The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  “You don’t know him? It’s not my kind of thing, but you need to know who he is. Artur has taken up yoga recently. He found a volume of Vivekananda at the collection center. He practices meditation.”

  “I also want … Vivekananda.” Olga wanted everything: all the books, all the conversation, and music, and theater and film, and Berdyaev, and the Indian Vivekananda, and she wanted to read Dickens in English right away. And, as in childhood, when she wanted to hurry to join the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol Youth Group so she could be in the vanguard, she now wanted to be accepted by Ilya’s amorphous group of acquaintances—King Arthur, and the others whom she didn’t know yet, but about whom she had heard. They were the ones who had been standing outside the courthouse when her professor was on trial, and being part of their company was far more appealing to her than serving on the Komsomol committee of the philology department.

  Ilya gave Olga both Berdyaev and Vivekananda, as well as Orwell, who truly astonished her. After her expulsion from the university, Olga now had plenty of free time. She lolled around in her room for days at a time while Faina took care of Kostya, feeding him, taking him out for walks, and putting him down for naps. Toward evening, when her mother came home from work, Olga would go out to meet Ilya. They had several favorite meeting places: by the monument to Ivan Fedorov, the printing pioneer; by the Kitai-Gorod wall; at an antiquarian bookseller’s; in the old apothecary’s on Pushkin Square. When the weather got warmer, they started meeting at the Aptekarsky Garden, a small botanical garden founded by Peter the Great.

  Half a year passed before Ilya invited Olga to Tarasovka again, this time for a wedding. Olga was surprised. Who would want to marry such an eccentric man?

  “Olga, you don’t know what you’re saying! Before he married Lisa, women were lining up for the privilege to become his wife. They dreamed of the honor of laundering his trousers! A famous actress flew all the way from Vladivostok to Moscow twice a month, just to get screwed by him. She arrives, and he says: ‘Sorry, I’m not on furlough today.’ And he goes off with the barmaid. When Lisa appeared on the scene, all that ended. He became a faithful husband. He never so much as glanced at another woman. Then Lisa began whoring around, too,” Ilya said, and laughed.

  Olga always admired how freely and simply he spoke about things that she couldn’t even have named before she met him. Olga couldn’t say the word shit out loud—it stuck in her throat; but coming from him, even the most unmentionable vulgarities sounded natural and amusing.

  “Who’s he marrying?” Olga said.

  “It’s a curious story, as you might imagine. He’s marrying Lisa’s elder sister. It’s something Lisa cooked up herself. You’ll see.”

  King Arthur’s wedding took place in mid-July. The summer was still fresh. It was the first sunny day after a month of steady rain. On the eve of the wedding, Maria Fedorovna, Ilya’s mother, went to visit her sister in Kirzhach. That evening, Olga went to see Ilya at home. For the first time they were able to spend a night together alone, without hurry, interruption, or the furtive awkwardness Olga always felt in the strangers’ beds that Ilya took her to from time to time.

  In the morning they felt calm and spent, emptied out, and this rapturous vacancy lent them a sense of weightlessness, both physical and emotional. They were both aware of the unprecedented nature of what had happened to them: through bodily self-expression, extreme and urgent, bordering on the edge of possibility, through the feat of the sexual act, they had traversed a generally prescribed boundary—as though making a discovery where they had least expected to find it. Beyond the supreme pleasure of sex, another, inexpressible kind of bliss opened up to them—the dissolution of the individual self, of the “I,” into an ineffable, hitherto unknown freedom of soaring flight.

  “It’s so wonderful, it’s even frightening,” Olga whispered when they were already sitting in the commuter train.

  “No, it’s not frightening. We were shown what they call seventh heaven. I feel I need to perform an act of gratitude.”

  “What kind?” Olga said. “What kind of act could it be?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe we should get married? Then I can fuck you like an honest man.” And he laughed out loud, as though he had said something quite witty.

  Olga felt seared by the expletive, but for some reason her body responded with immediate assent. She blushed—I’ve completely lost my mind—and said awkwardly:

  “No. I think we need to have a baby after all of this.”

  Ilya stopped laughing abruptly. His experience with fatherhood was terrible, and he had no wish to repeat it.

