White Walls

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  Anyway, Uncle Zhenya’s screams were horrible, as horrible, no doubt, as the scream of a falling man slipping into the abyss, who tries to hold on by clumps of grass: the pliant dry soil raises dust and crumbles, and the roots swell, leaving their earthy nest; close, close to the eyes a startled spider or ant has already run out of his little house. He’ll remain, but you’ll fly off, blossoming for a short while like a bird, like a towel, like a still-warm, living bundle swaddled in its own cry; the feet are already scratching the empty air, and the world is ready, spinning and turning, to offer you its fluffy, green, rough bowl.

  And I felt sorry for him, as one always feels sorry for those who’ve been beaten to a bloody pulp, as one pities the eyeless people you see in dreams.

  Meanwhile, Lyonechka, having ordered Vasilyok to take up the jigsaw and make the shelves on which he planned to place the future Pushkin’s works, applied himself in earnest to Judy’s education, to her initiation into his poetic faith. He couldn’t bring her home, nor to his uncle’s, needless to say, and my communal kitchen, enlivened by the invalid Spiridonov, resounded with Lyonechka’s crazed texts, protests, and toasts.

  “Well, what do you want? Tell me! I’ll take care of everything,” said Lyonechka, strewing the standard lovers’ promises, drinking his fill of tea and crunching the invalid’s cookies.

  Judy was embarrassed. She wanted to become a veterinarian as soon as possible. . . . She wanted to be useful and nurse little animals. . . . Cows, horses . . . “Sweetheart, those aren’t little animals, those are large, horned livestock!” “Horses don’t have horns. . . .” “That’s fallacious thinking. That’s a fallacy!” seethed Lyonechka. “Horses used to have horns, but they fell off in the process of evolution when the horse came down from the trees in obedience to social demands and went to work for man in the fields, where horns only got in the way. Do you have cows and horses in Africa? And do they hibernate in the winter?” the poet amused himself. And he explained to Judy that the cow, having taken care of her business and seen to the calf, goes off into the forest, digs a hole, and, settling in cozily, curling up like a bun, sleeps until the spring, swept by snow, with a gentle smile, her lovely eyes closed, eyes whose praises have been sung in epics ours and not ours, and she dreams of swift streams, lo, and green meadows scattered with daisies; meanwhile, forming a chain, hunters are already out on the winter hunt with flash-lights and red flags; and they poke the snowdrifts with rakes and lift the sleeping cow with oven forks—that’s why we only have frozen meat here. These aren’t any of your plain old zebu.

  When the snows melt, Judy dear, we’ll go to the country, to the thick forests and wide fields—the fir trees are dark, their stumps are huge—and you’ll see our northern fauna: curly-headed silky nightingales with blue eyes, white-fleeced sheep with silver hooves who sing wonderful refrains above the fleet waters; and what cats we have, dressed in caftans of ribbed velvet with copper buttons, and what goats—if only you knew—politically literate, tidy, with uncompromising civic attitudes, in steel-framed glasses. And our spiders, our flies—jolly creatures in red boots with gingerbread cookies under their arms—tell her, Spiridonov! Chin up, Spiridonov, let’s drink to the spider.

  I can’t say that I liked this evening Sabbath very much, this daily commotion and tea drinking on my tiny territory—I had my own plans for life, and a few dreams: to marry, to move Mama to my place from the suburb of Friazino or exchange my communal rooms for a one-room apartment. Frankly, although barely defined, these plans were somehow getting all confused and falling apart; it wasn’t that there weren’t any husbands or opportunities to exchange apartments—everything was there, but it was all somewhat shopworn, squalid, fifth-rate, with cavities and defects, abscesses and flaws.

