They both sat there like that for a long time, crying, and then Zhenya, in her winter dress with long sleeves, left that town for good. She no longer searched for her mother in mental hospitals and jails, though she kept wearing the earrings, and still does.
Two Kingdoms
IN THE BEGINNING THEY FLEW THROUGH A CELESTIAL PARADISE, through a glorious blue landscape and over thick curly clouds. You could tell the stewardess was from the place they were going to: she wore a wondrous linen suit with no buttons. The beverages she served had a foreign taste.
The passengers all dozed with fatigue. As Lina walked through the rows she was struck by how much everyone resembled everyone else, with their yellowish faces and black crew cuts. She even became frightened, thinking an army regiment was being transported with her to this new place. All the soldiers slept, reclining in the same exact way, their parched mouths half-open. But then again they might have been the embassy staff of some exotic southern country.
Then night fell. Lina had never flown so far and for so long, and she spent part of the night in the bathroom, looking out the little window. She saw stars above and around, as well as far below, where they could easily have been mistaken for dim village lights. Racing along through the black night, through the astral profusion, one’s soul felt elated, aware of itself at the center of the universe, in absolute and utter darkness among the large, furry, flickering stars. Alone among the stars!
Lina even began to cry. It was with difficulty now that she recalled the moments of parting from her family and everything she loved: it all seemed so enormous and confusing, and she could no longer remember what happened first and what happened next. The miraculous reappearance of Vasya with the tickets and the marriage license; the complex bureaucratic formalities; her mother’s tears when the women dressed Lina in white and wheeled her downstairs into the elevator, where Vasya took her in his arms and carried her to the car. Either she fainted or she was sick from the drive—everything was like a dream: the stupid music, the bewildered, terrified spectators on all sides, the mirrors showing Vasya with his beard, and then Lina, gray, emaciated, in white lace and with sunken eyes.
They must have done the operation they were planning before she left, but what happened after that, Lina was already unable to say. Her mother was howling for some reason, the sound muffled as if by a pillow, and her son was crying, frightened by the music, the flowers, and Lina’s face. He was crying the way frightened children always cry when they see their mother being beaten or taken from them: he shrieked loudly; it was heart-wrenching. He was too small—he had to stay with his grandmother because Lina needed another operation, in a foreign city, a foreign country, and with this new husband, this Vasya who had appeared out of nowhere with his beard.
He was really just a rumor, this Vasya. He would show up once a year, emerge from the crowd, kiss her hand, taking it in his big cold palm, and promise Lina fantastic treasures and a future for her son—not now, but soon. Later. Just then, at that particular moment, it was impossible. But later, later he would take them away, her and her son, and her honorable mom, too, to an earthly paradise far far away, somewhere on the shores of a warm sea, amid marble columns, where they had—was it little elves?—flying about. In short, she’d live like Thumbelina from the fairy tale.
And later, when Lina became seriously ill at all of thirty-seven, this Vasya appeared more often, bringing consolation. He visited after the first operation, walked right into the intensive care unit—it was very touching—when Lina was about to reunite with her Maker, lying with an IV and staring at her scrawny, disappearing arm. He came clad in white, like a doctor (actually, he always adored white things); the only problem was he walked barefoot. But no one noticed him. He wanted to take Lina away immediately when he saw the state she was in, and her stitches. Just then the nurse came running in, out of breath, shooed Vasya away, and gave Lina another shot, then called for the doctor, and Vasya disappeared for a long time.
The next time, though, he came straight to the hospital, told her that everything had been arranged, that her mother had said yes, that she and the boy could be brought over later, and that he’d leave them everything they needed.
But Lina had to be taken there right away—there was no time to lose. In his country they knew how to cure Lina’s illness. They had discovered a vaccine, and so on. By then Lina didn’t care either way. She was so tired this second time, she couldn’t resist anything—the sickness, death. They had her on very strong narcotics, and she was floating as through a fog.
She wasn’t even tormented this time by thoughts of her boy, her little Seryozha.
“And if I die in this hospital?” Lina had thought. “Would that be any better? This way I’ll live, and then I’ll bring him over to me.”
So Vasya arranged everything, although the doctors insisted on an operation, saying that without it the patient wouldn’t make it through another day. Vasya waited for them to finish the operation, meanwhile took care of all the formalities, and came to pick up Lina and take her again directly from intensive care. They drove her carefully, changed her attire—for some reason, because of her new outfit, she could no longer see or hear anything—and when she awoke she was already flying through the blue sky and the endless, deserted, fluffy field of clouds. Lina was surprised to find herself sitting next to Vasya, and, what is more, drinking some light sparkling wine from a glass. Later she even got up—Vasya was asleep, exhausted from all the preparations—and walked around the plane with a surprisingly light step. Nothing hurt—they must have given her some painkillers.
The plane passed very low over a magnificent city that unfolded underneath them like an architectural model, with a glistening river, bridges, and an enormous toy cathedral. It looked so much like Paris!
