid’s yoke, surrounded by chickens, a barn and a pig in the background—and so he was able to devote all his free time outside the pharmacy to the geese and the cherry trees. By contrast, our family had a small child army, and before the youngest had grown up the eldest already had kids of their own. Mother couldn’t keep up with the gardening required, and so the pharmacist’s farm slowly descended into disarray: the apple trees got to be as tall as the pines, the gooseberry bushes grew wild, the Persian lilacs refused to bloom and resembled a mop, the Turkish carnations crept away from their flower beds and we’d find them in the weeds by the fence sometimes.

  None of us children liked working in the garden; we enjoyed sitting on the porch in the evenings, playing cards or charades, reading or making up nonsense rhymes, one person writing two lines and then passing the sheet of paper to the next. Sometimes Father would join in and the rhymes would acquire a certain compactness as well as a hint of political sedition.

  Mama would walk past us with a pruner or a rake; she would work in the garden till dark, teaching us hard work by example—to no avail, as we never budged from our spots to help her unless she asked, and she rarely did. Occasionally a paroxysm of guilt wo
uld overtake one of us and we’d yell in her direction, “Mama, c’mon, I’ll weed there tomorrow!” But she’d impartially answer, “Morgen, morgen, nur nicht heute, sagen alle faulen Leute,” which was German for “Morrow, morrow, not today, that’s what lazy people say.”

  (Years later, when the Soviet regime fell apart and was succeeded by democratic times, when working for the common good was considered a laughable and contemptible anachronism, the courtyards of Saint Petersburg were choked with garbage, and no one came out to clean them. That is, no one except two people: the janitress and Mother. Mother was by then close to eighty. She’d put on canvas gloves, secure her hair with a headscarf, and set out to pick up the bottles peeking through the melting snow, to sweep up the frozen dog poop, to gather up paper, plastic bags, and discarded syringes. On TV, Sobchak was barking about democratic principles and we all watched in rapture; but Mother would walk past us, in silence. “Mama, c’mon, sit down, relax!” “Garbage doesn’t pick itself up. We want to live with a clean courtyard, don’t we?”)

  * * *

  §

  Besides that Lily of the Valley cow, there was the Eimans’ cow, but we were too lazy for the long walk to their place—it was about a quarter of a mile up a road overgrown with thick grass. The house belonged to a large extended family and one of the inhabitants was Vera Eiman, a mysterious woman, enveloped in sadness, who knew how to get rid of warts using a quarter of an apple: you secured one quarter to the wart and then buried the other three while saying these magic words: “You three, riding on a mare! Take this wart away from here!” A week later the wart would be gone without a trace—the three horsemen abided. At some point before 1914, this Vera was a personal dresser for the ballerina Anna Pavlova; she used to enrobe and disrobe this distinguished woman, clean her swan tutus reverently, travel the globe with her. She’d bring out autographed photo albums covered in velvet to show us: “For dearest Vera…” You’re standing there, with a three-liter milk can tugging on your arm—“All right, can I please go now?”—but Vera is still flipping through the formerly cream-colored pages with trembling hands. “You see? And here again: ‘To dearest Vera…’ ” Anna Pavlova decided to stay in England, and Vera came back to Russia to get married.

  And get married she did, or rather, thought she did, but the consummation never occurred, les cris de passion never rang out in the dark vaults of Vera’s bridal chamber: her husband would gently kiss her on the forehead and leave the room, closing the door behind him. Vera was an innocent maiden but nonetheless possessed some vague notions about the mechanics of matrimony; days followed days and nights followed nights.

  Finally, tired of waiting for the caresses promised her at the altar, unable to understand what all this meant, and not knowing where to turn, she got up from her cold marriage bed and knocked on her mother-in-law’s door for advice. Oh, the horror; oh, the depths of despair: the dim light of a kerosene lamp, shadows, lace, and scattered bedsheets. Yes, her husband was indulging in passionate lovemaking with his own mother in the very same bed where she’d birthed him, and where, as it turned out, after making him her lover for thirty years she still wouldn’t let go.

  Vera hanged herself. But her husband rescued her from the noose, brought her back to life, and then promptly hanged himself. No one tried to resuscitate him, it should be noted.

  She didn’t remarry, and she grew barren among the velvet-covered albums full of someone else’s exhilarating beauty. They say that after what had happened, men inspired only horror in her. I don’t know—when handing us a full three-liter milk can, having carefully placed it inside a checkered bag, did she sometimes think about what could have been, that it was possible to forget, to overcome, to fall in love again, to have children, to nurse them with her own milk, her own body whose earthly time had been so uselessly spent on the side of life’s road? Or did she completely dissolve into the swanlike whiteness of the past, into the dreamy sublime sadness, into those pointe shoes, ribbons, and flounces—the flounces and lace that she used to bleach with her very own hands, used to press with a sad iron?

