White Walls

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  Then from the town the horn sounded once again and Olga Khristoforovna could be heard shouting through the mega-phone:

  “Everyone lay down your weapons! I’ll count to 3,864,881. One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Eight! . . .”

  “There’s time,” said Zmeev. “Another round of drinks—and then we’ll start shooting.”

  “Shoot her, my dears, she sings songs,” complained Vasily Paramonovich.

  And sure enough, far below, Olga Khristoforovna, having counted to ninety-nine, interrupted her count and started singing:

  “Like conscience to tyrants, the blackness of treason,

  The cold autumn night is now here!

  Much darker than night in the deadliest season,

  The desolate vision of prison is near!”

  “That’s all right, she’s singing about the Vatican,” said Perkhushkov, listening closely. “That’s allowed.”

  “You don’t have to shoot her, just catch her,” said Antonina Sergeevna sympathetically. “She’s not so bad.”

  “What do you mean, not shoot her, when she’s right out in the open?” said Zmeev in amazement. “Amangeldyev, give me the gun.”

  The colonel hoisted the gun on his shoulder and fired. Olga Khristoforovna fell from the horse.

  “Now she’s not singing,” explained the colonel. “Let’s have another drink. The pickles are good.”

  “What are you doing?” Lyonechka screamed. “Why are you shooting people?”

  But no one listened to him.

  “Shooting—is beautiful. It’s moving,” Zmeev told his drink-flushed comrades. “After all, what do we value in life—what pleasures, I mean? In pickles—we value the crunch, in kisses—the smack, and in gunshots—the loud, clear bang. Just now we were coming here through the woods, and suddenly from all sides—a bunch of Negroes. Like this little lady here,” he said, pointing at Judy. “All painted white, feathers in their noses, feathers in their ears, even, forgive me, in front of the ladies I won’t say where, but there were feathers there too. Superb targets, little toys. We had a good shoot.”

  “Was anyone left alive?” asked Akhmed Khasianovich.

  “Not a one, I assure you. It was all clean.”

  “Well, all right, then. We’ll call off the blimps. Retreat,” sighed Akhmed Khasianovich.

  “Let them stay!” cried the inebriated Vasily Paramonovich. “Aren’t they beautiful? Just like silver pigeons. I remember when I was just a little tyke I used to keep pigeons. You wave your hand and they—frrrrr!—they fly off! And how they quiver, quiver, quiver! Ah!”

  “Well, one last round—and we’ll go for a ride,” proposed the colonel. “What do you young people say? We’ll look for mushrooms.”

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” Svetlana begged, admiring the colonel. “I want mushrooms, mushrooms.”

  “Amangeldyev, Mush . . . rrrooooms!!!”

  In the tipsiness and turmoil it was hard to say who sat, lay, or stood where, or who hung on whom, but, twining into a living lump, we were already racing in the Mercedes over hum-mocks and roots, and the pines zipped by, merging into a sturdy fence, and the wild raspberry whipped the windows, and Judy cheeped, pushing away the fat stomach of the sleeping Vasily Paramonovich, and Antonina Sergeevna bleated, and Spiridonov, squeezed in somewhere just under the roof, played someone’s national anthem, and no one divided us into the clean and unclean, and the sunset that appeared out of nowhere blazed like the yawn of a scarlatina-infected throat, and it was too early to let the crow out of the ark, for it was farther than ever to firm ground.

  “My little rifle!” said the colonel, tickling Svetlana.

  “Are you married?” Svetlana asked her magnificent beloved.

  “Yes, siree. I’m married.”

  “But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “No, siree, it doesn’t matter.”

  “I want mushrooms right now,” begged Svetlana.

  “You’ll have your mushrooms. I’ll show you a toadstool you’ll never forget,” promised the colonel.

  “Oh, the girl is going to get herself into trouble,” whined Spiridonov through his anthem, feasting his eyes on Svetlana. And she was something to look at—but Svetlana, shining with happiness, was not meant for the invalid—her hair glowed with its own light, her eyes had turned purple like a mermaid’s, her powder had blown away and her makeup fallen off, and she was so beautiful that Spiridonov swore quietly and pledged that he would give away half a kingdom for a glance from her—half a kingdom with all its half-palaces, half-stables, half-barrels of kvass, with all its mushrooms, pearls, tin, and brocade, with its kulich and gingerbread dough, raisins, bridles, saffron, burlap mats, sickles, plows, and rubies, its wild turkeys, azure flowers, and morocco leather half-boots. Only he didn’t have any of this.

