The Big Green Tent (25 page)

Valentina was seated next to Olga. She looked neither to the left nor to the right; her eyes remained fixed on her plate. Suddenly, she turned to her niece and said, “I'm going to leave soon, Olga. I'm spending the night here in town, with a girlfriend of mine. But I've brought something to give you. It's our family…”

This took Olga by surprise, but she stood up from the table and led her aunt into her mother's study. Her mother had spent the better part of her life here, sleeping seldom and working long hours, writing about weavers, carders, and milkmaids, drafting reports and speeches, composing official orders and reprimands. She once wrote a novel for which she almost received the Stalin Prize. The ancient typewriter with its faux leather cover, which the writer lovingly called “the martyr,” stood in the middle of the table like a tiny coffin. It was an Underwood. Next to it stood an iron receptacle for writing utensils depicting a muscular laborer, a bust of Tolstoy, and a photograph of herself—the most flattering picture ever taken of her: a girl in a leather jacket, her lips firmly compressed.

Antonina had not permitted any of her husband's antique furniture in her study. Everything was from the Stalin era. The massive objects even bore small metal tags in their intimate folds, attesting to their origins at the state distribution center. The writer had also died on the leather government-issue divan.

After her mother died, Olga promptly removed the mattress from the divan, and Kostya took it to the dump. She threw away the medicine bottles and paraphernalia. All that was left was the smell.

Valentina Naumovna entered her sister's room and was surprised at how uninhabited it looked, though she kept her surprise to herself. There were three official portraits on the wall: a large one of Lenin with a log, and two smaller ones, of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky. She sat on the edge of the leather divan and placed her briefcase neatly across her lap.

Mama had the very same briefcase
, Olga noted. Her aunt was shorter than her mother, but she had the same long nose and desiccated appearance. She was dressed in a similar fashion—a worn-out sweater over a gray blouse, and a skirt covered in cat hair.

I should give her Mama's clothes—her fur, her raincoat
, Olga thought.

“Olga, I really don't know whether your mother would approve of this … most likely she wouldn't. But I've decided to give you the family photographs I've managed to save.”

Well, that's a solemn beginning … oh, and shoes, too. The fur-lined boots Mama brought back from Yugoslavia fifteen years ago—I can't forget to give her those.

Meanwhile, Valentina fiddled with the lock on the briefcase, and then extracted from an envelope a diminutive packet wrapped in newsprint.

“This is, so to speak, our family archive—everything that has survived.” She carefully unfolded each layer of the newsprint, one after the other, until the photographs were visible. Then she stood up and laid out one cardboard-framed picture from a pre-Revolutionary photography studio and two faded amateur photos.

“I've written on the back, very lightly in pencil, who they are, and when…” She gently smoothed over the photograph glued to the cardboard. The other photos had rolled up into a tube, and she pressed them flat. “If I don't give them to you and Kostya now, there will be no successors to remember our forebears.”

Forebears? Successors? What is she talking about? Mama told me that she had been orphaned when she was little. She didn't know her relatives; the ones she could remember had all either perished or simply died off.

“This was our father, Naum Ignatievich, with our mother. Your grandfather and grandmother, that is.” Her gnarled old woman's finger tapped the edge of the photograph. In an armchair sat a priest with a mane of hair down to his shoulders and beard almost to his waist. He had black eyebrows that looked almost as though they had been pasted on. Behind his chair stood a pretty woman in a dark headscarf, tied simply, in the style of the common folk, and wearing a fine silk frock, decorated around the collar with what looked like beadwork. Next to the father were three boys, and with the mother, two little tykes. She held one toddler in her arms. The second was holding the hand of a dark-eyed young girl with a stern, matronly expression on her face.

“Our mother, Tatiana Anisimovna—her maiden name was Kamyshina—was also from a clerical family. Her father was the inspector of the Nizhegorodsky Seminary. All of us, from the very beginning, were in the Church—grandfathers, great-grandfathers, uncles.”

“Mama never told me…” Olga whispered, her voice faltering.

