•
Once again Zhenechka packed her bags to go visit her Finnish relatives: for the baby an ABC book, for the nephews something stronger. She was only waiting for the letter, and it arrived. The relatives came straight to the point—they couldn’t invite dear Eugénie to visit them anymore. She would understand, of course; after all, she had reached such a venerable age that what had happened to their neighbors’ Aunt Nika could happen to her any minute. And enclosed was a photograph of this aunt in her coffin, all dressed up and motionless, surrounded by Russian Orthodox lace and Finnish bouquets. Look how badly Aunt Nika behaved; if dear Eugénie were to do the same thing during her visit there might be complications, trouble, misunderstandings . . . and who would pay for it all? Had dear Eugénie considered this? And she needn’t write anymore, why strain her eyes—and she might get a cramp in her hand!
Zhenechka stood and stared at the photograph of an unknown old lady in a neat coffin, a graphic reproach to Zhenechka’s lack of foresight. And the nightingale that had sung songs on her chest for many years grew deaf and shut its eyes tight. And fate, like a black wind flying into an open window, turned, stuck out its tongue, and shouted, “Just try and be most beloved!” and with a deafening cackle snuffed the candle out.
. . . A light Karelian night. There’s neither darkness nor crimson dawn: an endless white dusk. All the colors have drained away; the grainy half-moon seems a cloudy brushstroke in the luminous heights; gray garden shadows and crevasses of clotted twilight crawl along the earth; between the tree trunks in the distance, the flat lake glimmers in lackluster coves. A mosquito whines, eyes close. There’s a rustling in the gray grass, the creak of cracked shutters. Overnight yet another colored pane will fall from the veranda, overnight the grasses will rise still higher, the path we walked in the morning will be swallowed up and our footsteps will vanish; fresh mold will bloom on the front porch, a spider will spin the keyhole shut, and the house will fall asleep for another hundred years—from the underground passages where the Mouse King roams, to the high attic vaults from which the fleshless steeds of our dreams take flight.
Translated by Jamey Gambrell
THE POET AND THE MUSE
NINA WAS a marvelous woman, an ordinary woman, a doctor, and it goes without saying that she had her right to personal happiness like everyone else. Of this she was well aware. Nearing the age of thirty-five after a lengthy period of joyless trial and error—not even worth talking about—she knew precisely what she needed: a wild, true love, with tears, bouquets, midnight phone vigils, nocturnal taxi chases, fateful obstacles, betrayals, and forgiveness. She needed a—you know—an animal passion, dark windy nights with streetlamps aglow. She needed to perform a heroine’s classical feat as if it were a mere trifle: to wear out seven pairs of iron boots, break seven iron staffs in two, devour seven loaves of iron bread, and receive in supreme reward not some golden rose or snow-white pedestal but a burned-out match or a crumpled ball of a bus ticket—a crumb from the banquet table where the radiant king, her heart’s desire, had feasted. Well, of course, quite a few women need pretty much the same thing, so in this sense Nina was, as has already been said, a perfectly ordinary woman, a marvelous woman, a doctor.
•
She had been married: it was as if she’d done an interminable, boring stretch on a transcontinental train and emerged—tired, dispirited, and yawning uncontrollably—into the starless night of a strange city, where the only kindred soul was her suitcase.
Then she lived the life of a recluse for a while: she took up washing and polishing the floors in her spotless little Moscow apartment, developed an interest in patterns and sewing, and once again grew bored. An affair with the dermatologist Arkady Borisovich, who had two families not counting Nina, smoldered sluggishly along. After work she would drop by his office to see him. There was nothing the least bit romantic about it; the cleaning lady would be emptying out the trash cans and slopping a wet mop across the linoleum while Arkady Borisovich washed his hands over and over, scrubbing them with a brush, suspiciously inspecting his pink nails and examining himself in the mirror with disgust. He would stand there, pink, well fed, and stiff, egg-shaped, and take no notice of Nina, though she was already in her coat on her way out the door. Then he would stick out his triangular tongue and twist it this way and that—he was afraid of infection. A fine Prince Charming! What sort of passion could she find with Arkady Borisovich? None, of course.
