“Yes, exactly! On a carpet! You have the word of an intelligence agent!”
“I thought you said you were a teacher.”
“Me? Did I say that? Take your pick! Whatever you like suits me fine, sugar! And I play for the national team too. Nothing to sneeze at.”
Dasha had never heard anybody call her Mama “sugar” before.
“Here she is!” Papa shouted when Dasha, overcome with excitement, entered the doorway.
“So, what are your plans for tomorrow, young lady? Shall we all go skating? In Gorky Park? In their huge skating rink — music, skaters, the last weekend of the season!”
“How did you know, Sergey? You’re a wizard! I got her skates for her birthday. She’s dying to try them.”
“A birthday? We’ll have to celebrate!”
“I don’t know how to skate on figure skates,” Dasha said, sulking. She remembered her fall and now was afraid to tumble again in front of the stranger.
“Ah, it’s very easy! If you’re used to Eiders, figure skates will be a piece of cake. I’m training the Moscow figure-skating team, by the way, so I’ll be able to show you a thing or two.” “Tomorrow, then?”
Papa winked at her again, and then at her mother.
That evening, Mama and Papa went to a movie comedy called The Carnival Night.
Dasha listened to the elevator for a while, and then happily fell asleep. In the middle of the night, she was wakened by whispering and unusually heavy breathing. Peering into the darkness, she recognized in the vague shape lying next to her Mama her new Papa. She withdrew deeper under the covers, pretending to be asleep.
When Dasha woke the next morning the sun was already up and their Papa had left. Since it was Sunday, there wasn’t any hurry, and she and her Mama had their customary breakfast of herring. Papa had something urgent he needed to attend to, but would be back by the time they were ready to leave, Mama said. Her face was smooth and radiant. Even so, she put a mask of sour cream on it for a few minutes, the smell of which Dasha has always detested. Humming to herself, she got out two red and white striped sweaters and matching white caps with red pom-poms. The sweaters, which they had only worn once before, were made from expensive Shetland wool and had been a gift from Mother’s work. After they had put everything on and got Dasha’s skates ready, they sat down to wait for Father. They jumped up when the doorbell finally rang.
But it was only their neighbour come to ask if Dasha could babysit. Mama said no, not today, today Dasha’s busy, and after the neighbour left, they sat and waited until there was another knock at the door. This time it was a neighbour who had borrowed two rubles and was returning them, since she had got paid. After that nobody rang or knocked. They took off their warm sweaters but still kept waiting, just in case.
“Sergey played soccer for the national team when he was 18,” Mama said.
“Did he win?” Dasha asked.
“His team, you mean? Probably, they did. Why wouldn’t they? But it doesn’t really matter. You have to be really dedicated and hard-working even to get on a team.”
Dasha nodded. Mother appreciated hard purposeful work.
And soon the day was on its last legs, with dusk starting to fall. They exchanged furtive glances and avoided each other’s eyes. Mama finally sat down at her typewriter, while Dasha got out her book bag to prepare her school things for the next day. Their Papa must have meant to go skating next Sunday, not this one, Dasha thought.
When next Sunday came and passed, Dasha removed another page from a tear-off calendar thinking that there are many Sundays in a year and that you can’t always be sure which is the right one. Since Sundays often feel the same, the best thing will be just to wait. And so she waited for another month. And then she decided that it must be because their Papa had forgotten their address.
On the way to school every morning, Dasha would go to the busy intersection where she had met him. For two weeks she would wait at the corner, but he must have had a different teaching schedule now, for he never came in the morning. Then she changed her strategy and would come after school, around three, and waited till five.
She stood in the same place at the very edge of the sidewalk, holding onto a dusty streetlamp with her arm, lest the crowd, sullenly rolling away toward the opposite shore with the green light, sweep her into the roadway. When an outflux began, she, like an pebble forgotten by the wave, waited orphan-like on the shore now bereft of people until the signal blinked its command for a new influx.
