The Big Green Tent (24 page)

He went up the back stairs, knocked on the wall and waited at the door, expecting her to come to undo the latch. He waited for what seemed a long time, but she didn't open the door. He knocked again—he ought to have telephoned, at least. But they weren't in the habit of calling each other. Sophia Markovna still didn't trust the telephone, though times had changed.

I'll try the front entrance
, Afanasy decided, and he went back out into the courtyard.

The bus, its windows draped in black, was performing a difficult maneuver, trying to pull right up to the front entrance of the building. People holding flowers leapt aside to make way.

A hearse
, Afanasy noted impassively.

And, at almost the same moment, he was struck with alarm: Who had died?

And, right away, he knew it was Sophia Markovna.

He looked at the window farthest from the entrance—at that very moment it flew open, as though confirming what he had already guessed. The two halves of the large entrance door were propped open, and an enormous, plain coffin was carried out, not in the proper way, feet first, but head first. And the head, propped up high on a pillow, was that very same beautiful head, with a pale yellow face and red-painted lips. And the sweet smell assaulted his nostrils.

The general started to reel, and his legs began crumpling underneath him. Someone grabbed him, breaking his fall. They put smelling salts under his nose, and he came to. The face of the woman he saw standing before him looked familiar, for some reason. She was of the same stamp as Sophia Markovna—a noble head, large, dark-brown eyes, shoulders almost as broad as a man's. But, of course, it was her sister, Anna Markovna—Annie.

“You! You!” She spat the words out with quiet rage. “What are you doing here? How dare you? Get out of here! Get out!”

And he did. He didn't witness the custom-made coffin—ready-made coffins for people of her girth were not available—being stuffed, with great effort, into the back of the bus, or her many Jewish relatives piling in behind it. Nor did he see his two former colleagues, with whom Sophia Markovna had kept up relations after her return from Karaganda.

They saw him, however, and exchanged glances with each other. For a long time afterward they would prattle about him, and about Sophia; they would surmise all kinds of things. They would finally conclude that Sophia Markovna had tried to pull the wool over their eyes with stories about her high blood pressure, about her advancing years and her loneliness, when all the time she had been secretly carrying on with her retired lover. They thought hard about it, and did the calculations. Since 1935—that meant they had been together for thirty-two years, not counting the years of forced separation.

The general, crushing a whisk of mimosa in his bluish fist, walked to the trolleybus. It turned out that Sophia had known everything. And had forgiven him.

 

ORPHANS ALL

The funeral was a sad and bitter affair. Not, however, due to tears and sobbing, loss and grief, or even, perhaps, regret accompanied by a sense of guilt. Rather the contrary. Not one of the mourners shed so much as a tear; there was no sadness, nor even sympathy. Their slightly benumbed faces expressed the decorum appropriate to the occasion. The absolute indifference to the death of the literary worker among those who attended the funeral did not go unnoticed by Ari Lvovich Bas, who officiated at these events of the Union of Writers. He had been organizing funerals for sixty of his seventy-four years. It was the family business. His grandfather had been the head of the funeral guild in Grodno. Ari Lvovich knew his craft down to the smallest detail. Not only was he one of the foremost experts in the dying profession of burial, he was also a poet of this ancient trade.

He was a consummate master of ceremonies, and he had laid to rest all the great writers: Alexei Tolstoy, Alexander Fadeev, even Gorky himself (though his contribution was minor) … The first big funerals he had a hand in, still not as the main organizer, but as the first assistant, were in the 1930s. That was when he first met Antonina Naumovna. He remembered her. Oh, how well he remembered!

On that day in April, he was called to take the measurements of someone recently deceased, a suicide. Ari went to Gendrikov Lane, but it turned out to be the wrong address. The well-known poet had shot himself somewhere else, on the Lubyanka, where his office was. On Gendrikov Lane, instead of the deceased poet, Ari found two men from the Political Directorate, and this very Antonina, also some sort of writer.

