Shortly after this interview, a man (I still don’t know who he was) found me and presented me with a thick stack of letters: Please read. “Perhaps you’ll find them useful,” he said. I read them and returned them: alas, useful they were not. All of them were written by the same woman—I don’t remember her name, so let’s call her Maria Vasilievna—who lived in the ancient provincial Russian town of Ryazan. I couldn’t quite figure her out, nor did I catch to whom she was writing, and the mysterious messenger didn’t care to elaborate. Maria V. worked as a trolley car driver, but her life was full of spiritual and cultural inquiries. Grammatical errors abounded in her writing, but her interests were all-encompassing: from simple rhymes she read in the local newspaper, to reminiscences of the famous Russian philosopher A. Losev’s funeral, which she considered an important cultural milestone, and for which she had traveled to Moscow to stand, full of reverence, in the crowd.
One of her letters I did ask to keep. The story that it told somehow pierced my heart. Twenty-five years have passed, but I’ll tell it now.
Retell it.
In her town of Ryazan, in one of the dilapidated houses across from the bus depot, there lived an artist with his wife and kids. He spent years salting away money for a bedroom furniture set. His wife dreamt of having it all—a night table on either side of a double bed, a wardrobe with a full-length mirror inside, intricate carvings—and for all of it to look ever so expensive, ever so artistic. Finally he’d saved up enough to go to Moscow to explore the antique shops.
Back in those days, all of the Frunze Embankment was basically one big antique market. All kinds of lovely junk was being sold there for a pretty penny: flame mahogany, black stuff with gold, white stuff with gold, stuff on crooked claw-feet, and stuff with the wings of a griffin. They had beds, chests of drawers, armchairs, oval and octagonal tables, centipede tables, kidney-shaped tables, consoles, vases, chandeliers, leaf-shaped crystal garlands, statuettes, paintings, and clocks, and everything was just so, so lovely.
As he walked amid all this splendor—a thick stack of bills tucked into the inside pocket of his jacket, fastened with a safety pin so it wouldn’t get stolen in the metro—he was using his keen artist’s eye to pick out the best. Meanwhile, back home in Ryazan, his wife, as you can imagine, was anxious about that stack of bills, which had taken years to accumulate—anxious but at the same time daydreaming, imagining how magically their marriage bed would be transformed, how mysteriously the lacquer on the nightstand would shine in the moonlight, how their love would be renewed, how her girlfriends would die of envy.
In one of the shops, by the back wall, he saw a sculpture. White, marble, the height of a woman. Judith with the Sword.
And he was gone.
Undoubtedly he had heard of Pygmalion, who carved Galatea and fell in love with her; they used to teach it in school back then. A standard sampling of romantic myths was offered—harmless and thus available to the Soviet citizen: Orpheus and Eurydice for the young; the faithful Penelope awaiting her husband’s return for women of Balzac age; and Pygmalion: My Fair Lady—who doesn’t know that one?
But it is one thing to know, and quite another to fall in love with a marble statue till death do you part. And when I say till death, I truly mean it.
The artist asked: How much? “This much.” He haggled, but it was still too expensive—he didn’t have enough; he dispatched a telegram to his wife: Send more. In a tizzy, she ran around borrowing from friends and neighbors: must be mahogany, must have curlicues and bronze inlay!
He bought his beloved, paying for her an outrageous sum; he barely had enough for the movers and his ticket back home. Judith was wrapped up in rags, but the movers were Soviet, drunk, unqualified; while they were dragging her along the train platform and shoving her into the train car, the tip of her sword broke off.
He dragged her home by himself, to the second floor, I believe.
Imagine, you’re the wife, you’re expecting your husband with a magnificent master bedroom set, including the nightstands—sacral objects, as it were. Mentally you are already luxuriating, stretching out on the bed, young and libidinous once again. And then he tumbles in through the door—with another woman. So what if she’s made of marble? That’s even worse.
