The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  “You’ve got to be kidding! You’ve just named all the ones who actually did make a choice. Not all of them have served time in prison yet, but their time will come, you’ll see. And I won’t survive another term in prison. I know that about myself. I won’t make it.”

  But, as it turned out, Mikha didn’t have to make a choice after all. Everything happened of its own accord.

  * * *

  There were bad days and good nights—so bright and brilliant was the unprecedented love that finally took hold between Alyona and her husband that it illuminated the gloomy days. Only now, Mikha sensed, was Alyona finally able to respond to his loving ardor. They were in corporeal dialogue with each other, something that had never happened before now. Something had shifted in the depths of her body—or was it her heart? Or perhaps the birth of their child had opened something like a sluice gate? And some natural gravity drawing a woman toward a man had fallen into place. Their sleeping daughter warmed them with her presence, and she gave great meaning to their unfolding happiness.

  Their intimate life flourished and filled the gaps of their impoverished existence. But what happened in the world outside the small circle of their love for each other gave no cause for comfort or hope. There was no job, no money, no meaningful activity of the kind that had occupied him before he was imprisoned. Their home, which had always been full of friends, both Muscovites and Central Asians, was now empty. Either they were afraid for themselves, or they were staying away because they feared for Mikha and Alyona.

  Even Sanya almost stopped dropping by. He was feeling both relieved and slighted: Alyona had seemed to have dropped him like a thing she no longer needed. Now he was perplexed. Had he imagined all the emotional pressure that Alyona put him under during the three years that Mikha was gone? He was hurt that Maya so easily and quickly withdrew her affection from him. She no longer clung to his neck or tickled his ears. Were all women in it together?

  Sanya even began to think vaguely about some colossal struggle of women against men, similar to the class struggle. Only Nuta never took part in that struggle: she loved boys. Most of all she loved her own grandson, of course; but she had also loved Mikha and Ilya. He wondered how it had been with her husbands and lovers—but it was unlikely she had waged war on them.

  Perhaps the problem was one of age? In youth, there is conflict; then a truce is declared; and, finally, in old age men and women become invulnerable to each other.

  I should discuss it with Nuta, he thought by force of habit. But this thought came up against the feeling of injury toward Alyona and Maya, who (both of them!) had loved him so importunately, so onerously, for three years; and then, after Mikha’s return, within a matter of a few weeks all that love had dried up and disappeared, as though it had never been …

  * * *

  Sanya would never know what Nuta thought of all of this. And Mikha would never know that Anna Alexandrovna couldn’t stand Alyona—or any others of that subtly drawn type: weak, demanding, despotic, feeble women, with a gift for inspiring tenderness, passion, and love, but who were nearly incapable of responding to it with gratitude and sympathy.

  After her death, all Anna Alexandrovna’s close friends were always trying to gauge what her reactions might have been, to reconstruct the words she might have said, apropos of one thing or another.

  Nadezhda Borisovna tried to push away her knowledge of the aversion her mother would have felt toward her fiancé, Lastochkin. Only six years later, after their divorce, when Lastochkin would begin the process of trading their large room in a communal flat on Chernyshevksky Street for two smaller apartments, and, to complete the absolutely fair transaction, would do an inventory of Nuta’s property, from the spoons to the bed linens, and then divide it all into two absolutely equal parts, did she shiver, thinking how lucky it was that Mama didn’t live to see this, and that Sanya had left for good …

  * * *

  But Anna Alexandrovna had also done something terribly cruel, something no one would have expected of her: she had left them all, abandoned them—Sanya, Mikha, Vasily Innokentievich and her daughter, Nadezhda, who had never learned how to move through the world on her own. She had not provided them with any explicit instructions for how to go on living. She had told them how and where she wanted to be buried—but what happened after the funeral? The next day? A month later? A year?

  All the boys and girls whom Anna Alexandrovna had guided so tirelessly through life, without their even being aware of it, were suddenly deprived of that light and lighthearted guidance, in which there was a golden mean of wisdom and whimsy. She had both common sense and a sense of contempt for it; a trust in life, and a sharp, critical vision that could size up a new person after only a single, fleeting encounter.

  While Sanya sank into a depression after his grandmother died, Mikha underwent, like an insect, the final stage of metamorphosis: the death of Anna Alexandrovna forced him to grow into an adult.

  Now, without Nuta, Mikha tried to understand why he had been the one to witness her last minutes on earth. He kept waiting for the mystery to be revealed, so that he would know how to live, how to go on in this world; for he was now the eldest, and there was not a single person on earth who could advise him on difficult questions and quandaries of existence.

  There was something very important that Anna Alexandrovna had not had time to tell him, and now he had to find out what it was for himself.

  Quietly, fearing to startle away the improbable happiness, Mikha delighted in his blossoming family life, adored his daughter, and trudged around to various places trying unsuccessfully to find a job. The deadlines imposed by the authorities had all passed, and he now ran the risk of being accused of “parasitism,” punishable by banishment from Moscow.

  Kusikov, the neighborhood parole officer, came by to urge him on in his search for employment. He was a country boy, with the vestiges of a rural ruddiness and with glimmers of humanity left in his face.

