Good People (31 page)

Since their wedding, they had exchanged only a few broken sentences about the twins. After she began working in Styopa's department, she learned that Maxim was less senior than he had hinted—but still he could have done more for them. For too long they had pretended everything was normal as if, as the weeks and months went by, she would have to accept the separation from Kolya and Vlada, and become used to guessing every morning whether they were dead or alive. Until finally she would kill them in her imagination, and they would fade in her memory, like other people who had passed away.

She choked. Was she putting a different blame on him now, a crueller blame—her own?

‘Tell me, Maxim,' she said, detaching herself from his sleeping body. As their skins separated, a peeling sound was heard. ‘You never said: did you shoot Morozovsky in the head, or was it Styopa?'

When she got up, the clock said eight-thirty, and she felt an annoying itch beneath the bandage. The urge to scratch had been irritating her for several days. Maxim asked her gently when she would get rid of the bandage, and she didn't tell him that, when the doctor said that she would have scars there, she decided she would never take it off. She'd learn to live with one hand.

The sweetish scent of his cologne filtered into her nostrils. ‘Good
morning, sleepyhead,' she heard him say as he placed the breakfast tray on the bedside table. She opened her eyes. He was sitting on the bed. ‘Maybe you don't remember. But last night you asked me a very strange question.'

She remembered how impressed she had been with his shrewdness, and she understood that he expected her to admit that she didn't remember.

‘I don't remember,' she said at last.

‘You asked me whether I shot Morozovsky.'

‘Really?' she said. ‘I must have been having nightmares.'

‘Of course,' he crowed, full of happiness because she had conceded to him. ‘It's no wonder, after the terrible thing that happened to you. No matter what, I don't want it to come between us: I didn't shoot him, it was Stepan Kristoforovich.' He looked down, as though embarrassed. ‘I would have shot him! But I didn't have a pistol in my hand—believe me, it would have been a pleasure to dip my hand in that reptile's filthy blood,' he shouted. ‘But I remembered how fond your parents were of him, and how close he was to you, and I was afraid that, even though he had attacked you like an animal, you wouldn't forgive me if his blood was on my hands.'

‘I understand. It really doesn't matter,' she said.

‘My love, let's not remember that cursed event anymore. I'm going to buy you a beautiful dress, and this evening we'll visit Semyon Emilyevich's dacha, okay?'

She didn't answer. He chose to interpret her silence as agreement and went off on his business.

She spent the whole day resting. In the evening, when Maxim returned, he lit a fire in the living room. There were stones of all sizes and colours on the mantelpiece: sharp-edged and round, rough rocks and trimmed stone, black and white, ochre and gold. With great ceremony, he handed her a box with a new dress in it, and went to set the table. He arranged delicacies on it that he had bought in a ‘disgustingly expensive, bourgeois shop' in the town centre, and produced a bottle of good wine he had received from Semyon Emilyevich.

Sasha sat at the table in the blue dress, which was cut from fine cloth to a design she liked. She complimented him on his taste. He ate fast, hardly bothering to chew; fatty grains of barley clung to his ginger moustache. She was hungry too, and helped herself to fish liver pâté and onion, and slices of bread slathered with butter and cheese. She covered a slice with a thick layer of barley, placed pickled cucumber on it, and cheerfully called out, ‘I've invented a new Russian dish. Register it now in the patent office. Does that still exist?'

Maxim seemed encouraged by the improvement in her mood. He poured more wine and then he remembered that he hadn't yet told her how, on the morning of their departure, he had gone to the office to make some final arrangements, and Stepan Kristoforovich had buttonholed him in the hallway—Maxim had the feeling that he was lying in wait for him—and invited him to his room. He served Maxim tea, and behaved with exaggerated courtesy, chatting about the New Year celebrations. ‘How about that—1940,' Maxim imitated him, ‘a new decade is cause for a big party!' He announced that he had chosen Podolsky to play him, the head of the department, in a skit that one of the imprisoned writers had written for the celebration. ‘And believe me, that poor guy sharpened his arrows and skewered me with no mercy.'

