The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Why go to such lengths for your brother? he remembered thinking. You’re the one who needs saving. But she wasn’t.

  The general was called before the administration and ordered to fire his secretary.

  Although tongue-tied and inarticulate, he was still indispensable, a valuable asset. But his interlocutor—a young captain, blond, with stubbly remains of hempen locks, close-set eyes like a pale, washed-out figure eight, blue shoulder straps—didn’t care that he had fought at the front, that he was a distinguished general; they could at least have sent a colonel to question him.

  “You’re trying to protect your mistress!” he said. “You know that I know that you know…”

  “Well, do what you know, then,” Afanasy Mikhailovich said, retreating after the second hour of interrogation. “You have your area of competence, I have mine—bridges, roads, and access routes.”

  The pale wisp smiled a cold smile, and nodded. But agreeing to fire her wasn’t enough for him. The haggling continued, step by step. It was like bargaining in business, but the captain kept turning the screws tighter and tighter. He knew everything—about what went on in the office, and about their secret rendezvous. He would drop oblique hints, avoid saying anything outright, and then—bam!—and didn’t you visit her on Dayev Lane? And didn’t you ever meet Sophia’s sister, Anna Markovna? A professor, isn’t she? And Iosif Markovich, her brother, an actor in the Moscow State Jewish Theater? You’re not acquainted with him?

  Is Sophia the only one they’re after? he asked himself suddenly. He was drenched in sweat.

  Are we quits, then? They were—and all it took was one signature. The next day a new secretary was sent to him, and Sophia was gone. For just over four years. At the beginning of 1954 she returned from the labor camp at Karaganda. Another year passed before they met again. And what a place to run into each other! It was at the market at Nakhabino, early one morning in June. Afanasy was buying radishes and carrots. It was Sunday, and guests were expected. Antonina Naumovna was bustling about, she had forgotten to send the housekeeper to the market. Afanasy Mikhailovich volunteered—glad to get out of the house to avoid the kitchen confusion. He went by himself in his private Pobeda, without the chauffeur.

  She recognized him first—and she stepped aside to avoid him. Her braid was gone, her plumpness had sagged, her hand flew up to her face and covered it: the same large hand with dimples at the base of every finger. Only now she didn’t wear red fingernail polish—it was a faint pink. He recognized that hand. It had stroked his bald head for many years, and with that one deft motion had vanquished his troubles and woes. He rushed to catch up with her.

  “Sophia Markovna!”

  “Afanasy!” she said, covering her mouth. “My God!”

  Every other one of her sugary white teeth was missing.

  “They released you?”

  “Eleven months ago, July last year.”

  “Why didn’t you let me know?” When they were face-to-face he was unable to call her by name. Addressing her formally was impossible, too.

  She waved her beautiful hand dismissively and turned down the road, as if to walk away from him.

  He chased after her and touched her on the shoulder. She stopped and began to cry. He removed his civilian straw hat and started crying, too. She wasn’t the same as she had been, she was someone else altogether; but in a single moment the two merged and became one—that former regal beauty, and the haggard, homely woman standing before him now, who was still the most wonderful in all the world.

  She lived with her sister, Anna Markovna, at her sister’s dacha, not far away. He left his car by the market so he could walk her home. They didn’t say a word along the way, as if the breath had been knocked out of them. His mind kept returning to the same question: Did she know that he’d signed the document? Before they reached the dacha, she turned to him and said:

  “We have to say good-bye here. My family can’t see you. And you don’t need to see them, either. You know they shot my brother.”

  She knows, he thought. His heart seemed to drop to his stomach. But what does she know? Maybe she thinks I betrayed her brother.

  Sophia had introduced him to her brother, Iosif. He was a good-natured fellow, and worked at Mikhoels’s Moscow State Jewish Theater. He had even written a few tales in Yiddish. They had met two or three times. But Afanasy Mikhailovich had put his name to paper only once—and that one signature had nothing to do with Sophia’s brother.