And then right away came the roar of the plane landing, and the plane, with its flat nose as wide as a hotel window, rattling and shaking like a wheelbarrrow, literally parked itself in a quiet garden. Lina’s big window had a door in it, and in the distance the river sparkled with its bridges and also some kind of triumphal arch.
“Place de Pigalle!” Lina said for some reason and pointed. “Look!”
Vasya went to open the door, which led out to the terrace, and a fairy tale life began.
Lina wasn’t allowed to go across the river just yet, though her treatment had started and was going well. Vasya would leave and then be gone all day. He never forbade Lina anything, but it was clear that the river and the cathedral were still very far off. In the meantime she began to go out little by little, wandering down the same tiny street, since she still wasn’t very strong.
Everyone here, she noticed, looked just like Vasya, like the hippies she’d seen in foreign films. Long hair, lovely thin arms, white clothes, beards for the men, even little wreaths. The stores, it was true, had everything you could imagine, but, first of all, Vasya never left Lina any money—it must have all gone to pay for her treatment, which was probably very expensive.
And second, it was impossible to send packages from here, or even letters. People in this country just didn’t write! There wasn’t a single sheet of paper anywhere, not a single pen. There was no connection—perhaps Lina had found herself in a kind of quarantine, a transitional place.
Across the river she saw the bubbling, real life of a foreign city.
They had everything here, too—restaurants, stores. But there was no connection. For now Lina moved by holding onto the wall with both hands, like an infant who has just learned to walk. When she complained to Vasya that she wanted to go shopping, he immediately brought her a pile of clothing, including some that had been worn—men’s, women’s, children’s, and what’s more of different sizes. He also brought a suitcase full of shoes, the way friends from abroad used to bring them to Russia. Among the clothing was a pair of gray men’s army-issue long underwear, which Lina found a little embarrassing. Who knew what those were, or whose! And what was she supposed to do with all this clothing? She
had quickly begun to wear only Vasya’s things—a white chemise, and over that a thin white linen dress. She and Vasya were the same height, and Vasya’s build, though he was healthy, turned out to be the same as that of the emaciated Lina. She cried over the mountain of clothes, and in the evening told Vasya that she really wanted to send a package to her mother and little Seryozha, and pointed at the two small piles. Vasya frowned and didn’t say anything; the next morning all the clothes were gone.
Vasya worked, it turned out, on this side of the river, in this zone, and he didn’t have any desire to go across the river to the arches and cathedrals. Lina was forced to get used to his quiet, measured existence. She knew, of course, from her old life, that anything could happen: the youthful Vasya could fall in love with another woman and leave her. He didn’t really love her, this Vasya with his beard, though he protected her from all cares. Their food appeared all by itself, their clothes sparkled.
When did he find the time? Their room, which Lina in her feverish state still imagined to be part of a plane or a spacecraft, looked out on a white-columned terrace, but there was no joy there. Lina was brave, enduring her separation from little Seryozha, her mother, her girlfriends, and her college friend Lev. She understood now that her condition was incurable, and the best she could hope for was to keep to her current state—without pain, but also without strength. What talk could there be of bringing her loud little Seryozha here, with his wild tears and eyes all red from crying! And then her mother especially, with her insinuating hellos, and also tearful. There was no grief here and no tears. It was another country.
Annoyed, Lina watched the people who lived here hovering in their circle dance over the river to the monotonous music of the harps (a silly activity, by the way). She observed their silent sessions at the long common tables in the restaurant, before glasses of the lovely local wine.
Lina very much wanted to tell her girlfriends back home and her mom what she thought of all this, to at least drop them a line to say that everything was all right, that her treatment was going well, that the stores have everything but you can’t buy it—first of all because it’s very expensive, and second because no one dresses that way here—that the food is strange but she can’t eat too much yet anyway. And so on. That she wants to send Seryozha a package but so far no one is going back there, and there seems to be no postal service between their two countries. Lina dragged herself down the streets, holding onto whatever she could, and wrote letters home in her head.
Eventually, though, Lina began to see that there would be no letters. Vasya definitively promised that her mom and Seryozha would visit eventually, especially her mom. But her mom without Seryozha? Or Seryozha without his grandmother? “In time,” said the bearded Vasya. “In time.”
Lina wanted to start buying things in preparation for her mother’s visit, but Vasya made it clear that by then everything would be taken care of.
In fact, no one here worried about the future—everyone was too busy—but nonetheless things were organized perfectly, comfortably, cleanly. Vasya worked at a bookstore that he’d inherited from an aunt, but never brought home any books since Lina could not read the language, and the store had nothing in Russian. It turned out Vasya could not even write in Russian.
Then the time finally came when Lina learned to move in the flying way of the natives. It turned out to be very simple. You just got up on a step above the ground and then took a big wide stride into the air. The next stride, too, came from the force of the initial push, and every stride thereafter was freer and lighter, as in a dream. Bearded Vasya didn’t say anything, but at the appointed time he disappeared forever, probably across the river into the wealthy city. Lina was left on her own, although fully provided for. At first she thought, without fear or tears, that soon they would chase her out of their spacecraft—the food couldn’t always be in the refrigerator! But the refrigerator kept filling up, as if through a dumb-waiter, though Lina didn’t eat anything, just drank juice and stayed healthy.
