Tea and vodka poured out in rivers, kitchens basked in the fervent steam of political dispute, so that the dampness crept up the walls to the hidden microphones behind the tiles at the level of the ceiling.
Ilya knew everything and everyone. He was calm and conciliatory in arguments, because he always had his “on the one hand” and “on the other hand” at his disposal … And he told Olga:
“You know, Olga, any position you take limits you, makes you dumber. Even this stool has four legs!”
Olga could only guess at what he was trying to tell her, but she agreed with him in her heart of hearts: the idea of stability appealed to her.
Meanwhile, Tamara, under Marlen’s influence, had temporarily become a Zionist; but endocrinology prevented her from immersing herself completely in the Jewish movement. Her dissertation was almost finished, and the results of her laboratory research were astounding. The hormones had been synthesized, and were working away like good little things in test tubes; all that remained was to test them on a living organism, if only a rabbit.
Vera Samuilovna was thrilled with her former graduate student, who, after graduating from the institute, took a lowly job as a senior lab assistant, with a likewise paltry income, but had nevertheless blossomed into a full-fledged scientist.
Tamara stayed until late in the evenings at the laboratory, then met Marlen by the Molodezhnaya metro station. From eleven to twelve at night they walked together, while Marlen walked his beloved setter, Robik, whom he loved still more for the opportunity he gave him to go out in the evening.
Marlen and Tamara were in the throes of a great and secret love, with all the signs of its exceptional and divinely ordained nature: an abundance of every kind of intimacy, a burning sensation at the slightest touch, an understanding beyond words, the bliss of mutual silence and the thrill of even the most ordinary conversation. Marlen was astonished by Tamara’s magnanimity; she perceived even his failures as merits, never tiring of praising his mind, his erudition, and at the same time his nobility.
She based her judgment about the last quality on his devotion to his children, his family, and the Jewish traditions he had introduced into his home. For some time now his Russian wife had regularly set the table for the Friday night Shabbat ritual and had read the prayer in Hebrew above two candles. Marlen’s Communist ancestors would have rolled over in their graves, but prisoners in Kolyma were not committed to graves. Only his mother, who had by some miracle been spared a fate in the camps, and had gone off her rocker from fear instead, had managed to lie down in a grave in Vostryakovo Cemetery.
The parents of Lida, Marlen’s sweet wife, would have been very surprised about the “kikification” of their daughter. But they knew nothing about her Friday-night family entertainment; and, besides, they loved Marlen for his joviality, his affability, and his eternal readiness to drink moderately, in a non-Russian way, while offering drinks generously to others. They were simple, unpretentious Soviet folk, an engineer and a teacher, who had not yet been informed that Marlen planned to move the whole family to Israel.
After the Shabbat meal, Marlen took Robik out on his leash and walked him to the nearby five-story building where Tamara lived, so that he could spend the Sabbath as the Talmud decreed. Robik lay on the doormat and also had his share of pleasure—he gnawed on a bone specially prepared for this occasion. Raisa Ilinichna sequestered herself in her hundred-square-foot room and didn’t even dare come out to use the bathroom—it was as if she wasn’t there at all.
* * *
Galya was coming up in the world. Her husband found her a suitable position working in the Army Sports Club. She had a job in her own field, and she received a good salary. As a husband, Gennady didn’t disappoint. He was faithful and honest; he always carried out his promises. His own life was not easy. He worked long hours, traveled a great deal, and was enrolled in night courses, which he said were necessary for his professional development. He had been developing for five years already. And this development had already led to an apartment in a brick building in Kuntsevo, and to a good position. The exhortation of the Leader—to learn, learn, and learn—was not lost on him. He attended various courses to expand his qualifications, and he acquired a second higher degree along the way.
The only thing missing was progeny. It was as though fate were mocking them—in a country with the highest number of abortions per capita in the world, Galya happened to be the one whose ovaries backfired and defied the best attempts of all the little seeds, the one who was shunned by this most ordinary of miracles.