  The ark stopped, and Svetlana, arm in arm with Colonel Zmeev, walked into the forest on tiptoe.

  “I’ll hire myself out as a sailor, and carry you off to Bombay!” Spiridonov shouted after her like a fool. And he himself blushed.

  “We, too, were young turks once upon a time,” sighed Vasily Paramonovich who had awakened. “And what are you doing here?” he suddenly jumped on Judy. “What’s she doing here?”

  “I . . . animals . . . want to cure animals . . .” babbled Judy.

  “She wants to cure animals. You should cure us, that’s what,” Vasily Paramonovich raged, suddenly angry for some unknown reason. “Any fool can cure animals! I soft-soaped Agafonov, I soft-soaped Kuznetsov, I worked hard at it, how much good I did for people—anyone else would have puked. Need cement—go to Vasily Paramonovich, need stucco—go to Vasily Paramonovich, but for promotions—go to someone else. That’s the point, not curing animals. All they do is walk around and around, around and around.”

  “He’s kind, very kind,” explained Antonina Sergeevna. “The weather’s affected him, but he’s very kind. At home he’s got canaries, ten of them, and in the morning as soon as he’s up, he sings to them—cheep, cheep, cheep, and they already know him, they chirp. They can feel kindness. Well, now, where are our people?”

  Straightening his military jacket, Colonel Zmeev came out of the forest.

  “Everything’s in order. Let’s go have dinner.”

  “But where’s Svetlana?”

  “I accidentally killed her,” laughed the colonel. “I was hugging her and hugging her, well and . . . I squashed her a little. You know how it happens. It’s all right, I’ll send a unit up later, they’ll dig a hole. There’s not much work there. It’s army business. Well, let’s go. Amangeldyev!”

  •

  It’s strange now, after fifteen years have passed, to think that not one of us has remained—neither Svetlana, who died, one likes to think, of happiness; nor Judy—even her grave is gone now, replaced by a road; nor Lyonechka, who lost his reason after Judy’s death and ran into the forest on all fours—though they do say that he’s alive and that some frightened children saw him lapping water at a stream, and there’s a group of engineers, aficionados of the mysterious, who organized a society for the capture of “the wild mid-Russian man,” as they refer to him scientifically, and every summer they set up ambushes with strings, nets, and hooks and set out bait—cakes, Danish, rolls with marzipan—not understanding that Lyonechka, an exalted and poetic individual, will only fall for the spiritual. Spiridonov’s gone, he ended his life quietly with a natural death at a venerable age, and had subsequently invented many interesting things: a talking teapot, and automatic slippers, and a cigarette case with an alarm clock. There’s no one left, and you don’t know whether to regret this, whether to grieve, or whether to bless the time, which took these unfit, unnecessary people back into its thick, impenetrable stream.

  Well, at least they sank into it untouched, whole, but Uncle Zhenya was picked up in pieces, in fasciae, hairs, and tufts; moreover they never did find one of his eyes, and he lay in his coffin with a black velvet patch on his face just like Moshe Dayan or Nelson,
in a new striped suit borrowed from the embassy cook, to whom, by the way, they kept promising and promising but never did pay any compensation, which pushed him into counterfeiting invoices for marinated guava. And it’s well known: once you start it’s hard to stop; the cook got carried away, it turned his head, and although every day he promised himself he’d stop, the demon was stronger. Somehow a Rolls-Royce appeared, then a second, a third, a fourth; then, of course, he developed a passion for art and began to understand all the subtleties of the expensive contemporary avant-garde and didn’t like politics anymore, the ambassador and certain of the embassy secretaries didn’t suit him—careful, cook!—then came the connection with the local mafia, the racket and narcotics business, secret control over a network of banks and brothels, intrigues with the military, and plans for a widespread government coup.

