Expulsion

by Marina Sonkina

  4

  It was only when the girl’s mother had had enough that things finally got under way. She scratched her head, tapped the tip of her pencil against her desk, and then, by an obscure subterfuge, obtained room between the two Gogols. A relative had been killed in the war, his widow had disappeared into the camps, and so there it was, that tiny room, waiting to be occupied.

  Its window looked out onto the courtyard, where homeless men retrieved bottles left under its two benches, and pigeons cooed around the birch tree.

  Even if you couldn’t see the Kremlin or either of the Gogols, for that matter, you still knew they were nearby, a consolation for anybody who might have yearned for a more rarified space.

  And the Grauerman Maternity Hospital was little more than a block away, just in case.

  Later a mattress would be found, but on their first night in the room, Andrey spread newspapers on the floor, undressed the girl and put her down on the newspapers next to himself. She cried from the sharp pain. It hurt to know that her Andrey could do such monstrous things to her right off the bat. He lit two candles next to the newspapers so he could see his young girl better. That meant he must love her, after all, she thought. And maybe he did. Most likely he did, and why wouldn’t he? Deep in his heart he considered himself a romantic, and expected the world to hold up its end of the bargain.

  While serving in the army in far northern Archangelsk and assigned to guard duty, with hoarfrost gathering on his eyebrows and Kalashnikov, Andrey would imagine some vague, tender womanly presence hovering, twirling around him. In the solitude of the black subarctic air, the creature’s soft, gentle laugh would seem to caress his ears, muffling the angry barking of the dogs. That womanly presence was always sweet and forgiving, the woman happy of her own accord. Her laugh and hands were magical, little hands weaving a domestic cosiness all around him, protecting him from the cruelty and pettiness of life. And when the horror of his service was over and he was discharged, he would step back into the world again and find that angel of the night. Only this time she would be real.

  But what he got in fact was quite different. The girl was brittle and vaguely dissatisfied. And he sensed behind her brooding melancholy a stubborn, unquenched yearning. He wanted her to be for him, for him alone, while he continued to pick at the hole in the wall and think about taking a stab at one or another of the great mathematical problems in history, exactly which he hadn’t decided yet. Perhaps the Hodge Conjecture, or Fermat’s Last Theorem, if that one hadn’t already been proved, or the Riemann Hypothesis, or . . . whatever would make him famous.

  “And while I’m doing that, just be here for me, girl.”

  But she wasn’t. She was somewhere else, in a mute world of vague longing. She wanted something but didn’t know what it was and she cried and stared at him in bewilderment for doing nothing to provide it. He could see the deep unhappiness and reproach in her almond eyes, and resented it.

  5

  On that first real night together, instead of crying, the girl did her best to hold back her tears. That was a mistake. Had her lashes been moist with tears, their ends wouldn’t have scorched so easily — with a light crackling — when one of the candles tipped over. The girl’s auburn curls were burned too. Andrey smelled what he thought was burning flesh (that’s how burning hair smells) and grabbed the blanket and waved it several times over her, both of them rigid with terror.

  “Something’s shaking. Is it an earthquake?” the girl said.

  “In the centre of Moscow? Don’t be silly. It’s the Metro. A line goes under the building.”

  “Feel how it’s shaking!”

  “Yeah, it really is.”

  “It’s all right about my hair. Don’t worry. It’s just the two strands in front.”

  “I’m not worried. You can trim them later.”

  The girl fell silent. Then she whispered: “Let’s play a game. Do you know this one?”

  “Which?”

  “Where you don’t say yes or no, or black or white.”

  “What?”

  “It’s simple. I might ask: ‘Are you going to the ball?’ And you say ‘Maybe.’ Or: ‘I don’t know.’ Or something like that. Only don’t say: ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ And then I might say: ‘What kind of a pretty dress are you going to wear?’”

  “A dress? But I’m not a girl!”

  “I know, but just pretend your are. It’s like two aristocratic ladies talking in the past. So then I might ask: ‘What kind of dress, black or white?’ since I want to trick you. And you say, ‘pink’ or ‘purple,’ or whatever, only not ‘black’ or ‘white,’ or else you lose. Or I could say, for example: ‘Surely you’re going to wear black lace at the ball. It looks so becoming on you.’ And if you say, ‘No,’ then you lose. You have to come up with a different answer instead. See?”

  “But that’s silly.”

  “You have a tiny gnome hiding inside you, and he calls everything silly.”

  “Hold on! What have gnomes to do with ‘Black and White’?”

  Slowly, with a tip of her finger, she drew a line across his naked chest, from one shoulder to the other.

  “See, you’re so big, but your soul is tiny, like a gnome. And it’s scared of having to live in such a big body. And that’s the cause of our problems.”

  “Andrey caught her wandering hand and squeezed it.

  “Ouch!” she cried. He let her hand go.

  “Your mind works in crazy patterns, I can never quite follow it.”

  They both fell silent. He sat up in bed, then fumbled in his trousers hanging off the back of the chair, looking for a cigarette.

