The Big Green Tent (53 page)

“Lyudmila, why Israel all of a sudden? I don't understand.”

“My mother was unbelievably fastidious, you know. She never lost track of a single piece of paper or document. After her death I had already found the death certificate of my maternal grandmother. She died in 1922. Her name was Barbanel. Alta Pinchasovna Barbanel. Her father was Pinchas Barbanel, from a famous line of rabbis. My mother saved all the papers—my grandmother's birth certificate, and a note about the change of her family name after marriage. She became Kitaeva after she got married. And my mother's papers have all been preserved as well. When Jews hear the name Barbanel, they nod their heads and cluck their tongues in recognition.” She spoke, as always, in a listless, expressionless voice—only her face was sweet and soft, with a perpetual half-smile.

A Proto-Slavic face, rounded mouth and brows …

“Why Barbanel? Where is it from?”

“It's a distortion of the name Abrabanel. I discovered that it's a well-known, ancient Sephardic family of Talmud scholars.”

“Amazing! I can't wrap my head around it. You—in Israel! It's all so unexpected. What are you going to do there?” Ilya said, incredulous.

“It's all the same to me—maybe I won't even stay there. I have an invitation to go to Israel, but where I'll end up I have no idea. Maybe America.”

“All right, all right … but how in the world did you come up with the idea? Can you just explain that to me?” Ilya was terribly agitated.

“What is there to explain, Ilya? I'm nearly fifty, my heart isn't very good. My mother died of a heart attack at forty-three. I have no one to leave Ilya with. And they have good medical facilities there. They'll take care of him; he won't perish. But here—can you imagine what would happen to him without me?”

Little Ilya came into the room. He was enormous for his age, and deformed from illness: his arms and hands were elongated, with thin, dangling fingers; he had a tiny chin and sunken eyes … poor, poor thing … In addition to autism, they had discovered another syndrome; but autism alone would have been bad enough …

“Without me, without me, without me…” He uttered the words almost threateningly.

Lyudmila sat him down and gave him an apple.

“Good clinics, humane interaction and care, the best possible treatment—it's our only choice,” Lyudmila said calmly.

“Our only choice, our only choice,” little Ilya said with an absurdly happy intonation.

That same evening, Ilya signed the document that Lyudmila had already prepared. He didn't raise any objections.

He saw his son a few more times after that. The last time was when he took them to the airport.

Before he left for the airport, Olga thrust an enormous stuffed teddy bear into Ilya's arms.

“Give this to your little boy so he has something to remember you by.”

“It's a pretty hefty bear,” Ilya said, feeling the weight of it in his arms.

“Like your son. He's rather large himself, from what I know.”

Ilya had never given any stuffed toys to his son, and he was already getting too old for them. But little Ilya beamed when he saw the bear. He ripped off the cellophane wrapping and pressed his prematurely old face into its soft belly.

“Olga and Kostya asked me to give you this teddy bear,” Ilya mumbled, and was surprised at himself: he had said the names of his other family, names his unfortunate son was hearing for the first time.

“Teddy bear, teddy bear,” young Ilya said joyously, while his father frowned from embarrassment and pain.

Ilya was already approaching Rechnoi Vokzal metro station at the same time that Lyudmila was asking the flight attendant to move them to the front row, where the boy's long legs would have more room.

Young Ilya settled in to his seat, repeating the last words he had heard in his homeland:

“A good ticket, a good ticket…”

*   *   *

In America, Lyudmila agonized for a long time before placing Ilya in a home. She might not have done it, had it not been for the fact that he had become more aggressive with time, and she found it increasingly difficult to manage him. He stayed in the home for two years. Then they transferred him to a special institution, where he was given job training so that he had skills for doing some limited but useful tasks.

Lyudmila visited him on Sundays. She brought him white chocolate, which he loved, and a big bottle of cola. It took her two hours, one way, to get there—from Brighton Beach, where they had settled her in low-income housing, to a distant part of Queens. Six hours every Sunday she devoted to her son, and each time, after she returned home, she would collapse onto the double bed given to her by a charity organization, close her eyes, and give thanks to God that the boy was well nourished, warm, and receiving good medical care. One Sunday she didn't show up, but he didn't seem to notice.

