The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  My little world, my giant world,

  A world all eyes, light-brown, and moist,

  One sleepy green eye, shade unfurled,

  Ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum …

  The little girl had fallen asleep. Mikha embraced his wife. She covered his lips with her hand and said:

  “You haven’t told me anything I wasn’t already aware of. I know everything. I spoke to his lawyer. You don’t know her, Natalia Kirillovna. She’s wonderful. I asked her to tell him I didn’t ever want to see him again.”

  She didn’t say the word father. She said “him.” Mikha took her hand away.

  “Alyona, that’s crazy. You can’t do that to him. He deserves only pity…”

  * * *

  Everything was just as it had been before—the courtyard, the neighbors, the broken floorboard in the corridor, the poplar trees outside the window, the ancient curbstones that marked out what had once been a flower bed, the former skating rink … the saleswomen in the bakery and the fish store, the building manager. Yet it seemed as though thirty years had passed, and not just three. One false move and everything might split open with a resounding crash—the house, the courtyard, his little daughter, his wife, the whole city. And April, so warm and welcoming this year.

  Anna Alexandrovna was the first person Mikha visited after his release, in the evening on his second day of freedom. She was the one he told, on that same day, that Alyona’s father was giving evidence and that he was afraid it would land him back in prison.

  Anna Alexandrovna had prepared for Mikha’s arrival: she had spent the whole day before his visit in the kitchen.

  “You know, Mikha, there’s nothing new under the sun. My husband’s own brother sent him to prison. They both perished. It’s fate that decides, and not our own actions or behavior, whether good or bad. Please eat, I made it for you.”

  Three years in prison camps had changed him beyond recognition: a dark, haggard face, thinning hair, eyes faded almost to yellow. And the way he thought about everything seemed to have somehow shifted.

  Anna Alexandrovna had not changed in the least. Her face was overlaid with a dense, fine net of wrinkles, as though carved with a burin. It had appeared very early and had frozen in place, without disfiguring her in the least. Now, when she was nearing eighty, she appeared to be very youthful. Looking at her, pondering her enigmatic words, Mikha realized that Anna Alexandrovna was a strikingly beautiful woman. And much more than beautiful. Through the veil of wrinkles, through the abyss of years, he saw her face suffused with light and loveliness.

  “Anna Alexandrovna, I’ve so missed your home … If you only knew how much I love you…”

  She laughed.

  “Well, it’s about time! Mikha, I prepared you a ‘Jewish-style pike.’ That’s what Molokhovets calls it in her cookbook. I just threw it together, never having made it before. Taste it and tell me what you think.” And she placed an oval dish with pieces of pale fish in front of him.

  “It’s delicious! Especially considering I’ve never eaten such a delicacy in my entire life!” At that moment, Mikha realized he was truly home. He beamed, smiled, talked, and ate all at the same time, forgetting for a time about the constant gnawing pain in his stomach.

  Anna Alexandrovna, on her part, felt relieved. Perhaps everything would fall back into place. Mikha would assume his rightful role as father of his family, and Sanya would return, freed from his worries and cares about Alyona. Everything would go back to the way it was before, and all the complications, real and imagined, would disappear of themselves.

  For the next two weeks, Mikha was often at the Steklovs’. Everything seemed fine with Alyona, and their daughter was for him a miracle from above. Still, everything else that surrounded him was bad, far worse than before he was sent to prison.

  Nevertheless, in Anna Alexandrovna’s home, he was happy. As before, Sanya was rarely home, but his absence was comforting. It meant that Sanya was gradually returning to his element. He again spent his evenings at concerts, and in the Conservatory dorms, where he had many friends. It seemed that the electrical charge that had been building up during the years when Mikha was in the camps had been defused.

  In the first weeks after his release, Mikha managed to stop by to see Anna Alexandrovna several times. Two of those times Sanya was at home, and the aura of closeness that they had shared in childhood and youth returned. They understood each other implicitly; and what they didn’t understand about each other inspired interest and sympathy.

  Mikha was also happy that Anna Alexandrovna was, as before, the grown-up, and he was still the child. And, like a child coming home from a walk, he brought Anna Alexandrovna little tributes from his excursions: a pine branch with a cone still on it, a funny drawing of Maya’s.

