From May to September, Veronika Vikentievna, who suffered from insomnia, came out into the garden at night, stood in her long white nightgown holding a pitchfork like Neptune, listening to the nocturnal birds, breathing jasmine. Of late her hearing had grown more acute: Veronika Vikentievna could hear Mother and Father three hundred yards away in our dacha, with the camel’s hair blanket over their heads, plotting in a whisper to get Veronika Vikentievna: they would dig a tunnel to the greenhouse with her early parsley.
The night moved on, and the house loomed black behind her. Somewhere in the dark warmth, deep in the house, lost in the bowels on their connubial bed, little Uncle Pasha lay still as a mouse. High above his head swam the oak ceiling, and even higher swam the garrets, trunks of expensive black coats sleeping in mothballs, even higher the attic with pitchforks, clumps of hay, and old magazines, and even higher the roof, the chimney, the weather vane, the moon—across the garden, through dreams, they swam, swaying, carrying Uncle Pasha into the land of lost youth, the land of hopes come true, and the chilled Veronika Vikentievna, white and heavy, would return, stepping on his small warm feet.
Hey, wake up, Uncle Pasha! Veronika is going to die soon.
You will wander around the empty house, not a thought in your head, and then you will straighten, blossom, look around, remember, push away memories and desire, and bring—to help with the housekeeping—Veronika’s younger sister, Margarita, just as pale, large, and beautiful. And in June she’ll be laughing in the bright window, bending over the rain barrel, passing among the maples on the sunny lake.
Oh, in our declining years. . . .
But we didn’t even notice, we forgot Veronika, we had spent a winter, a whole winter, a winter of mumps and measles, flooding and warts and a Christmas tree blazing with tangerines, and they made a fur coat for me, and a lady in the yard touched it and said: “Mouton.”
In the winter the yardmen glued golden stars onto the black sky, sprinkled ground diamonds into the connecting courtyards of the Petrograd side of town, and, clambering up the frosty air ladders to our windows, prepared morning surprises: with fine brushes they painted the silver tails of firebirds.
And when everyone got sick of winter, they took it out of town in trucks, shoving the skinny snowbanks into underground passages protected by gratings, and smeared perfumed mush with yellow seedlings around the parks. And for several days the city was pink, stone, and noisy.
And from over there, beyond the distant horizon, laughing and rumbling, waving a motley flag, the green summer came running with ants and daisies.
Uncle Pasha got rid of the yellow dog—he put it in a trunk and sprinkled it with mothballs; he let summer renters onto the second floor—a strange, dark woman and her fat granddaughter; and he invited kids into the house and fed them jam.
We hung on the fence and watched the strange grandmother fling open the second-story windows every hour and, illuminated by the harlequin rhomboids of the ancient panes, call out:
“Want milkandcookies?”
“No.”
“Want potty?”
“No.”
We hopped on one leg, healed scrapes with spit, buried treasures, cut worms in half with scissors, watched the old woman wash pink underpants in the lake, and found a photograph under the owner’s buffet: a surprised, big-eared family with the caption, “Don’t forget us. 1908.”
Let’s go to Uncle Pasha’s. You go first. No, you. Careful, watch the sill. I can’t see in the dark. Hold on to me. Will he show us the room. He will, but first we have to have tea.
Ornate spoons, ornate crystal holders. Cherry jam. Silly Margarita laughs in the orange light of the lamp shade. Hurry up and drink! Uncle Pasha knows, he’s waiting, holding open the sacred door to Aladdin’s cave. O room! O children’s dreams! O Uncle Pasha, you are King Solomon! You hold the Horn of Plenty in your mighty arms. A caravan of camels passed with spectral tread through your house and dropped its Baghdad wares in the summer twilight. A waterfall of velvet, ostrich feathers of lace, a shower of porcelain, golden columns of frames, precious tables on bent legs, locked glass cases of mounds where fragile yellow glasses are entwined by black grapes, where Negroes in golden skirts hide in the deep darkness, where something bends, transparent, silvery . . . Look, a precious clock with foreign numbers and snakelike hands. And this one, with forget-me-nots. Ah, but look, look at that one! There’s a glass room over the face and in it a golden Chevalier seated at a golden table, a golden sandwich in his hand. And next to him, a Lady with a goblet: and when the clock strikes, she strikes the goblet on the table—six, seven, eight. . . . The lilacs are jealous, they peek through the window, and Uncle Pasha sits down at the piano and plays the Moonlight Sonata. Who are you, Uncle Pasha?
