The Big Green Tent (50 page)

Her tears streamed down her cheeks to her little chin. Olga and Marina grabbed hold of each other and cried in each other's arms. Their tears were as heady and salty as blood.

“Never mind, never mind, everything will turn out all right,” Olga whispered. “We'll find Hera. Your parents will be released. Everything will be fine…”

Marina, who had quieted down a bit, began howling again.

“Fine? What could be fine about it? Those idiots will come back, and everything will start all over again. They're crazy, they belong in the loony bin, not in prison! The only good thing about my life is that they're not in it. I was ten years old the first time I ran away from home. I couldn't have told you why back then. But now I know why. They don't need me! I only get in their way. All the other kids had normal lives, but all I had were endless meetings and conversations in the kitchen. Marx, Lenin, Lenin, Marx! I hate them. I don't know how I'm going to survive now. But when they get out of prison, it will be the end…”

The coffee had long since grown cold.

“Warm it up, okay?” Marina said.

“I'll put on a fresh pot.”

“Are you nuts? Just warm up this one. Have you got any cigarettes?”

Olga didn't smoke. Even after all her years together with Ilya, she had never taken up smoking. She looked around to see whether Ilya had left any behind. They drank the old, warmed-up coffee, then put on another pot. Olga wanted to keep Marina at home with her, but she couldn't. Her mother was going to spend the night at home, since she had scheduled some medical tests at the Writers' Union polyclinic that morning.

“I'll go home with you,” Olga said. They got on the number 15 trolleybus and took it to Tsvetnoy Boulevard, where the Kulakov family lived on the first floor of a three-story building in the courtyard of the former Trubnaya Square.

The misfortunes didn't end there that day. When they arrived at Marina's, they found there was no electricity in the building. It was plunged in darkness, and there was a powerful stench. The wooden floor was full of puddles. When they entered the building, the door slammed shut with a bang.

“Olga, hold the door open, I can't see a thing.”

Marina peered into the darkness: the door to her apartment had been forced, and a notice was stuck to the door frame.

“The KGB has been here again, Olga.”

They went inside. Marina flicked the light switch—nothing. The whole apartment was underwater. It was clear that the flood had occurred several days ago already, because they could see where the water level had receded. Swollen books floated like victims of drowning. And the stench was commensurate with a disaster area.

Quite unexpectedly, Marina started laughing. Olga looked up in alarm: Had the girl suddenly lost her mind?

“Look, Olga! The four lower shelves of books are soaked! The water came all the way up to here! The divan is soaking wet—so are the pillows and the blanket! What a stroke of luck! Too bad it wasn't a fire! No, a deluge is way better! Olga, we're going to toss everything out right this minute. Get rid of everything! Everything the KGB didn't take! Plato! Aristotle! Hegel! And everything in German, too! And Karly-Marly! And Engels!”

She rushed over to the shelves and started pulling everything off, both the wet and the completely dry volumes, and they fell into the shallow, fetid water with a weighty plop, joining scraps of pictures, pieces of wallpaper, and little vases …

“‘Over the gray expanse of sea, wind gathers the storm clouds. / Between the storm clouds and the sea the stormy petrel soars like black lightning! / Now with his wing he grazes the whitecaps, now like an arrow surges toward the clouds. / He screeches, and the storm clouds hear the joy of the bird's bold cries!'”

In clothes that were not her own (Olga's black sweater and trousers held up by Ilya's belt), given to her after the bedbug death bath, Marina swept through the apartment like a fury, throwing books from the shelves and yelling:

“‘In his cries is the storm's wild thirst! In his cries the storm clouds hear / the power of his rage, the flame of passion, and sure victory! / Let the tempest rage and roil!' Fuck it, Olga, I'm a
Wunderkind
! Didn't you know? I've read every one of these books. I've even read Plato's
Republic
! I read Aristotle at fourteen! I never read Hegel, but I read the
Communist Manifesto
! Fuck it! It's the deluge! Finally, the flood has come! I'm going to throw everything out and renovate the whole apartment. All by myself! I'll scrub everything down, I'll whitewash it! Everything will be just like new, white and clean!”

