The Big Green Tent (46 page)

A month and a half passed, and he still hadn't had any news from home. And, strange as it may seem, he didn't seek out ways to get in touch with his wife. On the face of it, this was because he didn't wish to cause her any trouble. But deeper down, he admitted that he felt more tranquil without her agitated caprices, her alarm and fears.

A relative of Nikolay Mikhailovich's tossed a single postcard in the mailbox from Boris Ivanovich upon her return to Moscow: Don't worry, everything's fine. I love and miss you.

In August, Nikolay Mikhailovich's wife arrived with their oldest son, Kolya. She was the daughter of a famous Russian artist. Both daughters hovered around their mother, pampering her like an honored guest, with a constant refrain of “Mommy, Mommy!” The son, a strapping thirty-year-old, trailed around after his father. Nikolay Mikhailovich's relationship with his wife was also unusual. They were tender and respectful toward each other, almost formal in their manners and forms of address. They spoke in quiet voices, attentive and courteous to each other. It was hard to believe they had ever made children.

The grown-up children still remained their children, and it was amusing to see how the grandchildren adopted the manners and habits of their parents—bringing them a pretty apple, or a bouquet of late-blooming wild strawberries. Boris Ivanovich, who was staunchly opposed to childbearing, even began to doubt his long-held theory—that producing new human beings in this country, ruled by an inhuman and shameless government, in which they would be destined to a life of poverty, filth, and meaninglessness, was wrong. This was the condition on which he married Natasha.

He and Natasha had been married for eight years already, and she had not yearned for children. But there was another circumstance that irked her. Whether it was because she lacked a sense of humor, or because her husband's views and ideas weighed too heavily on her, she began to recoil from the cartoons, which had become more strident and bitter with time. They lived very comfortably, compared with others. He had graduated from the department of applied arts and crafts at the Stroganov Institute, so he had never become a “proper artist.” He carried out commissions, and earned more than the real artists at the plant, where he made up to a thousand rubles on a project.

Sometimes he took on private commissions for well-known people, or assisted in creating metalwork décor and panels for all manner of palaces of culture, whether railroad or metallurgical—but invariably socialist. This kind of hackwork filled him with spiteful rage, and he began making ever more acerbic cartoons about this socialist way of life that would any day now become full-blown communism.

He began to indulge his passion for drawing with greater intensity. By trade, he was a craftsman specializing in fine metalwork, but drawing became his source of joy and rest—and an outlet for his frustrations. Once he was invited to take part in an art exhibit held in an apartment, out of sight of the authorities, and after this he was welcomed into a select circle of underground artists.

His underground work even drew admirers. The first to attract attention were the laborer and female collective-farm worker made out of the coveted salami—but only on paper, naturally. Thanks to his friend Ilya, this salami even made it all the way to West Germany and was published in an evil anti-Soviet magazine (like all the magazines over there). After this taste of success, Boris even grew indifferent to large-scale commissions and spent most of his time scratching away with his pencil.

Here, in Danilovy Gorki, Muratov lost all interest in drawing salami. They didn't have it there, and no one missed it. Neither had he any interest in the quiet sketches of gentle nature that every member of Nikolay Mikhailovich's family, young and old, was so fond of making. So, during the summer, he refrained from drawing.

It was getting on toward September, and they began to prepare for going back to the city. They stuffed mushrooms, raspberries, and strawberries dried in the oven into pillowcases. They hadn't made jam that year—there wasn't enough sugar, and the jars were hard to transport to the city, anyway. They put away the salted cucumbers and mushrooms in the cellar, and buried the early potatoes.

During the winter, Nikolay Mikhailovich and his son always made a trip here from the city on “inspection”—to look at the house, and to fetch provisions to take back to Moscow. The route during the winter, in contrast to the summer “water” route, was far more grueling: first by train, then by bus, then four more miles through the forest. Cars weren't able to make it to Danilovy Gorki because there was no road; the only way to reach it was by tractor.

When their departure was imminent, Nikolay Mikhailovich said to Boris:

“Well, do you intend to winter here, Boris Ivanovich?”

