It wasn’t long before Tanya was ordered to report to the administration. Waiting for her was the usual triumvirate: the party secretary, the dean, and Titko, the union chair.
“How long has she been ill? And why didn’t she let the collective know? It could have helped her,” the secretary said in a compassionate tone to nobody in particular.
Tanya assured them that everything was fine with her.
The party secretary nodded solicitously. He wanted to help, but Perepelkina hadn’t cooperated. He had been about to go on a fishing trip, but she had served up this surprise. What good could it lead to? He sighed and took a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket, loudly blew his nose, wadded up the handkerchief again, and put it back in his pocket.
“Let her submit a notice in writing,” Titko languidly suggested without looking at Tanya.
“What kind of notice?” the dean asked.
“The usual,” she said. “That’s she’s leaving of her own accord.”
Then she turned to Tanya and, flashing her eyes, suddenly started to shout: “We don’t keep your sort on at the institute! You’re cutting off your own nose! You’re hatching a religious swamp here! You’re trying to spread a religious microbe! You’re defending Markov! What is he to you, or did he bribe you? Or are you in cahoots? Anointed with the same myrrh or something? Both baptized?”
For a moment Tanya lost the gift of speech.
“I can’t give you a statement like that . . . There’s no way I could do that,” she mumbled, getting over her initial fright. “I have to feed my husband . . .”
“Feed your husband?! What were you thinking about before?! And what were you thinking with?!” Titko yelled. “Submit your notice!”
The party secretary drummed his fingers on the table and loudly sighed.
“You’ve made a real mess of things, and now we have to clean it up . . . Tamara Semyonovna is right. If we want to, we can get rid of workers like you any time. But” — and he drummed his fingers on the table again — “but it all depends on you. Write that you are remorseful about what you did, that you admit your mistake. And then say it in front of everyone at a meeting and we’ll excuse you.”
“What do you mean write?”
“Well, just that. Write it down. You’re not illiterate.”
He pushed a blank sheet of paper toward her and started to dictate. “Manifesting ideological spinelessness in regard to the student Markov, I thereby enabled . . .”
“I couldn’t . . . How could I . . .”
The party secretary was flummoxed. He loudly blew his nose again and, opening his eyes wide, looked hard at Titko. She leaned over to him and, without taking her eyes off Tanya, whispered something in his ear.
“Yes, quite right,” he said to her. “We need an expert assessment, a psychiatric evaluation.”
“You can go now, Comrade Perepelkina,” Titko said. “We’ll inform you of our decision in due course.”
When after a time Tatyana was called back to the office, her face had grown sallow and somehow she had become even shorter.
“We’re letting you off. You’re free to go! You can thank Mikhail Timofeyevich for that,” Titko said in an unexpectedly gentle tone, referring to the party secretary. “It was entirely his doing.”
“So I can just go, right?”
Unable to believe her ears, Tanya shifted from one foot to the other and remained standing where she was. “Oh, thank you so much! Thank you! You see, I didn’t want . . . I just wanted . . . it to be fair. It’s true, I didn’t want . . .”
“We’re going to limit it to a reprimand in your personal file. Only don’t even think about asking for leave tomorrow! Show up for work! Understand?”
“Of course, I do, yes, of course.”
And on unsteady legs by no means suitable for walking, Tanya finally turned around and left the office.
Almost a week passed. Tanya lived surrounded by the same wary silence. That no one had touched her even though she didn’t write a statement she attributed to God. He had protected her on his own, without being asked. Only once when she came across a beggar with stumps for legs sitting by the metro, and was bending over him to toss a few coins into his greasy cap, she started to cry bitterly from pity, but not so much for him, she realized, as for herself. And then around the beginning of autumn when as usual she was hurrying to work, her way was suddenly blocked by an ambulance.
Two orderlies shoved her into a panel van with sealed windows. Twenty minutes later, she found herself in the reception room of the Sailors’ Rest psychiatric hospital. In front of her, she saw a bolted steel door. One of the orderlies took a key from his pocket, unlocked the door, and led her down a long windowless corridor. At the other end was a room guarded by two attendants. One of them opened its door with his own key and pushed her into something like a low storage room, where a doctor was waiting. He quickly glanced over his new charge and said something in an undertone to another attendant standing beside him. Tanya was quickly undressed and injected in a buttock. Trembling, she attempted a protest: “What are you doing? Why did you inject me? I’m not sick!”
“If you don’t cooperate, we’ll put you on insulin!”
“Why insulin?” she asked, her voice already starting to sound like a remote echo of something with no connection to her. And then they dragged her, or rather her body, to another room, wrapped her in a sheet, and put her in a tub of ice water. Then they pulled her out again, tightened the wet sheets around her, and threatened to strap her to the bed if she resisted. The last thing she remembered was a cleaning woman watching nearby with a broom in her hand.
“Do you still think you’re Jeanne d’Arc?” a young female doctor in high-heeled boots asked.
“But I never thought I was.”
“We have it all written down, so there’s no use denying it,” she said and then fell silent for a moment. “Well, all right. Who is it that you think you are, then?”