She looked avidly then at the mournful, preoccupied faces rolling toward her in compact ranks: women weighed down with string bags and purses and wearing, out of season, knitted hats and warm coats; men with briefcases who were more often lightly dressed and empty-handed; a fat man with a garland of toilet paper rolls around his neck awkwardly waddling like a penguin with his belly stuck out. It was funny, and Dasha burst out laughing.
But the one person she needed, their Papa, so far wasn’t among them. And even so she believed that he would finally come, lithe, his jacket fluttering as he moved, a ball in his hand, a carelessly tied yellow scarf round his neck. He would come, he would definitely come!
It was only for the time being that he was unseen, was hidden from her eyes, the way rivers are hidden beneath the ice in winter, or birds in a forest thicket, or any lost thing. But she would wait. For everything that is unseen remembers us and expects to meet us again and resume its life.
And only if we disavow or forget, only then will people and everything on the earth cease to exist.
A REQUIEM FOR DANDELION
THERE WAS NO way the newcomer would fit into our twelve-square-meter room. It just wasn’t possible. He couldn’t be put between my parents’ bed and the wardrobe, since my cot already occupied that space. Nor could he be put behind my mother’s desk with its two stacks of essays on top and my homework in the middle: the larger, uncorrected stack on the left, and the smaller one with the gashes of my mother’s red pen on the right. And I wasn’t going to share my only sanctum of privacy either — the bookcase’s bottom shelf reserved for my toys, even if it was half-empty. (I was indifferent to stuffed animals and dolls and their frills.) The main pleasure of that shelf wasn’t its toys, however, but the nylon pennant that hung from a nail inside the bookcase’s glass door.
The pennant was studded with pins, badges, and medals that my father, a Greco-Roman wrestling champion, had brought back from tournaments abroad — odd triangles and squares and translucent disks with mysterious inscriptions on them that were our only proof of “abroad’s” otherwise mythical existence. When I was alone, I would open the door wide and then slam it shut, producing a chorus of sound as the pennant slapped against the glass: the solemn bang of the medals won in East Germany, the fussy tap of the badges from Bulgaria, the diffident chink of the lily-shaped pins from Poland. So no, I wasn’t going to share any of that with the boy which I was sure he would be, as I had no use for girls at all. Beyond our rime-embossed windows lay the building’s courtyard. Veils of snow caressed the earth at night, and by morning the wooden slide, shaped like an inverted “y,” awoke muffled to its neck. Holding big pieces of cardboard, we rushed up the slide’s rickety ladder, elbowing each other aside as we struggled to be the first to swish down through the fresh snow covering the slide’s surface. After a couple of rides, the now wet cardboard would fall apart, and then we would slide down without it, on our bottoms, risking salvos of scolding at home for our torn flannel pants.
How would I ever elbow my way to the top through all those boys if I had to drag him along too, holding his tiny hand in the cocoon of my mitten? The brisk, breathless liberty of snow and winter was mine alone. There was no place in it for anybody else.
Earlier that fall, I had imagined myself a mighty ship patrolling a sea of dead leaves, as I ploughed through their rustling heaps. There could be no question of taking him on board for th
at either. Leaves’ whispering belonged to me alone.
But my greatest worry was that I would have to share my birthday if he was born the same day I was, on the 7th of November, the Day of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Kneeling on a chair by our front window five stories above, I would watch the parade that seemed to have been organized every year just for me. Tanks and trucks with Katyusha rockets would rumble past on their way to Red Square, and then after an interval would come a tide of red flags and banners and artificial flowers, and, carried high above the human surge, portraits of Lenin and Stalin and a fierce-looking man with a black, shovel-shaped beard. The rippling white letters on red banners would gradually coalesce into words and then entire phrases: Long Live Stalin, Father of Peoples! The Party is the Intellect, Honour, and Conscience of Our Era! Long Live the Great Soviet People, Immortal Builder of Communism! And all of it, all of that exuberance, belonged to me by my birth date and eagle’s aerie. To keep them safe from my brother, I wanted to take up those tanks and trucks and people in my arms and hide them. Let them celebrate every year for my sake alone.
