The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  It was the earliest performance of the piece. Later, in 1950, Shostakovich recorded it with Rostropovich, and even modified the original version.

  Vinberg’s large ears, with their tufts of hair, inherited from distant ancestors, seemed to quiver from tension. Vera Samuilovna, a qualified listener herself, had always considered Daniil Shafran to be a more versatile and gifted performer than Rostropovich. But here was Shostakovich, who seemed to her to be dry and severe. Her husband heard the music differently: there was a refusal to compromise, a drama of inner struggle and confrontation. The piano cadenza in the third movement recalled Beethoven’s late sonatas.

  “Hopelessness. Cosmic hopelessness. Don’t you think, Vera?”

  * * *

  Dulin went straight to the vivarium after talking to Vinberg. He had a cabinet there in which he kept a secret stash of medical spirits under lock and key. He removed a half-liter vessel and poured some of it into a measuring beaker, to which he added tap water, half and half, as he did for the rabbits. Then he drank it down, all 200 ml of it straight from the measuring beaker. He put the vessel in his briefcase. It didn’t quite fit, but the cork was sturdy and snug, so he lay it on its side. And he went to get the trolleybus. He began feeling drunk only once he was inside the bus. When he got home, no one was there. Nina had gone to pick up Marinka from the biology club at the municipal House of Pioneers, which she took part in even though she was too young to join the Young Pioneers organization. She had an avid interest in biology.

  At home, Dulin diluted more of the spirits, and drank another 200 ml. Disgusting stuff. How do they drink it? Now he was already feeling woozy. The room was spinning around his poor head. He couldn’t fall asleep, though. One thought, like a splinter in his brain, kept jabbing and jabbing away at him: What were the seven answers? What answers could there be, besides yes and no?

  Then Nina came home. It took a while for her to realize that he was stone drunk. At first, she started to laugh:

  “Poor little drunken rabbit!”

  She tried to sober him up with strong tea, to put him to bed; but he refused to go. He kept babbling on and on about seven answers, or seven questions, and only late at night did she understand the cause of his torment.

  By that time, Dulin had diluted the rest of the spirits, but he couldn’t drink it. He vomited, and began having severe stomach spasms. Then he lay down, shaking with chills.

  Nina was already tired of looking after him. She sat down in a chair, muttering something angrily under her breath. She didn’t get into bed herself. Then Marinka came in in her nightgown, complaining that her head was hurting. At that moment, Dulin recalled all the bad things that had ever happened to him in his life: how the local kids had teased him at school, how Kamzolkina, the teacher, had yelled at him, how his mother had beaten him, how Mama’s drunken “suitor,” Uncle Kolya, had pulled him by the ears … And he began to weep.

  Dulin wept—because he was a rabbit, and not a man.

  That’s what Nina told him, anyway.

  THE ROAD WITH ONE END

  A camera without film dangled from Ilya’s neck. The film had been confiscated and exposed by the border guards. A half-empty camping rucksack was slung over his shoulder. In it he had a change of underwear and an English-language textbook that he had carried around with him constantly for the past two years. He was wearing a new jacket and old jeans. A scarf was wrapped around his neck. Olga had knitted it out of black and gray yarn, and it resembled exactly his already graying hair.

  There was a line of people leading up to the mobile staircase used to enter the plane. The former Soviet citizens, a good half of them, were easily distinguishable from the non-Soviets by their heavy, poor-quality attire and varying degrees of bewilderment. An old man in a sheepskin hat standing next to him hiccuped, and some woman whom Ilya couldn’t make out in the midst of the throng of people giggled nervously. Ilya was eager for the moment when he would finally board the aircraft, take a seat, and the plane would take off. Although it was already obvious that he had crossed some irrevocable boundary, he wanted to leave the ground. And he wanted even more to go to the restroom.

