The Big Green Tent (30 page)

She thought and thought. She decided she couldn't keep them inside the house, either; instead, she took them to the outhouse. There was a high shelf, right up by the ceiling, draped with cobwebs. No one ever looked up there. Two empty paint cans had been left on the shelf and forgotten. Masha checked the surface to make sure it was dry. It was: a sturdy sheet of tar paper covered the roof of the outhouse, and even hung over the side.

I'll get a job,
Masha thought.
I'll earn some money and send it to Grandpa, and no one will ever know. Winter will come, and I'll be wearing my boots! And college? Well, I'll just apply to get in the following year.

This was the revolution that happened in Masha's head in the space of one day. And even her heart felt lighter. She had graduated from high school, almost with honors. She had planned to enroll in college right away, and get married, and eventually get an apartment in Moscow so as not to be a burden to her mother and her uncle. But the boots pushed back all her plans by a year. She shoved the box back into the very corner of the shelf, and put the empty paint cans back in front of it. No one would ever find it there.

Artur and her mother didn't get home until much later. They had gone all the way to Pushkino, to a big store where they'd bought the wallpaper and paste, and whitewash for the ceiling and windows. They returned toward evening. Shura was happy, beaming like a copper kettle. She bustled in, carrying the big rolls of wallpaper by herself. Artur followed leisurely behind, with a weary and perpetually good-natured air.

A lord
, Masha thought disapprovingly.

Before they had even managed to bring all their purchases into the house, some uninvited visitors barged in: three in uniform, two in plainclothes. They asked for Korolev, Artur Ivanovich. The senior officer, with a bleached-out face, showed his ID, then pulled out a piece of paper and shoved it under Artur's nose.

Artur sat down in his armchair, smiling a bland smile.

“Get on with it! Go ahead, get to work, fellows. Shura, you prepare some food for us. While these people work, we'll have something to eat.”

*   *   *

The search lasted almost twelve hours, from half past four until three in the morning. They climbed into the attic, they crawled under the floorboards, they tapped on all the walls. They went out to the gazebo and broke down the wall. They threw all the lumber out of the woodshed, and turned everything upside down. They peered into the outhouse and shone a flashlight inside. Artur showed them both his discharge papers and his award certificates.

“You must answer to the law,” the captain mumbled sullenly. “You have no license, you don't pay taxes. You bind all this stuff, all this anti-Soviet junk…”

Piles of secondhand books, in both new bindings and old, fraying ones, crowded the workbench.

“What do you mean, anti-Soviet?” Artur said, spreading out his enormous hands. “Hamsun, Leskov; and this is a cookbook. What kind of anti-Soviet stuff are you referring to, fellows?”

Masha was also a bit anxious. What if they found the boots on the shelf in the outhouse and decided to open a case against her?

The good fellows finished their work when it was already growing light in the east. They left with both books and bookbinding tools.

“Put on the tea, please, Shura,” Artur said.

Masha sat fretting: What if Artur was thrown in prison and she and her mother would have to go back to Ugolnoe? And would there be enough money for a plane? By train it would take four whole days and nights.

Artur crawled under the table—there had been a whole pile of books there, and now there was nothing. The searchers had turned everything inside out and upside down. Artur sat in his chair with the patched armrests and scratched his hairless pink chin in perplexity.

“I don't understand it. It must be some sort of magic, a spell! Shura, there was a copy of
The Gulag Archipelago
lying there, under the table. That's what they were after, I'm sure of it. Some bastard ratted on us. But where did it go? It was a huge packet of paper! How could it just disappear? Am I crazy?”

Well, let's say that Shura, for one, knew he was crazy. They don't just throw you in the loony bin for nothing. But Masha was already asleep, exhausted by the drama of the boots, unfortunately a tad too tight, the nocturnal search, and the happy knowledge of her secret possession.

