White Walls

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  Korobeinikov’s ashtray is full of butts—geez, look how much he smoked! Everyone stares after the ashtray meaningfully as Olga Mikhailovna’s husband goes to dump it—that mound of empty, stinking cardboard tips—as if it measured the guilt of an unclean man.

  Korobeinikov walks through the unsheltering grove. The birch trunks are chilly, and the ground feels cold through his shoes; ahead smolder the lights of the sanatorium, a vale of woe: the beds there are white and the bed tables are white, the walls shine with white oil paint, white lamps hang from the ceilings, and on the staircase landing, where Korobeinikov goes to smoke, a fire hose is curled up in a white cabinet with glass doors. The hose is brown, flat, long—infinitely long, longer than life—and at night, when Korobeinikov falls asleep, headless orderlies will sail into the ward without touching the floor and order Korobeinikov to swallow the hose—that’s what you have to do before an operation—and, choking, he will swallow, swallow those long, endless yards of dull, rough ribbon.

  The next day, Korobeinikov sits at his boring meal, listlessly pokes at his fish balls with a fork, stares out the wide sanatorium windows to where August burns with gold, green, and deep blue—he’ll go for his usual walk and then he’ll drop by that house after all: he was only imagining things, he must have been in a bad mood himself, it’s just the illness, it’s the pain, the rumble, the spoonful of fire he must have swallowed somehow by mistake, those people have nothing to do with it. He walks through the grove, touches the cold bushes, leans his spectacles earthward, looking for a mushroom, but there aren’t any; lots of people hunt for them here.

  He sits on the veranda, trying to joke and be entertaining, but Olga Mikhailovna only narrows her eyes, and Olga Mikhailovna’s husband, who whenever he hears a good joke repeats it again and again, asks, “So how’s your megahertz—still hurts?” although the question is really unnecessary. And the conversation flags, halts, dries up, as if everything on earth had already been said.

  It must be boring for them to listen to the same thing over and over again—why hadn’t he considered that? Now, when that yellow-eyed sculptor puts on a show, they’re all pleased as Punch, they all laugh. Still, an old friend is better than two new ones, Korobeinikov thinks vaguely to himself; no matter, he’ll just have to outtalk him. He’ll prepare something for tomorrow. About life after death, for instance. What a person sees when he faints or is in a coma, when he’s clinically dead. Oh, there’s a lot of gripping stuff! The witnesses are completely reliable. He actually talked to one of these people. This guy told him that on the other side, everything is sky blue and transparent, but there’s no air, and you don’t need to breathe, you don’t even miss it. And, you know, the feeling is like when you’re young, or you just got out of the army, or you just had a son—a really good feeling. And then someone appears—you can’t exactly see anyone, but he’s there all the same—and this someone talks to you, but without any voice. “It’s not time yet,” he says. In a kind of respectful way. And then, whoosh!—you’re suddenly back on the operating table again, everybody’s running around you, frantic, but you’re lying there and you’re thinking, What do any of you know! . . . Yes, that’s a good story. Only it has to be told with élan, with spirit. Have to rouse the audience, right? . . . No, I won’t go there anymore, thinks Korobeinikov, heading back, tripping over a root. It’s humiliating, for heaven’s sake! If only it weren’t for the whiteness of the hospital, the dull shine of the linoleum, the sterile, deathly cigarette bucket! If only the fire hose didn’t come sneaking up in the evenings, didn’t stick to you with suction cups, didn’t sting you to the very core.

  Completely yellow, Korobeinikov walks along the evening path. Dmitry Ilich embraces Olga Mikhailovna in the birch forest.

  “Why does he keep dragging himself over here?” says Olga Mikhailovna indignantly, her eyes following the gaunt figure.

  “Oh, don’t pay him any mind, little one,” says Dmitry Ilich, kissing her.

  “How do you stand him, Dima, you’re simply a saint!”

  “Don’t be silly, my child, what’s there to get excited about! He’s got it bad enough as is, let him live out his life in peace! For him the time has come to wither; for you, to blossom. You see, even my walking stick is blooming at the sight of you.” Olga Mikhailovna’s head spins; if no one could see her she’d jump up and down and do cartwheels—wow, what a romance! Dmitry Ilich combs back his hair with his fingers, flashes his hawk eyes, and feasts them on Olga Mikhailovna.

