“She and I should really, er, hook up or something,” Grishunya said to Nina, gesturing vaguely and looking the other way. “You see what problems she has getting an apartment. She’s from way up north, from Totma, she can only rent this storeroom, but what talent, no? And her daughter’s very drawn to art, too. She sculpts, she’s good—and who can she study with in Totma?”
“You and I are getting married. I’m all yours,” Nina reminded him sternly.
“Yes, of course, I forgot,” Grishunya apologized. He was a gentle man; it was just that his head was full of a lot of nonsense.
Destroying Lizaveta turned out to be as hard as cutting a tough apple worm in half. When they came to fine her for violating the residence permit in her passport, she was already holed up in a different place, and Nina sent the troops over there. Lizaveta hid out in basements and Nina flooded basements; she spent the night in sheds and Nina tore them down; finally, Lizaveta evaporated to a mere shadow.
•
Seven pairs of iron boots had Nina worn out tramping across passport desks and through police stations, seven iron staffs had she broken on Lizaveta’s back, seven kilos of iron gingerbread had she devoured in the hated custodian’s lodge: it was time for the wedding.
The motley crowd had already thinned out, a pleasant quiet reigned in the little house in the evenings, and now it was with due respect that the occasional daredevil knocked at the door, carefully wiping his feet under Nina’s watchful gaze and immediately regretting that he had ever come by. Soon Grishunya would no longer be slaving with a shovel and burying his talent in the snowdrifts; he would be moving to Nina’s where a sturdy, spacious glass-topped desk awaited him, with two willow switches in a vase on the left, and, on the right, from one of those frames that lean on a tail, Nina’s photo smiled at him. And her smile promised that everything would be fine, that he’d be well fed and warm and clean, that Nina herself would go to see Comrade Makushkin and finally resolve the long-drawn-out question of the poetry collection: she would ask Comrade Makushkin to look over the material carefully, to give his advice, fix a few things, and cut up the thick, sticky layer cake of Grisha’s verse into edible slices.
Nina allowed Grishunya a final good-bye to his friends, and the innumerable horde poured in for the farewell supper—girls and freaks, old men and jewelers. Three balletic youths with women’s eyes arrived prancing on turned-out toes, a lame man limped in on crutches, someone brought a blind boy, and Lizaveta’s now nearly fleshless shadow flitted about. The crowd kept coming; it buzzed and blew around like trash from a vacuum cleaner hooked up backward; bearded types scurried past; the walls of the little house bulged under the human pressure; and there were shouts, sobs, and hysterics. Dishes were broken. The balletic youths made off with the hysterical Agniya, catching her hair in the door; Lizaveta’s shadow gnawed her hands to shreds and thrashed on the floor, demanding to be walked all over (the request was honored); the deacon led the Tungus into a corner and questioned him in sign language on the faith of his people, and the Tungus answered, also by signs, that their faith was the best of all faiths.
Grisha beat his porcelain brow against the wall and cried out that fine, all right, he was prepared to die, but after his death—you’ll see—he’d come back to his friends and never be parted from them again. The deacon didn’t approve of such proclamations. Neither did Nina.
By morning all the scum had vanished, and, packing Grishunya into a taxi, Nina carried him off to her crystal palace.
•
Ah, who could possibly paint a portrait of one’s beloved when, rubbing his sleep-filled blue eyes and freeing a young, hairy leg from beneath the blankets, he yawns with all his might. Entranced, you gaze at him: Everything about him is yours, yours! The gap between his teeth, and the bald spot, and that marvelous wart!
You feel you’re a queen, and people make way for you on the street, and your colleagues nod respectfully, and Arkady Borisovich politely offers you his hand, wrapped in sterilized paper.
How fine it was to doctor trusting patients, to bring home bags full of goodies, to check in the evenings, like a solicitous sister, to see what Grishunya had written during the day.