  “Do you still live on Dayev?”

  “I live at my sister’s. They took the room away from me. A yardkeeper lives there now,” she said indifferently, and he recalled the room that smelled like Red Moscow perfume, the flock of pillows, her collections of flacons and cats—of porcelain, glass, stone. “They tell me they’ll get the room back for me, and kick the yardkeeper out.”

  Indeed, it was not long before they did return the room to her. Afanasy Mikhailovich began to call her from public phone booths now and then at the old, prewar number. He wanted to see her. For a long time Sophia refused him.

  “No, please, I don’t want to, I can’t.”

  But one day she said: “Yes, come.”

  And once again he went through the courtyard and up the back stairs, which were adjacent to one wall of her room. As before, he avoided going through the main entrance, where the door to the communal flat was covered with doorbells for all the families living there. Instead, he knocked on the wall to her room, and she undid the huge iron latch to the back door, filling the darkness of the corridor with her body and her sweet scent. Then she led him into her little nest of pillows and blankets, where he basked in the warmth of her luxuriant body, which sank underneath him.

  And all their former closeness returned, even more intense than before—for they had lost each other forever, and found each other again by chance.

  And the second part of their double-feature true-love movie began. One thing, it goes without saying, had changed. They never talked about work. Sophia Markovna was as tactful and circumspect as ever. She never asked him anything. She never talked about her own trials and misfortunes. They talked about the subjects he brought up. The conversation usually concerned domestic matters, his family affairs. And he always talked about his daughter, Olga. Sophia Markovna had known her since she was born, of course—from a distance. Only from photographs. Once, not long before all the trouble, in 1949, he decided that Sophia Markovna should see Olga in person. He bought three tickets to a children’s theater, a ballet performance of Doctor Ouchithurts. He gave two of the front-row tickets to Olga and her girlfriend, and the third ticket he gave to Sophia Markovna. The girls sat next to Sophia Markovna; she watched them, and they watched the performance.

  Framed photographs of the little girl adorned her walls. And that’s how things continued. Sophia took a great interest in Olga. It is likely that Afanasy Mikhailovich would not have known as much about his daughter as he did if he hadn’t been assembling this domestic dossier on her for Sophia Markovna: he reported what grade she had gotten on dictation, what museum she had visited the previous Sunday, and so forth …

  The years passed, and Sophia heard all about Olga starting college, and about her early marriage. She’d had her doubts about the marriage from the very beginning. No, she said, our Olga is head and shoulders above Vova as far as intellect is concerned; mark my words, she’ll find someone far more interesting. And she was right. She was always right about everything. When Olga’s travails began, Sophia Markovna again gave Afanasy the right advice: she told him to retire.

  He wouldn’t have been able to make the decision himself—but, at her urging, he submitted the necessary papers. This decision bolstered his health. After he retired, his life changed, and the changes were much for the better.

  Afanasy Mikhailovich never notified Sophia of his impending monthly visit. He didn’t announce himself beforehand. She never left the house before noon, in case he decided to drop by. She always kept frozen minced meat
on hand, ready for preparing pancakes at a moment’s notice. She would make the dough, then fry up the paper-thin crepes, two for wrapping around the meat filling and one for the sugar-sweetened cottage cheese. He washed down the meat-filled pancakes with thyme-infused vodka, and the sweet one with tea. All the food Sophia made was slightly sweet—even meat and fish. And the sweetness seemed not to come from the sugar, but from Sophia herself, from the smell of her body, her clothes, her bed.

  On March 12, he went to see his girlfriend for the last time, though he didn’t know this yet. He only knew that it hadn’t even been a full month since he had last visited her, but just over two weeks. And already he was filled with longing; he couldn’t contain himself. The bus was running on schedule, and the electric commuter train didn’t let him down, either. He arrived at Rizhskaya Station promptly at 9:50. It had been quiet and still outside of town, but here snow was blowing through the squares. While he was buying flowers—mimosa—the squall died down and the sun peeped out. He boarded the trolleybus. Everything was happening right on time, but for some reason Afanasy felt uneasy. What if she wasn’t home? Something could have come up—maybe she had gone to see the doctor, or gone out shopping. He felt around for the key in his pocket. Sophia had given him the key to her room long ago, just in case. Which was quite pointless, since he didn’t have a key to the main entrance. And he couldn’t have gotten into her room through the rear, because the back door was always latched.

