After the silence of Kukovkino, Moscow crushed me with its roar, but within a week I began to get used it. I stopped shying away from cars and people and realized that the city’s comforts, conveniences, planning and abundance generously make up for its noise. Greedy for new experiences, I began to study local life as soon as I dove into it, but it took me a while to really understand it.
For the first two days I stayed with the Bzhanias. They gave me a key and wrote their address on a slip of paper, just in case. I walked around, window-shopping stores filled with food and attractive goods. The prices, I noted, were at least fifty percent higher than in Volochok. I went down into the subway, rode for three stops and turned back—I hadn’t seen so many people in my entire life. I found the way home all by myself. There, I made dinner, tidied up, although the apartment was already pretty clean, did a load of laundry and hung it out to dry. Thank goodness, my hosts accepted my help graciously, understanding that I was trying to compensate them for their kindness.
At night, when the conversation turned to Moscow, I could barely conceal my anxiety and awe.
“Moscow melds everyone to its mold. You’ll get used to it soon,” Viktor said.
Lyuda was a native; three generations of her family had lived here and she was proud of it. Before the revolution, her forefathers came to work seasonal jobs in Moscow, and spent more time in the city than in their native villages. They returned home to visit, to pay taxes, to give money to their families and breed the next generation. Lyuda’s ancestors came from Tula and Kineshma. But Kolomna, Tver, Sergiyev Posad, Kostroma, Volokolamsk and many other towns and provinces also sent a steady stream of labor to the city. Gradually, the men would pull their families to join them, teach their craft to their children, and keep at it—scheme, take chances, and pursue better-paying, cleaner jobs. The Revolution, then the Civil, Finnish and the Great Patriotic Wars and Stalin’s terror shredded and vanquished Moscow’s own. Before the Great War, there were a million and a half people here; after it—eight hundred thousand. Those who survived had developed vast networks of connections, raised and educated their children. They would not take a factory job or sweep streets anymore; that was out of the question. Lyuda’s grandfather was a humble nurse’s assistant, but her father was a professor of urology.
With the passportization of villages, a new wave of “quota” hires flowed into Moscow. For them, hard, base labor guaranteed a place to live. By the time I got here, the worst jobs had been left for us, the Empire’s broken-off shards, refugees, migrant souls. Moscow always needs workers, and she takes them all—Moldovans, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Tajiks and even smuggled in Vietnamese and Chinese.
This new great migration has flooded Moscow with strange, never-before seen people who barely speak Russian. Many of them, of course, will perish on their way to a better future, or will move on, into Russia’s limitless spaces, where they will live out their lives, born of warm sun and sweet fruit, in some mosquito-infested marsh, with a plate of potatoes and a jar of pickles. But those who survive will be Muscovites.
Right away, I fit in and blended into the crowd; everyone thought I was a native. Except for the Bzhanias, no one cared what happened to me, and I was very happy with that. On the third day, Viktor took me to Racing Street, to the apartment building where I was to live with the paralyzed Grandma Lisichanskaya.
. 3 .
Viktor had described the case to me: an old woman, a bad stroke, her speech and movement essentially gone. Her son, a famous pianist, lives in Italy; he cannot bring his mother to live with him, and it’s pointless, anyway—Mark Grigoriyevich believes she should die in her own home.
“There are also some distant relatives, but he does not let them close to his Mother. It’s the usual family stuff, you know: you’ll have to play the guard dog, too.”
I did not have a long run in the role of guard dog. As soon as I complained about the relatives, the two old ladies evaporated. Mark Grigoriyevich strictly prohibited them from visiting his mother. He received us in the kitchen that first time—an eccentric-looking fifty-year-old man, not tall, with a head of curly gray hair, wearing thick glasses, a dark suit, and shined black shoes—ready for the stage. He made us coffee and chatted non-stop, but I noticed that his coffee was delicious and strong, his stories were not dirty, and his kitchen glistened as if scrubbed and scoured with sand. He caught my eye.