  He took a good look around him. He examined Alyona’s graphics for a long time. They were marvelous. Mysterious and enchanting. Noticing his curiosity, Mikha explained that his wife was an artist. The policeman was impressed, and filled with respect for the wispy girl. They may have been poor, but you could see they were cultured. He even wanted to help them out. As if from nowhere, Kusikov was filled with a sense of pity for Mikha and his spindly wife.

  He offered to help him get a job as a loader in a fish factory. The manager was a friend of his. Mikha shrugged uncertainly. He’d worked as a loader before, but his eyesight had gotten so bad that more of that kind of work—loading and unloading things in the dark—could do untold damage to his vision. His hand strayed mechanically up to the metal frames of his glasses. Alyona offered the policeman tea. He sat down, his legs spread-eagled on the chair, his sturdy boots planted on either side of it. Maya stared transfixed at the policeman’s cap lying on the table. Alyona placed two pastries on a plate in front of him. He ate only one of them, evidence of his good country breeding.

  When he was leaving, Kusikov said he knew of another good job opening for Mikha, working somewhere as a guard. He lamented that the personnel office might not approve it, though, with Mikha’s criminal record.

  “How strange our Soviet—or maybe Russian—life is: you never know who will denounce you, report you to the authorities, or who will help you out; or how quickly those roles might reverse. Isn’t that true, Alyona?”

  Alyona nodded, her hair falling over her face.

  “Yes, I think about that a lot. Everything is so mutable, so unpredictable. There is warmth and sincerity in abundance, and so many good intentions; but they never amount to anything.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Mikha objected.

  “But that’s what I mean,” Alyona said, smiling a clever smile. Lately, she had acquired a new, clever smile—much cleverer than she really was.

  Two days later, Kusikov took Mikha to a curious establishment, where they hired him as a forwarding ag
ent. He was in charge of sorting and sending out samples sent in by geological expeditions to several other establishments.

  In comparison with his work at the school for the deaf, which required all his spiritual and emotional energy, or the camps, which drained him of all his physical strength, this almost meaningless work was remarkable in one sense: it lasted from eight to four; sometimes he was even able to leave earlier in the day. The workday ended when it ended, until the next day. He didn’t have to think about it; his mind, his heart, were free, and he had strength left over. There was an enormous expanse of time that he could spend with Alyona and his daughter. Sometimes he went to the library, where he read up on every possible subject, without his former greedy hunger, allowing every word to penetrate his being—Montaigne, Madame Blavatsky, Lao-tzu …

  Then he returned home for a late dinner. Maya would already be asleep. Alyona would be wearing her lime-green sheath dress that outlined her slim body, but had generous bell sleeves. In her fragile hands she would bring in from their communal kitchen a heavy cast-iron skillet loaded with fried potatoes.

  The room smelled of cooking oil, a sleeping child, freshly mopped floors, and Alyona’s special scent—cool, and a little sweet. These were the smells of home life, of family and love.

  Mikha ate his potatoes in a hurry, while Alyona slowly drank her herbal tea, drawing out the end of the day and keeping the arrival of nighttime at bay.

  His former life, with its wrongs and injustices, its stale ideas, and its notions of reform and change, drifted away from him. Sergei Borisovich’s public repentance, though it threw into confusion all of his previously held ideals, to a certain extent justified Mikha’s capitulation. Having chosen between the valorization of some and the betrayal of others, he lived his life in quiet and somewhat shameful disgrace. The act that several months before had tormented him as defeat and apostasy—signing the humiliating document renouncing all social and political activity—now seemed to him to be his only means of surviving and protecting his family.

  Everything fell into place again, and even the job as a forwarding agent—a mind-numbing, alienating task—had its advantages. Mikha sometimes had to sort the contents of parcels with all manner of samples: colored clays; sharp, translucent crystals; stones gleaming with veins of metals. The marvelous names of the places where these samples had originated—Maly Storozhok at a tributary of the Lenochka stream; Matiukovka Mountain, part of the Vsevolod-Vilvensky deposits; the Shudi river basin in the northern Urals—caressed his tongue. Mikha once even wrote a poem full of these enchanting geographical names.

  Life continued on its quiet way, as though on tiptoe at twilight, and despite the lack of money, the material scarcity, and Mikha’s deeply hidden shame for renouncing his former existence, daring and vivid, domestic happiness brightened their 150-square-foot room, and everything seemed larger than life, like the best films, like his favorite lines from Pasternak:

  Shadows lie upon

  the glowing ceiling.

  Crossed hands, crossed legs,

  Fates entwined.

  Two small slippers

  clatter to the floor,

  and tears of wax drip

  from the lamp onto the dress.

  Just around the corner, a three-minute walk, was Potapovsky Lane, where Pasternak’s last love, no longer young and gone to fat, who had done time in the camps for this love, and her daughter, who had also been imprisoned for complicity and knowledge of the affair, stopped into the same bakery or grocery store that Mikha shopped in. When he saw them on the street, he would whisper to Alyona: “Look, there’s Ivinskaya, there’s Ira Emelianova, she went to our school.”