  It grows dark. Korobeinikov, completely black, shuffles from the village to the sanatorium; a little ball of light bounces about on the roots. Dmitry Ilich has no secrets from Olga Mikhailovna: “By the way, my child, I was only joking,” he says, knocking leaves from a bush with a stick. “It was a practical joke—punish me. That story about the poems—it never happened, and I’ve never seen that Korobeinikov of yours before in my life.”

  “What do you mean, Dima?” says Olga Mikhailovna, scared.

  “The devil led me astray. Or maybe I was jealous of him. I thought, Who is this Korobeinikov character? But I pulled it off, didn’t I?”

  “Ohhhh, Dimochka, you’re so bad,” pouts Olga Mikhailovna. “What are we going to do with you? Come on, let’s go have our tea. My husband is probably sharpening his switchblade by now.”

  Over tea they giggle like conspirators. “What’s with you two?” says Olga Mikhailovna’s husband, surprised. So they have to tell about how Dmitry Ilich played a joke on Korobeinikov. Dmitry Ilich is very amusing about doing penance—he clasps his hands together and begs to be forgiven. He even wants to get down on his knees in front of everyone, only his lame leg gets in his way. “Don’t be ridiculous!” everyone shouts. No, he insists, he’ll get down on his knees! At least on one knee. He’s repented, repented! On one knee, and the other leg cocked like a pistol: how do you prefer the other leg—in front or behind? Everyone laughs: this Dmitry Ilich is so awfully artistic! And though Korobeinikov may be vindicated now, he’s a bore anyway. And somehow they’ve got used to thinking badly of him. Oh, to hell with him! “Heavenly flame!” “Megahertz!” “It hertz until it stoptz!” “Did you hear that?” shouts Olga Mikhailovna’s husband. “It hertz until it stoptz!” Anyway, he always talked such a lot of nonsense, and told such lies—did you notice? And tomorrow he’ll drag himself over here again. He ought to at least be ashamed—he can see how people feel about him; he could just stay put in that sanatorium of his! Spit in his face and he thinks it’s a spring rain!

  The next day Olga Mikhailovna feels very uncomfortable. First of all, around her husband, who doesn’t suspect a thing—oh well, that doesn’t matter—and secondly around Korobeinikov. It would be better if he didn’t come. It’s uncomfortable to look someone straight in the eye when we’ve treated him like crap for no reason and we can’t admit it. But, on the other hand, he’s been cleared. And now we don’t have to live with that awful feeling of having invited a bastard into the house. Dima behaved badly, of course. But he’s repented—and all on his own, too, no one twisted his arm. It takes guts to do that, whatever you say. That’s courage.

  But Korobeinikov does come, of course. And he tries really hard. Why does he try so hard? It’s all over with! And Olga Mikhailovna puts up with him, soiled as he is, and she’s solicitous, emphatically solicitous, as she pours him tea and feeds him pound cake. “Everything they give you in the sanatorium is probably mush—isn’t it? At least here you can eat like a real person.” Korobeinikov is startled, he looks bewilderedly through his thick glasses. He doesn’t understand—what was all that about, last week? What’s going on now? There’s some kind of tension in the air. And does anyone like this tension? No one does. It’s hard to be with him, Korobeinikov. He’s already turned completely yellow. And it would be nice if he’d realize that, since the conflict is resolved and everything’s cleared up now, it would just be better if he didn’t come here anymore. Because it’s hard to be with him. And when he looks closely into their faces, t
rying to understand, that’s hard too. And there’s no point staring. As it turns out, it’s nothing to do with him. He’s been acquitted and now he can just leave.

  Olga Mikhailovna looks at Korobeinikov with hatred. These nightly visits drive her crazy. And they drive everyone else in the house crazy, too. What—don’t we have the right to live like human beings? Among our own friends? Honestly, it would be better if he died. Yes, well, that’s what’ll probably happen soon. That’s no ulcer he’s got, oh no. It’s not an ulcer; see how lemony-looking he is, and he’s aged right before our very eyes. And another sign that the end is near is that insensitivity and tactlessness, that thickheaded stubbornness—when the sick person doesn’t care about proprieties anymore and just clings to life, to people, to whatever there is. Yes, as an honest person, she freely admits it to herself: she wishes he would die. There you have it. Everyone would rest easier.

