White Walls

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  Ah, how he loved me! Should I go or not?

  A human life has four seasons. Spring! Summer. Autumn . . . Winter? But winter was behind Alexandra Ernestovna—where was she now? Where were her moist, colorless eyes directed? Head back, red lid pulled away, Alexandra Ernestovna squeezes yellow drops into her eyes. Her scalp shows like a pink balloon through the thin net. Could this mouse tail have been a thick black peacock tail caressing her shoulders sixty years ago? Had the persistent but poor Ivan Nikolayevich drowned in those eyes—once and for all? Alexandra Ernestovna groans and feels around with her gnarled feet for her slippers.

  “We’ll have some tea now. I won’t let you go without a cup. No-no-no, don’t even think about it.”

  I’m not going anywhere. That’s why I dropped by—for a cup of tea. And I brought pastry. I’ll put the kettle on, don’t worry. And she gets the velvet-covered album and the old letters.

  It was a long way to the kitchen, to another city, along an endlessly shining floor, so polished the red paste left traces on my shoes for two days. At the end of the corridor tunnel, like a light in a deep robber forest, glowed the circle of the kitchen window. Twenty-three neighbors were silent behind the clean white doors. Halfway down was a wall telephone. A white note tacked up once upon a time by Alexandra Ernestovna: “Fire—01. Emergency—03. In case of my death call Elizaveta Osipovna.” Elizaveta Osipovna herself is long gone. No matter. Alexandra Ernestovna forgot.

  The kitchen is painfully, lifelessly clean. Somebody’s cabbage soup talks to itself on one of the stoves. In the corner stands a curly cone of smell left by a Belomor-smoking neighbor. A chicken hangs in a net bag outside the window as if being punished, twisting in the black wind. A bare wet tree droops in grief. A drunkard unbuttons his coat, resting his face on the fence. And what if Alexandra Ernestovna had agreed to abandon everything and fly south to be with Ivan Nikolayevich? Where would she be now? She had sent a telegram (I’m coming, meet me), packed her things, tucked the ticket away in the secret compartment of her wallet, pinned her peacock hair up high, and sat in an armchair by the window to wait. And far south, Ivan Nikolayevich, agitated, unable to believe his good fortune, rushed to the railroad station—to run, worry, fluster, give orders, hire, negotiate, lose his mind, stare at the horizon enveloped in dull heat. And then? She stayed in the armchair until evening, until the first pure stars. And then? She pulled the pins from her hair, shook her head. . . . And then? Why keep asking and then, and then? Life passed, that’s what happened then.

  The teakettle came to a boil. I’ll make it strong. A simple piece for the kitchen xylophone: lid, lid, spoon, lid, rag, lid, rag, rag, spoon, handle, handle. It’s a long way back down the long corridor with two teakettles in your hands. Twenty-three neighbors behind white doors listen closely: will she spill her crummy tea on our clean floor? I didn’t spill, don’t worry. I push open the gothic doors with my foot. I’ve been gone an eternity, but Alexandra Ernestovna still remembers me.

  She got out cracked raspberry-colored cups, decorated the table with doilies, puttered around in the dark coffin of a cupboard, stirring up bread and cracker smells that come out of its wooden cheeks. Don’t come out, smell! Catch it and squeeze it back with the cut-glass doors: there, stay under lock and key.

  Alexandra Ernestovna gets out wonderful jam, it was a gift, just try it, no, no, you try it, ah, ah, ah, yes, you’re speechless, it’s truly amazing, exquisite, isn’t it? Really, in all my long life, I’ve never . . . well, I’m so pleased, I knew you’d like it, have some more, please, take it, have some, I beg you. (Damn it, I’ll have another toothache!)

  I like you, Alexandra Ernestovna, I like you very much, especially in that photograph there with that marvelous oval to your face, and in that one, where your head is back and you laugh with those perfect teeth, and in that one, where you pretend to be pouting, and your arm is behind your head so the lacy festoons will fall back from your elbow. I like your life, interesting to no one else, passed in the distance, your youth that rushed off, your decayed admirers and husbands proceeding in triumphant parade, everyone who ever called your name or was called by you, everyone who passed and went over the high hill. I’ll come to you and bring you cream, and carrots, so good for your eyes, and you’ll please open up the long-closed brown velvet albums—let the Gymnasium girls breathe some fresh air, let the mustachioed gentlemen flex their muscles, let brave Ivan Nikolayevich smile. Don’t worry, don’t worry, Alexandra Ernestovna, he can’t see you, really. . . . You should have done it then. You should have. She’s made up her mind. Here he is—right next to you—just reach out! Here, take him in your hands, hold him, here he is, flat cold shiny with a gold border, slightly yellowed: Ivan Nikolayevich. Hey, do you hear, she’s decided, yes, she’s coming, meet her, she’s stopped hesitating, she’s made up her mind, hey, where are you, yoo-hoo!