There it is, the bed on glass legs. Semitransparent in the twilight, invisible and powerful, they raise on high the tangle of lace, the Babylon towers of pillows, the moonlit, lilac scent of the divine music. Uncle Pasha’s noble white head is thrown back, a Mona Lisa smile on Margarita’s golden face as she appears silently in the doorway, the lace curtains sway, the lilacs sway, the waves of dahlias sway on the slope right to the horizon, to the evening lake, to the beam of moonlight.
Play, play, Uncle Pasha! Caliph for an hour, enchanted prince, starry youth, who gave you this power over us, to enchant us, who gave you those white winds on your back, who carried your silvery head to the evening skies, crowned you with roses, illuminated you with mountain light, surrounded you with lunar wind?
O Milky Way, light brother
Of Canaan’s milky rivers,
Should we swim through the starry fall
To the fogs, where entwined
The bodies of lovers fly?
. . . Well, enough. Time to go home. It doesn’t seem right to use the ordinary word “Thanks” with Uncle Pasha. Have to be more ornamental: “I am grateful.” “It’s not worthy of gratitude.”
“Did you notice they have only one bed in the house?”
“Where does Margarita sleep, then? In the attic?”
“Maybe. But that’s where the renters are.”
“Well, then she must sleep on the porch, on a bench.”
“What if they sleep in the same bed, head to foot?”
“Stupid. They’re strangers.”
“You’re stupid. What if they’re lovers?”
“But they only have lovers in France.”
She’s right, of course. I forgot.
. . . Life changed the slides ever faster in the magic lantern. With Mother’s help we penetrated into the mirrored corners of the grownups’ atelier, where the bald tubby tailor took our embarrassing measurements, muttering excuse me’s; we envied girls in nylon stockings, with pierced ears, we drew in our textbooks: glasses on Pushkin, a mustache on Mayakovsky, a large white chest on Chekhov, who was otherwise normally endowed. And we were recognized immediately and welcomed joyfully by the patient and defective nude model from the anatomy course generously offering his numbered innards; but the poor fellow no longer excited anyone. And, looking back once, with unbelieving fingers we felt the smoked glass behind which our garden waved a hankie before going down for the last time. But we didn’t feel the loss yet.
Autumn came into Uncle Pasha’s house and struck him on the face. Autumn, what do you want? Wait; are you kidding? . . . The leaves fell, the days grew dark, Margarita grew scooped. The white chickens died, the turkey flew off to warmer climes, the yellow dog climbed out of the trunk and, embracing Uncle Pasha, listened to the north wind howl at night. Girls, someone, bring Uncle Pasha some India tea. How you’ve grown. How old you’ve gotten, Uncle Pasha. Your hands are spotted, your knees bent. Why do you wheeze like that? I know, I can guess: in the daytime, vaguely, and at night, clearly, you hear the clang of metal locks. The chain is wearing out.
What are you bustling about for? You want to show me your treasures? Well, all right, I have five minutes for you. It’s so long since I was here! I’m getting old. So that’s it
, that’s what enchanted us? All this secondhand rubbish, these chipped painted night tables, these tacky oilcloth paintings, these brocade curtains, the worn plush velvet, the darned lace, the clumsy fakes from the peasant market, the cheap beads? This sang and glittered, burned and beckoned? What mean jokes you play, life! Dust, ashes, rot. Surfacing from the magical bottom of childhood, from the warm, radiant depths, we open our chilled fist in the cold wind—and what have we brought up with us besides sand? But just a quarter century ago Uncle Pasha wound the golden clock with trembling hands. Above the face, in the glass room, the little inhabitants huddle—the Lady and the Chevalier, masters of Time. The Lady strikes the table with her goblet, and the thin ringing sound tries to break through the shell of decades. Eight, nine, ten. No. Excuse me, Uncle Pasha. I have to go.
