The Big Green Tent (43 page)

Tamara buried herself in her science and wrote her doctoral dissertation.

Marlen and his family now live in Rehovot, a research town outside of Jerusalem. Everything worked out well for him.

No one knows, though, who finally ended up with the blue-winged angel with the outsize head. Likewise the little Korovin and the Borisov-Musatov.

 

THE HOUSE WITH THE KNIGHT

By the time Ilya left, it was already dark. The rain was still falling. He felt strange. He had lost—dismally, irrecoverably. But he had also, inexplicably, won. Is it possible to win and lose at the same time? He walked slowly up Gorky Street. There really was no way out. Well, perhaps one: the record of his father's nationality on his birth certificate. His father had been half-Jewish. Ilya could recover the documents, haul out his one-fourth Jewish credentials, and try to apply for an exit visa on those grounds. But that was the very moment they'd try to arrest him.

He turned toward the Aragva restaurant; there was a pay phone there. He deposited a two-kopeck coin, and dialed.

“Katya! Hey, is Victor Yulievich home? On Bolshevik Lane? Thanks. How are things with you? Okay, see you.”

He dialed the old phone number. Ilya knew that after his mother's death Victor Yulievich often stayed in his old apartment. The neighbor answered. Ilya waited a long time before Victor came to the phone. He asked whether he could visit right away.

He went to Eliseevsky's and picked up a bottle of five-year-old Armenian cognac. In the early days their teacher had treated them to good Georgian wine; now they treated their teacher to Armenian cognac.

At Pushkin Square he got in a trolleybus and went to Chistye Prudy. Then he walked to the house with the knight standing in a niche above the main door. It felt like coming home. The iron man underneath his pseudo-Gothic arch had outlasted the Revolution and the renaming of the street from Gusyatnikov to Bolshevik, and had no idea what lay in store for him—that he would return to his old address, Gusyatnikov, without budging from his niche.

Ilya went up to the fourth floor. The were five bells on the outside door; above one of them it read “Shengeli.” He rang. There were six bolts on the tall door, placed at quite a height—had the people who lived here before been taller than they were now? All the locks but one were broken.

For how many years had he been coming here? Since 1956? Or was it 1955? Since they were all thirteen years old, at any rate. And now he was as old as his teacher had been then. Just about, anyway. Strange, it was taking him so long to open the door. A rotund neighbor woman in an apron came to the door.

“He's home. He probably doesn't hear you.”

The bronze, asymmetrically rounded door handle, in the Art Nouveau style … how many times had he pressed it down until he heard the click of the latch? He entered. His teacher was asleep on the divan, snoring lightly, his head thrown back unattractively and his mouth slightly agape. The sleeve of his sweater was sewn shut from the inside. Ilya wondered what the stump looked like.

He looked like an unshaven, aging man with a yellowish complexion. The dark-red plush tablecloth was turned back halfway, revealing the table's stained surface, on which a thick notebook, a pen, and a glass of tea, as dark as iodine, were arranged. Of course, it would be impossible to write on that plush tablecloth.

Ilya threw off his raincoat and sat down at the table. He wouldn't wake the old fellow. Yes, he looked just like an old man. How quickly he had aged. And he was only fifteen years older than they were. Of course, it was not long ago that they had celebrated his forty-fifth birthday. Had a whole year passed already? Poor guy. He had been so brilliant, so elegant, a mix of both Don Quixote and Cervantes. The boys had followed him around in a flock. And the girls, too. He had cleared their minds, but had himself wilted. Gotten old. Katya had left him. Or maybe he was the one who had left her? They fired him from teaching. Then he had worked as a guard at the Museum of the Soviet Army for many years. He said he was writing a book. The museum had a marvelous collection—documents from World War II. He was preoccupied by a new idea: initiation by fear. Where there is no initiation into maturity through positive impulses, initiation through fear takes over.