  Thousands of years, thousands of days, thousands of translucent impenetrable curtains fell from the heavens, thickened, turned into solid walls, blocked roads, and kept Alexandra Ernestovna from going to her beloved, lost in time. He remained there on the other side of the years, alone at the dusty southern station, wandering along the sunflower seed–spattered platform; he looks at his watch, kicks aside dusty corn cobs with his toe, impatiently tears off blue-gray cypress cones, waiting, waiting, waiting for the steam engine to come from the hot morning distance. She did not come. She will not come. She had deceived him. But no, no, she had wanted to go. She was ready, and the bags had been packed. The white semitransparent dresses had tucked up their knees in the cramped darkness of the trunk, the vanity case’s leather sides creaked and its silver corners shone, the shameless bathing costumes barely covering the knees—baring the arms to the shoulder—awaited their hour, squinting, anticipating . . . In the hat box—impossible, enticing, insubstantial . . . ah, there are no words to describe it—white zephyr, a miracle! On the very bottom, belly-up and paws in the air, slept the sewing box—pins, combs, silk laces, emery boards of diamond sand for delicate nails; trifles. A jasmine genie sealed in a crystal flask—ah, how it would shine with a billion rainbows in the blinding seaside sun! She was ready—but what interfered? What always interferes? Well hurry, time’s passing. . . . Time’s passing, and the invisible layers of years get thicker, and the rails get rusty, and the roads get overgrown, and weeds grow taller in the ravines. Time flows and makes sweet Shura’s boat bob on its back and splashes wrinkles into her incomparable face.

  . . . More tea?

  After the war she returned—with her third husband—here, to these rooms. The third husband kept whining, whining. . . . The corridor was too long. The light too dim. The windows faced the back. Everything was behind them. The festive guests died out. The flowers faded. Rain hammered at the windows. He whined and whined and died, but when and of what, Alexandra Ernestovna did not notice.

  She got Ivan Nikolayevich out of the album, and looked at him a long time. How he had begged her! She had even bought a ticket—and here it was, the ticket. Hard cardboard—black numbers. If you want, look at it this way, if you want, turn it upside down. It doesn’t matter: forgotten signs of an unknown alphabet, a coded pass to that shore.

  Maybe if you learn the magic word . . . if you guess it; if you sit down and think hard, or look for it . . . there has to be a door, a crack, an unnoticed crooked way back there to that day; they shut up everything but they must have missed a crack somewhere: maybe in some old house, maybe if you pull back the floorboards in the attic—or in a dead end, or in a brick wall, there’s a passage carelessly filled with bricks, hurriedly painted, haphazardly nailed shut with crisscrossed boards. . . . Maybe not here but in another city . . . Maybe somewhere in the tangle of rails on a siding there stands a railroad car, old and rusted, its ceiling collapsed: the one sweet Shura didn’t get into?

  “There’s my compartment . . . Excuse me, I’ll get by. Wait, here’s my ticket—it says so right here.” There, down in that end—rusted shock absorbers, reddish bu
ckled wall girders, blue sky in the ceiling, grass underfoot—that’s her place, right here! No one ever took it, no one had a right.

  . . . More tea? A blizzard.

  . . . More tea? Apple trees in bloom. Dandelions. Lilacs. Oof, it’s hot. Leave Moscow—to the seaside. Until our next meeting, Alexandra Ernestovna. I’ll tell you all about that part of the world. Whether the sea has dried up, whether the Crimea floated away like a dry leaf, whether the blue sky has faded. Whether your tormented, excited beloved has deserted his volunteer post at the railroad station.