  When he was nearing the building, the snow squall started up again. Afanasy Mikhailovich noticed that there was a crowd standing in front of the house. There was a bus, and several smaller vans. But this was not his affair; he had nothing to do with them, or they with him.

  He went up the back stairs, knocked on the wall and waited at the door, expecting her to come to undo the latch. He waited for what seemed a long time, but she didn’t open the door. He knocked again—he ought to have telephoned, at least. But they weren’t in the habit of calling each other. Sophia Markovna still didn’t trust the telephone, though times had changed.

  I’ll try the front entrance, Afanasy decided, and he went back out into the courtyard.

  The bus, its windows draped in black, was performing a difficult maneuver, trying to pull right up to the front entrance of the building. People holding flowers leapt aside to make way.

  A hearse, Afanasy noted impassively.

  And, at almost the same moment, he was struck with alarm: Who had died?

  And, right away, he knew it was Sophia Markovna.

  He looked at the window farthest from the entrance—at that very moment it flew open, as though confirming what he had already guessed. The two halves of the large entrance door were propped open, and an enormous, plain coffin was carried out, not in the proper way, feet first, but head first. And the head, propped up high on a pillow, was that very same beautiful head, with a pale yellow face and red-painted lips. And the sweet smell assaulted his nostrils.

  The general started to reel, and his legs began crumpling underneath him. Someone grabbed him, breaking his fall. They put smelling salts under his nose, and he came to. The face of the woman he saw standing before him looked familiar, for some reason. She was of the same stamp as Sophia Markovna—a noble head, large, dark-brown eyes, shoulders almost as broad as a man’s. But, of course, it was her sister, Anna Markovna—Annie.

  “You! You!” She spat the words out with quiet rage. “What are you doing here? How dare you? Get out of here! Get out!”

  And he did. He didn’t witness the custom-made coffin—ready-made coffins for people of her girth were not available—being stuffed, with great effort, into the back of the bus, or her many Jewish relatives piling in behind it. Nor did he see his two former colleagues, with whom Sophia Markovna had kept up relations after her return from Karaganda.

  They saw him, however, and exchanged glances with each other. For a long time afterward they would prattle about him, and about Sophia; they would surmise all kinds of things. They would finally conclude that Sophia Markovna had tried to pull the wool over their eyes with stories about her high blood pressure, about her advancing years and her loneliness, when all the time she had been secretly carrying on with her retired lover. They thought hard about it, and did the calculations. Since 1935—that meant they had been together for thirty-two years, not counting the years of forced separation.

  The general, crushing a whisk of mimosa in his bluish fist, walked to the trolleybus. It turned out that Sophia had known everything. And had forgiven him.

  ORPHANS ALL

  The funeral was a sad and bitter affair. Not, however, due to tears and sobbing, loss and grief, or even, perhaps, regret accompanied by a sense of guilt. Rather the contrary. Not one of the mourners shed so much as a tear; there was no sadness, nor even sympathy. Their slightly benumbed faces expressed the decorum appropriate to the occasion. The absolute indifference to the death of the literary worker among those who attended the funeral did not go unnoticed by Ari Lvovich Bas, who officiated at these events of the Union of Writers. He had been organizing funerals for sixty of his seventy-four years. It was the family business. His grandfather had been the head of the funeral guild in Grodno. Ari Lvovich knew his craft down to the smallest detail. Not only was he one of the foremost experts in the dying profession of burial, he was also a poet of this ancient trade.

