At the end of the other beam, near a row of the eighteenth-century townhouses, a different Gogol sits stooped in a chair, his little head withdrawn into the collar of his cloak, which is too large for his emaciated body. He’s cold and shivering, and looks like he’s just let a bronze drop fall from the tip of his runny bronze nose and is embarrassed about it.
This is the Gogol who consorted with no mortal woman during his sad, brief life, the Gogol who burned the second part of his great novel in the townhouse behind his seat, where several decades before that the incandescent Natasha Rostova had danced at her first ball in War and Peace.
Stop, turn around, and retrace your steps along the second boulevard beam. In 15 minutes you’ll come to the Kremlin and Red Square. South of the territory between the two Gogols is the famous Arbat district, where writers, artists, and anybody who mattered used to live.
Andrey and his girl moved into the heart of the Arbat, into a garret room in one of the yellow but now ramshackle townhouses hunched between the two Gogols.
You might think there couldn’t be a better place in the whole city for a young couple to feather their love nest. But that isn’t what Andrey’s girl thought, a dreamy, languid, moody 18-year-old.
What Andrey felt about the room between the two Gogols remains a mystery even for the author who, occupying the next room to the right, was not averse — let’s admit it — to occasional eavesdropping. But Andrey’s whole demeanour, the way, for example, he sauntered to the toilet and back, implied that a real man shouldn’t give a damn about his surroundings, least of all a garret.
Who knows why the glimmer of a useless pebble in moonlight will send a tingle down your spine, whereas a room of your own in a communal apartment that instead of the usual 40 residents along its dreary hallway has only 14 will leave you indifferent?
The abiding mystery of the human heart!
Communal apartments, that shrewd contrivance of the Russian Revolution, have been so brilliantly and exhaustively described by so many gifted writers that you’d think Lenin and his confederates had brought them into existence just for the sake of Russian literature.
Your ordinary, garden-variety writer would have had to twist the plot’s arm to arrange encounters among characters whose paths wouldn’t have had the slightest chance of crossing in normal circumstances. But not your Soviet Writer! He didn’t have to pull any such fantasy from his magician’s hat. Life, dancing to its Leninist choreography, had brought all the characters together for him on a single, miniature stage, four square-meters per person, and — ready, set, go! — raised the curtain.
In the blue haze of the communal kitchen, machinists, violinists, construction workers, accountants, doctors, petty thieves, and KGB informers were brought together, quickly producing in the chafing of unshaved cheek and jowl a tumult of savage accusation and squabbling against a shabby background of zinc wash basins, boiling bed sheets, and seething kettles of borscht.
The sole bulb hanging from a braided cord in the hallway throws pale shadows on the warren of scheming. The infernal poison of intrigue and blackmail seeps into the tiny rooms, each one further subdivided with cardboard: a nook for granny, a cranny for her daughter, a third, slightly larger space for her son, his wife, and their infant. The attic cavity is crammed with communal junk: dusty, yellowed stacks of newspaper, a jumbled heap of broken chairs, a rusty tricycle with a missing wheel, for nothing may be thrown away in the land of dialectical materialism that has almost managed to eliminate everything material.
The poetry of early morning washing! An erratic stream of water issues in turn from a spigot in the wall onto 14 pairs of impatiently waiting hands. The continuous gurgle of the solitary toilet, the urgent destination of all 14 people at six am when they all awake with the rest of their great nation to fulfil its daily round.
The night imparts to the falling snow a blue-green tint. The toiling residents have returned to their warren, their crannies, their lairs, their bedbug-infested dens. They take refuge in front of their televisions, the flickering images on their tiny screens magnified by water poured between double lens of convex glass.
A telephone rings on a rickety, scribbled over shelf in the hallway. Ears prick up behind each door. A woman with an apron tied over her robe and paper rollers in her hair opens her door a crack and then slips out.