  “And you, of course, you never have fear, right? A real Jeanne d’Arc,” he said lighting the cigarette and taking a deep puff.

  “Oh, sure I have. Give me a puff. Sure,” she said sitting up in bed next to him and reaching for the cigarette he had just lit. In the pallid light coming from the sole lamp stand behind the window pane her naked shoulders and back looked childishly thin. She pulled a little smoke into her mouth and immediately choked.

  “I told you not to smoke.”

  “Can’t you just not interrupt me? I started telling you something important. You asked me about fear, didn’t you? Today, for example. I’m walking down the street . . . The chestnut trees have already lit all their candles, kids plop through puddles. Everything is so beautiful because it’s a bit strange. Even old toothless babushkas on the benches are beautiful, the way they squint their eyes at the reflection of the sun in the puddles and the windows panes, as if it were their first spring. And I’m scared. This beauty demands something from me, you understand? And all I have inside is void, void! Nothing within to stand up to this beauty, see? Something is trying to break through, yet it can’t. I’m dumb, I have no voice and it’s scary and painful.”

  “Good brains given to a fool, that’s your case, my dear.”

  “It’s as if I weren’t worthy of this life, because I have no power to express its beauty. And so I’m afraid. We’re both afraid. You’re afraid of your things, I’m afraid of mine. That’s why we fight.”

  When the girl woke the next morning, Andrey was gone. She remained lying on the floor. She was embarrassed to leave the room with her eyes so strangely exposed. She thought she might move to a chair by the window, but it hurt to sit, so she looked at the small patch of the grey sky visible from their marriage bed, the newspapers on the floor, all the time expecting Andrey to come back. He would kiss away the nakedness of her eyes and her pain down there.

  But he didn’t come back.

  She watched the day die, night finally swallowing the streets and boulevards with houses and trees. Darkness stared back at her with the black eyes of a widow. Soon the cockroaches would come out. Then the girl heard soul-wrenching cries. It must be babies, she thought.

  Naked babies cut with a dull knife. Or b
eing boiled or skinned alive. But who would give up their children for such torture? She listened. Then she knew it was just the wailing of cats: lascivious, insatiable, hunting, pinning each other to the earth, violating each other in hatred and ecstasy. It frightened the girl. She began to pray. “Dear Andrusha, please come back! I’m scared! I’ll never wrong you again! I promise!” She now loved him more than ever and would come to love him even more.

  But still he didn’t come.

  After two days, the girl knew she’d been abandoned. She packed up her few belongings, meaning to return to her parents. But then the door opened. It was Andrey.

  “A clandestine overnight operation,” he said, chuckling with a sidelong glance. “My sister was getting divorced in Novgorod. I had to sneak all her furniture out before her husband could. My mother asked me to do it. I couldn’t say no to my mama, could I?”

  “Why didn’t you leave me a note or something? It was our first night, after all. I woke up and . . . and you were gone.”

  Needing air, she opened the window half way and was struck in the face by a flurry of snowflakes. Where had they come from? It was April.

  She closed the window again, and they went on with their lives in the little room between the two Gogols.

  •

  What embarrassed her the most with Auntie Shura was that Andrey wasn’t her husband yet. They had planned to get married at once, but an unexpected circumstance had interfered: the marriage registrar, a buxom woman tucked into an official blue suit, had taken the official seal with her on a vacation to the Black Sea.

  By the time the registrar returned from romping on the beach, the girl had put herself on a long waiting list for an abortion at the nearby maternity hospital. She lost sleep agonizing over what would happen if she passed the deadline before her turn came up and they would send her away. By early summer, her morning sickness had passed, and then at last the procedure was done and she was bereft. She fell into catatonic melancholy. How the wedding went, who was there, what was said and eaten, she had no idea. She came too only when the men shouted the customary “Bitter! Bitter!” and somebody’s hard, dry lips for some reason pressed against her own. They were her husband’s.

  6

  For the rest of the summer she remained weak and ailing, reluctant to go on living with her now empty self.

  But in the fall the iron fingers of necessity seized her by the neck. She was a second-year student, and lectures began at 8 am. Missing even a few could result in expulsion. Her eyes were red from sleeplessness and tumultuous nights with her man. At the seminars, she covertly yawned into her fist.

  The fall also brought some relief. She loved the remorseful sadness of the falling leaves. They softened the air, their rustling somehow filling it with the promise of forgiveness. Later, when the snow came, she found herself pregnant again. “A little boy is knocking at my heart,” she whispered in Andrey’s ear.

  “How can you tell?”

  She sat down in his lap and put her arm around his close-cropped head. She felt small next to his large frame and loved the feeling. He had grown a massive red beard, which made him look even more imposing.

  “The baby told me,” she said, pointing to her flat belly. She felt a surge of tenderness for the boy and his father.

  “And you’re not going to . . . ?”

  “Oh, no! I’ll never do that again.”

  “What’s changed since the last time?”

  “Nothing, really, but we’ll manage somehow, won’t we?”

  “But how, exactly? You’re a student.”