  It was impossible, for instance, to take my suitor Valery seriously: strong and tall, and ardently admiring himself for these qualities, with the face of a policeman or an executive, Valery ate a lot of meat, kept weights, springs, a bicycle, skis, and other unnecessary sports thingamajigs at home; his dream was to buy a blue jacket with metallic buttons, but none could be found for love or money. Without the jacket Valery felt himself to be out of life’s mainstream. Once we took a walk in the autumn along the windy embankment of the Yauza: it was a cold, orange evening, the last leaves were flying about, a clear star shone in the sky, and there was a feeling of winter’s closeness in the air, a feeling of melancholy, of the meaningless, ineluctably nearing New Year; the wind rose and tossed freezing urban dust at us. Valery stopped and burst into tears. I stood there, waiting through it, looking at the sky and the star in the emptiness. I understood that words meant nothing, that no comfort was needed, I understood that this was grief, failure, ruin: the blue jacket had gone out of fashion, floating by Valery; like a rosy morning cloud, an ephemeral vision, cranes flying overhead, or an angel in the lunar heights, the jacket sailed off—it had beckoned, agitated, clouded his soul, entered his dreams, and passed, just as the luxurious, colorful, spicy empires of the East had passed, resounding and shining. Having cried his fill, Valery wiped his rigid Komsomol face with a red hand, and we went on, hushed and sad, and parted at the vegetable store on the corner, never to meet again.

  Neither was Garik, a spiritual man, a suitable fiancé. Not that the constant searches of his kennel bothered me: the government kept attacking Garik, confiscating his spiritual papers and pictures, taking away his favorite books, and sometimes picking up Garik himself. It’s not that I was scared off by his six children from his former wife—Garik was a kind, loving, sweet, and unusually resourceful young man: he managed to feed the children, and indefatigably bustling about, he somehow quickly resurrected the papers at the same time. But I got sort of bored listening to him—everything was “vineyards” and more “vineyards,” and paths, and quests, and bliss, and the sweetest and not of this world, and yet life went on—a bad life, but the only one around, and his den was full of rubbish, rags, dust, and glue bottles on the windowsills, and meatless porridge in a burned pot, and tatters on a wobbly nail . . . and could it really be that this, this puny, ugly world, was the one whispered about and promised, proclaimed and presaged when everything began, when the unseen gates opened and the inaudible gong sounded?

  To tell the truth, love was what I wanted, and it was there too, because love is always there, right here inside you, only you don’t know whom to share it with, whom you can entrust with carrying such a marvelous, heavy burden—this one’s a bit weak, and that one will tire quickly, and those—you should run from as fast as you can, before they’ve grabbed you like a jam roll on sale near the store Children’s World, slapping down a coin and wrapping up their catch in oiled paper.

  Yes, I wanted something . . . something that would be heavier than Valery’s weights and lighter than Garik’s homespun wings. I wanted to travel or just leave, or talk for a long, long time, and maybe listen, and I imagined an indistinct traveling companion, friend, passerby, and the road appeared dimly: a path at nighttime, the fusty scent of rot, drops from wet bushes, laughter in the dark and a light ahead, a wooden house and a washed floor, and a book in which everything was written—and the sound of the high, unseen trees all night long until morning.

  And also . . . but it doesn’t matter. There was reality: the kitchen, the shouts, the gray stubble of Spiridonov’s beard diving into a glass of tea, the crowdedness and the two of them, this unnatural pair with far-flung plans. We closed the window tight, so as not to hear the distant, needle-sharp, endless, tormenting cry of Uncle Zhenya.

  “You know what, old girl,” Lyonechka hinted, “if the fate of Russian letters is dear to you, why not bring the cot out into the kitchen?”

  I didn’t want to sleep in the kitchen, or “go out for a walk,” or spend a week in Friazino, and Spiridonov didn’t want to either. But Lyonechka swore, fought, and cursed Spiridonov and me—both privately, as a matter of course, and in poems, for eternity—and bought us tickets to a double feature with news-reels.

&n
bsp; Spring was in the air—cold, nocturnal. The wind already droned in the trees, and water flew in the wind, and birds, cawing, bunched in billows in transparent trees, on rusty domes; clear puddles trembled, reflecting the lights of stands selling dumplings, vodka, and meat pies; and alarm, life, and desire breathed, sailed, and ran in the air—common property, unclaimed, no one’s. I shuffled arm in arm with the gloomy, foot-dragging invalid Spiridonov along the crooked lanes, under Moscow’s Muslim moon, and his foot, laced up in a fourteen-ruble, thirty-kopeck shoe, traced a long, meandering line through Moscow, as if plowing the barren urban asphalt, as if preparing a furrow for unknowable industrial seeds. And then, hunkered down in our damp coats in the movie theater, the invalid and I sullenly watched some fleetingly glimpsed factories, pig iron, awkward heroes of labor, tempered iron beams, tractors, record-setting hogs, bald, well-fed people in tweed suits rubbing ears of wheat between their fingers; we watched the stream of ideologically consistent grain flood us; we watched, waiting submissively for the friendship of homeless people to gel somewhere out there in the form of the illegal infant Pushkin, our last hope.