And then the day finally came when, after much lonely and sad contemplation, she tore herself from her front steps and with wide strides raced to the bank of the river to the circle dance and, stepping between two dancers, who momentarily separated their hands, entered the stream and began to fly around the circle. She understood, she knew, that something was wrong, and she no longer wanted to have her mother here, or her son. She didn’t even want to run into that army regiment again, and in fact she didn’t want to see anyone again, or if she did see someone she didn’t want to know who it was, hoped she’d be unable to distinguish between the young, pale, calm faces in the circle dance, flying free like her—and hoping not to meet anyone at all anymore, in this kingdom of the dead, and hoping never to learn just how much they grieved in that other kingdom, of the living.
There’s Someone in the House
THERE IS CLEARLY SOMEONE IN THE HOUSE. WALK INTO THE bedroom: something falls in the living room. Look for the cat: it’s sitting on the little table in the front hall, its ears pricked up; it clearly heard something, too. Walk into the living room: a scrap of paper has fallen, all by itself, from the piano, with someone’s phone number on it, you can’t tell whose. It just flew off the piano soundlessly and lies on the carpet, white and alone.
Someone isn’t being careful, thinks the woman who lives here. Someone isn’t even trying to hide anymore.
A person can be afraid of rodents, insects, little ants in the bath, even a lonely cockroach that’s stumbled into your apartment in a drugged state, fleeing the disinfection campaign at the neighbors’—which is to say, he’s just standing naked and defenseless, in plain view. But a person can be afraid of anything when she’s alone with her cat and everyone has departed, all her old family, leaving this little human roach completely by herself, unprotected.
On weekends, especially, it appears that things are falling and Someone is secretly, soundlessly creeping from room to room. That’s how it seems.
The woman doesn’t tell anyone about her poltergeist: It’s still hiding, not knocking, not causing mischief, not setting anything on fire. The refrigerator isn’t hopping around the apartment; the poltergeist isn’t chasing her into a corner. Really there’s nothing to complain about.
But Something has definitely moved in, some kind of living emptiness, small of stature but energetic and pushy, sneaking and slithering along the floor—that’s how it seems. No wonder the cat’s ears pricked up.
“Come now,” the woman says to her cat. It’s a strange and quiet cat, as all cats are. It won’t let itself be petted, won’t lie on its mistress’s knee when beckoned, but will suddenly jump up by itself at an inopportune time. “What are you afraid of, little one?” says the woman cheerfully. “Calm down; there’s nothing there.”
The cat twists away and leaves the room.
The woman watches television until she falls asleep. She watches intently, her face pressed to the screen. She immerses herself in its bluish rays, floats off to foreign worlds, becomes frightened, intrigued, heartbroken—in short, she lives. This is her place, on the couch. And then—crash! Something just fell in the bedroom.
This time there was an awful racket. It really collapsed, whatever it was. The sound is still echoing through the apartment.
The woman runs into the room and stands there in shock. The shelf with all her records has collapsed. They’ve scattered all over, spread out in a fanlike formation on the unmade sofa bed and on the floor. If someone—you get three guesses who—had been sleeping there, she’d have gotten the sharp corner of the shelf right in the skull. But it didn’t happen. Now the wall features two gaping wounds: the nails, driven into the wall by someone we’d rather not bring to mind right now, have fallen out. Of course they weren’t nails exactly—they have some other name. It was a major production at the time, she remembers. It could almost have passed for love. He’d had to use a drill.
But these nails, or not-nails, whatever, had in the end been inserted, and
in the end they’d given way.
The shelf now lies on the piano—that’s why it made such a terrible racket, with echoes like in the mountains.
The piano—that, too, was an adventure. A little girl tried to learn to play it. Her mother insisted, forced her to sit there and practice. Nothing came of it; stubbornness won out in the end, the stubbornness that protects us from the will of others, that defends our right to live our life the way we want. Even if it means life will turn out worse than anyone planned, will turn into a poor life—but it’ll be one’s own, however it is, even without music, even without talent. Without concerts for the family, maybe—but also without needless worries that someone else plays the piano better. The mother always worried that other children were more talented than her daughter. The daughter heard this enough times and had her revenge by becoming a total nonentity, a fact that both mother and daughter freely acknowledged.
Then it all dissolved, all those family dramas straight out of Turgenev; now all that remained was the piano and the old records that crashed into it. The mother had collected classical music, once. The mother had spent hours discussing her daughter over the phone, spilling her child’s secrets as if they didn’t cost a thing. Now there was no mother, no daughter, no shelf for the records. Just a woman standing in a doorway, awestruck by the scene of destruction that was her bedroom. There could be no more sleeping on that bed—everything was ruined, soaked through with dust. She had to change the sheets. She had to wash, clean, find a new place for everything—but where? There was no room.
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby Page 10