  One evening he dropped in to see Anna Alexandrovna after returning from Tarasovka, where he had visited his old friend Artur Korolev, the bookbinder. He and Korolev had drunk vodka together, but the visit hadn’t lasted too long, and Mikha returned to the city before nightfall. He had nothing special to give Anna Alexandrovna, so he bought some lollipops in the shape of roosters from a gypsy at the train station. He presented the handful of fiery roosters on sticks to his elderly girlfriend like a bouquet. She placed the roosters in a glass, and they gleamed with festive brightness. Mikha suddenly noticed that the whole house had become rather old and shabby.

  The heart is home. The heart is glad. For what?

  The shades of home? The garden shadows? I don’t know.

  The ancient garden, all the aspens bent and withered. Horror!

  The house in ruins … the scum that lines the ponds …

  So much is lost! Brother against brother … what wrongs!

  Decay and dust … it lists and crumbles; but still stands …

  Whose home is here? Whose ashes on the ground?… Whose corner, this?

  Dead pauper’s lair, without a hearthstone or a stove …

  The hands of the old woman, as fragile and thin as porcelain, poured the weak tea into semitransparent cups. “You remember Annensky … It’s so very sad … Look how plain our tea ceremony is today—just tea with sugar and lollipops. Sanya will be coming soon. He promised to go to the store on his way home. Can you wait?”

  She stood up and pulled out the potbellied sugar bowl and tongs from the cupboard—the sugar was cubed.

  Anna Alexandrovna and Mikha sat in front of their weak tea. There were no cookies, no gingersnaps, not even dry crusts of bread. For the second week in a row Anna Alexandrovna hadn’t left home because of the unusual fatigue that had come over her. She hadn’t taken sick leave, but asked a teacher who taught only part-time to take over her lessons. A week had already gone by, and she didn’t feel any better. She complained to Mikha that she felt terribly lazy: she didn’t go to work, and she was letting things slide at home, too—she didn’t even have anything to offer him to go with his tea.

  “Tomorrow I’ll pick up my old bones and go out. But Sanya’s not pulling his weight either—he couldn’t even bring home a loaf of bread! And I won’t even start in on Nadezhda. Ah, you haven’t heard the news! My daughter has gotten herself involved in a romance. She doesn’t sleep at home these days. Imagine! It’s indecent.” She laughed, as though she were talking about a fifteen-year-old scamp of a girl, and added, with her characteristic directness:

  “She’s going to marry him. What idiocy…”

  And she frowned.

  It seems like she’s not feeling at all well, Mikha thought. He was used to Anna Alexandrovna always serving fresh tea. Even if the old pot had just been brewed a few hours before, she tossed it away without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Well, how are things going with you?” Anna Alexandrovna said. Mikha began telling her about what pained him the most: he couldn’t find a job. He had looked high and low. No one would hire him. “The local police keep coming by and asking me when I’ll start working…”

  She listened to him attentively, mechanical
ly kneading her self-rolled cigarette and thumping the empty mouthpiece against the tabletop. Suddenly, she dropped it, leaned back against the chair, and, looking somewhere into the distance, said:

  “Mikha, I don’t feel well … I’m unwell.”

  She opened her mouth and let out a few spasmodic gasps, one after another, through tensely drawn lips. Her hand scrabbled across the table, knocking over the red roosters. Her eyes stared so intently and fixedly at a place somewhere behind Mikha’s head that he turned around to look. No one was there. The gold spines of the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedias gleamed on the bookshelf.

  Mikha caught her and carried her to the divan. She was light, and hung over his arms like a down comforter. He laid her down, propping two cushions behind her back. She continued to stare straight ahead—not at him. He pressed her wrist in the wrong spot, where there’s no pulse even among the living.

  “Just a minute, just a minute … medicine … an ambulance…” Mikha mumbled, already fearing it was too late.

  He dashed to the telephone. The Steklovs were the only ones in the communal flat with a telephone in their own room, though they shared the line. He picked up the receiver and heard a snatch of the neighbor’s conversation:

  “How many times did I try to warn her, you’ve got to keep your eye on him! She just laughed; and now she’s had her laugh! He’s a respectable man, which is rare in our day and age…”

  Mikha rushed out into the corridor:

  “Quick! Anna Alexandrovna’s ill! Call an ambulance!”