  “No, that’s going too far. No way, never. Remember that.”

  Something collapsed inside her: what a roller coaster ride! What was this? Cruelty? Stupidity? How could he say such a thing? But he was neither cruel, nor stupid: he realized immediately that he had offended her. He took her arm above the elbow and squeezed it.

  “You don’t understand. Only freaks of nature are born to me. I’m a freak myself. You can’t bear any child of mine.”

  Olga grabbed hold of his hand. Her hurt was transformed into poignant sympathy; he had hinted to her before that his child was not entirely healthy. Now she understood that he had not been talking about an ordinary childhood illness; he was talking about an unmitigated catastrophe. They both fell silent, and stared out the window. The leafy green verdure beyond the window, so fresh, and washed clean by the long rains, seemed to call for silence. After this confession, their intimacy grew even more profound than they could have imagined possible.

  Tables had been shoved together and placed along the path leading up to the house. The grounds around the house were so overgrown with burdock, raspberry, and nettles that there was no other place to set them up. There were about forty guests, and not everyone had arrived yet. At the back of the property wood was burning in a makeshift outdoor grill. Smoke was rising into the air, and it smelled of wet grass and jasmine. Two young men were fussing happily around the grill.

  No one was sitting down yet, although bowls of various kinds of salads crowded the middle of the long table. Some of the guests had already started drinking, having sought out comfortable, conducive spots—in the ramshackle gazebo, long on the verge of collapse, next to the rain barrels, or on a stump near the outhouse. Loud peremptory cries could be heard coming from the house—Lisa was taking charge of everything. Then she emerged onto the porch: a real beauty, a sex bomb, a starlet—from her slender, shapely legs in spiked heels to the fountain of hair on her head and the oversize, slightly tinted glasses. She smiled, revealing a pair of sharp, fanglike teeth on either side of her mouth. What was she, a vampire? A witch?

  “Pannochka!” Olga whispered to Ilya. “It’s like she just stepped off the movie screen. She should be playing Pannochka!”

  “Maybe,” Ilya said.

  Then Olga saw the King. He was sprawled on a chaise longue, either meditating or just sleeping. His eyes were closed, his large, smooth chin pointed up to the sky.

  “Your Highness! Come to the table!” Lisa shouted, and the King opened one eye. “Why are you being such a layabout? We can’t start without you!”

  There was a stirring in the thickets and the undergrowth—the guests, some of them already in their cups, made their way to the table and settled onto the benches. Ilya was one of the first to throw a leg over a bench and sit down. Olga sat beside him. She knew some of the people there, though not all.

  But what people they were! All ages—young and middle-aged, two octogenarians, and one very amusing elderly lady. And all of them less than Soviet in their persuasions—to be more precise, they were downright anti-Soviet! Marvelously anti-Soviet! And, of course, her imprisoned professor had been part of this circle.

  “Tell me who’s who,” Olga whispered.

  “Which one in particular do you find interesting?”

  “Well, the red-haired one, for example.”

  “Ah, that’s Vasya Rukhin, a philoso
pher and theologian. He’s extremely erudite. Fascinating conversationalist. He gets drunk quickly, though, and all he can talk about then is the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy.”

  The philosopher-theologian was completely sober, and maybe for that reason he seemed rather downcast. He poured some generic alcoholic liquid into a glass, and the woman sitting next to him, whose hand kept straying to the tightly braided bun at the back of her neck, quietly protested. A stooping, almost hunchbacked man with the chiseled features and decorative mustache common among people from the Caucasus Mountains, raising his right arm and gesturing broadly with his left, began slowly declaiming what sounded like verse:

  “Alas, the printed word has scruples, but the lyre favors nonsense…”

  “That’s Damiani. He’s a genius. A modern Khlebnikov. He writes palindromes, acrostics, all kinds of formal wordplay. And his poems are brilliant. He’s a true genius. He was born too late. If he had lived at the turn of the century, Khlebnikov wouldn’t have been able to hold a candle to him. I haven’t seen Sasha Kuman yet. They’re like bosom enemies. They always go everywhere together. Sasha is also a poet, but of a different stripe. They’re always at each other’s throat, and poetry is the bone of contention.”

