The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Young Ilya settled in to his seat, repeating the last words he had heard in his homeland:

  “A good ticket, a good ticket…”

  * * *

  In America, Lyudmila agonized for a long time before placing Ilya in a home. She might not have done it, had it not been for the fact that he had become more aggressive with time, and she found it increasingly difficult to manage him. He stayed in the home for two years. Then they transferred him to a special institution, where he was given job training so that he had skills for doing some limited but useful tasks.

  Lyudmila visited him on Sundays. She brought him white chocolate, which he loved, and a big bottle of cola. It took her two hours, one way, to get there—from Brighton Beach, where they had settled her in low-income housing, to a distant part of Queens. Six hours every Sunday she devoted to her son, and each time, after she returned home, she would collapse onto the double bed given to her by a charity organization, close her eyes, and give thanks to God that the boy was well nourished, warm, and receiving good medical care. One Sunday she didn’t show up, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  The socialization program went very smoothly, and a year later he received his first job: twice a week he sold papers in a kiosk one stop from his institution. He got ten dollars for the work he did, and in a tiny store where they already knew him, he bought some treats for himself—a bar of white chocolate, a bottle of cola, and a lottery ticket. He pointed his thumb at the candy bar, and the black salesclerk said:

  “Chocolate?”

  “Chocolate, chocolate,” Ilya replied.

  Then he pointed to a lottery ticket, and the salesclerk held out the printed paper to him, saying, “Here’s a good ticket for you…”

  “A good ticket,” Ilya replied.

  His whole life seemed to fall in place. He had friends that he could watch television with. After Lyudmila stopped visiting him, Russian words seemed to evaporate completely from his strange memory, which still contained many verses, however. Now they had become foreign to him.

  During the last week of May, Ilya worked in the kiosk until noon, received his ten dollars, and bought a bar of chocolate, a cola, and a lottery ticket. The ticket turned out to be better than just good—he hit the jackpot, winning $4.2 million.

  His residence was intended for low-income people. They didn’t keep millionaires there.

  The millionaire couldn’t quite fathom the complexity of the new situation. According to the law, Ilya was considered incompetent to deal with it. His mother had died. They tried to find his father, Ilya Bryansky. After lengthy correspondence and numerous inquiries, they established that his father lived in Munich. When they tracked him down, it turned out that he had died not long before. Then the lawyers contacted his stepbrother, Konstantin (Kostya).

  Kostya was summoned, and he flew to New York. He remembered dimly that Ilya Isayevich had a son from his first marriage. The doctors warned him about his newfound brother’s illness. On seeing Ilya, Kostya was taken aback—but the expression on his face didn’t betray his shock. He clapped the skinny giant on the shoulder and said in Russian:

  “Hey, brother!”

  Ilya broke into a grin.

  “Hey, brother!”

  Kostya pulled a photograph of his stepfather out of his wallet.

  “Here’s Ilya.”

  Ilya took the photograph, and his face lit up.

  “Ilya.”

  “And I’m Kostya.”

  Ilya dimly grasped who he was, and said with some effort:

  “Teddy bear.”

  But Kostya knew nothing about Olga’s parting gift.

  Ilya repeated “teddy bear” a few more times, and then began reciting Pushkin:

  “When in the country, musing, I wander

  and, stopping off at the public cemetery,

  survey the gates, small columns, and the decorated graves…”

  He recited it to the end.

  “More,” Kostya said.

  And Ilya, furrowing his brow, fished out another from his afflicted but boundless memory.

  He recited for a long time—all the favorite verse of his dead father, with the same intonation, and in a voice that very much resembled his.

  Kostya looked at this sick, no-longer-young boy, and remembered his stepfather—quick-witted, lively, talented—and at the same moment realized that he would have to find a similar kind of institution, not public, but private, for the well-off, apply for guardianship, make calculations, and set this strange and uncanny life to rights again.

  Then Kostya took his newly discovered brother to a diner. Ilya pointed to a big apple pie.

  “Do you want one piece or the whole thing?”

