A sense of triumph engulfed her. At last she would be the equal of Nike and say to her on the telephone this very evening, “Nike, darling, I’ve hitched up with this guy, he’s so sweet, cute face, designer stubble, and you can tell at a glance that he’s got all his marbles about him.”
“Only bear in mind,” he warned her, “I have absolutely no time for courtship. But I’m free this evening. Let’s get away from here.”
Masha had been intending to go back and listen to a bespectacled youth who had been crumpling his papers while waiting for his turn, but there and then thought better of it.
“Okay, wait for me here.” She went into the lavatory, and he stood by the door.
Masha hurriedly put on her things. She had a feeling that there was absolutely no time to lose. Alik, without knowing it, had already infected her with his innate sense of urgency. He helped her on with the thin, elegant little coat that Alexandra had made.
Outside, it was dark and desolate, the worst kind of winter, with no snow but severely cold. Masha, as was the fashion in the preboot era, was wearing light shoes and no hat. Alik took hold of her cold, bony fingers.
“We’re always going to be very short of time, and there’s a lot to be said. To get the boring stuff over with: in weather like this it wouldn’t be a bad idea to wear felt boots and your grandmother’s shawl. I offer you that advice as a doctor. But as regards your poems,” he unconsciously moved closer to her, “there are some you should throw out, but some of them are remarkable.”
“Which ones should be thrown out?” Masha asked, flustered.
“No, it’s better if I tell you which ones you should keep.” And he recited to her one of the poems he had just heard and which he had memorized by ear and with total accuracy:
“We live like exiles in the busy Hades
of this sad, homeless world our orphaned Earth;
the autumn day is bright with light unfading
And pangs of piercing cold attend a birth.
Above the graveyard, cloudlike in the air,
a silence hovers redolent with singing,
a promise of relief through sculpted prayer,
a promise of tumultuous torrents bringing.
Though rustling maple leaves astound the gaze
and unconsumed by flames the eye astonish,
Though graves like martyrs’ pyres accusing blaze,
the calendar has yet to be abolished.”
“I think that is a very fine poem.”
“It’s in memory of my parents. They died in a car accident ten years ago,” Masha said, amazed how easy it was for her to tell him something she had never spoken about to anyone else.
“They lived their lives happily together and died on the same day?” Alik looked at her seriously.
“There’s nothing else left now but to believe that.”
Some marriages are made in bed, while others burgeon in the kitchen to the metallic music of the kitchen knife and the egg whisk; some couples are nest builders, forever redecorating, snapping up bargain lots of timber for their dacha plot, nails, drying oil, and fiberglass wrap; other couples live for blazing, set-piece rows.
Masha and Alik’s marriage was consummated in conversations. This was their ninth year together, but every evening when he came home from work, the soup would be left to get cold and the rissoles to burn while they told each other about the important events of the day.
Each of them lived life twice over: the first time directly, the second time in selective paraphrase. The paraphrase did slightly rearrange events, giving more prominence to something which had been less significant at the time and bringing a personal coloration to what had happened, but both of them were perfectly aware of that and took the other’s interests into account when deciding what to offer.
“Here’s something you’ll like,” Alik would say, stirring the hot soup in his bowl, “I’ve been saving it up for you all day.”
There would follow a description of a ridiculous row in the Metro that morning, or of a tree in the yard, or a conversation with a colleague. Or Masha would lug an old volume into the kitchen with so many bookmarks in it they looked like noodles, or a samizdat brochure and slew it around at the right place and say, “Here’s something I picked out specially for you.”
In recent years they had partly exchanged roles: previously he had been the one who read more and dug deeper into cultural problems, but now his researches left him no time for intellectual distractions, especially since he couldn’t yet move on from working in the ambulance service which, apart from being professionally interesting, left him with enough free time for research work in the laboratory. He had completed his postgraduate studies through extension courses, which had suited him fine.
Masha sat at home with her son, a unique little boy who could keep himself meaningfully occupied from morning till evening. She churned out entries for a journal of abstracts, read large numbers of books avidly, and wrote poetry and other less readily classifiable texts which seemed to have been plagiarized from a variety of other writers. She hadn’t yet found her own voice and was pulled in different directions—sometimes toward Rozanov, sometimes to Kharms.
Her poems were also written in different voices, and although they had been published along with those of other poets in magazines, hers had seemed peripheral and unremarkable. On the page they hadn’t looked like hers, the overall selection didn’t seem to have been made very well, and to crown it all there had been two printing errors. Alik was terribly proud and bought up a whole stack of copies to give to all their friends, but Masha privately resolved not to allow any more ephemeral publications but to wait until she could bring out a proper volume of her own work.
Their closeness was so rare and so complete that it showed in shared tastes, in the structure of their speech, and in the tone of their humor. Over the years even their body language became similar, and it looked as though by the time they were old they would be like a couple of parrots. Sometimes, guessing an unspoken thought from the other’s eyes, they would chorus their beloved Brodsky: “They had lived so long together that the second of January again fell on a Tuesday.”
