White Walls

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  Toward the end of winter on a damp, tubercular evening Peters was drying his hands in the men’s room under the hot blast of air and eavesdropping on Faina talking on the telephone in the corridor. The dryer shuddered and shut up, and in the ensuing silence the beloved voice laughed: “No, we have nothing but women on our staff. Who? . . . Him? . . . That’s not a man; he’s a wimp. An endocrinological sissy.”

  Adele, love my reed. Inside, Peters felt as if he had been run over by a trolley. He looked around at the pathetic yellowed tile, the old mirror, swollen from inside with silver sores, the faucet leaking rust—life had selected the right place for the final humiliation. He wound the scarf around his throat carefully, so as not to catch cold in his glands, wended his way home, felt for his slippers, went to the window, out of which he planned to fall, and pulled the blind. The window was thoroughly taped for the winter and he didn’t want to waste his work. Then he turned on the oven, placed his head on the rack with cold bread crumbs, and waited. Who would eat rice porridge in his memory? Then Peters remembered that there hadn’t been any gas all day, they were doing repairs, grew furious, with trembling finger dialed the dispatcher and screamed horribly and incoherently about the outrageous service, got into his grandfather’s chair, and sat there till morning.

  In the morning, large snowflakes fell slowly. Peters looked at the snow, at the chastened sky, at the new snow banks, and quietly rejoiced that he would have no more youth.

  •

  But a new spring came, through the connecting courtyards, the snows died, a cloying smell of decay came from the soil, blue ripples ran over puddles, and Leningrad’s cherry trees once again showered white on the matchbox sailboats and newspaper ships—and did it matter at all where you start a new voyage, in a ditch or an ocean, when spring calls and the wind is the same everywhere? And marvelous were the new galoshes Peters bought—their insides laid with the flesh of flowering fuchsia, the taut rubber shining like patent leather, promising to mark his earthly paths with a chain of waffle ovals no matter where he went in search of happiness. And without hurrying, hands behind his back, he strolled along the stone streets, peering deeply into yellow archways, sniffing the air of canals and rivers; and the evening and Saturday women gave him long looks that boded no good, thinking: here’s a sickie, we don’t need him.

  But he didn’t need them, either; but Valentina caught his eyes, small and sinfully young—she was buying spring postcards on the sunny embankment, and the fortunate wind, gusting, built, changed, and rebuilt hairdos on her black, short-cropped head. Peters dogged Valentina’s steps, afraid to come too close, afraid of failure. Athletic young men ran up to the beauty, grabbed her, laughing, and she went off with them, bouncing, and Peters saw violets—dark, purple—bought and presented, heard them call her by name—it tore away and flew with the wind, the laughing people turned the corner, and Peters was left with nothing—dumpy, white, unloved. And what could he have said to her—to her, so young, so bevileted? Come up on his flabby legs and offer his flabby hand: “Peter-s . . .” (“What a strange name . . .” “My grandmother . . .” “Why did your grandmother . . .” “A little German . . .” “You know German?” “No, but Grandmother . . .”)

  Ah, if only he had learned German then! Oh then, probably . . . Then, of course . . . Such a difficult language, it hisses, clicks, and moves around in the mouth, O Tannenbaum, probably no one even knows it. . . . But Peters will go and learn it and astonish the beauty. . . .

  Looking over his shoulder for the police, he posted notices on street lamps: “German Lessons Wanted.” They hung all through the summer, fading, moving their pseudopods. Peters visited his native lampposts, touching up the letters washed away by rain, gluing the torn corners, and in late fall he was called, and it was like a miracle—from the sea of humanity two floated up, responding to his quiet, faint call, slanted purple on white. Hey, did you call? I did, I did! He rejected the persistent and deep-voiced one, who dissolved once more into oblivion, while he thoroughly questioned the tinny lady, Elizaveta Frantsevna from Vasiliyevsky Island: how to get there, where exactly, and how much, and was there a dog, for he was afraid of dogs.