The post-Revolution generations had been inoculated by fear at a very early age, and it had been so strong that other impulses were weak and ineffectual. This was Victor Yulievich's discovery. He discussed it with friends and with his former students. Mikha was completely enamored of the idea; it appealed to Ilya, too. They were eager to read the book. They offered to publish it in the West. Victor Yulievich never finished writing it, however. Perhaps he had talked about it too long, and it had become rarified; or perhaps it was now “in the air,” become common knowledge for people who bothered to think about it at all.

In principle, the teacher was right about everything. Ilya closed his eyes.
Yes, he's an ingenious loser. And Mikha is a mediocre poet, an idealist. Sanya is a musician
manqué
. And now I've become a stool pigeon. What a bunch.

Well, I'm actually just doing my job. I want to leave a legacy. If no one knows about it, then it will be like it never happened at all. My archive will preserve this entire pathetic, hopeless, plague-ridden era. And fear? It was, is, and will be …

He had a point; still, he couldn't understand what had happened to Victor Yulievich himself. He would have to ask him: Why he was lying there all alone, half-drunk, surrounded by the finest works of Russian literature? Maybe it was true that only beauty would save the world, or truth, or some other high-flown garbage; but fear was still more powerful than anything else. Fear destroyed everything: everything born of beauty, the tender shoots of all that was fine, wise, eternal … It was not Pasternak who would remain, but Mandelstam, because his poetry expresses the full horror of his time, and recoils from it. But Pasternak had always wanted to reconcile himself to it, to find a positive way of giving voice to it, of accommodating it.

Ilya was tired of sitting, so he began drumming on the tabletop with his finger. The sleeper was jarred awake, and his mouth snapped shut.

“Ah, I've been expecting you, Ilya.”

Ilya pulled a bottle out of the pocket of his raincoat and placed it on the table. Victor Yulievich stood up, swaying on his feet.

“Yes, yes,” he said, starting to bustle about, “just a moment.”

He took two glasses out of a cabinet, smiling weakly.

“There's no food in the house.”

Ilya dug around in his pocket and pulled out a lemon.

“Let's at least have some sugar.”

“I do have that.”

He poured them each a glass—round-bellied cognac snifters. The teacher's hand was beautiful and refined, with long, pale fingers and evenly trimmed nails. He held his glass tenderly by the stem.

“Well, my dear friend! You see what we've come to?” Victor Yulievich smiled. Two teeth on the left side of his mouth were missing. And what had Ilya wanted to ask him? What did he want to tell him? Nothing. This was just what he had wanted: to sit down and drink a glass together, to commiserate with each other, to feel mutual sympathy, compassion, love. They drank in silence. And Ilya felt better.

 

THE COFFEE STAIN

Irina Troitskaya, just over six feet tall, nicknamed Mile, with man-sized extremities, never told anyone that her father was a general. And definitely not which department he served in. She dressed like everyone else, even though her walk-in closet in the Generals' Building next to the Sokol metro stop contained everything a young girl could ever dream of.

She had everything a young girl could dream of, and more besides. But no one wanted to befriend her during her college years. When she approached, people would fall silent. And not only in the cafeteria; in the smoking lounge, too. They didn't mind bumming cigarettes off her; but they still wouldn't talk to her. Actually, not everyone avoided her—mainly the ones she would have wanted to be friends with: Olga, Rikhard, Lyalya, Alla, and Voskoboinikov. What hurt her most was that Olga's father was also a general, Rikhard's father was a government minister in Latvia, and Lyalya's was an ambassador to China. Why were they so haughty and contemptuous of her? She couldn't simply go around telling everyone right and left that although her father was a general in the KGB, he was a real heavyweight—he had been in foreign intelligence his whole life.

Her older sister, Lena, had graduated from the Moscow State University of International Relations. She hadn't experienced anything like the kind of contempt Irina endured there. On the contrary: children of bigwigs were highly respected. The girls all got married before graduation, to suitable young men of their own caste. This was encouraged. None of the girls embarked on independent careers, but for any diplomat, a well-prepared wife was an advantage.