Yet she’d certainly earned the right to happiness, she was entitled to a place in the line where it was being handed out: her face was white and pretty and her eyebrows broad, her smooth black hair grew low from her temples and was gathered at the back in a bun. And her eyes were black, so that out in public men took her for a Moldavian Gypsy, and once, in the metro, in the passageway to the Kirovskaya station, a fellow had even pestered her, claiming that he was a sculptor and she must come along with him immediately, supposedly to sit for the head of a houri—right away, his clay was drying out. Of course she didn’t go with him; she had a natural mistrust of people in the creative professions, since she had already been through the sorry experience of going for a cup of coffee with an alleged film director and barely escaping in one piece—the fellow had a large apartment with Chinese vases and a slanted garret ceiling in an old building.
But time was marching on, and at the thought that out of the approximately 125 million men in the USSR fate in all its generosity had managed to dribble out only Arkady Borisovich for her, Nina sometimes got upset. She could have found someone else, but the other men who came her way weren’t right either. After all, her soul was growing richer as the years passed, she experienced and understood her own being with ever greater subtlety, and on autumn evenings she felt more and more self-pity: there was no one to whom she could give herself—she, so slim and black-browed.
Occasionally Nina would visit some married girlfriend and, having stopped off to buy chocolates at the nearest candy shop for someone else’s big-eared child, would drink tea and talk for a long time, eyeing herself all the while in the dark glass of the kitchen door, where her reflection was even more enigmatic, and more alluring in comparison with her friend’s spreading silhouette. Justice demanded that someone sing her praises. Having finally heard her friend out—what had been bought, what had been burnt, what ailments the big-eared child had survived—and having examined someone else’s standard-issue husband (a receding hairline, sweatpants stretched at the knees—no, she didn’t need one like that), she left feeling dismayed. She carried her elegant self out the door, onto the landing, and down the staircase into the refreshing night: these weren’t the right sort of people, she should never have come, in vain had she given of herself and left her perfumed trace in the drab kitchen, she had pointlessly treated someone else’s child to exquisite bittersweet chocolate—the child just gobbled it down with no appreciation; oh, well, let the little beast break out in an allergic rash from head to toe.
She yawned.
And then came the epidemic of Japanese flu. All the doctors were pulled out of the district clinics for house calls, and Arkady Borisovich went, too, putting on a gauze face mask and rubber gloves to keep the virus from getting a hold on him, but he couldn’t protect himself and came down with it, and his patients were assigned to Nina. And there, as it turned out, was where fate lay in wait for her—in the person of Grisha, stretched out completely unconscious on a bench in a custodian’s lodge, under knit blankets, his beard sticking up. That was where it all happened. The near-corpse quickly abducted Nina’s weary heart: the mournful shadows on his porcelain brow, the darkness around his sunken eyes, and the tender beard, wispy as a springtime forest—all this made for a magical scene. Invisible violins played a wedding waltz, and the trap sprang shut. Well, everybody knows how it usually happens.
A sickeningly beautiful woman with tragically undisciplined hair was wringing her hands over the dying man. (Later on, to be sure, it turned out that she was no one special, just
Agniya, a school friend of Grisha’s, an unsuccessful actress who sang a little to a guitar, nothing to worry about, that wasn’t where the threat lay.) Yes, yes, she said, she was the one who’d called the doctor—you must save him! She had just, you know, dropped in by chance, after all he doesn’t lock his door, and he’d never call for help himself, not Grisha—custodian, poet, genius, saint! Nina unglued her gaze from the demonically handsome custodian and proceeded to look the place over: a large room, beer bottles under the table, dusty molding on the ceiling, the bluish light of snowdrifts from the windows, an abandoned fireplace stuffed with rags and rubbish.
“He’s a poet, a poet—he works as a custodian so he can have the apartment,” mumbled Agniya.
Nina kicked Agniya out, lifted her bag from her shoulder, and hung it on a nail, carefully took her heart from Grishunya’s hands and nailed it to the bedstead. Grishunya muttered deliriously, in rhyme. Arkady Borisovich melted away like sugar in hot tea. The thorny path lay ahead.
