White Walls

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  The moon came out behind a cloud,

  He drew a knife and cried out loud:

  Now I’ll stab you, Now I’ll hit,

  I don’t care, ’cause you are IT!

  And the horrid, yellow, horned moon with a human face rose up from the clouds of blue-black billowing fog, and its armor clanked dimly and its word—was law. I don’t care, ’cause you are it! And they were afraid of the Moon and did not violate its oppressive, threatening will. Except when one of them cried out the colorful, catchy, lizardlike word: chooreekee! allyallyincomefree! Then for a second the horrific wheel of the world stopped running, stood rooted to the spot, the iron gates locked open, the fetters unfastened—and inside the charmed, delicate rainbow bubble of sudden freedom the little rebel himself stiffened in surprise, stopped in shock.

  Heavenly valleys, tall rose-colored grasses swaying in the warm breeze; hills rising with floral breath. And in the evenings, a never-extinguished sunset beyond the black spruce peaks—orange, raspberry; in the evenings—gray, red-eyed wolves carefully distributed between the tree trunks, waiting in vain for their sinister wolfish opportunity—but no one would lie near the edge of the bed or cradle.

  And in the heights above everything stretched the world of grownups—noisy, droning high overhead like pines in foul weather. Grownups: large, warm pillars, reliable, eternal columns that held out glasses of milk and offered trays of latticed blueberry pie, that ran out with prickly wool sweaters in their outstretched hands and got down on their knees to fasten small dusty sandals.

  And then something broke, something went wrong. The kaleidoscope—and everything in it—shattered: a handful of dull glass shards, bits of cardboard, and strips of fiery, crimson-backed mirror. The world began to dwindle and wither, the grass receded, the ceiling lowered, borders started to show through, the delightful games were forgotten. The evening fog, the wolves and the forest, it turned out, were painted on canvas carelessly tacked on wood stretchers that leaned against the cold wall. Grownups broke all the rules and died: Father was crossed out by the red line of war, Mother shriveled and extinguished; their faces dissolved in a tremulous netting of rain. The only one to dig in, hold on, the only one to stay—was Grandmother. And like a barrier, like Baba Yaga’s pike fence, impenetrable, pitch-black adolescence rose up in front of Natasha: twisted dead-ends, shameful thoughts, revolting conjectures.

  The sky was silent, the earth died. Slushy rains fell for centuries. Natasha dragged the swelling caldron of her body, lumbering along on her pawish feet—there are five of them, seven of them, they’re in the way; in the mirror, heavy, clumsy eyes looked out at her from a thick, rubbery face. People walked around up to the waist in filth, they concealed stench and open sores under their clothes, and all of them thought only of one thing. And with a shudder, suspecting her own unclean, female, animal nature, Natasha felt attacked night and day by a foul wind blowing and blowing from below at her gut, at her unprotected depths.

  She began to dream of silent ravines, closed underground dens, staircases with collapsing steps. Every night, ripping her nails, Natasha tore off the cold, padded doors, and behind one of those doors her dead father, his huge mouth yawning, blew a monstrous black bubble from ash-colored lips—a hellish balloon.

  And Natasha lay for hours, covering herself with a blanket from head to toe so that neither humans nor the stars could discern the marshy rubbish heap writhing like putrid mushrooms in her soul, so they wouldn’t recognize the unmentionable.

  At this time Konovalov began to drop in.

  He came in from the cold, took out a handkerchief, and carefully dried his nose as it defrosted in the warmth; he gazed intently with his blue eyes, wiped his hands, made friends with Grandmother’s cheesecake: Natasha attracted him. Konovalov helped Grandmother with money, gave advice about Natasha’s future, moved the furniture, screwed in pale light bulbs high up on the ceiling, and, flustered, even offered a princely gift: he rented them a cheap dacha for the summer. And Natasha waited for the squeak of the door from the communal hall, the shudder of the dusty ball fringe on the door curtains, waited for the moment when, bearing a questioning blue fire in his eyes, Konovalov would enter.

  But Konovalov was clean and Natasha was dirty, and she battened down all the hatches, caulked all the cracks, stood like a mute black tower. Konovalov’s blue flares fizzled out against her cold surface.

  Like a frenzied falcon, Konovalov looked this way and that, circled, clicked his beak, and then, unwillingly, shot up into the air and hid himself far beyond the deep blue forest. No one ever loved her again.

  . . . But that summer, that summer in the country, the magical farewell feather that Konovalov let fall.