The wife—writes Maria V., if you still remember her—ran out on him in a hurry, with kids in tow. They haven’t seen her in Ryazan since. And we—continues Maria—finally managed to get an invitation to come visit him. Brought a cake, the kind with green cream roses. Surprisingly tasty! He put the kettle on. He’s a lovely man, very polite. He has interesting paintings. Lives alone. And her—writes Maria V. in holy awe—we saw her, too. She stands by the wall—white, her gaze averted, hair parted neatly and pulled back into a bun. The tip of her sword is missing. The apartment is nice and clean—goes on Maria V.—but under the wardrobe I saw a strange gray rug, which I bent down to examine closer: it was dust. He must have not dusted under there for eight years! Otherwise he’s perfectly normal.
So that was the letter. And all of it has been left behind the barrier of time, all of it must be gone by now: Maria Vasilievna, the artist, that world.
There is only love, unexpected and inexplicable, and it’s always the same story: embarrassing, pointless, down to the last penny. And silent.
Stay silent, but stay.
Aetherial Worlds
“You do understand, don’t you, that from this moment on, all the rights as well as all responsibilities and liabilities associated with this property will become yours,” the lawyer patiently repeated. “This will no longer be David and Barbara’s responsibility, it will be yours.”
David and Barbara were watching me sullenly, without blinking. In my hand was a pen with black ink, and all I had to do was imprint the purchase agreement with one last signature. David and Barbara were getting a divorce and selling their Princeton, New Jersey, home. I was the buyer. And we were all sitting in a lawyer’s office. A heavy American downpour raged outside, the weather bearing similarity to that of the flood of Saint Petersburg in 1824; it was coming down with a particular kind of vengeance, you couldn’t see more than thirty feet ahead of you—there was just a wall of rain—and what you could see inspired consternation: the furious waters had already climbed halfway up the tires of the cars parked outside and were rising as fast as a second hand sweeps the face of a clock.
“Yeah, we may see some flooding,” the lawyer said indifferently, following my gaze. “In New Jersey, thousands of cars wind up at used car lots after a downpour like this. But I wouldn’t recommend buying one. They’re all lemons. However, that’s entirely up to you.”
“What about the house?” I asked. “Might the house get flooded?”
“The house sits on a hill,” David interjected, fidgeting. “The neighbors do get flooded, but not us, so far—”
“Mister P., please!” came a strict reminder from counsel.
This lawyer forbade David from speaking to me and me to him. Perhaps he feared that David would let something slip, possibly exposing the hidden flaws of the house, whereupon I’d gasp, and the sale price would immediately plummet. David would suffer a loss. Or—just as now—he would ply me with false promises, like the one about the hill allegedly ensuring the safety of the property, and I’d believe him, only later to walk into the house and find water undulating in the basement. This would mean that David had lied to me in the presence of two attorneys and so I would file a lawsuit, there would be litigation with no end in sight. No, according to the playbook, David was supposed to be cold, reserved, and neutral. Courteous but distant.
But this David? This David could scarcely hide how tickled he was that somebody wanted to buy his pitiful—at least by American standards—dwelling: a long gray unfinished barn with a leaky roof, tucked away in the back of an overgrown plot in an unprestigious rural corner. The address may have said Princeton, but really it
was Bumblefuck, New Jersey—dense forest, a rutted road leading toward neglected, dilapidated structures. At the end of the road was a shack I would come to call “the End of All Paths”: boarded up, broken windows, decayed to the color of ash, it would have collapsed long ago if not for two dozen thin but sturdy young trees that pierced it like spears and improbably, impossibly, un-fucking-believably held it upright.