“That's why. They were all priests,” her aunt said, nodding, still pointing at the sepia cardboard picture. “My father, Naum Ignatievich, looked like his mother, Praskovya. She had dark eyes and black hair. She was of Greek origin, also from a line of priests. After Praskovya, the line was ruined and the Greek strain of black hair and eyes appeared.”

“Mama told me nothing about this.”

“Of course she didn't. She couldn't. She was afraid. I'll tell you everything I know. When Antonina was little, she always helped around the house. She was a good girl. At first she was the only girl among five brothers. There were three older boys and two younger ones. She took care of the younger ones. Andrei and Panteleimon both took after our mother, with their light hair. And they both died in the same year, in exile. She was ten years older than me—I was born in 1915. I wasn't born yet when this picture was taken. But I remember how your mother would feed me and dress me when I was little. She was very good, very kind,” her aunt repeated several times.

Valentina smoothed over the formal portrait. The amateur photographs had rolled up into a tube again.

“In 1920, our father, Naum Ignatievich, who was a priest at the church in Kosmodemyansk, was sent into exile.” She let her finger rest on the girl with the stern face, whose hand was placed on the shoulder of the small child. “I don't really remember my parents. Most of what I know, Aunt Katya has told me. I saw my father for the last time in 1925, when he returned from exile. By that time Mama had already died. Aunt Katya took me to see him.”

“Who is Aunt Katya?” Olga looked at her mother's sister and realized suddenly that she was not at all dowdy and shabby. She was quiet and calm, and her diction was very correct, even impeccable.

“Aunt Katya, Mama's sister, Ekaterina Anisimovna Kamyshina, took me in as a small child, after our parents were sent into exile. Pyotr and Seraphim were already big lads; they renounced the old ways immediately, and weren't exiled. Nikolai went with Father. By that time he had already finished seminary and was serving as deacon in a small settlement on the Volga. He's wearing a cassock in the photograph; he was still studying. He was ordained, became a priest, then disappeared in the labor camps. I don't know what year it was, I don't know anything more about him. Katya had lost touch with him. The two younger boys, Andrei and Panteleimon, went into exile with our parents. Both of them died.”

“And Mama?” Olga had already guessed what she was about to hear.

“Antonina followed her brothers' example. She left home at fifteen. Pyotr and Seraphim had already left for Astrakhan before her. They all renounced their father the priest when they were there. They put a notice in the newspaper saying that now Lenin was their father, and the Party was their mother.”

The girl in the leather jacket looked out on them from her frame, confirming that this was true.

“What became of Grandfather?”

“Five years in exile in the Arkhangelsk region; after that he returned to Kosmodemyansk. In 1928 they sent him to prison, and then released him one more time. In 1934, he disappeared for good. Katya was never able to trace his whereabouts. Katya and I went to see your mother in 1937. We begged her on bended knee to intervene, to help find out where he was. But Antonina said that there was nothing to find out.”

There was a polite knock at the door, which stood ajar, and Ari Lvovich poked his head in to say good-bye. In the living room, everyone was talking quietly at the table. With Zoya, the neighbor, Tamara discussed the mysterious illness that had abandoned Olga and had migrated to Antonina Naumovna. Zoya asked Kostya about Ilya. Despite being on very friendly terms with the neighbor, whenever the subject of her ex-husband was broached, Olga pretended that she hadn't heard the question.

Olga thanked the funeral director. He nodded deferentially. When he was already by the door, tipping his lush fur hat, he bowed with aristocratic aplomb and said in a dignified manner:

“At your service, Olga Afanasievna. Always at your service.”

Brainless idiot. As though his services are in such high demand
, she thought. While she was walking down the hall, she was bracing herself to hear more of what she could already anticipate: exile, arrest, persecution, execution.

But Aunt Valentina said nothing of the kind. She unrolled the two faded photographs: one showed an old man with an oversize jacket hanging off him. He was standing by a wicker fence with two earthenware pots affixed to its posts, and his face was such that it took Olga's breath away. On the other one, he appeared again, this time in a black cassock. He was sitting at a table covered with a tablecloth. In the middle of the table was a small white mound of Easter curd cheese, and a plate with three dark eggs.

