White Walls

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  And there were those who ripped open their shirts to free their suffocating throats, tore off their clothes, fouled by poison and pus, and renounced henceforth and forevermore, crying out: Anathema to Augeas and his works, to his wives and his heirs, his steeds and his chariots, his golden stores, and his servants, his idols and his sepulchers! . . . And, having screamed their fill, they wiped away their saliva, tightened the belts and strings on their bundles and duffel bags, took their children in their arms and old people on their shoulders, and, without looking back or crossing themselves, dissolved into the sunset. A step forward—over the hunchbacked bridge—through the waters of the Lethe—a wood trampoline—darkened air—a whistling in the ears—the sobbing of the globe, quieter and quieter, and then: the world is different, blossoming thistle, spring blackthorn, wormwood cordial, capers shall scatter and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and . . . Ah, the new stars are so innocent, and the thronging lights below are so golden, as if a burning being had passed by and left traces, his step wide and uneven—golden, segmented worms and shining tentacles wriggle and burrow, and then the cake of an alien city spins, bloody-blue, doused with rum and set ablaze, stinging the eyes and fingers, hissing in the black water, while the sea with its smoking river tongues inches forward into space—a cooling, darkened, sluggish space already covered with a thin film. Farewell, you who were too slow, farewell, you who remain, forever, forever farewell.

  And others survived, preserved themselves, guarded against changes, laid low behind the strips of unglued wallpaper, behind the loosened doorframes, under the tattered felt, and now they emerged, honest and old-fashioned, redolent of ancient virtues and devalued sins. They emerged and couldn’t understand, they recognized neither the air, nor the streets, nor a single soul—“this is not the same city, nor is the night the same!” They came out, carrying under their arms valuables safeguarded in their lethargic sleep: decayed novelties, frayed audacities, moldy discoveries, expired insights, amen; squinting, strange, rare, and useless, they came out the way an antiquarian, albino cockroach might emerge from a pile of old newspapers, and the hosts, amazed by nature’s play, can’t bring themselves to raise their slippers and crush the creature, who seems as noble as a Siberian fox.

  But that’s now. Then—it was January, a black frost, two-sided, double-lobar love, and the two of them, standing opposite each other in the foyer of my old apartment, gazing at each other in amazement—oh, to hell with them, I should have pulled them apart right away and nipped imminent misfortune and the whole disgraceful mess in the bud.

  I guess it’s no good talking about it now.

  We forgot her real name and simply called her Judy; as for the country she came from, well, I couldn’t find it in the new atlas, and I turned the old one in for recycling—in a hurry, without thinking, since I urgently needed to buy the recycled edition of Backcountry River by P. Raskovyrov: everyone remembers that those two volumes traded well for Baudelaire, and Baudelaire was needed by a masseur I knew, who knew the fixer who finally helped me to get the apartment, though he ended up creating a lot of bad blood along the way. However, that’s beside the point. But I couldn’t find the country. Apparently, after the usual battles, partitions, witchcraft, and cannibalism, Judy’s compatriots tore apart the hills, the smoky river, and the fresh morning valley, sawed the crocodiles in three, dispersed the people, and scorched the straw huts. It happens. There was a war going on there, that’s the thing, that’s why Judy ended up stuck here with us: no money, no home, and no one answered any letters.

  But in the beginning she was just a muffled, freezing young woman who didn’t understand much of anything, who wanted to nurse animals and who believed Lyonechka’s every word.

  I knew him well, however. I knew Lyonechka from grammar school, and therefore I could neither trust nor respect him, but as for others—well, I never stopped anyone else from respecting him. All in all he was a great guy, a childhood friend—you don’t respect those kind of people, you just love them—and at one time he and I hurried together through the same iron-gray morning gloom, past the same snowdrifts, fences, and swaying streetlamps to the same redbrick school whose facade was girded with medallions sporting the alabaster profiles of frostbitten literary classics. And we shared the melancholy of green walls and floors smeared with red floor-polish, of echoing staircases and warm coatroom stench, and of stern-eyed Saltykov-Shchedrin on the landing of the third floor—a scary, murky presence who wrote obscurely about a carp which you had to condemn in the biannual exam that bore the purple stamp of the city board of education. This Saltykov was always either “castigating ulcers” or “revealing birthmarks,” and behind his rabid, arrested gaze there arose the bloodied apron of the sadist, the torturer’s tense tongs, and the slimy dock, at which it was better not to look.