“Before you, Verochka, I had this woman who cleaned pretty well, but I couldn’t get along with her. Can you imagine, she turned out to be a born-again psycho who had taken a vow to help the sick and the helpless, but for money, mind you. She named her price before she’d barely gotten through the door. She came in, all eyes, and she had these ribbons in her hair, with the prayers that you put on dead people’s foreheads. She is cleaning and muttering the liturgy for the repose of the soul. ‘You are already sending my Mother to her maker,’ I say. She—bam!—falls to her knees, ‘I’m sorry, dear, it’s just in case.’ ‘Quit it,’ I say. ‘You don’t pray like that for people who’re still alive, you silly goose.’ She looked at me with respect at first, and was quiet for some time. And then suddenly she comes up to me, like she’s spoiling for a fight, and asks, ‘Is your apartment blessed?’ I must tell you, I was totally stumped. Was it supposed to be? Mom came from an atheist generation, and on top of that, what business is that of hers?—I hired her to clean, not to make rules. So, long story short, she tidied the place and I sent her on her way, bless her heart. I can’t stand those Bible-thumpers.”
He was a natural talker and could not keep it in when his emotions overflowed.
We finished our coffee. Mark Grigoriyevich sort of faded and said, almost in a whisper, “Let’s go; she was asleep half an hour ago.”
We entered the bedroom. The Grandma was lying on her back: a white face with a little bird-like nose, her eyes closed, a waxy hand on top of the comforter. Mark Grigoriyevich sat down on a stool and gently stroked his mother’s hair.
“Mom, I brought Vera to meet you.”
The air in the room was stale. I began by pulling back the curtains, then opened the window. A cool breeze entered the room; the Grandma opened her eyes. I came up to her, took her hand and began stroking her fingers as I’ve done so many times. She had the hands of a very sick person: cold and anemic, but I was already warming one of them in my palms, making the stagnant blood flow again.
“Hello, Grandma. I am Vera.”
“Vera-Vera,” her eyes dashed anxiously from side to side as if she was desperately trying to fix my name in her mind.
Bookshelves lining the walls, a baby grand in the next room, the sensitive Mark Grigoriyevich tearing up—everything about this place was warm, and, like a stray dog who finally finds a home, I understood in a flash that my place was here.
“Viktor, she welcomed her, even said her name. Perhaps she is improving?”
Vitya tactfully evaded the question. Mark Grigoriyevich switched gears and steered the conversation to business matters. He confirmed the conditions of my stay and we agreed that the next day we’d open a new account at the neighborhood bank where he could transfer the money.
“Well, that’s that, you can move in as soon as tomorrow. Come around two, I have to teach in the morning.”
And when he said that, for some reason, he turned a deep red.
I moved the next day. Mark Grigoriyevich handed me the keys and dashed out; he came back late, close to midnight. Grandma and I read or, more accurately, I read Dead Souls to her. When I began to read, the wrinkles on her face stirred and formed into a serious and thoughtful expression with which she followed my fingers as they turned the pages. I sensed it: Grandma could hear me and enjoyed the reading. In those first days, she remained in excellent spirits. I changed her linens, gave her a sponge bath and rubbed her entire body with a fluffy towel. Grandma dined on pureed chicken with mashed vegetables, drank half a glass of carrot juice and lay on her clean sheets gleaming, lively-eyed and puffing her nostrils
slightly like a thoroughbred who’d just won a race.
“She’s welcomed you, Verochka, I swear to God, she has,” Mark Grigoriyevich rhapsodized in the kitchen. “It’s a load off my soul, you can’t imagine how much I love her.”
We drank tea; behind our window the restless street hummed, refusing to turn in for the night. Mark Grigoriyevich took off his suit coat, undid the top two buttons of his shirt and complained about the difficulties of living abroad: one had to get used to everything anew, to start from the bottom. I nodded—I understood him better than anyone else, except he didn’t know that I understood him, which was a bit funny. At some point, I interrupted his drawn-out confession to take a minute to check on the Grandma: she was snoring quietly, asleep, like a good girl, with her hands crossed on her chest. It was as if she were chiseled from stone. When I returned to the kitchen, Mark Grigoriyevich was asleep. Unfinished tea steamed from his cup. I roused him and led him to his room; he did not apologize, but followed me obediently, like a calf, fell onto his bed, and muttered as I left, “Good night, Verochka.”
