The Big Green Tent (47 page)

Nikolay Mikhailovich's house yielded yet another gift to Boris Ivanovich: three boxes of children's colored pencils. He had no respect for his metallurgical hackwork, considering himself to be a graphic artist; but these simple colored pencils awakened the painter in him, and applying strokes alternately in blue, green, and black, he created something of strange, multilayered beauty.

Now he felt he was a scholar, a scientist, documenting a disappearing world in images. Laughing, the old women told their intricate stories, their wrinkled faces joyous, and Boris Ivanovich sat at the table, dashing off his marvelous pictures. He was already well into his supply of wallpaper.

The snow fell, and autumnal bleakness, the dreary brown wetness, gave way to the whiteness of winter. It stayed in Boris's memory as a brilliant, bright patch, a sunny clearing in the dull, gray background of his life.

Boris Ivanovich spent every daylight hour, which were few at the end of November, wandering around the village. The swamps were frozen over, and it was possible to walk out on them, but so much snow had fallen that it was already higher than the tops of his boots.

One day he returned home, frozen to the bone, and found all the old women scurrying around in the yard. They had decided to subject themselves to a major cleansing in anticipation of the next day's holiday.

“What kind of holiday is it? It's not November seventh, the reddest of red-letter days; and it's surely not the fifth of December, the day of the Soviet Constitution, is it?” Boris Ivanovich said.

“We call it the Great Presentation.”

But who was presenting what to whom, they couldn't say. They all agreed, as one person, however, that they had to bathe. And it was time, in any case. The last time they had washed was for the Feast of the Intercession, when the first snow had fallen.

Only Nikolay Mikhailovich had a decent bathhouse. The old women's bathhouses had all fallen into disrepair long before. So much snow had piled up in Nikolay Mikhailovich's garden that it would have taken a whole day to dig a path through it. They decided to bathe in Nura's cottage, as they had done last time. If they had been younger, they could have bathed right in the stove, but now that they were old they were afraid they might burn themselves to a crisp.

Boris Ivanovich decided not to ask too many questions. He rolled the tubs from the outer entrance into the main room of the cottage. He hauled water from the well. He chopped wood for them, and brought it inside—the outer entrance was filled up with it. They began heating the water in the morning. It was so hot in the cottage that all the windows were steamed up, and tears ran down the panes, bathing them as well as the old women.

Everything was ready; they had even steamed the birch switches. Then they wondered: Where would they put the lodger? He would freeze outside, how could they chase him out of the house while they bathed? They couldn't hide him in the stove, he'd burn up. The cottage wasn't divided into separate rooms; there was only one place they could put him—behind the stove. But would he try to take a peek at them from there? Then they started laughing at themselves: Why would a young lad like him want to look at their old bones, anyway?

They put Boris Ivanovich behind the stove and pulled a curtain over it. He sat there with a book, but didn't read anything. The light from the lamp was as weak as candlelight, and didn't reach as far as where he was sitting. So he listened to the old women's conversation.

At first they giggled, saying that they had grown so dry the dirt wouldn't stick to them anymore. Then Zinaida said that she had already stopped stinking: when they were young they had smelled like pussy, but now they just smelled of dust and mold. Then the washing started. They groaned and whined, they poured the water and clattered the tubs. Then one of them slipped, fell down with a plop, and shrieked. Boris Ivanovich started, and jumped up to see whether she needed his help. He drew himself up to his full height and looked over the curtain. Zinaida and Marfa were picking Nura up off the floor, dissolving into childlike laughter.

Boris Ivanovich froze. He'd grown used to their wrinkled faces, to their dark, knotty hands and their blunt, shapeless feet, to everything that their ancient, faded clothing didn't conceal. But now—good God!—he saw their bodies. He couldn't take his eyes off them. Their long, loose gray hair streamed down over their bumpy spines. Their hands and feet seemed enormous and even more misshapen. Broken by working the earth, twisted like the roots of old trees, their fingers had taken on the color of the soil in which they had been digging for so many decades. The skin of their bodies, however, was so white it looked bluish pale, like skimmed milk. Marfa still had breasts, with dark animal-like nipples; but the breasts of the other two seemed to have evaporated, leaving only soft, translucent sacks that hung down to their bellies. Zinaida had long, shapely legs—or what remained of them. Their behinds had been rubbed away to a smooth flatness, and only the folds of skin underneath indicated where their round buttocks had once been.