David was simple and honest, so very simple and honest that his eyes would bulge from the fear that he might cheat me or hoodwink me, even by accident. He showed me where the floor was rotted in the kitchen: the linoleum was so worn it had holes in it, having gone unchanged for thirty years. But the wood underneath was still holding up. He proposed that we both get on all fours to look under some cabinet, where a big chunk of the floor was missing. He’d yank at the window frames by the latches now formless from all the coats of paint—“Look, these are no good! They’ll need to be changed!” He thoroughly described where the roof leaked, where I’d be obliged to put buckets when it poured. He told me about the patio fiasco. That is, David didn’t have a patio—it existed only in his dreams. “Go see for yourself.” After banging his hip against it several times, he was able to open the swollen, warped plywood door that lurked in the back of this squalid abode—and there…a most magical room!
You take but a step and escape the semi-dark, narrow, low-ceilinged pencil box of a house for this airy sunroom, suspended just a bit aboveground. On both the left side and the right were floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking lush gardens where little red birds fluttered, and something in bloom entwined in the trees swayed in the wind.
“You see, I had the door and window frames made by a great craftsman—he has a two-year waiting list,” said David apologetically. “I ended up spending a lot of money. Maybe two grand. Or two and a half. Didn’t have anything left for the patio.”
He pulled at the sliding glass door—transparent and patterned, like the wing of a dragonfly—and the whole thing moved to the side. Beyond the threshold there was a green abyss, and a little beyond that, a lone pine tree. Beneath that tree, a latticework of sun rays on a carpet of last year’s needles, through which had sprouted lilies of the valley, their gaze shy and averted. My heart skipped a beat.
“No patio,” repeated David ruefully. “Right here is where it should have been built.”
Like a true fucking lunatic, David had begun building his Garden of Eden before making a budget. And so this absurd, wonderful addition, this airy, translucent box promising entry into an aetherial world, was stuck in our terrestrial one, weighty and stifling.
“But it can still be built!” he said. “All you need to do is to apply for a permit at our local municipal building; they’ll grant it.”
“And why are you selling, if I may ask?” I asked.
“I want to buy a ranch and ride horses,” said David, lowering his gaze. Behind us Barbara began to weep quietly, stifling her sobs, and by the time we reentered the dimly lit house, she had already pulled herself together.
“I’ll take it,” I said. “It suits me fine.”
And now, once I imprint this American document with my illegible scribble, an entire acre of the U.S. of A. will become my personal property.
It was 1992 and time was flowing by—just whirling, raging past—as I had recently moved here from Russia, where everything had fallen apart, where the rug had been pulled out from under us, where it was impossible to tell what belonged to whom, and where nothing belonged to me. But here, in the New World, I could buy a green rectangle of dependable land and own it in a way that I’d never owned anything before. And if somebody dared to break in, I’d have the right to shoot them. Although I should probably look up the Constitutional rights of thieves and robbers first.
So David and I came to an agreement that I would definitely be buying his house. We even sat down to have a celebratory drink, trying not to pay any mind to Barbara weeping alternately in the bedroom and in the backyard. David told me that the house’s original owners were a childless African-American couple, and that all the flowers—he encircled the fading, autumnal yard with his hand—all these flowers had been planted by the wife; what the husband did, no one knew. “She had a real green thumb, as you’ll see later, when spring comes—you will see it all.”
The sale dragged on through the entire summer: first the college had to confirm my future employment, then the bank had to approve my future salary and calculate what mortgage terms I qualified for, then the lawyers had to figure out David and Barbara’s divorce and the distribution of proceeds from the sale of the house—there were a lot of bureaucratic steps, by which time the summer had passed, the foliage had wilted, the house was left sitting dark and cheerless.
