White Walls

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  I was going ho-o-ome . . .

  My heart was fu-ull . . .

  Why don’t you go home? Why don’t you go to your precious Katya?

  “Georges always bought halvah for me at Abrikosov’s—remember?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. . . .”

  “Everything was dainty, delicate. . . .”

  “Don’t I know it. . . .”

  “And now. Take these: I thought they were intellectuals! But they cut their bread in huge chunks.”

  “Yes, yes, yes . . . and I . . .”

  “I always used the formal ‘you’ with my mother. I showed respect. But these ones, well, all right, I’m a stranger to them, but their parents, at least their parents, but no . . . nothing . . . And they grab at the table. Like this! With their hands, their hands.”

  God! How long must we put up with each other?

  And then they shut the little park to let it dry out. And we simply walk the streets. And one day suddenly a tall thin girl— a white mosquito—throws herself screeching on Maryvanna’s neck, weeping, and caressing her shaking red face!

  “My nanny! My dearest nanny!”

  And look: that lump, weeping and gasping, also grabs the girl, and they—strangers—right here before my eyes, are both shouting and weeping over their stupid love.

  “My dearest nanny!”

  Hey, girl, what’s the matter with you? Rub your eyes! It’s Maryvanna. Look, look, she has a wart. It’s our Maryvanna, our laughingstock: stupid, old, fat, silly.

  But does love know that?

  . . . Get out of here, girl! Don’t hang around here . . . with all that goopy stuff. . . . I push on, angry and tired. I’m much better than that girl. But Maryvanna doesn’t love me like her. The world is unfair. The world is upside down. I don’t understand anything. I want to go home! But Maryvanna has this radiant look, holds me tight by the hand, and puffs along ahead.

  “My feet hurt!”

  “We’ll make a circle and head back . . . soon, soon. . . .”

  Unfamiliar parts. Twilight. The light air has risen and is suspended over the houses; the dark air came out and is standing in the doorways and arches, in the holes of the street. An hour of depression for adults, of depression and fear for children. I’m all alone in the world, Mama has lost me, we’re going to get lost any second, now. I’m in a panic and I clutch Maryvanna’s cold hand.

  “That’s where I live. There’s my window—second from the corner.”

  Disembodied heads frown and open their mouths—they’ll eat me—under every window. The heads are horrible, and the damp darkness of the archway is creepy, and Maryvanna is not family. High up, in the window, nose pressed against the dark glass, the hanged uncle waits, running his hands over the glass, peering. Bug off, uncle! You’ll climb out of the Karpovka at night, disguised as an evil Chechen, grin under the moonlight—eyes rolled back into your head—and you’ll run real fast on all fours over the cobblestone street, across the courtyard to the front door, into the heavy, dense dark, with bare hands up the icy steps, along the square staircase spiral, higher, higher, to our door. . . .

  Hurry, hurry, home! To Nanny! O Nanny Grusha! Darling! Hurry to you! I’ve forgotten your face. I’ll huddle against your dark skirts, and your warm old hands will warm my frozen, lost, bewildered heart.

  Nanny will unwind my scarf, unfasten the button digging into my flesh, and take me into the cavelike warmth of the nursery, where there’s a red night light, where there are soft mountains of beds, and my bitter childish tears will drip into the light blue plate of self-important kasha, so pleased with itself. And seeing that, Nanny will also cry, and sit close, and hug me, and won’t ask but understand with her heart, the way an animal understands an animal, an old person a child, and a wordless creature its fellow.

  Lord, the world is so frightening and hostile, the poor homeless, inexperienced soul huddling in the square in the night wind. Who was so cruel, who filled me with love and hate, fear and depression, pity and shame, but didn’t give me words: stole speech, sealed my mouth, put on iron padlocks, and threw away the keys.

  Maryvanna, having had her fill of tea and feeling cheerier, drops by the nursery to say good night. Why is this child crying? Come on, come on. What happened? Cut yourself? Stomachache? Punished?

  (No, no, that’s not it. Shut up, you don’t understand! It’s just that in the light blue plate, on the bottom the geese and swans are going to catch the running children, and the girl’s hands are chipped off and she can’t cover her head or hold her brother.)

  “Come on, wipe those tears, shame on you, you’re a big girl now! Clean up your plate. And I’ll read you a poem.”

  Elbowing Maryvanna aside, lifting his top hat and squinting, Uncle Georges comes forward:

  Not white tulips

  In bridal lace—

  It’s the foam of the ocean

  On distant shores.

