Ivan Isaevich arranged his dates with the walnut cabinet after first glancing at the theater schedule and choosing days when Ostrovsky was not being performed and Alexandra Georgievna would be at home. The first evening she sat at a side table writing letters; the second, she sewed a skirt for her daughter, then sorted the cereals while quietly humming a catchy melody from an operetta. She offered Ivan Isaevich first tea, then supper. She was taking to “the furniture man,” as she had christened him to herself, more and more for his earnest restraint, his laconic way with words and movements, and for his behavior in general which, although “a trifle wooden,” as she described him to her bosom friend Kira, nevertheless was “all man.”
At the very least he was clearly ahead of her principal suitor, an Actor of Merit recently widowed, with a sonorous voice, garrulous, vain, and as quick to take offense as a schoolgirl. He had recently invited her to his large and splendid Stalinist apartment adjacent to the Moscow City Soviet, and the following day she lengthily derided him on all points to Kira: how he had laid the entire table with old banqueting china, but placed in the enormous crystal cheese dish a solitary dried-out segment of cheese, and in a half-meter-sized hors d’oeuvre dish an equally dried-out piece of sausage; how, with a voice like thunder which filled the whole enormous room right to its four-meter-high ceiling, he spoke first of his love for his late wife and then equally resonantly tried to entice her into the bedroom where he promised to show her what he was capable of; and finally, when Alexandra was ready to go home, he had produced his wife’s jewelry box and, without actually opening it, announced that its contents would all fall to the woman whom he now chose to be his new wife.
“So what did you do, Alexandra, make your excuses or go into the bedroom with him anyway?” enquired her friend, to whom it was vital to know every last detail of Alexandra’s life.
“Shame on you, Kira,” Alexandra Georgievna chuckled. “It was obvious the only place he has unbuttoned his trousers for a long time is the toilet! I pouted my lips and said, ‘Oh, what a shame I can’t go into your bedroom, because today I am menstru-a-ting!’ He almost sat down on the floor. No, no, he’s looking for a cook and I’m looking for a man in the house. He’s out.”
Ivan Isaevich worked unhurriedly; he never did hurry anyway, but on the fifth evening of unhurried work the cabinet was nevertheless finished, and he specially left a little bit early in order to put the last layer of shellac on tomorrow. He would be sorry to leave this house never to return, and he looked hopefully at a dubious moderne three-leaved mirror which was manifestly defective.
He liked Alexandra Georgievna and everything about her house, and he felt as if he were observing her life from a hide created by using the walnut cabinet: unsmiling Vera, the student, always scuffling among her papers like a mouse; deep-pink Nike; and her older son, who dropped in for a cup of tea with his mother nearly every day. He saw here not the fear and respect for one’s parents which he was used to from his own childhood, but the lighthearted love of children for their mother, and a warm friendship between all of them. He was surprised and delighted.
Alexandra Georgievna agreed to the mirror, so now Ivan Isaevich came to see her twice a week, on her days off. She even found his presence slightly wearing: she couldn’t invite guests around and couldn’t go out herself.
The way she saw things, she had the furniture man eating out of her hand, but she herself was unsure: of course he looked like a regular he-man, and he knew his own mind, but he was still a drudge. In the meantime he turned up with a child’s cot shaped like a little boat: “It worked for the children of the gentry, and it’ll be just right for Nike,” he said, and presented it.
Alexandra sighed: she really was tired of being husbandless, on top of which a year ago her patroness had charitably presented her with a plot of land in the Maly Theater’s village to build her own dacha and she could hardly put a house up on her own. Everything was pointing the same way, in favor of slow-moving Ivan Isaevich; and in him too the currents which lead a lonely man to family life were swirling beneath the surface of consciousness.
As the furniture-mending prelude to their marriage continued, he became even more persuaded of Alexandra Georgievna’s exceptional qualities. “She’s a thoroughly decent person, not some kind of flirt,” he thought, having disapprovingly in mind that Valentina with whom he had lived a few good years before she was unfaithful to him with a captain who had turned up from her home province. It was certainly true that his lumbering Valentina lagged far behind Alexandra.
By now winter was coming to an end, and Alexandra’s long-running affair with the ministry official who had once secured for her the job at the Maly Theater was also coming to an end. A bribe taker and thieving bureaucrat, he was generous toward women and had always helped Alexandra; but now he had another strong liaison, saw Alexandra infrequently, and the end result was that she was a bit short of money.
In late March she asked Ivan Isaevich to go with her to the dacha plot, where the building of her house had been begun last year but not finished. From then on he began to accompany her regularly on these Sunday trips.
They met by the booking office at the station before eight o’clock in the morning. He would take from her the bag with the food she had prepared; they would get into the empty train and with barely a word travel to their station, and then walk two kilometers in silence along the main road. Alexandra had her own thoughts and paid little attention to her companion, while he was pleased by her intense silence because he didn’t like to talk much himself and there was in any case very little for them to talk about, since neither of them cared for theater gossip and they had yet to gain a life in common.