“This was from Easter of 1934. Evidently he had served at Easter matins.”

They sat and mused silently. Then Valentina wrapped everything up in the newsprint and put it back in the envelope.

“Olga, I have no one else to leave these to. You and your Kostya are the only ones left from our family. I really don't know you at all. Perhaps you don't want these photographs at all. I've saved them my whole life. First Aunt Katya had them, then me.”

“I'll take them, of course, Aunt Valentina. Thank you. How terrible it all was, though!” Olga took the envelope from her knotted old hands and her aunt immediately began getting ready to leave.

“Well, I must be going. I've stayed longer than I had planned already. I have to make it to Teply Stan.”

“Aunt Valentina, what about your older brothers? How did they fare?”

“Pyotr took to drink. Seraphim disappeared without a trace in the war. Pyotr, it seems, had a family, but his wife left him, taking the daughter with her. I don't know whether Seraphim left anyone behind when he went to war or not.”

“What a story. But come back to visit us. I'd like to give you some of Mama's things…” And she faltered, because the expression on Aunt Valentina's face was such that it was impossible to bring up the Yugoslavian boots. “I'll call you, I'll be in touch,” Olga murmured, trying to kiss her aunt's cheek, and kissing her gray knitted cap instead, as she led her to the front door. “We'll certainly see each other again, and you will tell me everything you can remember.”

“Yes, yes, child, of course. Only don't be angry with your mother. Those were terrifying times. Terrifying. Indeed, all of us were orphans. Now we all live so well…”

Kostya stood behind his mother, unable to understand why she had suddenly lost her nerve and broken down in tears; the whole day she had shown such admirable self-control. Olga went back into her mother's study. Again she laid out the photographs, which seemed to have floated up out of the abyss of oblivion.

Her mother was no more—her mother, who had long ago turned into a brittle shell of a human being, into a pile of sterile habits and mechanical phrases. And in her place there was now a stranger with a beautiful, expressive face, who had survived betrayal by his adolescent offspring, the death of his wife and his little children, prison, and who knows what else. The dim photograph with the Easter feast opened her eyes. Olga, tears streaming down her face, sat in her mother's study, undergoing a sea change the likes of which she had never known before. She felt like a shoot, slashed off with a knife, then grafted to the parent tree, which was her grandfather Naum, and all those myriad bearded men, with their long locks of hair, both village and townsmen, scholarly and not especially scholarly priests, their women and children, both good and not especially good. She couldn't find words to explain the upheaval that was taking place inside her. And Ilya, who would have been able to find the precise words, who would have known how to put everything in its proper perspective, wasn't there.

The B trolleybus, its rods hooked up to the wires above, rattling, pulled out from around the corner. Ari Lvovich quickened his pace: the trolleybuses ran infrequently during the late-evening hours. He had already forgotten about today's deceased. One of the secretaries of the Writers' Union was now at death's door. Ari was already planning the pompous funeral solemnities. He hoped it would happen during the week so he could go to the dacha on Friday. He was hurrying home to his young wife. Ten years earlier, a newly minted widower, he had met the wonderful, tender Klara at one of his funerals and had fallen in love. He had married her, and a new daughter, Emma, was born. He felt he had been granted a fresh life, a happier life—so that it was almost impossible to imagine he would ever have to die. And he had been on such close terms with death for such a long time that he served her not out of fear, but out of duty and compunction. Hadn't he earned a rebate?

Maybe I'll live until ninety-five, like my grandfather. And why not? I have adult grandchildren, thanks to my eldest daughter, Vera, from my first marriage. Great-grandchildren will be here before you know it. And if I make it to ninety-five, I'll live to see Emma's children, too. And why not? My health is good, knock on wood, I have an excellent job—a good income, as well as respect. And the work is interesting; it feeds the soul. Yes, it would be a good thing if the secretary—a rogue if there ever was one, by the way—died not today, and not tomorrow, and not even on Monday, but would hold out until Tuesday. Then everything could be organized without any rush, and it would all be over and done with before Friday. And the wake could be held in the Oak Hall, with a table set for one hundred guests.