The heavy black phone is, for her, a treasure trove. Cupping her hand over the mouthpiece, she whispers in monosyllables, speaks in coded phrases, and chuckles seductively. Take care! The rocky vessel of communal patience may capsize at any moment. As if by command, all the doors will be thrown open, heads will peer out, and fingers will reach for the phone, pulling it away from the woman. “Have you no shame? Making it out over the phone with your hick! Tying up our line! Get off or we’ll lodge a complaint!”
Where else could you get comedy and drama tied up into farce for the same low price?
Alas, Andrey’s girl was immune to all of those art genres. No sooner had she stepped into the room between the two Gogols and Andrey closed the door behind them than she got pregnant, the implacable truth of which declared itself in bouts of morning sickness and a morbid fear of cockroaches.
Cockroaches! At night their mighty hordes would storm the little table in the room. Turning on the light dispersed them only for a moment. Brazen, impudent, they would return in ranks again, resuming their search for food.
Imagining the rustling of their feelers, Andrey’s girl was sure she could hear them talking to each other in menacing whispers as they lurked behind the floor moulding or between the furniture and wall, waiting for her to fall asleep. Closing her eyes, she could see them peeking into every crack of the broken cupboard by the door, then moving over to her bed and feeling her blanket and pillow with the long quivering antennae that extended from the gleaming shells of their bodies: dark brown, black, and sometimes a translucent red, with their insides showing through.
Tooth powder and brush in hand and as pale as the terry-cloth towel over her shoulder, the girl would join the morning line at the kitchen tap. In a daze, she would try to remember her neighbours’ names. Olga, a single mother, lived in the same room with her 20-year-old son, Misha. Whenever one of her string of lovers visited, Misha would retreat behind the buffet and strum his guitar, drawing sad, broken sounds from it.
Vova, a young alcoholic who worked as a cop between binges, shared a room with his divorced wife and new girlfriend. Both hated Vova even more than they did each other. When the ex-wife’s anger reached the boiling point, she would curse him in a special way: “May dicks grow on your grave instead of weeds!” With that imprecation, Vova would collapse like a punctured balloon and cover his head with his hands in fear. He came from a village where the women claimed prophetic powers.
The room at the very end of the hallway, the only room with a balcony, was occupied by an elderly widow, her daughter, crippled from polio, and an empty fishbowl with dry coral. By a caprice of fate, the widow was from the same region, perhaps even the same village, as Vova. Years of urban life had not touched her, and each spring she would secretly try to raise chickens among the clutter of her balcony. At the sound of their clucking, Vova would fly into a rage and threaten to beat the two “bumpkins,” the two “yokels,” and kick them black and blue out into the street to die a dog’s death.
“I’ll take care of them! I’ll break that fucking cripple’s legs,” he would rant, while his two women grabbed him by his arms and pulled him back into their room. The next morning a plucked and headless sacrificial chicken would be placed on the table in Vova’s room. The offering accepted, Vova and the women would share a feast and declare a truce.
The room to the left of the widow’s belonged to two elderly women, Mina and Zina. In some ungraspable past, perhaps even before the war, they had been mother and daughter, but time had long since erased any difference in the grey sag of their faces.
&nb
sp; In the long history of the floor’s communal life, nobody had ever entered their room, which was guarded by two lap dogs not much bigger than rats and both incessant, ferocious yappers. Even while cooking in the kitchen, Mina-Zina would carry the dogs under their arms. The rest of us were sure that behind their closed door, they subjected the little beasts to feeble punishment with branches pilfered at night from the birch that filled the patch sky in our courtyard.
Andrey’s girl contemplated the barren landscape of our world with sad almond eyes. Whether Mina-Zina didn’t like eyes of that shape or merely envied the newcomer’s youth, they couldn’t bear the sight of her. If it was the second reason, then it may be fair to say that they were determined to help their enemy onto the fast track of aging.
One time they sneaked into the kitchen at night, held the dogs over the girl’s lidless coffee pot, and let them pee in it.