On recovering the use of his eyes and ears, Grishunya learned that the joyous Nina meant to stay with him to the bitter end. At first he was a bit taken aback, and suggested deferring this unexpected happiness, or—if that wasn’t possible—hastening his meeting with that end; later, though, softhearted fellow that he was, he became more complaisant, and asked only that he not be parted from his friends. Nina compromised for the time being, while he regained his strength. This, of course, was a mistake; he was soon back on his feet, and he resumed his senseless socializing with the entire, endless horde. There were a few young people of indeterminate profession; an old man with a guitar; teenage poets; actors who turned out to be chauffeurs, and chauffeurs who turned out to be actors; a demobilized ballerina who was always crying, “Hey, I’ll call our gang over, too”; ladies in diamonds; unlicensed jewelers; unattached girls with spiritual aspirations in their eyes; philosophers with unfinished dissertations; a deacon from Novorossisk who always brought a suitcase full of salted fish; and a Tungus from eastern Siberia, who’d got stuck in Moscow—he was afraid the capital’s cuisine would spoil his digestion and so would ingest only some kind of fat, which he ate out of a jar with his fingers.
All of them—some one evening, some the next—crammed into the custodian’s lodge; the little three-story outbuilding creaked, the upstairs neighbors came in, people strummed guitars, sang, read poems of their own and others, but mainly listened to those of their host. They all considered Grishunya a genius; a collection of his verse had been on the verge of publication for years, but a certain pernicious Makushkin, on whom everything depended, was blocking it—Makushkin, who had sworn that only over his dead body . . . They cursed Makushkin, extolled Grishunya, the women asked him to read more, more. Flushed, self-conscious, Grisha read on—thick, significant poems that recalled expensive, custom-made cakes covered with ornamental inscriptions and triumphant meringue towers, poems slathered with sticky linguistic icing, poems containing abrupt, nutlike crunches of clustered sounds and excruciating, indigestible caramel confections of rhyme. “Eh-eh-eh,” said the Tungus, shaking his head; apparently he didn’t understand a word of Russian. “What’s wrong? Doesn’t he like it?” murmured the other guests. “No, no—I’m told that’s the way they express praise,” said Agniya, fluffing her hair nervously, afraid that the Tungus would jinx her. The guests couldn’t take their eyes off Agniya, and invited her to continue the evening with them elsewhere.
Naturally, this abundance of people was unpleasant for Nina. But most unpleasant of all was that every time she dropped by, whether during the day or in the evening after her shift, there was this wretched creature sitting in the custodian’s lodge—no fatter than a fork, wearing a black skirt down to her heels and a plastic comb in her lackluster hair, drinking tea and openly admiring Grisha’s soft beard: a person named Lizaveta. Of course, there couldn’t possibly be any affair going on between Grishunya and this doleful aphid. You had only to watch her extricate a red, bony hand from her sleeve and reach timidly for an ancient, rock-hard piece of gingerbread—as if she expected any moment to be slapped and the gingerbread snatched away. She had rather less cheek than a human being needs, and rather more jowl; her nose was gristly; in fact, there was something of the fish about her—a dark, colorless deepwater fish that slinks through the impenetrable gloom on the ocean floor, never rising to the sunstreaked shallows where azure and crimson creatures sport and play.
No, no love affair, there couldn’t be. Nonetheless, Grishunya, the beatific little soul, would gaze with pleasure at that human hull; he read poems to her, wailing and dipping on the rhymes, and afterward, deeply moved by his own verse, he would blink hard and turn his eyes up toward the ceiling as if to stanch his tears, and Lizaveta would shake her head to show the shock to her entire organism, blow her nose and imitate a child’s sporadic whimpers, as if she, too, had just been sobbing copiously.
No, this was all extremely unpleasant for Nina. Lizaveta had to be gotten rid of. Grishunya liked this brazen worship, but then, he wasn’t picky; he liked everything on earth. He liked swishing a shovel about in the loose snow in the morning, living in a room with a fireplace full of trash, being on the ground floor with the door open so anyone could drop in; he liked the crowd and the aimless comings and goings, the puddle of melted snow in the vestibule, all those girls and boys, actors and old men; he liked the ownerless Agniya, supposedly the kindest creature in the world, and the Tungus, who came for who knows what reason; he liked all the eccentrics, licensed and unlicensed, the geniuses and the outcasts; he liked raw-boned Lizaveta, and—to round things out—he liked Nina as well.
