One good thing—there would be no women where he would be!
There was something about their meeting today, something that she could not quite define, something elusive but . . . irreparable.
And now she was too late for the students’ dining hall. A minor misfortune, but enough to plunge her into deep despair. She immediately remembered that the day before yesterday she had been fined ten rubles for leaving a trolley at the wrong end. Ten new rubles was a tidy sum, the equivalent of a hundred old ones.
Light snow had begun to fall when she reached the Stromynka, and a little boy with a peaked cap pulled down over his eyes was selling Kazbek cigarettes loose. Nadya went up to him and bought two.
“Where can I get a match?” she asked herself out loud.
“Here you are, lady, help yourself!” the boy said obligingly, handing her a box of matches. “No extra charge!”
Without stopping to think how it would look to passersby, Nadya lit her cigarette on the second attempt, clumsily, so that only one side was burning, gave the boy his matchbox, and walked up and down the street instead of going into the dormitory. Smoking was not yet a habit, but this was not her first cigarette. The discomfort and disgust caused by the hot smoke somehow eased the ache in her heart.
Nadya threw the cigarette away half-smoked and went upstairs to Room 318.
Inside, she squeamishly avoided Lyuda’s unmade bed and sank heavily onto her own, wanting more than anything in the world not to be asked anything by anybody just then.
When she sat down, her eyes were on the same level as the four typewritten copies of her thesis standing in four separate piles on the table. Nadya automatically remembered the endless fuss and bother she had had with it—arranging to have drawings photocopied, revising it, revising it again—and now it was back with her for a third attempt.
Remembering how hopelessly, impermissibly late the thesis was, Nadya remembered, too, the secret special assignment, her only hope of getting a little money and some peace. But the terrible eight-page application form stood in her way. It had to be handed in to the Personnel Department by Tuesday.
If she answered the questions honestly, it would mean expulsion before the week was out—from the university, from the dormitory, and from Moscow.
Or else—getting divorced immediately.
That was what she meant to do.
But it was a painful decision, and it would be tricky.
Erzhika had made her bed up as best she could. (She still wasn’t very good at it. Bedmaking, washing, and ironing were all things she had learned to do only there, on Stromynka Street; there had always been servants to do these chores for her.) She reddened her cheeks but not her lips, before the mirror, and went off to work in the Lenin Library.
Muza was trying to read, but it was hard going. She noticed Nadya’s morose inactivity and kept looking at her anxiously but could not quite bring herself to ask any questions.
“Ah, yes,” Dasha remembered. “I heard people saying today that we will get twice as much book money this year.”
Olenka looked up quickly.
“Are you serious?”
“Our dean told some of the girls.”
“Let’s see, how much will that be?” Olenka’s face glowed with the excitement that money can inspire only in people who are not used to it or greedy for it. “Twice 300 is 600, twice 70 is 140, twice 5 is. . . . Hey!” she cried, and clapped her hands. “750! Now that’s really something!”
She hummed a short tune. She had a pleasant little voice.
“Now you can buy yourself a complete Soloviev!”
“I don’t think so!” Olenka chuckled. “I can have a dress made for that money, dark red, in crêpe georgette. Can’t you see it?” She gathered the sides of her skirt between her fingertips. “With two ruffles!”
Olenka was still short of many things. It was only quite recently, in the last year, that she had begun to care again. Her mother had died the year before last after a very long illness. She was left without a single living relative. She and her mother had received notification of her father’s and brother’s deaths in the same week in 1942. Her mother had become seriously ill, and Olenka had had to leave university in her first year, miss a year, go out to work, and take a correspondence course.
But there was no sign of any of this in her sweet, chubby, twenty-eight-year-old face. She was, however, affected by Nadya’s look of numb suffering as she sat on the bed opposite. It was beginning to depress them all.
Olenka asked the question. “What’s wrong, Nadya dear? You were quite cheerful when you went out this morning.”
