Vera Ivanovna smiled an out-of-place smile. “She was behind it all. She killed my Tanya.”
“What?” Pyotr Stepanovich demanded, guessing at last that his wife was mad.
“She’s a little murderess, she was behind it all, she …”
The next ambulance took Vera Ivanovna away. The general didn’t wait for morning but called it immediately. That night he went down in the lift for a second time to liaise with the emergency services. Coming back up, he vowed not to spend another day under the same roof as his wife.
In the morning he rang Alexandra Georgievna, told her very tersely what had happened, and asked her to take Masha to live with her as soon as she was discharged from the hospital. The next day the general went off on a tour of inspection to Vladivostok.
Masha saw her grandmother only once more after that, at her funeral. Pyotr Stepanovich was as good as his word: Vera Ivanovna lived out the eight years of life remaining to her in a privileged clinic far from all her antique furniture, porcelain, and crystal. Masha did not recognize the dead, wizened old woman with sparse grey hair as the fine-looking Grandma Vera with the splendid mane who used to come in a cherry-red dressing gown into her room when she was seven years old to utter whispered curses at her in the night.
A week after this disaster with a relatively happy ending, the nondescript, provincial-looking Jewish Dr. Feldman pushed Alexandra Georgievna into a lumber room under the stairs which was piled up with old hospital beds, bundles of torn laundry, and boxes, and sat her down on one rickety stool and himself on another with three legs. An old knitted shirt with a stretched collar and a badly knotted tie looked out of the opening of his hospital coat. Even his bald head seemed untidy, with irregularly sized little clumps of hair resembling fur about to molt.
He folded his Hippocratic hands professionally in front of him and began: “Alexandra Georgievna, if I’m not mistaken. It’s completely impossible to speak privately here. This is the only place we won’t be interrupted. I have something serious to say to you. I want you to understand that the mental health of this child is entirely in your hands. The girl has been so profoundly traumatized that it is difficult to foresee the remoter consequences. I am quite sure many of my colleagues would insist that she become an inpatient and be given serious drug-based treatment. That may not yet be necessary: there’s no way of establishing a clear prognosis, but I think that there is a chance of burying the whole sorry business.” He looked awkwardly aware of having used an inappropriate expression. “I mean that the mind has formidable defense mechanisms, and perhaps these will become operative here. Fortunately, Masha is not fully aware of what happened. She hadn’t consciously formulated the intention of committing suicide, and is not aware of having attempted it. What happened to her may be regarded rather as a reflex, like when someone quickly pulls back their hand when they’ve taken hold of something hot. I have spoken to Masha a lot. She is reluctant to open up, but when she does, she talks sincerely, honestly, and you know”—he abandoned his quasi-scientific discourse—“she is an enchanting little girl, so clever and bright eyed, and somehow with very good moral instincts. A delightful child.” His face lightened and he even became likable.
“Just like someone else I know,” darted through Alexandra’s mind.
“Some people are crippled by suffering, but others, you know, are somehow raised up by it. What she needs right now is a hothouse, an incubator. I would take her out of school this year in order, you know, to rule out mischance: a bad teacher, unkind children. It would be better to keep her at home until next year; and make sure she has a very, very protective environment.” He became animated. “And absolutely no further contact with that grandmother! None at all. She has instilled a guilt complex in her for the death of her parents, which is something not every adult could cope with. All of this can be squeezed out. Try to avoid reminding her about this period, and it would also be best not to remind her about her parents. Here is my telephone number. Call me.” He took out a slip of paper he had already prepared. “I am not going to abandon Masha. I shall be keeping an eye on her. Thank you, that’s all I needed to say.”
Alexandra had not expected Masha to be allowed out so soon. Her belongings, moved for the second time in half a year to a new home by the general’s chauffeur, hadn’t yet been sorted and stood there together with the no longer needed suitcase and skis. Alexandra went home immediately after her talk with the doctor to get Masha’s things, and the same day took her back to Uspensky Lane.
It was the middle of January. The New Year’s tree had not yet been taken down, the table was still moved to one side for the holiday, and they even had a visitor: Alexandra’s oldest daughter Lidia, who was pregnant. The food was nothing special, not fare for a celebration: a pickled salad, rissoles with macaroni, and some slightly burned biscuits which Nike had cooked in a rush just before Masha arrived.
But then again, as far as the love prescribed by the doctor was concerned, things could not have been better: Alexandra’s heart was simply overflowing with prayerful gratitude that Masha’s life had been spared by a miracle and that she was well and living in her home. None of her own children seemed to her at that moment as dearly loved as this fragile, grey-eyed little girl who didn’t seem at all like the rest of them.
Nike cuddled her and hugged her and did everything she could think of to keep her amused. Masha sat at the table for a time and then moved to a little child’s wicker armchair which Ivan Isaevich had brought from somewhere a few days before her arrival: he had spent two days mending a broken arm and fixing a piece of red material and a fringe to the seat.
Made drowsy by her pregnancy, Lidia soon left. She and her husband were living in Ivan Isaevich’s old room now.
