The Big Green Tent (59 page)

“What happened, Sasha?” they asked in a chorus. “Well, tell us, you know how. Speak, speak, you can do it.”

“Da dag wan awa.” He struggled to articulate the sounds.

All four of them surrounded him, and a short woman with a thin plait wrapped around her head asked him loudly, stressing every sound:

“Which dog? Nochka or Ryzhik?”

“No-ka,” the boy said.

“Nochka. Don't worry, Sasha. She'll come back.”

The boy made another gesture—placing one hand on another, and making an upward movement. This was a question.

“She'll get hungry and come back for food,” the woman with the mustache said.

That has to be the director
, Mikha thought.

The boy said something else with his hands.

“Listen to me, Sasha. She'll get hungry and come back for food.”

When she made the sound “oo,” she pursed her lips, pushing them as far forward as she could.

The boy nodded and left.

“Sasha has only been here six months. And he began learning very late,” the woman with the plait said.

“Yes, it's only six months,” the one with the small mustache confirmed.

“Five months, Margarita Avetisovna,” Gleb Ivanovich, who had his own mustache, said. Very politely, so Mikha knew that she was indeed the director.

Ten minutes into their little tea party, Mikha knew that if they wouldn't take him on as a teacher, he would stay here and work in any capacity: whether as a janitor, a stoker, or a gym teacher.

They showed him the classrooms; there were four of them. And only forty-two children in all.

In one of the classrooms a girl was standing at the chalkboard and communicating something with her hands. The others listened to her—by watching.

“We don't renounce sign language completely. But we feel that if one begins teaching our methods early enough, most children can learn to speak.”

“I would like to work here. I lived in an orphanage until I was seven, until my relatives took me in. I know I'm probably not the sort of person you're looking for … I've already begun studying sign language, but I'm not proficient yet. But if you would agree to take me on…”

They welcomed him with open arms.

He signed a contract that no one else would have accepted, and started work without even taking the vacation that was his due as a recent university graduate.

Everyone was dissatisfied with Mikha's departure for the boarding school: Aunt Genya, who cried on the day he left as though he were departing for the next world, although he would return again the following Sunday; Marlen, who would inherit some of Mikha's responsibilities for looking after his mother; Alyona, with whom his on-again, off-again romance was at a low point, but who shrugged her shoulders in consternation nevertheless, saying, “Why a boarding school? Why?” Alyona's father, the extremely clever Chernopyatov, felt that the closer one's job was to the city center, the better the job. And the provinces, anything beyond the capital city limits, were not even fit for living.

Even Anna Alexandrovna expressed concern—not about his career, but about the hygienic conditions there. She believed Mikha would be lice-ridden and dirt-encrusted in no time. Sanya thought about how long it would take to travel from that back of beyond to the Conservatory, but he didn't say anything. Ilya was upset that he was losing his friend just at the moment when they might have been able to earn a decent income working together.

Mikha was now teaching Russian language and literature to deaf-mute children. He worked alongside a speech therapist, and things were going very well. Mikha developed an approach that even earned the praises of Yakov Petrovich. He introduced rhythm exercises into the lessons. He clapped out the various poetic meters, and the children hummed their iambs and trochees. How happy they were when he expressed his delight with them; and how generous he was with his praise!

The school was unique in both its poverty and its plenty. The government subsidies were paltry, and even with extra compensation the salaries of the staff were incommensurate with their qualifications and with the time they invested in their work. The materials they had at their disposal were insufficient. But the absolute dedication of the teachers, their selflessness, and their pride in the results of their efforts, which were evident to all, outweighed all these other factors. Not to mention the atmosphere of creativity and love.

Almost a third of the children had been chosen from orphanages. The rest had been brought by their parents, who hoped that the school would enable them to communicate with the world more easily. The children from orphanages had an easier time than the others, since they were already used to life in an institution. The children with families usually stayed for only a year or two, at most.

