Aetherial Worlds

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  Ivan told me, in a sad telephone voice, that he remembers clearly: after Fedor Kuzmitch were Krinda and Splat. Yes, he was five, and Olga was six.

  Thus shrink generations, thus decline the tsars, thus great kingdoms meet their demise as the sands bury the Sphinx to her breast. Where temples once towered, all that remains are white column shafts, and they are beset with scarlet poppies come springtime.

  * * *

  §

  Our sister Katerina had three children, and, being the eldest and by her own lights the most conscientious of us all, she decided to make things easier for Mom, and at the house in general, at least for a month. We were already sleeping there in layers and eating in shifts. She found a young nanny named Tosya, a sixteen-year-old girl with a tapirlike nose and the resulting nasal habits of speech. It was easy to see that she was an unreliable and dopey sort, but Katerina was fond of brave social experiments and firmly believed—against all common sense—in the equality of all living beings. She bought train tickets to Feodosia: the end goal for all of us was always Koktebel, its essential value being not just the beach and the sea, but its sacredness. Our grandfather was friends with Maximilian Voloshin in the days of yore when this famous poet’s house was still the only one on the deserted beach; the distant silhouette of the bluffs at the water’s edge back then still resembled his profile perfectly. Father was friends with Voloshin’s widow, and whenever he came to visit, she’d set up a bed for him and Mama in the studio. He later told me that this is where I was conceived, under the visage of the Egyptian princess Taïakh—her yellowish head blindly and mysteriously looking into the distance, her enigmatic features revealing nothing. It must have smelled of wormwood that day; all the grass had already dried out. Invisible cicadas clipped the hot air with tiny shears. August was under way; the waves beat ceaselessly against the empty beach.

  Three generations had already visited this house, and Katerina was on her way with the fourth. Mother was a little worried; she was waiting for a telegram to find out how the journey went. On the third day after Katerina’s departure, one of us went to the outhouse but found it occupied. It was still occupied ten minutes later, then twenty. We did a quick roll call—everyone was accounted for. After waiting a little while longer, we went out there to yank on the door, which was locked from the inside. Father pulled the handle strongly and broke into Curly’s handiwork. Inside, white as a sheet from fear and desperation, was Tosya the nanny.

  “What happened? Where is Katya?” exclaimed my parents.

  Tosya was silent.

  “Where is Katya? Where are the kids? What happened?!”

  The nanny could only shake her head. She was pulled out and taken back to the house, given hot tea. Fearing the worst, we pressed her, demanding: What happened? What?

  Finally she unclenched her jaw.

  “Flw ld ff trn.”

  “What?!”

  “Flw ld ff trn.”

  More tea, more alarmed exclamations, crazy thoughts, near-coronary panic. (Father: “Ooooh, I can’t take this anymore, I demand to know what happened!” Mother, as always, cool as a cucumber.) Finally the vowels returned to the young lady, and, barely moving her tongue, she got the words out:

  “Fellow lead off train.”

  Lead whom off? Lead where? At this very moment a telegram arrived. The post office lady was apprehensive about walking through the gate, since our dog Yassa was full of hatred toward all government employees: postmen, land inspectors, soldiers—basically anyone who came for official reasons and wearing boots; Father dragged the angry dog from the gate and frantically grabbed the telegram. Katerina wrote: “Nanny ran off with a Georgian comma everything OK comma fruit galore full stop.”

  Later, piecing together the mosaic of information, it came to light that shortly after Kaluga, but before the air turns sweet, southern, and languid; before the ladies selling baked potatoes and sour pickles become ladies offering sunflower seeds and hot corn on the cob through the open train windows, marriage grifters are already hard at work. The gorgeous Georgian “fellow,” twisting his sable brows above his intensely piercing eyes, performed a well-rehearsed routine of sudden passion, allegedly inflamed by the short-legged and long-nosed Tosya, promising her love till death did them part and giving her a pair of lacquered heels as proof. “Come with me, and even death won’t separate us.” Tosya ran to Katerina: in a rickety old train car, between the boiler with metallic-tasting hot water and the WC with rattling hinges, gear-locking mechanism number 3, and such, a Love was born. That’s exactly how love comes. “Please let me go!” Katerina tried to stop her: “Do not fall for men’s cunning tricks!” But the young lady was head over heels in love, and in tears, a state that did wonders for her looks; so Katerina, who gave her blessing to all emotions, let her go.

