The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Boris Ivanovich, in the meantime, had taken refuge for the night with an old woman who had been hawking green onions and parsley on the Kimry docks, had sold nothing, but had somehow returned home with a wayfarer who had missed the last boat to Novo-Akatovo. For a ruble she allowed him to spend the night in her barn on a haystack covered with a sheet. At sunrise he washed at the well, and by six in the morning he was on the boat. The old woman was a godsend—she didn’t report him.

  On the evening of the second day he was sitting in the remote, nearly inaccessible village of Danilovy Gorki, in an old peasant cottage that belonged to his friend Nikolay Mikhailovich, also an artist. He explained the situation to him and asked permission to live there, in their summer hut, or in the bathhouse, for the time being, in the guise of a cousin or some such relative. Nikolay Mikhailovich shook his head and groaned, but didn’t refuse him. And so began Boris Ivanovich’s life as a fugitive.

  Danilovy Gorki wasn’t exactly a village, but a small settlement of five houses. One of them was Nikolay Mikhailovich’s. Another stood empty, after the death of the owner two years back, and was awaiting a buyer. The owners of the other three hosted vacationers in the summer months. By the end of August, nearly everyone would return to the city.

  Nikolay Mikhailovich’s mother was from the nobility; his father had been a priest, and was executed in 1937. Thus, he was under no illusions about the relative seriousness of the situation. He said that until September, while there were still many strangers around the settlement, it would be safe to stay there. When the vacationers left, though, every person for five miles could be seen at a glance.

  The cottage was full to the rafters. Children, the elderly, two spinster aunts, all manner of dependents and houseguests. Everyone lent a hand, but on a voluntary basis. They were all busy from morning till night, but all free and unencumbered.

  For Boris, this country life was a novelty. He was a city man. His grandfather, who had been a serf, had started to work in Sytin’s lithography plant after 1883. His father had been a typography engraver: a “proletarian of artistic labor,” as he called himself. He settled in Moscow and lost all ties with his Ryazan relatives.

  Boris Ivanovich didn’t know much about country life, and was wary of it, but he didn’t like the city, either. He had lived in the Zamoskvorechye district, not far from the typography plant, since childhood, and he and his wife moved to Kharitonievsky Lane when they married.

  He felt happiest when he was on the Black Sea, and he vacationed in Sochi or in Gagra every year. He had never really seen the countryside before, and now, for the first time, he was discovering the charms of a secluded little village near a large river, among forests and swamps. He was also charmed by the descendants of this family of the nobility. They had never lived in palaces, or caught so much as a whiff of luxury. For half a century, between poverty and indigence, between banishment and prison, those who had survived had been honed and simplified. They no longer knew a single foreign language, but they had preserved some ineffable quality that Boris Ivanovich never managed to pin down.

  Nikolay’s daughters boiled kasha on the Russian stove, baked pies, worked in the vegetable garden, and washed clothing and linens in the river. The grandsons caught fish, the granddaughters and two aunts picked berries and mushrooms in the forest. All of them sang, drew, and put on children’s plays.

  Nikolay Mikhailovich’s cousin, the vivacious and full-throated Anastasia, came for a three-day visit. From the moment she arrived, she began making eyes at Boris. She turned his head; he was an easy and quick-witted catch. They lost no time about it, and their first night together would have been longer if they hadn’t sat around the table singing songs until all hours. And Anastasia sang remarkably well—with a kind of gypsy flair, sonorous and provocative. His own wife was more attractive than this Anastasia, with her small, childlike breasts and long nose, but Boris Ivanovich marveled about her long afterward: this woman, bony and angular, had been like the water of life for him. It was as though he had been cleansed from inside, picked apart bone by bone, ligament by ligament, then reassembled. He couldn’t recall when he had ever been such a potent and untiring partner. Anastasia sailed away on a little boat on the fourth day of their romance. She was a doctor, moreover the head of her department, and had to return to duty. The whole family went down to the river to see her off, and when she was still on shore she began singing, “Marusenka Was Washing Her White Feet.” For a long time, she waved her handkerchief from the boat that would take her to the big landing stage, where the regular ferry would pick her up.