Although the whole family had been looking forward to Masha’s arrival, her timing was unexpected, and the result was that they had nowhere for her to sleep. Nike went off to sleep in her mother’s bed, and Masha was put in Nike’s little boat, which she had almost grown out of over the summer. Masha’s eyes were drooping, but when they put her to bed, sleep departed. She lay there with her eyes open and thought about going to the winter camp with Nike next year.
Having washed the dishes and put them away, Alexandra came over and sat down beside the little girl.
“Can I hold your hand?” Masha asked her.
Alexandra took Masha’s hand, and she was soon asleep. But when Alexandra tried to carefully free her hand, Masha opened her eyes and said, “Can I hold your hand?”
Alexandra sat this way till morning beside her sleeping granddaughter. Ivan Isaevich wanted to relieve her at her silent vigil, but she just shook her head and motioned to him to go off to bed. It was the first night of many. Without someone to lead her through the night, her grandmother or Nike, Masha could not sleep, and even after falling asleep she sometimes woke with a scream, and then Alexandra or Nike would take her to their own bed and comfort her. It was as if there were two little girls: the daytime Masha, calm, loving, and outgoing, and the nighttime Masha, haunted and afraid.
They put a folding bed beside Masha’s, and it was usually Nike who slept there. She was better than her mother at watching over Masha’s fragile sleep and, if she was disturbed, could get back to sleep again right away. Nike was altogether more help to her mother than her older sister Vera, who was a college student, passionately interested in scholarship of every description, and, in addition to her studies at the institute, attending courses in German, Alexandra thought, or in some obscure branch of aesthetics.
Nike was twelve and had already attained a good height and acquired all sorts of feminine skills; a cluster of little spots in the middle of her forehead testified that the time was approaching when her gifts would be called upon.
Masha moved to Uspensky Lane just as Nike was losing interest in the traditional amusement of little girls, playing with dolls, and the live Masha promptly replaced all the Katyas and Lyalyas she had been practicing her inchoate maternal instincts on
at such length. The whole contingent of dolls along with a pile of little coats and dresses which nimble-fingered Alexandra never tired of sewing for them passed to Masha, and Nike now felt herself the matriarch of a large family consisting of her daughter Masha and lots of doll granddaughters.
Many years later, after Katya had been born, Nike confessed to Alexandra that she must have used up the first flush of her maternal feelings on her cousin, because she never felt for her own children a comparable all-consuming love, the taking of another person so completely into her heart as she did in the first years Masha lived in their house. It was particularly true of that first year, when her whole life was colored by compassion for Masha, holding her hand at night, braiding her hair in the morning, and taking her out after school for walks down Strastnoy Boulevard. Nike occupied an enormous place in Masha’s life, which it was difficult to define: she was her best friend, her elder sister, the best at everything, ideal in every way.
The following year, when Masha went back to school again, Nike would take her there in the morning and Ivan Isaevich would collect her in the afternoon. After her classes he would either take her home or cart her off with himself to the theater.
Soon after Masha’s arrival Alexandra’s illustrious patroness died, and she stopped working at the theater. Now she was managing a small private atelier which dressed the government’s wives. It was an illegal business activity, but Alexandra still had certain backers from her earlier years.
The crepe de Chine offcuts from vast dresses for government officials’ wives went to provide outfits for the dolls, but both Nike and Masha developed a lifelong aversion to anything pink, light blue, flounced, or pleated. When they were a little older, both of them took to wearing men’s shirts, and jeans when those became available in Russia.
Despite dressing in what seemed to Alexandra a thoroughly unfeminine manner, by the age of sixteen Nike was a runaway success. The telephone rang night and day, and Ivan Isaevich looked at Alexandra, expecting that any moment now she would put a stop to her daughter’s turbulent lifestyle.
Alexandra, however, seemed if anything to be delighting in Nike’s conquests. At the end of the ninth grade Nike embarked on a headlong romance with a youth poet who had become wildly fashionable, and without finishing her last term flounced off with him to Koktebel, announcing this ex post facto by telegram when she was already in Simferopol.
Masha had become Nike’s confidante from the age of eleven, and received her confessions with secret horror and admiration. Nike raked in pleasures large and small with both arms, and any sour little berries or pips she just spat out without giving them a second thought. She also spat out, as it happened, her schooling.
Alexandra did not tell her off, did not go in for senseless dressings down, and, mindful of the days of her own youth, quickly found Nike a place in a college of theater design where she had good contacts from when she worked in the theater. Nike did a bit of drawing, passed the exams with the requisite Grade Fours, and joyfully threw out her school uniform. A year later she was already more or less married.
Masha was now the last child of elderly parents, and the entire life of the family revolved around her. Her night fears had stopped, but her early contact with the dark abyss of madness left her with a subtle awareness of the mystical, a sensitivity toward the world, and an artistic imagination: all the things which go into creating an aptitude for poetry. By the age of fourteen she was wildly enthusiastic about Pasternak’s poetry, adored Akhmatova, and was writing secret poems in a secret notebook.
CHAPTER 10
Toward evening, clouds built up over the mountains in the place known as Rotting Dell, and in the house an atmosphere built up of silent expectation. Nike was expecting Butonov to look in. As she saw it, after their nocturnal romp it was for him to make the next move. The more so since she could not remember whether she had told him she was preparing to leave.