  In a tight sundress, with a waffle towel slung over her neck, Natasha went out on the June porch. An early sun—timid, cold, pure—trembled on high, entangled in the pine. The air was colored in unsteady morning tones—not quite color, but the intimation of color: a sigh of pink, a hint at transparency. The earth was black, firm, the grass wet, thick, and under every bush lay a hard block of lilac shade. It was damp, lush, shadowy, the garden was neglected. And the sun climbed upward and pierced the pine summits with pale rainbow knitting needles. There, at the very top, dark blue birds flitted about, and the tiny, green, sharp-tipped umbrellas shone with an unbearable, sun-filled happiness. There the morning was being made, a holiday was being celebrated, there was joy, joy, joy—a young June bride.

  Beneath one’s feet was a green, prickly country, dove-gray blueberry undergrowth, the green-pea shapes of unripened wild strawberries, whitish pink fields of cockles, and beyond the bright forest—the smooth quiet of a lake burning under the sun.

  And Natasha carried in her soul a limpid golden glass of champagne happiness.

  By autumn she was despondent, her heart pounded, she heard voices, had dreams. From rows of late gypsy poppies, spun from gentle soporific substances, the wind blew potions, visions of bedchambers, connecting suites, cool boudoirs, light blue lacy bridges over misty waterways, muddled paths that led to a nocturnal country: a pliant, soft, brown, elusive country; to a sleepy forest with neat yellow paths, literate bears that walked on their hind legs, friendly old women who willingly lived alone in thickets and waved plump hands from gingerbread windows; and you walk farther and farther on, you’ve already made it past the round table buried in the ground, and the old gray hammock stretched between resinous spruces, you’ve passed the abandoned, child-size watering can; and you see yourself, sitting on your haunches, with a yellow silk ribbon in your hair; and on the bench, ornamented by bark beetles, your dead parents are sitting and waiting. Now you remember their faces. Mama wears white tennis shoes and a white beret; Papa sports a mustache. He’s drawing a word of some sort on the sand with a black umbrella. A strange word, you can’t quite make it out. You’re on the verge of getting it . . . but no. They’re looking straight at Natasha, they’re silent, smiling: What’s the problem? Well? Didn’t you understand? Just a minute, wait, any second now . . . there . . . but the thick cloth curtains of dream quiver, the faces blur, the forest grows thin as gauze, and like a fish jerked out of the water, panting and weighty, Natasha is once again here. Upon awakening the unambiguous temples of her today throb. The obscure water closes up, the lid slams shut, on the white ceiling the undeciphered abracadabra—the futile missive from her dead father—melts swiftly.

  Grandmother took Natasha to the doctor, Natasha swallowed white tablets, and she no longer dreamt of anything except sighing, black waves of air.

  •

  After graduating from the institute, Natasha taught geography to schoolchildren. The word “geography” caused vast expanses to unfold in her mind: a hawk glided above the poppy fields, the muffled, nighttime sea roared, poisonous lily-white flowers swayed high overhead, and at the very bottom of the heavy, round earth, where the blue string bag of the meridians tightens into a stiff knot, a frost-covered skier, following the trail of whining dogs, slowly wandered upside do
wn among the delicate ice glades of Queen Maud Land. But she didn’t know how to talk about this, and for that matter, no one asked her to; in fact, there was no science on earth devoted to studying the fragrance of a garden at night, the moan of sea foam, the dark splendor of the ocean’s pearls, and the dull thud of a lonely heart. What if the children were to guess—how shameful—that Natasha, their melancholy, large-nosed teacher, imagined “bauxite deposits” as forest caves from which fat, reddish, short-haired dogs in round boxing gloves tumbled one after another, and “Tung Sten” as a raven-haired Chinese prince in a robe of iridescent cast? So, afraid of being found out, Natasha spoke in a dull, confusing manner, gazed imploringly at the awkward, chapped-knuckled eighth graders, whom she feared, hinted at the answers herself, and drew pretty blue A’s on their papers with a sense of relief.

  Time was passing, her heart beat, and no one arrived to love Natasha. But there were omens, premonitions, and visions, those ambiguous signs that fate proffers every so often—hadn’t the Yellow Moon, emerging with a knife from the blue billows of misty clouds, promised her something ominous, enormous, and petrifying? But now the Yellow Moon was silent and only played with the carved black shadows on Grandmother’s grave.

  •

  A long communal corridor ran through Natasha’s dwelling; overhead in the half-dark swam washbasin tambourines, dusty Aeolian bicycle harps, and over the exit, rising like a plague cemetery up in arms, the black skulls of electric meters huddled together; as night fell the white stripes of their teeth, each row marked by a single bloody tooth, began madly spinning to the right. In the evening, soccer games whistled and blazed blue behind other people’s doors, other people’s husbands argued loudly; grandmothers sitting on high beds scratched their legs. A cheerful plumber reached for his rosy young neighbor in the kitchen; the neighbor woman flapped her elbows and the cheerful plumber exclaimed delightedly: “Goooood and spunky!”