  “We both are.”

  “I’m not anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I officially withdrew.”

  “You did? When?”

  “What difference does it make? Last spring.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say something? What have you been doing all these months, then?”

  “I’ve been doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. Going to movies every matinee. Look: they’ll certainly give you an anaesthetic.”

  “They didn’t last time. But I . . . I just can’t believe what you said.”

  “Well, I’m sure that labour is worse.”

  “How would you know?”

  She pulled back from him and thought that he looked ridiculous with so much hair on the bottom of his head, on his cheeks and chin, while on top there was almost nothing at all.

  “You should let your hair grow,” she said, standing up.

  7

  The baby’s skin was milk white, and his head was covered with barely visible fluff. The girl gently touched his fontanel with her finger and for no reason began to laugh.

  Back home, she swaddled her baby, and nursed, and washed, and rocked him to sleep, while looking out the window at some men doing work in the street. She washed and boiled the soiled sheets (as diapers have not been invented yet), until they were spotless and then hung them to dry on a cord stretched across the length of the communal kitchen. When Mina-Zina took the sheets down and stuck them under the girl’s door, she said nothing and hung them out in the room instead.

  Andrey seemed indifferent to his son. Afraid to approach, to hold him. “Now the creature will know everything about me, which is a scary thought,” he once confessed.

  “How so?”

  “I mean, what if he turns out like me, God forbid, then he’ll know. He’ll feel the same, and there’ll be no hiding from that. He’ll figure me out, all right.”

  Then he left them alone, the mother and child, in their oneness of their being.

  The bed bugs tormented them at night. The girl thought they should replace the old wallpaper, since they all lived in the same room and the bugs could crawl from their mattress to the baby’s cradle. But she wasn’t good enough with her hands to undertake such a venture alone. And Andrey seemed to move slower and slower, as if walking through fog.

  He called the girl a birdbrain and a nothing for being so naïve about life, for lacking domestic skills, for not erecting around him a fortress within which he could solve the Hodge Conjecture or maybe prove the Riemann Hypothesis.

  But now she paid no attention to the noises he made. After putting a bowl of soup in front of him at dinner time, she resumed singing little songs to her baby.

  Andrey threw the bowls at her. None of the conjectures or hypotheses could be solved or proved or even approached. When there were no more bowls to eat from, girl mockingly poured the lukewarm soup into Andrey’s cupped hands. His hands were capable of holding a lot of soup, for he had inherited wide, strong hands, until then of little use to him.

  Andrey said: “You bitch! The soup’s cold. You can’t even cook. You’re a nothing! A zero!”

  She covered her baby’s face with a lace handkerchief and barked at Andrey as if she were a dog.

  “Not funny, idiot!” he said.

  Then she tried hooting like an owl, wailing like an angry tomcat, and bleating like an injured sheep.

  “What was all that about?” he asked her in the evening when the baby was a sleep.

  “You call me a bitch,” she said in the evening exasperated from howling. “Don’t dogs bark? I won’t talk to you ever again, till you call me by my real name.”

  Andrey tried to remember her real name, Masha or Sasha or Tasha, yes, that’s it: Natasha! But the name had long before withered as to become unusable.

  With time the girl stopped using her human voice altogether. With time she came to understand the voices of beasts: howling and barking, mewing and growling.

  One night she was climbing up their dark stairway. At the top, near the attic, a cat made its den. The girl was carrying her pink fluffy baby up to the sky, up to their room under the roof, when she heard the cat moaning. Not a moan of pleasure or desire. But of a wish for death. The girl listened carefully.
Last year the cat’s three kittens had been thrown in the river. This year all eight were drowned.

  The cat was startled by the girl’s pink baby and froze, its fur erect. But then it said: “Give me your baby for half a day to play with. It will comfort me and I’ll stop mourning my kittens.”

  The girl felt sorry for the cat and handed over her clean white bundle.

  “Play a little, while I go cook. Then I’ll come back for my baby.”

  The girl made some borscht, took the pot back to her room safely out of Mina-Zina’s reach, and returned to the stairway for her son. But he and the cat had vanished. She looked everywhere. She climbed up to the roof, she searched the attic, she peered into the nooks and crannies under the stairs and in every other dark place, but her son and the cat were gone, never to be found again.

  •

  Many years have passed since that time. Recently I was walking along the Arbat and turned into that familiar lane. The building between the two Gogols was still standing, although it was apparent from the boarded-up and broken windows that it wasn’t long for this world. Its plaster was crumbling, its entranceway was falling apart, and soon the building itself would pass into oblivion. The noisy, abusive crew that had taken shelter in its warren had long since scattered. Auntie Shura and her husband had passed away and Mina-Zina had been relocated by the housing authority to a new apartment in Moscow’s outskirts. Andrey never found the key to the mysterious mathematical door he had so desperately tried to unlock. But the door he did open was of a much more ordinary and kinder sort: a real apartment with a real woman good at sewing, knitting, and cooking, the very skills the adolescent wife of his youth had so sadly lacked.