  So by the time the cook, exposed at last, once again found himself amid the whortleberry copses and cumulous clouds of the homeland, he had managed to complicate the international situation so thoroughly, to inflate the prices on natural resources so enormously, and to introduce such bedlam into the art market, that it’s unlikely to be corrected by the end of the current millennium. The oil boom was also his doing, said the cook on visiting Aunt Zina at the May and November holidays. He’d already gone to pieces by this time, was unshaven and dressed in a quilted jacket; Aunt Zina spread a newspaper on the kitchen floor so that the cook wouldn’t drip while he drank a few shots of vodka; “I’m not asking you for money for the suit,” said the cook, “I understand you’re a widow, I only ask respect for my services, because the oil boom—that was my doing; and I never tasted that guava in my life, and there’s no cause to go dumping it all on me, only honor and respect, I don’t need any suits, and if I’ve got a real head on my shoulders then you should appreciate it, and not attack me—in another government I would have been oh so useful, they’d have asked me to be president and everything. They’d have said: Mikhail Ivanych, be our president, and you’ll be honored and respected, and the suit, a piece of junk, is totally unnecessary, to hell with your suits. . . . Here’s where I had them all,” said the cook, showing his fist, “this is where they all were, and if need be I’ll have them in the same place again: all those kings and presidents and general-admirals and all sorts of shahs. If you want to know the truth, I already had Norodom Sihanouk on a hook, I’d call him on a direct line: So, Norodom, how’s it going, you still hanging in there?” “I’m still hanging in, Mikhail Ivanych!” “Well, then, you just keep on hanging. . . .” “What is it, what can I do for you, Mikhail Ivanych?” “Nothing, I say to him, just checking. . . . Keep on hanging, just don’t let go. . . .” Or else the emperor of Japan would call me on the direct line: Here I am, Mikhail Ivanych, he’d say, I sat down to eat raw fish, but it’s no fun without you, why don’t you fly over and keep us company; yeah, sure, as if I hadn’t ever eaten that fish of yours; no, he says, hee-hee-hee, you haven’t eaten this kind, only I eat this kind . . . but everybody keeps on talking about this guava business,” swore the cook, as Aunt Zina pushed him toward the door. “Don’t you touch me! You, there, don’t grab my sleeve!” And snatching a ruble or sometimes even three, he would tumble noisily into the elevator, where he vomited the grated carrot and beet stars of a recently eaten salad.

  Having done the appropriate amount of crying and mourning, Aunt Zina had long since calmed down, and, seeing as people are weak and vain, found satisfaction in calling herself a social consultant on the capture of the wild mid-Russian man. She emphasized proudly that he was a close relative, and her neighbors envied her and even tried to arrange intrigues to deny her relationship, but, of course, they were put to shame. “How proud Zhenya would be if he’d lived to see this,” Aunt Zina repeated, her eyes shining like a young woman’s.

  Every year in the fall, regardless of the weather, I drop by to fetch her; she straightens the lace scarf on her head, takes my arm, and we walk—in no hurry, a step at a time, to visit Pushkin, to place flowers at his feet. “If they’d just made a little more effort—he would have been born,” whispers Aunt Zina with love. She gazes up at his lowered, blind, greenish face, soiled to the ears by the doves of peace, gazes into his sorrowful chin, forever frozen to his unwarming, metallic foulard blanketed with Moscow’s snows, as if expecting that he, hearing her through the cold and gloom of his new, commendatore-like countenance, would raise his head, reach his hand out from his bosom, and bless everyone: bless those near and far, crawling and flying, deceased and unborn, tender and scaly, bivalve and molluscan; bless those who sing in the groves and curl up under the bark of trees, who buzz amid the flowers and crowd in a column of light; bless those who vanished amid the feasts, in the sea of life, and in the dismal abysses of the earth.

  “And the Slavs’ proud grandson now grown wild . . . ” Aunt Zina triumphantly whispers. “How does the rest of the poem go?”

  “I don’t remember,” I say. “Let’s leave, Aunt Zina, before the police chase us off.”

  And it’s true, I don’t remember another word.

  Translated by Jamey Gambrell

  YORICK

  ON THE windowsill of my childhood stood a dust-colored round tin with black letters printed on it: “Dorset. Stewed Pork.” The tin served as a communal grave for all single buttons. Every now and then, a button would fall off a cuff, roll under the bed—and that was it. Grope as you might or run the broom under the bed, it was gone forever. Then the contents of “Dorset” would be shaken out on the table and picked over with one finger, like grains of buckwheat, in search of a pair, but of course nothing matching could ever be found. After a bit of hesitation, the other button would be snipped off—what can you do?—the orphan would be thrown into the pile, and a half-dozen new buttons wrapped in muddy, tea-colored waxed paper would be purchased at the variety store.

