He was afraid only of his wife, Vera Ivanovna. Only Vera Ivanovna, his faithful spouse and partner through thick and thin, disturbed his calm and jangled his nerves. She regarded her husband’s high rank and senior position as effectively her own private property and was fully capable of demanding all that, in her perception, was her due. When the need arose, she had no hesitation in raising the roof. It was these outbursts that Pyotr Stepanovich feared most of all. His wife had a powerful voice, the acoustical properties of their tall rooms were first-rate and the sound insulation inadequate. When she started shrieking, he surrendered with alacrity: “What must the neighbors think? You’ve completely taken leave of your senses.”
After her hungry Vologda childhood and penniless youth, Vera Ivanovna was knocked sideways by the loot of which Pyotr Stepanovich—who was not a covetous man, but neither was he a fool—shipped back one full goods wagon from defeated Germany at the end of 1945, since which time Vera Ivanovna had been unable to stop herself from buying more and more possessions. Cursing her for a lunatic and a madwoman, he did not consider her to be either of those things in a literal sense. For this reason when one night a few months after the death of their daughter he was awakened by the muttering of his wife, who was standing in a piglet-colored nightgown in front of the open drawer of a lady’s escritoire, from Potsdam as he recalled, it never occurred to him that the time might have come to commit her to a lunatic asylum.
“She thinks she will get all my things now, they’ll all be left to her, the little murderess,” Vera Ivanovna said, wrapping a Chinese fan and some little flasks in a light towel.
“What are you doing at this time in the night, Mother?” Pyotr Stepanovich asked, raising himself on his elbow.
“We need to hide them, Pyotr, hide them. That’s what she thinks will happen.” Her pupils were so dilated they almost merged with the black rims of the irises, and her eyes seemed not grey but black.
The general was so irate that the foreboding which had stirred briefly in his heart promptly dissolved. He hurled a long and elaborate curse in her direction, took the pillow and a blanket, and went to sleep the rest of the night in the study, trailing the long ribbons of his army-issue underpants behind him.
Madness, as anyone knows who has observed it at close quarters, is the more infectious the more sensitive the psyche of the person finding themselves in the proximity of the mad person. The general simply did not notice it. Motya, a distant relative of Vera Ivanovna’s who had been subsisting in their apartment since she was young, did notice certain strangenesses in the mistress’s behavior but paid them no special attention since she, having twice experienced famine in Russia, had long been slightly deranged herself. She lived in order to eat. Nobody in the family saw how or when she did it, although they did know that she ate at night.
She feasted in her narrow, windowless room, intended as a larder, with the latch down. First she gorged on what she had gathered during the day from food left by the family; then what she considered the food due to her herself; and finally, and sweetest of all, what she had slyly stolen with her own hands out of the Kremlin-supplied food orders: a makeweight piece of sturgeon, a lump of dry sausage, and chocolates if they arrived in paper bags rather than sealed boxes.
Her quarters were off limits to all members of the household: not even the cat was allowed in; and even the general, insensitive as he was to anything mysterious, was aware of some kind of unpleasant secret in there. She carried in cereals and flour which she had poured into paper bags, and tinned food. A day before her annual trip to her sister’s in the country, she would slip out the door, unnoticed by her mistress, with two large bags that she would take to Yaroslavl Station and put in the left-luggage section. All these foodstuffs were intended as a present for her sister, but year after year the same story repeated itself: the first evening she was there she would put on the table a tin of stew covered with delicious, cheap oil, intending to present the rest later; but her sick soul prevented her from carrying through this act of heroism, and she would revert to guzzling her supplies at night, in the dark and alone; and her sister, observing the midnight feasts from her place above the stove, only felt great pity for her greed and forgave her. Even though she was older than Motya, she lived off her vegetable garden, kept a cow, and didn’t suffer from gluttony.
It was no wonder, then, that Motya, constantly occupied with her search for food, failed to notice either the stupors into which Vera Ivanovna would fall or the abnormal agitation which would have her pacing around the apartment from room to room like a wild beast in a cage; and if she had noticed anything, she would have given it her customary explanation: “Vera is Satan incarnate.”