  He was a consummate master of ceremonies, and he had laid to rest all the great writers: Alexei Tolstoy, Alexander Fadeev, even Gorky himself (though his contribution was minor) … The first big funerals he had a hand in, still not as the main organizer, but as the first assistant, were in the 1930s. That was when he first met Antonina Naumovna. He remembered her. Oh, how well he remembered!

  On that day in April, he was called to take the measurements of someone recently deceased, a suicide. Ari went to Gendrikov Lane, but it turned out to be the wrong address. The well-known poet had shot himself somewhere else, on the Lubyanka, where his office was. On Gendrikov Lane, instead of the deceased poet, Ari found two men from the Political Directorate, and this very Antonina, also some sort of writer.

  The men were seizing papers and wrenching them out of a desk, and she was writing something down. A man with a thick head of hair looked up at Ari, his insolent gypsy eyes flashing fire—beat it! Ari, scared half to death, turned on his heels and rushed downstairs, recovering his composure only when he was outside again. Seasoned by his profession, he did not fear the dead. It was the living he feared. Two hours later they brought the body, carried it on a stretcher up to the fourth floor, and only when the three men, armed with two briefcases, had left the building did Ari go upstairs to the apartment again.

  Several people, among them two women, stood in the corridor. One of the women was weeping desperately. The door to the room had been flung wide open, and two people were standing next to it. They were bickering about the seal, which one of them had just removed from the door. The other one said:

  “You’ll pay for this. You’re not supposed to go inside—that’s why it was sealed.”

  The other one snarled back crudely:

  “Well, where in the hell should we put the deceased? In the hallway? Why are you such a chickenshit about every little seal? I’ve got my orders—put the body where it belongs!”

  Ari measured the body—six feet, three inches. The coffin would have to be custom-built.

  The funeral was unprecedented. Thousands of people packed into Vorovsky Street, and then the whole crowd followed on foot to Donskoi Monastery behind the truck carrying the coffin and a single wreath, a bizarre iron monstrosity of a thing fashioned from random parts, hammers and sickles. And not a single flower. The funeral was strange and magnificent, truly magnificent. Never before had he witnessed such an outpouring of public grief. Never before nor after. Except perhaps thirty years later when Pasternak died.

  Ari became firmly established in his profession. Now not a single person from the ranks of writers was buried without him. Provid
ed the death occurred in the environs of Moscow. After the war he constantly ran into Antonina, either in the honor guard next to writers’ coffins, or among the eulogists.

  As a young man, he could never have imagined how many people he would end up burying. Ari loved all his deceased. The deceased were the only ones he read. He never got around to reading them, not to mention loving them, while they were still alive. But again, their true stature would only be determined at their funerals.

  Antonina, now—it turned out she was a nobody. Zilch. And hardly anyone attended the funeral: six people in all. Her daughter, Olga; her grandson, Kostya, with his wife; a friend of her daughter’s; her neighbor from across the hall; and the sister of the deceased, Valentina, whom the family hadn’t seen in about ten years. The daughter seemed very pleased with herself. She had made amends with her mother toward the end, she fulfilled her obligations down to the last detail—moreover, Antonina had died quietly, without excessive suffering, under the effects of morphine. And there had been no love lost between them for quite some time, it must be said.

  On this day, Ari Lvovich, it seemed, was suffering more than anyone else. He hadn’t seen such a paltry funeral in a long time. Antonina Naumovna was buried according to the official Writers’ Union rituals. The coffin lay in state in the Central House of Writers, where actual public wakes took place, sometimes up to a thousand people. She was placed in the Minor Hall, which was all but empty. There were neither friends, nor officials. The new editor of the magazine couldn’t stand her predecessor and called a meeting so that her editorial board would be prevented from attending the funeral. She did send a wreath through her elderly secretary, however. It was made of funerary fir branches and decorated with white ribbons, reading “From the Collective.” Ari Lvovich delivered the official eulogy, a skill he had long since acquired, saying that the departed had been a true Communist and loyal Leninist. He also gave the family a chance to bid their farewells.