White Walls

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  That was it, and there was nothing more at all, and soon he disappeared, and there was no one to ask.

  •

  Far outside the city, beyond the wasteland of the outskirts, beyond the weedy alder copses, off the big roads, amid the pine forests and glades of fireweed, abandoned, surrounded by overgrown lilac, the dacha quietly ages. The lock is rusting, the porch rots, thistle has strangled the flower beds, and prickly raspberry edges away from the fence and across the garden, timidly at first, then ever more boldly, twining into the nettle to form a burning hedge.

  At night the wind rises and flies over the blustery, deserted lake; collecting a misty dust and the hum of uninhabited expanses, it tears an iron sheet from the roof, rumbles it about, and flings it into the garden. The wind-bent grass whistles, wild berries and the seeds of wild plants scatter on the humid night earth, sowing a gloomy harvest of dragon’s teeth. And we thought Zhenechka was immortal.

  We didn’t listen to the end of her stories, and now no one will ever know what happened to the mute boy; we threw out unread the books she gave us; we promised to come visit her in her Leningrad apartment but we didn’t mean it; and the older we grew the more excuses we found to avoid her cold, lonely home. And when we finally did come, how she rushed to and fro with joy, how she clutched us—already grown a head taller than she—with small, dry hands, how she flung herself from the table to the stove, where an apple pie was already well under way, how hurriedly she straightened a festive tablecloth on the round table, anchoring it firmly with a vase of autumn roses! And how hastily she smoothed out the high bed’s worn silk coverlet, pale, like the fluid, frayed petal of an enormous rose abandoned by August and possessed by a dusty, indoor spirit, a coverlet so light it couldn’t be thrown over the bed with one broad flap; rumpling in a slow glide, slack and indifferent, it descended unevenly, riding handfuls of stale household air as it fell and shuddering long after it landed, stirred by the thin streams of a warm draft, by the rumble of trucks outside. And, having eaten her pie, we would depart feeling awkward and relieved, and we would relish the autumn air, and laugh at everything, looking all around us eagerly for the arrival of love, which we expected any minute now—long, true love, everlasting and unique—while the love that leaned against the windowpane above and watched us go was too simple and mundane for us. But Zhenechka, thank God, didn’t realize that. And she fervently awaited the new summer, awaited her rendezvous with the old dacha, with the new flowers, and with us, her beloved ones.

  •

  And summer came.

  The era of cooks passed. Fed up, Marfa left, taking away in her trunk the little capital she’d accumulated from milk bottle deposits; the silver fox furs rotted in the storerooms, the factory fences fell apart, and Leningrad gardens turned crimson with wild roses. The school years were coming to an end, the examinations loomed ahead, and energetic Zhenechka prepared for a decisive summer of work. But all this voluntary service—drumming Russian grammar into the heads of ungrateful, sarcastic lazybones day after day; clearing the jungles of dense, stubborn, wily ignorance; planting the cleared terrain with shapely grammatical trees, their spreading branches sibilant with the fuzzy suffixes of Russian participles; trimming away dry knots; grafting flowering branches into place and gathering the fallen fruit—all this toil was apparently not enough for her. The uneasiness of the eternal cultivator drove her into the garden, once as untended and wild as the heads of her pupils. We would urge her to stretch out in the chaise lounge in the sun: what could be better for an old person—just cover your head with burdock leaves and doze till dinnertime. But instead it was we who collapsed in the chaise lounge, languid from sun and adolescence, while Zhenechka tied a kerchief on her head and marched into the overgrowth with shears and a rake. Who had the time to notice that in place of molehills and mountains of stinging nettle, swaying flowers rose in a gentle froth. In her hands flowers seem to soar: ornate pink hydrangeas like bombs ready to burst into red, or else blue ones like a mousse of whisked sky tinged with smoky thunderheads; thick peonies of dark, swooning velvet; and some frizzy, nameless trifle that was splashed all about like a quivering white rain. Only her beloved roses did poorly, no matter how hard she tried. We knew that Zhenechka dreamed of a genuine red rose, pure and deep like the sound of a cello; but either the meager northern warmth held them back, or the earth in our garden rejected the timid roots—the roses grew small, waifish, consumptive.