Gradually a genuine topic for discussion did arise between them: the practicalities of building a house. Ivan Isaevich’s advice was always intelligent and practical; the workmen who reappeared at the end of April to complete the building they had begun treated him as the owner and, under his watchful eye, worked quite differently from last year.
The question of matrimony was still not moving forward. Alexandra had become accustomed to not lifting a finger without consulting him, and having him there gave her a quite unprecedented feeling of security. The anxieties, extending over many years, of a lone woman wholly responsible for her family had exhausted her, and then the material support of men, of which she had been readily able to avail herself without raising unnecessary moral issues, had somehow dried up of its own accord.
She was constantly discovering new virtues in Ivan Isaevich but squirmed every time he clumsily misused the Russian language. Although Alexandra Georgievna’s own education had been nothing special—incomplete secondary schooling and her training as a laboratory assistant—her upbringing under Medea’s tutelage had given her irreproachable, grammatically correct speech, and from the Pontic seafarers she had probably inherited a drop of royal blood and honorary kinship with those queens who always had their profile toward the spectator as they spun wool, wove tunics, and made cheese for their husbands, the kings of Ithaca and Mycenae.
Alexandra was conscious that their mutual inspection was dragging on, but she had not yet freed herself of the quite mistaken belief that she was so much better than he in every respect that he should consider her choosing him to be great good fortune: she took her time, still not giving that wordless indication of consent which Ivan Isaevich was so much waiting for. A great and irreparable misfortune which occurred that summer brought them together and united them.
Tanya, Sergei’s wife, was a general’s daughter, and this was not a stereotypical characterization of her, but a simple biographical fact. From her father she inherited ambition, and from her mother a pretty nose. Through the general’s exertions she received a dowry of a new one-room apartment in Cheryomushki and a large secondhand Victory car. Sergei, who was both fastidious and independent, would not touch the car, and did not even obtain a driving license: Tanya was the driver.
That last preschool summer, their
daughter Masha was living at the general’s dacha with her grandmother, Vera Ivanovna, the general’s wife, who had an impossible, hysterical personality, as everybody knew. From time to time, the granddaughter would have a row with her grandmother and call her parents in Moscow, asking them to come and take her home. This time Masha rang late at night from her grandfather’s study. She did not cry but complained bitterly: “I’m bored. She doesn’t let me go anywhere and doesn’t let girls come to play. She says they’ll steal things, but they won’t steal anything, honestly …”
Tanya herself had not entirely forgotten her upbringing under Vera Ivanovna and promised to collect Masha in a few days’ time. This entailed major disruption of the family’s plans. They had been intending to drive all together to the Crimea in two weeks’ time, to Medea; the holiday had been written into her timetable, they had arranged it all with her, and it was quite impossible to move the trip forward.
“Perhaps Alexandra could look after Masha just for a week?” Tanya enquired, angling cautiously.
Sergei was not keen to take his daughter from “the Junta,” as he called his wife’s family. He felt it was unfair to his mother, whose dacha had only just been finished, to say nothing of the fact that the Junta’s dacha was enormous and provided with servants, while Alexandra had two rooms and a verandah.
“I do feel sorry for Masha,” Tanya sighed, and Sergei gave in.
They decided to play truant in midweek and set off early in the morning. They never made it to the general’s dacha: a drunk truck-driver swerved over onto the wrong side of the road, crashed into their car, and both died instantly in the head-on collision.
Toward the evening of that day, when Nike was worn out waiting for her much loved friend and cousin, and had arranged her dolls in a row for her, and herself beaten the raspberry mousse, the general’s Volga arrived and the dumpy general climbed out and walked unsteadily toward the house. Seeing him through the net curtain, Alexandra came out onto the verandah and stopped on the top step, anticipating news which had already reached her as a terrible inarticulate heaviness in the thickening evening air.
“Lord, Lord, wait, I can’t, I’m not ready for this …”
The general slowed his progress up the path, time slowed and stopped. Only the swing which Nike was sitting on did not stop completely, but very slowly glided down from its high point.
In this moment of frozen time Alexandra saw a large part of her and Sergei’s life, and even that of her first husband, Alexei Kirillovich, in that summer at the Karadag station: the newborn Sergei in Medea’s arms; their joint departure for Moscow in the expensive old-fashioned railway carriage; Sergei’s first steps at the Timiryazev dacha … and he in his little jacket, his head shaven, when he went to school. And Alexandra saw much more, like so many forgotten photographs, while the general stood on the path with his leg poised to take a step.
She watched it through right to the end, to Sergei’s coming around to Uspensky Lane the day before yesterday to ask her to keep Masha at the dacha for a few days until they could all go to the Crimea, and his awkward smile, and the way he had kissed her hair, which she wore pinned forward in a roll: “Thanks, Mum, you do so much for us.”
And she had dismissed his thanks: “Nonsense, Sergei. What sort of favor are we doing when we all worship your little Masha.”
General Pyotr Stepanovich Gladyshev reached her at last, stopped, and said in a slow, thick voice: “Our children … a crash … both of them killed.”
“With Masha?” was all Alexandra could find to say.
“No, Masha is at the dacha. They were on their way … they were going to collect her,” the general wheezed.
“Come into the house,” Alexandra ordered him, and he obeyed and climbed the steps.
