The Big Green Tent

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  “What do you think?”

  “What do you think we think! They offered you the chance to emigrate, didn’t they? Do it—you’ll never survive here.” Sanya was convinced that he himself wouldn’t survive here, either. But no one would send him, a Russian, an invitation to emigrate.

  “Yes. It’s the only way,” Ilya agreed.

  Mikha gestured toward Alyona’s back on the divan with his eyes.

  “Don’t you understand? I can’t! I just can’t. And Alyona can’t, either.” His face looked like that of a hunted animal.

  “Do you know what I think? Hear me out, now; don’t get upset. You should go alone,” Ilya said.

  “Have you lost your mind? Abandon my family? Do you have any idea what you’re saying?”

  “Alyona will come to her senses and follow you,” Ilya said, as confident as ever.

  “We’ll get her ready and send her off,” Sanya said, with less certainty.

  “What the hell? That’s rubbish! The situation is completely hopeless. It couldn’t possibly get worse.”

  Sanya embraced him like a child, pressed his cheek to Mikha’s stubbly face, and pleaded:

  “Mikha, I’m begging you. If you have no pity for yourself, at least think of Alyona and the child. Alyona will regain her health and follow you there. This is your chance! If I had even the remotest possibility to do the same, I’d jump at it in a second! I’d fly away like the wind! Please, go! That’s what Nuta would have told you.”

  It was already after two by the time they left Mikha. Sanya was tipsy, Ilya was sober.

  “Listen to what I’m telling you, Sanya. You blamed me once for what happened to Mikha. For his imprisonment, I mean. Well, it’s true, I am guilty; only not of what you accused me then.”

  Sanya stopped in his tracks and shook his head, trying to regain his sobriety. He was not a drinker, and only did it under exceptional circumstances, out of necessity. Ilya went on:

  “Everything’s more complicated than it seems. But I want you to know that both you and Mikha are like family to me. Even more than that. Do you understand that I would never betray you under any circumstances?”

  “Ilya, the thought never occurred to me. What I meant was that you got him mixed up in, you know, the magazine and all that. Lord, how do you guys drink this stuff? It’s absolutely vile!”

  Sanya stumbled against Ilya, who put his arm around him gently and led him through the Pokrovsky Gates toward home. Everyone felt miserable. Absolutely miserable.

  * * *

  Mikha was wrong about one thing: that things couldn’t get any worse. The following day, they did. He went to work, and the personnel director called him in. He said that several parcels had gone missing, and showed him a packet of invoices.

  “You see? There’s your signature right there! You sent them off, but they never arrived. They were valuable samples; look here.”

  The director had begun in a quiet, measured tone, but he quickly grew incensed, and three minutes later was cursing up a storm.

  Mikha realized immediately what would follow—he would be asked to sign a resignation letter. And that is just what happened: either sign the letter of resignation or be taken to court.

  Mikha signed the letter of voluntary resignation and didn’t even bother going to the accounting office for his back pay. This was Safyanov’s doing, no doubt.

  * * *

  That was Tuesday. On Thursday he was scheduled to see Safyanov again; but on Wednesday something unforeseen happened. And things got even worse. Without warning, Valentina Ivanovna arrived from Ryazan. She came in a car that she drove herself. This was, in itself, surprising. She hadn’t known how to drive before. She must have gotten her driver’s license. She came with Maya, but not to return her to her parents. She came to fetch Alyona.

  It was all very strange. Alyona, who hadn’t wanted to see her father at all since the trial, got up and began collecting her belongings submissively. Mikha had never seen this sort of submissiveness in her. She had always been independent to the point of insolence with her parents. Valentina Ivanovna helped her pack, coaxing her softly:

  “We’ve fixed up a room for you, with windows onto the garden. Liza Efimova sent me some mohair, for hats. There’s a whole box; twenty hanks. You could make a sweater. Look, I knitted a blue hat for Maya from it.”

  “Yes, blue,” Alyona said, nodding.

  Dumbfounded, Mikha watched them pack. The words caught in his throat before he could utter them. Valentina Ivanovna didn’t turn her head in his direction, as though he weren’t even there.