Words of sympathy—but really an expression of irritation. It is strange how nuances in the tone of voice can betray our feelings.
Nadya recognized the note of irritability in her neighbor’s voice. Besides, her eyes were on Olenka as she dressed, pinned a brooch (a flower in bloodred stones) to the lapel of her jacket, and perfumed herself.
The scent that surrounded Olenka with an invisible small cloud of happiness reached Nadya’s nostrils like a pungent reminder of irreparable loss.
Nadya answered without relaxing her features, pronouncing each word as though it cost her a great effort. “Am I bothering you? Am I getting on your nerves?”
They stared at each other across the thesis-heaped table. Olenka drew herself up, and her rounded chin set in hard lines.
“Look, Nadya,” she said distinctly. “I didn’t mean to upset you. But as our mutual friend Aristotle said, man is a social animal. We can spread happiness around ourselves, but we have no right to spread gloom.”
Nadya sat hunched up, looking much more than her age. Her voice was low and lifeless.
“Don’t you know what it’s like to be very unhappy?” she said.
“As it happens, I know only too well! You’re unhappy, all right, but you mustn’t be so obsessed with yourself! You mustn’t get into that frame of mind when you think you’re the only one in the world who knows what suffering is. It’s possible that other people have gone through much more than you. Just think about it.”
She said no more. But why should one missing person who could be replaced—because a husband is replaceable—mean more than a father and brother killed and a mother dead, three people in the nature of things irreplaceable?
She had nothing more to say, but she stood there motionless, staring unsmilingly at Nadya.
Nadya knew well enough that Olya was talking about her own bereavements. But she was unmoved. Yes, death meant an irreparable loss. But a person dies only once. After the initial shock your loss slips imperceptibly into the past. Grief gradually loses its hold on you. You perfume yourself, pin your ruby brooch on, and go to meet your boyfriend.
Whereas Nadya’s sorrow was always with her, holding her in a grip that could not be unlocked. There in the past, in the present, and in the future. However she struggled, whatever she clutched at, she could never break loose from its cruel teeth.
But she could not defend herself without revealing everything. And her secret was too dangerous.
So Nadya backed down and told a lie.
“I’m sorry girls, I’m at the end of my tether. I haven’t got the strength to keep on revising. How much of this am I supposed to take?”
Once she saw that Nadya was not belittling other people’s sorrows, Olenka’s resentment was allayed, and she quickly made peace.
“What’s the problem? Got to weed the foreigners out? You’re not the only one. Don’t let it upset you!”
“Weeding the foreigners out” meant going through the text and replacing “Laue has shown” with “scholars have succeeded in showing,” or “as Langmuir has conclusively demonstrated” with “as has been demonstrated.” Whereas if any Russian, or for that matter any German or Dane in Russia’s service, had distinguished himself in the slightest degree, it was essential to give his name in full and to emphasize his uncompromising patriotism and his immortal services to science.
�
��It isn’t the foreigners; I chucked them out long ago. I’ve got to get rid of Academician Balandin now—”
“Isn’t he one of ours. . .?”
“And his whole theory. Which is what my thesis is based on. It turns out that he’s . . . that he’s been. . . .”
Academician Balandin had suddenly sunk into the same abyss, the same subterranean world, where Nadya’s husband languished in chains.
“Still, you mustn’t take it so much to heart,” Olenka insisted. “What about me and Azerbaijan?”
There had never been any good reason why this girl from Central Russia should want to study Iran. When she entered the History Department, she had no such thought in her head. But her young (and married) supervisor, for whom she wrote a term paper on Kievan Russia, had begun to press his attentions on her and was very insistent that she should specialize in medieval Russian history as a graduate student. Olenka had taken fright and defected to the Italian Renaissance, but the Italian Renaissance man wasn’t old either and, when alone with her, behaved like a true Renaissance man. Whereupon Olenka, in despair, asked for a transfer to the decrepit professor of Iranian Studies and was now writing a thesis under his supervision. She would have brought it to a successful conclusion by now if the problem of Southern Azerbaijan had not surfaced in the newspapers. Olenka’s leitmotif was not, as it should have been, that the province had since the beginning of time gravitated toward Azerbaijan and that Iran was completely alien to it. So the thesis was returned for rewriting.