Only he was a frail thing: he cried a lot and didn’t want to eat, and he didn’t want to write neatly on clean paper but, out of habit, kept on picking up scraps and cigarette packs, and doodling or else just drawing flourishes and curlicues. And he wrote about a yellow, yellow road, on and on about a yellow road, and high above the road hung a white star. Nina shook her head: “Think about it, sweetheart. You can’t show poems like that to Comrade Makushkin, and you should be thinking about your book. We live in the real world.” But he didn’t listen, and kept on writing about the road and the star, and Nina shouted, “Did you understand me, sweetheart? Don’t you dare write things like that!” And he was frightened and jerked his head about, and Nina, softening, said, “Now, now, now,” and put him to bed. She fed him mint-and-lime-blossom tea, infusions of adonis and motherwort, but the ungrateful man whimpered and made up poems that offended Nina, about how motherwort had sprouted in his heart, his garden had gone to seed, the forests had burned to the ground, and some sort of crow was plucking, so to speak, the last star from the now silent horizon, and how he, Grishunya, seemed to be inside some hut, pushing and pushing at the frozen door, but there was no way out, there was only the pounding of red heels in the distance. . . . “Whose heels are those?” demanded Nina, waving the piece of paper. “I’m just interested—whose heels are they?”
“You don’t understand anything.” Grishunya snatched the paper.
“No, I understand everything perfectly well,” answered Nina bitterly. “I just want to know whose heels they are and where it is they’re pounding.”
“Aaa-agh!!! They’re pounding in my head!!!” screamed Grishunya, covering his head with the blanket, and Nina went into the bathroom, tore up the poems, and scattered them into the watery netherworld, the little domestic Niagara.
Men are men; you have to keep an eye on them.
Once a week she checked his desk and threw out the poems that were indecent for a married man to compose. And once in a while she would rouse him at night for interrogation: was he writing for Comrade Makushkin, or was he shirking? And he would cover his head with his hands, lacking the strength to withstand the bright light of her merciless truth.
They managed this way for two years, but Grishunya, though surrounded by every care and concern, did not appreciate her love, and stopped making an effort. He roamed the apartment and muttered—muttered that he would soon die, and the earth would be heaped over him in clayey, cemeterial layers, and the slender gold of birch coins would drift over his grave mound like alms, and the wooden cross or pyramid marker (whichever they didn’t begrudge him) would rot beneath the autumn rains, and everyone would forget him, and no one would visit, only the idle passerby would struggle for a moment to read the four-digit dates. He strayed from poetry into ponderous free verse as damp as pine kindling, or into rhythmic lugubrious prose, and instead of a pure flame a sort of white, suffocating smoke poured from his malignant lines, so that Nina coughed and hacked, waved her hands about, and, choking, screamed, “For heaven’s sake, stop writing!”
Then some kindhearted people told her that Grishunya wanted to return to his little house, that he had gone to see the custodian hired in his place—a fat woman—and bargained to see how much she would ask for handing him back his former life, and the woman had actually entered into negotiations. Nina had connections in the Municipal Health Department, and she dropped hints that there was a wonderful three-story building in the center of town, it could be taken over by an institution, hadn’t they been looking for something? Municipal Health thanked her, it did suit them, and very soon the little building was no longer a custodian’s lodge: the fireplace was torn out, and one of the medical institutes settled its faculty there.
Grisha fell silent, and for about two weeks he was quiet and obedient.
Then he actually cheered up, took to singing in the bath and laughing—but he completely stopped eating, and he kept going up to the mirror and pinching himself. “What are you so cheerful about?” Nina interrogated him. He opened his identity card and showed her the blue margins freshly stamped with fat lilac letters reading “Not Subject to Burial.” “What does that mean?” asked Nina, frightened. Grishunya laughed again and told her that he had sold his skeleton for sixty rubles to the Academy of Sciences, that “his ashes he would outlast, and the worms elude,” that he would never lie in the damp ground, as he had feared, but would stand among lots of people in a clean, warm room, laced together and inventoried, and students—a fun crowd—would slap him on the shoulder, flick his forehead, and treat him to cigarettes; he’d figured it all out perfectly. And he wouldn’t say another word in answer to Nina’s shouts; he simply proposed that they go to bed. But she should keep in mind that from now on she was embracing government property and thus was materially responsible before the law for the sum of sixty rubles and twenty-five kopecks.