  “You can’t imagine what good friends Papa and Maya have become. She never leaves his side.”

  “Yes, yes,” Alyona said in a soft, slow, completely alien voice.

  Mikha took the things out and put them in the trunk of the blue Moskvich. Maya waved to him vigorously. Alyona nodded good-bye as though he were just a chance acquaintance. Mikha didn’t dare even kiss her.

  The next day he would have to go see Safyanov again and listen to all his threats, all that garbage. He realized he was on the edge.

  * * *

  In the morning Mikha got up early, as usual, though he had no need to go to work. The emptiness was so pressing that his ears rang with it. Or perhaps his blood pressure was up? He spent two hours revising his old poems.

  Terrible poems. Terrible, Mikha thought, without any particular rancor or disappointment. He wanted to throw some of them away. He made a whole pile of them to get rid of. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  * * *

  He arrived at Captain Safyanov’s on time. The captain had a formal air about him, as if it were the eve of a holiday. Maybe it’s some sort of holiday for them? Mikha wondered. No, the November holidays were still two weeks away.

  “We’ve tried to do everything we could for you, Mr. Melamid. We even offered you something we resort to only in exceptional cases—letting you go abroad.”

  Mikha shook his head, and waved his hand dismissively. He didn’t even notice himself doing this.

  “Look here,” Safyanov said, and showed Mikha a piece a paper that read, “Arrest Warrant.” “It isn’t dated. We can sign it today, or tomorrow. And here is your testimony.” He waved several densely covered pages. “You yourself didn’t give us this testimony. No, you didn’t give it. Here, take a look.”

  Mikha took the standard protocol form. It was a new kind, printed on large-format paper and folded in half. Written in blunt words, with grammatical errors, in a woman’s handwriting, a secretary’s, with a thick line for the spine of each letter, it was a denunciation of various people, most of whom he had never laid eyes on.

  “This is my final offer. You put your signature here, and I’ll rip up…” And he shoved the arrest warrant under Mikha’s nose.

  It’s a risk, but maybe it will buy me another day of freedom? Mikha thought. What was it Ilya had said about that hypnotist, what was his name? Yes, Messing. He could make anyone think or do whatever he wanted them to do. Even Lavrenty Beria … Had he signed something? Or, no; it was what he didn’t sign. He just showed them a blank piece of paper, and they thought they saw a signature there.

  He picked up the protocol from the table and began to put his signature to it. He was a teacher, and during the years that he had to sign his pupils’ homework assignments and the roll call, he had elaborated a streamlined signature, like Victor Yulievich—first, “M. Mela…” followed by a long tail that soared upward.

  He took the pen, wrote an “N” that resembled an “M,” and put a period after it. Then he wrote “Ofuckingway,” and sent the tail soaring upward. The likeness was uncanny …

  “Here you are. But now I have to run home to my wife. She’s very ill. Please sign my pass so I can leave,” Mikha said in an importunate voice, at the same time tensing the part of his head just under the frontal bone, in the very center.

  Safyanov caressed the paper with the surprisingly elegant signature, which looked like it hadn’t
been written by Mikha’s hand at all, and called someone on the phone. A sergeant with a pass entered.

  Sign it, sign it, Mikha commanded Safyanov silently.

  The captain signed the pass, and Mikha walked backward toward the door, without removing his gaze from the captain. He exited the room with the sergeant. Now he didn’t care when they would notice his little joke. He had time!

  He walked to Chistoprudny Boulevard at a brisk pace. He went into his house, feeling light, almost weightless, not thinking about anything. He went up to the sixth floor on foot. It was just after four o’clock. The elevator was out of order again.

  He sat down at the table. He wanted to reread his poems again, but he suddenly felt that there was no time for that. He pushed the whole pile aside. Childish, childish poems. Soon he would be thirty-four. And still his poems were childish. And they would never be grown-up poems. Because I never grew up. But now the time has come for me to take my first step as a grown man. To liberate myself from my own absurdity, my lack of substance. To liberate Alyona and Maya from myself, from the utter failure of my existence, from my inability to live like a normal, full-grown man.