The men were seizing papers and wrenching them out of a desk, and she was writing something down. A man with a thick head of hair looked up at Ari, his insolent gypsy eyes flashing fire—beat it! Ari, scared half to death, turned on his heels and rushed downstairs, recovering his composure only when he was outside again. Seasoned by his profession, he did not fear the dead. It was the living he feared. Two hours later they brought the body, carried it on a stretcher up to the fourth floor, and only when the three men, armed with two briefcases, had left the building did Ari go upstairs to the apartment again.

Several people, among them two women, stood in the corridor. One of the women was weeping desperately. The door to the room had been flung wide open, and two people were standing next to it. They were bickering about the seal, which one of them had just removed from the door. The other one said:

“You'll pay for this. You're not supposed to go inside—that's why it was sealed.”

The other one snarled back crudely:

“Well, where in the hell should we put the deceased? In the hallway? Why are you such a chickenshit about every little seal? I've got my orders—put the body where it belongs!”

Ari measured the body—six feet, three inches. The coffin would have to be custom-built.

The funeral was unprecedented. Thousands of people packed into Vorovsky Street, and then the whole crowd followed on foot to Donskoi Monastery behind the truck carrying the coffin and a single wreath, a bizarre iron monstrosity of a thing fashioned from random parts, hammers and sickles. And not a single flower. The funeral was strange and magnificent, truly magnificent. Never before had he witnessed such an outpouring of public grief. Never before nor after. Except perhaps thirty years later when Pasternak died.

Ari became firmly established in his profession. Now not a single person from the ranks of writers was buried without him. Provided the death occurred in the environs of Moscow. After the war he constantly ran into Antonina, either in the honor guard next to writers' coffins, or among the eulogists.

As a young man, he could never have imagined how many people he would end up burying. Ari loved all his deceased. The deceased were the only ones he read. He never got around to reading them, not to mention loving them, while they were still alive. But again, their true stature would only be determined at their funerals.

Antonina, now—it turned out she was a nobody. Zilch. And hardly anyone attended the funeral: six people in all. Her daughter, Olga; her grandson, Kostya, with his wife; a friend of her daughter's; her neighbor from across the hall; and the sister of the deceased, Valentina, whom the family hadn't seen in about ten years. The daughter seemed very pleased with herself. She had made amends with her mother toward the end, she fulfilled her obligations down to the last detail—moreover, Antonina had died quietly, without excessive suffering, under the effects of morphine. And there had been no love lost between them for quite some time, it must be said.

On this day, Ari Lvovich, it seemed, was suffering more than anyone else. He hadn't seen such a paltry funeral in a long time. Antonina Naumovna was buried according to the official Writers' Union rituals. The coffin lay in state in the Central House of Writers, where actual public wakes took place, sometimes up to a thousand people. She was placed in the Minor Hall, which was all but empty. There were neither friends, nor officials. The new editor of the magazine couldn't stand her predecessor and called a meeting so that her editorial board would be prevented from attending the funeral. She did send a wreath through her elderly secretary, however. It was made of funerary fir branches and decorated with white ribbons, reading “From the Collective.” Ari Lvovich delivered the official eulogy, a skill he had long since acquired, saying that the departed had been a true Communist and loyal Leninist. He also gave the family a chance to bid their farewells.

Then the coffin was removed to Donskoi Crematorium. The secretary didn't accompany it, prevented by the infirmities of age. The coffin was placed on a special pedestal, and at this height Antonina Naumovna's gray face, with its sunken mouth and prominent nose, looked like it was made of cardboard. Music played until she had sunk through an opening in the floor, and the doors to the subterranean realm folded shut.

Kostya held his arm around his mother and could feel through her coat how narrow her shoulders were, how small she was, and how infinitesimal the span of a human life was—even a life as long as his grandmother's. And how sad was the funeral of a person whom no one loved, or pitied …

They threw her away like an old felt boot on a garbage heap
, Kostya thought bitterly. He acknowledged that he hadn't loved his grandmother, either.

After the coffin was consigned to the artificial underworld, Ari Lvovich pressed Olga's and Kostya's hands and said that if they wished to submit a request for material assistance, he would see to it that it landed on the right desk.

After the cremation, it would be two weeks before they could pick up the urn.