  Ilya was no longer waiting for Olga to prompt him with her questions. He waxed loquacious.

  “And those two are human rights activists. The fat one is a mathematician, his name is Alik. Theoretical mathematics. His logic is ironclad. I guess he’s the only one the KGB is afraid to tussle with. You can’t have a conversation with him—he proves every point. No one can keep up with him; his mind is like an automatic weapon. And the one sitting next to him, in the cowboy hat, a born-again Jew—his name is Lazar—is the inventor of machine translation. He’s a linguist and a cyberneticist. And next to him, in the blue dress, is his wife, Anna Reps. Also a poet. A fair-to-middling one, I’d say.”

  “How did the King come to know all of them?” Olga asked.

  “It’s a circle of like-minded people. They all live and breathe books. The King is a fine bookbinder. Everyone knows him, and has good relations with him. There are several different groups of people who are connected only through the King. It’s a circle,” Ilya said, stressing the word again, as though it summed everything up.

  At that moment, Lisa’s cry—“Shura! Shura! Where’s the pie?”—carried up to the porch. The door opened, and a large, red-faced woman stuffed into a white dress two sizes too small for her appeared in the doorway. In her outstretched hands, she held a baking sheet with a voluminous home-style pie. She had a fresh red burn mark on her forearm. A young girl, with an equally red face, also wearing a white dress, peeked out from behind her shoulder. She was carrying two large buckets. Olga craned her neck to get a better look—the buckets were full of sliced meat. The shish-kebab experts jumped up, grabbed the buckets, and disappeared.

  “Olga, that one there, the thin one with the dark eyes, is the famous Sinko. We listened to recordings of his songs at Bozhenov’s, remember?”

  “Yes, of course I do. Wonderful songs.”

  “He has a guitar with him, so he’s going to sing.”

  “Shura, put down the pie and go get the herring. Did you forget it?” Lisa admonished the plump one, her voice raised again. The sharp end of Lisa’s nose wriggled like that of a small creature, and Olga realized that her name was a reference to lisá, meaning “fox” in Russian, rather than a nickname for Elizabeth. Her pointy little nose was so mobile and alert, it seemed to have a life of its own. The plump one ran into the house, her behind jiggling. Lisa shook her head and smiled a condescending smile, as if berating a dull and inept assistant. The young girl in white went up to Lisa and told her something, but Lisa dismissed it with a wave of her hand:

  “Your job is to help. You didn’t bring the aspic!”

  And the younger one also trotted back to the house at a rapid clip.

  At last, King Arthur peeled himself from the chaise longue and went to sit at the head of the table. He sat in his armchair with the patched armrests. A girl with an expressive eastern countenance, large eyes, lips, and nostrils, her hair cut short, and wearing white jeans and a white T-shirt, sat down next to Artur on a bentwood chair. He put his arm around her.

  “What a stylish bride!” Olga whispered to Ilya.

  “No, that’s Lenka Vavilon. She has nothing to do with Artur at all. She’s Ossetian; she graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages. She knows all the languages of the Caucasus. And Persian, too. I’ve never laid eyes on the King’s bride myself.”

  At that very moment, Lisa went up to the stylish young woman and yanked the chair out from under her.

  “Lenka, that chair’s not for you.”

  Lenka remained unruffled.

  “Lisa, don’t order me around.”

  “Well, you get out of that chair, it’s for the bride!” Lisa shouted at her raucously. Lenka turned the chair with its back to the table, and then got up to sit in Artur’s lap.

  He didn’t seem to mind.

  “Shura, let’s get started! Come to the table!” Lisa screeched. The door flew open, and Shura appeared with a dish towel in her hands.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming!” On the way, she wiped her hands off with the dish towel, then fanned herself with it, saying quietly to Lisa (though Olga managed to catch what she said): “Lisa, tell Masha to sit down. You know she won’t, unless you tell her to.”

  Masha came out balancing a large oval platter of herring on the outspread fingers of each hand.