  Everything was settled, Elizaveta Frantsevna expected him in the evening, and Peters went to his favorite corner to wait for Valentina—he had been watching and he knew she would come by as usual, waving her gym bag, at twenty to four, and would hop into the big red building, and would work out on the beam amid others like her, swift and young. She would pass, not suspecting that Peters existed, that he had a great plan, that life was marvelous. He decided that the best way would be to buy a bouquet, a big yellow bouquet, and silently, that was important, silently but with a bow hand it to Valentina on the familiar corner. “What’s this? Ah!”—and so on.

  The wind was blowing, swirling, and it was pouring when he came out on the embankment. Through the veil of rain the red barrier of the damp fortress showed murkily, its lead spire murkily raised its index finger. It had been pouring since last night, and they had laid in a generous supply of water up there. The Swedes, when they left these rotten shores, forgot to take away the sky, and now they probably gloated on their neat little peninsula—they had clear, blue frost, black firs and white rabbits, while Peters was coughing here amid the granite and mildew.

  In the fall, Peters took great pleasure in hating his home town, and the city repaid him in kind: it spat icy streams from pounding roof tops, filling his eyes with opaque, dark flows, shoved especially damp and deep puddles under his feet, slapped the cheeks of his nearsighted face, his felt hat, and his tummy with lashes of rain. The slimy buildings that bumped into Peters were purposely covered with tiny white mushrooms and a mossy toxic velvet, and the wind, which had come from big highwayman roads, tumbled around his soggy feet in deathly tubercular figure eights.

  He took his post with the bouquet, and October poured from the skies, and his galoshes were like bathtubs, and the newspaper wrapped three times around the expensive yellow flowers fell apart into shreds, the time came and went and Valentina did not come and would not come but he stood there chilled through to his underwear, to his white hairless body sprinkled with tender red birthmarks.

  The clock struck four. Peters shoved his bouquet in a garbage can. Why wait? He understood it was stupid and too late to learn German, that the lovely Valentina, brought up among athletic and vernal youths, would merely laugh and step over him, lumpy and broadwaisted; not for him were fiery passions and light steps, fast dances and leaps on the beam, or casually bought damp April violets, or the sunny wind from the gray waters of the Neva, or laughter and youth; that all attempts were futile, that he should have married his own grandmother and quietly melted away in the warm room to the ticking of the clock, eating sugar buns and planting his old stuffed rabbit in front of his plate for coziness and amusement.

  He was hungry, and he went to the first friendly light he saw, bought some soup, and sat down next to two beauties eating patties with onions and blowing away the foggy skin on their cooling pinkish cocoa.

  The girls were chattering about love, of course, and Peters heard the story of a certain Irochka, who had been working a long time on a comrade from fraternal Yemen, or maybe Kuwait, in hopes that he would marry her. Irochka had heard that there in the sandy steppes of the Arabian land, oil was as plentiful as berries, every decent man was a millionaire and flew in his own jet with a gold toilet seat. It was that gold seat that drove Irochka crazy, for she grew up in the Yaroslavl region, where the conveniences were three walls without the fourth with a view of the pea field; all in all, it was like Ilya Repin’s painting Space. But the Arab was in no hurry to wed, and when Irochka put it to him straight, he replied in the vein of, “Oh, yeah, your mother wears army boots. So long, sucker!” and so on, and tossed Irochka out with her pathetic belongings. The girls paid no attention to Peters, and he listened and felt sorry for the unknown Irochka and pictured the pea-covered expanses of Yaroslavl, trimmed around the horizon with dark,
wolf-filled forests, melting in the blissful silence under the blue shimmer of the northern sun, or the dry, grim squeak of millions of sand grains, the taut push of a desert hurricane, the brown light through the deep murk, forgotten white palaces filmed with mortal dust or enchanted by long-dead sorcerers.

  The girls moved to the story of the complicated relationship of Olya and Valery, of Anyuta’s heartlessness, and Peters, drinking his broth, listened openly, entering someone else’s story invisibly, he came in close contact with someone’s secrets, he was standing at the door with bated breath, he felt, smelled, and saw, as if in a magical movie, and it was all unbearably accessible—just reach out—flickering faces, tears in injured eyes, explosions of smiles, sunlight in hair, cascading pink and green sparks, dust motes in the ray and the heat of warmed parquet floors, creaking nearby, in that strange, happy, and lively life.