“I don’t think I’m anybody.”
“Well, who are you, then? What are you?”
“I’m just Tatyana Perepelkina.”
After five days of interviews and treatment, the doctor produced a diagnosis: “sluggish” or latent schizophrenia. Tanya spent her days lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, her face swollen like those of drowned children retrieved from the water a week later. She vomited something yellow in the mornings, which brought relief. She grew interested in a spot on the ceiling over her head. Sometimes it looked like a creeping fly, and sometimes it was much bigger than a fly, fuzzy around the edges, and motionless. Awake, she remained silent. After two weeks, since she wasn’t violent, she was allowed to have visitors.
3
D’Artagnan was waiting for Tanya in the special room provided for the purpose, with a steel bolt on its door, a little observation window for the woman who supervised the visits, and no furniture except for two chairs. There was also an acrid smell that was instantly familiar to him from his childhood and his time in the army: the smell of urine and of lime scattered around the toilet holes in the latrine floor.
“What have you got there?” a voice in the observation window growled.
D’Artagnan opened his briefcase and took out something wrapped in newspaper.
“Just pajamas,” he said as he pulled at the wrapping.
“What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know the rules? No clothes from home are permitted! Germs!”
D’Artagnan returned the pajamas to his briefcase and fastened its clasp.
“What is allowed in here? Things to eat, maybe?”
“That depends. Generally speaking, the lunatics have everything they need.”
“Take me home,” Tanya said to her husband when she finally came into the visiting room. The tie strings on her hospital gown had been ripped off, so she held the two halves of it together with he
r hands, trying to keep herself covered, and d’Artagnan saw the triangle of her flat chest under the flimsy prison-coloured garment.
“Take me home, I beg you. They’re giving me insulin shots.” She started to cry and he wanted to put his arms around her, but she smelled so bad that he couldn’t bring himself to.
And then he didn’t visit her again for two weeks. When he did reappear, a bar of chocolate in one hand and his briefcase in the other, he was stunned by how much she had changed.
It was as if the disease for which she had been confined had finally emerged, forcing the real Tanya out and enclosing in a greasy, gelatinous shell whatever slow, listless semblance of her was left.
D’Artagnan took some documents from his briefcase. He was filing for divorce on the grounds of Tanya’s diagnosis of schizophrenia.
“By the way, Zoe’s moving in with me next week. We packed all your stuff in some suitcases. It’ll sit in the storeroom until you return. No need to worry about it.”
Tanya didn’t say a word or even glance through the documents. She took the pen d’Artagnan held out to her and with unbending fingers signed them.
“Here, press again, press harder. So they won’t find fault with it,” he said.
4
The student Vitaly Markov had in the meantime been expelled from the institute. Since the administration had been unable to engineer a unanimous Young Communist League vote for the purpose, he was given a failing grade on the final exam in Dialectical Materialism. This automatically terminated his enrolment without a degree. A valuable worker, he was still able to hold onto his part-time job for a while. The news of his expulsion and the reason for it hadn’t got out yet.
Even when the first warning call did come from the institute, his boss hesitated. It took a second one to convince him. “I won’t give you a bad reference, if you ever need one,” he said as he stared out the window. “But it’s the best I can do.”
They didn’t want to let Vitaly into the hospital. “It’s not visiting hours, and it isn’t permitted anyway!” the receptionist at the front desk cut him short.
“I’ll only visit her a minute and then come right back.”
“But I told you, it isn’t permitted! What’s your relationship to her?”
“She’s my sister,” Vitaly said, handing the receptionist an opened box of candy with a ten-ruble note placed between the tissue covering the candy and the lid with its picture of the Kremlin.
“Well, all right, go ahead, then,” the receptionist said, quickly moving the candy out of sight behind her desk. “She won’t last much longer, your sister.”
For several days Tanya’s temperature had been elevated. Dusk fell early now, and just before sunset she would grow anxious and toss and turn, moaning and whimpering.
And then through the barred window of her ward, she saw snow falling. It came unusually early this year, in September. Against the visible patch of clotted bluish sky, it looked like handfuls of pebbly grey flour had been hurled down. The old woman in the bed next to Tanya’s howled and swore obscenely, then snivelled like a little child calling for its mama, while white-gowned shapes hovered over her. But then they left and everything grew quiet. And then in the stillness Tanya made out the outline of a man sitting on the edge of her bed. It was Vitaly.
“How did you get in here?” she asked, feeling the apparition’s hand on hers.
“I told them you were my sister. I hope you don’t mind. In spirit, you are.” The apparition added softly: “It’s nice to see you, Tanya!”
“You, too . . . ” she slurred but with a vaguely caressing gaze.
The extreme pallor of her swollen face struck him.
“You need some fresh air. Don’t they take you for walks in the yard?”
“That isn’t the reason . . . It’s from the injections, I think.” He was surprised by how hoarse her voice had become. He remembered the high-pitched girlish one calling out to people to respect their own constitution.