  In Moscow’s stony hell Alexandra Ernestovna waits for me. No, no, it’s all true! There, in the Crimea, the invisible but agitated Ivan Nikolayevich—in white uniform—paces up and down the dusty platform, digs his watch out of his pocket, wipes his shaved neck; up and down along the lattice work fence rubbing off white dust, oblivious and agitated; past him, without noticing, go beautiful, large-faced young women in trousers; hippie boys with their sleeves rolled up, enveloped in transistorized badoobadooms; farm women in white scarves with buckets of plums; southern ladies with plastic earrings; old men in unyielding synthetic hats; smashing right through Ivan Nikolayevich, but he doesn’t know, doesn’t notice, doesn’t care, he’s waiting, time has been derailed, stuck midway somewhere outside of Kursk, tripped on nightingale rivers, lost, blind in fields of sunflowers.

  Ivan Nikolayevich, wait! I’ll tell her, I’ll give her the message; don’t leave, she’ll come, she’ll come, honest; she’s made up her mind, she’s willing, just stand there, don’t worry, she’ll be here soon, she’s packed, she just has to pick it up; she’s even got a ticket: I swear, I’ve seen it—in the velvet album tucked behind a photograph; it’s a bit worn of course, but don’t worry, I think they’ll let her on. There’s a problem back there, something’s in the way, I don’t remember what; but she’ll manage, she’ll think of something—she’s got the ticket, doesn’t she?—that’s important, the ticket, and you know the main thing is she’s made up her mind, it’s certain, I’m telling you.

  Alexandra Ernestovna’s signal is five rings, third button from the top. There’s a breeze on the landing: the dusty stairwell windows are open, ornamented with easygoing lotuses—the flowers of oblivion.

  “Who? . . . She died.”

  What do you mean . . . just a minute . . . why? . . . I just . . . I just went there and came back. Are you serious? . . .

  The hot white air attacks you as you come out of the passageway crypt, trying to get you in the eyes. Wait . . . The garbage probably hasn’t been picked up, right? The spirals of earthly existence end around the corner on a patch of asphalt, in rubbish bins. Where did you think? Beyond the clouds, maybe? There they are, the spirals—springs sticking out from the rotting couch. They dumped everything here. The oval portrait of sweet Shura—the glass broken, the eyes scratched out. Old woman’s rubbish—stockings . . . The hat with the four seasons. Do you need chipped cherries? No? Why not? A pitcher with a broken-off spout. The velvet album was stolen. Naturally. It’ll be good for polishing shoes. You’re all so stupid, I’m not crying. Why should I? The garbage steamed in the hot sun and melted in a black banana ooze. The packet of letters trampled into slush. “Sweet Shura, when will you?” “Sweet Shura, just say the word.” And one letter, drier, swirls, a yellow lined butterfly under the dusty poplar, not knowing where to settle.

  What can I do with all this? Turn around and leave. It’s hot. The wind chases the dust around. And Alexandra Ernestovna, sweet Shura, as real as a mirage, crowned with wooden fruit and cardboard flowers, floats smiling along the vibrating crossing, around the corner, southward to the unimaginably distant shimmering south, to the lost platform, floats, melts, and dissolves in the hot midday sun.

  Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

  ON THE GOLDEN PORCH

  FOR MY SISTER SHURA

  On the golden porch sat:

  Tsar, tsarevich, king, prince,

  Cobbler, tailor.

  Who are you?

  Tell me fast, don’t hold us up.

  —Children’s counting rhyme

  IN THE beginning was the garden. Childhood was a garden. Without end or limit, without borders and fences, in noises and rustling, golden in the sun, pale green in the shade, a thousand layers thick—from heather to the crowns of the pines: to the south, the well with toads, to the north, white roses and mushrooms, to the west, the mosquitoed raspberry patch, to the east, the huckleberry patch, wasps, the cliff, the lake, the bridges. They say that early in the morning they saw a completely naked man at the lake. Honest. Don’t tell Mother. Do you know who it was?—It can’t be.—Honest, it was. He thought he was alone. We were in the bushes.—What did you see?—Everything.

  Now, that was luck. That happens once every hundred years. Because the only available naked man—in the anatomy textbook—isn’t real. Having torn off his skin for the occasion, brazen, meaty, and red, he shows off his clavicular-sternum-nipple muscles (all dirty words!) to the students of the eighth grade. When we’re promoted (in a hundred years) to the eighth grade, he’ll show us all that too.

  The old woman, Anna Ilyinichna, feeds her tabby cat, Memeka, with red meat like that. Memeka was born after the war and she has no respect for food. Digging her four paws into the pine tree trunk, high above the ground, Memeka is frozen in immobile despair.