The socialization program went very smoothly, and a year later he received his first job: twice a week he sold papers in a kiosk one stop from his institution. He got ten dollars for the work he did, and in a tiny store where they already knew him, he bought some treats for himself—a bar of white chocolate, a bottle of cola, and a lottery ticket. He pointed his thumb at the candy bar, and the black salesclerk said:

“Chocolate?”

“Chocolate, chocolate,” Ilya replied.

Then he pointed to a lottery ticket, and the salesclerk held out the printed paper to him, saying, “Here's a good ticket for you…”

“A good ticket,” Ilya replied.

His whole life seemed to fall in place. He had friends that he could watch television with. After Lyudmila stopped visiting him, Russian words seemed to evaporate completely from his strange memory, which still contained many verses, however. Now they had become foreign to him.

During the last week of May, Ilya worked in the kiosk until noon, received his ten dollars, and bought a bar of chocolate, a cola, and a lottery ticket. The ticket turned out to be better than just good—he hit the jackpot, winning $4.2 million.

His residence was intended for low-income people. They didn't keep millionaires there.

The millionaire couldn't quite fathom the complexity of the new situation. According to the law, Ilya was considered incompetent to deal with it. His mother had died. They tried to find his father, Ilya Bryansky. After lengthy correspondence and numerous inquiries, they established that his father lived in Munich. When they tracked him down, it turned out that he had died not long before. Then the lawyers contacted his stepbrother, Konstantin (Kostya).

Kostya was summoned, and he flew to New York. He remembered dimly that Ilya Isayevich had a son from his first marriage. The doctors warned him about his newfound brother's illness. On seeing Ilya, Kostya was taken aback—but the expression on his face didn't betray his shock. He clapped the skinny giant on the shoulder and said in Russian:

“Hey, brother!”

Ilya broke into a grin.

“Hey, brother!”

Kostya pulled a photograph of his stepfather out of his wallet.

“Here's Ilya.”

Ilya took the photograph, and his face lit up.

“Ilya.”

“And I'm Kostya.”

Ilya dimly grasped who he was, and said with some effort:

“Teddy bear.”

But Kostya knew nothing about Olga's parting gift.

Ilya repeated “teddy bear” a few more times, and then began reciting Pushkin:

“When in the country, musing, I wander

and, stopping off at the public cemetery,

survey the gates, small columns, and the decorated graves…”

He recited it to the end.

“More,” Kostya said.

And Ilya, furrowing his brow, fished out another from his afflicted but boundless memory.

He recited for a long time—all the favorite verse of his dead father, with the same intonation, and in a voice that very much resembled his.

Kostya looked at this sick, no-longer-young boy, and remembered his stepfather—quick-witted, lively, talented—and at the same moment realized that he would have to find a similar kind of institution, not public, but private, for the well-off, apply for guardianship, make calculations, and set this strange and uncanny life to rights again.

Then Kostya took his newly discovered brother to a diner. Ilya pointed to a big apple pie.

“Do you want one piece or the whole thing?”

“The whole thing,” Ilya said, looking down shyly.

Kostya thought for a minute, and asked again.

“Do you want the whole pie, or just one portion?”

Ilya, even more shyly, stared down at his enormous sneakers. He didn't say a word.

“I see. You do follow a certain logic.”

“Logic,” Ilya answered happily, and sat down at the table like an obedient child.

The waitress brought the pie and a cola for Ilya, and mineral water with ice for Kostya. It was only the middle of June, but the New York heat had already set in, and there was no air-conditioning in this run-down little place.

Ilya consumed bite after bite with a plastic spoon, eating with intense childlike pleasure. His head was exactly like his late father's—curly chestnut-brown hair, with a sprinkling of premature gray. Even his face resembled his father's, in a slightly caricatural way.

Kostya recalled with cinematic clarity how, when he was around eight, the three of them were sitting on the shore of a lake—Valdai? Ilmen? Pleshcheyevo?—at sunset in front of a campfire, and his stepfather's long, dirty fingers had cleaned the ash from the baked potatoes. And all along the lake horizon there were ribbons of color—pink, raspberry, yellow—from the setting sun, and Mama, the red highlights in her hair aglow, was laughing, and his stepfather was laughing, and he, Kostya, was happy, and would love them forever and ever.

