GO TO SLEEP
But even solitude—his great love, his pure dove, in whose name he had been willing to do anything, anything—here, in prison, solitude was betraying him. True, only at night and only for one unpleasant second—when in the dark, practically sleepwalking, he would turn his back to the toilet, and realize that, out of habit, he hadn’t flushed for fear of waking his wife.
UNTIL NEXT TIME
He was watching them from his very crooked, horribly uncomfortable little bench and thinking that this love of theirs for the swings no longer had anything in common with the child’s passion for flight and fear and squealing; it was sheer coquetry, pretending to “be little”—plus, most likely, an opportunity to show off their legs; he was also thinking that this was exactly why the playground in front of his building—and probably all the playgrounds in this city—invariably became such a hot spot in the evenings. But they weren’t even trying to swing, these girls—they were just sitting on the swings, talking. The conversation was somehow nasty, he couldn’t hear anything, but he could see from their faces that it was a nasty conversation. Three of them—strapping, long-armed and strong-legged, their caricature-like school uniforms with their little white aprons and white knee socks looking suggestive—which was evidently how they wanted it—while the red-and-gold “Graduate” sashes stretched tight across their chests. But he wasn’t looking at those three, it was the fourth—small, agile, with a very pretty, but at the same time imperceptibly mean, cunning little mug. In the twilight her round eyes, lined with something blue and sparkly, looked sunken. There was something about her that was sharply, intuitively unpleasant to him. He was glad she wasn’t looking at him, and secretly hoped that she couldn’t see him at all. Over the course of this long day her three compatriots had already gotten quite rumpled, their salon hairdos disheveled, and only she remained fresh, spiffy-clean, her curls orderly, her bows plush. The others called her “Little One,” he heard them calling her “Little One,” he couldn’t make out anything else, just felt surprised that the conversation, which was obviously nasty, was proceeding so quietly and without swearing, and it suddenly occurred to him that this resembled a trial. The three large girls slowly got off their swings and surrounded Little One, she sat alone before them, hanging her head lower and lower, and when all three of them abruptly pulled her off the swings onto the sand, with a single jerk, he felt that he had nothing to do with this scene, that something important and righteous was occurring there, something he had no right to meddle in. It took them several seconds to stop getting in each other’s way, pushing and scrambling—and then one of them was kicking Little One methodically in the thigh, the second one was lashing her on the shoulder with the strap of her bag, and the third one, drawing her foot back the same distance each time, was assiduously kicking Little One between the shoulder blades with the tip of her shoe. But he kept sitting on the bench, frozen, and could neither blink nor move, and only when Little One cried out “Daddy, Daddy!” did he jump up and grab her, already abandoned, crying, one cheek bloodied, picked her up from under the swings, helped her up, hugged her, and took her home.
BANG
To Gavrilov
He ended up squeezed between two seats. The one in front had split and turned inside out. He was squeezed into an unbearable, contorted position, but on the other hand he had ended up between two soft surfaces. He spent the time it took for them to reach him—seven and a half hours, with dogs, a bottle of water lowered on a rope, assurances that everything would be OK—thinking about two things. First, that the callus on his right pinkie hurt, meaning he could feel that pinkie, which was important. And second, that he had never applauded during landings, and hadn’t applauded this time, either, and that mattered.
SLASHER
The hardest place to get the blood out from wasn’t under the nails, but from the finely engraved designs in the ring, gone dull under the cold water. The blood was menstrual, and the ring was from another marriage.
NOBODY’S THERE
If anyone was still alive on the day after the End of the World, and if this person asked him how to explain to future generations what the inhabitants of Earth had felt on that nightmarish evening, and if he himself was still alive to answer this question, and if, moreover, the thought of future generations didn’t seem idiotic to him on its face, he would say, “One of my sons stole my car.”