  Those painted floors, and the muddy carp, and the ulcers, and the hiss of the strap that Lyonechka’s father used to thrash him—all that had passed; the horizon, as they say, was lost in haze, and what does any of it really matter? Lyonechka was now an inspired liar and a poet—which is much the same thing—a small, bowlegged young man, with a head of mutton-blond hair and the round, not fully closed mouth of a skinned rabbit. Friends are like that. They aren’t pretty.

  He fought for truth, of course, wherever he imagined it to be. If the coffee in the cafeteria was watery, Lyonechka would run into the Food Inspectorate offices and, saying he was a public inspector, demand an accounting and a response; if the train couchettes were made up with damp linens, Lyonechka would blow up and, banging the walls, crashing through the cars, break in to see the conductor, announcing himself as an inspector of the Ministry of Transportation and threatening to smash this thieves’ jalopy of theirs to smithereens, including the engineer’s cabin and the radio room, and especially the dining car: he’d mash the mashed potatoes and spatter all their borscht with the impact of powerful fists, and he’d bury each and every one of them under an avalanche of hard-boiled eggs.

  At the time I’m talking about they’d already kicked Lyonechka off the editorial staff of the evening newspaper, where, under the banner of truth and sincerity, he had tried without authorization to add a literary luster to the obituaries:

  In horrible torment

  TER-PSIKHORIANTS,

  ASHOT ASHOTOVICH

  passed on. Head engineer of a sugar-refining factory, member of the CPSU since 1953.

  We can’t speak for the whole collective, but most of the packing department workers, two of the accountants and the assistant director of the local committee, L. L. Koshevaya, will remember him with a quiet, not unkind word for at least a little while.

  or

  The long-awaited death of

  POPOV

  SIMON IVANOVICH

  former director of a soft toy factory, came during the night of February 2–3, neither surprising nor upsetting anyone in particular. He’d lived long enough. Ninety years old, that’s no joke! Whoever wants to show up at the funeral, well, it’ll probably be on Wednesday the sixth, if they deliver the coffins, but then anything can happen here.

  or

  Noticed to be missing only a week later

  POLUEKTOVA

  KLARISSA PETRONOVA,

  an individual with no particular occupation, born in 1930, a confirmed drunk. Found by her neighbors on the balcony, she gave no signs of life, and she certainly won’t give any now. It’ll happen to all of us one of these days, what can we say? Too bad.

  or, finally,

  Baby PETER played with matches,

  Now he’s up in heaven fair,

  Where bananas grow in batches,

  Baby PETER, hear our prayer!

  Lyonechka was outraged by the narrow-mindedness and callousness of his newspaper colleagues, who didn’t accept his style. He felt that their position was based on poverty of intellect, acceptance of the cliché, lack of inspiration, and persecution of the creative intelligentsia—quite justly, in my view; he deplored their indiffere
nce to the Russian word, so powerful and poisonous and yet loving and lithe; he saw their disinclination to expand the limits of genre, and most important—he perceived their dishonesty, their dishonesty and their scorn for the simple, terrifying event that awaits us all, for the trappings of a simple man’s death.

  Lyonechka drank tea in my communal apartment kitchen, drawing my neighbor Spiridonov into arguments and shouting matches. Spiridonov had also suffered in the struggle with indifference: the perforated five-kopeck paper piece he invented had cost him an early heart attack, divorce from his wife, expulsion from the Party, and the loss of his illusions. Once a fanatic and now a lifeless, gray-haired man, Spiridonov would show up with tea in a railway tea-glass holder presented to him by his coworkers for his jubilee, set out hard vanilla cookies, and the two of them would grumble and shout at each other. “Dimwitted Hegels . . . he says to me: Did you substantiate the documentation? . . . The imagination of a worm . . . I said, how much metal alone are we throwing under a dog’s tail, these are the Altai Mountains we’re talking about . . . fly-brains with sclerotic arteries. . . . All the bus fleets—right? the whole subway—right?” They embraced and cried about all that was pure, fresh, and untarnished, about trust in ideas, love of one’s fellowman, about a simple smile—they cried about a lot of things in those days. Woe is me, oh, ach, alas and alack—as Barkhudarov and Kryuchkov, compilers of a glossary of our native tongue’s sighs, wrote sadly once upon a time. “They’ve done in Pushkin!” Spiridonov shouted ardently: “Ekh, if only Pushkin were here!” “Pushkin will come! We’ll make another Pushkin,” Lyonechka promised.