  “The whole thing,” Ilya said, looking down shyly.

  Kostya thought for a minute, and asked again.

  “Do you want the whole pie, or just one portion?”

  Ilya, even more shyly, stared down at his enormous sneakers. He didn’t say a word.

  “I see. You do follow a certain logic.”

  “Logic,” Ilya answered happily, and sat down at the table like an obedient child.

  The waitress brought the pie and a cola for Ilya, and mineral water with ice for Kostya. It was only the middle of June, but the New York heat had already set in, and there was no air-conditioning in this run-down little place.

  Ilya consumed bite after bite with a plastic spoon, eating with intense childlike pleasure. His head was exactly like his late father’s—curly chestnut-brown hair, with a sprinkling of premature gray. Even his face resembled his father’s, in a slightly caricatural way.

  Kostya recalled with cinematic clarity how, when he was around eight, the three of them were sitting on the shore of a lake—Valdai? Ilmen? Pleshcheyevo?—at sunset in front of a campfire, and his stepfather’s long, dirty fingers had cleaned the ash from the baked potatoes. And all along the lake horizon there were ribbons of color—pink, raspberry, yellow—from the setting sun, and Mama, the red highlights in her hair aglow, was laughing, and his stepfather was laughing, and he, Kostya, was happy, and would love them forever and ever.

  Poor Ilya! Poor Olga!

  POOR RABBIT

  When it came time to look back on his life, Dr. Dmitry Stepanovich Dulin was inclined to think that it had been a good one, maybe even undeservedly so. But he rarely thought about such abstract matters. Still, on Saturdays, when his daughter, Marinka, jumping up and down with excitement, pulled a little bunny wrapped in an old towel out of his briefcase, he felt a grateful satisfaction. His daughter looked like a little bunny herself—soft and gray, with an upper lip like a rabbit’s. Where the rabbit’s white ears stuck out, she had blue ribbons hanging down. Too bad he hadn’t taken a photograph of Marinka with the rabbit.

  Dmitry Stepanovich gave the rabbit to his daughter, and handed the towel with the hard, dry little pellets to his wife, Nina, which she then shook off into the trash pail before taking the towel into the bathroom to wash. This was the special rabbit towel, in which the little creature traveled home each Saturday, and in which it was wrapped again each Monday to go back to the laboratory.

  The little rabbit was a different one each time—whichever one he happened to grab out of the cage where the test animals lived. Dulin, of course, brought home not those that were undergoing testing, but those from the control group. The test rabbits were more or less healthy, but they had been born from alcoholic mother rabbits. The doctor had plied the mother rabbits with diluted spirits from a young age, then mated them with alcoholic father rabbits, after which he studied their offspring. This was the subject of his dissertation—the influence of alcohol on the offspring of rabbits. The effects of alcohol on the offspring of humans was already well known, of course. Masha Vershkova, the lab assistant, who was at his disposal on a part-time basis, was a representative of this sector of the population: her irises trembled—she suffered from nystagmus—and her fingers shook with a tremor as well. She had been born prematurely, at seven months ol
d. Both her parents were alcoholics, but fortunately she was not mentally impaired. Proof that even alcoholics have a stroke of luck now and then.

  Marinka had never been in any such danger. Her father could not tolerate alcohol. He didn’t even drink beer; nor did he smoke. He led a healthy life in all respects. Her mother drank about three small glasses a year, on holidays.

  Marinka would take the Saturday bunny to her own little corner, put it into her doll’s bed, pretend to wash it, squeeze and cuddle it, and feed it carrots.

  Dmitry Stepanovich had been born in the country, and was used to animals. He had remained a country boy until the urban sprawl of the city of Podolsk had swallowed up his unlovely little village and destroyed its rural ways and practices. Still, Dulin’s urban existence hadn’t begun immediately. The new five-story buildings were constructed according to some whimsical plan, by which they didn’t tear down all the peasant cottages at once, but only those that occupied the plots scheduled for construction. The Dulins’ home was one of the houses that remained standing for some time; but their farming and animal husbandry collapsed. The chickens, a cat, and a dog were the only animals left. The goat and the pig were given to his grandmother’s sister in a more remote village.

