On her way back in the evening, she would imagine how lonely the sick man must be feeling. On seeing her, he would prop himself up on one elbow, and his empty eyes would come to life.
One evening he said, “You must see so many people at work and in the metro, while all I ever see is this moth-eaten head.” And he pointed a pale finger at a brown elk head hanging on the wall.
Aleksandra Andreyevna’s colleagues felt sorry for her. They knew that her husband was seriously ill and that he needed a lot of care, even during the night.
“You, Aleksandra Andreyevna,” they would say, “are a true martyr.”
“What do you mean? It’s really not difficult at all. Far from it.”
But a twenty-hour day, at home and at her workplace, was too great a burden for an aging woman who was in poor health herself. After night after night of too little sleep, she was suffering not only from headaches but also from high blood pressure.
Aleksandra Andreyevna said nothing about her poor health to her husband. Sometimes, though, she would come to a sudden standstill as she was walking about the room. As if trying to remember something, she would put her hand over her eyes and the lower part of her forehead.
“You need a rest, Shura,” he would say. “Be kind to yourself.”
But words like this upset her, and even angered her.
She was on the staff of the archives of the Central Library. When she got to work, she would forget about the difficulties of the night. Fair-haired Zoya, who had been sent there immediately after graduating from her institute, would say, “Sit down now. Take the weight off your poor swollen legs!”
“They’re not so bad,” Aleksandra Andreyevna would answer with a smile.
Back at home she would tell her husband about the manuscripts and documents she was analyzing at work. She loved the 1870s and 1880s. To her there was something deeply precious about every least trifle to do with the Populists of that era—every least trifle concerning not only the more famous figures such as Osinsky, Kovalsky, Khalturin, Zhelvakov, Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, and Kibal'chich but also dozens of other forgotten revolutionaries in the inner circles or on the outer fringes of the various revolutionary organizations of the time: the Chaikovtsy, the Ishutin circle, the Black Repartition, and The People’s Will.
Dmitry Petrovich did not share his wife’s enthusiasm, which he put down to her coming from a revolutionary family. Her family photograph album was full of pictures of long-haired students with rugs thrown over their shoulders, of young women with short hair and severe faces, in dresses with narrow waists, long sleeves, and high black collars. Aleksandra Andreyevna remembered all their names. She—and she alone—remembered their sad and noble fates: this man had died, in exile, from tuberculosis; this woman had drowned herself in the Yenisey; another woman had perished while working in the province of Samara during a cholera epidemic; a third woman had lost her mind and died in a prison hospital.
To Dmitry Petrovich, an engineer and turbine specialist, all this seemed very noble and exalted but not exactly necessary. He was quite unable to remember the hyphenated surnames of so many of the populists. He was equally confused by the large number of them who shared the same surname; there were, for example, no less than three Mikhailovs: Adrian, Aleksandr, and Timofey. He also confused Sinegub of the Chaikovets with Lizogub of The People’s Will.
Nor could Dmitry Petrovich understand why his wife had once got so upset during a summer cruise down the Volga. After passing through Vasilsursk they had seen a steamer that had once been called the Sofya Perovskaya and that, after a refit and a new coat of paint, had been renamed the Valeriya Barsova. Valeriya Barsova, after all, was a truly splendid singer.
On another occasion, during a trip to Kiev, he had said to Aleksandra Andreyevna, “Look! There’s a huge pharmacy over there—named after your Zhelyabov!”
In answer she had shouted angrily, “It’s the main street, the Kreshchatik, that should be named after Zhelyabov, not just a pharmacy.”
“Dear, darling Shura!” Dmitry Petrovich had replied. “You do get carried away.”
He had no sympathy for the asceticism—the almost religious fanaticism—of the members of The People’s Will.
Those men and women had passed on; new generations had forgotten them. What Dmitry Petrovich loved was beautiful things. He loved wine and opera; he had enjoyed hunting. Even when he was getting on in years, he still liked wearing a fashionable suit. He liked choosing the right tie; he liked tying the knot the correct way.
One might have imagined that Aleksandra Andreyevna, who was indifferent to clothes, would be irritated by her husband’s tastes. In reality, however, there was nothing about him that she disliked. She liked all his weaknesses, all his whims. And so she talked freely to him, sharing all her thoughts about the era that captivated her, about the tragic struggle fought by the members of The People’s Will.
Now too, as he lay sick in bed, she would tell him about the things that upset her.
“Do you know what happened today, Mitya? I was criticized at a meeting. Remember that enchanting young Zoya who’s been sent to us? Well, she said I burden her with lots of unnecessary work to do with the 1870s and ’80s.”
Listening to his wife, seeing her cheeks flush with agitation, Dmitry Petrovich thought about how she was the only person in the world who was inseparably joined to him—through thought, feeling, and constant attention. No one else truly kept him in mind. Yes, everyone else, even their own daughter, merely recalled him—merely called him to mind now and then.
It was strange to think about the moments when Aleksandra Andreyevna got carried away by her work and stopped thinking about him. At such moments there was no one at all remembering him—not even the very finest of threads to link him to other people: people in other towns and cities, people in villages, people on trains...