  The tram ran outside the window, the glass rattled, the windowsill shook, and the minute population of “Dorset” jangled faintly, as though living its own cantankerous life. In addition to buttons, there were some old-timers in the tin: for instance, a set of needles from the foot-pedal Singer sewing machine that no one had used in so long that it gradually began to dissolve into the air of the room, thinning down into its own shadow before it finally vanished, though it had been a real beauty—black, with a ravishingly slender waist, a clear-cut gold sphinx printed on its shoulder, a gold wheel, a black rawhide drive belt, and a dangerous steel-toothed crevasse that plunged down into mysterious depths, where, shuddering, the shuttle went back and forth and did who knows what. Or there might be a crumbling scrap of paper in the tin, on which hooks and loops sat like black insects; as the paper died, the hooks fell to the bottom of the grave with a gentle clink. Or some metallic thingamabob resembling a dentist’s instrument; no one knew what it was, because there were no dentists in our family. We’d fish out this cold, sharp object with two fingers: “Papa, what is this?” Papa would put on the spectacles that sat on his forehead, take it carefully, and inspect it. “Hard to say . . . It’s . . . something.”

  The corpses of tiny objects, shells of sunken islands. One that constantly surfaced, fell to the bottom, and then surfaced again was a dull-white, bony blade, good for nothing. Of course, like everything else, no one ever threw it away. Then one time someone said, “That’s whalebone, a whale whisker.”

  Whalebone! Whale whiskers! Instantly, monster whale-fishes came to mind, smooth black mountains in the gray, silvery-slow ocean sea. In the middle of the whale—a fountain like the ones at Petrodvorets, foamy water spouting on both sides. On the monster’s face—small, attentive eyes and a long, fluffy mustache, totally Maupassant. But the encyclopedic dictionary writes, “Teeth are found only in so-called ‘toothed-W.’ (dolphins, narwhals, sperm W., and bottle-nosed W.), which feed mostly on fish; the whiskered, or baleen W. (gray W., right W., rorquals), has horny formations on the roof of the mouth, plates mistakenly called ‘bones’ or ‘whiskers,’ which serve to filter plankton.” Not true, t
hat is, they’re not only for filtering. As late as 1914, a seamstress sewing a stylish dress for Grandmother reproached my absent-minded, happy-go-lucky ancestor, “Nowadays, Natalya Vasilevna, one can’t circulate in society without a busk”; Grandmother was shamed and agreed to a straight busk. The seamstress grabbed a handful of “bones” that came from the mouth of a gray W., or perhaps it was a right W., or maybe even a rorqual, and sewed them into Grandmother’s corset, and Grandmother circulated with great success, wearing under her bust, or at her waist, slivers of the seas, small pieces of those tender, pinkish-gray palates, and she passed through suites of rooms, slim and petite, a decadent Aphrodite with a heavy knot of dark-gold hair, rustling her silks, fragrant with French perfumes and fashionable Norwegian mists; heads turned to watch her, hearts pounded. She loved, rashly and dangerously, and married; then the war began, then the revolution, and she gave birth to Papa—on a day when a machine gun strafed through the fog—and she was anxious and barricaded the frosted window of the bathroom; she fled south, and ate grapes, and then the machine gun began blazing again, and again she fled, on the last steamship out of grapevined, bohemian Odessa, making her way to Marseilles, then to Paris. And she was hungry, poor, and humbled; now she herself sewed for the rich, crawled on her knees around their skirts, her mouth pursed to hold pins; she pinned hems and linings and despaired, and again she fled south (this time the South of France), imagining that she could not only eat grapes but make wine herself—you only have to stomp on them with your feet, it’s called vendange—and then everyone would get rich again and everything would be like it used to be, absent-minded, lighthearted, carefree. But again she came to ruin most shamefully, ridiculously, and in August, 1923, she returned to Petrograd, her hair bobbed, wearing a new, stylishly short skirt and a mushroom-shaped cap, holding a much grown, frightened Papa by the hand. By that time, you could circulate in society without a busk, under different conditions. A lot of things circulated then.