Masha found a German word in a linguistics textbook which expressed their special relatedness: Geschwister. It was a unique word meaning “brother and sister,” but the German conjoining had some hidden additional meaning.
They had given each other no vows of fidelity. Indeed, on the eve of their wedding they had agreed that their union should be a union of two free people and that they would never stoop to jealousy and deceit because each would retain the right to independence. In the first year of marriage, feeling a slight disquiet that Alik should be the only man she had known, Masha undertook a few sexual experiments: with a former classmate, with a literary bureaucrat at a youth journal where she had once been published, and with some completely random individual, just to make sure she hadn’t been missing out.
She didn’t discuss it with her husband, but read him a poem written that year:
“Despised fidelity that smacks of duty
holds out the lure of casual affairs,
for only love is constancy and dares
bind not itself with vows and sophistry
and asks no bargain for the gift it shares.”
Alik guessed the meaning, said nothing, and gained a great deal thereby: Masha was completely reassured. Over the years of their marriage a few episodes came his way too. He did not go looking for them, but he didn’t run away from them either.
With the years, however, they became ever more closely attached and found more and more advantages in their family life. Observing colleagues and friends who married, divorced, or lightly embarked on a life of bachelor debauchery, he, like the Pharisee of whom he knew nothing, said in his heart: “God, we thank Thee that we are not as others are. We live an orderly and worthy life and are therefore content.”
His scientific work was going splendidly: so much so, indeed, that few of his col
leagues were capable of appreciating the results he was obtaining. His elite status, which in childhood had been such a heavy burden, made heavier by the embarrassing, unasked-for, and highly inconvenient fact of his being a Jew, changed its complexion over the years, but a good upbringing and his inborn good nature masked an ever-growing awareness of his superiority over the mediocre brains of the majority of his colleagues.
When his first article appeared in a prestigious American science journal, he looked down the list of the editorial board on the cover and told Masha, “There are four Nobel Prize–winners there.”
Masha glanced at his swarthy face, more Indian than Jewish, and knew that he was trying himself for size against the highest scientific honors. Reading his thoughts, she asked Nike, who still had a muffle left over from her dalliance with ceramics, to inscribe a poem on a china cup, which was Alik’s birthday present from his wife that year and on which in thick blue letters was written: “These things shall be: your morning dress; my evening gown; the King, listening, in his crown; a banquet for his guests.” The birthday guests greatly admired the cup, but no one apart from Alik caught the allusion.
Both of them enjoyed the fact that their wordless communication worked even in a crowd: they had only to exchange a glance to have shared their thoughts.
This time they had not seen each other for around two weeks, and Alik was bringing his wife sensational news. A famed American scientist who specialized in molecular biology had come to the Academy of Sciences to read a conference paper and give a lecture. He had duly visited the Bolshoi Ballet and the Tretyakov Gallery as prescribed by his social program, and had asked his interpreter to arrange a meeting for him with Mr. Schwartz. The interpreter contacted her superiors, passed on the intelligence, and received her instructions: the visitor was to be informed that Mr. Schwartz was unfortunately on holiday at the moment.
Mr. Schwartz was not, however, on holiday. Indeed, he came to the conference specifically to ask the American a particular specialized question. A five-minute conversation ensued during which the quick-witted American (not for nothing had his grandfather been born in Odessa) soon saw how the land lay, took Alik’s home telephone number, and late that evening came to visit him, paying the taxi-driver, who was also quick-witted in his way, a sum equivalent to Alik’s monthly salary.
All this had occurred in Masha’s absence. Debora Lvovna, Alik’s mother, was on holiday at a sanatorium. Mountains of unwashed dishes and piles of open books finally convinced the American that he was dealing with a genius, and he lost no time in making him an offer to come and work for him. In Boston, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That raised one technical but not insignificant problem: emigration. This was the development that Alik was bringing to his wife. Both of them were bursting to tell the other their news.
The topic of emigration was one of the most contentious among the intelligentsia in those years: to be or not to be, to go or not to go. “Yes, but supposing …” “No, but what if …?” Families were split, friendships sundered. Political motivations, economic, ideological, moral … And the actual business of getting out was so complex and agonizing, sometimes taking long years, demanding resoluteness, courage, or desperation. The official gap in the Iron Curtain was only open for Jews, although non-Jews used it too. This time it was the Black Sea that divided its waters to allow the Chosen People through, if not to the Promised Land then at least out of the latest Land of Egypt.
“It says in Exodus,” exclaimed Lyova Gottlieb, a close friend whom Alik called “the Principal Jew of the Soviet Union,” “that Moses led six hundred thousand men on foot out of Egypt, but nowhere is it said how many remained behind. Those who stayed simply ceased to exist. And those who didn’t leave Germany in 1933? Where are they?”
Alik was completely uninterested in his own life from a Jewish viewpoint: for him what mattered most was the advancing of science. Needless to say, he heard all these conversations taking place, and even took part in them himself, introducing a theoretical and unemotional perspective, but all that really concerned him was cellular aging.