  After that, everything happened fast, too fast, and according to the script: the Georgian sat Tosya down in the Bryansk train station waiting room, taking all her money and the lacquered heels as well; he needed to buy tickets to his native Sukhumi. “Wait here.” She waited until nightfall before accepting that this was it. The end. It’s unclear why she came back to our dacha, how she made it there with no money, and why she locked herself, cowering in fear, in our outhouse.

  We talked about her for a long time after that: How would she live in this world, being so naive. How do such people survive?

  How does anyone survive?

  * * *

  §

  It’s easy to enter the past: just keep looking straight ahead and walking. There will be no fences, no locks, the doors will open by themselves to let you in. Flowers won’t wilt, berries will know no season, apples won’t fall from tall-as-pines apple trees but will reach the ledge where the heavens part and turn into stars and grapes. Here is old man Dobroklonsky, an art historian, taking his four dachshunds out for a walk. He also lives in the White House—he must have moved in after us, because I can see him only from our side of the fence; we can no longer go for walks and play ball on the enormous field with its bald spot in the middle, but he can; he’s bending over, unclasping the leashes so his frail, bowlegged dachshunds can run every which way in the grass. One of them, with cloudy cataracts in her bluish old eyes, hobbles my way to yap from across the wire fence. Yassa, locked inside the house, is worn out from indignation, she bangs her paws on the window, her bark hoarse: How dare they??? How dare they???

  Mother walks to the lake with water buckets; Dobroklonsky greets her by lifting his black academic’s skullcap. Mother says: He was friends with Benua and Yaremich, he used to be the director of the Hermitage. Father says: He lost both his sons in the war.

  Dobroklonsky crosses the meadow that no longer belongs to us, he disappears behind the lilac bushes that are also no longer ours; I won’t see him again. You don’t know, do you, the names of his dachshunds. But I do! Another fifty years from now—even a hundred, or two hundred—and I’ll still be able to hear his noble clarion voice:

  “Myshka, Manishka, Murashka, Manzhet!”

  Those were their names, and always in that order.

  * * *

  §

  First Nanny passed and it was unclear how to go on. Nanny had lived in our family since my mother’s birth in 1915, that faraway and already not-so-peaceful year when the first hammers started clanging at the future site of the White House. She’d leave, come back, suffer from asthma; she’d light a red lantern by an icon at night. She darned cotton stockings on a wooden mushroom; she kept a tin filled with various buttons, bits of lace, and flat elastic bands for rethreading into warm flannel pants. She let me sort the buckwheat: I’d scatter it on the oilcloth, and make a circle with my fingertip around the foreign elements: black thingies, oat-seed thingies, and tiny barrel-shaped thingies—all that weird stuff that you inexplicably find in buckwheat. Nanny smelled of clean, warm groats heated up in a pan. The lines on her face were checkered
and soft.

  “How you used to cry ‘Nanny, don’t leave! Nanny, dearest, don’t leave!’—but it was time for my vacation, I had to go back to my village, to see my brother Petrusha, he was waiting and waiting for me, my little brother Petrusha…” “ ‘Nanny, don’t leave!’ ” she’d repeat dreamily to me, or oftentimes to herself: she’d stand by the window, looking out somewhere in the distance and repeating my impassioned pleas to herself. Yes, I did cry—we were still living in Eden then, and I still believed that you could make someone stay with tears and love.