He talked about this to Aleksandra Andreyevna, and she replied, “Your turbines, your methods for calculating the reliability of a blade—these things truly exist. As for Zhenya, she’s devoted to you. She doesn’t often write to you, but that’s neither here nor there. And do you really think your friends have forgotten you? Life’s hectic nowadays and they get very tired—but don’t forget how caring your colleagues were when you first got ill.”
“Yes, darling, I know,” he replied, and gave an exhausted nod of the head.
But she too understood that not all of his complaints could be put down to the excessive anxiety of a sick man.
His friends were all getting older now and they did, of course, find it tiring having to travel to work on crowded buses and trolleys. And they had worries and obligations of their own; they had problems at work, and there were tasks to be done at the dacha during the summer. All the same, it was upsetting for him that his old friends seldom asked after him, and that, if they did occasionally pay him a visit, they came neither in order to make him feel better, nor because they truly enjoyed it, but to avoid being nagged by a guilty conscience.
At the start of his illness, his colleagues had brought him presents of sweets and flowers, but it had not been long before they gave up coming. The progress of his illness was of no interest to them, and he himself was no longer interested in the life of the institute.
Their daughter, Zhenya, had married and moved to Kuibyshev, on the banks of the Volga. She had used to send him detailed letters, but now she wrote only to her mother. In her last letter she had written as a postscript, “How’s Papa? No change, I suppose.”
Zhenya was upset with her mother. It was annoying enough that her mother should devote all her time to people whom no one needed any longer. And now she was wasting her time on a sick man who was every bit as forgotten and useless as those forlorn figures from the 1870s and ’80s.
Why was it that Shura was so devoted to him? Maybe it was not simply from love but also from a sense of duty? After all, when she had been sent into exile in 1929, he, a man who adored Moscow, had left everything. He had left his friends, the
work he loved, their comfortable room in the center of town—and had gone to spend three years with her in Kazakhstan, living in a little wooden house in Semipalatinsk and working in a small brick factory.
Shura was always saying things like, “Your turbines, your calculation methods—they’re still alive.” But there had never been any turbines of his design—that was just Shura getting carried away—and as for his methods for calculating turbine-blade reliability, they were no longer in use, they had been replaced by newer methods.
No one could go on and on being one of the ill; one was expected either to get better again or else to join the ranks of the dead. When his colleagues gave him sweets, what they had really been saying was “We’re helping you to overcome this illness of yours!” And when his childhood friend Afanasy Mikhailovich—Afonka—had talked about hunting trips, what he had really been saying was “It won’t be long, Mitya—soon you and I will be out there again, making our way through bogs and forests!” During the first two weeks of his illness Zhenya too had believed that her father would recover, that he would join her in the summer on the banks of the Volga, that he would help to look after his grandson, and that with his advice—and his many important contacts—he would be able to help her husband in his work as an engineer. She had believed that he would continue to play many different roles in her life. But time had passed, and Dmitry Petrovich’s life remained very different indeed from the lives of healthy people: he did not work, he did not pay court to pretty colleagues, he did not join in arguments at meetings. He did not receive his pay, nor did he receive encouragements or rebukes from his superiors. Nor did he dance at birthday parties, get caught in the rain, or go for a quick glass of beer after work.
Dmitry Petrovich’s present concerns were very different: Would the medicine from the pharmacy come as a powder or in capsules? Would the nurse who came to give him his injection be the friendly nurse with the light, delicate touch, or would it be the sullen, slovenly nurse with the blunt needle and cold, heavy hands? What would his next cardiogram show? And these concerns were of no interest to his friends and colleagues.
The day came when all of them—daughter, friends, and colleagues alike—ceased to believe in Dmitry Petrovich’s recovery and therefore ceased to be interested in Dmitry Petrovich. If a man cannot get better, he must die. It is cruel. As far as the people around someone terminally ill are concerned, the only thing that can give meaning to his or her existence is death. Death is of interest to healthy people, but the life of someone terminally ill holds no interest for anyone. The interests of the terminally ill can never coincide with the interests of those who are healthy.
His life could no longer lead to actions or events of any kind—neither at work, nor among his fellow hunters, nor among the friends who were used to drinking and arguing with him, nor in the life of his own daughter. His death, on the other hand, could bring about a number of events and changes and even emotional conflicts. This is why news of someone who is terminally ill feeling better is always less interesting than the news that they have taken a turn for the worse.
Dmitry Petrovich’s impending death was of interest to a broad circle of people: the other tenants of his communal apartment; the house manager; his daughter, who could not help thinking that her father’s death might make it possible for her to return to Moscow; the receptionist at the district polyclinic; his fellow hunters, with their selfless curiosity about what would happen to his unique hunting rifle; and the woman who came every two weeks to clean the communal toilet and bathroom.
His hopeless, terminal existence, on the other hand, was of interest to only one person: Aleksandra Andreyevna. He never had even the least difficulty reading the look on her face; he could see it shift between joy and anxiety depending on whether he said that he had been less short of breath and had suffered no pains in his chest or that he had had spasms that day and had had to take nitroglycerine. Even if he was terminally ill, she still needed him. More than that—it was utterly impossible for her to exist without him. He knew this. She was horrified by the thought of his death, and this horror of hers was his only lifeline, the single thread that still tied him to life.