Pyotr Stepanovich didn’t notice anything either, since for many years he had been avoiding contact with his wife, getting up early and not breakfasting at home. The moment he arrived at his enormous office, his secretary would bring him tea. He would return home late, in the old days after midnight, having sat out some sixteen hours at a time in his department; what he enjoyed most of all were tours of inspection to installations, and he was often out of Moscow. He did not exchange two words with his wife if he could help it. He came home, had supper, burrowed into her silk-covered, down-filled duvets as fast as he could, and rapidly fell asleep like the healthy man he was.
So it happened that all the monstrous power of Vera Ivanovna’s insanity fell upon Masha. She started school here, on Tinkers Embankment. She was wakened, taken to school, and brought home again by Motya, but from dinnertime on, Masha spent all her time with her grandmother.
Masha sat down at the table. Grandma Vera sat down opposite and didn’t take her eye off her for a moment. She didn’t keep scolding Masha; she just stared at her with grey, unblinking eyes and from time to time whispered something incomprehensible. Masha pushed her silver spoon around in the bowl and couldn’t raise it to her mouth. Under Vera Ivanovna’s chilling gaze the soup quickly got cold and Motya, who had a vested interest, quickly took it off to who knows where and put a large plate with the main course in front of Masha, which very soon was carried off almost untouched to wherever it was the soup had gone. Then Masha ate a piece of white bread with stewed fruit, which was to remain her favorite food for the rest of her life, and her grandmother would say to her, “Let’s be off.”
She would sit down obediently at the piano on three thick encyclopedia volumes and lower her fingers to the keys. In her life she never came across any cold more piercing than the chill that flowed through her bones from the black and white teeth of the hated keyboard. Vera Ivanovna knew that the girl hated these exercises. She would sit to one side of her, watching and ceaselessly whispering something, and tears welled up in Masha’s eyes, ran down her cheeks and left cold, damp tracks.
Then she was sent to the corner room. A framed photograph of Tanya stood in there on a table, and there were many more in a cardboard box. Masha would open her exercise book and push one of her mother’s photographs between the pages, most often the one where she was standing in the doorway of a house in the countryside; to one side you could see part of a hedge and a flowering shrub, and she had such a broad smile that it barely fitted on her narrow face. It was a snapshot Sergei had taken, and the happiness of the summer morning was plain to see, and reflections of the first night they had just spent together after Tanya herself had proposed to Sergei. He had long been silently in love, but hesitating and putting the moment off, embarrassed by the shadow her father’s rank cast over her.
Masha practiced her writing, sometimes staring motionlessly at the photograph for a long time. She sat for hours at her lessons. She was not allowed out for walks for some special reason of Vera Ivanovna’s. Occasionally, Motya would take Masha with her to the shop, or the baker’s or the shoemaker’s. Nearly all the shops were downstairs on the ground floor of their apartment block, so it wasn’t a long walk. Occasionally they walked to Solyanka, where there was Masha’s favorite house, with the caryatids—the giants, as she
called them. An even greater delight was that the River Yauza, the little churches, the fences around the building sites which she could see from their window on the eleventh floor suddenly became much larger, didn’t look so toy-like, but in compensation sprouted little details and attractive touches.
At night, after Motya had put her to bed, the most dreadful part began: she could not sleep; she turned over and over in the large bed and kept waiting for the moment when the door would creak and Grandma Vera would come into her room. She came in very late, at an hour which Masha had no way of knowing, wearing a cherry-red dressing gown, and with a long smooth plait down her back. She would sit beside the bed, and Masha would curl into a ball and screw up her eyes. She remembered one such evening particularly clearly because of the illuminations with which the block had been decorated for the October Revolution festivities. The light fell in yellow and red stripes, and Vera Ivanovna, sitting in a shaft of red light, moaned in a clearly audible whisper: “Murderess, little murderess. You phoned them and that’s why they set out … you made it all happen … live with it now, live with it and gloat over what you’ve done.”