Unable to hold down any food or drink in the morning, it wasn’t the girl who sipped coffee in the morning. “What did you bring me? Just smell it!” Andrey chortled. Oh, my, she had had no idea, it wasn’t her fault, but she wasn’t ever going to leave her coffee pot on the kitchen table again.
Luckily for her, the Soviet government came up to her rescue: Soon after the incident, coffee disappeared from all the stores for the next two decades. But Mina-Zina, veterans of communal life, found a way to hoodwink even the Soviet economy.
It was after the girl had made some borscht, the only thing she knew how to do. Since there wasn’t any place in their tiny room for it, she left the saucepan on the kitchen table again. That night, Mina-Zina added a large piece of brown soap to it. By morning the meat in the soup had acquired a nasty stink, leaving Andrey with no food. He called the girl stupid, a lame brain, for her carelessness.
Was it after that second episode that he stopped using the girl’s name? Or had he avoided it even before that? She tried to catch him out, to make him use it. How else could he call her if he needed something? But all she noticed was that empty place, that void affixed to her being. It preceded her into the room before and remained, wrapping itself around her wherever she sat.
Frightened, she decided to retrace the steps of her life. She would be free again, an unladen vessel. She would harden her heart and not tell him what she was going to do to punish them both. But she was too weak to carry it through and too broken-hearted. She wept every night, reaching out to him with her tears.
“Stop sobbing for God’s sake! Look, I’m not forcing you to do anything. If you really want it, go ahead.” He moved away, so as not to touch her.
“But how? How?” she kept sobbing “We have no income and barely a place to live.” She resigned to his aloofness by pulling her knees to her belly like a child, and all he could hear was her muted snivelling. “I’m afraid,” she whimpered.
“If you still think we can have it, then go ahead.”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“Well, don’t be angry at me then. It takes two to tango, right?”
He reached for her, putting his arm under her hot dishevelled head.
“Sh-sh. Enough already. You’re agreeing with me that it’s not a good idea right now, a baby in our room . . .”
“There is nothing wrong with the room. Yes, it’s tiny, but the baby will be small too . . . we can disinfect the cockroaches . . . and by the time the baby grows up, who knows . . . If we get on a waiting list now, in five or seven years . . . we can get something, like the Chernovs did.”
“Chernov’s father is a big fish in the Union of Architects. But right now — right now — how am I going to solve The Hodge Problem with a baby in the same room, you tell me.”
“What problem?”
“Oh, never mind.”
“The problem of our life, you mean? It’s unsolvable.”
2
Auntie Shura and her husband, Uncle Petya, a cobbler, came from Old Believer stock. Old but trim and tidy, they smelled of cleanliness, as if somebody had washed them in a cool brook and rinsed each wrinkle separately. Auntie Shura liked the girl, perhaps for the same reason that Zina-Mina hated her — her youth, her innocence, her lost, brooding look.
Once, Auntie Shura invited the girl to their room. The bright, festive arrangement astonished her: the icons decorated with paper flowers, the neat little altars with their doilies, the incense and votive candles.
Sitting on a stool beside an altar, Petya was repairing a shoe. Shura kept her wisdom under a white kerchief tied beneath her chin with a double knot. Though usually taciturn in the evening, she liked to chat with the girl whenever they were in the kitchen by themselves. She would lift one of her feet up onto a bare wooden stool, revealing from under the wide fan of her skirt a surprisingly robust calf in a homespun wool stocking, and then lean over and say: “You, my girl, don’t know how to cook! Your husband comes home and what have you got to show for your day? Take this” — indicating a plate containing sour cabbage with two meatballs resting on top — “My Petya loves it. I bet your man will too.”
Scratching a bedbug bite on her forearm, the girl thanked her benefactor. She didn’t want to say out loud what the old woman already knew anyway: that Andrey didn’t need to come home because he had never left in the first place. He had dropped out of the math department at the university, then quit four jobs in succession, and now, finally free of all obligations, he would lie in bed for days at a time, enlarging an indent in the wall with his finger, waking the dormant bedbugs living behind the wallpaper.