Although he had lived there for nearly two months in placid tranquillity, he had nevertheless been contemplating the future, and so was quick to answer:

“I have some trepidation, Nikolay Mikhailovich. Not about the police—but about your stove, about your cottage. One has to know these things from childhood. I may be too old by now to pick these things up.”

“True, our father was a parish priest, and we lived in a cottage like this from childhood. It's a simple science; but a science nevertheless.”

Nikolay Mikhailovich scratched his scraggly beard, thought for a bit, then said:

“Old Nura's vacationers have all gone home, and she has been unwell for about a year. Why don't you stay with her, Boris; I'll talk to her about it. You can help her get through the winter. I'll come in December to check in on you. God willing, things will work out.”

They had adopted a practice: If they called each other just by their given names, Boris and Nikolay, they used the formal address. If they used their patronymics, they addressed each other as “thou.”

Muratov gave Nikolay Mikhailovich instructions about what to do once he reached Moscow. He wanted him to stop in at his home one evening without prior arrangement and hand over a letter, without revealing his whereabouts. That was all. And he wanted him to meet with his friend Ilya, convey his greetings, and tell him one word: “Forward.” He would know what to do.

Before Nikolay Mikhailovich's return to the village in December, Boris requested that he meet with Ilya again, take the money he would have ready, give half of it to Boris's family, and bring the other half with him here. How much money there would be he didn't know: perhaps a lot, perhaps not much; perhaps none at all …

Nikolay Mikhailovich fulfilled these requests down to the last detail during the first week after his return to Moscow.

Muratov moved in with Nura. The old woman was shrunken and stooped over. She had a craggy face and gnarled fingers with huge, bulbous knuckles and joints. She held them perpetually in front of her, as though she were holding a cup or a saucer. Her joints no longer worked, and she manipulated her fingers as if they were claws.

She allowed Muratov to live with her in exchange, not for money, but for vodka. The old woman turned out to be very fond of tippling, and was quite a character. Early in the morning she would wake up and crawl out of bed, her bones creaking. Then she would cross herself in front of the holy place in the corner, where there was an icon completely covered in soot, and imbibe her first thimbleful. At noon she took another. At some indeterminate point during the day she ate porridge or potatoes. All the other fats, proteins, and carbohydrates a person needs to survive she would get from a further three thimblefuls of the potion. A bottle lasted her a week; she had established this for herself years ago. In the mornings she was barely alive, but by evening she was animated and cheerful, and even did some housework. But she mumbled more and more incoherently as the day wore on.

Three years before, the settlement had been furnished with radio and electricity. The old woman ignored the electricity. She never turned on the light, going to sleep when it got dark, and rising at sunrise. She took a liking to the radio, however. When Muratov learned to decipher the meaning of her mumbling, he would catch merciless and hilarious gibes at the radio broadcasts that she listened to in the mornings. That year, another campaign against drinking had been launched. They issued statements and decrees, and the antialcohol message was sent out over the radio waves.

“Now they're all worked up about vodka. Who can drink vodka, when there's not even any moonshine! We don't need anything from you, leave us to ourselves. You can keep your BAM,
*
but leave us the vodka.”

When Boris Ivanovich started to understand her indistinct muttering, he came to appreciate the liveliness and wit of her repartee.

“Listen, lodger, that new Stalin, whatchamacallem, he'll be worse than the old one.”

“Why is that?”

“The old one took everything, and this one is picking through the leftovers. Oh yes, they liberated us from everything, the dears—first they freed us from the land, then from my husband, then from my children, from my cow, my chickens … They'll liberate us from vodka, and our freedom will be complete.”

Nura's husband had perished in 1930, during collectivization. Her three sons, who had come of age at the beginning of the war, had died in combat, one after another—the eldest in '41, the middle in '42, and the youngest in '45.