“Just be thankful they’re letting you correct it first. Worse things happen. Muza could tell you about . . .”
But Muza was no longer listening. She had been lucky enough to lose herself in a book, and the room around her no longer existed.
“A girl in the Literature Department defended her thesis on Zweig four years ago. She’s been a senior lecturer for some time now. But they suddenly realized that she’d called Zweig a ‘cosmopolitan’ three times in her thesis and used the word approvingly. So the Higher Degrees Examination Board sent for her and took the diploma away. What a nightmare!”
Dasha chimed in. “Even chemists can get nervous breakdowns! So what are political economists like me supposed to do? Hang ourselves? Never mind; we survive somehow. Hurrah for Stuzhaila-Olyabyshkin, my savior!”
They all of course knew that Dasha was now on her third thesis subject. Her first had been “Problems of Communal Catering under Socialism.” Straightforward enough twenty years earlier, when every Young Pioneer, Dasha included, knew for certain that family kitchens would very shortly be a thing of the past, that the home fires would go out, and that emancipated women would get lunch and dinner from “cooking factories.” But as the years went by, the subject had become opaque and indeed dangerous. It was quite obvious that anybody—Dasha herself, for instance—who still ate in a dining commons did so out of dire necessity. Only two forms of communal feeding flourished: eating in restaurants—but there socialist principles were not conspicuously upheld—and in scruffy little snack bars selling nothing much except vodka. In theory the “cooking factory” continued to exist, inasmuch as the Leader of all Toilers had not found time in the past twenty years to address the subject. Which made it dangerous to express an opinion of your own. Dasha suffered endless torment until her supervisor gave her a different subject—thoughtlessly, however, taking it from the wrong list: “Retail Trade in Consumer Goods under Socialism.” There proved to be a dearth of information on this subject, too. Speeches and directives invariably stated that consumer goods could and indeed must be produced and distributed, but, in practice, figures for the output of such items had begun to look rather pathetic in comparison with those for rolled steel and oil products. Would light industry grow and grow or gradually contract? The Academic Council itself did not know, and it turned the subject down in good time.
Well-meaning people put another idea into Dasha’s head, and she obtained permission to work on “the nineteenth-century Russian political economist Stuzhaila-Olyabyshkin.”
“I hope you’ve at least found a picture of your benefactor?” Olenka said, laughing.
“Do you know, I just can’t find one!”
“That’s most ungrateful of you!”
Olenka was trying to amuse Nadya, to share the elation she felt as her “date” drew nearer.
“I would find one and hang it over my bed. I can just see him: a handsome, elderly country gentleman with unsatisfied spiritual needs. After a hearty breakfast he sits in his dressing gown by the window, in the depths of the country—you know, like where Onegin met Tatyana, a place where history’s storms are powerless, and as he watches a peasant wench feeding the piglets, he muses dreamily on
the wealth of nations,
and what they live by. . . .
“Then in the evening he enjoys a game of cards.”
Olenka was overcome with laughter. She was flushed. She felt happier by the minute.
Lyuda, too, had now donned her sky blue dress and so deprived her bed of its fanlike covering. (Nadya winced painfully whenever her eyes strayed in that direction.) Before the mirror Lyuda first touched up her eyebrows and lashes, then with great precision painted herself a rosebud mouth.
“Make a note of this, girls.” Muza often came out with unexpected remarks as naturally as though everybody was hanging on her words. “How do the heroes of Russian literature differ from the Western European variety? The favorite heroes of Western writers always aspire to a career, fame, money. But your Russian hero scorns meat and drink; all he seeks is justice and righteousness. Am I right?”
She immersed herself in her book again.