  •

  Zhenechka would come onto the veranda greatly distressed, and casting an alarmed look at us, she’d say, “Worms are eating the roses.” “Give ’em the old one-two,” we answered, bored. “Make an example of them.” “Cut off their quarterly bonus.”

  But she was afraid of them—of flower worms, and rain worms, and especially of mushroom worms; it was difficult to slip a basket of mushrooms past her watchful eye. Arrest, inspection, and destruction threatened our booty, so we had to hand the basket straight through the low kitchen window while someone stood watch. Hastily dashing icy well water over the slippery, jumping, liplike brown boletuses stuck with leaves, or the pale, wide russulas that crumbled like shortbread and squeaked in our hands, we would throw them into the noisily boiling pot, using a straining spoon to hold back the mushrooms crawling over the rim and to skim off the turbid foam full of dead, floating worms. At the clunk of Zhenechka’s orthopedic shoe we would work faster, bustling and giggling, and by the time she ceremoniously entered the kitchen, pushing open the door with a royal gesture, the burbling broth already shone with a dark, transparent purity.

  “No worms?” she would ask, grave and anxious. “No, no, Zhenechka, perfectly wonderful mushrooms each and every one!” And she would calm down, never dreaming that we could possibly fib, while behind her back, wild with adolescent laughter, someone would wipe the straining spoon clean of the dried gray foam teeming with white corpses.

  And everyone else would look away in embarrassment, as if we’d deceived a child.

  •

  . . . August approaches, evening descends; the dark forest stands with its back to us, facing the sunset, and watches the liquid crimson islands burn out in orange seas high overhead. The first star is out. The night damp gathers. Women sitting on porches pull the hems of their skirts over their knees, speak more softly, raise their dark faces to the heavenly stillness. A black tomcat steps noiselessly out of the black grass, places a black mouse on the stoop. Soon the last heavenly island will be extinguished, darkness will move in from the east, the lake will speak in heavy, muffled waves; the wild lake wind will billow, straighten out, and moan, tearing off into dark, unpeopled expanses to bend bushes, fell ripe seeds, drive nameless, prickly orbs through cooling clover valleys and through untrodden copses; with a drone, it will ascend to the agitated sky in order to blow away the first wisps of feeble, ephemeral stars as they slip into the abyss. Soon it will be time to get up, sigh, shake off specters, walk across the old boards; cups will clink, gas burners will flare like blue asters, the evening tea will trill. Refrigerators will clank open, and the women, back from the stars, will stare mindlessly into their rumbling, dimly lit interiors, slowly recognizing the contours of terrestrial cutlets or dense, frozen cottage cheese.

  Zhenechka, quietly aging, goes through the house, opens the kitchen drawers, whisks some sort of rag about, and steps out onto the silenced porch, holding her breath so as not to frighten the stillness. She puts her hands on my shoulders—dry old hands, chilled to the marrow—and I suddenly feel how small and light she is, how easily the night wind could carry her away to the dark, clamoring distances.

  A lengthy, tranquil moment sets in, one of those moments when superstition says an angel is passing over, and Zhenechka begins, “Now, I remember . . . ,” but we’ve all come to, started talking, and stood up; the porch clatters under our feet, and Zhenechka rushes to tell us the rest, but it’s too late, the angel has come and gone in a gust of wind that covers her words. I see her lips moving, her naive, loving gaze rea
ch out; the wind grabs Zhenechka, the years spill from the sky like stars and fall onto the greedy earth where they grow like thistle, goosefoot, and couch grass; the grasses rise higher, close in; the old house chokes and dies, footsteps are erased, paths are lost, and oblivion blossoms everywhere.

  •

  An old person is like an apple tree in November: Everything in him is falling asleep. In anticipation of night the sap stops flowing, the insensitive roots grow chill and turn to ice, while slowly, slowly the split branch of the dusty Milky Way spins overhead. With its head leaning back, its dry stumps stretched to the frost-furred stars, the obedient, perishable creature waits, submerged in somnolence, expecting neither resurrection nor spring, waits for the dull, speechless swell of time to roll over it, carrying everything along.