  Shura, going up to the bentwood chair, turned it around toward the table again, hung the dish towel over the back, and sat down heavily. This was the bride. In the meantime, Lenka Vavilon had vanished from Artur’s lap as though she had never been there at all. Shura’s hair was a hopeless mess. Early in the morning she had rushed out to the hairdresser’s, where they had whipped her hair into a tower of curls. This made Lisa furious. She harangued her sister, then ordered her to wash her hair at once, getting rid of both curls and hairspray. Shura used an entire bottle of her sister’s foreign-made shampoo. Now her hair was cleaner than it had ever been before; but it was so limp and flyaway that no amount of pinning and clipping could contain it. Shura kept reaching up to fiddle with her plain reddish locks, revealing dark stains under the armpits of her white dress. Her face was as flushed as if she had just emerged from a steam bath. It was clear she had been laboring in front of the stove all day.

  Now Lisa’s voice, with a metallic edge, rang through the air again:

  “Well, come on, pour us a glass! Fill up the glasses, Artur! Why are you such a deadbeat? Get up, bridegroom! Who’s going to make a toast? Sergei Borisovich, you’re the head honcho here!”

  A short, small-boned man in glasses, who looked about fifty, with an unhappy, self-contained air, refused outright.

  “Lisa, you dragged us all into this farce; you see it through to the end.”

  “Who is that?” Olga said, startled by the exchange.

  “Chernopyatov. A lot depends on him. He’s a strong, uncompromising man. He was sent to the labor camps when he was only fourteen. He was still in school. I’ll tell you more about him later.”

  Lisa waved her hand indignantly.

  “Fine! It’s my wedding, after all. My own husband is marrying my own sister.”

  She gestured toward her sister dismissively, as if brushing her aside. Shura stood up, and Lisa jumped up onto her chair. Her getup was like something from another world. She had on a white silk blouse, on top of which was a black lace bra; short shorts peeked out from under her shirttails. She stood on the chair unsteadily; the chair legs wobbled, sinking into the soft, uneven ground. Her spiked heels only made matters worse. Strands of unruly hair blew around in the breeze. Artur, watching the orator attentively, prepared to catch her if she lost her balance. On the other side of her, Shura shuffled around in place, arms outspread, watching the precariousness of the situation in alarm. Still, Shura hadn’t foreseen just h
ow precarious the situation was—suddenly it dawned on her that Lisa was totally smashed.

  “Hey, where’s the champagne? Pass me a glass!”

  Someone gallantly thrust a glass into her hand. She raised it into the air and shouted:

  “It’s bitter!”*

  Artur grabbed her. She clung to his neck and began kissing him: on his bald head, on his cheek, on his nose—until she came to his mouth, when she fastened her lips to those of the imperturbable King.

  “I am giving my beloved husband away in marriage! To my dear sister! Hey, Masha! Hey, where’s my niece? Come over here, Masha! I’ve found a daddy for you!”

  Masha was standing next to her mother; the expression on her face was no laughing matter.

  No one knew what would happen next, but it was clear there was trouble afoot.

  Olga was riveted by the scene and didn’t notice that Ilya was gone. He reappeared a few minutes later laden with shish kebab skewers. He was accompanied by one of the grill tenders.

  Lisa grabbed a skewer and thrust it at the King.

  “Shura! Look at me, goddammit! The first piece always goes to him! Masha, you too! I’ll tear your eyes out if I have to!”

  But there was no need to tear out Shura’s eyes—they were already filled with tears, and she wanted to die of shame. She stood rooted to the spot. Ilya passed out skewers, and the shish kebab distracted the attention of the guests from the main wedding ritual—the bittersweet kissing.

  “Ilya, she’s just a rogue, she thrives on chaos!” Olga fumed, when Ilya brought her the shish kebab.

  “Of course she’s a rogue! A brilliant rogue. She’s the one who got the King out of prison and into the loony bin, then got him discharged. She paid some, turned tricks for others. She became a lawyer. No, it’s true! She graduated from law school, taking evening courses. You can’t imagine what all she’s done. I knew her first, before I met the King. She was a girl from the Far East, her father was a hunter. She went out hunting in the taiga with him when she was just a little tyke. And she can hold her liquor; she keeps up with the best of them. She’s an iron lady, except when she’s got the hots for someone. That’s her only weakness. And the King is impotent, which she herself will announce shortly.”