“I'm telling you, Nura, I can't pick up anything heavy anymore; my womb starts falling out whenever I do,” Marfa said, challengingly, and with some sort of secret pride. Just then, Boris Ivanovich noticed that a gray bag the size of a tobacco pouch was dangling down between her legs. He grimaced, but still couldn't tear his eyes away from these three cronelike graces.

Marfa squatted and nimbly pushed the little pouch back under the hairless, wrinkled mound, into the depths of what had once been a woman's body.

Boris Ivanovich was not an autodidact. He had graduated from art school, and his father had been, after all, an artist-engraver. From childhood he had been familiar with Doré's illustrations for
The Divine Comedy
. He had examined that book in the latter years of childhood and early adolescence, when the female body held a burning interest for him. But these crooked, bent creatures who were pottering about just six feet away from him were the living vestiges of bodies, and only with a great effort of the imagination could he discern a female form in their contorted bones, their drooping flesh.

“Old age is sexless,” Boris Ivanovich thought, and felt a sudden horror: “And me? Will this happen to me, too? No, no, I don't want it to happen to me! I'd rather exit on my own than fall into this sort of decrepitude, this sort of nonbeing.”

Just then, there was a screech of laughter; the old women had caught him in the act!

“Oh-oh, that lodger of yours, Nura, he's peeking at the girls!”

“Let's whip him with the birch switch so he won't be naughty again!”

Nura screamed. “Stinging nettles! We'll whip him with stinging nettles, since he peeked!”

“Oh, come off it, what do I need with a bunch of old grannies like you? I thought I might need to rescue whoever it was that slipped and fell. You should be glad!”

And he retreated behind the curtain again. He spent several days afterward drawing this “Bath of the White Swans,” as he called it, in secret.

He filled up the last remnants of the wallpaper with this strange work. He remembered how he had been taught to do life studies in art school, but this quest for form by means of a child's pencil had nothing at all to do with that slavish shading, that endless struggle of light and shadow. The pictures that emerged were grotesque and terrifying—but for some reason, amusing at the same time.

He was able to draw about twenty of them before the paper ran out. Just when Boris Ivanovich was starting to feel bored, Nikolay Mikhailovich and his son returned from the city to inspect his household. He brought Boris Ivanovich a great deal of money from Ilya, more than he had ever expected. He also brought greetings and a letter from his wife.

Together they set out for a store in the neighboring village, a distance of about four miles.

Verka, the shopkeeper, knew Nikolay Mikhailovich well. She had great respect for him. She pulled out the hidden vodka from under the counter. Nikolay had brought two bottles from Moscow, but Boris Ivanovich couldn't pass up the opportunity to spend his newly earned riches. He had avoided going to the store, for fear of the locals: What if they informed on him, saying there was a stranger wandering around these parts?

They emptied out almost all the meager inventory of the store into two rucksacks: cookies, sticky candy without wrappers, sprats, vegetable oil, barley, a package of dried peas, briquettes of cherry kissel, cheese spread, and two packs of salt. Boris Ivanovich scoured the shelves in the hopes of finding some real food. Verka examined the customer, trying to size up whether he would do for any other kind of business. To all appearances, he would—but his eyes were roving over the foodstuffs, not over her, the beauty …

Nikolay Mikhailovich, after working his shoulders under the straps, gave them a good shrug to settle the purchases in the bottom of the rucksack; the bottles clanked together softly and invitingly.

“Have you come to stay for a while? Stop in and see us!” Verka propped her round cheek on her beet-red fist.

“No, Verka, thank you. I'm only here for a day. I didn't even bother heating the house, it would just waste firewood. We're going to stay the night at Old Nura's, then go home.”

“Well, you could send your friend over to us,” Verka said with a giggle. “Otherwise, we girls might get bored. He's been living here so long already, and he hasn't gotten to know anybody.”

Ah, so the grapevine had been in good working order all along. They even knew in nearby villages that someone was living here who hadn't been accounted for. The artists exchanged a significant look.

“We're leaving tomorrow. You'll get to know each other in the spring, when we come back.”