  The nights are cold: she goes out on the porch, offers Korobeinikov a jacket, knowing that he won’t take it; she waits while he lights the flashlight, steps down from the porch; she listens greedily to his feeble feet shuffling through the fallen leaves. She hopes that she’s right about the symptoms. Soon, very soon. It would be nice if it were before the end of the summer. She stands for a long time and watches the flashlight’s pale fire count the hospital-white birch trunks, watches the corridor of light close in, the darkness thicken, the heavenly flame sweep blindly by, searching out its victim.

  Translated by Jamey Gambrell

  MOST BELOVED

  AT NIGHT spring blows through Leningrad. River wind, garden wind, and stone wind collide, whirl together in a powerful rush, and race through the empty troughs of the streets, shatter the glass of attic windows with a peal and lift the damp, limp sleeves of laundry drying between rafters; the winds fling themselves flat on the ground, soar up again, and take off, speeding the scents of granite and budding leaves out to the night sea where, on a distant ship under a fleet sea star, a sleepless traveler crossing the night will raise his head, inhale the arriving air, and think: land.

  But by early summer the city begins to wear on the soul. In the pale evening you stand at the window above the emptying street and watch the arc lamps come on quietly—one moment they’re dead and silent, and then suddenly, like a sick, technological star, a rosy manganese point lights up, and it swells, spills, grows, and brightens until it shines full strength with a dead, lunar whiteness. Meanwhile, outside of town, the grasses have already quietly risen from the earth, and without a thought for us the trees rustle and the gardens change flowers. Somewhere out there are dusty white roads with tiny violets growing along their shoulders, the swish of summer stillness at the summit of century-old birches.

  Somewhere out there our dacha is aging, collapsing on one side. The weight of February snows has crushed the roof, winter storms have toppled the double-horned chimney. The window frames are cracking and weakened diamonds of colored glass fall onto the ground, onto the brittle litter of two years’ flowers, onto the dry muddle of spent stems; they fall with a faint chime no one will hear. There’s no one to weed out the stinging nettle and goosefoot, sweep the pine needles from the rickety porch, no one to open the creaky, unpainted shutters.

  There used to be Zhenechka for all this. Even now it seems she might be limping along the garden path, in her hand the first bouquet of dill, raised like a torch. Perhaps she actually is somewhere around here right now, only we can’t see her. But the cemetery is definitely not the right place for her—for anyone else in the world, yes, but not for her. After all, she meant to live forever, until the seas dry up. It never even crossed her mind that she could stop living, and, truth be told, we too were certain of her immortality—as we were of our own, for that matter.

  •

  Long, long ago, on the far side of dreams, childhood reigned on earth, the winds slept quietly beyond the distant, dark blue woods, and Zhenechka was alive. . . . And now, from the herbarium of bygone days which grows with every year—green and motley days, dull and brightly colored ones—memory fondly extracts one and the same pressed leaf: the first morning at the dacha.

  On the first morning at the dacha, the damp glassed-in veranda still swims in green, underwater shadow. The front door is open wide, cold creeps in from the garden; the pails are in place, empty and resonant, ready for a run to the lake, to the smooth, blinding lake, where the reflected world fell upside down in the early hours of the morning. The old pail gurgles, a distant echo gurgles. You ladle the deep, cold silence, the stilled, smooth surface, and sit for a while on a fallen tree.

  Cars will soon start honking outside the gates of the dachas, summer folk will pour out of the automobiles, and, sighing and moaning, a taxi-truck will turn around in the narrow, wooded dead end of the road, scraping on the low branches of maples, breaking off the fragile flowering elder. It will give a gasp of blue smoke and fall quiet. In the returning silence the only sound will be the thunder of the truck’s wood side-panels dropping, and on its high platform strangers’ belongings, crowned with an upturned Viennese chair, will be shamelessly revealed to the eye.

  And one automobile will drive straight through the gates, and from the wide-flung door will emerge a firm, elderly hand gripping a walking stick, then a leg in a high-buttoned orthopedic shoe, then a small straw hat with a black ribbon, and finally smiling Zhenechka herself, who will straightaway cry out in a high voice: “Look at the lilacs!” and then, “My suitcases!” But the bored driver will already be standing with the canvas bags in both hands.

  Zhenechka will hurry into the house, exclaiming loudly over the aromas of the garden; she’ll push open the casements impatiently, and with both hands—strong like a sailor’s—pull branches of lilac into the rooms, their cold, purple curls rustling with noisy importance. Then she’ll hurry to the sideboard to see whether the winter mice have broken her favorite cup, and the cabinet will grudgingly open its swollen doors, behind which Zhenechka’s treasure whiled away the January nights alone in the stale, empty depths, alone with a graying, forgotten cookie.