  * * *

  —

  Then Aunty Lola passed, we no longer heard the tap tap tap of her cane on the staircase; it was now possible to sit and relax in the sunroom without the fear of being caught and taken upstairs for French lessons. Her personal cup—the one she drank her tea from and forbade us to touch—now idled in the sideboard; now you could just take it, but no one wanted to anymore; it seemed to be a peculiar porcelain gravestone, white with orange maple leaves and worn-away gilding. The smell of pink peonies and Acorn perfume lingered for years in Aunty Lola’s bedroom, or perhaps it just seemed that way, was just our wishful thinking.

  Once, long ago, Aunty Lola’s nephew came to visit her at the dacha. He was an art student, and he spent the day at the lake drawing a study of sky and clouds. Nothing else. The grown-ups had little to say after looking at his creation. But I liked the clouds, they were of the cumulus variety, my favorite, eternal wanderers, clean celestial mountains. They’d hung above Lake Hepojarvi for a while that day, and then left. The cardboard painting was placed on top of the sideboard; it soon fell into the crack between the sideboard and the wall.

  But then—a few years later—I found it; bending some wire into a poker, I pulled it out, along with a thick layer of dust, dead flies of years past, and a green leg from a plastic toy hippo. I took the cardboard picture and thus appropriated a singular day of eternity. In it is summer, and midday, and immortality. Certainly immortality.

  * * *

  —

  Then others passed away—first this one, then that one. Each one had their own important life theme, their own love—real or imagined, happy or unrequited. Each one must have had a person, or a dream, or an idea, or a garden, or a house around which their life orbited, as if around the sun. They passed on, their personal suns went out, and there was no one left to speak of them, to think of them and to tell stories, to laugh and shake one’s head while remembering.

  Even Curly, whose life’s purpose seemed to be to continually prove the law of conservation of mass—whatever is removed in one place is invariably added back in another—even he was, as we found out accidentally, an ardent supporter of Nikolaev, the one who killed the prominent Bolshevik leader Kirov (or was appointed in name as his killer; it’s all terribly dark, unclear, and complicated). I was already an adult, Curly was old and frail, and Mother sent me to bring him some medicine. I found his apartment on the Petrogradsky side, hidden in one of the gloomy courtyards: a narrow room with windows that didn’t open, dust, summer, and stale air. Tables, stools, shelves fashioned out of planks, all do-it-yourself, all from stolen boards and appropriated plywood; every surface covered with ancient magazines, stuffed and overflowing envelopes, documents that had descended from the sofa to the floor like glaciers.

  “I keep writing!” Curly complained woefully. “I keep sending letters to historical magazines! To professors in Moscow, to party bigwigs, trying to explain that it wasn’t him, it wasn’t him! I knew him! Nikolaev just couldn’t have done it, he was slandered! And they keep sending rejection letters: ‘Thank you for your interest….’ They don’t want to get to the bottom of this.”

  He wanted to talk, to explain to me his theory about what actually happened; the people around him must have grown tired of his truth by now: “What’s it to you, it’s over.” I was a fresh—albeit unexpected—visitor. But I, too, couldn’t be bothered to listen, and all the while, even as I walked down the dilapidated, treacherous staircase, Curly kept talking from the dimly lit landing; he kept talking and talking, his gray, but still curly, simpleton’s head hanging low.

  And then he passed away, too.

  * * *

  §

  Natasha usually brought Klavsevna a kilo of sausages; Natasha was forever Klavsevna’s lost little girl. This time she couldn’t make it: students, kids, heavy bags, the need to transfer from one trolleybus to another. So she asked me to go instead. It was the first time she had, strangely enough. It took me awhile to find the entrance. It was an old building on the Griboyedov Canal, on the seventh floor of a walk-up, and as I was climbing up this unpleasant stairway off the back entrance, out of breath, I kept thinking: How does she manage? She must be eighty-six by now.