  He knew that Olga and Kostya and the other well-wishers were standing behind some window, waving good-bye, and that they were probably waiting for him to wave back when he ascended the steps to the plane. He didn’t even try to seek out with his eyes the glass passageway where they were most likely standing. He couldn’t have made them out in the crowd anyway. Nevertheless, when he was on the very top step, he turned around and waved his hand vaguely in an indeterminate direction, like Brezhnev on the rostrum in a Party greeting.

  This was it—the cinematic moment of his life, Ilya thought, smiling to himself and relaxing. His seat was in the second-to-last row, by the window. The plane was full to bursting.

  When the cumbersome aircraft finally left the ground, Ilya said to himself: Free! From everything—I’m free!

  The plane seemed to gain altitude with difficulty, pressing everyone downward; but Ilya felt himself becoming weightless. He felt he could have flown all on his own, without a motor, just on the strength of his sense of limitless freedom.

  The woman who had been giggling by the steps, who was sitting somewhere in front of him, near the aisle, started laughing and sobbing out loud, both at the same time. A stewardess the height of a basketball player brought her a glass of water.

  Yes, yes—a tall woman … that’s good, a tall woman. But he didn’t think through to the end the thoughts that flashed through his mind.

  The gray mist beyond the window grew brighter, and the plane broke through finally into a clear blue sky. Underneath were thick white clouds, dense as thick porridge, and as crude as theater props. The plane gained altitude steadily, and lunged westward, leaving behind the ruins of a cursed life, a viscous confusion, fear, shame, deceit. He breathed the artificial airplane air—the air of freedom and high altitudes. Ahead of him a captivating emptiness beckoned. Life turned over a new page, and all the blots and mistakes were wiped out, as though by an eraser. His neighbor in the seat next to his tugged at his sleeve—an old Jewish woman with a new set of gold teeth.

  “Excuse me, please, would you mind changing seats with me?”

  Certain of his answer, she tried to unfasten her seat belt, but pulled it from the wrong end.

  “No,” Ilya replied curtly.

  “Why not?” she said, offended.

  “I don’t want to,” he said, not even turning his head.

  “But why not?” She couldn’t believe her ears.

  He didn’t deign to answer. She was a piece of the past, which he had turned his back on.

  “But I’m stuck here right in the middle,” said the woman plaintively, and turned to her neighbor on the other side. “Excuse me, could you please change seats with me?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand what you said. What do you want?” said the man, with a noticeable accent.

  Ilya looked over at him. An old man with gray hair, holding a German newspaper in his bony hands. Intriguing. This was what Ilya liked more than anything: a question, a mystery, details, details … The striped silk tie, the white shirt made of some unfamiliar ribbed fabric, the worn-out blazer, and, particularly, the German newspaper—it all captured his attention.

  “Well, I wanted to sit by the window. This man here wouldn’t let me, so I’d at least like the aisle seat.” She kept tugging fruitlessly at the seat belt, but Ilya didn’t offer to help her. He looked at her askance: What a pushy old bag!

  The old man stood up. He was very tall and thin, and, judging by his appearance, he was a foreigner. The blazer, though …

  “Just a moment, I’ll help you unfasten it.” The man released the woman as though from captivity, and stepped out into the aisle. She immediately plunked down in his seat.

  “You can always judge a person by his manners,” she said loudly, reproaching Ilya and praising the old man.

  “Excuse me, but allow me to s
it down in your place first, before you take mine.” He stood in the aisle, his head hanging down, in an expectant pose.

  “Oh, sure,” she said with a nod, and unpeeled her behind from the seat.

  Ilya grinned, his eyes meeting those of the old man—a delicate visual touch, without words, as if to say: How amusing; the nerve of the old fool! But the old man’s eyes registered no response.

  They changed places. The old man sat down and nodded to Ilya. Then he opened his newspaper again. The name of the paper wasn’t visible.

  The woman wouldn’t leave him in peace.

  “Oh, so you can read a foreign language?”

  He nodded yes.

  Ilya turned back to the window. The sky was brilliant and bright, but his sense of elation had plummeted. He wanted to talk to this unusual neighbor, but now, after the impositions of the woman, he felt awkward.

  The woman refused to give up.

