‘It’s up to you to decide whether to participate in the realisation of the unanimous decision of the tenants in entrance number nine!’
There was no more cake. All three children stared at me as their father solemnly handed me a pencil and sheet of paper resting on a piece of firm cardboard. I signed my name under the text of the decision of the tenants of number nine. Just to get away as soon as possible from the increasingly infectious trio! There was not a single crumb of that fateful cake left. In the depths of my chest I felt a slight ache. I could not remember where and when I had felt it before.
As I mounted the steps in long strides, two at a time, I remembered that children should not be given dry cake without a mouthful of milk. I had read that somewhere. If I could find it, perhaps it was a newspaper cutting, I could knock on that door and reproach the neglectful father. Would he appear again with all three children?
Oh, those new faces that peer out of unknown doorways! My eccentric uncle, who liked to stroke the tip of the moustache on the left of his mouth (he had none on the right), used to say:
‘New faces are like false lures. You don’t want to look at them. But you can’t stop yourself. The impulse surfaces in any case! Plop!’
I reached the top floor out of breath, hastily unlocked the door, and soon felt the agreeable cool of the kitchen floor tiles under my feet. I opened the door of the fridge, but all I found was a half-empty plastic bottle of oil. At least there was water in the tap, as I might have recalled had this been a quite ordinary thirst. But I was looking for a carton of milk in the fridge. A blue and white carton with the expiry date printed on it. This time I would not have looked demandingly at the date. Would my hand know how to make that short, precise cut with a knife through one of the top corners of the carton?
‘Thirst is a higher form of hunger,’ my left-whiskered uncle used to say.
I stared at the white inside of the fridge lit by a tiny gleaming light and knew that I was going to think of the eccentric family virtually every day.
‘Whoever you think of first in a new home, he’ll be in your thoughts forever!’
He said that too. Sucking his left-hand whiskers.
Him again!
Nevertheless, tranquil days and months followed. And there were no new faces. Nor false lures. Nor did I knock on any more strange doors. The figure of my left-whiskered uncle settled into my memory. And my thirst was quite ordinary.
In keeping with the unanimous decision of the tenants of number nine, we were given little keys for the lock on the main door. We began to get used to our new apartment, the fridge was full, and a long period set in at number nine without any new, important decisions being made.
We got used to the order of the different coloured front doors, to the smells and sounds by which we distinguished each floor even with our eyes closed. Meagre signs of the lives of the tenants of number nine became familiar. I forgot the hiccupping trio. Just occasionally, in passing, I would hear children’s voices and laughter from behind the door in the basement. And their father’s coughing! The caretaker of number nine must have been thinking up a new, important decision.
Entrance number nine became an ordinary habit. Like a brief limbering-up exercise before entering the apartment that smelled of menthol. The length of time between two sounds and that smell depended on how tired we were and the speed of our steps.
On the first floor was the sound of a sewing machine. A metal bee working tirelessly. Opposite was a door from which music could be heard. Someone’s hand sliding over the radio dial. On the second floor was a brass plate with large, thick loops on the letter ‘B’. It was fixed onto a door behind which a man’s and a woman’s voices could be heard. Her voice was strong and it would repeat the same sentence several times. When it stopped, the man’s voice would say:
‘Don’t shout. I can hear you. And shut the door. There’s a draught. Dear God, does no one in this house ever listen to me?’
From opposite came the sounds of a kitchen. Strangely, there were no smells. Just the clinking of enamel, china, cutlery ...
On the third floor there were no sounds. From the door on the right came the aroma of fresh bread, sometimes of cinnamon and vanilla. Opposite was a door concealing something that stank of hospitals. Sometimes I would deliberately pass closer to it. I felt a piercing heat in the nape of my neck and hastened up the next stairs. I rushed into our apartment, but for a time I went on feeling a slight prickle on my nape.
On the fourth floor something scratched at the door. Whining, barking. When the door opened a boy and a dog appeared. The boy chased the dog down the steps. He looked round only when he reached the next landing and mumbled in a rush:
‘ ‘afternoon!’
Opposite was silence. The quietest door in entrance number nine. With no smells I could recognise. This was not the silence of an empty apartment. Nor the kind that reigned in apartments crammed with old, heavy furniture. I must be able to identify it! That special, secret silence.
Perhaps one should put one’s ear to a door like that. Or the metal end of a stethoscope. Can one listen to an apartment as one does to the depths of a human chest?
But that is not what I did. Just as I was always afraid to put my hand into the breast of a plucked chicken and, with one, swift, abrupt movement, pull out all that was left: the blue heart.
Soon the shabby door began to reveal itself through a colour. It appeared in the little glass pane through which one could peer from inside. Like a light, blue shadow. And that is how it was day after day. So that I began to think that someone with blue eyes, hidden and secretive, was watching me from inside. Watching me as I climbed to the top floor with my heart beating ever more rapidly in my chest.
It was not a child. It would have betrayed itself by laughter or some other sound. But the blue-eyed door remained perfectly silent. Inside, there was someone leaning on it, someone accustomed to long, patient waiting. Someone who no longer measured time.