. . . Uncle Pasha froze to death on the porch. He could not reach the metal ring of the door and fell face down in the snow. White snow daisies grew between his stiff fingers. The yellow dog gently closed his eyes and left through the snowflakes up the starry ladder to the black heights, carrying away the trembling living flame.
The new owner—Margarita’s elderly daughter—poured Uncle Pasha’s ashes into a metal can and set it on a shelf in the empty chicken house; it was too much trouble to bury him.
Bent in half by the years, her face turned to the ground, Margarita wanders through the chilled, drafty garden, as if seeking lost footsteps on the silent paths.
“You’re cruel! Bury him!”
But her daughter smokes indifferently on the porch. The nights are cold. Let’s turn on the lights early. And the golden Lady of Time, drinking bottoms up from the goblet of life, will strike a final midnight on the table for Uncle Pasha.
Translated by Antonina W. Bouis
HUNTING THE WOOLY MAMMOTH
ZOYA’S a beautiful name, isn’t it? Like bees buzzing by. And she’s beautiful, too: a good height and all that. Details? All right, here are the details: good legs, good figure, good skin, the nose, eyes, all good. Brunette. Why not a blonde? Because you can’t have everything.
When Zoya met Vladimir, he was stunned. Or well, at least pleasantly surprised.
“Oh!” said Vladimir.
That’s just what he said. And wanted to see Zoya very often. But not constantly. And that saddened her.
In her one-room apartment he kept only his toothbrush—a thing that is certainly intimate, but not so much that it would firmly tie a man to the family hearth. Zoya wanted Vladimir’s shirts, underwear, and socks to settle in, how shall we put it, to make themselves at home in the underwear drawer, even lie around on a chair. To be able to grab a sweater or something and soak it, into the Lotos soap with it, and then dry it neatly spread out.
But no, he didn’t leave a trace; he kept everything in his communal flat. Even his razor. Though what did he have to shave, with that beard? He had two beards: one thick and dark, and in the middle of it, another, smaller and reddish, growing in a narrow tuft on his chin. A phenomenon! When he ate or laughed, that second beard jumped. Vladimir wasn’t tall, half a head shorter than Zoya, and looked a bit wild and hairy. And he moved very quickly.
Vladimir was an engineer.
“You’re an engineer?” Zoya asked tenderly and distractedly on their first date, when they sat in a restaurant and she opened her lips only a millimeter to taste the profiteroles in chocolate sauce, pretending for some intellectual reason that it wasn’t very tasty.
“Exac-tic-ally,” he said, staring at her chin.
“Are you at a research institute? . . .”
“Exactically.”
“. . . or in industry?”
“Exactically.”
Go figure him out when he was staring at her like that. And had a bit to drink.
An engineer wasn’t bad. Of course, a surgeon would have been better. Zoya worked in a hospital, in the information bureau, and she wore a white coat and thereby belonged a bit to that amazing medical world, white and starched, with syringes and test tubes, rolling carts and autoclaves, and piles of rough, clean black-stamped laundry, and roses and tears and chocolates, and a blue corpse rolled swiftly down endless corridors followed by a hurrying sorrowing little angel clutching to its pigeon chest a long-suffering, released soul, diapered like a doll.
And king of this world is the surgeon, who cannot be regarded without trembling as, dressed with the aid of gentlemen of the chamber in a loose-fitting mantle and green crown with laces, majestically holding his precious hands aloft, he is prepared for his holy kingly mission: to perform the highest judgment, to come down and chop off, to punish and to save, and with his glowing sword give life . . . What else, if not a king? And Zoya very much wanted to fall into a surgeon’s bloody embrace. But an engineer wasn’t bad.
They spent a very nice time at the restaurant, getting to know each other, and Vladimir, not realizing yet what he could count on from Zoya, was generous. It was afterward that he began to economize, looking through the menu briskly, ordering only an inexpensive main course for himself, and not lingering in restaurants. There was no need for Zoya to sit languorously with a casual expression on her face, slightly mocking, slightly dreamy—her face was supposed to reflect the fleeting nuances of her complex spiritual life, like exquisite sadness or some refined reminiscence; she ate, staring off into space, her elbows delicately resting on the table, her lower lip pouting, sending lovely smoke rings up to the painted vaulted ceiling. She was playing fairy. But Vladimir didn’t play along: he ate with gusto, without a trace of sadness, gulped down his vodka, smoked without languor: quickly, greedily smelling up the table and squashing the butt in the ashtray with his yellowed finger. He brought the check close to his eyes, was horribly astounded, and always found a mistake. And he never ordered caviar: that was for princesses and thieves, he claimed. Zoya was hurt: wasn’t she a princess, albeit unrecognized? And then they stopped going out completely, and stayed home. Or she stayed home alone. It was boring.