Among the little outbuilding’s visitors, Lizaveta was considered an artist, and indeed she did exhibit in second-rate shows. Grishunya found inspiration in her dark daubings, and composed a corresponding cycle of poems. In order to concoct her pictures, Lizaveta had to work herself into an unbridled frenzy, like some African shaman: a flame would light up in her dim eyes, and with shouts, wheezes, and a sort of grubby fury she would attack the canvas, kneading blue, black, and yellow paint with her fists, and scratching the wet, oily mush with her fingernails. The style was called “nailism”—it was a terrible sight to behold. True, the resulting images looked rather like underwater plants and stars and castles hanging in the sky—something that seemed to crawl and fly simultaneously.
“Does she have to get so excited?” Nina whispered to Grishunya once as they observed a session of nailism.
“Well, I guess it just doesn’t happen otherwise,” dear Grishunya whispered back, exhaling sweet toffee breath. “It’s inspiration, the spirit, what can you do, it goes its own way.” And his eyes shone with affection and respect for the possessed scrabbler.
Lizaveta’s bony hands bloomed with sores from caustic paints, and similar sores soon covered Nina’s jealous heart, still nailed to Grisha’s bedstead. She did not want to share Grisha; the handsome custodian’s blue eyes and wispy beard should belong to her and her alone. Oh, if only she could become the fully empowered mistress of the house once and for all, instead of just a casual, precarious girlfriend; if only she could put Grisha in a trunk, pack him in mothballs, cover him with a canvas cloth, bang the lid shut, and sit on it, tugging at the locks to check: are they secure?
Oh, if only . . . Yes, then he could have whatever he wanted—even Lizaveta. Let Lizaveta live and scratch out her paintings, let her grind them out with her teeth if she wanted, let her stand on her head and stay that way, trembling like a nervous pillar beside her barbaric canvases at her annual exhibitions, her dull hair decked out with an orange ribbon, red-handed, red-faced, sweaty, and ready to cry from hurt or happiness, while over in the corner various citizens sit at a rickety table cupping their palms to shield against inquisitive eyes as they write their unknown comments in the gallery’s luxurious red album: “Revolting,” perhaps; or “Fabulous”; or “What does the arts administration think it’s doing?” or else something maudlin and mannered, signed by a group of provinc
ial librarians, about how sacred and eternal art had supposedly pierced them to the core.
Oh, to wrest Grisha from that noxious milieu! To scrape away the extraneous women who’d stuck to him like barnacles to the bottom of a boat; to pull him from the stormy sea, turn him upside down, tar and caulk him, and set him in dry dock in some calm, quiet place.
But he—a carefree spirit ready to embrace any street mongrel, shelter any unsanitary vagrant—went on squandering himself on the crowd, giving himself out by the handful. This simple soul took a shopping bag, loaded it with yogurt and sour cream, and went to visit Lizaveta, who had fallen ill. And of course Nina had to go with him—and, my God, what a hovel! what a place! yellow, frightful, filthy, a dark little closet, not a single window! There lay Lizaveta, barely discernible on an iron cot under an army blanket, blissfully filling her black mouth with white sour cream. Bent over school notebooks at a table was Lizaveta’s fat, frightened daughter, who bore no resemblance to her mother but looked as though Lizaveta had once upon a time bred with a St. Bernard.
“Well, how are you doing here?” asked Grishunya.
Lizaveta stirred beside the dingy wall: “All right.”
“Do you need anything?” Grishunya insisted.
The iron cot creaked. “Nastya will take care of everything.”
“Well then, study hard.” The poet shuffled about and stroked fat Nastya on the head; he backed into the hallway, but the enfeebled Lizaveta was already dozing, a stagnant lake of unswallowed yogurt apparently frozen in her half-open mouth.
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