  By summer there was still no Pushkin, and my life had become completely unbearable: the international lovers had made themselves at home in my room, they ate noodles straight from the pot, played the zurna, walked around naked, and even tried to start a campfire on the floor on a sheet of metal; for scientific entertainment Lyonechka bought Judy some white mice and a white tomcat; being a convinced pacifist, Lyonechka imposed his views on the cat—he developed a system of enlightening lectures and conducted practical seminars on restraint from mouse eating.

  The Hannibals were always short of money. Lyonechka got a half-time job for a while working on a women’s daybook calendar as an ethnic cuisine columnist. But here, too, love of truth did him poor service, because no one at the calendar wanted base truths, critical harping, and exposés, they didn’t want the recipe for May salad to start with the words: “Let’s be frank—there ain’t nothin’ to eat.” They didn’t want missives and sermons like: “Ladies, if you can afford to buy tomatoes at the market, stop and ask yourselves: Have you been living the right life? Where did you sin? When did you take the wrong step, turning from the narrow path of virtue onto the beaten track of temptation? . . .” And he was fired again, and again he was proud and indignant and immediately picked up a couple of friends, or rather pupils and followers: bearded guys dressed in rumpled clothes, draped with crosses and bells, with wandering smiles and aloof, bovine gazes, and, inviting them home—to my place, that is—he gave them edifying lectures, taught them to choose the unfalse path, and produced as a living visual aid the cat, who, having experienced the power of the True Word, had already become the most perfect Buddhist and had transcended all earthly, ephemeral, and scurrying things.

  A warm summer, an emptied, Sunday city—I would go out to wander the side streets, choosing the old, dark corners where it smells of beer spilled in the dust, of cheap stucco, of the wood fences of construction sites, places where shingles stick out of the walls of buildings, and dandelions—no matter how you trample them—innocently and stupidly sprout at the foot of sheds and temples from the time of Ivan Kalita. The grave luster of a church dome in the distance, the meaningless, un-ceasing rustle of already darkening leaves, fleet coins of sun, rags, and reek around garages, grass in linden shadow and bald earth patches in the courtyards where laundry hangs to dry—this was where I was to live and die, not meeting a soul, not speaking a word to anyone.

  Maybe there actually was a certain someone in another city . . . but who cares, what does it matter if nothing came of it, and now, after so many years, I’ll sit alone and drink a glass of rowanberry cordial to the memory of Judy’s soul, and I’ll look into the candle’s flame for a long time, and won’t see anything in it except a shining petal with a white core, except for emptiness burning in emptiness.

  Farewell, Judy, I’ll say to her, you’re not the only one who didn’t make it. I’m done for, too, all the beasts of my breed have scattered to the four winds—they’ve gone beyond the green waters of the Lethe, beyond the glass wall of the ocean, which won’t part to allow passage; those who didn’t pay close attention were shot and wounded, the hunters had a glorious hunt, their mustaches are bloody, and fresh feathers have stuck to their teeth; and the ones who bounded off in all directions in the desperate hope of surviving hastily changed into alien clothes, adjusted their horns and tails in shards of mirror, pulled on gloves with claws, and now you can’t tear off the dead, fake fur. I run into them sometimes, and we look at each other turbidly, as if from underwater, and I should probably say something, but there’s no point in talking. It’s like when someone is seeing you off on a trip and you stand inside the train car behind the unwashed double glass, and he stands on the platform in gusts of night rain, and you’re both smiling tensely; everything has already been said, but you can’t leave, and you nod and draw waves on your palm: “write,” and he nods too: I get it, got it, I’ll write. But he won’t write, and you both know this, and the train keeps standing there, it won’t budge, none of it will start—the jolts of movement, the sheets, the rubles, the neighbors’ chatter, the dark, sickly sweet tea and oiled paper, the dull flash of lampposts on an empty railway platform, the blazing, beaded gold of raindrops in dotted lines on the glass, the sinful, sidelong glance of a soldier, the swaying crush of bodies in the corridor, the shameless cold of the john where the rumble of the wheels is stronger and more demeaning, and your own reflection stares at you from the murky half-dark, close and unflattering, your own reflection—humiliation—destruction . . . But this is all to come: right now the train is still standing and hasn’t moved, and your smile is strained and ready to slip, to drift into a tear; and in anticipation of the jolt, the end, the last wave of the hand, you move your lips, whispering senseless words; eighty-seven, seventy-eight; seventy-eight, eighty-seven—and on the other side of this deafness he also moves his lips and lies with relief: “Definitely.”