We figured out all the terms ourselves and even became friendly—Barbara no longer bothered keeping up appearances; she’d walk around the house hunched over, eyes red and face puffy, her arms dangling limply, resigned to her fate and awaiting the inevitable. David had already showed me all his manly treasures, which he kept in the garage: jack planes, chisels, screwdrivers, and drills. Men like to show these instruments to women, and women like to pretend that these instruments are absolutely fascinating. He even took down his grandfather’s sled from the wall. His grandpa had used it back in the 1920s, as a rosy-cheeked, chubby five year old; when he started school—a mile and a half on foot in the freezing snow—his mother would get up before dawn to bake him two potatoes, one for each pocket, to warm his hands during his long, unaccompanied journey. David gave me the sled as a gift and I didn’t know what to do with it. He also gave me his proposed alteration plans, which he no longer had any use for—a whole binder of them on tracing paper, one more fantastical than the other: here is the house, all in ruin, and here it is growing wings on either side; here is a loft with an oval window taking flight above it; here are terraces encircling it like ruffles. In short, David poisoned me, lured me, entrapped me; he sold me his dreams, his fantasies, his ship in the sky with no passengers and an invisible captain.
Meanwhile, I was renting an expensive and no-longer-necessary apartment, where I kept all my belongings, accumulated during my three years here. Our stuff wasn’t anything special, but a family of four does acquire quite a few earthly possessions: earthly suitcases, earthly dishes, and earthly clothes, not to mention our earthly table and our four chairs, which were the earthliest of all. I asked David if I could keep all this crap in the house—David’s house, but mine, too, in a way—perhaps shoving it all in the basement. David didn’t mind. But, just in case, he consulted his attorney, who immediately reacted, restricted, and rejected the idea: the storing of my things in this yet-to-be-purchased house would create, under the laws of New Jersey, some sort of tricky loophole, the victim of which would be David, since I would thereby have the right to simply take his house without paying, or otherwise rob, bind, and deprive him, the owner.
No, we couldn’t do that, and so I watched in dismay as the last of my savings were depleted—I guess I won’t be fixing the roof this year, or putting in a new bathtub to replace David’s old trough. Wouldn’t have enough for a lawn mower, either, which I knew was a must here, but at least the linoleum—that I could afford, as I’d be installing it myself, and not buying it as a single piece but in those dirt-cheap squares instead. The black-and-white ones, just as in the painting of Nikolai Ge’s, wherein Tsar Peter interrogates the Tsarevich Alexei.
* * *
—
Looking out the window once again, I saw that the waters had already roiled up to my car doors, and that if I didn’t sign right now I wouldn’t have anything to drive away in. And so I bit the bullet. The house became mine, and I—its.
All the participants, who either received or parted with their money, experienced their complicated and contradictory emotions and went their separate ways: David disappeared into the wall of rain, conveyed by his pickup truck; Barbara glided o
ff into the waterfall of her unhidden tears, and my family, we made our way toward our new home, unsure whether it was still standing.
It was completely empty, naked, and old. The floors were drab and worn, the windows swathed from the outside in dark spruce branches. I don’t like pine trees—to me they feel like the trees of the dead. Blue pine trees are the worst; they are the color of a Soviet general’s uniform, and so they plant them where those high-status corpses lie. Our neighbor had one such pine. And so I was forced to look at it, see.
Brown spiderwebs were already dangling under the ceiling, in the corners. The agile American spider produces a high-quality web overnight, and since Barbara had long stopped taking care of the house, the accumulated layers of web could easily support the weight of small household items, if somebody decided to place them there for some reason, as if in a hammock. My boys gloomily inspected their dimly lit cubbyholes, unpacked their computers, and proceeded to stare at their screens.
The magical room was also sad and cold. And its glass doors opened onto nothingness.
I alone loved this house.
* * *
§
Spring in the states, on the East Coast, is basically crazy. Overnight, everything that just yesterday stuck out its dead branches is resurrected. Cherry blossoms adorn the green lawns like pink fountains, forsythia bushes are sprinkled with yellow flowers without a single green leaf—the leaves come later. And the pear trees—my God, I can’t take such beauty! By the time the magnolias begin to bloom it’s already too much—a simple heart does not require such splendor. Flowers should be crumpled, torn, and ragged, like peonies, for instance.
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