Olga realized that this was exactly what would happen, and she started taking all the sodden books down to the garbage heap. The blue Lenin, and the red Stalin, and all the historical materialism, and the dialectical materialism, and the political economy … everything.

“Along with the bedbugs! We have them, too, you know! Not as many as in Peterhof—but plenty of them!” Marina shouted.

And Olga grew suddenly happy herself. This is it, the real
Fathers and Sons
! The Kulakovs would be released—Valentin in two years, Zina in a year. Then they would have three years of exile, and return home. And their lives would be pure and white.

Just one thing remained unclear—how she would survive all those years, this passionate, bold, desperate girl, covered with bedbug bites, raped by a pair of alcoholics, pitiless toward herself, pitiless toward her parents … a tender girl-child.

On her third run down to the garbage, a huge bin hammered together any which way out of rough boards, Olga discovered a medium-size dog sitting there. It was Hera. She had come back home, all the way from Molodezhnaya Station to Tsvetnoy Boulevard. A true dissident dog.

 

HAMLET'S GHOST

Ilya brought home a pass for the dress rehearsal a day before the opening night. Alik, a lighting technician at the theater and a longtime friend of Ilya's, got it for him. Getting a ticket for the premiere was out of the question—there wasn't a single seat left. The pass was for one person only. For Olga. Olga was beaming with delight.

The performance was for close friends and family, and the hall was filled to the rafters; people even crammed into the aisles. But the first two rows were nearly empty. They were reserved for the creators: Lyubimov, as magnificent as a commander going into battle, who was himself cut out for the role of a bold king, or a dastardly villain, or even the Lord Almighty; the gloomy artist with a wide, froglike mouth; the wiry young composer; the assistant director; and several other people of indeterminate function or position.

As she entered the hall, Olga felt a cold thrill of ecstasy, as though she were about to sit for an important examination. Everything seemed magnified, writ large with capital letters: Theater, Director, Hamlet, Shakespeare, and Vysotsky himself. She sat down in the next to the last row, on the side, and she swiveled her head around, craning her neck, because watching the audience was an integral part of the event—the spectators were personalities in their own right, and appeared almost beautiful on those grounds alone. Suddenly, she felt a hand on her shoulder, and heard a thick, pleasant voice say her name, half-questioning:

“Olga?”

She turned around. There was something familiar about the portly figure with an Eastern countenance.

“Karik? Mirzoyan?” She felt glad to see her former classmate, forgetting for the first moment that he was responsible for getting her expelled first from the Komsomol, and then from the university. Yes, in precisely that order.

He seemed to melt from happiness, and Olga understood immediately:
He thinks I've forgotten. And so I had, at first. Oh, what does it matter!

Just then, the earth-brown curtain began to sway, then floated upward, raising a cloud of dust. Everything went still, and, suddenly, there was Vysotsky-Hamlet, a smallish figure wearing what looked like a black leotard. From the depths of the stage, not looking at the audience, he spoke, as though to himself:

“The din dies down. I enter from the wings…”

She felt goose bumps along her arms, her spine. And that's how it was until the very close, everything unfolded as though in a single breath, and the words of Pasternak's translation seemed newly fledged, as though they were being heard for the first time.

Olga completely forgot about Karik, and when she ran into him in the crush at the coat check, she was again taken by surprise to see him.

“Olga, you haven't changed a bit,” said the heavyset, Eastern-looking man with a bald pate, smiling at her. He had liked Olga very much during their student days. He had even wanted to ask her out, but back then she had been completely out of his league. His fortunes had risen considerably, however. Now he found her even more attractive than he had in his youth. Her face was mottled with tears, her eyes were shining. She seemed as fragile as a young girl. In his youth he had preferred shapely women; the wife he had chosen was as spherical as a snowman. But recently Karik had developed an interest in just this kind of woman—fragile and shining. Very rare birds.