  He laid out his plan to Spiridonov. I’m supposed to be an intellectual, right? said Lyonechka. An intellectual . . . you know, you’ve seen the posters . . . the one shown in the back, behind the worker and the peasant woman, wearing glasses just begging to be smashed by, say, a length of pipe or a chunk of cement—the one with a kind of watery, uncertain smile ready to turn into a humiliated smile any second: as if he’s saying, I know, I know my place! The intellectual on the posters knows his place: it’s in the back, in the doorways, at the threshold—and one undrawn foot is already groping backward for the step down, the way back, the path to retreat; that’s the place where they chuck out leftovers, hand-me-downs, scraps, rags, dregs, dribbles, butts, slops, slivers, splinters, mismatches, misreadings, mis-seeings, mis-thoughts. What, you dare to stand up! I’ll teach you! Aha, so you don’t like it . . . You don’t li-i-i-ke it? Take that, take that, take that! Sic ’im! son of a b——. Now he’s trying to bite, is he? . . . Look, he’s baring his teeth . . . he doesn’t li-i-i-ke it. So get the hell outta here! Bastard. Kick ’im, kick ’im out, hey, guys, let’s go, let’s give it to him! Aha, he ran off. Run, run . . . You won’t get far, ha! And he wanted to talk his way out of it, the louse.

  It’s no accident, oh no, it’s no accident that intellectuals are placed in the back on official paintings—posters, that is—it’s not by chance they’re depicted as second-rate, last and least, just like the posters calling for friendship of peoples, by the way, treat black people as second-rate—behind the whites, set back a little. As if to say, friendship is all well and good, but, well, comrades, they’re still black . . . you know what I mean.

  It therefore followed that the intellectual (Lyonechka) and the black (Judy) should be joined in the bonds of matrimony, and this union of the insulted and injured, the wounded and outcast, this minus, multiplied by a minus, would yield a plus—a curly-headed, plump-bellied, swarthy little plus: if our luck holds we’ll get a Pushkin right off; if not, we’ll go at it again and again, or wait for our grandsons, great-grandsons—and going to the grave my blessing will I give!—decreed Lyonechka. “Go for it,” sighed Spiridonov, and left, taking away his jubilee tea-glass holder, on which three silver satellites orbited a pea-sized earth with one lone country on its bulging side.

  Lyonechka went for it.

  It was the most nebulous possible time for this, it must be said, since it was precisely then that Judy, or whatever her name really was, turned out to have no citizenship status. That is, she simply had no status of any kind—in place of her African homeland a theater of military operations had opened up. One country wouldn’t recognize her, another wanted to expel her, a third invited her to be interned for an indefinite period, and our country exceptionally regretted, shrugged its shoulders, scratched its head, blew the dandruff off its comb, smiled politely, and looked distractedly out the window, but could definitively propose nothing comforting at that given nebulous point. Just be glad it’s no worse.

  Aunt Zina, Lyonechka’s aunt, not yet suspecting what a dirty trick her nephew was planning to play on her and her well-being, said to Judy, “Chin up, daughter. Life is hard on everyone.” But her husband, Uncle Zhenya, whose diplomatic career was taking off—and who was expecting appointment to the corner of the African continent opposite Judy’s at any moment, as it so happened—did not approve of contact with the foreign citizen, even though she was homeless. As the hour of the final paperwork on his appointment drew nearer, he became more strict and vigilant, so as not to take a false step in any direction. Thus, he forbade Aunt Zina to subscribe to Novyi Mir, remembering that its poisonous aura had not yet evaporated; he crossed all suspiciously surnamed acquaintances out of his address book, and hesitating, even crossed out a certain Nurmukhammedov (which he bitterly regretted later, when, straining his eyes, he held the page up to the light in an attempt to restore the telephone number, since the guy turned out to be nothing but a car repair swindler); and in the last, crisis-fraught week, he even smashed all the jars of imported food in the house and threw them into the incinerator, including the Bulgarian apple jam, and was already eyeing products from the other republics, but Aunt Zina protected the beet horseradish with her body.