The night, indeed, was good and quiet, and so was the next one. For the five days that Mark Grigoriyevich stayed with us, Grandma was on her best behavior. But as soon as he left, she began pulling tricks. Grandma missed the son who had abandoned her, went on hunger strikes and refused to keep her monstrously high blood pressure down. So began our process of getting used to each other. Only with tenderness did I slowly and carefully finally gain her real trust. After that, our life together began.
. 4 .
I rarely saw the Bzhanias now. Vitya made sure I got the job with the Lisichanskys and then disappeared for a long time. I didn’t want to call him first: they had their hands full already, and then there was Vitya’s work, which sometimes kept him in his unit overnight. Nonetheless, I was invited to his birthday party, and not without a hidden agenda: Lyuda seated me next to a likeable, shy surgeon named Naum Yakovlevich, a fifty-something bachelor. We talked the entire evening, but things didn’t go any further; he, like myself, must have resisted being set up.
I could not say I suffered from loneliness. Grandma, while we were getting used to each other, demanded constant attention; in this respect, she was no different from, say, Mustang. Every living creature needs attention and trust. But touch is essential for more intimate contact. When I take a patient’s hand, or place my hand on his head or chest, I am mysteriously transformed, as if I had never before seen clearly and then put on glasses for the first time. I begin to think with my heart, to see the patient the way he or she could have been if fate hadn’t chosen otherwise. I do not hide, I don’t put up a shield of words; everything happens in perfect silence and that may be why I feel that a part of my soul is revealed to the patient too—that part that is inborn and intact and isn’t scarred by the constant battles we all wage with our reason or conscience.
I have known many doctors, but only those who engender trust in their patients were good. Some people can do this easily, without thinking about it, but others do not have this gift at all. A doctor who has the gift of persuasion knows how to fight off The Reaper. He alone, guided by his inborn compass, can find those anchors that still hold a gravely ill person in the world of the living.
Life held on in Grandmother Lisichanskaya due to her incredible will power and that alone. When I gathered her fingers into my hand, when I began massaging them, when my warmth reached her, her nostrils flared and she inhaled deeply, studying my smell; when she believed, in that instant, that she could trust me, she reached out towards me gladly. Later, her willfulness took over, and her whims followed—a series of tests, really—she needed to know if she could count on me when she was desperate. Only kindness and care allowed me—not quite to win—but to ensure my position as someone who guides her, something she could no longer do herself. I had no chance to get bored: a massage therapist came every morning, and twice a week her physician visited, a responsible and attentive doctor who listened to my observations, examined Grandma and was prepared for any trick she might try. He and I got along great. Then there was the ironing and the cooking; I couldn’t keep up at first, but after two or three weeks things found a certain rhythm—only rarely broken by unpredictable crises.
In the mornings, after an early massage, Grandma would doze off and sleep until two or three in the afternoon. After that, we had all-body rubs and our ongoing battle with bedsores that were healing, thanks to trusty buckthorn oil. Then lunch and the afternoon nap until five or six. Evening reading, juice, vegetable puree, sleep. From ten till two and from nine p.m. till the morning, if everything went according to the plan, I was free. In the mornings I did shopping or went to the pharmacy, cooked, washed and ironed, and in the evenings, after nine, I had my personal time.
I decided not to spend the five hundred dollars that Mark Grigoriyevich paid me, so that, within two or three years, I could save up for an apartment in Volochok. I knew, of course, that I couldn’t count on this job to last that long, but I had no other plans; I had to become independent, and that meant I had to save. We had enough money for food, and I did not spend a penny of it on myself; I collected all the receipts and taped them into a big notebook to report to Mark Grigoriyevich. When he came to visit and saw my giant ledger, he just said:
“If it’s easier for you this way, waste your time, write all you like. But I don’t need your reports; all I care about is that Mom is alright.”