 

THE UPPER REGISTER

The house on Potapovsky Lane had known hundreds of residents. Its walls had been covered in silk, then in empire wallpaper, striped, or scattered with roses, later in crude oil paint, green and blue, then layers of newsprint, and cheap, porous wallpaper again, repeatedly torn. Having gone through its century and a half of wealth and poverty, birth and death, murder and marriage, densification and communalization, remodeling that only made things worse, trifling fires and petty floods, the house had begun to adorn itself in the 1960s with Czech furniture and three-cornered tables. The house existed in its own slow, incremental, virtually geological time; and only one room—the yardkeeper's storeroom under the stairwell on the first floor—had preserved its primordial aspect and purpose: the walls were bare exposed brick, never even plastered, just as they had been right after the house was built; and, as of old, it was full of brooms, crowbars, and pails of sand. It also had a hose, lying in coils—its prize possession. The storeroom was locked with a padlock. The mammoth iron padlock could have defended much more valuable goods than these, but Ryzhkov, the yardkeeper, well known in the neighborhood for his fierce expression and his exceptional bowleggedness, loved sturdy, enduring things, and among them, he particularly loved his sixteen-pound padlock. His granddaughter Nadia had to struggle with the lock, poking and prodding it, every time she took a young man there. Nadia loved this—that is, she loved any kind of mild struggle, the poking and prodding. She had been ignited prematurely and was given to disgraceful behavior; she couldn't even remember when she had first engaged in this fascinating activity. But by the ninth grade she was a master of the trade; and, like any master, she had her own signature and small predilections. She didn't like the grown men, who stuck to her like flies. She preferred boys. Her classmates and the neighborhood kids, often a year or two younger, were aware of her worth, always stuck up for her, and never said an unkind word about her; she was a highly prized public asset.

Nadia's grandfather rose early and went to bed with the chickens. There hadn't been any chickens for a long time, of course—but his body clock still remembered when there had been a stable in the yard of the two-story house, with two lean-to sheds, and the chickens had lived in one of them. It was at that early evening hour, when her grandfather was snoring with the long-gone chickens, that Nadia would take the key from the nail and disappear into her boudoir under the stairs for an hour or two.

There, on the armchair of Karelian birch with the broken back, in the coils of the hose, and among the brooms, many interesting things transpired. Skinny boys, sometimes too young to have broken out in pimples, tested their powers and honed their weapons for the future. Half the boys in the nearby buildings had undergone their sexual initiation here, in the yardkeeper's storeroom. It must be said that only once or twice had Nadia turned someone down, refusing them the pleasure of this simple, healthful activity.

Ilya came to her, too, taking advantage of her favors on a first-come, first-served basis.

Nadia had a weakness for virginal boys, and, with her characteristic directness, she asked Ilya now and then: “Why doesn't Steklov ever come to me? Bring him here.”

Sanya was exactly to her taste—pale, slender, with clean hands, and excessively polite.

Ilya invited Sanya to visit Nadia. Blushing as deeply as the red-haired Mikha, he refused point-blank. Afterward, he began having second thoughts; it tormented him. Until then, he had never felt any interest in Nadia. She was a big, vulgar girl in the same grade, but in the parallel class. She had dark eyes that looked out from under her bangs. He had never exchanged more than two words with her. But after Ilya's suggestion, he was agitated for a whole week and couldn't get her off his mind. He decided that if Ilya approached him about it again, he would agree to go—it was obvious where, and why.

Ilya did, and this time Sanya was easily persuaded. They arrived at half past nine. Nadia was waiting for them, and reading a book—
Virgin Soil Upturned
, which was on their required reading list.

Ilya left immediately, and Nadia fastened the large iron latch across the door from the inside.

“Should I show you, or what?” the experienced Nadia asked. She could demonstrate if need be; but she could just jump right in, too.

Sanya didn't say anything. He wanted very much to see in person what he had until then seen only in the Urban and Shwarzenberg
Atlas of Human Anatomy
on his mother's bookshelf. But he kept silent.

“Don't be afraid, it's really nice.”

She unbuttoned her blue wool sweater, and he caught a whiff of warm sweat. Under her sweater he saw the top of her breasts rising up out of her tight bra, behind a pink slip with white lace.