Why can't she go into the ground right away?
Kostya wondered.
Who knows where she'll be for the next two weeks? It's like they'll be taking her to a left-luggage room.

*   *   *

Olga invited everyone home to a wake for the deceased. Her daughter-in-law, Lena, had rushed off early to tend to the small children. Ari Lvovich considered it his duty to be in attendance until the late evening, and he opened the door of the bus, admitting the dreary women. Kostya got in last. He had wanted to sit with his mother, but she was already seated next to the newly arrived aunt. The aunt was younger than Antonina Naumovna, but she had similar features and a sharp nose. Ari Lvovich looked out the window. He had a lot to think about.

Olga had set the table before leaving home. Her mother's body had been taken directly to the morgue after she died, and Olga had had plenty of time to put the house in order, airing out all the rooms. Even after three days had passed, however, the smell of medicine still overpowered the smell of resin and floor polish.

They all sat down at the long, oval table, which had been restored by Afanasy Mikhailovich, and Olga, placing her clean hands on the rough linen tablecloth, suddenly felt a pang of longing for her father. She remembered his fleshy nose, his slightly protruding upper lip, his boyish seriousness when he was busy with his woodworking at the dacha, and the smell of furniture polish and wood shavings that always clung to him. This was toward the end of his life, when he was already retired. Because of her own foolishness, that whole mess at the university … Her mother had been beside herself with fury, and had screamed in rage; her father, impassive, his eyes closed, had observed a strict silence. He had remained silent—and just as silently had gone into retirement.

“Father, Father,” Olga whispered.

Tamara, who was sitting next to her, heard. A perceptive soul, she understood the words in her own way. She whispered:

“Yes, Olga. I also think that your parents have found each other there and are reunited.”

Ari Lvovich, examining the valuable furnishings restored by Afanasy Mikhailovich with a trained eye, revised his estimation of the family's status. Empire furniture was fashionable in prosperous households, and he hadn't expected to see such rarities in the home of the deceased, a simple Party functionary. Very, very interesting. Holding back just to be sure that no one more significant would take the initiative, he stood up:

“Let us drink, according to old custom, to dear Antonina Naumovna. Don't clink glasses, don't clink glasses!”

Everyone drank. Kostya took a sip, then put down his glass. He didn't like vodka. He would have preferred wine, but no one offered him any.

Olga drank her glass and grew tipsy almost immediately. The warmth from the alcohol rose to her head, then dropped to her feet, and she seemed to go soft and limp. She sat, resting her haggard cheek on her palm. Her freckles grew more vivid, and her face grew rosy and more youthful. Her hair, which had fallen out completely after her long course of chemotherapy, was growing back again. It was new, fresh growth that even curled above her forehead a bit, and the color—the dark, lustrous amber of Easter eggs dyed with onion skins—was the same as it had been before the terrible treatment.

Her friend Tamara, surprised by her new loveliness, rejoiced: Olga had risen up again, she had revived after her grave illness. And she also thought:
Antonina Naumovna took Olga's illness into herself.
These were Tamara's new thoughts, flowing seamlessly from her Orthodox mindset. Now she no longer viewed all the movements of life, the turns and twists of fate, as random or fortuitous, but as though they were filled with meaning, unequivocally purposeful and wise.

Olga's thoughts moved in another direction altogether: If she had left with Ilya, who would have been there to bury her mother? But now, after her parents had both died and Kostya had married, it was just the time to leave. How much longer would she have to wait until she and Ilya were together again?

Valentina, Antonina Naumovna's sister, sat timidly off to the side. Her appearance was not exactly provincial and backward—just somewhat homely and simple. She lived in Protvino, sixty miles from Moscow, a scientific research town. And she was not at all the cleaning lady or housekeeper she resembled, but a respected biologist with a Ph.D. Olga did not know this, however. She only recalled that her mother had not had a very high regard for her, and had spoken, not without mockery, about the sheep to which her sister had devoted her whole life. And this was true. Valentina had graduated from a veterinary college. But her older sister, a big Party boss, clearly viewed this with contempt.