Dasha took pity on her and turned the light on.
Lyuda now had her boots on and reached for her fur coat. That was when Nadya nodded at Lyuda’s bed and said in disgust: “Are you leaving us to clear up your mess again?” Lyuda flared up, and her eloquent eyes flashed. “Please do nothing of the sort! And don’t dare touch my bed ever again!” Her voice rose to a shout. “And stop telling me how to behave!”
Nadya lost control of herself and began shouting all the things she had held back.
“Can’t you understand that the way you behave is an insult to us! Maybe we have other things to think about besides your evening’s entertainment!”
“Jealous, are you? Can’t get a bite yourself?”
The faces of both girls were distorted. Women in a rage are always ugly.
Olenka opened her mouth to join in the attack on Lyuda, but she detected an unflattering innuendo in the words “evening’s entertainment” and stopped short.
“There’s nothing to be jealous of!” Nadya cried in a hollow, broken voice.
“So you lost your way to the nunnery”—Lyuda’s voice rang out louder than ever as she smelled victory—“and now you’re a graduate student. So sit up in a corner and stop playing mother-in-law. We’re sick of it! Horrible old maid!”
“Lyudka! Cut it out!” Dasha yelled.
“Well, why doesn’t she mind her own business? Old maid is what she is! Up on the shelf!”
Muza woke up at this and joined in the shouting, brandishing her book at Lyuda.
“How vulgar can you get?”
All five began shouting at once. Nobody heard or wanted to hear what anybody else said.
Nadya’s throbbing head was no longer capable of thought, and she was ashamed of her outburst and her tears. Just as she was, in her best clothes, put on for the visit, she flung herself facedown on the bed and covered her head with the pillow.
Lyuda powdered her face yet again, arranged her curly blond tresses over the collar of her squirrel coat, let down a little veil that came just below her eyes, and without actually making the bed but throwing a blanket over it by way of compromise, left the room.
The others called to Nadya, but she did not stir. Dasha removed Nadya’s shoes and turned the corners of her blanket up to cover her feet.
Then there was another knock, in response to w
hich Olenka flitted out into the hallway, returned like the wind, tucked her curls under a little cap, dived into a fur jacket with a yellow collar, and advanced toward the door with something new in her walk. (Something that said, “I mean to be happy and expect to have to fight for it.”)
So Room 318 had dispatched, one after the other, two charmingly dressed charmers to tempt the world beyond.
Room 318 had also lost with them its animation and laughter and had become quite dreary.
Moscow was an enormous city. And there was nowhere to go in it.
Muza stopped reading again, took off her glasses, and hid her face in her large hands.
“Silly Olenka!” Dasha said. “He’ll have his fun with her and chuck her. I’ve heard he’s got another woman somewhere. Let’s hope there won’t be a kid.”
Muza looked out from between her hands. “She isn’t tied to him in any way. If he turns out like you say, she can leave him.”
“Not tied!” Dasha smiled a wry smile. “How could she be any more tied than she is?”
“You—you always know everything! What makes you so sure?” Muza asked indignantly.
“What more is there to know, when she spends the night there?”
Muza brushed this aside. “That doesn’t prove a thing!”
“It’s the only way nowadays. You won’t keep a man any other way.”
The girls fell silent, each busy with her own thoughts.
The snow outside was falling more heavily. It was getting dark already.
Water gurgled quietly in the radiator under the window.
The thought of the murderously dull Sunday evening ahead in this dog hole was unbearable.
Dasha thought of the snack-bar man she had rejected. A strong, healthy fellow. Why did she have to brush him off like that? He could have taken her after dark to some club away from the center, where nobody from the university ever went. And squeezed her up against a fence somewhere.
“Muza, love, let’s go to the movies!” Dasha said.
“What’s on?”
“The Indian Tomb.”
“That’s just rubbish! Commercial garbage!”
“Yes, but it’s right here in the building.”
In the First Circle Page 49