He took the tag out of her hand and fetched her coat for her. It was a jacket with a hood, too light for the season.

“I'll walk you home,” he said, announcing rather than offering. She nodded.

“Thank you.”

He took her by the arm.

“Shall we go straight to the metro, or walk a bit? You won't get too cold? You're very lightly dressed.”

“I won't get cold. My father's from Vologda, I've got a hardy northern constitution.”

“And I'm from Baku. I've been in Moscow for so many years, but I still can't get used to the winter.”

“Oh, what a play! Absolutely brilliant. I love the Taganka Theater anyway, more than the Sovremennik. I don't even know what to compare it to, it was just … words fail me.”

They walked a long time. From the Taganka they went to Kotelniki, crossed the streetcar tracks next to Ustinsky Bridge, and then went down Solyanka Street, talking all the while about Lyubimov, about Vysotsky, and about contemporary art, which was the only thing that breathed and moved in their stultifying existence.

Karik echoed her sentiments, then turned the conversation to more mundane topics: What, how, with whom?

“The same as before, only with a different husband.”

“What about a job?”

“Hmm, that's more difficult. I have to chase around to find work, of course. I don't go to an office—I write reports, teach a bit, do some translation.”

“Oh, what languages do you know? French, wasn't it?” Karik said.

“My French is decent; I can do simultaneous interpreting, and written translation. My Spanish isn't as good, but it's passable. And my most recent love is Italian. It's more like music than like language. I'm teaching myself. I mastered it in about a year. But you know how it is—I don't have steady work; it's either feast or famine.”

“Do you know Spanish Spanish, or Cuban Spanish?” he said.

“My Spanish is Spanish,” she said, and sighed. “But I don't have a diploma, Karik. Perhaps you recall that I was expelled in my fifth year?”

Karik laughed.

“How could I forget, when I'm the one who caused it. I was the Komsomol organizer, and I was just in the process of getting admitted to the Party. You understand what I mean—I was about to defend my thesis, but I don't have five languages under my belt, like you do. In fact, I've always had problems with languages. Armenian is my native language, and I know some Azerbaijani from playing with other kids in the neighborhood. I learned Russian at school. And also in the neighborhood. But we Caucasians can never get rid of our accents. I'll be honest with you, I worked in England for a year, but nothing helped. They couldn't make a spy out of me.”

“Well, never mind. You still became a good KGB man, didn't you?” Olga said, laughing.

“Olga, didn't your father work in the same capacity?” Karik said, smiling, not in the least put out by her comment.

“No, my father is a military man, in the construction department. He's retired now. My mother is active in the Party, though.”

“Yes, I remember that someone in your family had a high position. My grandfather was a shepherd, and my father baked
lavash
at the market. There were eight of us children at home. Do you sense the difference?”

Olga felt uncomfortable. She did sense the difference between his background and hers.

“But I can help you out with work. I'm an administrative officer at the Writer's Union, on the Foreign Committee. I can't get you a staff position, but I can set you up with some freelance jobs. Our translator just resigned—you must know her, she was from your year: Irina Troitskaya. There is a Latin American writer arriving in two weeks. He's already almost a classic. The job will involve travel to either Leningrad or Tashkent. You'll have to accompany him, attend meetings with him, and so on. Would you be up to that? You won't let me down?”

Oh, so he does have a conscience after all! He's trying to make up for past sins.

They had already made their way to Dzerzhinsky Square. Olga was cold, and wanted to take the metro. He walked her to the entrance and they parted ways. They didn't exchange phone numbers.

Karik called her two days later, after Olga had already forgotten about their conversation. She still remembered everything about
Hamlet
, though; she couldn't stop talking about it. In fact, all of Moscow was abuzz with it. It was the premiere of the season, a major event. Everyone was in a hurry to see it, because Lyubimov's productions were always getting shut down, or even banned during rehearsals.

Karik asked her to stop by his office on the same day. Olga was just three minutes away by foot if she went through the main entrance. Even less if she went by way of the courtyard.