Sanya shrank back. Nadia showed her white teeth and the pearly strip of her gums.

“Don't be scared, give me your hand.”

Sanya extended his hand, like he expected her to shake it. She turned over his palm and placed it on her breast—it felt like fresh bread, warm and firm.

“You act like a complete stranger,” Nadia said with a slight note of disapproval, and turned out the light to encourage the stranger to get to know her.

She was an experienced seductress, but her animal innocence prevented her from being aware of this herself. There were no windows in the storeroom; it was as dark as a dungeon.

“Come on, Sanya! You're stiff as a board, loosen up.”

He
was
stiff as a board. She took his cold hands in her own large warm ones, and started guiding them around her torso as if she were a tree. He wanted to run away and hide, but where? Where was it darker than this pitch-black darkness?

There was a rustling over in the corner, then squeaking. He gripped Nadia's shoulder in alarm. It turned out that she was already completely undressed. Her whole body was like a loaf of fresh bread, not just her breasts.

“Don't be scared, it's just a rat with her babies, they have a nest. I'll show it to you later.”

The rat calmed Sanya down, for some reason. He was afraid that Nadia would stop moving his hands around over her own body and would set her sights on him. And that's what she did. Oh, how he wanted to run away, but now it was too late, far too late … She was already holding him in her soft palms and whispering: “My sweet boy, my sweet little one…”

Her words were, on the face of it, quite tactless, but they were in effect encouraging, and expressed an overwhelming sympathy. The seductress was full of compassion. She held his timid manhood with gentle firmness.

“See how good it is?” said the invisible Nadia with a deep sigh. She had won; that's what she felt. Again she had won. She pressed Sanya's head against her chest—what power she felt! This was how she conquered all of them.

No, I don't want to, I don't want to
, Sanya told himself; to no avail. He was already inside, and there was no place else to go.

Then came a quiet, satisfied chuckle.

“See? The little animal finds its nest.”

What could have been the beginning was at the same time the end.

He seized up, then let go. Sticky and hot. And ashamed. So that was it?

Nadia sought out his lips with her mouth. He offered them politely. She licked his mouth with her large tongue, then put it under his top lip. She sucked in air, making a smacking sound.

“‘Die if you will, but never give a kiss without love,'” she whispered.

Never a truer word. Even dying would be better than this.

It was still drizzling outside, just as it had been when he went in. Ilya was waiting for him across the lane.

“Everything go okay?” he asked drily, without so much as a smile.

“I guess so. It was pretty disgusting,” Sanya said faintly, so faintly that Ilya couldn't even guess just how disgusted he was.

They walked to Sanya's house without speaking and parted at the entrance.

The next day, Sanya wasn't in school. He had fallen ill. The usual thing—a high temperature, and no other symptoms. In his sleepy delirium he imagined he was dying, that he had syphilis or something even worse. But he had nothing of the sort. Three days later, his temperature fell. He lay around in bed for a few more days, while his grandmother boiled fruit compote for him, and made him cookies with cream filling and applesauce. He struggled with an unrelenting sense of self-loathing for himself, for his own body, which had betrayed him and responded to the summons of a complete stranger, against his own wishes … or not?

He lay in bed reading
The Odyssey
. He read to the part where Odysseus's companions row past the island of the Sirens and pour wax into their ears, so they won't hear the Sirens' voices and jump into the water. And Odysseus, tethered to the mast, writhes and struggles to escape so he can throw himself into the sea and swim toward the irresistible song. He was the only one who heard their song and survived it. The stony shores were strewn with the dried-up corpses and bones of the hapless travelers who had reached the island—lured there by the bewitching, double-voiced song—and who were then sucked dry by the bloodthirsty Sirens.

“Nuta, what do you think—is the part about the Sirens about the power of sex over men?”

Anna Alexandrovna froze with a saucer in her hand.

“Sanya, I've never thought about it before; but I think you must be right. It doesn't just have power over men, though—women are under its power, too. Let's just say it has power over human beings. Love and hunger rule the world. It's terribly banal, but that's the way it is.”