Almost every Sunday Mikha returned to Moscow. He visited Aunt Genya and caught up on all the chores and errands he had missed during the week—from washing the floors and windows to buying groceries. Since the time Mikha had started college and the financial help from his relatives to his aunt had stopped, she had become tight-fisted and capricious. The sausage had to be Mikoyan, the cheese had to be Poshekhonsky, the milk Ostankino, and the fish—fresh carp or frozen perch—from a store that was closed on Sundays. So Mikha occasionally came to town on Saturdays just to buy this carp, if it was available.

After finishing his household chores and errands, he flew over to Alyona's. She would either be waiting for him with mascara on her lashes, which meant that she had turned her face toward him that day, or without any makeup at all. This suggested that her thoughts were elsewhere. Why her moods were so volatile he didn't know. He would try to find out from her, but she would just shrug her hair off her shoulders and slip away without explanation.

Then he would sit down with Sergei Borisovich in the kitchen and drink tea or vodka, depending on the time of day, the presence or absence of guests, and the mood of the host.

What an incredible human being! What a life!
Mikha marveled at Chernopyatov. Sergei Borisovich Chernopyatov's father, born in Batumi, had been one of Stalin's closest companions. He was killed later than all the others, in 1937, when the leader had already done away with most of the friends of his youth. Sergei Borisovich was still just a boy the first time he was imprisoned, several weeks after his father's arrest. This was just a trial run—a children's penal colony. When he was eighteen they transferred him to a prison camp. In 1942, he was released from the camp and sent into exile. In Karaganda he met an “Algerian”—his future wife, Valentina. That was when he learned the meaning of that satanic geographical moniker, ALZHIR. It meant: Akmolinsky Camp for Wives of Traitors of the Homeland. Among the thousands of women were the mothers of Maya Plisetskaya, Vasily Aksyonov, and Bulat Okudzhava. Alyona's grandmother on her mother's side was the widow of a prominent Party member from Ryazan.

Valentina fell under the “FMTH” category: Family Members of Traitors of the Homeland. She was seventeen when they executed her father and arrested her mother. She managed to escape the fate of 25,000 FMTH minors who were sent to orphanages. She followed her mother, and ended up in the village of Malinovka, a forced-labor settlement. Her mother died a year later.

That was where she met Sergei. They were both twenty years old, and both of them dreamed of having a family. They married young, thus saving each other's life. Alyona was born in 1943. In 1947 they received permission to return to Russia, and they moved to Rostov-on-Don, where they found Valentina's relatives. Sergei Borisovich passed his high-school graduation exam, then entered college. The life about which they had dreamed began. In 1949, he was sent to prison again. Stalin's hand refused to loosen its grip. He was released in 1954; and his life began again for the third time …

Alyona was sick to death of hearing these stories. She would lock herself up in her room and turn on loud music. Sometimes she sat in her room for hours on end, scribbling with a slate pencil on rough paper: whimsical patterns of curlicues and cascades. Sometimes she simply left, without saying a word, ignoring Mikha altogether.

*   *   *

Mikha sat with Sergei Borisovich, picking up commonsense wisdom. And what a talent he had for sharing it! You would say something to him, and he would hold it up to scrutiny and then reveal its full significance to you, like a picture that blossomed into color when you held it underwater. He had such a deep understanding of life, of its inhumanity and absurdity and cruelty!

And the people! The guests who visited Sergei Borisovich, for all their diversity, had one thing in common: they were inveterate, implacable enemies of the authorities. They understood the nature of the system, its deep-rooted injustice. One was a geneticist, another a philosopher, yet a third a mathematician. And at the very center of all of them stood Sergei Borisovich—hardheaded, astute, clever—actively committed to the public welfare.

Mikha loved him, too, because he was the male embodiment of everything that attracted him to Alyona: barely discernible wrinkles in the corners of the eyelids that rose slightly upward, small folds pointing downward at the corners of the mouth, the small bones and lightness of movement characteristic of dwellers of the Caucasus. True, Alyona had inherited a delicate pallor from her mother, but Sergei Borisovich, with his admixture of Circassian blood, was dark-haired and swarthy. He was a real man—a father, brother, friend. An antidote to Mikha's fatherlessness, something he had never yet managed to come to terms with. Sergei Borisovich treated Mikha with kindness, but too much condescension. That was, in fact, how he treated most people—he seemed to look down on them slightly.