Masha was waiting too, her expectation all the more tense since she could not decide who she wanted to see more: her husband Alik who was taking some of his holiday entitlement to come down for a few days, or Butonov. She could still see him running down the hill, leaping over the thorn bushes and jumping up and down on the scree. Perhaps her infatuation might indeed have been dispelled if she had sat in the kitchen and talked to him.
“He’s completely thick,” she recalled Nike’s words, resorting to a saving but meaningless logic which proposed that someone who was completely thick couldn’t be the object of an infatuation.
The person most acutely tormented by expectation was little Liza. That morning, after all her petty squabbling and displeasure with Tanya the day before, she had discovered that really she couldn’t live without her. She had been waiting all day for her to come, pestering everyone, and now in the evening, tired of waiting, was wringing her hands and throwing a tantrum. Nike never took Liza’s excessive demands on life too seriously, but this time she smiled: she too was having an affair of the heart. “She’s just like me. If I want something, I want it now.”
And right now the wishes of mother and daughter partly coincided. Both were eager to continue their romance.
“Oh, do stop it. Get dressed and let’s go to see your Tanya,” Nike mollified her daughter, who ran to put on her best dress.
With the buttons on the back of her dress undone and with a whole armful of toys, Liza returned to Nike in the kitchen to ask which toy she could give to Tanya.
“Whichever one you don’t mind parting with,” Nike smiled.
Medea looked at her tear-stained granddaughter and thought to herself, “So hot-blooded. How enchanting she is.”
“Liza, come here. I’ll do up your buttons,” Medea commanded, and the little girl obediently came over and turned her back.
It was difficult to get the small buttons into the even smaller buttonholes. Her fair hair still had that familiar sweet baby smell.
Fifteen minutes later they were at Nora’s, sitting in her little house decked with arrangements of wisteria and tamarisk. The tiny summer house had a Ukrainian coziness about it, was cleanly whitewashed, and the earthen floor was covered with mats.
Liza had hidden the hare she had brought under her skirt and was trying to intrigue Tanya, but Tanya had her eyes down and was eating her porridge. Nora, as ever, was complaining mildly that they had got very tired yesterday, that the sun had been too hot, that the walk had really turned out to be very long. She went on and on. Nike sat by the window constantly glancing over toward the owners’ residence.
“Valerii hasn’t come out all day, either,” Nora said, nodding in the direction of the Kravchuks’ house. “He’s watching television.”
Nike got lightly to her feet, turned at the door, and said, “I’m just going to see Aunt Ada for a minute.”
The television was turned up full volume, and there was a big meal on the table. Landlord Mikhail didn’t like small portions, and Ada’s saucepans, for all the modest size of her family, were practically the size of buckets. She worked in the kitchens of one of the sanatoriums and had all the resources of the state catering organization at her command, which also reflected gratifyingly on the rations of the two pigs she kept.
Valerii and Mikhail were sitting looking slightly dazed after their heavy meal, while Ada herself had just gone down to the cellar for the stewed fruit. She came into the room behind Nike with two three-liter jars. Ada and Nike kissed.
“Plums,” Nike guessed.
“Nike, do sit down. Mikhail, pour something,” Ada ordered her husband.
Butonov stared fixedly at the television.
“I won’t, I just came in to say hello. My Liza is visiting your lodgers,” Nike excused herself.
“You don’t come to see us yourself. You only visit our tenants,” Ada reproached her.
“No, really, I’ve come ’round several times, but you were either out at work or driving around looking up your friends,” Nike said.
Ada furrowed her little brow and rubbe
d her nose, which was barely visible on her fat face.
“That’s right enough, we went to Kamenka to see my godmother.”
Mikhail had meanwhile already poured her a glass of chacha. He was good at all sorts of practical things, as Valerii had already heard from his neighbor Vitka: distilling chacha, smoking meat, salting fish. No matter where Mikhail lived, in Murmansk, in the Caucasus, in Kazakhstan, what interested him most was what people ate, and he made a mental note of all the best practices.
“Here’s to our meeting,” Nike exclaimed. “Your health!”
She held out the glass to Butonov too, and he finally tore himself away from the television. She gave him a look which Butonov did not like. Right now he didn’t like Nike. Her head was tightly bound with an ancient green scarf which concealed her lively hair and made her face seem too long, and her dress was the color of dilute iodine. Little did Butonov know that Nike had put on precisely the things which most suited her, and in which she had posed for a famous artist. It was he who had told her to wear the scarf tight, and had gazed at her for a long time almost in tears, repeating over and over again, “What a face … my God, what a face … it’s a Fayum portrait.”
But Butonov knew nothing about Fayum portraiture, and was just feeling ratty that she had come trolloping over here to him without an invitation, a right he hadn’t conferred on her yet.
“This is a friend of our Vitka. He’s a famous doctor,” Ada boasted.
“Yes, we went to the coves with Valerii yesterday. We’re already acquainted.”
“You always were quick off the mark,” Ada said waspishly, alluding to something Butonov didn’t know about.
“Yes, that’s the truth,” Nike replied brazenly.
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