  The ship creaks

  Its ancient wood.

  Unheard of pleasures

  Beyond the foam.

  Not black tulips—

  It’s women in the night.

  Noon passions

  Are hot at midnight too.

  Roll out the barrel!

  The native women are fine!

  We’ve waited for this night—

  Let’s find our pleasure!

  Not crimson tulips

  Floating on his chest—

  The captain’s camisole

  Has three holes in front;

  The merry sailors

  Grin on the ocean floor . . .

  The women in that country

  Had beautiful hair.

  “What horrors at bedtime for the child,” grumbles Nanny.

  The uncle bows and leaves. Maryvanna shuts the door behind herself: until tomorrow.

  Go away all of you, leave me alone, you don’t understand anything.

  A prickly ball spins in my chest, and unspoken words bubble on my lips, smeared by tears. The red night light nods. Why, she has a fever, someone far far away cries, but he can’t shout over the noise of wings, geese and swans attacking from the noisy sky.

  . . . The kitchen door is shut. The sun breaks through the matte glass. Noon spills gold onto the parquet floor. Silence. Beyond the door Maryvanna weeps, and complains about us.

  “I can’t take any more! What is this—day after day, it gets worse . . . contrary, spiteful. . . . I’ve lived a hard life, always among strangers, and I’ve been treated in many ways, of course. . . . No, the terms—I’m not complaining, the terms are fine, but at my age . . . and with my health . . . Where does that spirit of contradiction, that hostility come from. . . . I wanted a little poetry, loftiness. . . . Useless . . . I can’t take any more. . . .”

  She’s leaving us.

  Maryvanna is leaving us. Maryvanna blows her nose into a tiny handkerchief. She powders her red nose, stares deeply into the mirror, hesitates, seems to be seeking something in its inaccessible, sealed universe. And really, deep in its twilight forgotten curtains stir, candle flames flicker, and the pale uncle comes out with a black piece of paper in his hands.

  Princess Rose grew weary of life

  And ended it at sunset.

  She wet her lips sadly

  With poisoned wine.

  And the prince froze like a statue

  In the grim power of sorrow,

  And the retinue whispers condolences

  That she was innocent.

  The porphyry parents

  Had their heralds announce

  That the grieving populace

  Lower flags in the towers.

  I enter the funeral procession

  As a funereal violin,

  I place narcissus on the princess’s

  Grave with a melancholy smile.

  And pretending sorrow,

  I lower my eyes, so that they cannot see:

  What a wedding awaits me!

  You’ve never seen its like.

  The ch
andeliers are covered with deathly white netting, and the mirrors with black. Maryvanna pulls down her heavy veil, gathers the ruins of her purse with trembling hands, turns and leaves, her worn shoes scuffing over the doorsill, beyond the limit, forever out of our lives.

  Spring is still weak, but the snow is gone, and the remaining black crusts lie only in stone corners. It’s warm in the sunshine.

  Farewell, Maryvanna!

  We’re ready for summer.

  Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

  OKKERVIL RIVER

  WHEN THE sun moved into the sign of Scorpio, it grew very windy, dark, and rainy. The wet, streaming city, banging wind against the glass outside the defenseless, uncurtained, bachelor’s window with processed cheeses cooling between the panes on the sill, seemed to be Peter’s evil plan, the revenge of the huge, bug-eyed, big-mouthed, and toothy carpenter-tsar, ship’s axe in his upraised hand, chasing and gaining on his weak and terrified subjects in their nightmares. The rivers, rushing out to the windblown and threatening sea, bucked and with hissing urgency opened the cast-iron hatches and quickly raised their watery backs in museum cellars, licking at the fragile collections that were crumbling into damp sand, at shamans’ masks made of rooster feathers, at crooked foreign swords, at beaded robes, and at the sinewy feet of the angry museum staff brought from their beds in the middle of the night. On days like that, when the rain, darkness, and window-bending wind reflected the white solemn face of loneliness, Simeonov, feeling particularly big-nosed and balding and particularly feeling his years around his face and his cheap socks far below, on the edge of existence, would put on the teakettle, wipe dust with his sleeve from the table, clearing away the books that stuck out their white bookmark tongues, set up the gramophone, selecting the right-sized book to support its listing side, and in blissful anticipation pull out Vera Vasilevna from the torn and yellow-stained jacket—an old and heavy disc, anthracite in color, and not disfigured by smooth concentric circles—one love song on each side.