“You’ll get better, Tanya, you’ll see.” He picked up her hand. It was burning hot. The pulse was racing.
“You have quite a fever,” he said, trying to hide his anguish.
“Yes, I always do in the evening. Soon it will all be over with.”
“Oh, don’t say that, Tanya! Sure, the situation here is harsh, and it isn’t any wonder you have thoughts like that. But you’ll certainly get better! I’ve brought you something to eat.” And careful not to attract the attention of the other people in the ward, he took some mandarin oranges from his pocket.
“Mandarins! Where did you get them?” she said.
“Shall I peel one for you? You need the vitamin C to get your strength back.”
She weakly nodded.
“Do you know that you have the most beautiful eyes?” he said. “I’ve never seen eyes like yours. Like lapis lazuli, only not as dark.”
“Like what?”
“Actually, I’m not sure myself. Maybe I’m pronouncing it wrong. All I know is that it’s a very beautiful blue. Once I was on a ship in the Baltic. And I went out on the deck just before dawn. It was completely quiet, and the sea was very, very calm, almost motionless, and silver-grey, just like the sky above it, so that you couldn’t really tell where the water ended and the sky began. And then the sun came up and broke though the grey haze, and the water turned a soft light-blue. Your eyes are just like the mysterious blue of the sea that morning.”
She pressed his hand in response and he fell silent from embarrassment.
“What made you come today, Vitaly?” she asked in her hoarse voice.
“They were selling the mandarins on the street today, so I bought some for my son and for you.” He lightly stroked her fingers again. “But can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Why did you do it? That is, take my side? I’ll never forget that you did.”
“Oh, that. . .” She sighed and her lips formed something like a little smile. “When God stops working miracles, someone has to do it for Him, don’t you think?”
THE SECRET VERMONT LABS
A STITCH IN time saves nine, the proverb goes. But we paid no attention to folk’s wisdom.
“But how were we supposed to know?”
“There were signs all over the place,” the language department head said his right eyebrow twitching, a sure sign of his displeasure. “You should have noticed.”
In hindsight, I have to agree. She left more than a few traces and clues. But we were people of good will and trusting by nature.
So we gave her the benefit of the doubt. Which was foolish, since something had seemed off to us from the moment she came through our office door. My own view was that she must have had a good connection — a hairy paw, as we call it — in some high place to saunter in like that. With hardly a nod, let alone a smile. With a severe profile and black hair hanging spade-like down her back. And bangs cut straight across her forehead. Sturdy looking, as if made of bristle. Clear, pale skin. Squinty feline eyes. Arrogant aquiline nose always tilted at a disdainful angle. Pencil-thin and flat-chested, an assortment of sharp angles: chin, collar bone, elbows. Wiggling her almost non-existent derrière in a sly, even arch way, that was embarrassing to see. Bangles, five or six of them on each arm, clicking as she moved, and the swishing of her flared skirt. Was she an Armenian? A Georgian? A Gypsy? We had no idea.
Azelea Butikova-Armand. What kind of name was that? How could you have such a name if it was not as camouflage? Azelea! What was it, a garden plant? A species of African antelope, perhaps? But certainly not an appropriate name for a Soviet instructor of French! Most definitely not! And then Butikova . . . What did that mean? Booties of some kind that nobody ever wears? Or that idle ladies of the past pulled on over their fancy evening footwear to protect it from nasty weather when they went to the opera? Does that mean her ancestors were
shoemakers? Or was the name just part of the deception? And Armand? It fell, after the hyphen, like brick on your head: Armand! Who hadn’t heard of the French Communist Inessa Armand? Comrade Armand, the passionate Bolshevik and intimate of Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. Was our Azelea a relation or just named for her? That’s a question we racked our brains over. Half of us believed she was related, while the other half thought it was a hoax. In the end we couldn’t be sure, and that dumped the apples from our cart and paralyzed our thought processes.
When Lenin arrived from Switzerland in a sealed train with a secret cache of German money to finance the Bolshevik revolution, Comrade Armand had been on the train with him. Where Nadezhda Krupskaya was is covered with a veil. Some say that she shared the car with the lovers, while others say that she was even in the same compartment with them. Wherever the three were located in the car, Lenin emerged alone at Finland Station in Petrograd to make his revolution. Because the women were true revolutionaries, they didn’t quarrel in a petit-bourgeois way, with tufts of hair flying in every direction. They showed respect. When you’re blazing with a desire to reshape the world (a desire they all shared), there is no room for jealousy left in your heart.
Having the busiest schedule on earth as the leader of the world proletariat, Lenin was nevertheless both very humane and a stickler for detail. He personally turned up at Armand’s front door with galoshes wrapped in a newspaper under is arm. Well, perhaps he did sent the galoshes through the NKVD of the Russian Federation. I’ll give you that. But it isn’t the point! The point is that he cared! But could it be that he cared too much? Wasn’t it overshooting the mark to personally write that woman 150 letters while the whole world was holding its breath for his next directive? In other words, did Comrade Armand deserve such thoughtful attention from the leader of the World Revolution?
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