AND THAT’S IT
He couldn’t work knowing that that thing was lying in one of his desk drawers, he couldn’t use the bathroom if that thing was stowed in the bathroom cabinet, he couldn’t even endure its presence in the old cupboard on the balcony, he constantly felt like it was going to explode, as if it could. He couldn’t rent a safety deposit box at the bank and put the thing there, because he knew that then the ponderous metal safe-box would take up residence right inside his head. On the fourth day, he rented an eleven-hundred-square-foot meat locker thirty miles outside town (negative four degrees, for three years) and took the thing there. They gave him a card and a code, he opened the airtight door, clamped his eyes shut, threw the thing inside, locked the door and dashed to the stairs, but got the feeling that the thing was lying too close to the door. So he went back, opened the door again, lifted the thing, carried it over to the farthest corner of the locker and covered it with his coat. Then, on reflection, he covered it with his blazer, then his shirt, then himself.
DONE AND DONE
It was later, in heaven, that they got to talking about whether it had had any meaning, and all signs pointed to no, it hadn’t.
AHEAD OF TIME
He came back shell-shocked, but all decorated, covered in medals, a real hunk. His future wife had been a sniper, a woman with an iron fist. Over five years of shooting, her palm had turned black and shiny as a glove from the dirt, gunpowder, and sweat that had worked themselves into it; his future wife would tell guys trying to hit on her, “I’ll twist your nuts off.” She and her future husband were discharged from the hospital on the same day; he noticed her in the courtyard, she had her back to him. He saw a head wrapped in bandages and her ears, red from the spring wind above the upturned collar of her greatcoat. Afterward, she would often repeat the phrase he first addressed her with (she had a good memory for phrases): “Excuse me, would you be so kind as to lend me a light?” The whole family learned that phrase from her by heart; many years later their twin sons, learning to smoke in the basement of a brand-new five-story building where their father and mother, both decorated heroes, had received an enormous subsidized apartment, used the words “Would you be so kind …” as a code phrase—let’s go smoke; one time their mother heard them and each of them got a black leathery palm to the side of the head.
Back then, in the courtyard of an indoor pool that had been converted into a hospital, she turned to him, saw his bandaged head and the chilly protruding ears, and asked what tree he had kindly knocked his head against. He said, “I could tell from behind that you were a lady” (this phrase would also appear in her stories, but somehow didn’t catch on). Both joined the general staff because of their wounds, both had heads injured on the left side and would embrace on their “good” sides their whole lives through. Both had degrees in philosophy, the Party took up a lot of their time, plus her head injury resulted in a severely damaged sense of smell, which made her cook very badly, so they preferred to eat in the Party canteen, later his aide started bringing them takeaway boxes home for dinner—after the twins were born. He disliked the medals and decorations from peacetime—“third anniversary of the defense of this,” “fifth anniversary of the taking of that,” whereas she liked them, received them gladly and invited those who had served with her over to drink and celebrate. Some of these honors were awarded to both of them at once, some only to him or only to her. Twice in the course of their lives together he went on a dramatic and very sudden bender, the second time he almost got into big trouble, but within two or three months he would pull himself together. After his head wa
s injured he couldn’t hear well for a while, then his hearing came back and only severe headaches remained, and also he always slept very little; at night, to occupy himself, he would burn beautiful, regular designs into the lids of wood boxes, achieving great mastery; they wrote about him in the paper, a handicrafts museum acquired a couple of the boxes, some mathematician wrote an article about his designs; they brought him a gray mathematical journal, he understood nothing but felt good looking at the diagrams.
He shot himself at the end of July, roughly three weeks ahead of the tenth anniversary of the battle victory at the heroic city of Kursk. Neat, clean-shaven, clad in uniform, she thought he was sitting up very straight on his stool when she came home after the call from the police: the housekeeper had found him, but until the wife got there, no one moved the body—out of respect. In the basement where the sons would go to smoke every night and where he would descend to create his intricate boxes, they sealed everything up and rummaged around for a long time: there were suspicions that he had shot himself after committing treason; she was interrogated at length, they confiscated several unfinished boxes, which they searched for a false bottom. It was very scary, but they didn’t find anything, returned the papers and boxes, said, “The shell shock got him.” Just in case, she burned some of his papers then and there, in the concrete basement, burned them up quietly early in the morning, when the smoke would have surprised no one, kept certain things to show to the twins, hid others well; donated the boxes to the handicrafts museum. As for the several dozen notebooks, pocked with neatly arranged squares and circles—she spent a long time looking through them, wanted to send them to Odessa to that mathematician, maybe he could use them; but when it came time for the funeral and they brought the velvet pillow, she understood, having dumped his medals onto the bed (his were kept in a shoebox, hers in an empty pasta box), that thirty-six of them could be placed on the pillow in a perfect square; as for the thirty-seventh one, it was totally unclear where it could even go.