  This was one of the cleanest and most spacious communal apartments that I ever did see, and in Klavsevna’s room, where she lived and lived, time magically stood still; it was the emptiest of rooms and it got the most light, and I didn’t immediately realize why. A narrow bed with two stiff pillows and a thin blanket was nestled by the wall. In the space between the two windows, a table made of yellow plywood and a mirror in a plain frame, and, fastened with a thumbtack, a fan of postcards: the operetta star Georg Ots in a carnival mask for the role of Mister X, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and a portrait of someone unidentifiable. No drapes on the windows—the doctors advised against “looking in the dark”—so the white night evening was equally bright outside, on the empty street, and inside, in the empty room. In the window, faraway rusty roofs, chimneys, a tree growing through someone’s balcony.

  She was still pretty, Klavsevna, nimble and snub-nosed, and even leggy. We had nothing to talk about, but convention seemed to dictate that we talk, and so she unexpectedly told me her life’s story—out of the blue, seated on her maiden bed, the sausages in her lap.

  In 1914, Klavsevna had a fiancé—he was handsome, he was in love with her. They were walking hand in hand along Nevsky Prospect, not far from where we were sitting, by the way. On the bridge across the Griboyedov Canal they came upon some Gypsies. They laughed, decided to get their fortune told. The Gypsy told Klavsevna that anyone who married her would die. They laughed some more. Then the war started. Klavsevna’s fiancé was killed.

  And in the 1920s, after she’d had time to mourn and to move on, a wonderful young man, an engineer, asked for her hand. She was planning to marry him, but he died. She remembered the Gypsy woman and became alarmed. And in the 1930s, while traveling somewhere by train, in the compartment she met a lovely older gentleman, a professor. He kept looking at her, and then followed her into the rattling train corridor to say: “You’re so beautiful! Would you be my wife? I am a widower, my kids are grown, I have money, I’ll turn your life into a fairy tale.”

  She asked for three days to think it over. After the three days were up, she declined the professor’s offer: he was so lovely and she didn’t wish to be the cause of his demise.

  And that was that. No more suitors, no more love, and no children—nothing but vitamin drops in her eyes and big stiff pillows in her bed.

  “Would you…would you buy a postcard from me? And a plate? I need three rubles,” said Klavsevna.

  I gave her three rubles for the postcard and the plate.

  On the plate, the edges of which were wrapped in kitschy gilded lace, trembled a poorly painted skylark; a reproach was written in Slavic script: “Still asleep, little man? Spring has sprung, get to work.” The postcard was of a soldier with a harmonica, with an inscription that read: “Farewell to my family, farewell to my friends, farewell to my lady, all’s come to an end.”

  What was written on the other side, with a piece of paper glued over it, we are not meant to know.

  “How is little Olya doing?” asked Klavsevna.

  “Wonderful,” I lied.

  “What a chiseled figure she has,” sighed Klavsevna.

/>   “Yes.”

  I wanted to remind her that it’s best to keep the sausages in the fridge, but she, most likely, didn’t have one.

  She didn’t have anything.

  That’s why her room was so spacious and full of light.

  “Something to remember me by.” Klavsevna motioned with her eyes toward my pitiful acquisitions. “Maybe you’ll think about me sometimes.”

  Once at the threshold, I turned back to look, but she had already dissolved into the air and blended in with the white evening light.

  The Square

  In 1913, or 1914, or maybe 1915—the exact date is unknown—Kazimir Malevich, a Russian painter of Polish descent, took a medium-sized canvas (79.5 cm. x 79.5 cm.), painted it white around the edges, and daubed the middle with thick black paint. Any child could have performed this simple task, although perhaps children lack the patience to fill such a large section with the same color. This kind of work could have been performed by any draftsman—and Malevich had worked as one in his youth—but most draftsmen are not interested in such simple forms. A painting like this could have been drawn by a mentally disturbed person, but it wasn’t, and had it been it’s doubtful that it would have had the chance to be exhibited at the right place and at the right time.