  In the evenings Natasha played poker with yellow, tobacco-permeated Konkordia Benediktovna, who gave her advice on how to dress; Konkordia Benediktovna herself wore a dark, glinting brooch at her breast, she fetched large faceted beads from little boxes, turned cups over, and tapped her fingernail against the porcelain bottoms with their pale blue pedigree stamps—antiques, ancient antiques. Natasha gazed at the worn little cards and wanted to look like the Russian Queen of Diamonds—soft, blue-eyed, dressed in a white gathered head scarf and a sable vest. The old widower Gagin would stop in, looking like a graying crane in a red muffler; every year he drew a crazed Santa Claus and a violently lunatic Snow White for the windows of the vegetable store: mammoth, red-faced, ready to take on anything, they raced furiously through a curly blizzard on princely sleighs with silver spangles.

  In the morning there was the humiliating visit to the toilet with its oozing pistachio walls, carefully torn rectangles of Socialist Industry or The Week, and a swaying dog-leash chain ending in an old-fashioned porcelain pear, on which some wise Englishman, to help things along, had written the black word “Pull” in English and had even drawn a tiny pointing hand in a black cuff: which direction to pull. But just for fun, the cheerful plumber always deliberately disobeyed the Englishman’s directions, and while Natasha fumed indignantly in the slime-covered isolation booth, old lady Morshanskaya, ailing and disheveled in her nightgown, was already pounding on the door, shouting in her whiskered voice:

  “Have some consideration for old people! . . . Natalia, is that you? . . . Your insides will fall out! . . .”

  The bathroom window opened onto the back stair, and old lady Morshanskaya, fearing an attack by Young Pioneer scouts out collecting materials for recycling, barricaded it with a wooden washtub—the very same cracked one, the last hand-me-down from the Magic Golden Fish. The bathroom was used exclusively for washing clothes—they went to the baths to wash themselves. Natasha went as well: she looked at the strange, undressed women, pink, like wet ham, and found fault with them all. Once, in the steam room, on the slippery, sloping floor, the fat, naked high-school headmistress passed by with a wet knot of hair on her forehead and a tub tucked under her arm like a class register, the same headmistress who, that very morning, had sternly declared: “We, pedagogues, collectively recognize.” And long afterward, whenever the head-mistress—her face purple, her medal clinking—yelled at adolescents who giggled during the ceremonial lineup, all Natasha could see was the horrid, red, distended creature that shuffled hurriedly past along the wet, terra-cotta tile.

  On the summer boulevards sat old women who had known a better life: gilded cups, the frosty flora of lace hems, the tiny antlike facets of foreign fragrance vials, and perhaps—indeed, most likely—secret lovers; they sat with one leg crossed over the other, their gaze lifted to where the heavenly evening theater silently lavished burning crimsons, golden treasures; and the loving western light crowned the blue hair of these former women with tea roses.

  But nearby, heavily spreading their swollen legs, with drooping hands and drooping heads wrapped in dotted kerchiefs, flames all snuffed out, like dead swans sat those who had lived for years in brown communal kitchens, in dim corridors, those who had slept on iron frame beds next to deep-set windows, where beyond the speckled blue casserole, beyond the heavy smell of fermentation, beyond the tearstained glass, another person’s wall darkens and swells with autumn anguish.

  And Natasha began to dream: if old age must come to me as well, then let me turn into a clean, pink, white-haired old lady, a beloved schoolteacher, kind and funny, like a hot cross bun. But she wasn’t made to be a hot cross bun and so was obliged to become a stooped, muddy-gray old lady with jowls.

  •

  She only made it to Moscow once, by chance. In a taxi, scared stiff, she zoomed along the nighttime streets squeaky with frost; she gazed up at the enormous buildings—rearing black chests of drawers, the gloomy castles of vanished titans, gigantic honeycombs crowned with bloody embers standing guard. And in the morning she looked out of the hotel window onto a hushed thaw, the soft, gray day, the jumble of little two-story yellow buildings and annexes pierced by morning lights—muslin is drawn back from a small window, a kettle whistles, a grandmother in felt boots entertains her grandson with white rolls—sweet, soft, Russian Moscow!

  She immediately wanted to live there, wanted to exhale frosty steam in the small lanes, clear little paths in the snowdrifts, wear loose, ample blouses untucked, drink tea with hard round pretzels purchased in a little, ruddy, golden shop.