CAREFUL
He woke up the way he had done as a child following a long bedtime cry—not just exhausted, with swollen painful eyes, but also with a false sense of high fever. It made no sense to spend fifteen minutes covering his face with a pillow, persuading himself to cancel his first appointment—he never canceled appointments unless he was really very sick. He slid off the bed, made it to the closet on all fours and allowed himself to put on yesterday’s shirt. Having barely overcome the wish to start down the stairs the same way, on all fours, he hoisted himself to standing in two jerks and, hardly seeing the stairs through heavy, swollen lids, went downstairs from the apartment into his tiny office. Here it turned out that even last night, monstrously drunk and harrowed by crying, he had not only forced himself to go upstairs to his apartment to sleep, but also, in the end, put his office in order: in particular, he threw away the empty bottle and placed his notes on his first appointment on the arm of his chair. There was practically no time left before the arrival of his first patient. He felt a certain gratitude, not unmixed with disgust, toward yesterday’s nighttime self, sank into the chair, stretched out his legs, closed his eyes, drawing out the last minutes of intoxication with his own sorrow—and suddenly realized that when he was lying on the rug and bawling yesterday, he had emptied the tissue box that always sat on the table in front of the patient. He forced himself to open his eyes, picked the folder up from the armrest and hurriedly looked through his notes on R.’s last three visits. R.’s restraint was undoubtedly of a pathological nature, and R. supplanted normal expressions of emotion with long rational pontifications. But today—and this he knew for certain—today R. would finally burst into tears.
DIFFERENTIAL
It all began with the senseless but draining fear that everyone he talked to on the phone was trying to conclude the conversation by stating some hyperspecialized, encyclopedic fact.
THE PROMISE
When he still lay in the thick, dark waters, he received a promise from the Lord. The Lord’s promise was round, heavy, flat on both sides, and rough around the edges. At first the promise didn’t fit into his little fist, but he squeezed it and grew and grew, and the promise finally settled itself comfortably into his palm—as comfortably, he thought, as the entire life ahead of him would settle into his palm, life with all its joys and good deeds, for which he had received his reward from the Lord as an advance. Then came the night when he, suddenly awake, realized he was suffocating, that his body was being pulled down like a stone, that the smooth walls of the room were contracting and releasing, pushing him out. In his horror he curled up into a ball and shut his eyes so tightly that his head rang. He was being pushed and pulled, pushed and pulled somewhere, he was lying swaddled in his own fear, that deathly dullness that descends on everyone that the world, all of a sudden, starts irrevocably and furiously ridding itself of. Suddenly he realized that, in his fright, he had accidentally loosened his grip and dropped the Lord’s promise. He began to fumble around fitfully with his little hands, squirming, writhing, trying to grasp the neat, round thing in the fading darkness. He kicked the soft walls with his feet, hoping to push them aside and discover the promise in the slippery folds of the room that was closing forever. Somewhere out there these blows produced screams full of fear and anticipation. Suddenly someone grabbed his foot, turned him, pulled him and drew him out into the light. For a second everything seemed so awful to him that he forgot the lost promise and decided to die immediately, but they kept preventing him. They wanted something from him, jiggled him, slapped him, stuck their fingers in his mouth, slapped him again. He himself wanted something unbearably, something that was itself trying to get out—it even seemed to him that his own body was contracting and releasing, pushing that something out of itself, and finally he erupted in an unhappy, bitter cry, which those in the room were long unable to calm.