  And then, if you please, just as he had brought himself to an unheard of, unbelievable, inhuman ideological purity, just when he virtually glowed, like a good, ripe persimmon—all the pits shine through and there’s not a bruise to be found whichever way you turn it—no, no, no, I am not now nor have I ever been under investigation, I never participated, possessed, belonged, intended, pronounced or met, never even considered, never heard of in my life, never entertained the least thought, never had the foggiest notion; but he rested not day or night, saying: holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty, Which was, and is and is to come—at this very moment a boy, a snot-nosed boy, his nephew, scientifically speaking, a near relative, sullies, do you understand, his reputation, compared to which the hermits of Mount Athos are simply delinquents, vandals writing indecent words in elevators, mongrels, sorcerers, fornicators, murderers, and idolaters!

  So Uncle Zhenya had a screaming fit and flailed about on the floor. Because of Lyonechka’s matrimonial intentions his career hung on a thread, and in his mind he had already traveled, served his time, and returned, bringing oodles of stuff with him: wall masks, and rugs, and a fuzzy lampshade, not to mention large-scale items. He could already picture how future guests—the ones that might arise five or six years from now—would change from their boots into slippers and peruse the living room in apparent impartiality, their souls in fact racked with envy; how he would then relieve the tension of the evening with jokes: he’d take a Hong Kong rubber spider out of a packet and throw it against the wall—sticking and tearing itself away, and sticking again, the loathsome thing would crawl down, provoking happy cries and frightening the ladies; he envisioned how they would drink tea from a blue tin with a kind of dancing girl in bloomers—a diamond in her nose, and in her eyes, you know, a certain something, a sort of false innocence; Indian tea would they drink, while the small fry would make do with Georgian tea. In short, Uncle Zhenya planned to live luxuriously, to live forever. But God ruled differently. Jumping ahead, I’ll say that after a few glorious months of his African career—which did happen after all—when he visited the national animal preserve where he teased a baboon with a stick, he got distracted and was torn in
to teensy pieces by one of those African animals passing by. Before his end, however, almost as if he’d had a premonition, as if he were uneasy, he did manage to send Lyonechka a present—the above-mentioned sticky spider; but the parcel took so long to arrive that when it came the spider had expired and it wouldn’t crawl, it simply splatted; it took so long that even the newspapers promising that Uncle Zhenya’s memory would remain forever in our hearts had been handed over for recycling, to return, in the eternal circulation and transformation of matter, as eighty-kopeck wallpaper, the line for which was long and dismal, as if in mockery of our aspirations.

  But all this was later. At that moment Uncle Zhenya was still alive and happy. His wife was just what was called for—the daughter of a military man—and the tile in the john was lettuce green, Czechoslovakian, and on the wall hung a balalaika, a sign of loyalty. So his screaming was completely natural and justified.

  He screamed at Lyonechka’s father—the right of a younger, but successful brother—for giving who the hell knows what kind of upbringing to his children: Lyonechka, who had failed miserably in the corridors of the press—the pup could have grown into a strong, international sports journalist if he’d only listened to his uncle; Svetlana, Lyonechka’s sister, an undisciplined girl prone to hanging around cafés and riding in cars with God knows whom; Vasilyok, the youngest, a fifth-grade pupil, also got his share, though he was definitely not guilty of anything and had even just taken second place in the municipal skating olympics. He screamed at his wife, Aunt Zina, accusing her of permissiveness, absentmindedness, self-indulgence, and of the fact that the husband of her second cousin once considered working for the Planning Department, and for that matter the grandfather of one of the former employees of this Planning Department lived next to a peasant who had owned two cows in 1909, and this could be regarded as wittingly dangerous proximity to kulak circles; he screamed at the cat, who with the approach of March looked ever more frequently out the window; he screamed at the custodian, at the radish seller in the courtyard entrance, at the elevator lady, at the cooperative parking lot guard, at the head of the housing office, and even at the hamster living in a cage in the kitchen—and as a matter of fact, the hamster, having listened to Uncle Zhenya, up and died.