  She’s such a cultured woman; but what a slut! Boris Ivanovich thought in rapturous bewilderment. He had never in his life met a woman like her.

  Nikolay Mikhailovich, as though reading his mind, said quietly:

  “It’s in Anastasia’s blood—her great-grandmother, or great-great … slept with Pushkin.”

  On Transfiguration Day the whole household went to church in Kashino. Starting out in the evening, they traveled first by boat, then by bus. It was an exhausting journey. They were cultured, well-educated people—but religious as well. Boris Ivanovich had never met people like this before, either.

  “Your way of life is rather anti-Soviet,” he said in amazement.

  “No, Boris, it’s simply a-Soviet,” Nikolay Mikhailovich replied, laughing.

  Boris stared wide-eyed at everything. He watched the rising sun, and the shallow water lapping the sandbars, where the minnows and tadpoles darted to and fro as though they had some great business to attend to. He saw the sandy shore with its empty mussel shells and ornately patterned grasses, which he had noticed on icons, but he hadn’t known they really existed in the world. He saw all this, and felt a happy wonder. He and the others tramped into the woods to pick mushrooms, which were sparse in July but much more numerous in August, after the gentle, sweet rains.

  Boris Ivanovich turned out to have a passion for hunting mushrooms, and for fishing. He even proved to be adept at peasant labors: he learned to wield an axe like the best of them, helping Nikolay Mikhailovich repair the barn and set the gate upright again.

  The days were long, and the evenings, with their endless tea-drinking, were pleasant. The nights passed by in an instant: he would fall asleep and wake up again refreshed, as though no time at all had passed. And Boris Ivanovich felt an unprecedented calm and peace, something he had never known in his Moscow life.

  A month and a half passed, and he still hadn’t had any news from home. And, strange as it may seem, he didn’t seek out ways to get in touch with his wife. On the face of it, this was because he didn’t wish to cause her any trouble. But deeper down, he admitted that he felt more tranquil without her agitated caprices, her alarm and fears.

  A relative of Nikolay Mikhailovich’s tossed a single postcard in the mailbox from Boris Ivanovich upon her return to Moscow: Don’t worry, everything’s fine. I love and miss you.

  In August, Nikolay Mikhailovich’s wife arrived with their oldest son, Kolya. She was the daughter of a famous Russian artist. Both daughters hovered around their mother, pampering her like an honored guest, with a constant refrain of “Mommy, Mommy!” The son, a strapping thirty-year-old, trailed around after his father. Nikolay Mikhailovich’s relationship with his wife was also unusual. They were tender and respectful toward each other, almost formal in their manners and forms of address. They spoke in quiet voices, attentive and courteous to each other. It was hard to believe they had ever made children.

  The grown-up children still remained their children, and it was amusing to see how the grandchildren adopted the manners and habits of their parents—bringing them a pretty apple, or a bouquet of late-blooming wild strawberries. Boris Ivanovich, who was staunchly opposed to childbearing, even began to doubt his long-held theory—that producing new human beings in this country, ruled by an inhuman and shameless government, in which they would be destined to a life of poverty, filth, and meaninglessness, was wrong. This was the con
dition on which he married Natasha.

  He and Natasha had been married for eight years already, and she had not yearned for children. But there was another circumstance that irked her. Whether it was because she lacked a sense of humor, or because her husband’s views and ideas weighed too heavily on her, she began to recoil from the cartoons, which had become more strident and bitter with time. They lived very comfortably, compared with others. He had graduated from the department of applied arts and crafts at the Stroganov Institute, so he had never become a “proper artist.” He carried out commissions, and earned more than the real artists at the plant, where he made up to a thousand rubles on a project.

  Sometimes he took on private commissions for well-known people, or assisted in creating metalwork décor and panels for all manner of palaces of culture, whether railroad or metallurgical—but invariably socialist. This kind of hackwork filled him with spiteful rage, and he began making ever more acerbic cartoons about this socialist way of life that would any day now become full-blown communism.