In the summer she wanted to go south to the Caucasus. There would be noise and wine and midnight swims with squeals of laughter, and masses of handsome men who would look at Zoya and say, “Oh!” and flash their teeth.
Instead, Vladimir brought a kayak to the apartment and two friends, just like him, in stinky checked shirts, and they crawled around on all fours, putting it together and taking it apart, patching, and sticking sections of the smooth repulsive kayak body in a basin of water, exclaiming: “It leaks! It doesn’t leak!” while Zoya sat on the bed, jealous, annoyed by the crowding, and having to keep lifting her legs so that Vladimir could crawl from spot to spot.
Then she had to follow him and his friends on that horrible expedition to the north, to some lakes, in search of some allegedly glorious islands, and she got chilled and soaked, and Vladimir smelled of dogs. They hurried along, rowing fast, bouncing on the waves, along a grim, northern lake blown up with leaden dark waters, and Zoya sat right on the floor of the hateful kayak, legs stretched straight out, severely shortened without high heels, so pathetic and scrawny in jogging pants, and felt that her nose was red and her hair matted and the hostile spray of the water was melting her mascara, and ahead lay two more weeks of suffering in a damp tent on an uninhabited cliff covered with pine and bilberries, among offensively hearty strangers bawling cheerfully over their dinner made of pea concentrate.
And it was Zoya’s turn to wash the greasy aluminum dishes in the deep icy lake, after which they were still dirty. And her hair was dirty and her head itched under her scarf.
All the engineers had their own women, no one gave Zoya special looks or said “Oh!”, and she felt sexless, a camping buddy, and she hated the laughter around the campfire, and the guitar playing, and the peals of joy over catching a pike. She lay in the tent totally miserable, hating the two-bearded Vladimir, and wanted to get married to him as soon as possible. Then she’d have the perfect right as his legal wife not to get ugly in the so-called great outdoors, but stay home in a light and graceful
robe (full of ruffles, made in the GDR) on the couch, legs crossed, facing a wall unit with a color TV (let Vladimir buy her one), with pink light coming from the Yugoslav lamp, drinking something light and smoking something good (let the patients’ relatives give her some), and wait for Vladimir to come back from his kayaking trip to greet him a little irritated and suspicious: well, I wonder what you’ve been up to without me? who was with you? did you bring any fish? and later, of course, forgive him for his two-week absence. And during that absence, maybe one of the surgeons would call and flirt, and Zoya, lazily embracing the telephone and with that look on her face, would drawl, “Oh, I don’t know . . . We’ll see . . . Do you really think so?” Or she would call a girlfriend, “So what did you say? . . . And what did he say? And then you?” Ah, the city! Shimmer and evenings and wet asphalt and red neon lights in the puddles under your high heels . . .
Here the waves thudded against the cliff, and wind howled in the treetops, and the campfire danced its endless dance, and night stared into your back, and the engineers’ dirty-faced ugly women squeaked in their tents. What a drag!
Vladimir adored it, got up early, while the lake was quiet and clear, went down the steep slope, grabbing onto the pines and getting resin on his hands, stood with his legs spread wide on the granite shelf leading into the sunny transparent water, washing, snorting, and groaning; looking back with happy eyes at Zoya, sleepy, without makeup, standing grimly with a pitcher in her hands. “Well? Have you ever heard such silence? Just listen to how quiet it is! And the air? Beautiful!” Oh, how disgusting he was! Marry him, hurry up and marry him.
In the fall Zoya bought slippers for Vladimir. Checked and cozy, they waited for him in the entrance, mouths open: slip your foot in, Vova. You’re at home here, this is your snug harbor. Stay with us. Why do you keep running off, you silly fool?
White Walls Page 5