When Vera Ivanovna went away, Masha could finally cry. She buried her face in the pillow and fell asleep in her tears.
On Sundays dear Alexandra, for whom Masha had been waiting all week, would finally come. Masha was handed over to her until dinnertime, a few hours. Downstairs by the entrance Ivan Isaevich would be waiting for them, Uncle Vanya, sometimes alone but more often with Nike, and they would go for an outing: to the zoo, or the planetarium, or to somewhere in Durov. The partings always proved more powerful for her than the meetings, and just the brief outing itself reminded her of other people, who had the good fortune to live in Uspensky Lane.
Alexandra took Masha there several times. She could see the little girl was unhappy, but could never have imagined that what was upsetting her most was the appalling accusation of the crazy old woman. Masha said nothing about it because what she feared most of all was that her beloved Alexandra and Nike would find out what she had done and stop coming to see her.
Late in the autumn Masha had a terrible nightmare for the first time. In it nothing happened at all. It was just the door to her room opening, and someone terrifying was going to come in. She could feel the monster coming nearer down the corridor, and the horror grew and grew until Masha woke up with a scream. Who was pushing the door open and why? And it was never quite where the real door was … Motya usually came running in when she screamed. She would tuck her in again, stroke her, and make the sign of the cross, and then when it was already almost morning Masha would fall soundly asleep.
If before she had been unable to sleep, waiting for her grandmother to come, now even after she left, Masha could not sleep for a long time, terrified of the nightmare which visited her more often the more she feared it. In the mornings Motya had trouble getting her out of bed. She sat half-asleep through her lessons, came back home half-asleep and performed her musical servitude in front of Vera Ivanovna, and then she fell into a fitful catnap which saved her from nervous exhaustion.
The location above the River Yauza where their apartment block stood had long been considered an unholy spot. Above it was Louse Hill, and along the shore itself there once sprouted the hovels of tinkers and potters. On the opposite bank had sprawled Khitrov Market, whose environs were populated by rag-and-bone men, prostitutes, and tramps. It was their descendants who inhabited the tenements built here at the turn of the century, and these were the people, crammed now into moldering communal flats, who pointed to the vast building which rose up higher than any of the neighborhood churches, a flight of architectural insanity not without irony, with a spire, arches, colonnades above tiers of diverse heights, and said, “That’s an unholy place.”
Many residents of the block died unnatural deaths, and the narrow windows and stunted little balconies attracted suicides. Several times a year the emergency services would drive up to the block with sirens wailing and scrape up the flattened human remains which some compassionate soul had covered with a sheet. Statistics, a science so much cherished in Russia, had long ago established that the number of suicides rose on sunless winter days.
That December was unusually dismal. The sun did not once break through a blanket of cloud. It was the ideal time for a last flight.
The Gladyshevs usually dined in the dining room but ate their supper in the kitchen. One evening as Masha was finishing the potato fritters which Motya had cooked country style, Vera Ivanovna came into the kitchen. Motya informed her that someone else had “made the leap” today. The daughter of a famous aircraft designer had thrown herself from the seventh floor.
“Unlucky in love, I expect,” Motya commented.
“They spoil them. That’s what it leads to. You shouldn’t let girls out,” Vera Ivanovna responded sternly. She poured some boiled water into a glass and went out.
“Motya, what happened to her?” Masha asked, tearing herself away from the potatoes.
“What do you mean? She killed herself. It’s stone paving down there you know, not straw. Oh, this sinful world.” She sighed.
Masha put her clean plate in the sink and went to her room. They lived on the eleventh floor. There was no balcony in her room. She moved a chair over and climbed up onto the broad windowsill. A rudimentary little balustrade was squeezed in between the tenth and eleventh floors. Masha tried to open the window, but the bolts were paint-stuck.
Masha got undressed and put her things on the chair. Motya came in to say good night. Masha smiled, yawned, and fell asleep instantly. For the first time in her life at Tinkers Embankment, she fell into a light, happy sleep; for the first time she did not hear the quiet curses with which Vera Ivanovna came into her room at midnight; and the door of the terrifying nightmare did not open that night.