  He began to indulge his passion for drawing with greater intensity. By trade, he was a craftsman specializing in fine metalwork, but drawing became his source of joy and rest—and an outlet for his frustrations. Once he was invited to take part in an art exhibit held in an apartment, out of sight of the authorities, and after this he was welcomed into a select circle of underground artists.

  His underground work even drew admirers. The first to attract attention were the laborer and female collective-farm worker made out of the coveted salami—but only on paper, naturally. Thanks to his friend Ilya, this salami even made it all the way to West Germany and was published in an evil anti-Soviet magazine (like all the magazines over there). After this taste of success, Boris even grew indifferent to large-scale commissions and spent most of his time scratching away with his pencil.

  Here, in Danilovy Gorki, Muratov lost all interest in drawing salami. They didn’t have it there, and no one missed it. Neither had he any interest in the quiet sketches of gentle nature that every member of Nikolay Mikhailovich’s family, young and old, was so fond of making. So, during the summer, he refrained from drawing.

  It was getting on toward September, and they began to prepare for going back to the city. They stuffed mushrooms, raspberries, and strawberries dried in the oven into pillowcases. They hadn’t made jam that year—there wasn’t enough sugar, and the jars were hard to transport to the city, anyway. They put away the salted cucumbers and mushrooms in the cellar, and buried the early potatoes.

  During the winter, Nikolay Mikhailovich and his son always made a trip here from the city on “inspection”—to look at the house, and to fetch provisions to take back to Moscow. The route during the winter, in contrast to the summer “water” route, was far more grueling: first by train, then by bus, then four more miles through the forest. Cars weren’t able to make it to Danilovy Gorki because there was no road; the only way to reach it was by tractor.

  When their departure was imminent, Nikolay Mikhailovich said to Boris:

  “Well, do you intend to winter here, Boris Ivanovich?”

  Although he had lived there for nearly two months in placid tranquillity, he had nevertheless been contemplating the future, and so was quick to answer:

  “I have some trepidation, Nikolay Mikhailovich. Not about the police—but about your stove, about your cottage. One has to know these things from childhood. I may be too old by now to pick these things up.”

  “True, our father was a parish priest, and we lived in a cottage like this from childhood. It’s a simple science; but a science nevertheless.”

  Nikolay Mikhailovich scratched his scraggly beard, thought for a bit, then said:

  “Old Nura’s vacationers have all gone home, and she has been unwell for about a year. Why don’t you stay with her, Boris; I’ll talk to her about it. You can help her get through the winter. I’ll come in December to check in on you. God willing, things will work out.”

  They had adopted a practice: If they called each other just by their given names, Boris and Nikolay, they used the formal address. If they used their patronymics, they addressed each other as “thou.”

  Muratov gave Nikolay Mikhailovich instructions about what to do once he reached Moscow. He wanted him to stop in at his home one evening without prior arrangement and hand over a letter, without revealing his whereabouts. That was all. And he wanted him to meet with his friend Ilya, convey his greetings, and tell him one word: “Forward.” He would know what to do.

  Before Nikolay Mikhailovich’s return to the village in December, Boris requested that he meet with Ilya again, take the money he would have ready, give half of it to Boris’s family, and bring the other half with him here. How much money there would be he didn’t know: perhaps a lot, perhaps not much; perhaps none at all …

  Nikolay Mikhailovich fulfilled these requests down to the last detail during the first week after his return to Moscow.

  Muratov moved in with Nura. The old woman was shrunken and stooped over. She had a craggy face and gnarled fingers with huge, bulbous knuckles and joints. She held them perpetually in front of her, as though she were holding a cup or a saucer. Her joints no longer worked, and she manipulated her fingers as if they were claws.