  Anna Pavlova’s name has been immortalized by one KLM airplane, by an Australian dessert, and even, God help me, by some haptophyte algae; it still resounds, and all this is well and good; yet it might still please her—now on the other side of that blue glass—to know that even here, in the shade of the White House, amid the pines in the middle of nowhere, Vera, the eternal maiden, spent her long, sad life loving her, and that after each evening’s milking she’d smooth out Anna’s silky photographs the way she used to smooth out her tutus.

  * * *

  §

  The house was overrun with children, and Klavsevna was hired to take the little ones—Olya and Ivan—for walks, so they wouldn’t be in the way. You’d amble somewhere, not doing anything in particular, and here they are—situated by a pile of sand, next to a fallen pine tree, Klavsevna sitting down on the tree’s roots, her red jacket visible from afar, while Olya and Ivan are making mud pies or playing with toy trucks: beep beep. I don’t know exactly what she would talk to them about or how she entertained them, but at some point an imaginary character by the name of Fedor Kuzmitch entered the picture.

  He, as I understand it, bore no relation to any historical figure. He just materialized out of nowhere and there he was. Fedor Kuzmitch was a role model: he always finished his supper, he never licked his plate even after raspberry jam, he never spat cherry pits out onto the table, but only onto his spoon, then carefully placing them on the edge of his plate.

  Before entering the house, Fedor Kuzmitch always shook the sand off his sandals, as well as the pine needles from his clothes: he was considerate of Mother’s having to sweep the floor. Fedor Kuzmitch didn’t dangle his feet and kick under the table, didn’t pick his nose, didn’t draw on the tablecloth with colored pencils. And he never—NEVER!—brewed tea in the buckets of fresh water just brought back from the lake, as Olya used to do; never stomped his feet over the blueberry pies covered with tea towels on the table as, again, Olya did. And he never mixed salt and sugar—quickly and deftly—while looking with innocent and impudent eyes when caught in the act, Miss Olya! Sure, you’re five years old, and yes, you’re the most uncontrollable creature around for miles—button nose, corkscrew curls—but Fedor Kuzmitch, dignified and exemplary, does not approve of such shenanigans.

  I’d overhear bits and pieces of this epos: Klavsevna gently rustling, the rug rats possibly absorbing some of the lessons.

  * * *

  §

  Now that Olya is long gone, and we have lived out most of our lives and will ourselves soon be going beyond the blue glass, I called my brother Ivan to ask: What was all that about? And who was this Fedor Kuzmitch? Where did he come from and where did he go? But Ivan doesn’t remember. Fedor Kuzmitch just was. So I guess, once again, I’m the sole witness of the existence of these titans and their dilapidated worlds.

  Remember the palace of giants,

  The silvery fish in the water,

  The sycamore trees—goliaths,

  The fortress of rock and mortar?

  Remember the golden stallion,

  Playfully rearing mid-canter,

  His white shabraque and medallions

  Adorned in an exquisite manner?

  Remember, the heavens parted,

  Together we found a ledge;

  The stars, in the skies uncharted,

  Like grapes dropping down unfetched.

  I was twelve years old when I picked up a thin old book from the shelf and read these verses by Nikolai Gumilev. It seemed like they were speaking to me. When a line in a book says “Remember?” then it seems to me as if I do remember. Yes, I think I remember. Something rings a bell. I don’t really know what a “shabraque” is and I’m still too lazy to look it up, that’s more up your alley, Mister Gumilev, but “the skies uncharted”—let that
be mine. I read this and dutifully remembered. Immediately the palace of giants appeared to me as the White House: the white columns, the dark-green tiles, the smooth blue-gray balusters disappearing high up the stairs, all seemed colossal in my childhood; and the loft window rested directly against the crown of the pine tree, the pine cones knocking against it in the storm—you could just reach up and touch the ledge where the heavens parted.

  Fedor Kuzmitch must have come from a clan of Titans that populated the earth even before the appearance of man. He was a dazzling resident of the mythological Golden Age, close but not equal, of course, to Dmitriev Junior the Demiurge, who created our world according to his personal whim and who saw that it was good. Blind aoidoi in dusty and loud markets, in the shade of reed canopies, sang about the twelve labors of Fedor Kuzmitch; for a small price, cunning entrepreneurs showed the bluffs where Fedor Kuzmitch’s cyclopean bed-sized feet stomped, and the vertical wall, overgrown with ivy, that Fedor Kuzmitch poked with his staff to create a spring of sweet water. Here Fedor Kuzmitch healed a quadriplegic, and over there is where he overcame the Minotaur. A rainbow in the sky, a thundering explosion on an invisible shooting range, twin trees on a faraway, unreachable shore—all these were the tracks of Fedor Kuzmitch that lingered long in this world, until the Golden Age ended. I blinked and missed how that happened and he was replaced with Krinda and Splat.