  “We’re done, let’s go!” one beauty commanded the other, and spreading their transparent umbrellas, like signs of another, higher existence, they floated out into the rain and rose into the skies, into the blue beyond the clouds, hidden from his eyes.

  Peters selected a rough piece of cardboard from the plastic glass serving as napkin holder and wiped his mouth. Life roared by, bypassing him, and hurried on, like a swift-flowing river goes around a heavy mound of rocks.

  The cleaning woman whirled like a sand storm among the tables, flipped her rag in Peters’s face, and deftly picked up twenty dirty dishes and disappeared in the yeasty air.

  “It’s not my fault,” Peters said to someone. “It’s not my fault at all. I want to participate. But they won’t take me. No one wants to play with me. Why? But I’ll try harder, I’ll win!”

  He went out—under icy splashes, under the cold, lashing water. I’ll win. Win. I’ll clench my teeth and push on through. And I will learn that damned language. There, on Vasiliyevsky Island, in the dampest of Leningrad’s damp, Elizaveta Frantsevna is waiting, swimming like a seal or mermaid, mumbling easily in the dark German tongue. He would come and they would chatter together. O Tannenbaum! O, I repeat, Tannenbaum! How does it go after that? I’ll find out when I get there.

  Oh, well, farewell Valentina and her quick sister, ahead lies only an old German woman—he braced himself. . . . Peters imagined his path, his looplike track in the wet city, and failure, running on his tail, sniffing the waffle prints of his shoes, and the old woman at the end of his path, and in order to confuse fate he hailed a taxi and sailed through the rain—steam rose from his feet, the driver was grim, and he wanted to get out right away. Tacka-tacka-tacka-tacka, ticked away his money.

  “Stop here.”

  A doorman guarded the entrance to a gilded place—a door into a subcellar, and beyond it muffled music blared, and lamps shone in the windows like long tubes of acid syrup. Young men—all pretenders for Valentina’s hand, farewell Valentina—huddled in front of the door, teeth chattering in the whirlwinds of rain, there was no room in the restaurant, but the doorman, deceived by Peters’s solid appearance, let him in, and Peters passed through and two others slipped in by his side. A good place. Peters took off his hat and raincoat in a dignified manner, promised a tip with his eyes, stepped into the noisy room, and trumpeted his arrival in his handkerchief. A fine place. He ordered a pink cocktail, a pagoda pastry, drank, ate, drank some more, and relaxed. A very, very fine place. And at his elbow appeared a moth-girl, from out of thin air, from the colored cigarette smoke; her red, green dress—the colored lights blinked—blossomed on her like an orchid, and her eyelashes blinked like wings, and bracelets jangled on her thin arms, and she was completely loyal to Peters to her dying breath. He signaled for more pink alcohol, afraid to speak, to scare off the girl, the marvelous Peri, the flying flower, and they sat in silence, as amazed by each other as would be a goat and an angel upon meeting.

  He waved his hand—and they gave even more and some meat.

  “Ahem,” said Peters, praying to heaven not to recall its messenger right away. “As a child I had a stuffed bunny—a friend in fact and I promised him so much. And now I’m off to my German lesson, ahem.”

  “I like stuffed bunnies, they’re really cute,” the Peri noted coldly.

  Peters was surprised by the angel’s stupidity—a stuffed bunny couldn’t be cute, he was either a friend or a nonentity, a sack of sawdust.

  “And we also played cards and I always got the cat,” Peters recalled.

  “Cats are really cute, too,” the girl replied through her teeth, like a familiar lesson, looking over the crowd.

  “No! Why do you say that?” Peters countered, getting upset. “That’s not the point. I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about life, it keeps teasing you, showing and taking away, showing and taking away. You know, it’s like a shop window, it shines and it’s locked, and you can’t take anything. And, I ask, why not?”

  “You’re really cute, too,” the indifferent girl insisted, not listening. “You dropped something.”

