White Walls

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  Lenochka did not wish to hear about Sergei’s hat anymore. As if there were nothing else to talk about. And really. . . Children, don’t shout! I don’t understand who she is. Why she married me. If she doesn’t care about anything . . . She’s water-logged. . . . Not a person, but soap suds. Seryozha, you’re shouting so loudly. Just like Pavel Antonovich. Hush, hush. In her condition, Lenochka needs peace.

  Lenochka, don’t be mad at me. All right, all right, Seryozha. Drive a nail there—to hang up the diapers. Why don’t you sleep in the study, won’t little Antosha let you get any sleep? The shadow of leaves falls on the tiny face, the lace-trimmed sheet; the infant sleeps, his wrinkled fists raised, his brow furrowed—struggling to understand something. The fishies are asleep in the pond. The birdies are asleep in the trees. Who’s breathing outside in the garden? We don’t care, my love.

  Sweet dreams, sonny, you’re not to blame for anything at all. The plague corpses in the cemetery are covered with lime, the poppies on the steppe bring sweet dreams, the camels are locked up in the zoos, warm leaves rustle and whisper over your head. What about? What do you care?

  Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

  SONYA

  A PERSON lived—a person died. Only the name remains—Sonya. “Remember, Sonya used to say . . .” “A dress like Sonya’s . . .” “You keep blowing your nose all the time, like Sonya . . .” Then even the people who used to say that died, and there was only a trace of her voice in my head, incorporeal, seeming to come from the black jaws of the telephone receiver. Or all of a sudden there is a view of a sunny room, like a bright photograph come to life—laughter around a set table, like those hyacinths in a glass vase on the tablecloth, wreathed too with curly pink smiles. Look quickly, before it goes out. Who is that? Is the one you need among them? But the bright room trembles and fades and now the backs of the seated people are translucent like gauze, and with frightening speed, their laughter falls to pieces, recedes in the distance—catch it if you can.

  No, wait, let me look at you. Sit as you were and call out your names in order. But it is futile to try grasping recollections with clumsy corporeal hands. The merry laughing figure turns into a large, crudely painted rag doll and will fall off its chair if it’s not propped up; on its meaningless forehead are drips of glue from the moplike wig; the blue glassy eyes are joined inside the empty skull by a metal arc with a lead ball for counter-weight. Just look at that, the old hag! When you think she pretended to be alive and loved. But the laughing company has flown up and away, and contrary to the iron laws of space and time is chattering away in some inaccessible corner of the world, incorruptible unto eternity, festively immortal, and might even appear again at some turn in the road—at the most inappropriate moment, and of course without warning.

  Well, if that’s the way you are, so be it. Chasing you is like catching butterflies waving a shovel. But I would like to learn more about Sonya.

  One thing is clear—Sonya was an utter fool. No one has ever disputed that quality of hers, and now there is no one to do it anyway. Invited out to dinner for the first time, in the distant, yellowish-smoke-shrouded year of 1930, she sat like a dummy at the end of a long, starched table, in front of a napkin cone folded into a house, as was then customary. The bouillon pond cooled. The idle spoon lay before her. The dignity of all the kings of England froze Sonya’s equine features.

  “And you, Sonya,” they said to her (they must have addressed her more formally, using her patronymic, hopelessly lost now), “and you, Sonya, why aren’t you eating?”

  “Waiting for the pepper,” she replied severely with her icy upper lip.

  Actually, after some time had passed and Sonya’s irreplaceability in the kitchen for pre-party preparations and her sewing skills and her willingness to take other people’s children for walks and even babysit if the whole noisy group was heading for some unpostponable festivity became evident—with the passage of time, the crystal of Sonya’s stupidity sparkled with other facets, exquisite in its unpredictability. A sensitive instrument, Sonya’s soul apparently captured the tonality of the mood of the society that had sheltered her yesterday, but, gawking, she failed to attune herself to today’s mood. So, if Sonya gaily shouted out, “Bottoms up!” at a wake, it was clear she was still at somebody’s birthday party; while at weddings, Sonya’s toasts gave off the gloom of yesterday’s funeral meats.