•
And from that moment on, as Nina said later, their love seemed to go awry, because how could she burn with full-fledged passion for public property, or kiss academic inventory? Nothing about him belonged to her anymore.
And just think what she must have gone through—she, a marvelous, ordinary woman, a doctor, who had indisputably earned her piece of the pie like everyone else, a woman who had fought for her personal happiness, as we were all taught to do, and had won her right in battle.
Despite all the grief he’d caused her, she was still left with pure, radiant feelings, she said. And if love didn’t turn out quite the way she had dreamed, well, Nina was hardly to blame. Life was to blame. And after his death she suffered a good deal, and her girlfriends sympathized with her, and at work they were kind and gave her ten unpaid days off. And when all the red tape was done with, Nina made the rounds of her friends and told them that Grisha now stood in the little house as a teaching aid, tagged with an inventory number they’d given him, and she’d already gone to have a look. And everything was actually just as he had wanted: the students joke with him, they tug on his wrist to make him dance about, and they put a white cap on his head. The place is well heated, at night he’s locked up in the closet, but otherwise he’s always around people.
And Nina also said that at first she was very upset about everything, but then it was all right, she calmed down after a woman she knew—also a lovely woman, whose husband had also died—told her that she, for one, was even rather pleased. The thing was that this woman had a two-room apartment and she’d always wanted to decorate one room Russian style, just a table in the middle, nothing else, and benches, benches all around the sides, very simple ones, rough wood. And the walls would be covered with all kinds of peasant shoes, icons, sickles, spinning wheels—that kind of thing. And so now that one of her rooms was free, this woman had apparently gone and done it, and it’s her dining room, and she always gets a lot of compliments from visitors.
Translated by Jamey Gambrell
LIMPOPO
JUDY’S LITTLE grave was dug up last year and a highway was laid down in its place. I didn’t go out to see it: it’s already done, I was told, cars whoosh and zoom by, children sit in the cars eating sandwiches and dogs smile zipping along in the embrace of their mistresses—they come and go in a flash. What would I do there?
In cases like this a condolence letter is usually sent to the near and dear: step lively, so to speak, and get your dear departed ashes out of here, because we’ve got a shock crew on the job, the fires of the five-year plan are burning, and stuff like that. But Judy had no near, no relatives—at least not in our hemisphere—and of dear there was only Lyonechka, and where can you find Lyonechka these days? There is that group of energetic enthusiasts who’ve been looking for him, of course, but more on that later.
Last year was the fifteenth anniversary of Judy’s death, and not knowing anything about the highway, I lit a candle as I always do on that day, set an empty glass out on the table, covered it with a piece of bread, sat down across from it, and drank a toast to her memory with rowanberry cordial. The candle burned, and the mirror watched from the wall, and a snowstorm raged out the window, but nothing danced in the flame or passed across the dark glass or summoned me from the snowflakes. Maybe that wasn’t the right way to remember poor Judy, maybe I should have wrapped myself up in a sheet, lit incense sticks, and beat on a drum until daylight, or shaved my head, spread lion’s fat on my eyebrows, and squatted facing a corner for nine days—who knows how it’s done over there in Africa?
I don’t even remember exactly what her name was: you had to sort of howl in a special way, clack your teeth, and yawn—and you’d said it. You couldn’t write it down on paper in our letters, but, Judy told us, it was really a very sweet, lyrical name, which according to the dictionary meant “a small plant of the liliaceous order with edible tubers”; in the spring they all go off into the hills to dig this stuff up with sharp sticks, and then they bake it in cinders and dance all night until the cold dawn, dance until the huge, crimson sun rises to dance in turn on their faces, black as oil, on the poisonous blue flowers stuck in their wiry hair, and on their dogs’ teeth necklaces.
Whether that’s what they really do over there or not is hard to say now, especially since Lyonechka—in a burst of inspiration further encouraged by Judy’s ear-to-ear smile—wrote tons of poems on the subject (they’re still lying around here somewhere); fact and fancy got so mixed up that now, after all these years, you can’t figure out whether shining black people did in fact dance in the hills, joyfully greeting the rising sun, whether a blue river, steaming in the dawn, ever flowed at the foot of those hills, whether the equator curved like a morning rainbow melting in the sky, whether Judy actually did have sixty-four cousins, or whether it was true that her maternal grandfather thought he was a crocodile and would hide among the dry rushes to grab the legs of children and ducks swimming by.