Sometimes Alyona, having done her eyelashes, seemed kindly disposed toward Mikha. At those times he would follow her wherever she wished; they would walk around Moscow, her limp, fine-boned hand in his—what intense joy!—and he would touch her hair, breathing in its pungent, feathery scent. He would speak off the top of his head, and from the bottom of his soul, reciting poetry. He had already gone through Mayakovsky, had absorbed Pasternak, and was in those days brimming over with Mandelstam. Brodsky began a bit later with him. She listened, fell silent, hardly deigning to respond. Also with condescension.

Sometimes, during these felicitous periods—there were three such during Mikha's life in Milyaevo: the winter of 1962, at the very beginning of Mikha's stay in the boarding school; then in the spring of 1963; and at the end of 1964—she suddenly came to him in the middle of the week, and stayed overnight with him in the utility room that had been allocated to him. Mikha was nearly beside himself with unexpected joy.

The greater these intervals of happiness, the more bitter were those periods when she would cool toward him and withdraw her affection. At those times he would throw himself into his work. His commitments to the deaf children filled his life to the point of overflowing, so that he had almost no time for misery and longing.

The boarders were also lacking fathers, and they clung to the male teachers—Gleb Ivanovich and Mikha—vying for their attention and affection. The older ones were more restrained, but they also gravitated toward the male teachers.

Yakov Petrovich Rink invited Mikha to participate in seminars once a month, trying to involve him in the project to which he had devoted the better part of a decade. He was engaged in a struggle to found a deaf children's learning center in Moscow, either at the pedagogical college or at the Academy of Medical Sciences. The authorities had already approved the project in principle, but the inertia of the government machine was so great that the span of one human life was simply not enough to create something new, unless it concerned either the military-industrial complex or the cosmos. Rink was counting on Mikha becoming one of the handpicked protégés who could continue his life's work.

Yakov Petrovich mentored Mikha, gave him studies to read by contemporary French and American researchers, and, finally, advised him to write an article himself—which Mikha did with great enthusiasm. Yakov Petrovich read through the industrious scrawl—the boy could write!

He had bred his students and assistants over the decades for quality—selecting them for size, taste, shade … After three years of voluntary slavery in the boarding school, Rink broached the subject of graduate studies to Mikha—albeit in absentia
.
But Mikha himself preferred this. He had no intention of parting with his charges.

Mikha passed the qualifying exams for graduate school with flying colors, and was waiting for his enrollment papers. This was in fact just a formality. He was not interested in abstract, theoretical scholarship. Rather, he was looking forward to real, applied scholarly research, such that the results would be immediately evident after several years of implementing the proper methods. The blind did not yet see, the deaf did not hear, and the dumb did not speak; but some of them were learning little by little to articulate words and to enter a world that till then had been closed to them … and what a joy it was to lead them by the hand!

Contrary to all expectation, Mikha seemed to be the most successful of the Trianon members. Sanya had dropped out of the Institute of Foreign Languages and begun his studies at the Conservatory again. Ilya had forgotten all about his intention to study at the Leningrad Institute of Cinema Engineering, assuming that he could teach photography himself if he wished and that there was no need for him to continue his education. He had accumulated friends and acquaintances, and interesting connections, especially in the new democratic human rights movement. Ilya and Mikha continued to share a common interest in poetry. Ilya still made the rounds of antiquarian booksellers, and his collection of rare and valuable books was growing apace.

Ilya was the one Mikha chose to confide in about his fantastic new prospects. Ilya's reaction was tepid. He had been lucky that day, too. He had a new acquisition. It was an absolute rarity—one of the few remaining copies of Vladimir Narbut's collection
Alleluja
, which had been published in St. Petersburg in 1912 and immediately banned by the Holy Synod, condemned to destruction “by means of rending and tearing.”