It was a quiet Saturday evening—a time when the other people in the apartment were usually at their dachas.
Sundays were a joy to Dmitry Petrovich. On Sundays he saw his wife all day long; he could hear her voice and the soft sound of her slippers.
He half opened his eyes and sighed. Aleksandra Andreyevna should have been home by now. But then he remembered: on her way back she was going to go to the pharmacy and the food shop.
He tried to doze off. When he dozed, he was less acutely aware of the agonizing slowness of time—and by evening his need for his wife was overwhelming. It was with a power equal to the power of extreme hunger that he felt the need to hear the familiar sound of the key, and then the sound of his wife’s voice, and to see in her eyes something that felt more necessary to him even than camphor: a living interest in a life that no one needed any longer.
“You know,” he had said a few days before this, “when you come near, I feel as if my mother were there beside me, as if I’m just a little baby lying in my cradle.”
“I’ve been missing you,” Aleksandra Andreyevna had replied.
***
He opened his eyes. The room was dark, although there was a little light from the streetlamps, and his wife was asleep in the bed beside him. He remembered that she had come back from work and given him some tea, and that he had then gone to sleep.
For a few moments he lay there half asleep, with a dim and anxious awareness that it was very silent. And then he realized. He realized that the silence was coming from Aleksandra Andreyevna’s bed.
He was seized with terror. He had been wrong. He had only imagined that his wife had come home, given him a cup of tea, and counted his drops of medicine into the glass. That had been yesterday—and the day before yesterday. It had been every day, but it had not been today.
He broke out into a sweat; his chest and his palms were damp. He had not—as he had previously thought—been the unhappiest being in the world. To be dying, warmed by the love of his wife, now seemed like happiness. But Shura was not there.
His fingers were slow to turn on the switch. Darkness was a defense; in darkness lay hope.
But he turned on the light. He saw the bed that Aleksandra Andreyevna had made up in the morning—and he saw that she was not there. She must have...she must have died.
What lay behind his last panic? Was it grief for his wife? Was it that her thoughts, her breath, her every look were more precious to him than anything else in the world? Or did his burning despair stem from the fact that he was alone and helpless, and that the only person who loved him had perished?
He tried to climb out of bed. He knocked on the wall with his withered fists. He lay unconscious for a moment. Then he knocked again.
But the apartment was empty. The other tenants would not come back from their dachas until Sunday evening. The nurse from the district polyclinic would not be coming until Monday morning. Sunday evening...Monday morning...There was an unimaginably long time to get through.
Where was Shura? Had she had a heart attack? Had she been knocked down by a car? Maybe she had breathed her last breath and her body was this moment being carried on a stretcher to the dissecting room.
Dmitry Petrovich no longer had any doubt about his wife’s death. He had turned on the light and seen her empty bed—and at that moment he had, it seemed to him, ceased to be of interest to anyone on earth. Continuing to exist, he had become a matter of indifference to everyone.
Shura and the reverence she felt for the members of The People’s Will...Some powerful force had drawn her to those young men and women, to their short path that had ended at the executioner’s block. But as for him...No, it was not for the sake of her pitying heart, not for the sake of her conscience and purity of soul that she had loved her sick husband. She had simply loved him�
�she just had. And that was something he had always found impossible to understand.
Thoughts were arising out of the darkness and giving birth to a still greater darkness.
Shura...Shura...
If he had had the strength to get to the window, he would have thrown himself out, down into the street.
But he was not only drawn to death; he was also terrified of it.
Everything around him was keeping silent—the dry electric light, the napkin on the table, Zhelyabov’s handsome, thoughtful face.
His heart was aching, burning, pierced by a hot, thick needle. Helpless before the terror of death—though death was something he himself was invoking—Dmitry Petrovich searched with trembling fingers for the pulse on his wrist.
And suddenly Dmitry Petrovich’s eyes met someone else’s slow, attentive eyes.
For many years now that head had been there on the wall, and he had long ago ceased to notice it.
When he had first brought the head back from the zoological museum taxidermist, it had seemed to fill the whole of space.
Hurrying off in the morning, standing in the doorway in his coat and hat, he had used to look around at the elk’s head before leaving the room. He had used suddenly to remember it in the tram.
When people he knew called by, he would tell them how he had come to kill the animal. Aleksandra Andreyevna had found this cruel story utterly unbearable.
The years had gone by. Dust had covered the elk’s head and Dmitry Petrovich’s eyes had slid over it with ever-increasing indifference. And eventually this long, powerful head, with a thin mouth and a nose that still seemed to be breathing, had once and for all become separate from the half dark of the autumn forest, from the smell of moss and decaying leaves—and Dmitry Petrovich, now remembering the elk only when they were cleaning the apartment, would say, “We must sprinkle DDT on the elk’s head. I think it’s become a home for bedbugs.”
And now, at this moment of terror, his eyes had again met the eyes of the cow elk.
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