  “I saw you yesterday at the concert with a beautiful lady; I wonder, who was she?” Sonya would ask a bewildered husband as she leaned across his stiffened wife. At moments like that, the mocker Lev Adolfovich would purse his lips, arch his eyebrows, and shake his head, his shallow glasses glinting. “If a person is dead, that’s for a long time; if he’s stupid, that’s forever.” Well, that’s just what happened, time merely confirmed his words.

  Lev Adolfovich’s sister, Ada, a sharp, thin woman of serpentine elegance who was once discomfited by Sonya’s idiocy, dreamed of punishing her. Just a little, of course, so they could have a laugh and give the little fool some amusement. And they whispered in a corner—Lev and Ada—plotting something witty.

  So, Sonya sewed. . . . And how did she dress? Most unbecomingly, friends, most unbecomingly. Something blue, striped, so unflattering. Just imagine: a head like a Przewalski’s horse (Lev Adolfovich noted that), under her jaw the huge dangling bow of her blouse sticking out from her suit’s stiff lapels, and the sleeves were always too long. Sunken chest, legs so fat they looked as if they came from a different person’s set, enormous feet. She wore down her shoes on one side. Well, her chest and legs, that’s not clothing. . . . Yes it is, my dear, it counts as clothing too. You have to take features like that into account, some things you just can’t wear at all. . . . She had a brooch, an enamel dove. She wore it on the lapel of her jacket, never parted with it. And when she changed into another dress, she always pinned on that dove.

  Sonya was a good cook. She whipped up marvelous cakes. And then that, you know, offal, innards—kidneys, udders, brains—it’s so easy to ruin them, but she made them wonderfully. So those dishes were always assigned to her. It was delicious and an excuse for jokes. Lev Adolfovich, pursing his lips, would call across the table: “Sonechka, your udders simply astonish me today!” And she would nod happily in reply. And Ada would say in a sweet voice, “I, for one, am enraptured by your sheep’s brains.” “They’re veal,” Sonya would reply, not understanding, smiling. And everyone enjoyed it; wasn’t it just too much?

  She liked children, that was clear, and you could go on vacation, even to Kislovodsk, and leave the children and the apartment in her care—why don’t you live at our place for a while, Sonya, all right?—and find everything in perfect order upon your return: the furniture dusted, the children rosy-cheeked and fed, and they played outside every day and even went on field trips to the museum where Sonya worked as some sort of curator; those museum curators lead a boring life, they’re all old maids. The children would become attached to her and be sad when she had to be transferred to another family. But you can’t be egoists and hog Sonya; others might need her, too. In general, they managed, setting up a sensible queuing system.

  Well, what else can I say about her? Basically, I think that’s it. Who remembers any details now? Fifty years later there’s almost no one left alive. And there were so many truly interesting, really worthwhile people, who left behind concert recordings, books, monographs on art. What fates! You could talk endlessly about any of them. Take Lev Adolfovich, a bastard basically, but a brilliant man and in some ways a pussycat. You could ask Ada Adolfovna, but she’s pushing ninety, I think, and . . . you understand . . . Something happened to her during the siege of Leningrad. Related to Sonya, incidentally. No, I don’t remember it very well. Something about a glass, and some letters, a joke of some sort.

  How old was Sonya? In 1941—when her tracks break off—she should have been forty. Yes, I think that’s it. From that it’s easy to figure out when she was born and so forth, but what difference could
that make if we don’t know who her parents were, what she was like as a child, where she lived, what she did, and who her friends were up to the day when she came into the world out of nebulousness and sat down to wait for the pepper in the sunny, festive dining room?

  Of course, we must believe she was a romantic and, in her own way, lofty. After all, those bows of hers, and the enamel dove, and the poetry quotations, always sentimental, that flew from her lips inappositely, as if spat by her long upper lip that revealed her long ivory-colored teeth, and her love of children—and any children at that—all that characterizes her quite unambiguously. A romantic creature. Was she happy? Oh, yes! That’s certain. You can say what you want, but she was happy.

  And just think—life is full of such tricks—she owed her happiness completely to Ada Adolfovna, that snake. (Too bad you didn’t know her in her youth. An interesting woman.)