  What a simple and certain choice! Why had this way out never before occurred to him? How perfect it was that he had not yet turned thirty-four. Thirty-three was the age when Jesus had committed the deed that proved his absolute maturity: he had willingly given his own life for an idea that didn’t inspire any sympathy in Mikha whatsoever—the sins of others.

  Being the master of one’s own fate—that’s what it meant to be an adult. But egotism was an adolescent trait. No, no, he no longer wanted to be an adolescent.

  * * *

  He went to the bathroom and took a shower. He put on a clean shirt. He went over to the window. The window frame was dilapidated, the glass was dirty, but the windowsill was clean. He opened the window—rain, gloom, paltry city light. The streetlights weren’t on yet, but there was a gentle shimmer of illumination.

  He took off his shoes so they wouldn’t leave dirty footprints and jumped up on the windowsill, resting there for a brief moment. He murmured: “Imago, imago!” And flung himself down lightly.

  * * *

  And the wings? Through a fissure in the chitin, the moist, sharp folds of wing rigging burst forth. With a long, fluid movement a wing works itself free, straightens itself out, dries itself in the air, and prepares for its first beat. Gridded like a dragonfly’s, or scaled and segmented like a butterfly’s, with an intricate map of venation, unable to fold up, if more ancient, or folding up smoothly and easily, when of newer vintage … and the winged creature flies away, leaving the empty shell of chitin on the earth, empty grave of the airborne, and new air fills its new lungs, and new music sounds in its new, newly perfected organ of aural perception.

  * * *

  His glasses and a piece of paper with his last poem lay on the table.

  Once amid the bright flash of the day

  The future will shed light upon my credo:

  I am in the people, too, I did not forsake you

  In any way. My friends, for me please pray.

  His friends who were believers bid farewell to the nonbelieving poet, each according to his own lights. In Tashkent, the Tatars honored him: they carried out a memorial rite in the Muslim tradition for him. In Jerusalem, Marlen and his friends commissioned a Kaddish, and ten Jews read aloud the ancient, mysterious words in Hebrew to honor his memory. In Moscow, Tamara, Olga’s girlfriend, arranged a funeral mass in Preobrazhensky Cathedral, where a freethinking priest was willing to perform a requiem for a suicide.

  The face of the deceased was covered. There were many people, and everyone wept. Victor Yulievich, the former teacher, stood with lowered head, tears streaming down his unshaven, unkempt countenance.

  “Poor boy! Poor Mikha! I am to blame here, too.”

  Mishka Kolesnik, the childhood friend of the defrocked teacher, accompanied him. He stood next to him: “Three arms, three legs,” as they had called themselves so long ago.

  * * *

  Sanya wept—his tears were never far from the surface. Ilya had his camera, and photographed the memorial. Everyone ended up in the frame: even Safyanov, with the purple growth on his cheek. He had miscalculated, and it had been his downfall. Oh, what a downfall!

  Alyona didn’t attend the funeral. Her parents decided that it would be better not to inform her of her husband’s death when she was in such a frail psychological state. Later they would tell her.

  A RUSSIAN STORY

  In winter, at the height of the Christmas frosts, Kostya’s children came down with measles, and his wife, Lena, suffered a sudden attack of pyelonephritis, a chronic kidney infection. Anna Antonovna, Lena’s mother, a retired seamstress who always visited from her village, Opalikha, at the first summons, couldn’t make it, due to the frosts. She would have to stoke the oven at her house constantly to prevent the pipes from bursting.

  So, until the frosts retreated, Kostya was left to run back and forth from bed to bed with medicine, bedpans, cups, and plates on his own. Lena refused to go to the hospital. She lay on her back and wept quietly, from weakness and from pity for her children and Kostya.

  Finally, Anna Antonovna showed up, rolled up her sleeves, and sent Kostya off to work. He set out for his laboratory, where work had come to a standstill without him. Kostya resumed his running back and forth to the lab, now with the aim of salvaging the long-term synthesis process that hadn’t succeeded without him. They had failed to guarantee the consistency of temperature, and the results were not what had been predicted. But chemistry is a mysterious science, and mistakes in staging experiments sometime yield interesting discoveries.