  Alyona turned around to look—she saw a heavy older woman wearing too much makeup, without a trace of her former beauty, in a tattered coat. Could it really be her? Was it possible? And to think that at one time she had been compared to Simone Signoret.

  Alyona and Mikha exchanged glances: we live not in nature, but in history … And Pasternak walked down this very lane twenty years before. And one hundred fifty years ago—Pushkin. And we are walking down it, too, skirting the eternal puddles.

  * * *

  In the spring, in the middle of May, something unexpected happened. At two in the morning, the elevator door banged shut, then the doorbell rang four times—the Melamids’ ring. Mikha and Alyona, sleeping in each other’s embrace, startled awake simultaneously. Through their confused, nighttime stupor, they thought: They’ve come!

  They hugged each other more tightly, pressing together their cheeks, their breasts, their knees, bidding farewell with their whole bodies, and got up, pulling on their clothes. The bell—four rings—resounded again, but this time less urgently. Now they embraced again, this time not saying good-bye, but expressing hope that misfortune would pass.

  Hand in hand they walked down the communal corridor toward the front door. Mikha opened it without asking who was there. Instead of three, four, five security thugs, they saw a small girl in a green silk dress, with a thick braid of hair as coarse as a horse’s tail hanging over her shoulder. They recognized her immediately.

  “Ayshe! Ayshe!”

  The Tatar girl they had met in Bakhchisaray, daughter of Mustafa Usmanov, hero and leader of the banished Tatars, was standing in the doorway. Only she was now no longer a small girl, but a young woman. “Come in, come in! Why didn’t you call? We would have met you at the station…”

  A small suitcase, a cloth-lined basket, her gloves fall to the floor. “Don’t take off your shoes! In our room, you can take off your things in our room. Why didn’t you call, how many years has it been? Yes, four, five, at least, you have a daughter; and we do, too! We have a daughter, too. You got married, yes, tell us, tell us everything! Tell us…”

  “I couldn’t call. I was too scared. They arrested Father. He has a good lawyer, who told me to come to Moscow. He said I needed to find Academician Sakharov, so that he would write a letter. But how can I possibly find this Sakharov? The lawyer said we need foreigners to make a fuss about it, on the radio, or however they do it there. From America! It’s urgent—Father has shrapnel in his chest, and if it moves, he’ll die. And our Tatars are all quarreling. Father is a Communist. Although he was expelled from the Party ages ago, he still keeps talking to them about Lenin. And those evil devils will destroy him in jail! The lawyer sent me—you need to leave immediately, he said, otherwise your father won’t survive until the trial…” And she cried through her garbled words, and her tears were as blue as her eyes, and fell thick and fast, like the tears of small children.

  “Ayshe, don’t cry, please. There, now, don’t cry…”

  * * *

  There was an extra place to sleep in the room on a folding cot, if her head was pushed right up against the wall under the windowsill, the table was shoved about eight inches to the side, and the child’s high chair was put away. They drank some tea, put Ayshe to bed, and went back to sleep themselves for another two hours. Mikha got up at seven, and by eight he was already at work.

  He called Ilya from work to say that they needed to meet. Where? Same place as always. Milyutin Park, in other words.

  “You mean she’s at your house right now?” Ilya asked, frowning. “That’s dangerous. Someone’s sure to be shadowing her. You have to move her somewhere else.”

  “No, that’s impossible. That night in the cemetery, in Bakhchisaray … And Mustafa is a remarkable human being. What will be, will be. Can you find Academician Sakharov for me, Ilya?”

  “Give me one day,” Ilya said.

  Ilya’s circle of friends and acquaintances was enormous. He even boasted a bit about the variety of his connections, and joked that if you didn’t include the Chinese, common laborers, and peasants, he knew everyone in the world, either personally or through someone else. That’s exactly how it was with Academician Sakharov. A certain Valery, an old acquaintance of Ilya’s, worked closely with the academician: both of them were members of the Committee for Huma
n Rights. After a few phone calls back and forth, Sakharov agreed to meet with Ayshe.

  Three days later, Mikha took her to Chkalov Street. They walked the distance, since it was twenty minutes by foot from their house to his.

  The whole way, Ayshe couldn’t stop trembling. Her head ached from agitation and worry, and she broke down in tears when they were at the door. While Mikha was trying to comfort her, the door opened, and an adolescent carrying a garbage pail asked them who they wanted to see. When they told him, he let them in, and asked them not to slam the door behind them.

  From that moment on, everything that happened seemed to Mikha and Ayshe to be completely improbable. Ayshe even began thinking that someone had played a trick on them. A thin, ordinary-looking man in an old cardigan, who did not in the least conform to their idea of an academician, received them sitting on a bed in a small, cluttered room. Ayshe was hiccuping so strongly after her bout of tears that Mikha had to tell the whole story of Mustafa himself, beginning with their first acquaintance in a hotel in the city of Bakhchisaray.

  The academician—or the impostor who called himself an academician—listened attentively, nodding, his head inclined forward. He made a few replies that revealed a detailed familiarity with the case, noted down the name and surname on a scrap of paper, then offered them tea.

  They moved into the kitchen, where a middle-aged woman in thick glasses was presiding.