* * *
During these years of happiness for Olga, Tamara saw very little of her. The silence got in the way. Tamara’s secret love was already common knowledge, but she never mentioned Marlen in her conversations with Olga. Olga was hurt; this was not the way a friend should behave, not the way women should behave. Female friendship that was not well oiled with exchanges of intimacies about life soon dried up and lost its charm. Even when Marlen and his family were unexpectedly bundled off to Israel, Tamara didn’t say a word to Olga. And there was plenty to say.
After that, hard times began for Olga. Ilya emigrated and everything changed in Olga’s life. All that had once held meaning for her was now meaningless, and nothing emerged to take its place. Ilya’s absence proved to be even stronger than his presence. He became a fixation, and Olga’s thoughts, like the needle on a crazy compass, continually pointed toward him. During these months, before Olga had recovered from the first blow, Tamara came to her side. At first Olga’s illness appeared to be the classic symptoms of an ulcer. But Tamara saw all the signs of depression: Olga lay with her face toward the wall, silent, hardly ever getting out of bed, going without food and almost without water. With her medical acumen, Tamara sensed trouble ahead.
“Olga, it’s like you’ve come to a standstill, you have to make an effort to save yourself. You’ll lose your mind, you’ll get ill! Get rid of it, root it out of your being—you can’t live like this!”
Tamara tried to drag Olga out of her depression. First she took her to a psychologist who received patients in a clinic that was underground, in all senses of the word. Then she took her to a psychiatrist. Olga’s natural resilience, Tamara’s guidance, and antidepressants lifted her out of her doldrums. But soon she started bleeding. Tamara was almost glad, thinking that her bodily ills would save her psyche. But the obsessive thinking and talking about Ilya continued as before. The illness was snuffed out, but the flame of injury, jealousy, and animosity still burned bright. The former Olga, smiling and even-tempered, had nearly disappeared, and had given way to something else—tears, wailing, bouts of hysteria.
The girlfriends absorbed the fallout of these outbursts, taking the burden onto themselves. Galya visited Olga on a regular basis, sympathized with her quietly, and nodded mechanically in agreement. Ilya’s cruel act, his abandonment of Olga, was perfectly in keeping with her view of the world, in which men were bastards, beautiful women were whores, bosses were unfair, and girlfriends were envious of each other. Olga, who was a girlfriend and also beautiful, was an exception. Likewise, Galya’s own story: her husband was a decent man who didn’t run after other women and who turned over his whole salary to his wife. From superstition, she held her tongue about the family happiness she enjoyed—she didn’t want her girlfriends to jinx it inadvertently.
Tamara saw everything in a different light. Galya’s simplistic notions inspired only contempt in her. Tamara didn’t have time for Galya; she was busy rushing around to visit specialists of all kinds with Olga. The doctors had diagnosed cancer, which was progressing rapidly and seemed to be outpacing the medical examinations. The cancer had been caught in its early stages, but it was an aggressive one. It was possible that Olga’s bitterness and hurt fed the illness; science was silent on the matter.
At times, Olga refused treatment. Once she even fled the clinic, the best one of its kind, to which Tamara, using all her own and Vera Samuilovna’s medical connections
, had managed to get her admitted. In the end, Olga gave in to Tamara’s importuning and underwent a course of chemotherapy; her health began to improve.
The dynamics of the relationship between the friends changed: Olga lost the upper hand and seemed not to be aware of it. Now Tamara was in charge. Galya ignored this change in relative power and influence. She had perfected the art of keeping silent, observing pauses, not noticing questions, and nodding vaguely. Tamara, who had always considered Galya to be a nonentity, could hardly endure her presence.
Tamara was the only one who still remembered the incident of the typewriter.