Then Stepan Kristoforovich added that he tried to intervene as little as possible in the private affairs of his workers; while marriage was a holy covenant in his view, love like that between Maxim and Sasha wasn't common around here. He lamented that young couples these days delayed having children, a grave error in his opinion because there was nothing more wonderful for a couple than a child who will always embody and rekindle the purity of their love.

‘A philosopher is sitting on the second floor, not a department head,' Sasha grumbled—she couldn't believe that Styopa would be so sentimental. She looked around. The stones on the mantel looked like babies' faces. Once, Nadyezhda Petrovna had said to her that with a little imagination anything in the world could resemble part of the human body, and that made it a lot more interesting. It was possible,
for example, to fall in love with a chimney. It was also possible to become a poet of the changing seasons, like Varlamov.

‘But there's some truth in what he says,' Maxim whispered. ‘How long have we loved each other? I've never loved another woman. If you're worried that a baby will interfere with your future, remove that concern from your heart. Stepan Kristoforovich promised me that he would put you back in your former position whenever you want, and in the morning, when you're working, my mother could—'

‘Let's talk about this later,' she interrupted him.

They went out to Semyon's dacha, plunging down the hill into the cold night winds. Their boots left tracks in the damp, slippery earth. Sasha bent down and ran her finger across it. Like touching clay. Maxim looked thoughtful, gripping the white trousers that hung off his hips, whose cuffs were stuffed into his boots. Once again she probed something that rarely surfaced in their daily routine in Leningrad: the webs of imagination that Maxim wove around their marriage, at first perhaps self-consciously, but afterwards without effort. Now a pattern had taken shape, and all his memories were stuffed into it. A child was only a matter of time, especially now that Stepan Kristoforovich was involved. The strange thing was that, as soon as he raised the question of a baby, the slight revulsion she had for him was crushed by a heavier feeling: she envied him his faith in their marriage. He was thrilled by the baby that would be born; this holiday was only a belated honeymoon for him while she was tormented by the events that led to their marriage. There was no one around her now who was truly engraved in her soul.

She imagined him repeating those inanities to their child, and felt disgusted. She remembered what he had said to her in the parking lot on the evening of the NKVD assembly: the only consistent thing in history is the terrifying elasticity of the human soul. Then she believed he was referring to human cowardice and the citizens' willingness to be reconciled with any lie, to praise someone and a week later to demand his death. Now she understood that he was describing something else: the flexibility that allowed people to lie in bed at night
and imagine or dream about the most horrible crimes, but wake up the next morning feeling that everything was fine; the flexibility that allowed Maxim to filter out every memory that would endanger the story he believed in. That elasticity was the hidden hand that smoothed out every wrinkle in the flag of truth. Sometimes blasphemous thoughts arose in people, doubts vexed them, they were bowed down by memory, but then they stood up straight and rushed at their story again and clung to it by force of a supreme command of the soul.

The walls of Semyon's dacha were covered with crimson satin, and the wooden floor was coated with burgundy lacquer. It reminded Sasha of the red room in
Jane Eyre
—hell for sinful girls is what her mother would have called it. Cigarette smoke gathered above the roulette table like a many-branched tree, in which people and their arms were moving, pushing and intertwining. Chips in a welter of colours were thrown down on the green cloth and shoved about.

Maxim was swallowed up in the smoke. She heard him call out, ‘Here he is, here's the bastard who's going to rob you all,' and she followed him as he patted people on the shoulder and sent joyful barks into the air. He disappeared, and reappeared. Apparently he had won his first bet. ‘Twenty-seven red, twenty-seven red,' he called out. Then he shouted, ‘Yes, comrade, my sister, yes, God!' Sometimes he called out things like that when they were lying together, and she surprised him with an unexpected movement.

He raked in a pile of chips and turned towards her, glowing with a sweet smile. He expected her to be happy with him, and when she didn't react, he showed surprise: Really, can't you be content, at least this evening?

A petite woman of about forty in a tight black lace dress turned away from the table and approached her. ‘Are you feeling better, dear?' she asked.

‘Feeling better?'