  Time passed, and we became adults. Busy with our urgent affairs and our friends, our books, and our children, we brushed Zhenechka’s life aside; it was harder and harder for her to leave her house, and she would phone to relate things that interested no one.

  For a minute or two, I listen to her slow voice, then lay the receiver softly on the telephone table and run off: in the kitchen pots are boiling, hot oil is shooting from the skillet; in the dining room there’s lively conversation, laughter, and news, and they’re calling me to share it all. The doorbell rings, a frozen, rosy crowd enters in raucous fur coats, there’s the clatter of skis, the thud of feet, the floors shake, the windowpanes shake, and beyond the windowpanes the frosty trees shake, bathed in a dusky winter gold.

  Zhenechka’s voice lies cozily on the tablecloth, unhurriedly telling the telephone book, ashtray, and apple core about its joys and worries. Complaining and marveling, admiring and wondering, her soul flows from the telephone receiver holes in an even stream, spills over the tablecloth, evaporates like smoke, dances like dust in the last rays of the sun.

  “Why is the receiver off the hook?” someone asks. I grab the phone with barely wiped wet fingers, and shout: “Yes, Zhenechka! Of course, Zhenechka!” and rush away again. Her hearing aid sings and chirps; she doesn’t notice a thing.

  “Well, what’s she saying?” asks a passing member of the household.

  “Let me listen. . . . Something about some Sofia Sergeevna who went to the sanatorium last summer and the roses they had there. . . . She says the roses were red and their leaves were green . . . in the sky was the sun . . . but at night the moon . . . and the sea was full of water . . . people swam, and got out of the water . . . and dressed in dry clothes and the wet clothes dried out . . . oh, and she asks how we are. Fine, Zhenechka! I said, we’re fine, Zhenechka! Just fi-ine! Yes! I’ll tell them! I’ll tell them!”

  We were all she had left in the world.

  But there came a day in the middle of winter when—shaken to the depths of her soul, armed with a cracked walking staff, the remains of her boyar hat pulled low—Zhenechka appeared on the threshold with a long blue envelope in her hands.

  Words buzzed and fluttered in the envelope, telling her that she was not alone in this world; that quite close by—just a stone’s throw away, beyond the cold gulf, beyond the arc of green ice and the swishing pines, in the snow-covered city of Helsinki (formerly Helsingfors), in an A-frame house, around a cheerful fireplace—there lived the offspring of Zhenechka’s long-lost favorite sister; that these offspring were waiting, couldn’t wait for dear Aunt Eugénie to enter under the peaked roof, into their hospitable half-Finnish embraces, and to lay cellophane-wrapped flowers on the grave of her dear sister, who rests in a neat Finnish cemetery.

  We saw Zhenechka off at the station. She was flustered and embarrassed, like Cinderella stepping into the pumpkin carriage drawn by mice; she clutched her canvas suitcase with her toothbrush and a change of underclothes inside it. We had seen these undergarments at the dacha, on the lakeshore at dawn, when Zhenechka did the hygienic exercises suitable for her age. The shifts consisted of rectangular, sackcloth panels, meticulously joined with a solid, eternal seam; these severe, soldierly items knew neither darts, nor flounces, nor any other tailor’s mischief—they were just sturdy panels, like the white pages of a story about an honest, hardworking life, usefully lived.

  A month later we went to meet her at the same station, ran the entire length of the train, and couldn’t find her. From one car emerged an impressive old lady with eyebrows black like a fallen angel’s and thickly blushed cheeks, dressed in fluffy furs and a dignified hat. The porter carried her scented suitcases. Someone recognized Zhenechka by her orthopedic shoe.

  “Well?” we asked.

  “They’ve got everything over there,” she said. And, overcome, she nearly fainted.

  We took her home and made her tea.

  After that, Zhenechka went to Finland every spring. And then each summer—shining and crazed, happy and youthful, she grew unheard-of flowers from Finnish seeds in the fragrant, revitalized garden of our dacha. Zhenechka’s lacy underwear, celestial and lemon-colored, hung on a line above the flowers, and in her room incredible objects were heaped on her shelf: perfumes, lipsticks, nail polish. And the roses—red roses which had behaved capriciously for many years—suddenly flourished under Zhenechka’s hands, shooting out new buds in swift succession. The Finnish fertilizer must have helped.