I did not stop my accounting—who knows what might happen, and life had taught me to be practical—but I didn’t show him the notebook any more. As I said, I had no chance to get bored, and, on the other hand, easily found little odd jobs. The apartment building where I lived was a residential cooperative and it was originally inhabited by musicians, artists and professors from the Pedagogical Institute. Of course now it was all mixed up: some of the old people had died, others went to live abroad, and still others sold their apartments and left, never to be heard from again. The Lisichanskys, by the way, were among the founders, a fact which, for some reason, made Mark Grigoriyevich extraordinarily proud. The building fed itself, hired its own staff and repairmen, and its news, as had always been the custom in such buildings, accumulated in the concierges’ tiny room on the ground floor next to the elevators.
Our concierge was Polina Petrovna, a skinny, arthritis-bent old woman who had seen her share of life. She had thin, silvery hair held in a ponytail by a black rubber band of the sort pharmacists use to hold down paper caps on pill bottles. She had a narrow forehead scored by wrinkles, no eyebrows whatsoever, tiny black eyes that never blinked, a long beaky nose and, under it, a narrow slit of a mouth that revealed a row of small, sharp teeth, like a ferret. Her tiny chin rested on folds of dry skin, and she always smelled of whatever she happened to be cooking on her electric plate. Her defining characteristic was an incredible resilience; she would have survived a nuclear holocaust, like a cricket—she’d find a warm place, nestle into it and start chirping about whatever caught her sharp little eye. She worked all her life at the Vagankov market. When that was torn down, she moved to our building, to live out her remaining watchful years. Her tiny cell of a room had a couch, a table, a telephone stand and an old TV. Petrovna went to bed at half past eleven and got up at half past five. Her daughter, as she told me plainly and without embarrassment, was a prostitute by calling, and when she could no longer walk the streets she started drinking, so Petrovna’s home life wasn’t much to brag about. Without anyone really noticing, the old woman started to work double shifts, which meant that she basically moved into her little cell, forcing out the woman who used to cover the other shift. On Saturdays, she washed in the basement where we had two shower stalls for repairmen. Sometimes her grandson came to visit, a young man of about twenty-five, of whom Petrovna was very proud. He always brought her a cake, and in exchange, she gave him cash. She lived simply and saved, knowing the price of money and taking any small job she could still do.
Our building also had Volodya
the electrician, a thirty-year-old man. He did not see much fresh air: he was either in his workshop soldering something, or on a call to one of the apartments. Volodya came from somewhere around Penza, and that was the only thing I knew about him, but he was a good worker and never turned down a side job. He lived in a basement room without a window, didn’t bring girls around, spent his evenings with beer and TV and despised stronger drink. For these reasons, he became part of the building, was thought of as irreplaceable, and in his three years here had taught himself plumbing and “European-style” tiling. Clearly, he was also saving; the electrician had his paperwork in order and the police didn’t bother him.
In the other wing of the building, also in the basement, lived a Bashkir, the groundskeeper Fedya. He had come a year before me, by himself, and took over the former Red Corner,[3] with a toilet and a shower next to his room. I lived in a similar basement in Volochok, so I knew very well what it was like. Fedya was soon joined by his son, a boy of about fifteen, quiet and diligent; I never heard anything but “Hullo” from him. Later, when they were already established, came Fedya’s wife, a woman without a name. She only came out after massive snow storms, to help her family clear the yard.
Clearly, I belonged to the same class of residents as the Bashkir groundskeeper and the electrician. Petrovna welcomed me as one of her own and stopped me occasionally to tell me the news: who, where, with whom and for what. I was forced to listen: the old woman took her job very seriously and considered information gathering an essential duty. She saw and knew everything, but discipline learned at the market had taught her to keep her mouth shut, and she only indulged in talk with people of her own standing. I was still a newbie, and although I realized it was unlikely that someone would want to run me out of a terminal patient’s apartment, I listened dutifully. Petrovna, should she be offended, could show her claws.
Fish- a History of One Migration Page 21