* * *
The three girlfriends met for the last time on the occasion of Olga’s birthday, at the general’s dacha, in 1982. They were all thirty-eight. Galya and Tamara arrived at the dacha separately, one by bus, the other by the usual route—the commuter train from Rizhskaya Station. They ran into each other by the gates of the dacha. The gates appeared to be hewn from logs; they were ancient. The grounds were sprawling, and now seemed even more spacious. There was a pond on the property that hadn’t been cleaned for ages and was overgrown with duckweed around the edges. The outlines of a half-rotted boat were visible in the middle of the pond. The two-story house was falling into charming decay. The general had died, Antonina Naumovna had been relieved of her high administrative post, and the dacha looked like a nobleman’s dilapidated estate. Kostya came out to greet the girlfriends. He was already a tall young man with a shock of light hair like Esenin’s, which he kept pushing off his forehead. Physically, he bore a striking resemblance to his father, Vova, but in his mannerisms and his speech he took after Ilya, though without Ilya’s wit. They all exchanged kisses in greeting.
“Mama’s over there,” he said, and led them to the veranda.
Olga was sitting in a wingback chair, her head resting on a tapestry pillow, her little feet in thick knitted slippers, propped up on a low bench. Her hand, which looked more as if it were carved from ivory than like human flesh, lay on a side table that was next to the chair. Everything incidental had drained from Olga’s face; all that was left was a sharp, naked beauty and the illness itself. Her small head was wrapped tightly in a silk kerchief. Then she pulled the kerchief off, revealing the sparse, uneven growth, resembling an auburn hedgehog, underneath. After the chemo, her hair was growing back like a child’s, new and buoyant.
Half a year had passed since Olga had discharged herself from the clinic and had categorically refused any medical treatment. The letter from Ilya had done its work. Now everything was happening not according to science, but according to magic.
Kostya brought sandwiches with caviar and smoked sausage out to the veranda. Antonina Naumovna’s supplies of provisions had not been cut off, Galya observed, accustomed to the government feedbag herself. On this day she had come to say good-bye to Olga, as it had seemed then, forever. But she couldn’t find the words to communicate this: as usual, Tamara’s presence daunted her.
Right before she left, she said she was saying good-bye for a long time, because she and her husband were going abroad. Olga, with seeming indifference, asked her where.
Galya grinned. “Just imagine, we’re going to the Middle East. I can’t say where exactly. Tamara would get too jealous.”
There was no room for doubt about the precise destination. Tamara turned away her head, with its shapely afro. Tamara’s neck was extravagantly long, even disproportionately so; Olga used to joke that she seemed to be able to turn it 360 degrees.
During their school years, Tamara had considered Galya to be a necessary appendage to her beloved Olga, or like a levy placed on her own friendship with her. She merely tolerated her. And she would never have admitted to Olga what she thought of Galya—that she was a lowly plebeian sort, a pest and a nuisance, lacking in wit and talent, and also unkind … not to mention a traitor. Tamara had never forgotten about the typewriter.
Tamara looked in the direction of the pond. So they’re over there, too, those KGB thugs. They’re everywhere, there’s no escaping them … not even in Israel! There’s nowhere to hide from them.
“Oh,” Olga said. “The Middle East. You should learn French.”
“Why French?” Galya said, surprised. “I’m studying English.”
“Will you be gone long?”
“Three years, most likely.”
* * *
Afterward, when she was home on leave, Galya visited Olga—both times during Olga’s fantastical four-year remission, which lasted from the moment Olga received Ilya’s letter until she received the news of his death.
She brought souvenirs with her: Jerusalem crosses, icons, amulets. Olga wasn’t interested in these trinkets for the pious, and all of them migrated gradually into Tamara’s possession. She was thrilled to have them. Olga had become her old self, cheerful and energetic.
The third time Galya came to Moscow, Olga was no longer among the living. Galya already knew about her death. She called Kostya and went to visit their home, which they hadn’t changed or rearranged at all after Olga had died. The only difference was that now it was in complete disarray. Galya brought expensive gifts for Kostya’s children: plastic soldiers with mechanical innards, battery-powered toy cars, and a long-legged doll with clothes that fit her.
When she got home, she cried long and hard over Olga, then called Tamara. It was early evening and they both wept into the telephone. Then Galya asked whether she could come to see her.
