by Maxim Osipov
“When I first came here to manage the department—well, that was a different era.” Sasha’s taking another smoke break. “I used to bring bags full of instruments and drugs from abroad. My friends over there would filch a little from their hospitals, collect samples. Then she showed up,” he points to Ordzhonikidze’s window, “with her foundation. It’s not that we aren’t grateful—the woman’s done a lot—but our own administration is enough of a headache. More than enough.”
Bella listens attentively. Sasha has excellent pronunciation: his vowels are large and round.
“And now, on top of that, your Angelina is the face of Compassion,” he raises his voice. “Did you catch that jingoist crap about Crimea she wrote the other day? Or signed, at least—not much of a difference. You’re lucky you don’t read the papers.”
Sasha wants to appear strong. She needs to find something to tell him. The other day Lev said: “Bellochka, a person who wants more from life than the bare necessities will step on anyone who gets in his way.”
Sasha looks confused: Who’s Lev, her husband? He has to go: office hours, children are waiting. She and Lev, on the other hand, left the Kuibyshev resort together, only he went off to Leningrad and she to Moscow. They agreed to meet in three weeks at the Red Gates in Moscow, and they set a definite time, because Bella didn’t have a phone yet.
•
That evening—or perhaps a day had passed, or maybe a few days—the girls sit around and talk. They say that more and more people are quitting because they don’t want to deal with terminally ill kids, but that this is the case all over, and that soon there won’t be enough money to send the kids abroad to get treatment. And then it would be like the old days, with parents weeping, groveling at Ordzhonikidze’s feet—not a sight for the faint of heart . . . Who but the old dame could take it? They’d have to fall back on a lottery again, pulling names out of a hat. So now all hope rests on tomorrow’s very important visitor—otherwise it’s a Grimm fairy tale, right, Bella Yuryevna? And what bad luck they’ve had, with people raising such a stink about Angelina’s article—or maybe it’s a good thing.
Then Angelina herself arrives, and she’s in a terrible funk. She greets Tasha and the other girls, but hardly nods to Bella and immediately looks away. While Bella tries to figure out what she might have done to upset Lina, Ordzhonikidze enters the room: “They’ve never held anything heavier than a phone in their hands, but now they feel they can sit in judgment . . . Tasha, don’t just sit there—go on, ring up oncology. Tell them to send over a good-looking fellow, a minority. No, wait, let’s send Lina over there. Tell them to get some scrubs ready. And shoe covers—for her and the photographer.”
When she returns from oncology, Lina has coffee with the girls and cries. She presses her palm to her chest and repeats that she’d do anything to save the children, anything at all, even sell her soul to the devil. And all the girls keep saying how wonderful Lina is, and taking photographs, and crying—except Ordzhonikidze, who only frowns. Bella also takes part in the general outpouring of affection for Lina, who has, after all, done so much good for her, but who now, for some reason, won’t meet her eyes.
Then Sasha comes in, and Bella notices for the first time that he’s a redhead. Sasha’s also piqued, but for some other, personal reason. He keeps shooting glances at Lina, and asking Ordzhonikidze to temper her ardor, take it down a notch, and stop spreading all sorts of nonsense about his oncology department—they’re no miracle workers: “I’m telling you, it’s nothing.” He stammers in agitation. “So we treated a Japanese boy. So we operated on a non-Russian. That’s news? I’ve been fighting off journalists all day. . .”
Ordzhonikidze shrugs her shoulders: what a delicate flower.
“Colleagues, let’s focus on tomorrow.” She asks one of the girls to print out copies of the script for the visit and distribute them, so that the participants can learn their roles.
“But will . . . will he really come?” one of the girls asks.
“We’re still on his schedule, for the time being.”
“A photo op,” Sasha grumbles. “I don’t want any part of it.”
“It’s not about what you want, Alexander Markovich,” Ordzhonikidze objects. “It’s for the cause, for the sake of the children. And by the way, a photo like that won’t do you any harm.” She grins. “You’ve passed the height test, anyway.”
Tasha interjects: “Put that photo in your passport and you’ll never have any problems at customs or with traffic cops.”