Poor Ilya! Poor Olga!

 

POOR RABBIT

When it came time to look back on his life, Dr. Dmitry Stepanovich Dulin was inclined to think that it had been a good one, maybe even undeservedly so. But he rarely thought about such abstract matters. Still, on Saturdays, when his daughter, Marinka, jumping up and down with excitement, pulled a little bunny wrapped in an old towel out of his briefcase, he felt a grateful satisfaction. His daughter looked like a little bunny herself—soft and gray, with an upper lip like a rabbit's. Where the rabbit's white ears stuck out, she had blue ribbons hanging down. Too bad he hadn't taken a photograph of Marinka with the rabbit.

Dmitry Stepanovich gave the rabbit to his daughter, and handed the towel with the hard, dry little pellets to his wife, Nina, which she then shook off into the trash pail before taking the towel into the bathroom to wash. This was the special rabbit towel, in which the little creature traveled home each Saturday, and in which it was wrapped again each Monday to go back to the laboratory.

The little rabbit was a different one each time—whichever one he happened to grab out of the cage where the test animals lived. Dulin, of course, brought home not those that were undergoing testing, but those from the control group. The test rabbits were more or less healthy, but they had been born from alcoholic mother rabbits. The doctor had plied the mother rabbits with diluted spirits from a young age, then mated them with alcoholic father rabbits, after which he studied their offspring. This was the subject of his dissertation—the influence of alcohol on the offspring of rabbits. The effects of alcohol on the offspring of humans was already well known, of course. Masha Vershkova, the lab assistant, who was at his disposal on a part-time basis, was a representative of this sector of the population: her irises trembled—she suffered from nystagmus—and her fingers shook with a tremor as well. She had been born prematurely, at seven months old. Both her parents were alcoholics, but fortunately she was not mentally impaired. Proof that even alcoholics have a stroke of luck now and then.

Marinka had never been in any such danger. Her father could not tolerate alcohol. He didn't even drink beer; nor did he smoke. He led a healthy life in all respects. Her mother drank about three small glasses a year, on holidays.

Marinka would take the Saturday bunny to her own little corner, put it into her doll's bed, pretend to wash it, squeeze and cuddle it, and feed it carrots.

Dmitry Stepanovich had been born in the country, and was used to animals. He had remained a country boy until the urban sprawl of the city of Podolsk had swallowed up his unlovely little village and destroyed its rural ways and practices. Still, Dulin's urban existence hadn't begun immediately. The new five-story buildings were constructed according to some whimsical plan, by which they didn't tear down all the peasant cottages at once, but only those that occupied the plots scheduled for construction. The Dulins' home was one of the houses that remained standing for some time; but their farming and animal husbandry collapsed. The chickens, a cat, and a dog were the only animals left. The goat and the pig were given to his grandmother's sister in a more remote village.

By that time, they didn't keep a cow.

For some reason, the well next to the house was filled in, but plumbing was not installed. After that, they had to walk almost a mile to reach a water pump. Thus, the boy Dmitry lived between city and village. He wore raggedy country clothes to a city school, was a poor student, and was despised by the urban majority for being the “country” minority.

His mother punished him for his bad grades. When she wasn't too tired and careworn, she would thrash him, letting her bony little fists land where they might, and she would shriek in a high, piercing voice until she fell down in exhaustion. Many years later, after Dmitry had become a doctor, he diagnosed her disorder ex post facto as “hysteria.” And her thyroid was involved. But by the time Dmitry made the diagnosis, she was already dead.

Uncle Kolya also gave him a hard time. True, he didn't hit him; instead, he dragged him by the ear, squeezing the top of it painfully between his thumb and forefinger. Dmitry was hurt that his mother allowed this to happen, and didn't intervene. Dmitry's grandmother defended him, however. Uncle Kolya, a country fellow who was desiccated from drinking, paid visits to many of the single women around, Dmitry's mother among them. Grandmother called him the “traveling ladies' man.” She despised him, but at the same time feared him. They died at almost the same time—Uncle Kolya of drink, and his grandmother of old age.