  Zhenechka would catch us at the front door or in the garden, and excitedly thrust photographs at us for the umpteenth time: Zhenechka on a Finnish sofa in the living room, Zhenechka with her great-nephew—her new, adored pupil—clinging poignantly to her hand (what’s his name again, Zhenechka? Koko or Pupu?), Zhenechka in the dining room at dinner: lettuce leaves and a couple of green weeds.

  “They’re very thrifty. And they follow a strict diet.”

  We looked at Zhenechka’s belatedly blackened eyebrows and yawned, listening as she sang her hymns to the untold riches of the fish stores.

  “But Zhenechka, do they have sprats in tomato sauce?”

  “No, now I don’t think I saw any sprats.”

  “Well, there you are. How about Wave fish paste?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, then! They’re way behind us! Just look, our shelves are filled with them!”

  And earnest Zhenechka did her best to argue and persuade.

  “And where did you go while you were there?”

  “Oh, I stayed at home. I took care of my great-nephew.”

  “And them?”

  “They went to the Azores. They’d already bought the tickets,” she said in justification.

  So while the relatives lolled about on ocean beaches, the infatuated Zhenechka watered, weeded, and coddled her new sapling with the stubbornness of an insane gardener; she drew the barbarian alphabet on blue paper, so that the boy could meet his suntanned parents with a Russian poem or unpronounceable greeting. On her return to Leningrad, she took to writing postcards, choosing the prettiest: bouquets, golden Petersburg bridges, and the statue of the Bronze Horseman (her relatives mistook Peter the Great on his horse for the anarchist Kropotkin). And new love, which never comes too late, thundered and raged and cascaded over her from head to toe.

  And we believed that Zhenechka was immortal, that youth can return, that a candle once lit will never go out, and that virtue, whatever we might think of it, will eventually be rewarded.

  •

  We’ll choose a day, lock the doors behind us, descend the cold staircase, go out into the stuffy morning city, and leave for the dacha. Out there, pink grass sways and rustles in the warm wind, pine needles cover the old porch; with a slight shush there passes through the emptied, abandoned house the shadow of a shadow of she who once lived, simple as a leaf, clear as light, still as morning water: she who once naively desired to be most beloved.

  We’ll step off the train onto the bare cement platform, walk under the aspen hum of the wires and on—through marsh and thicket, across hills and copses—to where the empty house sleeps beyond the glades of overgrown fireweed, where lilac has gone wild, where a crow taps his beak a
long the porch, where mice say to one another: “Let’s live here for a while.”

  We wade through the grass, parting the dense overgrowth with our hands like swimmers; we find the long-forgotten keys and look around, stretching arms numb from the weight of the bags. It’s a damp, lushly blooming northern June. The old, crooked dacha sinks into the grass like a half-drowned boat. Lilac darkens the rooms, pines have crushed the veranda’s fragile breast. The brittle fifes of bedstraw have opened their white umbrellas; disturbed, a mysterious young bird cries loudly; and tiny veronica blossoms litter every sunny clump of dry earth with dark blue.

  There are no roads or paths in the ocean of grass yet, the flowers are not yet crushed, only a slight corridor can be discerned where we walked from the gates to the porch. It’s a shame to break the dense, stiff clusters of lilac—a blue, snowy shadow lies on them as on a new-fallen, sparkling crust of ice. It’s a shame to trample the quiet, thick grass forests.

  We drink tea on the veranda. Let’s spend the night. Why don’t we ever come here? We could live here! But it’s a long way to lug supplies. We should weed out the nettle. Plant some flowers. Repair the porch. Prop it up somehow. The words fall into the stillness, the impatient lilac has burst through the open windows and sways as it listens to our empty promises, our impossible projects, our rosy dreams fading in an instant: it’s not true, no one will come, there is no one to come, she’s gone, she’s a shadow, and the night wind will blow away her dilapidated dwelling.