“But will you take a picture with me, doctor?” Lina asks suddenly, with absolute innocence. Her tears have dried up. It’s the old Lina, sweet and calm.
Sasha’s cheeks and forehead turn red: “With you? Yes, of course . . .”
•
The conversation moves on to the topic of what, exactly, they should ask for. It’s dark outside the window, quite late. Bella leans her head against the wall and closes her eyes. Tasha whispers: “Let me walk you out.”
No, she’ll sit and listen.
Sasha and Ordzhonikidze go at each other again, and that wakes her up: “Well, well, well—an hour ago you were too good to shake you-know-who’s hand, but now look at your list of demands!”
“What do we need a chapel for when we can’t pay our nurses?” Sasha shoots back.
“Not by pills alone, Alexander Markovich . . . The chapel will make an impression. He’s a man of faith.”
The lanky photographer who showed up with Angelina has grown terribly bored. He cuts in: “He also knows what the Leningrad Symphony is about.”
Ordzhonikidze—also sweating and flushed—shakes her head: You see?
“What’s that got to do with anything? And how do you know?” Sasha’s stammering again.
The photographer shrugs his shoulders: It’s a well-known fact that he’s a man of culture.
“You’d never say that about a normal person: ‘Oh, what a fine fellow—knows what the Leningrad Symphony’s about!’ ”
“Don’t start, Sasha.” There are always a few steely notes in Ordzhonikidze’s voice, but now they aren’t just individual notes—they’re a thunderous rail.
“You wouldn’t give anyone else special credit for that—not me, not my nurse, not even that poor demented old lady!”
A pause. Sasha storms out, while the others sit with their eyes cast down. Ordzhonikidze alone looks at Bella, searchingly: “Do you know what the Leningrad Symphony’s about?”
It’s Bella’s cue. “I’ll have to ask Lev,” she says. “He knows Shostakovich like the back of his hand.”
Lina walks over to Bella and impulsively kisses her on the shoulder. What’s the matter? Bella’s mind is filled with a sense of confusion. Tasha accompanies her to the trolley, and then ends up taking her all the way home, although Bella would, of course, have managed just fine on her own. Tasha puts her to bed, and Bella cooperates, although it isn’t her bed, and the whole apartment looks different, strange.
“Listen, Bella Yuryevna, you just stay home and rest up . . . I’ll call you when he’s out of our hair.” Tasha has white teeth and big eyes: you can see them shining in the dark.
•
The apartment Bella remembers as her own really isn’t the one where Tasha has left her. It’s on the same metro line, but closer to the center—in Khamovniki. And it’s not an apartment but a room in a communal apartment. Her neighbors are Aunt Shura, a pensioner, and Nina the housepainter, a hopeless drunk. The apartment is located in the basement—that is, on the ground floor—and you can access Bella’s room in two ways: the usual, through the main entrance and down the stairs, or, if you remove the bars, through a window near the ceiling.
Of course, she could have given Lev the address, and he would have come straight there, or not come—three weeks is a rather long time to be apart, and many things could have got in the way. For example, Lev could have been arrested, or he could have simply changed his mind (she herself had no doubts, but he had given her an
opportunity to decide). And it wasn’t entirely clear how his Leningrad wife actually felt about polygamy.
And so she wakes up very early on the day of their meeting, looks around the room—trying to see it as Lev would see it—has breakfast, noting that Nina is already at work (good!) while Aunt Shura is where she always is. There’s still enough time to do her hair. It seems she was just at the salon, but now her hair is long again. The girls had warned her not to cut her hair on the new moon: it would grow right back before she knew it. Rainwater, by the way, is great for the hair, but you won’t find much of that in March, so she’d have to settle for tap.
Instead of a hair dryer she uses a hand dryer—a most convenient gadget stolen from the public restroom of the Red Army Theater and given to Bella as a present: you just sit under it and pull the lever above your head. There’s plenty of time, but Bella’s already a bit tired; for an actress, eight in the morning is still nighttime. So she closes her eyes for a bit, but by the time she opens them it’s already eleven. Oh, no! This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to her! What a screwup—to put it mildly. There’s no way he’d wait two and a half hours . . . She jumps from car to car at every stop: come on, come on—Dzerzhinskaya, Kirovskaya.