‘Yes,' she said brightly. ‘Your husband said you weren't feeling well, and that's why you stayed inside the dacha.'

‘Yes, much better, the air here is invigorating.'

‘Indeed, invigorating,' the woman echoed with forced gaiety. ‘And you, my dear, are you betting?'

‘I don't like gambling so much.'

‘Sometimes it can really be a soul-restoring pleasure. It might look like a volcano, definitely not recommended for people with weak hearts, but for me it's a place of wonderful tranquillity. You can concentrate on the ball for hours and all the world's troubles disappear, everything falls silent.'

‘Truly? Does roulette do that for you?' Sasha asked.

‘Truly. I always tell Semyon Emilyevich that a bet brings on the greatest calmness apart from death. Look, that's my husband.' She pointed at a small head and an amazingly long neck that rose out of a lemon-coloured sweater stretched over a pudgy body. ‘I'm Evelina Sergeyevna.' Her eyes were fixed on the bandage. ‘My dear, I have to say: you still look a little ill.'

She showered Sasha with advice about the remedial effect of elderberries, and went back to the roulette table.

Maxim approached her, a bit sweaty. ‘Luck is on my side tonight,' he panted. He seemed to have pardoned her already. That was how he was: his anger was short, and he didn't bear grudges. ‘All the time, red and red. I won't bet on black…that Evelina Sergeyevna is a fine woman,' he added. ‘She told me—apparently she didn't want to embarrass you—your bandage is unravelling, and the wound can get infected. She has bandages and antiseptic.'

Sasha looked at the bandage: the woman was right. ‘Tomorrow morning I'll take care of it.'

‘Great.' He gave her a hug. ‘It's not as if I haven't changed a few bandages in my life, but in these matters women prefer other women.' He hurried back to the roulette.

‘I met a wrinkled Circassian man,' Evelina Sergeyevna said in a clamorous, drunken voice. ‘He begged me to lend him money. His little boy was at his side. I asked: When will you return it? And he drew a picture of a house, and the boy, who can't have been more than eight, shouted: Give me your address and the money. We swear we'll
send it back.'

‘Those Circassians really are a nuisance,' called out Semyon, who was now standing next to his wife and coughing heavily. ‘They do nothing all day long, and they bequeath their laziness to their children.' ‘Yes,' exclaimed the woman, almost shouting, ‘I did want to help them, and bought a few bracelets that were supposedly made of copper, but they broke the same day.'

‘They're made of copper the way the mountains here are made of gold. They just saw a generous, good-hearted citizen and decided to exploit her,' responded a handsome man in a stylish dinner jacket. He had an arrogant, embittered look (with types like him—she had already interrogated a few—the bitterness was always connected to money).

‘It's impossible to talk with them. They live in a stagnant world!' Semyon shouted. ‘They don't want to integrate into society, and they have no interest in any of our values.'

‘Exactly,' Maxim trumpeted. His hair was unkempt, and his sideburns looked thick and scraggly. ‘I say: we have to teach them a lesson once and for all.'

The old, wild tone was back. How many times had she heard Podolsky as a boy, shouting, ‘We have to teach them a lesson!' His new, respectable look hid the violence in him, but apparently everything you are is always sizzling somewhere in your soul. Was she speculating about his personality again? He was constantly revealing contradictory character traits, and it was hard to put all the particles together into a consistent structure, a single person. She compared him to a Ferris wheel: at any moment some feature of his character shone high on top, and you thought, here at last is the essential Podolsky, but that man disappeared at once, and from up there a different person was waving to you.

‘I say, let's wake them up with a little lead over their huts, and then maybe they'll understand that it's time for a change,' shouted the man in the dinner jacket, urbane and aggressive.

‘Their village is too far away for rifles,' said Podolsky.

‘Even better, we'll fire in their direction. Semyon Emilyevich, are
you with me?' It was clear that he intended to stir his friends up; actually he was making fun of them.

‘Yes,' Semyon grunted. ‘We'll send some bullets their way. It's been two days since we did any shooting. We were told there were partridges here, but there aren't. Let's wake up those fakirs.'