“And they liberated us from God, too.” She peered through the darkness at the icon and muttered: “But maybe He Himself turned his back on us, who's to say…”

In the evenings there were sometimes visitors—Marfa and Zinaida, both a bit younger, but no less bitter than Nura. They drank Boris Ivanovich's tea, and Nura praised him:

“God sent me a good lodger. Sometimes he brings me vodka, and sometimes tea…”

Boris Ivanovich hadn't thought about salami for a long time now. It had completely lost its symbolic significance in these parts, having long ago been out of circulation, and thus forgotten. These women had no money to take a commuter train to Moscow to buy salami, and they would never have laid eyes on an orange if Nikolay Mikhailovich's family had not presented them with this delicacy from time to time.

Nowadays, Muratov drew only the old women's meager feasts. He discovered great riches amid the scarcity: small, crooked potatoes, boiled in their jackets, pickled cucumbers, disfigured from being crammed in their barrels, mushrooms—small boletes, stout milk caps, and saffron agarics. And the queen of the table was a turbid bottle of moonshine with a homemade stopper. And vodka, if they were lucky. In the winter, bread supplies were intermittent. They hadn't gotten any at the village store in the larger settlement of Kruzhilino, four miles from Danilovy Gorki, so the old women took turns baking it themselves.

Boris Ivanovich had quickly used up all the paper he found in Nikolay Mikhailovich's house. Luckily, he had found ten rolls of wallpaper that had been intended for the attic. The renovation had been put off for several years, and then forgotten. But the wallpaper was just what Boris Ivanovich needed. At first he drew on the back side, which was ash gray; then he started working on the right side of the paper, a lightly stippled yellow background that brought the old women's faces to life.

They were the last people in the village. The others had already died, as worn out as their ancient clothing, resigned and humble as the potatoes that were their only food, and free as the clouds.

When they drank, they would grow frisky and cheerful, rather than gloomy. They would strike up a song or lose themselves in reminiscences. They laughed, covering their toothless mouths with their blackened fingers. Among the three of them they had only a few teeth left. They cured the toothache with sage and nettles. The village shepherd, Lyosha, had pulled teeth, but after he died, all the teeth left in their mouths fell out by themselves, without any extra help.

The old women's stories were always the same. New ones were rarely aired. Boris Ivanovich sketched their gatherings with a fine pencil, along with their intriguing quips and words, which he inscribed on ribbons coming from their toothless mouths. And what words they were! There were stories about how, before the war, Party functionaries had come to the village to herd them into a collective farm. The people protested and shouted, but they had to join up, they had no choice. But Nura's eldest son, Nikola, was a daredevil if ever there was one. He found a rotten egg—they had a chicken who was such a schemer that you couldn't find where she hid her eggs, and when they would finally rot and explode, the stench was so bad it would hang around for a month. Nikola bent over backward to find a few that hadn't exploded yet, to put them in the wagon carrying the officials, so that they would break them with their fat behinds along the way. And what do you know, the first Party boss who sat in the wagon broke the rotten egg. There was a soft whistle—and the foul stink spread all over the place. Oh, what a laugh! Another time Zinaida's tooth was hurting, and Lyosha the shepherd was on a binge, so Zinaida went to Kashino to get her tooth pulled. The dentist sat her down in a chair, and she peed all over herself in terror … Imagine, from Kashino she ran all twelve miles to get home. When she got there, her toothache was gone: the abscess had broken along the way!

They recalled their husbands, and even argued a bit: Marfa remembered how Zinaida had seduced her husband in 1926. Zinaida, in her turn, reported that Lyosha the shepherd had stolen milk right and left from the entire herd. And Lyosha was Marfa's own brother. Words were exchanged, and they almost got into fisticuffs. But Nura saved the day by singing an off-color little ditty apropos of the situation, about who had sneaked into where and filched what, and they both started laughing.

And again they reminisced about things long past but not forgotten—about how the “Commonists” had starved the village and stolen its men. When they fell silent, they would drink a thimbleful. Then they'd burst out laughing and drink some more. But they didn't allow sad stories to creep in and put a damper on things. They derived pleasure from the most trivial matter; they laughed on the slightest pretext, or for no reason at all. They cracked jokes, mocked and made fun of one another, danced and sang, a bit for show, with Boris Ivanovich in mind as their audience, but mainly for one another, in the most candid and heartfelt manner.