Everything’s possible! Why not? Everything’s exotic over there, but here, nothing but nothing at all ever happens anywhere, anytime, anyhow.
Dances are all well and fine, but Judy apparently managed to grab a scrap of some kind of education somewhere, for she came to us to do a residency (in veterinary school, for heaven’s sake!). We unwound scarves, scarves, and more scarves; wraps, plaid shawls, shawls made of goat yarn with knots and splinters, shawls that were gauzy and orange, with gold threads, shawls of blue linen and striped linen; we unwound; we looked: what was there left of her to reside? There was nothing to reside, much less fight with livestock and swine: horns, tails, hooves, tripe, and abomasum, dung and udders, moo-oooo and baaa-baaaa, horrors! To combat this rough host—only a little pillar of living darkness, a slice of shadow shivering from the cold, with dark brown dog eyes—that was all there was. But Lyonechka was instantly captivated, bewitched, spellbound; moreover, the reasons for this sudden gush of passion were, as were all of Lyonechka’s reasons, purely ideological, a mental tornado, or to put it simply you could say that rationalism was always one of his dominant characteristics.
Well, first of all, he was a poet, and motes of distant countries carried a lot of weight on his poetic scales; second, as a creative individual he was constantly protesting something—exactly what didn’t really matter, the subject of the protest emerged in the process of indignation—and Judy arose like protest incarnate, like a challenge to everything in the world, a scrap of darkness, a coal amidst the snowstorm, tangerine shawls in the fierce Moscow January, almost Candlemas—to quote Lyonechka. As I saw it—nothing special. Third, she was not just black, but black like a stoker, Lyonechka enthused, and stokers were Lyonechka’s favorite heroes—along with custodians, night watchmen, woodsmen, doormen, and more or less anyone who froze in a sheepskin jacket under the cruel stars, or wandered in felt boots squeaking with snow to guard a construction site at night with the bared fangs of its vertical piles, or kept a d
rowsy watch on the hard chair of an official building, or stood next to pipes wrapped in rags, checking the pressure gauge in the dim light of a boiler. I’m afraid that his notion of a stoker was either unnecessarily romantic or out-dated—stokers, as far as I know, are not at all that black. I knew one once—but we’ll forgive the poet.
Lyonechka admired all these professions as the last bastions of the genuine intelligentsia. Because outside, the times were such—in Lyonechka’s words—that the spiritual elite, no longer able to watch its weak but honest candle crackle and smoke in the foul air of the epoch, had retreated, had turned away, and, accompanied by the hooting of the mob, gone into the basements, the watchmen’s lodges, shacks, cracks, and crevices, in order, having hidden itself, to preserve the last candle, the last tear, the last letter of its dispersed alphabet. Almost no one returned from the cracks: some were lost to drink while others went mad, either on paper or in reality, like Seryozha B., who got a job guarding the attic of a cooperative apartment building and one spring saw heavenly bouquets and silver bushes with sparkling lights in the dark sky beckoning to his ensavaged soul with a portent of the Second Coming, which he went to meet, stepping from the window of the fourteenth floor right into the fresh air, thereby casting a pall on the pure delight of the working classes out to enjoy the holiday fireworks.
Many people flew off into stern, high-minded flights of fancy about pure, princely air, about maidens in green peasant frocks, about dandelions growing next to wooden fences, about radiant waters and faithful steeds, embroidered ribbons and emboldened riders; they sorrowed and saddened, cursed the course of the times and grew significant, golden beards; they hewed birch blocks to carve spoons, bought themselves samovars, grandfather clocks with cuckoos, woven doormats, crosses, and felt boots; they condemned tea and ink, walked with a ponderous gait, would say “A lady, and you stink” to women who smoked, and with a third eye, which opens forth on the forehead after lengthy fasts and mental stoppages, they began to see sorcery and black magic everywhere.
White Walls Page 31