There was of course no certainty that my brother would arrive on November 7th. But what was sure was that it would be ten years too late, an inexcusable miscalculation on his part that made him, even though he wouldn’t be a girl, still quite useless to me. Being so young, how could he defend me from the wickedness of adults or the apprentice cruelty of other children? Obviously, he would be unable to take revenge on the boys who had tied my braids to the fence as I intently watched a caterpillar nibbling on a leaf.
But useless and still invisible though he was, he had already affected our lives. My mother, who was so quick and nimble in her management of the day’s many tasks, had because of him been turned into a sluggard. And because of him she had put away all her jewellery and begun to wear a baggy, nondescript dark calico dress with the tiny, sad-looking polka-dots. One morning I suddenly saw that dress in a completely new light. I realized for the first time what it concealed: irrefutable evidence of the truth of the nasty jokes of the boys in the yard. The adults — and even worse, my own parents — must in fact have been doing that awful thing with each other out of my sight. My mother’s bulging dress was proof that she and my father had done it at least once.
The landslide of that logic quickly gained momentum, overwhelming everything else. If they had done it once, then what would have kept them from doing it twice? Or ten times? Or all the time? And then came the logic’s inevitable conclusion. If they had done it to bring my brother into being, then they must have done it to bring me into being too! No, my beginning couldn’t have originated in that humiliation, that shame. I knew at once with perfect confidence that I had always been here, had always been uncreated, free, and independent of anyone’s will. At least the idea of me was — the necessity of me.
Instantly losing all respect for my parents, I felt there was only one way to escape their treachery. I had to free myself totally from their life, their home.
There were throngs of Gypsies in every train station in the city, bands with fearless curly-haired children who begged in the nearby streets, and women in wide, brightly coloured skirts who went from door to door with infants on their hips. If I gave them money, they might take me to their camps. Thirty kopeks a day saved from school breakfasts would come to ten roubles in not much more than a month. To get ready, I sewed myself a little satchel for a change of clothing and some biscuits.
It was near the end of October when I finally had the sum in hand: ten roubles and twenty kopecks. The Gypsy women could come to our door any time now. Before falling asleep, I mentally said a bitter farewell to my betrayers, feeling little pity even for my mother.
Early the next morning, there was a knock on the door. Suddenly gripped with fear I managed somehow to get into the sleeves of my school uniform, and to open the door to my long-awaited rescuers.
“Did you call a cab?” a man with a crumpled early morning face asked when I finally got to the door. My father had already left for work, and I was supposed to go to school. Not even a Biblical deluge could have altered the regular routines of our universe. And so my mother left for the maternity hospital by herself, no less subject to the same immutable order in which she too was a staunch believer.
My brother was born several hours later, one month premature but luckily a week before my birthday.
Unlike me, he was the image of his mother. He had, as she would later remark with rueful regret, the same snub nose. And the same eye shape. And the delicate curve of his ears and his fingers and his nails were miniature replicas of hers. And instead of the usual old, wrinkled appearance, his skin was angelically pristine, as if the rough passage to this world had cost him no effort at all. Because of the white down on the crown of his head, my mother called him Dandelion. It was his name of first rapture, the name he received before any real one.
“When they brought him to me the first time,” my mother said, “I gently blew on his face to test his reflexes. And his lips quivered in a little smile, as if he recognized me. He looked like a fluffy dandelion.”
The next day she remarked to the nurse: “What an amazing baby he is! I haven’t heard a peep out of him! Not like my first. She screamed non-stop.”
“That’s too bad . . . That he hasn’t cried,” the nurse said, avoiding my mother’s gaze. “The ones born two months prematurely usually survive. But a month early won’t make it.” Was it a folk’s belief she had brought out as the excuse unwilling to tell my mother the true story?