An old man? An old woman? Lonely old women often peered out like that. Hardly anyone ever knocked on their doors.
My game with the blue began. I would stop by the door and raise my hand as though waving to someone. Then I would drop it suddenly towards my head and arrange my hair. The blue soundlessly disappeared.
Or else I would smile. I’d look at the blue. The way I sometimes smiled at old people sitting on benches in the park. Then the blue would stay framed in the circle of glass. Not giving itself away by the slightest sound.
It happened that I would set out absent-mindedly, particularly on mornings when the day was like cold water that one had to step into. Then I would go straight past the blue-eyed door, but I’d quickly remember and stop. I would think of going back. I felt that without the blue my day was deprived of a beginning.
‘A day without a beginning, a day without an end!’
Ah, that was my left-whiskered uncle speaking, again!
But I liked the end of the day. I liked the shady peace of the top floor and the smell of menthol. Towards evening, it was stronger and caressed my dry nostrils benignly. It would be terrible if the day had no end, while in my chest, from the depths, something unknown and troubling was beginning to g row.
Sometimes I would think: perhaps the blue has gone.
Then I sighed with relief: it was there!
But what if the door should open? I had not anticipated that.
Then it happened.
Before the blue revealed itself in two little eyes with thin, pale lashes and a captive tear, the person who had been watching me silently and constantly for months made herself known by her unusual, Russian name.
A Russian woman in number nine.
The sound of her name came permeated with three-part hiccupping. Together the caretaker’s three children announced:
‘Daddy sends kind regards to the new tenants. He asks you to be so kind as to sign here. The tenants’ council is discussing the purchase of a new rubbish bin and a broom for sweepi
ng the steps.’
‘A yellow bin!’
The voice of the middle child came first. The youngest followed:
‘The old bin’s fallen to bits! So has the broom!’
The oldest child coughed painfully. They were standing side by side, each up to the next one’s ear. They were looking at me and I felt a pain in the depths of my chest.
The familiar three-part sound began again. But there was no cake. They must already have eaten it as they knocked on door after door. And it must always have been a piece of the same cake. Dry cakes last for a long time and don’t easily go mouldy. By the third floor, the caretaker’s three children, bearers of the important decision of the tenants of number nine, had devoured the last crumb of the piece they had broken off. All that was left was the terrible three-part sound.
‘Under Auntie Galina,’ said the oldest child, handing me the pencil, paper and piece of firm cardboard it was resting on.
‘Auntie Galina Nikolaevna,’ added the middle child while the youngest nodded obligingly.
And so I signed underneath Galina Nikolaevna’s long, illegible signature. As I did so, I felt an increasingly strong pain in my chest and I thought that I ought to give the children a mouthful of milk each. There were at least five blue and white cartons with a freshly imprinted date on them in the fridge. But how could I offer milk to someone else’s children? They would tell their father. It would be suspicious, insulting.
The caretaker’s three children went away, hiccupping. They would tell their father that the decision had been unanimously signed. He would write it out in his formal hand. He would stick the piece of paper up on the notice board by the main entrance. And the name of Galina Nikolaevna remained in our fat together with the sound of hiccupping. Like a face seen in a broken mirror. Carried over into the sound of a broken music machine.
‘When you move into a building where a Russian woman lives, that’s where you’re meant to await old age.’
That’s what my eccentric uncle used to say. After his death, he left two thick notebooks filled with nonsensical sayings like that. And they kept occurring to me ever since we moved into entrance number nine. In the family we used to whisper that a Russian woman had eaten the right-hand of his moustache, choked and died. And that afterwards my uncle had abandoned his rule of growing old in a house where a Russian woman lived. He experienced old age and death (which was not something my left-moustached uncle liked to mention) in a house in which no single Russian woman had ever lived or ever choked to death in due to her craving for a man’s right-hand moustache.
Those who visited him before his death were mostly silent, listening to his tireless voice and strange nonsense. After all, my left-moustached uncle was interesting to listen to.
In fact, someone maintained that my uncle used to shave of his right-hand moustache every day. He used his right hand to make important gestures. He had no time left for such silliness as twisting his moustache. But his left hand and his left-hand moustache –that was another matter!
In entrance number nine, I had not yet experienced old age (my uncle did not like to mention death) but I did experience the first big explosion that rocked the city that soon afterwards became besieged.
All the doors opened at almost exactly the same moment and the tenants rushed down to the cellar. Terrible noises drive a person into the depths, even smelly, damp ones like the cellar in entrance number nine.
Under the only bulb in the cellar, feeble and flickering, I caught sight of two small blue eyes and knew: that must be her! Galina Nikolaevna!
One of her eyes was smaller than the other. Had it shrunk from peering through the tiny glass circle? From her other eye a captive tear threatened to fall at any minute. From long waiting it had become an opaque, dense drop, inappropriate for a blue eye, even if it was an old person’s. In front of me was a thin, nondescript little old lady, unlike the attractive sound of her name. In a satin housecoat with light blue and green roses printed on its brown background. Under the cellar light that swayed from the strength of the explosion, Galina Nikolaevna’s eyes looked like two worn, fake emeralds. A sad, aniline imitation. They could not possibly have been the eyes of those mysterious Russian women from the long, romantic novels that girls read in the daylight, by a half-open window.