  * * *

  In the middle of the day he got a call from home. His agitated mother-in-law informed him that a very strange old woman wearing felt boots had arrived. She said she had something important for Kostya, but she wouldn’t leave it. She said she would wait until Kostya returned so that she could give it to him with her own hands. She was sitting in the living room, still in her outer clothes. She refused to eat or drink anything, and she stank horribly. Anna Antonovna told Kostya to hurry home.

  Kostya asked what the children’s temperatures were, and got a satisfactory answer: they had fallen. This was after five days of temperatures hovering around 104 degrees. Naturally, this was in part due to Anna Antonovna’s beneficent influence and care. For a long time already, Kostya had called his mother-in-law “Mother Valerian,” for her pacifying effect on all living beings, from spiteful neighbors to neighborhood dogs, not to mention children and plants. A woman with an open, active heart and soul.

  Kostya lingered at the laboratory for another hour, and then went home to deal with the old woman who stank to high heaven.

  In fact, the stench in the house was penetrating, but not foul. It was redolent of raw sheepskin, and there was nothing particularly unpleasant about this acrid, rural odor. Evidently, the old woman had agreed to take her outer clothes off and to have some tea, judging by the old sheepskin coat lying on the floor under the coatrack. Kostya wanted to hang it up, but it had no convenient loop under the collar. Next to the coat were thick felt boots, well patched, which smelled of wet fur. The old woman was no longer in the living room. She had moved to the kitchen. She was drinking tea, strong and black.

  Her appearance was completely earthy and rural. She was swathed in four different scarves, of which two were on her head—a black cotton one underneath, and a gray woolen one on top of that; a third was wrapped around her waist; and a fourth covered her shoulders.

  “Good day, Granny,” Kostya greeted her, smiling at the overall strangeness of the situation. His mother-in-law stood behind him and, contributing to the strangeness, said:

  “Here is our young master, Konstantine Vladimirovich, Granny.”

  “Oh, my child, my grandson, you don’t look a bit like your grandfather, not a bit,” the old woman mumbled, visibly touched, and began to cry, almost as th
ough he did indeed look just like some long-lost unknown grandfather.

  Kostya decided not to push things and pester her with questions—he would let the comedy take its own course and play itself out. And things were, indeed, comical. The old granny, herself pinkish, with eyes the color of turquoise beads, nodded her head in its sheath of scarves like a Chinese top, in all directions at once—to the side, to the front, to the side, and back again to the other side. She clapped her little dry red hands together:

  “Oh, Kostya, Konstantine, here is the last little branch, here it is, God knows from what a mighty tree sprung forth…”

  Kostya fell into the folk idiom himself, and said in response:

  “And how might you be called, Granny?”

  “Call me Mother Pasha. I am Paraskeva. That’s what your grandfather called me.”

  “And how by your patronymic might you be called?” Kostya still kept up the game, but was starting to feel a bit abashed, trying to gauge what his grandfathers—his mother’s father, the late General Afanasy Mikhailovich, and, on his father’s side, Victor Grigorievich, a fighter pilot who had died during the war—could have in common with this funny old woman …

  “No one ever called me by a patronymic—Pasha it was, and Pasha alone.”

  “Which grandfather of mine are you talking about?” Kostya asked her point-blank.

  “Oh, what an old fool I am! I’m not talking about your grandfather, but about your great-grandfather Naum Ignatievich. That was his worldly name; but to us he was His Grace Nicodemus.” The old woman, seeking something with her eyes and not finding it, crossed herself, looking at the window. “Now our protector and patron in Heaven, to be sure!”

  Long, long ago, when his grandmother had died, his grandmother’s sister Valentina had come to visit them and had brought some ancient family photographs with her. Olga had ordered the most treasured one restored. It was blown up into a portrait, and Olga had liked it so much that she hung it in the bedroom, where it was still hanging.

  “Come with me,” Kostya said, nodding to the old woman. “I have something to show you.”