  “Hmm, I see. Which one?”

  “In this case, it’s German,” the old man said with a smile, his gaze still trained on the paper.

  After a short pause, she asked him another question, in a loud whisper.

  “Tell me, are you Jewish?”

  “Yes,” he said. He smiled.

  “And where are you going—to Israel or America?”

  She’s a real pain in the ass! Ilya thought. He was relishing this little scene.

  “I lived in Germany until ’33. I’m returning home. I lived in Russia for a very long time.”

  “So you’re a foreigner?” The woman was fascinated.

  He smiled again.

  “Now I am.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. You don’t really seem like one of us. I’m going to Vienna, and then to America. My son is there already. At first I didn’t want to, but then I thought—okay, I’ll go. It’s too bad I have to leave everything behind, of course.” She wanted to talk, and her neighbor satisfied her purposes.

  The German was a polite, considerate man. He answered all the silly questions of this silly woman. Ilya did the calculations in his head—he had left in ’33, when Hitler had come to power. He was probably a Communist. He had done time in Russia, of course. Now, that’s a biography. He had most likely reclaimed his German citizenship. It would definitely be worthwhile talking to him.

  Ilya turned to the window again, but the rapturous feeling that had filled him on takeoff had vanished completely. He already felt earthbound, and was wondering whether Pierre, who had promised to fly to Vienna to meet him, would be there, or whether he would have to go to some transit camp—a dormitory stuffed with immigrants.

  No, no, he’d break out of it. After all, he had acquaintances, even friends. He’d call them; maybe they’d send money. And Pierre would help him, of course. He wanted to go to Italy. But France appealed to him, too. Nicole was there, a good friend of his. He had people he could turn to. And at some point, at least part of his collection would sell. The elation he had felt at first began to revive.

  The meal was served—delicious! An hour passed.

  Mountains were visible from the window. Could they really be the Alps?

  He even said it aloud: “The Alps.”

  The old man, who seemed to be dozing, suddenly threw his head back and turned to Ilya:

  “Call the stewardess, please. I’m feeling unwell.”

  Ilya pressed the call button. The old man closed his eyes. He was yellowish-white, and his open mouth was gasping for air.

  “Hurry … a doctor…” he wheezed.

  Spasmodically, with deep, hoarse gulps, he sucked in air, then threw himself against the back of the seat. He froze, his mouth agape.

  The woman next to him stared at him in horror.

  The stewardess came up. She took his hand and felt for a pulse.

  The woman, who was now standing in the aisle, was first to understand, and she set up an urgent peasant wail of despair: “Aaaaaah!”

  Then Ilya realized that his neighbor was dead.

  Edwin Yakovlevich Vinberg’s emigration was over.

  DEAF-MUTE DEMONS

  There is a year, or perhaps a season, in almost every person’s life, when the buds of possibility burst open, when fateful meetings take place, when paths cross, when courses and levels shift, when life rises from the depths and ascends to the heights. When Mikha was twenty-one, he met Alyona and fell in love with her so profoundly and so hopelessly that his entire former life, full of sweet girls, lighthearted and noncommittal rendezvous, and earnest, energetic nights in the dormitory, shattered like glass. Only meaningless shards and slivers of his former enthusiasms remained.

  The second event that shook the foundations of his life, one no less significant, occurred a bit earlier. It involved his professional interests. At the beginning of his fourth year, Mikha didn’t exactly renounce his love of Russian literature, but he did discover one more strong attraction. Every day he rushed off to the department of defectology, where he audited classes on pedagogy of the deaf-mute taught by the renowned specialist Yakov Petrovich Rink. Rink represented a whole dynasty of specialists who had been developing speech therapies for the deaf, deaf-mute, and hard of hearing over the past century.

  A friend of Mikha’s took him to Rink’s first lecture, and after several weeks Mikha was determined to devote himself to studying the pedagogy of the deaf-mute without having to abandon the department of philology. With Rink’s permission and encouragement, he took several preparatory exams and declared a double major in deaf education and philology.