  “No! it’s not you! I love! so passionately!” Vera Vasilevna skipped, creaking and hissing, quickly spinning under the needle; the hiss creak and spin formed a black tunnel that widened into the gramophone horn, and triumphant in her victory over Simeonov, speeding out of the festooned orchid of her voice, divine, low, dark, lacy, and dusty at first and then throbbing with underwater pressure, rising up from the depths, transforming, trembling on the water like flames—pshsts-pshstspshsts, pshsts-pshsts-pshsts—filling like a sail, getting louder, breaking hawsers, speeding unrestrained pshsts-pshsts-pshsts a caravel over the nocturnal waters splashing flames—stronger—spreading its wings, gathering speed, smoothly tearing away from the remaining bulk of the flow that had given birth to it, away from the tiny Simeonov left on shore, his balding bare head lifted to the gigantic, glowing, dimming half sky to the voice coming in a triumphant cry—no, it wasn’t he whom Vera Vasilevna loved so passionately, but still, essentially, she loved only him, and it was mutual. Kh-shch-shch-shch.

  Simeonov carefully removed the now silent Vera Vasilevna, shaking the record, holding it between straightened, respectful hands; he examined the ancient label: Ah, where are you now, Vera Vasilevna? Where are your white bones now? And turning her over on her back, he placed the needle, squinting at the olive-black shimmer of the bobbing thick disc, and listened once more, longing for the long-faded, pshsts, chrysanthemums in the garden, pshsts, where they had met, and once again, gathering underwater pressure, throwing off dust, laces, and years, Vera Vasilevna creaked and appeared as a languorous naiad—an unathletic, slightly plump turn-of-the-century naiad—O sweet pear, guitar, hourglass, slope-hipped champagne bottle!

  And by then the teakettle would be aboil, and Simeonov, fishing some processed cheese or ham scraps from the window-sill, would put the record on again and have a bachelor feast off a newspaper, delighting in the fact that Tamara would not find him today, would not disturb his precious rendezvous with Vera Vasilevna. He was happy alone in his small apartment, alone with Vera Vasilevna. The door was securely locked against Tamara, and the tea was strong and sweet, and the translation of the unneeded book from the rare language was almost complete—he would have money soon, and Simeonov would buy a scarce record from a shark for a high price, one where Vera Vasilevna regrets that spring will come but not for her—a man’s romance, a romance of solitude, and the incorporeal Vera Vasilevna will sing it, merging with Simeonov into a single longing, sobbing voice. O blessed solitude! Solitude eats right out of the frying pan, spears a cold meat patty from a murky half-liter jar, makes tea right in the mug—so what? Peace and freedom! A family rattles the dish cupboard, sets out traps of cups and saucers, catches your soul with knife and fork—gets it under the ribs from both sides—smothers it with a tea caddy, tosses a tablecloth over its head, but the free lone soul slips out through the linen fringe, squeezes like an eel through the napkin ring, and—hop! catch me if you can!—it’s back in the dark magical circle filled with flames, outlined by Vera Vasilevna’s voice, following her skirts and fan from the bright ballroom out onto the summer balcony at night, the spacious semicircle above a sweet-smelling bed of chrysanthemums; well, actually, their white, dry, and bitter aroma is an autumnal one, a harbinger of fall separation, oblivion, but love still lives in my ailing heart—a sickly smell, the smell of sadness and decay, where are you now, Vera Vasilevna, perhaps in Paris or Shanghai and which rain—Parisian light blue or Chinese yellow—drizzles over your grave, and whose soil chills your white bones? No, it’s not you I love so passionately. (That’s what you say. Of course it’s me, Vera Vasilevna.)