  Elated by the strong morning air, by Moscow’s slapdash shabbiness, by the smoldering geranium lampposts in low windowsills, Natasha awoke, threw her arms open wide, laughed, and fell in love—swiftly and uninhibitedly, on meeting the bearded, sandy-haired Pyotr Petrovich from the city of Izium, who had come to Moscow to go shopping. Happy, she laughed, leaning her chest on the table of the dumpling shop, and watched with shining eyes as Pyotr Petrovich heartily tossed the steaming white blobs into his large mouth; she trotted around to stores with the cheerful Iziumer like a dog, waved from long lines, helped him lug blue shoeboxes, elbowed her way through to the steep Eliseevsky counter windows, and in the crowd accidentally pressed her cheek to the wide, fragrant back of that beloved sheepskin coat.

  And Pyotr Petrovich, unaware, laughed joyfully, turned around toward Natasha as he swayed in the roaring surf at the counters of Children’s World, and in a booming voice called through the storm of heads: “Miss! Over here, Miss! Give me a tabletop ring toss.” And from afar he raised his victorious hands and linked them over his head, nodding to Natasha: I’m alive, alive, I bought it, await me on the shore. . . .

  And at the station, near the train to Izium, he shook Natasha’s hand joyfully: Thank you, you’re a wonderful woman, come visit Izium, you’ll get on splendidly with my wife, you’ll meet my children. . . .

  Pyotr Petrovich sank, Natasha howled like a wolf after the departing green train, and her howl—a wartime, train station howl—flew over the ringing rails, over the redbrick barrac
ks, over the cruel, bitter-cold earth. And behind Natasha, holding her firmly by the shoulder, stood old age, like a stern, patient doctor who has prepared his usual instruments.

  •

  She began to like gray goosedown scarves, to be pickier about her shoes: were they well-cut, did they pinch? She went to visit old lady Morshanskaya, and inspected her boxes of homeopathic remedies: sulfur iodine, salvia, hamamelis. For the old woman’s birthday she gave her an enema bag: light blue, cheerful, with a relief drawing: little bouquets of lily of the valley against a sunrise. Konkordia Benediktovna returned from visiting her sister in Paris and brought Natasha a red plastic spoon. The widower Gagin would drop in with a crossword puzzle: Now then, Natasha, this is your territory—a river in Kazakhstan, five letters, ending with “sh”?

  At New Year’s, Gagin drank champagne and offered Natasha his heart and hand; Natasha laughed, Gagin laughed too; he was a jovial old man, and every year his drunken Santa Clauses and pedigree milk-cow Snow Whites turned out cheerier and cheerier.

  Natasha moved the buffet and remembered Konovalov; at first he flared like a blue spark in the dark, then he flew in more and more often, hovered in the air, blotted his nose, and timidly disappeared if someone knocked at the door. While canning tomatoes, throwing the whole weight of her body onto the stiff lids of the jars, Natasha imagined how Konovalov, gratefully surprised, would fish out a soft, cool, dripping ball with two fingers, and ask for seconds.

  Asleep in Serafimovsky Cemetery, Grandmother approved of Konovalov, but she’d gone and taken his address with her. Natasha flipped through the phone book: Konovalovs multiplied like cards in a deck, they scattered about the city like ants, their little black numbers blinked—one lived here, on Liteiny. It was easy to say: find Konovalov . . . A copper bell with a round inscription: “please turn.” Brrring, brring, brrriiinngg! Silence. Slip-slap—footsteps. The bar clanks; squealing, a two-foot-long iron-smelling hook flies off; a chain scrapes. A suspicious old lady sticks a yellow, hairy nose out from the darkness, the smell of kasha wafts through the door: “Who do you want?”—“Konovalov.”—“He’s not home.” Bang!—the door slams shut. Maybe he lives in a new building, on Rzhevka, or Grazhdanka, or on Silvery Boulevard, all riddled with rusty wire? . . . “Who’s there?” “I’m looking for Konovalov, please. . . .” A surprised wife—dark, thin—wipes her hands on her apron, perplexed: Come in, please, but . . . Behind her—an unfamiliar, alien apartment, their apartment, the unread story of a life that has passed without me. . . . Konovalov comes out, chewing: “Who are you? . . .” No, but maybe he actually lives out of town? In some two-story wooden house. . . . A rooster wanders about the yard, tiger lilies bloom near the porch, the ground is trampled, packed down by feet. . . . A front door—like a dacha outhouse, and farther on, up a steep stair—a dark entryway, a hanging horse collar, wooden washtubs. . . . “It’s Konovalov you want? Upstairs, upstairs, knock on the door. . . .” And he’s lying in his boots on the bed, a cigarette in his hand, flowers in the windows, a grandfather clock: ticktock, ticktock; the pinecone weight crawls down. . . . And what will I say to him? “Oh, Konovalov! If once you loved a green, unripe sapling, then won’t you now take autumn’s withering, rotting fallen fruit? . . .”