  She will walk through the rooms, as yet unwarmed by the sun; she’ll unpack, hand out presents crackling with paper, shake fruit fudge and sweet cakes from packets, cram the corners of the rooms with bouquets of wild flowers, hang our smiling photographs above her bed; then she’ll clear the desk, and stack it with textbooks, dictionaries, and dictation books. Not a single idle day will she allow us; she’ll sit us each down for at least an hour of lessons geared to our respective ages. “We are legion—you can’t teach us all!” We’ll wriggle and hop about in front of Zhenechka. “Yes, I can,” she’ll answer calmly, looking for the inkwell. “Take pity on yourself,” someone will whine. “Like Pushkin says, we’re disgusting, lazy—no curiosity. . . .” “All of you are going to grow up to be educated people.” “We won’t grow up! We’re slaves to our stomachs! We’re denizens of the dark kingdom! Take the books and burn them all!” “Never mind, we’ll manage,” says Zhenechka, and she’ll seize us roughly and kiss us each harshly with a convulsive love we accept indulgently: All right, let her love us. Already she’s dragging the first victim to her lesson, saying, as always, “I taught your mama, you know. Your grandmother and I were childhood friends. . . .”

  And on her chest, in the folds of her dress, her hearing aid begins to chirr like a nightingale—the hearing aid that for some reason never works quite right. Well, then, we’re back to lessons again, exercises and dictations; once again, sitting in the creaky wicker armchair, propping her bad leg against the walking stick, Zhenechka, in her measured voice, will begin patiently turning us into educated people, and with the heedlessness of childhood, we will again start to bait her. We’ll crawl into the room where the current captive languishes at the copybook; we’ll crouch behind Zhenechka’s armchair—her hunched linen back, her clean soap smell, the willow creak—and take advantage of her deafness to prompt the giggling victim with wrong or indecent or ridiculous answers, or pass notes with calls t
o rebel against the slave driver, until Zhenechka notices something’s up and, all in a dither, banishes the spies.

  And beyond the windows, beyond the tinted panes: a fresh, flowered stillness, warm shadows beneath the pines, and the midday lake filled with blue, glinting through the boughs, all covered with patches of sun, with fleet wedges of rippled brightness. . . . But here we are, locked indoors, the table covered in green blotting paper, the thumbtacks rusted over the winter, the ink stains bleeding an official-looking lilac rainbow. And everything Zhenechka says—is boring, correct, old. If only she’d go into the garden or go drink coffee! “Zhenechka, how much longer?” “Underline the subject with one line, the predicate with two. . . .” “Zhenechka, the summer will be over!” The willow armchair gives a heavy sigh, the blue eyes gaze with calm reproach, the patient voice says: “There’s a time to sow and a time to reap. . . . Sluggards never make scholars . . . . Live and . . .”

  Ohh, isn’t there something she’s dying to do?

  The evening fades, the dust on the road grows cold, dogs bark far away. We lie in our beds on cool pillows, listening to the sighs and purrs of the day winding down, the whispers of doors, muffled laughter. From the attic—lighter than shadow, quieter than dust—dreams descend, surging in a transparent wave and confusing what has been with what never was.

  Knocking, squeaking, and rustling, groping through the twilight of the house, Zhenechka makes her way to our beds, settles in, and takes up an unending story about bygone years—about the children she taught and loved, about the wind that scattered them throughout the wide world: some disappeared, some grew up and forgot, some returned to dust. Dreams swirl like a warm shadow; from the invisible cloud of soap and mint only her voice emerges, sympathetic and soft, then cooing and enraptured, unhurried, like a blissful June day. Transparent visions float in dozing waters: a boy surfaces, a faraway dark-eyed, light-haired, antique boy, who long, long ago lay just like this in a dizzyingly distant white bed and listened to the murmur, the gurgle, the rise and fall of Zhenechka’s voice—a boat rocking on waves of drowsiness. His eyes drooped and shut, his fingers relaxed, his speechless lips parted—for the dark-eyed boy was mute. That’s why Zhenechka was asked to come: to pity, love, and care for him; to croon lullabies and babble fairy tales about dark forests, about the cat and the wolf, about the seven orphaned goats; and, as the boy fell asleep, his muteness mingled with the night’s, and his bed set sail under the low vault of dreams.