She had put on an ugly grey waistcoat over her dress. Galina Nikolaevna! My first Russian woman. Women like her certainly did not possess an expensive trunk in which they brought, all the way from Russia, a beautiful ball-dress with a long, excessively long train, long enough for many new, extravagant ball-dresses to be sewn from it year after year. When the train was all used up the Russian woman would die, in deep old age. All that would be left was the ball-dress brought from Russia. The Russian woman would be buried wearing it.
But, all this is just some crazy fairy tale, or, perhaps, one of my eccentric uncle’s pieces of nonsense. No, he never said that or recorded it in either of those two notebooks. But he said enough, and talked in such a way, that here I was in the damp, dark cellar, searching for an empty page in an invisible notebook. Had my uncle made it all up? His left-hand moustache was quite real!
Fine questions for a night when red-hot balls were falling onto the besieged city. My throat was dry. I heard a child’s scream. The boy said:
‘Mummy, I’m thirsty.’
So, this was it. What was meant to happen. You went down into the cellar, you felt desperately thirsty while upstairs, above you, in the fridge, inaccessible, were plenty of cartons full of milk. Plenty of jars of fruit juice. In this cellar there were only a terrible thirst and an ugly satin dress.
Never to climb up to the menthol and the blue and white cartons. A dog whined in the dark corner. The Russian woman was standing under a light-bulb, whispering:
‘But why ... why ...’
Her voice sounded as though she had just arrived from Russia. And she had already used up the long train. And even the dress.
Ten days later she knocked at our door. In the meantime the telephones had stopped working in the besieged city. All of them except those with a combination of digits like our number. Galina Nikolaevna had somehow discovered that in entrance number nine, the new tenants’ telephone was working. She rang her son who lived in another part of the city.
‘Kolya, Kolya ...’
She repeated that name softly, for a long time, and then replaced the receiver helplessly. She thanked us and thrust a withered apple which she took out of the pocket of that terrible satin dress into the boy’s hand.
Afterwards, she began to drop in. Occasionally and briefly. There was always the telephone and ‘Kolya ... Kolya ...’. And always before she left, saying ‘Thank you so very much’ (I think she once said ‘spasiba’), she would thrust something into the boy’s hand. A sweet, chewing gum, a little piece of chocolate ... Once, in the boy’s hand, after ‘Kolya, Kolya ...’, there was a shiny ornament used to decorate New Year and Christmas trees. And it was summer, the first summer in the besieged city. Just as hot as the fiery balls that were falling onto the town. For a time the boy used the ornament, looking at his face in its shiny surface, and then, once, without meaning to, he trod on it. The ornament turned into hundreds of tiny, shining splinters. He collected them in his child’s spade and said:
‘New Year’s won’t come. It’s over!’
Galina Nikolaevna’s meagre pocket soon dried up. She used to put her hand into it out of habit, and bring it out empty. She looked at me helplessly and said:
‘Do you know that over there, in Russia, I had two aunts, both called Agdofia?’
That day Galina Nikolaevna left us, like a token with which one pays for telephone calls, the little story of the two sisters, both called Agdofia.
Over there, in Russia, a long way away and a long time ago, a woman gave birth to a little girl. And they took the little girl to church to be christened. The priest stood beside the still nameless child, bent over her tiny face, shook his shaggy head and began to chant i
n a resounding voice:
‘I name thee Agdofia!’
Some years later, the same mother gave birth to another girl child. She too was taken to the same little church to be christened. And the same shaggy head bent over the little wrinkled, pink face and his voice rang out:
‘I name thee Agdofia!’
One of the household coughed timidly and whispered into the ear of the shaggy head:
‘We already have one in the house!’
Unruffled and not looking at the speaker, the head pronounced in its resounding voice:
‘Let there be one more!’
Somewhere around the time when she bequeathed us the story of the two Agdofias, Galina Nikolaevna stopped knocking at our door. For days an old invoice lay on my desk with ‘Two Agdofias’ written on the back of it.
The first terrible winter in the besieged city began. It arrived early, during the autumn months. The heaps of snow were as high and heavy as the ones Galina Nikolaevna remembered from her childhood. And there was no power or fuel. Parquet was used for firewood throughout the city including entrance number nine. Old paper was burned. Furniture. Books. Someone even burned the only tree in the courtyard without seeking the unanimous approval of all the tenants in number nine. Besides, the caretaker had already abandoned the besieged city, with all three of his children. That was at the time when it was still possible to leave the besieged city. Soon a terrible, impenetrable ring was drawn tightly round it which could hardly be overcome by adults, let alone children, especially if there were three, each those reaching the other’s ear. All the important, unanimous decisions vanished from the notice board in entrance number nine. The smell of vanilla and cinnamon vanished. What was left was the smell of a clinic. Behind the door with the large loops on the letter ‘B’, only the man’s voice could be heard:
Death in the Museum of Modern Art Page 5