The Lermontov Monument—when Lev first told Bella where they’d meet, he’d added: “The sculpture is by Isaac Brodsky.” Leningraders are just born knowing that kind of thing . . . Her Lev is strolling up and down the steps—and he’s brought a backpack full of books and two suitcases. Blind as she is, Bella mistakes the suitcases for dogs. “Oh,” Lev says. “There you are.”
There’s a gap after that—but no, Bella remembers how deftly he had slipped into her basement with the suitcases, and asked: “Well, then, shall we make some noise?” And how Aunt Shura accepted Lev’s arrival in the apartment with surprising meekness, never asking about his residence permit and, in general, staying out of their way all day.
They talk and talk . . . Most of their talk, of course, concerns Lev’s state of affairs: he won’t starve—there’s always a call for tutors, he could translate, and if push came to shove, he’d write dissertations for idiots. As for his dissident activity, he’d probably stop—not out of fear, mind you, but because he was tired of the responsibility, tired of constantly having to think of himself as a good person. They talk about anything and everything, and go out for a stroll. They pass the Church of Saint Nicholas in Khamovniki, which the government never closed; and the Tolstoy House Museum, which Bella, to tell the truth, had never visited; and walk all the way to the Novodevichy Convent. Bella wants Lev to like Moscow. She’s delighted to see that there isn’t a trace of that typical Leningrad haughtiness in him. And then, on the way home, Bella suddenly begins to cry. She tries to hide her tears, but it’s no use. God forbid he should think she’s some typical hysterical actress—and by the way, actresses aren’t typically hysterical; men are far worse—but Lev says her tears are perfectly natural, they need no explanation, because this moment isn’t just any moment, it’s special, and it will never come again.
•
It rained all night. Bella would wake up, toss and turn for a while, then fall asleep again. She woke up for good when the phone rang. A woman’s cheerful, laughing voice gushed from the receiver, swallowing its vowels: “Bella Yuryevna, it’s canceled, he isn’t coming. What do you mean, who?” Laughter. “The one who knows what the Leningrad Symphony’s about.” More laughter. “Maybe he’s got a cold—or maybe his tummy hurts. Oh, and we’ve printed up your paperwork. Bella Yuryevna, it’s time to read to the kids. Oh, come on! Don’t you recognize me?”
Bella hangs up the phone, thinking hard. Paperwork, symphonies—she can’t make heads or tails of it. Should she go? Yes, it’s time. Looks like she overslept again, missed something important.
She stands out in the courtyard for a while, with her head thrown back, and watches the clouds. How full of joy they are, full of fun—why, that one there is about to burst with rain! You just watch, it’ll come down in buckets, like in Lev’s favorite movies—water everywhere. Then the sun appears, and Bella squints, turning her wet hair to it. Rainwater is good for the hair.
For the first time in a long time, Bella’s mind is completely clear. And there he is, across the courtyard, the one she’s been waiting for. She calls out to him, waves. He must hear her . . . Why won’t he respond? And where did he get that dog? She and Lev never had any dogs. No dogs, no children. Never.
July 2016
Translated by Boris Dralyuk
OBJECTS IN MIRROR
“HOLD IT, bastard.”
Now they’ll grab him by the arms and drag him to the Volvo. A terrible force—oppressive, but also attentive, making sure he doesn’t howl, isn’t hurt. Before they shut his mouth, he’ll manage to ask one idiotic question: “But why?” Then darkness, followed by a whole different story—if there’s to be any story at all, if it isn’t straight into the furnace. He’d had other plans for this day, especially for how it should end, but these things do happen—without warning.
“You,” he had planned to say to the eight young people who’d enrolled in his course, “you are the salt of the earth, worth your weight in gold. The screenwriter is the only true auteur. Directors? Directors can sit on their hands: the actors will act, the cameraman will make sure they look good on film, and the editor will splice the film together. That’s why everyone wants to be a director.” He’d shake his head: “Directors direct nothing . . . But you,” he’d repeat, “are worth your weight in gold.”