What the American offer meant to him was that he would be able to work more effectively. “By about three hundred percent,” he estimated when telling Masha all about it. “The best equipment in the world, no problems with reagents, laboratory assistants to help me, and absolutely no material problems for you and me. And Alik can study at Harvard, eh? I am entirely ready for this. It’s up to you, Masha. Well, and Mother too, of course, but I can talk her around.”
“But when?” was all Masha could ask, entirely unready for events to take this turn.
“If there are no hitches, then in six months’ time, if we submit our documents straightaway. But it could drag on for a long time: that’s what I’m most worried about, because I’ll have to leave work immediately in order not to land my boss in trouble.” He had already thought everything through.
“Two weeks ago a proposal like this would have delighted me,” Masha thought. “But today I can’t bear to think about it.”
Alik had been hoping in the depths of his heart that Masha would be gladdened by the prospects this opened up, and he was puzzled by her hesitancy now. He didn’t yet know that their home life, so logical and well thought out, had cracked right from its crystal top down to its much despised bottom. Masha had not yet fully realized it herself.
Then Masha read Alik her recent poems, and he praised her and noted their new quality. He received Masha’s ardent confession about the revelation she had received in a new and intense relationship, about a special kind of perfection she had found in a different person, about a new experience in her life, as if a dulling film had been lifted from the whole world: from landscapes, from faces, from ordinary feelings.
“I don’t know what I should do with all this now,” Masha complained to her husband. “Perhaps from the generally accepted point of view [‘bourgeois’ wasn’t a word she ever used] it is terrible that it should be you I am telling this to, but I trust you so much. You are the person closest to me, and it only makes any sense at all to talk about this to you. You and I are one, as far as that is possible, but all the same I don’t know how we are to go on living. You say we should emigrate. Perhaps we should.”
She was slightly shivery, her face burning and her pupils dilated.
“Bad timing,” Alik decided, and brought half a bottle of brandy out of the kitchen. He poured two glasses and concluded magnanimously: “Well, let’s face it, this experience is indispensable for you. You are a poet, and in the last analysis, is this not the material that poetry is made from? Now you know there are higher forms of fidelity than sexual. I already knew that. You and I are both researchers, Masha. It’s just we have different areas. At the moment you are making a discovery of your own, and I can understand that. And I won’t stand in your way.” He poured them each another glass.
Brandy was the right prescription. Masha soon buried her face in his shoulder and murmured: “Alik, you are the best person in the world. You are my fortress. If you want, let’s go anywhere you like.”
They comforted themselves in each other’s arms, and reassured themselves of their eliteness, and confirmed to themselves their superiority over other family couples of their acquaintance who might indulge in all sorts of petty mischief, transient couplings in a locked bathroom, and have all sorts of piffling lies and baseness in their lives whereas they, Masha and Alik, were totally open and lived a life of purest truth.
Three days later Alik went back, leaving Masha with the children, the washing, and her poetry. She would be spending another month and a half in the Crimea, because Alik had brought her the money needed for that.
Two days after he left, Masha wrote her first letter. To Butonov. And followed it up with a second and a third. In the intervals between writing letters, she wrote short, desperate poems which she herself liked very much.
Butonov conscientiously collected her letters from the mailbox. He had given Masha
his Rastorguevo address only because during the summer, when his wife and daughter went to stay at the university-owned dacha of Olga’s friend, he usually stayed in Rastorguevo rather than in his wife’s apartment in Khamovniki. Butonov never worried about keeping secrets from his wife: Olga wasn’t nosy and would never have dreamed of opening someone else’s letters.
Masha’s letters surprised him greatly. They were written in tiny handwriting which sloped backward, and had drawings in the margins and stories from her childhood which had absolutely no bearing on anything; and for some reason they contained references to writers he’d never heard of, and a lot of hints that were quite unclear. In addition, the envelopes contained separate sheets of rough grey paper with poems. Butonov guessed she had written them herself. He showed one of the poems to Ivanov, who knew about that sort of thing. Ivanov read it aloud with a strange expression:
“Though love is of the soul, the body hale
has at this feast its own allotted ration.
You put your hand in his in joyous fashion:
the warmth that makes your spirit quail,
the blazing heat of carnal passion
are measured on a single scale.”
“Where did you get this, Valerii?” Ivanov asked in astonishment.
“A girl sent it to me,” Butonov said, shrugging. “Any good?”
“Yes. She probably lifted it from somewhere. Although I can’t think where,” Ivanov pronounced his highly professional judgment.
“Out of the question,” Butonov retorted confidently. “She’s not the kind to copy someone else’s stuff. She wrote it herself, I’ll swear she did.”
He had already forgotten about his latest southern romance, but this sweet girl seemed to have given it some quite excessive significance. Butonov had never had anyone sending him letters, had never written any himself, and had no intention of replying to these; but still they came.
Masha kept walking to the post office in Sudak and was terribly upset when there was no reply. Unable to bear it any longer, she rang Nike in Moscow and asked her to go out to Rastorguevo and see whether anything had happened to Butonov or why he wasn’t replying to her. Nike refused irritably, saying she was far too busy.
Medea and Her Children Page 25