  The neighbor, Maria Solomonovna, a pharmacist with gold teeth spotted in red lipstick, greatly admired and respected Anna Alexandrovna.

  “Well, that’s all for now. The neighbors need the phone. It’s an emergency. But don’t forget to remind her: how many times did I warn you…”

  The latch on the entrance door to the flat rustled, then clicked open. Sanya walked in. He was carrying a bag of groceries. On the way he had stopped in at the store and bought everything they needed, even a chicken, and was proudly bringing home the provisions to his grandmother. Perhaps for the first time in his life …

  “Anna Alexandrovna is unwell … the ambulance … it seems very bad…” Mikha mumbled. Sanya tore into their room, with Maria Solomonovna waddling right behind him.

  Fifteen minutes later, before the doctors had even arrived, Vasily Innokentievich called. It was his daily call and mantra—“How’s life?”—which was a source of slight annoyance to Anna Alexandrovna. He rushed over immediately. Their lifelong romance, which had lasted for nearly sixty years, with breaks and interruptions for Nuta’s marriage and infatuations, was coming to an end. Rejected countless times and returning to her over and over during the most difficult times of her life—when her husbands and lovers were imprisoned and shot—now he had to bury his great love, without hope for another resurrection. It was over.

  Ilya arrived simultaneously with Vasily Innokentievich. He was an infrequent visitor. Thus, all Nuta’s favorite people had gathered around her body, already growing cold, before the doctor had even come to pronounce her dead. Only Nadezhda Borisovna was missing—she was spending the night at a rented dacha, where there was no telephone. She found out about the death of her mother only on the morning of the next day.

  The body was removed later that evening, and the three grown boys sat together. It was almost as if they fused into a single being—with their shared thoughts, feelings, and memories, similarly devastated, similarly forlorn. In the presence of Sanya and Mikha, Ilya’s third eye, or fourth, or whichever one it was—the organ of warmth and sympathy—opened up in him, and they all seemed to breathe the same air, to suffer the same grief.

  The funeral was strange in its unevenness and incongruity. A will was discovered in which Anna Alexandrovna gave very precise instructions about how she wanted to be buried. She wanted a funeral service to be held in the Church of Peter and Paul by the Yauza Gates.

  There were many people. They distracted Sanya from Anna Alexandrovna, who lay like a white island among the black human waves.

  Along with friends and family, the academy directors were present, too—looking puzzled and out of place in their uniforms with blue shoulder straps. Students also came. In those years, they were no longer Chinese, but Cubans and Africans. Anna Alexandrovna had taught them Russian very well. They brought her a pine wreath with a black-and-red ribbon. The wreath chafed Sanya’s eyes.

  At the head of the coffin stood Vasily Innokentievich, his gray hair giving off sparks, his face crumpled. Liza was not with him. She was on a concert tour in Germany. Ten or twelve old-lady friends—Evgenia Danilovna, a couple of her gymnasium friends, Eleonora Zorakhovna with two aristocratic white roses—mingled with former colleagues from various walks of life and with Sanya’s friends. Ilya brought Olga. Near them stood Tamara Brin, granddaughter of Nuta’s late girlfriend. Tamara’s face was a rare Levantine type that was instantly recognizable. Sanya remembered her—she had been invited to one of his birthday parties in childhood.

  The pallid Mikha stood next to Sanya, and quietly wept into the mohair scarf that Anna Alexandrovna had given him long ago for one of his birthdays. Next to Ilya stood his wife—pale, strawberry-blond, holding hyacinths in her hand. From time to time Sanya’s gaze would come to rest on a thickset man with bushy eyebrows and a broad face. He stood by Sanya’s mother, and for some reason gripped her arm possessively. It was her intended, whom Sanya was seeing for the first time. Why had his mother brought this man along?

  * * *

  Sanya observed everything happening as if at a remove, like watching it through thick glass. The dead face of his grandmother seemed like an artist’s forgery. Her beauty had taken on a kind of ultimate form, and this absolutely superfluous beauty inspired uncertainty about the world of the living, so bustling and unattractive.