He could spend hours lying pressed against his mother’s belly, embracing it. Even when he was put on her breast, he, no sooner sated, would crawl toward her belly again, so that his mother would joke that when she slept she still felt pregnant and could sleep only on her side or back. Every night before bed he made his mother tell him the story of how he came into the world—he preferred this story to any lullaby or book, and always wished he could be told it from the end to the beginning; however, he was completely uninterested in the moment of his conception, and his mother, to her relief, didn’t have to deal with this slippery subject. She got used to always starting the story with how he, once extracted from the womb, raised a terrible cry (“I even began to cry with you, my heart was bursting with pity for you; you cried as though you had fallen in among strangers, I even thought that you hated me”—here he would hug his mother’s belly tightly, calming her, but he never told her, of course, the actual reason behind his newborn tears). He would ask: “And before that?” and listen to the story of how he struggled there, inside, as though he had changed his mind about coming out, and how the doctor had to stick his hand in there, into the belly, grab onto his leg and turn him carefully so that he would finally come out. He remembered that moment well—the hand on his ankle, the hope slipping through his fingers. “And before that?” he would ask, and his mother would say that, before that, he had begun his birth very, very gently, as in a dream, and here he would ask again: “And before that?” and his mother would say with a smile: “And before that you lived in here,” and would place her hand on her belly. In that moment the delightful and torturous feeling of loss would wash over him, and for a second it would be as though the rough roundness of the Lord’s promise touched the edges of his palm: the palm grew, but the promise always covered it completely, barely fitting—but always fitting in the end, so that, squeezing his hand shut, he was able to hide the dim light from the avid eyes of strangers. He was an easy child—very quiet, very adult, very bright, and constantly asked his mother to give him a little brother or sister. His mother was touched, especially when he would talk about how he would love th
is new child, take care of him, help raise him. His mother would say that the baby would cry at night and take away the time that they spent together now, would demand to play with his toys, but he would only look at his mother seriously and pleadingly, and she was already imagining holding the little one at her breast (a girl, of course), her son lying nearby, hugging her once-again emptied belly. And that’s how it was: she got pregnant with a girl, and her son hugged her growing belly so tightly and often that it started to get on her nerves. Later he tempered his ardor but would still come to her when she was resting or sleeping, press his face against her belly and think. He thought a single thought, fixedly and attentively, repeated the same words with emphasis, and it took him an unbelievable amount of effort not to press on the belly where his sister lived with his hard, protruding forehead. He thought and thought, and gradually his tiny sister—who couldn’t even square her shoulders or open her huge eyes with protuberant, transparent, fishlike lids—began to think back to him. He kept reciting and reciting the same instructions, time after time, day after day, and demanded that she repeat them after him, learn them by heart, not mix anything up, and she would promise him every day not to mix anything up. Gradually she learned it all by heart; he thought to her there, in his mom’s belly: “What a good girl you are,” and “I love you so much,” and she would answer him from in there, from the belly, that she loved him even more. That was how she learned to smile. When the time came and the walls of her room began to contract, and she herself, a little fish in a waterless space, began to drop down to somewhere outside, she didn’t have to struggle and tremble, causing her mother pain, because her brother had told her what would happen and how, and she had nothing to be afraid of. Everything happened exactly how he promised, and she was born very quickly and very easily. They shook her, slapped her, clapped her on the back, slapped her again, they tried to open her mouth with a tiny tongue depressor, they pressed on her chest, they squeezed her cheekbones from the sides, but she didn’t loosen her grip for a second: her toothless little mouth remained tightly shut, like she had promised her brother. She didn’t cry and didn’t start breathing, and finally they put her on the table in the living room, having dressed her in white and swaddled her, and now she really looked like a fish, a smooth fish with a little human face and shiny little wisps of black hair. His mother was sobbing in the bedroom; they asked him, didn’t he want to go and lie next to her, but he responded to this proposal with indifference. He waited until everyone had left the bedroom, got up on a chair and bent over his sister. Her little mouth, with the dried droplets of blood on its wounded, puffy little lips, was half open. He carefully stuck his finger inside, pushed it into her cheek and felt his promise—it was round, flat, rough. He carefully took it out of his sister’s mouth and placed it on his palm. It was as he had imagined it, maybe even a little bigger. He clasped the promise in his fist and now no one could see it. Then he slowly bent his knees, collapsed onto the chair, awkwardly lowered his legs down, but, without climbing down onto the floor, began to cry bitterly and hysterically. Every time he brought his little fist to his eyes, the tears poured from them more abundantly, and his piteous cries became even louder. He had had such an unbelievable, such a beautiful, such an amazing sister, the most loyal, the most trustworthy sister in the world—and now she was gone.
Found Life Page 11