Every time they brought Dandelion for feeding, he responded with that tiny smile which in itself was unusual: newborns don’t smile. At what point did he decide to leave? Was this whiff of a smile a gentle apology for his departure?
I never saw my brother. He died a week later on my birthday. The hospital insisted that my mother leave the body to them.
Where is my brother buried? We’ll never know.
For a long time after his death I thought that, if I had consented to give him a small place in my own life, he would have stayed. If I hadn’t begrudged him the banging of the badges and medals, or the cardboard for the slide, or the leaves whispering farewell to the trees, or the tanks and trucks rumbling past on my birthday . . .
It was at my silent request that he had spared himself the pain of being: the pain of acquiring a form, then losing it, then finding another of which we will know nothing. His tiny fingers left no traces on any surfaces. His tongue never tried any words. Every day he grows younger. First by ten years, then twenty, then thirty, and now he’s nearly half a century younger than I am.
Because his was an in-between name, no one has used it in our family in the years to come. I couldn’t give it to my sons, nor could they give it to their own. We never talk about Dandelion. There’s nothing to recall. He was little more than a subjunctive, a might have done, a might have become . . .
In the beyond where souls are weighed, the scales with Dandelion’s unblemished soul will be so light as to feel empty to the judge. He long ago yielded place in the sun to other souls. To me he granted what I wanted: the freedom of the solitary.
Sometimes, in a faraway city of rainy winters, I imagine Moscow’s snow-shrouded boulevards and trees and street-lamps and monuments and cast-iron gates. I imagine dark winter waters of the river half-encased in ice, flowing out beyond the realm of the city into the wooded plains where Dandelion may lie, and I think of the quick moving through the snow to their final destinations and the dead pitying and forgiving the living.
THE MIRACLE WORKER
1
THERE WASN’T MUCH to say about Tanya’s looks other than that they were plain. Hundreds of such Tanyas made their way through Moscow’s crowds every day. Not that her face was unpleasant, especially in profile with its straight line extending from her guileless brow to the tip of her nose and then gently dropping to her lips and the tidy curve of her
chin. And her figure was nicely put together too, even if she was on the short side. But there was a meek uncertainty in the tilt of her head, in the way she lowered her eyes, so light they seemed almost colourless. The Creator had apparently run out of pigment when he got to her irises, although he had skimped her other parts too, leaving her hair and skin a dull, ashen tone.
But Tanya was married to a dashing fellow, the spitting image of d’Artagnan on the cover of the book she had kept under her pillow as a girl. His cologne, the erect points of his moustache, the glint in his eyes, the cleft in his strong, well-shaped chin — Tanya was in love with every part of him.
Yet d’Artagnan didn’t love Tanya back. He couldn’t possibly love that mouse. Why then he had married her? It was a mystery to all who knew them. She was such a good soul, he had told her once in a moment of offhand, lukewarm affection. The phrase wounded her. Nobody ever falls in love with the goodness of somebody’s soul. She was smart enough to know that.
While Tanya suffered in silence, d’Artagnan saw no reason to miss out on life. Apart from his own, many other wives and single women too took great pleasure in his company. Like the sun, he shared his warmth unstintingly. He had a generous heart. He enjoyed making women happy.
The proof of that Tanya found one day in a pocket of his pants before dropping them off at the cleaners. There were two notes, one in a childish, upright hand, the other in a hasty scrawl. Both had phone numbers, although Tanya wasn’t tempted to call either one. To her husband she gave no hint at all of her discovery.
She couldn’t tell what troubled her more: that he was sleeping with other women, or that he hadn’t bothered to hide it. Was it deliberate carelessness? Did he hope that she, and not he, would set the awkward ball of their lives careening toward honesty until it had wrecked everything she held dear? That scenario would have undermined her stoic patience and threatened the perilous path she had taken to hold onto her man.
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