First he’d intimidate them with his erudition, then he’d tell them a story in which he himself would come to look foolish, silly. He had a vast reserve of such stories and they never failed to charm. He was the master, and they were his pupils. Their business was to learn from the master, his was to elucidate the nature of cinema: what constitutes a film, and what does not. Then they’d watch a movie together.
“Transformation,” he’d snap his fingers. “It’s all about transformation. If it takes place, then . . . You understand?”
That would be enough for the first day. Then he’d go see the twins and give them his collected scripts as a present. The food would be good. Then home to Varya, his wife, and Anyuta, his daughter. They’d already be asleep. That was his plan.
•
The day began with a funny, insignificant incident. While taking the elevator down from the top floor, he glanced into the mirror that had appeared after the last renovation and found himself face-to-face with a ceremonial portrait of the Leader—in his marshal’s tunic, studded with medals—which had been pasted firmly to the opposite wall. He was about to scrape it off with a key when he saw an inscription, in blue ink, across the white tunic—HANG-MAN, with a hyphen. There was no mistaking Anyuta’s writing. On the one hand, it was rather sad—the Gnessin School focused on music, but shouldn’t they at least teach her how to spell? On the other hand, it was touching. He scraped the hyphen off the Generalissimo, along with the marshal’s star.
The building was old and solid (a clever thought: it was now Stalinist in every respect), with only twelve apartments, so there could be no doubt as to who had put up the portrait—a tenant with the repellent name Vobly. Who else would bring that trash into the house? Certainly not Vadik, the virtuoso violinist. Not Tamara Maksimovna, the voice coach. No, it had to have been Vobly, the former KGB stooge—who else?
He ducked a bit when stepping out of the entrance. The renovation was done, but the building was still surrounded by all sorts of metal structures and scaffolding. He expected to see Vobly, who spent most of his time outside during the warmer months; Vobly’s family didn’t let him smoke inside, and, after years in the service, loitering around entrances was probably a matter of habit with him. Though in the past few weeks Vobly had been coming out with a little stool—something wrong with his spine, he said.
“We’ve all got bad backs, from working on our feet. We didn’t have all these surveillance cameras back then. Didn’
t have all these cell phones, neither.”
True enough.
“Off to the salt mines, Andrey Georgievich?” Vobly would ask and look at his watch. He’d nod in response and feel a momentary pang of guilt—it was noon, and he was only now leaving the house. And then he would indeed set off for work, on foot. That summer the sidewalks in their neighborhood had been widened and the roadway had been narrowed, so the streets looked odd to him. He’d make a detour, so as to pass by the French school where he’d studied: a typical five-story building, recently furnished with an extension, a glass cube—not a stylistic match, exactly, but Moscow is an eclectic town. Actually, he hadn’t spotted Vobly at the entrance. He hadn’t seen him for several days now, but that wasn’t unusual; he might be at the hospital again, for his back. Well, let him get some rest. That HANG-MAN must have given him a good laugh.
•
Yes, he had gone to the French school, the best in town. And he had done well for himself after graduating, too, enrolling at Moscow State’s Mechanics and Mathematics Department, though he had no particular aptitude for mathematics. Nor was he especially good at French—nor, he sometimes felt, was he especially good at anything. But to his friends, of whom there were many, he seemed, on the contrary, to be a man of great and varied gifts.
“You love me as a thing, not as a person.” Stravinsky, he recalled, had said something similar after Feodor Chaliapin’s death. Maybe it hadn’t been Stravinsky, but someone had said it.
“No, Andryusha, you’ve got it wrong—you love yourself as a thing,” his friends would respond. “We just love you.”
And that would reassure him, for a time. The feelings of friends are conditional; they require periodic updates. The desire to be liked (in his case, an entirely innocent desire) is obviously a character flaw, but, for an artist, it’s simply natural. Or common, at any rate. Of course, the worst thing he had ever done, from a civic standpoint, was to join the Communist Youth. Just think, here he was, a boy with a family history of anti-Soviet activity—his parents’ apartment had been searched twice (“raided,” the grown-ups had said). He still remembered the look of surprise on his teacher’s face: Andrey was one of the first in his class to submit an application. Foolishness, utter foolishness, and not even close to mandatory in 1987. On the other hand, he had always been totally honest with women, which is why he was on his third marriage.