  “Memeka, meat, meat!”

  The old woman shakes the dish of steaks, lifts it higher for the cat to see better.

  “Just look at that meat!”

  The cat and the old woman regard each other drearily. “Take it away,” thinks Memeka.

  “Meat, Memeka.”

  In the suffocating undergrowths of Persian red lilac, the cat mauls sparrows. We found a sparrow like that. Someone had scalped its toy head. A naked fragile skull like a gooseberry. A martyred sparrow face. We made it a cap of lace scraps, made it a white shroud, and buried it in a chocolate box. Life is eternal. Only birds die.

  Four carefree dachas stood without fences—go wherever you want. The fifth was a privately owned house. The black log framework spread sideways from beneath the damp overhang of maples and larches and growing brighter, multiplying its windows, thinning out into sun porches, pushing aside nasturtiums, jostling lilacs, avoiding hundred-year-old firs, it ran out laughing onto the southern side and sopped above the smooth strawberry-dahlia slope down-down-down where warm air trembles and the sun breaks up on the open glass lids of magical boxes filled with cucumber babies inside rosettes of orange flowers.

  By the house (and what was inside?), having flung open all the windows of the July-pierced veranda, Veronika Vikentievna, a huge white beauty, weighs strawberries: for jam and for sale to neighbors. Luxurious, golden, applelike beauty! White hens cluck at her heavy feet, turkey-cocks stick their indecent faces out of the burdock, a red-and-green rooster cocks his head and looks at us: what do you want, girls? “We’d like some strawberries.” The beautiful merchant’s wife’s fingers in berry blood. Burdock, scales, basket.

  Tsaritsa! The greediest woman in the world:

  They pour foreign wines for her,

  She eats iced gingerbread,

  Terrifying guards surround her. . . .

  Once she came out of the dark shed with red hands like that, smiling. “I killed a calf . . .”

  Axes over their shoulders. . . .

  Aargh! Let’s get out of here, run, it’s horrible—an icy horror—shed, damp, death. . . .

  And Uncle Pasha is the husband of this scary woman. Uncle Pasha is small, meek, henpecked. An old man: he’s fifty. He works as an accountant in Leningrad; he gets up at five in the morning and runs over hill and dale to make the commuter train. Seven kilometers at a run, ninety minutes on the train, ten minutes on the trolley, then put on black cuff protectors and sit down on a hard yellow chair. Oilcloth-covered doors, a smoky half-basement, weak light, safes, overhead costs—that’s Uncle Pasha’s job. And when the cheerful light blue day has rushed past, its noise done, U
ncle Pasha climbs out of the basement and runs back: the postwar clatter of trolleys, the smoky rush-hour station, coal smells, fences, beggars, baskets; the wind chases crumpled paper along the emptied platform. Wearing sandals in summer and patched felt boots in winter, Uncle Pasha hurries to his Garden, his Paradise, where evening peace comes from the lake, to the House where the huge, golden-haired Tsaritsa lies waiting on a bed with four glass legs. But we didn’t see the glass legs until later. Veronika Vikentievna had been feuding a long time with Mother.

  The thing was that one summer she sold Mother an egg. There was an ironclad condition: the egg had to be boiled and eaten immediately. But lighthearted Mother gave the egg to the dacha’s owner. The crime was revealed. The consequences could have been monstrous: the landlady could have let her hen sit on the egg, and in its chicken ignorance it could have incubated a copy of the unique breed of chicken that ran in Veronika Vikentievna’s yard. It’s a good thing nothing happened. The egg was eaten. But Veronika Vikentievna could not forgive Mother’s treachery. She stopped selling us strawberries and milk, and Uncle Pasha smiled guiltily as he ran past. The neighbors shut themselves in; they reinforced the wire fence on metal posts, sprinkled broken glass in strategic points, stretched barbed wire, and got a scary yellow dog. Of course, that wasn’t enough.

  After all, couldn’t Mother still climb over the fence in the dead of night, kill the dog, crawl over the glass, her stomach shredded by barbed wire and bleeding, and with weakening hands steal a runner from the rare variety of strawberries in order to graft it onto her puny ones? After all, couldn’t she still run to the fence with her booty and with her last ounce of strength, groaning and gasping, toss the strawberry runner to Father hiding in the bushes, his round eyeglasses glinting in the moonlight?