The most eligible boys in Lena's year practically stood in line to ask for her hand; and students that were ahead of her in college as well. Her father joked: they're like Orthodox priests—they won't get ordained if they aren't married. And marriage was indeed good for their careers; they got excellent appointments.

Her father was very smart, jovial, and handsome. Her mother deferred to him in everything—except her height. Igor Vladimirovich always said he had married his wife, Nina, to improve his stock and produce strapping boys, but she brought him only girls. What use was their height to them? They might at least have played basketball.

Both his daughters were half a head taller than their father, and their shoes were two sizes larger. They adored their father, small of stature but always fascinating. He knew something about whatever subject one broached: history, geography, literature. Their home library was like that of a university professor. He wasn't a professor himself, but his grandfather had taught Roman law at the University of Kazan in those antediluvian times before there was any trace of Marxism-Leninism, and the founder of the backside of that future science sat on the benches among his fellow students, showing little interest in the subject.

Igor Vladimirovich insisted that his daughter study, arguing that life was far more interesting among educated people than among the uneducated.

He went up to the bookcase and pointed at the titles:

“If you can't read them, at least study the covers: Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch. Irina will study a smattering of these at the university; but you, Lena, should read a book occasionally—it won't hurt you.”

Lena and Irina glanced absently at the valuable books. They had known which books stood where since childhood.

The bookcases were antique, of Swedish make. The lower shelves were enclosed, and the upper shelves were covered with glass panes. On the bottom shelves her father kept special books—they were in Russian, but had been printed abroad. He brought them home from work.

Lena had no interest in them whatsoever, but Irina sometimes read them. There were many interesting books that one couldn't find in the library: Gumilev, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Mandelstam.

It was these very books that changed Irina's status in her department. This poetry that had been out of print for ages was the bait that lured the whole group to her side. Then she began taking other books from her father's shelves, one by one. She didn't inform her father, naturally. He himself, by the way, loved this rare poetry, and knew much of it by heart.

Irina Troitskaya's prestige grew. She was clever and didn't reveal all her treasure to them at once, but apportioned it in measured doses. She brought dangerous publications and valuable rarities with her to the smoking lounge—all brand new, and published abroad. Most of them had been published by the YMCA Press. This was the first time that Olga had ever come across the name of Berdyaev; but back then she preferred poetry. By mistake she spilled coffee on the cover of a volume of Khodasevich—now it looked like a murky tree and a road, so indistinct you could tell your fortune in it. Olga was very upset about the incident, but Irina just shrugged it off and told her not to worry.

Then the first Nabokov arrived in Russia. It was
Invitation to a Beheading.
The group of friends read it and were completely beguiled by it. It was a tattered copy, published in Berlin in 1936. Inside the front cover was an inscription that read: “To my dear Edwin, on his birthday. Anna.” It had been confiscated during the arrest of a German Jew who had emigrated to Russia from Germany in the thirties. The above-mentioned Edwin had studied Russian with this book; in the margins there were German annotations in pencil.

A friend of General Troitsky's had given it to him as a gift, also on his birthday, but many years later. These books met with various fates. Some of them were destroyed; others passed from hand to hand.
The Gift
was one of the latter. Its readers discovered a new writer who was not to be found in any library, nor mentioned by name in any textbook.

Olga was bursting with desire to show the book to her favorite professor. She asked him gingerly about Nabokov. He raised his eyebrows. “Which book?”

“The Gift.”

The professor had himself only recently become aware of it—one of his students, a Canadian of Russian descent, had brought him his first Nabokov.

“Yes, yes.” The professor nodded circumspectly. “A remarkable writer. There has been nothing like it in Russian for many years.”

He didn't ask: What else do you have?

Invitation to a Beheading
was making the rounds of the young philologists. It put a dent in the Iron Curtain. Hands trembled, hearts skipped a beat. How to accommodate it? It required a complete revision of the entire hierarchy. A new heavenly body had appeared in the galaxy; the web of connections was disrupted, the celestial mechanism shifted before their very eyes. Half the literary canon underwent spontaneous combustion and turned to ash.