“When? Could you come over right now?”
Galya caught a cab and fifteen minutes later she was with Tamara. You couldn’t say they talked—rather, they cried in each other’s arms all evening, their tea growing cold on the table in front of them. They didn’t even bother to turn on the lights. First they cried about Olga, whom they had both loved deeply, then about themselves, and about everything that life had promised and not given, interrupting their tears with silence, and their silence with tears. Then they cried about each other, sympathizing with each other about the things they could never say, and again about Olga. Then Tamara found half a bottle of cognac, and they each drank a glass, and Tamara finally asked the most important question—about the typewriter—for all the betrayal had begun with this machine.
“Didn’t Olga tell you? I told her about it as soon as I found out. My brother, Nikolay, God be with him”—here Galya crossed herself with a sweeping gesture—“took the typewriter and The Gulag Archipelago to the district branch of the KGB. He would never have done anything like that himself. Raika, his wife, God be with her, too”—again she crossed herself, but with less vigor—“she had always hated me, and she talked him into it. They showed Gennady the text of his letter. ‘To intercept an anti-Soviet conspiracy by enemies of the people and to evict my sister Galina Yurievna Polukhina from the apartment,’ Nikolay wrote. The housing authorities were kicking them out of the basement and resettling them in a new apartment, and Raika thought they might end up with a bigger space if I was out of the picture. In the new apartment, they died in a fire that started when they were both drunk.” Again she crossed herself ceremoniously.
Apparently, the mutual shedding of tears softened the invisible crust around Tamara’s heart. She, too, told Galya about what she had kept to herself for so long. After telling her these things, she beseeched, under her breath: “Lord, Lord, forgive me!”
After Marlen’s departure for Israel, and perhaps even before, Tamara had come to love Jesus Christ deeply. This had changed her in many ways.
Why have I hated this unfortunate little fool for so long?
Galya would have liked another drink, but she was too shy to ask. For the first time, Olga’s girlfriend, the clever Tamara, who had hardly paid the slightest bit of attention to her, was opening up to her.
It seems that Olga has brought us together, Galya thought tenderly.
Then Tamara showed her their new, but already aging, apartment. Galya had been to their old room in the communal flat on Sobachaya Square several times,
but she had never been invited here. All the furnishings were from their previous life: the piano, an armchair, bookshelves, and photographs. Only the pictures were missing. Galya asked about them, and Tamara laughed.
“You noticed? The paintings are gone.”
“I remember them. There was an angel with an enormous head, blue. Yes, Tamara, I was at your old house a few times. Olga took me with her. I remember the pictures, and I remember your grandmother.”
When it was already after one in the morning Tamara walked Galya out to the taxi. Both of them felt like milk bottles in the hands of a good housewife, ringing with cleanliness after a thorough wash. They didn’t yet know—they still had a great deal to share with each other—what kinds of strange paths had led them to this evening: Tamara, a Jew and former Zionist, who never did leave for Israel, was now a Russian Orthodox Christian; and Galya, the wife of an official at the Russian compound in Jerusalem, occupying what appeared to be a minor post, but which was, in fact, very significant. Over the past few years she had grown to despise everything that had to do with “religious leaders,” priests, rabbis, and all other mullahs, and at the same time, the entire East, with all its stratagems, secrecy, and base insincerity. Still, she was steeped in a warm feeling for the person of Jesus Christ …
“Israel itself is a wonderful country. Too bad you never went there. If only it didn’t have all those religions,” Galya concluded.
Tamara laughed.
“Why do you make the sign of the cross on your forehead, then? You’ve always been a silly girl, Galya, and you still are! How can you acknowledge Christ, but not Christianity?”
Galya composed her poor face into a stern expression, then answered back for the first time in her life:
“You just can, that’s all!”
After so many years of animosity, their relations had become easy and familial.
Galya, in no way offended, said defiantly:
“You’re the silly one, even if you do have a Ph.D. You’ve got your head on backwards!”
The Big Green Tent Page 30