  When he finally got up from the table, the angel had risen to heaven, and with it, Peters’s wallet and money. Got it. Well. So be it. Peters sat with his leftovers, as immobile as a suitcase, sobering up, imagining how he would have to explain, ask—the scorn and mockery of the coat check—fish for damp rubles in the swampy pockets of his raincoat, shaking out change that slipped fishlike into the lining. . . . The music machine stomped and beat the drums, announcing someone’s coming passion. The cocktail evaporated through his ears. Cuc-koo! There.

  What are you, life? A silent theater of Chinese shadows, a chain of dreams, a charlatan’s store? Or a gift of unrequited love—that’s all that is intended for me? What about happiness? What is happiness? Ingrate, you’re alive, you weep love strive fall and that’s not enough? What? . . . Not enough? Oh, is that so? There isn’t anything else.

  •

  “I’m waiting! I’m waiting!” shouted Elizaveta Frantsevna, a quick, curly-haired lady, throwing back latches and bolts, letting in the robbed Peters, dark, dangerous, full of misery up to his throat, to his top tight button.

  “This way. Let’s start right away. Sit down on the couch. First lotto, then tea. All right? Quickly take a card. Who has a goat? I have a goat? Who has a guinea hen?”

  I’m going to kill her, decided Peters. Elizaveta Frantsevna, look away, I’m going to kill you. You, and my late grand-mother, and the girl with warts, and Valentina, and the fake angel, and all those others—all of them who promised and tricked me, seduced and abandoned me; I’ll kill them in the name of all fat and wheezy, tongue-tied and awkward men, in the name of all of those locked in the dark closet, all those not invited to the party, get ready, Elizaveta Frantsevna, I’m going to smother you with that embroidered pillow. And no one will ever know.

  “Frantsevna!” someone shouted and pounded on the door. “Give me three rubles, I’ll wash the hallway for you.”

  The urge passed, Peters put aside the pillow. He wanted to sleep. The old woman rustled her money, Peters looked down at the “Domestic Animals” card.

  “What are you thinking about? Who has a cat?”

  “I have a cat,” Peters said. “Who else has one?” And he sidled out, crushing the cardboard cat in his fist. The hell with life. Sleep, sleep, fall asleep and don’t wake up.

  Spring came and spring went and came again, and spread out blue flowers in the meadows and waved her hand and called through his sleep, “Peters! Peters!” but he slept soundly and heard nothing.

  Summer rustled, wandered free in gardens, sitting on benches, swinging bare feet in the dust, calling Peters out on the warm street, the hot sidewalks; whispered, sparkling in the shimmer of linden trees, in the flutter of poplars; called, didn’t get an answer, and left, dragging its hem, into the light part of the horizon.

  Life got on tiptoe and peered into the window in surprise: why was Peters asleep, why wasn’t he coming out to play its cruel games?

  But Peters slept and slept and lived in his dream: neatly wiping his mou
th, he ate vegetables and drank dairy products; he shaved his dull face—around his shut mouth and under his sleeping eyes—and once, accidentally, in passing, he married a cold, hard woman with big feet, with a dull name. The woman regarded people severely, knowing that people were crooks, that you couldn’t trust anyone; her basket held dry bread.

  She took Peters with her everywhere, holding his hand tight, the way his grandmother once did, on Sundays they went to the zoological museum, into the resonant, polite halls—to look at still, woolen mice or the white bones of a whale; on weekdays they went out to stores, bought dead yellow macaroni, old people’s brown soap, and watched heavy vegetable oil pour through the narrow funnel, as thick as depression, endless and viscous, like the sands of the Arabian desert.

  “Tell me,” the woman asked severely, “are the chickens chilled? Give me that one.” And “that one” is placed in the old shopping bag, and sleeping Peters carried home the cold young chicken, who had known neither love nor freedom, nor green grass nor the merry round eye of a girlfriend. And at home, under the watchful eye of the hard woman, Peters himself had to open up the chest of the chilled creature with knife and axe and tear out the slippery purplish heart, the red roses of the lungs, and the blue breathing stalk, in order to wipe out the memory in the ages of the one who was born and hoped, moved his young wings and dreamed of a green royal tail, of pearl grains, of the golden dawn over the waking world.