  It was then that Spiridonov, who had ruined his teeth on cheap crackers and the damaging effects of the hot water he drank every evening, was obliged to order himself new crowns. The scatterbrained invalid supposed that he was having gold ones put in, but his very mouth was ripped off for a pretty sum as it turned out later. However, the variety of metals in his middle-aged mouth created a rare but marvelous effect: Spiridonov himself began to receive radio broadcasts without any supplementary appliances. Soft tangos floated out from him, distant foreign voices and prayers, soccer matches howled, raging who knows where. He usually worked on shortwave and turned on in the evenings. In the early hours he transmitted all kinds of rubbish, “For all you inquisitive people out there,” or a concert of machine operators’ requests, but the thicker the darkness grew, the more mysteriously the world muttered and laughed, and lights escaped from the gloom, and there were colored lanterns and drums . . . and water ran somewhere, full of lights. What kind of water and what kind of lights, and what the drums were saying—how could we possibly know? . . . And at midnight the invalid broadcast in Portuguese, I think. Maybe it wasn’t Portuguese, how would we know? But oh, what a beautiful language! A taut, flat ocean rhythmically beat at the shore in a wave as long as a whip, colorful sails entered the harbor, and stone steps descended to the water, and there was the smell of seashells and boiled rice, and under red roofs stern women sang loudly of flowers, murders, vessels freighted with burlap and lacquered boxes, birds and beads, purple silk and fragrant pepper. Perhaps it wasn’t like that at all—but how could we possibly know if we had never seen it and would never, never, never see it—never, to our dying day, to the squeak of the cheap, painted coffin of wet pine slabs lowered on a hairy rope in jolts, spurts, and last earthly lengths into the sandy autumn soil, loam, red earth . . . to the last aster, the royal flower, stamped into the November earth, its head bitten off by the heel of a purple-faced, hurried grave-digger? Never, never, sang Spiridonov; never, I sobbed; n
ever, shouted Lyonechka. Time has stopped, space has dried up, people have hidden in the cracks, the domes have rusted, and the fences are wrapped round with bindweed; you yell—and can’t be heard, you look—and can’t lift your sleepy eyelids, there’s dust as high as the clouds, and Pushkin’s grave is grown over with thick goosefoot! cried Lyonechka. O’er summer’s thickened goosefoot dragon-geese go flocking by. Like beasts at first they’ll howl, or stamp their feathery feet and cry. A lonely maid is frightened—bearded dragon-geese fly by, Is that you Ivan Susanin? See me home, dear, or I’ll cry. To our plans there are no limits, the whole nation reaches high; blackened crabs have picked the flesh off of a dead and bloated thigh. Peter’s pinching peppered pickles, pinching pecks of parsnips too; slews of Slavs have sharpened sickles, but can’t figure what to do. Beyond the gates the cold winds blow—the nightingale its teeth has bared; the fiend, sweet home’s ferocious foe, refuses to be spared! The night bird croaks upon his bough, beneath him breaks the cradle slim; and cock-a-doodle-do bewails aloud the six-winged seraphim. God’s little birdie knows no mercy—neither knows he shame; he’ll tear your heart out, eat it whole, and gaily seek his fame. Midst foggy mist a string resounds—the road is all in dust; if life should e’er deceive you, then it’s homeward that you must.