  At first he rushed from one department to the other, but with time he gravitated more and more toward defectology.

  Perhaps an astute psychoanalyst could have ascertained the true motivation behind Mikha’s new interest, but this did not happen. The shade of the inarticulate Minna did not trouble him, and the universal sense of guilt that plagued him did not enter into it. Alyona’s arrival in his life swept away all thought of his minor amorous triumphs of the past three years, as well as his memories of this adolescent trauma. And what was there to remember, anyway?

  A slow-witted, barely articulate creature, Minna had lived her twenty-seven years almost unnoticed. She never burdened anyone with her presence, and she died just as inconspicuously as she had lived. Aunt Genya viewed the death of her daughter almost as though she had been a household pet. Other people didn’t even notice that the timid, gentle creature with the weak smile, who never caused anyone any harm, had died. And Mikha recalled Catullus’s sparrow, how—what was her name?—Lesbia had wept for it.

  Soon after Minna’s trestle bed and the child’s chair she always laid her clothes on before going to sleep were removed from the house, Aunt Genya was liberated from heavy cares, and with deep satisfaction and a shadow of pathological pride, she would lament from time to time, like a litany: “How much misfortune! How much misfortune has fallen on me to bear! I have been the butt of misfortune!”

  Mikha had been a boon for her. From the time he moved in with her at the age of twelve, he had been tasked with going to the store, tidying the room, cleaning the communal facilities and the kitchen, as well as—and this was the most unpleasant task for him—carrying out random trivial errands for Aunt Genya, such as rushing off to the drugstore for medicine, taking half a pie to her sister Fanya and picking up a saucer of meat jelly from her other sister, Rayechka.

  For almost ten years he had carried out his familial duties, uncomplaining and with a light heart. His aunt, insofar as she was able, loved her charge, and did not intend to part with him if she could help it. But, obeying her Jewish instinct for matchmaking—joining up two free valences so they wouldn’t end up in the wrong place—she occasionally introduced him to nice Jewish girls from her wide circle of family members. Her greatest misfire had occurred on this front: her own son Marlen had slipped out of her fingers and married a Russian girl. She had never been able to reconcile herself to this fact, though she admitted that “this Lida girl” was “quite suitable and decent.” />
  * * *

  At the beginning of October, Aunt Genya invited her distant niece Ella to visit. Quiet, as curvaceous as a bottle, with bottle legs, Ella brought with her a large oval box of chocolates. Aunt Genya wouldn’t touch them, for fear of diabetes. Among her other firmly held beliefs was this one—that diabetes is caused by indulging in chocolate. She placed the box adorned with a running elk on the buffet and served bouillon.

  Mikha sat submissively through all three courses of the meal, praising each of them, while the downcast Ella pushed her food around with her spoon silently. It was evident that she, too, suffered through the forced spontaneity of these meals with eligible distant male relatives, none of which culminated in the engagement that was sought. After dinner, Genya raised an eyebrow signaling that it was time for Mikha to take Ella to the metro. When he returned, his aunt, crossly shaking her doll-like head with its narrow part down the middle, said:

  “You should have paid more attention to Ella. She has a good education, and she’s an only child. They have an apartment in Maryina Roshcha that you wouldn’t believe! Yes, she’s a bit older than you are, I won’t deny it. But she’s one of ours!”

  Still, the last thing she wanted was to be left alone in the communal apartment with the neighbors, who used to be decent, but who had all been replaced by anti-Semites and thieves, as if they had been handpicked exclusively for her.

  But at that moment Mikha was thinking only about the box of chocolates. A beautiful girl named Alyona, a first-year student from the department of graphic arts, had invited him to her birthday party. As soon as she had arrived at the institute, she began to attract attention, not so much for her beauty—her face was like those Botticelli had loved, full of bright silence and youthful androgyny—as for her remoteness and haughtiness. Everyone wanted to be friends with her, but she was like water: she slipped out of one’s grasp. Yet the previous evening, she had approached Mikha herself and invited him to her birthday party!