  By that time, they didn’t keep a cow.

  For some reason, the well next to the house was filled in, but plumbing was not installed. After that, they had to walk almost a mile to reach a water pump. Thus, the boy Dmitry lived between city and village. He wore raggedy country clothes to a city school, was a poor student, and was despised by the urban majority for being the “country” minority.

  His mother punished him for his bad grades. When she wasn’t too tired and careworn, she would thrash him, letting her bony little fists land where they might, and she would shriek in a high, piercing voice until she fell down in exhaustion. Many years later, after Dmitry had become a doctor, he diagnosed her disorder ex post facto as “hysteria.” And her thyroid was involved. But by the time Dmitry made the diagnosis, she was already dead.

  Uncle Kolya also gave him a hard time. True, he didn’t hit him; instead, he dragged him by the ear, squeezing the top of it painfully between his thumb and forefinger. Dmitry was hurt that his mother allowed this to happen, and didn’t intervene. Dmitry’s grandmother defended him, however. Uncle Kolya, a country fellow who was desiccated from drinking, paid visits to many of the single women around, Dmitry’s mother among them. Grandmother called him the “traveling ladies’ man.” She despised him, but at the same time feared him. They died at almost the same time—Uncle Kolya of drink, and his grandmother of old age.

  In contrast to Dmitry, his mother was a complete failure. When it came time for their house to be demolished and for her to get an apartment in a new building—the one-room apartment with gas and hot water seemed like heaven to her—his mother took a spill and died instantly, as had her mother. She was awarded her heavenly dwelling, not as a result of all the tedious paperwork necessary for the transaction—as a soldier’s widow, an invalid of the paltry third class, and a high-achiever of Communist labor—but just like that, without lifting a finger. The upshot was that Dmitry’s dream of moving his mother to the capital, of shrewdly exchanging the apartment in Podolsk (which she never received) for a single room in Moscow, was all for nought. Through her bad luck, his mother had liberated her son from the fuss and bother of an apartment exchange and a move.

  He had always pitied her, poor thing. Very early on, however, he had decided that he would not be like his mother—he would leave and make something of himself, he would cut the contemptible country hick out of his very being. After seven years of primary and secondary school, he enrolled in nursing school. There were few men there. His presence was valued, and he applied himself to his studies. Then came the army, where he was assigned to a medical unit, thus making using of his education. After the army, he didn’t stay in Podolsk, but entered medical school in Moscow, where he was accepted on the strength of his army service, without having to compete for a spot. Since that time he had been a true city man.

  All that remained of Dulin’s rural childhood was the habit of working with animals. Sometimes he even missed having a cat in the house, and he brought home Marinka’s Saturday bunny because he liked feeling the creature’s animal warmth in his own, human, hands. But Nina didn’t want animals in the house, not even a cat. And what Nina did not want, Dulin did not do.

  They got married in the third year of medical school. Dmitry was older than Nina by six years. She was rather stunted, and he enticed her with his height, his seriousness, and his modesty. She was not mistaken in the least—nor was he. Dmitry owed everything to his wife: his residence permit in Moscow, and his internship in neurology, and then his graduate studies. He had not aspired to that himself; but through her friends, Nina secured him a place in a research institute. She herself worked as a doctor at a local clinic, for which she was given an apartment, thus bypassing the waiting list.

  Dulin initially resisted the idea of graduate school. He couldn’t understand why it was necessary. If it was so important to her, why shouldn’t she enroll in graduate school and defend her dissertation? But Nina had decided otherwise. Since the institute he entered for graduate studies specialized in psychiatry, and Dulin’s particular field was neurology, he had to dip into some psychiatry textbooks to pass the entrance exam. He was assigned the topic of alcoholism—and he learned everything there was to know at the time: about changes in the psyche, behavioral responses of alcoholics, delirium tremens, and other fascinating things.