  Trolleys passed Simeonov’s window, once upon a time clanging their bells and swinging the hanging loops that resembled stirrups—Simeonov kept thinking that the horses were hidden up in the ceiling, like portraits of trolley ancestors taken up to the attic; but the bells grew still, and now all he heard was the rattle, clickety-clack, and squeals on the turns, and at last the red-sided cars with wooden benches died, and the new cars were rounded, noiseless, hissing at stops, and you could sit, plopping down on the soft seat that gasped and gave up the ghost beneath you, and ride off into the blue yonder to the last stop, beckoning with its name: Okkervil River. But Simeonov had never gone there. It was the end of the world and there was nothing there for him, but that wasn’t it, really: without seeing or knowing that distant, almost non-Leningrad river, he could imagine it in any way he chose: a murky greenish flow, for instance, with a slow green sun murkily floating in it, silvery willows softly hanging down from the gentle bank, red brick two-story houses with tile roofs, humped wooden bridges—a quiet world in a sleepy stupor; but actually it was probably filled with warehouses, fences, and some stinking factory spitting out mother-of-pearl toxic gases, a dump smoldering smelly smoke, or something else hopeless, provincial, and trite. No, no reason to be disillusioned by going to Okkervil River, it was better to mentally plant long-haired willows on its banks, set up steep-roofed houses, release slow-moving residents, perhaps in German caps, striped stockings, with long porcelain pipes in their mouths . . . even better to pave the Okkervil’s embankment, fill the river with gray water, sketch in bridges with towers and chains, smooth out the granite parapets with a curved template, line the embankment with tall gray houses with cast iron grates on the windows—with a fish-scale motif on top of the gates and nasturtiums peeking from the balconies—and settle young Vera Vasilevna there and let her walk, pulling on a long glove, along the paving stones, placing her feet close together, stepping daintily with her black snub-toed slippers with apple-round heels, in a small round hat with a veil, through the still drizzle of a St. Petersburg morning; and in that case, make the fog light blue.

  Let’s have light blue fog. The fog in place, Vera Vasilevna walks, her round heels clicking, across the entire paved section held in Simeonov’s imagination, here’s the edge of the scenery, the director’s run out of means, he is powerless and weary, he releases the actors, crosses out the balconies wit
h nasturtiums, gives those who like it the grating with fish-scale motif, flicks the granite parapets into the water, stuffs the towered bridges into his pockets—the pockets bulge, the chains droop as if from grandfather’s watch, and only the Okkervil River flows on, narrowing and widening feverishly, unable to select a permanent image for itself.

  Simeonov ate processed cheese, translated boring books, sometimes brought women home in the evenings and in the morning, disappointed, saw them out—no! it’s not you!—hid from Tamara, who kept coming over with washed laundry and fried potatoes and flowered curtains for the windows, and who assiduously kept forgetting important things at Simeonov’s—hairpins or a handkerchief she needed urgently by nightfall, and she would travel across the whole city to get them, and Simeonov would put out the light and stand pressed against the foyer wall while she banged on the door, and very often he gave in, and then he had a hot meal for dinner and drank strong tea from a blue and gold cup and had homemade cookies for dessert, and it was too late for Tamara to go back home, of course; the last trolley had gone and it wouldn’t reach the foggy Okkervil River, and Tamara would fluff up the pillows while Vera Vasilevna—turning her back and not listening to Simeonov’s explanations—would walk into the night along the embankment, swaying on her apple-round heels.

  The autumn was thickening when he purchased a heavy disc, chipped on one side, from a shark—they had haggled over the damage, the price was very high, and why? because Vera Vasilevna was forgotten, was never played on the radio, never flashed in a newsreel, and now only refined eccentrics, snobs, amateurs, and aesthetes who felt like throwing money on the incorporeal chased after her records, collected wire recordings, transcribed her low, dark voice that glowed like aged wine. The old woman’s still alive, the shark said, she lives somewhere in Leningrad, in poverty, they say, and shabbiness, she didn’t shine too long in her day, either; she lost her diamonds, husband, apartment, son, two lovers, and finally her voice: in that order; and she managed to handle all those losses before she was thirty-five, and she stopped singing back then, though she’s still alive. So that’s how it is, thought Simeonov with heavy heart on the way home over bridges and through gardens, across trolley tracks, thinking that’s how it is. . . . And locking the door, making tea, he put on his newly acquired treasure and, looking out the window at the heavy colored clouds looming on the sunset side, built, as usual, a section of the granite embankment, erected a bridge: the towers were heavier this time, and the chains were very cast iron, and the wind ruffled and wrinkled, agitated the broad gray smoothness of the Okkervil River, and Vera Vasilevna, tripping more than she ought in her uncomfortable heels invented by Simeonov, wrung her hands and bent her neatly coiffed head toward her sloping little shoulder—the moon glowed so softly, so softly, and my thoughts are full of you—the moon wouldn’t cooperate and slipped out like soap from his hands, sliding across the Okkervil clouds—there were always problems with the Okkervil skies—how restlessly the transparent, tamed shadows of our imagination scurry when the noises and smells of real life penetrate into their cool, foggy world.