  A whole group of them got together—Ada, Lev, and Valerian, Seryozha, I think, and Kotik, and someone else—and worked out this practical joke (since the idea was Ada’s, Lev called it “a plan from Ades”), which turned out to be a great success. This must have been around 1933. Ada was in her prime, though no longer a girl—marvelous figure, dusky face with dark rose cheeks, she was number one at tennis, number one at kayaking, everyone thought she was terrific. Ada was even embarrassed by having so many suitors when Sonya had none. (What a joke! Suitors for Sonya?) And she suggested inventing a mysterious admirer for the poor thing, someone madly in love with her but who had reasons why he couldn’t meet her personally. Excellent idea. The phantom was created instantly, named Nikolai, burdened with a wife and three children, and moved into Ada’s father’s apartment for purposes of correspondence—here protests were voiced: what if Sonya learns, what if she sticks her nose in there?—but the argument was rejected as insubstantial. First of all, Sonya was stupid, that was the point; and secondly, she had a conscience—Nikolai had a family, she wouldn’t try to break it up. There, he wrote quite clearly, Nikolai did: darling, your unforgettable visage is imprinted forever on my wounded heart (“Don’t write ‘wounded,’ she’ll take it literally that he’s an invalid!”), but we are fated never, ever to be near because of my duty to my children . . . and so on. But my feeling, Nikolai continues—no, sincere feeling is better—will warm my cold members (“What do you mean, Adochka!” “Don’t bother me, you idiots!”) a pathfinding star and all that other moon-june-spoon. A letter like that. Let’s say he saw her at a concert, admired her fine profile (here Valerian fell off the couch laughing), and now wants to start up a lofty correspondence. He found out her address with difficulty. Begs for a photograph. Why can’t he meet for a date, the children won’t be in the way for that? He has a sense of duty. But for some reason they don’t keep him from writing, do they? Well, then he’s paralyzed. From the waist down. Hence the chilled members. Listen, stop fooling around. If necessary, we’ll paralyze him later. Ada sprinkled Chypre cologne on the stationery, Kotik pulled a dried forget-me-not from his childhood herbarium, pink with age, and stuck it in the envelope. Life was fun!

  The correspondence was stormy on both sides. Sonya, the fool, went for it right away. She fell in love so hard you couldn’t drag her away. They had to rein in her ardor: Nikolai wrote about one letter a month, braking Sonya and her raging cupid. Nikolai expressed himself in poetry: Valerian had to sweat a bit. There were pearls there, if you understood—Nikolai compared Sonya to a lily, a liana, and a gazelle, and himself simultaneously to a nightingale and an antelope. Ada wrote the prose text and served as general director, stopping her silly friends and their suggestions to Valerian: “Write that she’s a gnu. In the sense of an antelope. My divine gnu, I perish anew without you.”

  Ada was in top form: she quivered with Nikolai’s tenderness and revealed the depths of his lonely, stormy spirit, insisted on the necessity of preserving the platonic purity of their relations, and at the same time hinted at the destructive passion, whose time to be displayed for some reason had not yet come. Of course, in the evenings, Nikolai and Sonya had to lift their eyes to the same star at an appointed hour. Couldn’t do without that. If the participants in the epistolary novel were nearby at the appointed minute, they tried to keep Sonya from parting the curtains and sneaking a glance at the starry heights, calling her into the hallway: “Sonya, come here a moment. Sonya, here’s what—” relishing her confusion: the significant instant was approaching, and Nikolai’s gaze was in danger of hanging around in vain in the neighborhood of Sirius or whatever it was called—you generally had to look in the direction of Pulkovo Observatory.

  Then the joke got boring: how long could they go on, especially since they could get absolutely nothing out of languid Sonya, no secrets; she didn’t want any bosom buddies and pretended nothing was going on. Just think how secretive she turned out to be, while she burned with unquenchable flames of high feeling in her letters, promising Nikolai eternal fidelity and telling him about every little thing: what she dreamed and what she had heard little birds twittering. She sent wagon loads of dried flowers in envelopes, and for one of Nikolai’s birthdays she sent him her only ornament, taking it off her ugly jacket: the white enamel dove. “Sonya, where’s your dove?” “It flew off,” she said, revealing her ivory equine teeth, and you couldn’t read anything in her eyes. Ada kept planning to kill off Nikolai, who was turning into a pain, but when she got the dove she shuddered and put the murder off for a better time. In the letter that came with the dove, Sonya swore to give her life for Nikolai or follow him, if necessary, to the ends of the earth.