Upon their return, the men found that Nura had baked potato pies for them and had herself retreated behind the stove. Zinaida and Marfa stayed away, out of politeness.

“Maybe we should call them?” Boris Ivanovich said. He had made his decision: he would have to leave this marvelous place, where he had already stayed too long.

“No, they won't come today. They're well-brought-up peasant women. They would never come over on the first day. I don't know why—whether for fear of bothering someone, or not to seem to beg for gifts or favors. They had a sound upbringing, not like today's young local women. Verka, the shopkeeper, is just a broad, not to mention a thief. She's Zinaida's niece. According to the rules, she should come to visit her aunt and bring her gifts and provisions, but she doesn't. Zinaida's son has been doing time for two years already. His wife drinks. One of her grandsons drowned last year, and now there's just a slow-witted granddaughter left.” Nikolay Mikhailovich gestured dismissively. “But what do our country dramas mean to you, Ivanovich…”

Kolya arrived, his arms full of supplies from the cellar.

“Everything's okay, Dad. Nothing froze. The potatoes are well protected. I don't think we could make it to the station without them freezing, though. I'd take the cucumbers and mushrooms, but I wouldn't touch the potatoes.”

“Too bad. But you're right, Kolya. The frosts are getting stronger, and even in the bus the potatoes would freeze.”

The three men sat around the table, talking companionably and eating the pies and all manner of country delicacies. To mark the occasion, they cleaned some potatoes to eat, and doused them in vegetable oil. They didn't open any of the canned preserves; they left them for the old women for their Christmas repast. The Nativity fast had just begun; but their fast lasted all year without interruption, not counting a chicken they might boil up now and then.

When it was already late, around ten o'clock, there was a knock at the door. Nikolay Mikhailovich leapt to his feet, thrust the plate and glass into Boris's hands, and bundled him behind the stove with the old woman. And it was the right thing to do: at the door stood Nikolay Svistunov, a distant relative and a policeman. Family ties weren't all that significant anymore, since half the people were Svistunovs, and the other half Erofeevs, in the three surrounding villages. And every other fellow was named Nikolay.

Svistunov took off his hat, then unbuttoned his uniform coat. Without a word, Nikolay Mikhailovich took a clean glass and filled it just over halfway for him.

“I stopped off in Gorki when I noticed that you weren't heating your stove and there was no light on in your cottage,” Svistunov said.

“Well, you have to heat it for three days to get it warm. We just dropped in to look around and pick up some cucumbers and mushrooms from the cellar. We're staying here at Nura's, then heading back to the city.”

There was no road out of Danilovy Gorki, not even a ski run. Nikolay and Boris had tamped down a fresh path, and this was what the policeman had followed. The newly fallen snow had already powdered over the recent tracks, however.

“It'll take more than an hour to get back,” Svistunov said, and started hurrying. Wolves had been spotted last week in Troitsky. Svistunov didn't want to meet up with them, so he didn't stay at the old woman's for long. Never mind what someone had seen, or what someone said. He had stopped by, checked documents; they were familiar vacationers, well known in these parts, lived in a house they had bought themselves, and he hadn't seen any strangers about the premises at all.

But, just for the record, he asked: “Nikolay Mikhailovich, you haven't see any strangers around here, have you?”

“Strangers?” the artist said. “No, no strangers. Only our own.”

And officer Svistunov made his way back home along the narrow path through the woods. He ran into no strangers; he ran into no wolves.

Boris Ivanovich came out from behind the stove, where old Nura had been sleeping a childlike slumber; she was herself the size of a child. The men finished off a second bottle of vodka, and afterward drank tea. Then Boris wiped off the table and laid out three piles of his drawings. In one pile there were drawings of the old women's feast, with traces of their conversation. In another there were still lifes, with potatoes and salted cucumbers lying among curious nameless objects of questionable purpose, long ago fallen into desuetude: some sort of tongs, wooden pincers, little shovels, and clay vessels that could either be for drinking, or children's toys. In the third pile, the largest, were pieces of wallpaper covered with drawings on both the front and back. These were the naked old women, their bony protrusions, their sacks and pouches and folds of skin, their wrinkles. Only it wasn't “Hell” of any kind. They were laughing, smiling, guffawing. They were happy—from the hot water, from the ritual bathing.