Shura shook her head. “You were caught, my girl, caught just like a chicken in a plucker’s clutches.”
Somehow the old woman knew.
3
Andrey was a large man: six-foot-five, big-boned, broad-shouldered, with a massive, well-shaped head, a reddish crew cut, and a spattering of freckles on his muscular neck and shoulders and his forearms lightly covered with ginger hair. What spoiled the look were his narrow, off-kilter eyes, vaguely like those of an ostrich.
He must have fallen in love with his girl by accident. Actually, it hadn’t really mattered to him whom he fell in love with, that not being something that a real man should worry about.
But the timing had been right. The girl was young and pretty, and her eyes changed colour: hazel-green in the morning and chestnut- brown at night.
The first time he saw her she was wearing a tight-fitting, hand-knitted wine-red dress, proof of her female domestic skill, he decided.
How could he have taken her for a homemaker on the flimsy evidence of a dress? It was a mirage, an illusion. The girl, as it turned out, was neither an able amateur seamstress nor even a knitter. The dress had been produced on a knitting machine by a classmate of hers in trade for her long copper-coloured braid.
No, she certainly couldn’t knit the way Andrey’s mother could, with turrets of coiled yarn guarding every corner of her apartment. Though a mix of contradictions, like most people, Andrey didn’t lose any sleep over them. He took no interest in his hearth, so long as others looked after it for him.
Nor did he have that much use for his mother, either, even though he hoped that his girl would have the same knitting skill. His mother was adept at making her dreams come true, the sort of dreams her son regarded with silent disdain. The way she rubbed shoulders with film stars in elite clubs that would otherwise have been closed to her as a mere knitter and dressmaker. The way she could make dresses with patterns from the German fashion magazine Burda, sewing onto them labels from Dior, Yves St. Laurent, and Valentino before selling them to the wives of movie directors or trading them for tickets to exclusive shows.
So, before anybody had even had a chance to blink, it looked like the whole thing was quickly moving to a wedding. Andrey brought the girl a bunch of dry, artificially coloured flowers whose stems released poisonous purple ink into the vase. He had just been discharged from the army. How could he have had any gr
asp of the subtleties of civilian life?
The girl paid no heed to such trifles. She desperately wanted a wedding ring on her dainty finger. It was the prerequisite for a happy life.
Andrey had a rucksack among his possessions. The girl was delighted. They could camp in the woods and loll in the meadows and drink milk and honey. Though no camper herself, she assumed that Andrey could pack a neat, orderly universe that she would carry up and down the flowering hills on her shoulders. But he took any effort as a personal affront. In the end they didn’t go anywhere, cuddling instead on the narrow sofa in her parents’ little apartment, while the latter loudly talked on the other side of the wall, pretending they didn’t hear or were even aware of the activity on the sofa.
Andrey and the girl would lie very quietly, pressing their bodies against each other ever closer, as he tried to remove her tight-fitting wool turtleneck, while she resisted, before burying her face in his chest and going soft and limp as a sign of her consent. And he would continue to undress her, determinedly pulling the sleeve off her left arm and then off her right one and pressing her now naked body hard against his own, feeling her long slender smoothness against his skin, hungry for her, for all of her. As his desire for her grew, he tried to restrain himself, to conceal his excitement so he wouldn’t frighten her — for as she had told him during their previous session on the sofa, she knew very little about male anatomy. Yet at the same time she herself wanted to excite him even more, as he could deduct from her moans, something he couldn’t help responding to. He silenced her with the greed of his kisses, and then once more she would fight free, breaking into tears. That confused him, but he decided to ignore it and remove her sweater from around her neck. Now their caressing had become a struggle: the sweater at first wouldn’t cooperate. So that when he pulled it hard over her head, she shrieked: “You’re choking me!” That strangled cry chilled his ardour, wrapping it in a sudden, cold cloud of fatigue. Suddenly indifferent, he got up from the sofa and went across the room to look out the window at the lights of night-time Moscow.
Expulsion Page 11