  The whole imaginable crop of laughter had been harvested, damned Nikolai was like a ball and chain underfoot, but it would have been inhumane to abandon Sonya alone on the road without her dove, without her love. The years passed: Valerian, Kotik, and, I think, Seryozha dropped out of the game for various reasons, and Ada carried the epistolary weight alone, hostilely baking monthly hot kisses by mail, like a machine. She had even begun to turn a little like Nikolai herself and at times in evening light she fancied she could see a mustache on her tanned pink face as she looked in the mirror. And so two women in two parts of Leningrad, one in hate, the other in love, wrote letters to each other about a person who had never existed.

  When the war began, neither had time to evacuate. Ada dug ditches thinking about her son, taken out of the city with his kindergarten. No time for love. She ate everything she could find, boiled her leather shoes, drank hot bouillon made from wallpaper—that had a little paste, at least. December came, everything ended. Ada took her father on a sled to a common grave; and then Lev Adolfovich; fueled the stove with Dickens and with stiff fingers wrote Sonya Nikolai’s farewell letter. She wrote that it was all a lie, that she hated everyone, that Sonya was a stupid old fool and a horse, that none of it had been here and damn you all to hell. Neither Ada nor Nikolai wanted to go on living. She unlocked the doors of her father’s big apartment to make it easier for the funeral brigade to get in and lay down on the couch, piling her father’s and her brother’s coats on top of her.

  •

  It’s not clear what happened next. First of all, hardly anyone was interested; and secondly, Ada Adolfovna isn’t very talkative, besides which, as I’ve already said, there’s time! Time has devoured everything. Let’s add that it’s hard to read other people’s souls: it’s dark and not everyone knows how to do it. Vague conclusions, attempts at answers—nothing more.

  I doubt Sonya received Nikolai’s graveside song. Letters didn’t get through that black December, or else took months. Let’s suppose that raising her eyes, half-blind with starvation, to the evening star over bombed-out Pulkovo, she did not feel the magnetic gaze of her beloved that day and realized his hour had come. A loving heart—say what you will—feels such things, you can’t trick it. And realizing that it was time, ready to turn to ashes in order to save her one and only, Sonya took everything she had—a can of prewar tomato juice, saved for a matter of life and death like this—and made her way
across all of Leningrad to the dying Nikolai’s apartment. There was exactly enough juice for one life.

  Nikolai lay under a mound of coats, in a hat with ear flaps, with a horrible black face, caked lips, but smooth-shaven. Sonya sank to her knees, pressed her eyes to his swollen hand with its broken fingernails, and wept a bit. Then she spoon-fed him some juice, threw a few books onto the fire, blessed her lucky fate, and left with a pail to get some water, never to return. The bombing was heavy that day.

  That, basically, is all that can be said about Sonya. A person lived—a person died. Only the name remains.

  “Ada Adolfovna, give me Sonya’s letters.”

  Ada Adolfovna rolls from the bedroom to the dining room, turning the big wheels of her chair with her hands. Her wrinkled face twitches. A black dress covers her lifeless legs to her toes. A large cameo is pinned near her throat, someone is killing something on it: shields, spears, the enemy gracefully fallen.

  “Letters?”

  “Letters, letters, give me Sonya’s letters!”

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “She never can hear the word ‘give,’ ” her nephew’s wife hisses in irritation, narrowing her eyes at the cameo.

  “Isn’t it time for dinner?” Ada Adolfovna smacks her lips.

  What large dark cupboards, what heavy silverware in them, and vases, and all kinds of supplies: tea, jam, grains, macaroni. In the other rooms there are more cupboards, cupboards, chiffonniers, wardrobes—with linens, books, all kinds of things. Where does she keep the packet of Sonya’s letters, an old package wrapped with twine, crackling with dried flowers, yellowed and translucent like dragonfly wings? Does she not remember, or does she not want to tell? And what’s the point in pestering a trembling paralyzed old woman? Didn’t she have enough hard days in her life? Most probably she threw the packet into the fire, standing on her swollen knees that icy winter, in the blazing circle of a minute’s light, and perhaps the letters, starting slowly at first and then quickly blackening at the corners and finally swirling up in a column of roaring flames, warmed her contorted, frozen fingers, if only for a brief instant. Let it be so. But she must have taken the white dove out of there, I think. After all, doves don’t burn.