  For three years Marinka played with the rabbits, while Dulin forced his rabbits to drink diluted spirits, pouring it into them through a funnel since the test animals refused to drink it on their own. Then Dulin defended his dissertation and became a junior researcher. He no longer brought the baby rabbits home, but now Marinka sometimes accompanied her father to the institute’s vivarium. In addition to rabbits, there were also white rats, and cats and dogs. At one time there were even monkeys.

  When Dulin finished his dissertation, he was suddenly filled with uncertainty: the results of his research were exactly what he had expected them to be, and his work had not yielded anything even remotely resembling a discovery. Karpov, his academic adviser and the head of the department, reassured him:

  “Expecting a great deal of oneself is a fine quality in a scientist. I assure you, however, you can live a worthwhile life in science without making any discoveries. We are the workhorses of science. We are the ones who move it forward, not those who make discoveries, some of them quite dubious. And as for geniuses … we know what these geniuses are like!”

  Dulin understood perfectly well that his adviser was referring to Vinberg. Dulin had become acquainted with him by chance, on account of a fire that broke out in Vinberg’s laboratory. Two years before, when Dulin happened to be the only one on that floor, he was busy with his calculations when a wire shorted out and caught on fire. His keen sense of smell sniffed out the fire in Vinberg’s lab, and he called the fire department; but even before they arrived, he managed to switch off the fuse box and put out the fire. And he prevented the firemen from even entering the lab, since he knew they would only cause chaos, and would steal things, besides. He spoke firmly to the fire chief, let him have a look around, and signed the protocol. Vinberg was grateful; and Dulin had been on friendly terms with him ever since.

  Edwin Yakovlevich Vinberg was a real professor, with a brilliant education. And he was a rarity: he loved to talk about science. There was nothing he liked more than a question, in answer to which he would deliver a whole lecture. Because of his modest position and intellectual innocence, Dulin could never have expected to find any grounds for communication with this stellar individual. But the fire had afforded Dulin the right to visit the Vinbergs in the evenings for a chat over tea.

  From him, Dr. Dulin learned things that never appeared in Soviet textbooks: about Dr. Freud, about archetypes, and about the psychology
of the masses. Vinberg himself studied gerontology, forms of dementia in old age; but he seemed to know everything about everything, and had fascinating theories on every subject, including alcoholism.

  Many people were suspicious of Vinberg. He had fled from the Fascists in Germany to the USSR even before the war. In Russia, he was arrested a month later. They protected him from the Fascists for nearly twenty years in the labor camps. After the death of Stalin, he was “rehabilitated”—it turned out he had been arrested by mistake. He was released, and very soon, in a matter of a few years, he assumed his rightful place—not in a career, of course, but in science. How many years he had spent in the camps! It would have been natural to suppose that there, as a doctor in the camp dispensary, he would have been unable to continue his work as a scientist. It turned out, however, that not only had he kept up with modern science, he was even in the forefront of it: he wrote two monographs right away, and he was awarded a doctorate without having defended a dissertation. Psychiatrists flocked to him for consultations from every corner of the land. His authority was undisputed, though he still had a fair number of detractors. Not everyone liked the fact that this quintessential stranger, moreover a Jew and a German to boot, was developing his legendary teachings and comporting himself with a European self-respect virtually unknown on our native soil.

  “Dmitry Stepanovich!” he said to Dulin, in his heavy German accent, with irreproachable Russian grammar. “No one has yet studied the social nature of alcoholism, and the patterns of social behavior specific to alcoholics. There’s no better place than Russia for studying this subject. Here, the entire country could serve as a platform for laboratory experiments. But where are the statistics about the relationship between alcohol use and aggression? They don’t exist. If I were younger, I would certainly take on this topic. You ought to work on it, it’s very promising! As for the somatic view, it’s not terribly interesting. It would be fruitful, however, to work at the genetic level. But those rabbits of yours—they’re not viable objects of study. They aren’t drosophila! And alcohol dehydrogenase is the same in everyone, it’s a simple fermentation process. No, no, if I were you I’d study alcohol and aggression.”