  From a side recess, a priest emerged and began the service. Evgenia Danilovna thrust a burning candle into Sanya’s hand. The voice of the priest mingled with the voices of the choir, a music that Sanya had never heard before. It commanded attention, because it contained something very significant, but ineffable.

  The priest, who looked Greek, offered prayers with profound attention and without any shortcuts. The whole funeral mass seemed interminable. Sanya noticed that the voice of the priest blended in beautifully with the singing, and the subtle sounds—the crackle of the candles, coughing, soft sobs—also enhanced it. The instrumentation was exquisite. When the candles were extinguished, Sanya thought that the service had ended. But the priest again began reading something out loud, and the choir began to sing again. Sanya was transported by the sounds, the smells, and the sheen of light on the icon settings to a place that, until now, only music had been able to take him.

  The choir fell silent, and the priest said that the close friends and relatives could take their leave of the departed. Everyone began to move, forming a line to the coffin.

  Anna Alexandrovna hated lines. She said that half her life had been spent standing in line: for bread, milk, potatoes, soap, tickets, letters. She had even perfected a means of defense: she repeated poetry to herself that she knew by heart.

  She would say, laughing, that the Soviet authorities had helped her train her memory, forcing her to stand in line so long. She had no doubt never imagined that on her final day on earth there would be such a long line of people waiting to bid her farewell.

  Anna Alexandrovna had requested to be buried at the Donskoi Monastery, at her grandfather’s grave. The body was cremated at the Donskoi Crematorium. The monastery cemetery had been closed for a long time already, and it was only possible to bury the urn two weeks later.

  It was not a grave, but a crypt; but it had collapsed so long ago that it was only possible to bury her on top of it, next to the listing tombstone. Her grandfather’s name was an aristocratic one, but not very well known.

  Unlike the funeral service, there were few people at the burial—only the closest friends and relatives.
Vasily Innokentievich stood next to Sanya and kept wanting to say something to him, but couldn’t find the right moment. When everything was over and they were all walking out of the monastery gates, he caught Sanya by the hand and said, very quietly and clearly:

  “Sanya! We’ve lost Liza for good. She’s not coming back after her tour. She’s staying in Austria. She called me to say that we would all understand in time, that everything was fine, that she was happy and asks everyone to forgive her. And she loves us all. I told her that Nuta had died, and she cried and asked whether she could call you. I said I’d ask you.”

  “Oh my God!” was all Sanya could get out.

  “She’s planning to marry a conductor there. She met him on her first tour, and they performed together. He’s an old man! A terrible loss. The people we love most are all abandoning us. We’ll never see Liza again. Maybe you will; but I won’t.”

  “Vasily, how sad it is! Women always want to get married for some reason; look,” and he gestured with his eyes toward his mother, who was being led by the hand by a man with a hat like a furry pastry on his fat head. “Your son-in-law is an Austrian, and not a German?”

  Vasily Innokentievich nodded.

  “I just didn’t like that fat Boba fellow, and I was glad when they divorced. This new son-in-law, by the way, is a handsome guy. He has a wonderful face. I have a record with his picture on it. Why do women do what they do? Take a look at that … janitor,” Sanya said, looking over at his mother and her fiancé. “Nuta knew everything.”

  Mikha came up to them. He gripped Sanya’s maimed hand, and bent right down to his ear:

  “Your mother is alive, but I have no one. Anna Alexandrovna was closer to me than my whole family put together. I only just now understood that. She’s gone away, and now I’m first in line.”

  “What? What do you mean?” Sanya said, not hearing or understanding what Mikha said.

  “There are no more grown-ups ahead of me. It’s my turn next,” Mikha explained.

  * * *

  Two weeks after Anna Alexandrovna’s death, the thickset gentleman in the pastry hat who was holding his mother’s hand moved into their apartment. His name was Lastochkin, and the name didn’t suit him in the least. In no way did he even remotely resemble his namesake, the swallow. They rearranged the furniture, took down the dividing screen, and partitioned the room with a wardrobe and a bookcase. They nudged Sanya over a bit, depriving him of the geometrical security to which he was accustomed.