  She allowed Muratov to live with her in exchange, not for money, but for vodka. The old woman turned out to be very fond of tippling, and was quite a character. Early in the morning she would wake up and crawl out of bed, her bones creaking. Then she would cross herself in front of the holy place in the corner, where there was an icon completely covered in soot, and imbibe her first thimbleful. At noon she took another. At some indeterminate point during the day she ate porridge or potatoes. All the other fats, proteins, and carbohydrates a person needs to survive she would get from a further three thimblefuls of the potion. A bottle lasted her a week; she had established this for herself years ago. In the mornings she was barely alive, but by evening she was animated and cheerful, and even did some housework. But she mumbled more and more incoherently as the day wore on.

  Three years before, the settlement had been furnished with radio and electricity. The old woman ignored the electricity. She never turned on the light, going to sleep when it got dark, and rising at sunrise. She took a liking to the radio, however. When Muratov learned to decipher the meaning of her mumbling, he would catch merciless and hilarious gibes at the radio broadcasts that she listened to in the mornings. That year, another campaign against drinking had been launched. They issued statements and decrees, and the antialcohol message was sent out over the radio waves.

  “Now they’re all worked up about vodka. Who can drink vodka, when there’s not even any moonshine! We don’t need anything from you, leave us to ourselves. You can keep your BAM,* but leave us the vodka.”

  When Boris Ivanovich started to understand her indistinct muttering, he came to appreciate the liveliness and wit of her repartee.

  “Listen, lodger, that new Stalin, whatchamacallem, he’ll be worse than the old one.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The old one took everything, and this one is picking through the leftovers. Oh yes, they liberated us from everything, the dears—first they freed us from the land, then from my husband, then from my children, from my cow, my chickens … They’ll liberate us from vodka, and our freedom will be complete.”

  Nura’s husband had perished in 1930, during collectivization. Her three sons, who had come of age at the beginning of the war, had died in combat, one after another—the eldest in ’41, the middle in ’42, and the youngest in ’45.

  “And they liberated us from God, too.” She peered through the darkness at the icon and muttered: “But maybe He Himself turned his back on us, who’s to say…”

  In the evenings there were sometimes visitors—Marfa and Zinaida, both a bit younger, but no less bitter than Nura. They drank Boris Ivanovich’s tea, and Nura praised him:

  “God sent me a good lodger. Sometimes he brings me
vodka, and sometimes tea…”

  Boris Ivanovich hadn’t thought about salami for a long time now. It had completely lost its symbolic significance in these parts, having long ago been out of circulation, and thus forgotten. These women had no money to take a commuter train to Moscow to buy salami, and they would never have laid eyes on an orange if Nikolay Mikhailovich’s family had not presented them with this delicacy from time to time.

  Nowadays, Muratov drew only the old women’s meager feasts. He discovered great riches amid the scarcity: small, crooked potatoes, boiled in their jackets, pickled cucumbers, disfigured from being crammed in their barrels, mushrooms—small boletes, stout milk caps, and saffron agarics. And the queen of the table was a turbid bottle of moonshine with a homemade stopper. And vodka, if they were lucky. In the winter, bread supplies were intermittent. They hadn’t gotten any at the village store in the larger settlement of Kruzhilino, four miles from Danilovy Gorki, so the old women took turns baking it themselves.

  Boris Ivanovich had quickly used up all the paper he found in Nikolay Mikhailovich’s house. Luckily, he had found ten rolls of wallpaper that had been intended for the attic. The renovation had been put off for several years, and then forgotten. But the wallpaper was just what Boris Ivanovich needed. At first he drew on the back side, which was ash gray; then he started working on the right side of the paper, a lightly stippled yellow background that brought the old women’s faces to life.

  They were the last people in the village. The others had already died, as worn out as their ancient clothing, resigned and humble as the potatoes that were their only food, and free as the clouds.

  When they drank, they would grow frisky and cheerful, rather than gloomy. They would strike up a song or lose themselves in reminiscences. They laughed, covering their toothless mouths with their blackened fingers. Among the three of them they had only a few teeth left. They cured the toothache with sage and nettles. The village shepherd, Lyosha, had pulled teeth, but after he died, all the teeth left in their mouths fell out by themselves, without any extra help.