Something had changed in Masha from the day she heard about the girl who had “made the leap.” Evidently there was a possibility she hadn’t known about, and knowing about it made her feel better.
The next day Alexandra rang to see if she would like to go with Nike to a winter camp run by the Theater Society. Masha would have liked to go anywhere in the world with Nike. Nike was the only girl left from her old life: all her other friends in the southwest region of Moscow, where she had lived before, had vanished without trace, as if they too had been killed along with her parents.
For the few days remaining before New Year, Masha lived in a state of happy anticipation. Motya packed her case, covered it in protective canvas, and sewed a white square to it on which she wrote Masha’s name. The general’s chauffeur brought over her skis from the southwest. He couldn’t find the poles but bought some new red ones in Children’s World, and Masha stroked them and smelled them. They smelled more delicious than any food.
She was to be taken to Pushkin Square on the morning of December 31. She would meet Nike at the place from which the buses would be leaving. She imagined that all her friends from her old home would be there too: Olya, Nadya, and Alyona.
On the evening of the thirtieth her temperature rose to almost 104 degrees. Vera Ivanovna called the doctor and rang Alexandra Georgievna to inform her. That was the end of the trip.
Masha lay for two days in a high fever, opening her eyes from time to time and asking: “What’s the time? It must be time to go. Aren’t we going to be late?”
“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” Motya kept saying, hardly leaving her bedside.
In occasional lucid moments Masha saw Motya and Alexandra, Vera Ivanovna and even her grandfather, Pyotr Stepanovich. “When am I going to the camp?” Masha asked in a clear voice when the illness released its grip on her.
“But the holidays are over, my dear. What camp could you be going to?” Motya responded.
It was the end of the world.
In the evening Alexandra came and comforted her for a long time, promising to take her to stay in the summer at her dacha in Zagoryanka.
That night the nightmare came b
ack. The door from the corridor opened and somebody terrifying was slowly approaching her. She wanted to scream but couldn’t. She sat bolt upright, jumped out of bed in a strange state between sleeping and waking, moved the chair over to the windowsill, climbed up on it, and heaved the bolt with a strength which came from who knows where. The inner window frame opened. The second opened easily, and she slipped down off the sill before she even had time to feel the icy touch of the tin cowling. The hem of her nightdress snagged on its jagged edge, pulling her in just enough for her to fall lightly onto the snow-covered balustrade of the tenth floor.
An hour later Motya finished gorging herself and came out of her storeroom. A cold draft blew over her. Ice-cold air was coming from the open door of Masha’s room. She went in, saw the open window, gasped, and rushed to shut it. On the windowsill a small, uneven pile of snow had drifted. Only after she had closed the window did she notice that Masha was not in bed. Her legs buckled under her and she fell to the floor. She looked under the bed. She went over to the window. It was snowing heavily. She could see nothing other than the slow snowflakes.
Motya shoved her bare feet into felt boots, threw on a shawl and an old overcoat of her mistress’s, and ran to the lift. At the bottom she ran through the large vestibule with its red carpeting, squeezed through the massive door out to the street, and ran around the corner of the house. The snow was loose and level and sparkling prettily.
“Perhaps she’s been covered over already,” she thought, and walked along, kicking through the thick snow under the windows of their apartment with her boots. The little girl wasn’t there. Then she went back up and woke the master and mistress.
Masha was out on the balustrade for a further hour and a half before she was found. She was unconscious but hadn’t a scratch on her. Pyotr Stepanovich went out to the ambulance with the girl tucked up in blankets and then came back to his apartment. Vera Ivanovna sat throughout that hour and a half on the edge of her bed, not moving an inch or saying a word. After Masha had been taken away, the general led Vera Ivanovna into his office, sat her in the cold leather armchair and, taking her firmly by the shoulders, gave her a good shake: “Tell me what happened!”
Medea and Her Children Page 15