They had a bad time with the general’s wife, Vera Ivanovna. For three days she shrieked and screamed, hoarsely, dementedly, and fell asleep only when given injections; for all that, she wouldn’t let poor Masha out of her sight. Swollen and bloated, Vera Ivanovna brought Masha to the funeral. The girl immediately rushed to Alexandra and stood, squeezing against her, through the whole immensely long secular funeral service.
Vera Ivanovna beat against the sealed coffin and finally started shouting out snatches of a Vologda folk lament, torn from the depths of a simple, peasant soul which had been spoiled by her exalted status. Alexandra stood like stone with a firm hand resting on Masha’s black hair. Her two elder daughters stood to the right and left of her, and behind them, holding Nike by the hand, Ivan Isaevich protectively stood sentinel over the family’s grief.
The funeral party was held at the general’s apartment on Tinkers Embankment. Everything, including the china, was brought in from some special place which fed high-ranking persons. Pyotr Stepanovich got utterly, terribly drunk. Vera Ivanovna kept demanding that Masha should come to her, but the little girl held on to Alexandra for dear life. So the three of them sat through the whole evening, two mothers-in-law united by a shared granddaughter.
“Alexandra, let me come and stay with you, Alexandra,” the little girl whispered in her ear, and Alexandra, who had promised the general not to take away their only child, comforted her by promising to let her stay just as soon as Grandma Vera was feeling a bit better.
“We can’t just leave her all alone, can we now?” she reasoned with Masha, herself thinking how desperately she wanted to take Masha back to her two and a half rooms in Uspensky Lane.
This was the evening when Alexandra first noticed a scattering of ginger freckles on Masha’s pale face, the hereditary freckles of the Sinoply family, little indicators of the continuing presence of long-dead Matilda.
“Masha ought to be taken away from that place. I could help,” Ivan Isaevich murmured late that evening as he saw Alexandra home from Tinkers Embankment, not addressing her directly in order to avoid having to call her Alexandra Georgievna, which by now was just too formal.
“Ought to be, certainly, but how’s it to be done?” she replied equally unspecifically.
Medea did not come to her godson’s funeral. Her late sister Anelya’s adopted daughter Nina was ill in the hospital after a serious operation; Medea had taken her two little children from Tbilisi to stay with her and now had no one to leave them with.
In late August, Ivan Isaevich finished installing fencing around the dacha, put grilles on the windows, and installed an ingenious lock: “No self-respecting thief is going to be breaking in here, and it’s a deterrent to vandals.”
All this dark time, from the day of the funerals, he had not left Alexandra’s side, and here, in this sad place, they began their life as man and wife. The tragedy seemed to cast a shadow on their relations for all time, and Alexandra herself no longer seemed able to throw herself into celebrating life as she had from her earliest youth come war, peace, or universal flood. Ivan Isaevich had no inkling of this. He was a different kind of person, who didn’t have the words in his vocabulary or the sights in his memory that Alexandra had. He saw his wife as a superior, perfect being. Even when he did work out that her youngest daughter Nike could not possibly have been fathered by the Colonel Kitaev whose surname she bore but who had died four years earlier, he would sooner have believed in an immaculate conception than in any other explanation.
Alexandra, purely from a desire to preserve his exalted faith in her, had to concoct a story about how she had been planning to marry a test pilot who crashed the day before the wedding. The story was not a complete fabrication: there really had been a pilot. There was even a photograph of him with a breezy inscription, and alas he really had died in a crash during a test, but there had never been any suggestion of marriage between them, and it was not he who was Nike’s father. He had crashed five years after she was born, and Nike remembered him because he always brought long boxes of chocolates called “Nuts of the South” which you couldn’t get later on.
So positive, however, was Ivan Isaevich’s attitude toward his wife that even in this questionable pa
rt of her biography he discerned merit: a lesser woman would have had an abortion or some such disgusting thing, but Alexandra had had the baby and brought it up, denying herself in all things. He was eager to ornament her bitter life by any means within the scope of his imagination: he brought her the best things he could find in Eliseev’s delicatessen; he gave her presents, sometimes completely absurd; he guarded her sleep in the morning. What he most appreciated in intimate relations with his wife was the very fact that they occurred at all, and in the depths of his simple soul at first supposed that his demands could only be a source of vexation to his noble wife. It was some time before Alexandra succeeded in getting him more or less attuned to the extracting of modest and muted matrimonial joys. Ivan Isaevich’s fidelity much surpassed what the concept usually entails. He served his wife with his every thought and every emotion, and Alexandra, taken aback by such an unexpected gift so near to the falling of the curtain on her womanly biography, accepted his love gratefully.
General Gladyshev had built so many military and semi-military installations in the course of his career and had received so many decorations for his broad but short chest that he was almost not afraid of the authorities. Not, of course, in the sense in which a philosopher or an artist in some namby-pamby bourgeois state is not afraid of the authorities, but in the sense that he had held his ground under Stalin and outlived him, had got on fine with Khrushchev, whom he had known from the war, and was confident that he could find a common language with any other authorities.
Medea and Her Children Page 14