The Big Green Tent (7 page)

And, truly, how was one to reckon it, to weigh the losses? Some had had their childhoods stolen from them, others their youths, still others their freedom. Victor Yulievich himself had lost the most insignificant thing of all: his graduate studies.

After his three-year term of quasi-exile—after all, he was living in the same part of the country to which clever young people like himself, with a sense of their own dignity and self-worth, had been sent during tsarist times—his seventh-graders graduated, and he returned to Moscow to live with his mother on Bolshevik Lane, in the building with the knight standing in a niche above the entranceway.

By some stroke of luck, the first place he was offered a teaching job in Moscow was only a ten-minute walk from his home, near the History Library. The library held a strong attraction for him. He had felt starved of literary culture and missed it more than theaters and museums when he was away.

He tried to reestablish his university connections, seeking companionship. He got together with Lena Kurzer, who had spent the war as a military interpreter, but they couldn't really communicate. He found two more of his former classmates, but again nothing clicked. The mood of the time was taciturn, disinclined to frankness. People started to open up and talk only several years later. Of the three classmates who had survived the war, one of them embarked on a career in the Party and a second taught school. His first and last meeting with them was limited to splitting a bottle of vodka. The third, Stas Komarnitsky, was out of reach: he had been sent to prison, either for telling a joke or just for talking. The only one of his friends he was always happy to see was Mishka Kolesnik, his former neighbor. They made for an amusing postwar pair: Mishka was missing a leg, and Victor an arm, so they called themselves “Three arms, three legs.”

Mishka had meanwhile become a biologist and was married to a nice girl, also from their neighborhood, but younger.

She was a doctor and worked in the municipal hospital. She was desperate to marry Victor off, and kept trying to hook him up with one of her unmarried colleagues. But Victor had no intentions of marrying. After he returned from Kalinovo, he had fallen in love with two beauties at the same time. One he had met in the library, and the other had approached him in a museum, where he had taken his students on a field trip. Mishka joked, “It's your good fortune that the dames flock to you in pairs, Vic. If there were only one of them, she'd collar you for sure.”

But it was, in fact, work that “collared” Victor. It turned out that teaching his thirteen-year-olds was the most fascinating experience in his life. These Moscow youths had nothing whatsoever in common with their country counterparts. They didn't plow the land, didn't sow, didn't repair the horses' harnesses, and had none of the peasant's sense of responsibility for family.

They were ordinary kids—in class, they cut up, threw paper wads and spitballs, sprayed one another with water, hid one another's book satchels and notebooks, and grabbed and pushed and shoved like puppies. Then they would suddenly freeze in wonder, and ask him real questions. Unlike the country lads, they had had a real childhood, which they were now leaving behind once and for all. Besides pimples, there were other signs, in a higher register, of their maturing: they asked the “accursed questions,” agonized over the injustices in the world, and listened to poetry. A few of them even wrote something that vaguely resembled it. The first one to bring the teacher a neatly copied page of verse was Mikha Melamid.

“Yes, I see,” Victor Yulievich said out loud, smiling.
Jewish boys are particularly sensitive readers and writers of Russian literature
, he mused.

Half of the class did not quite understand what the literature teacher wanted from them. The other half clung to his every word. Victor Yulievich tried to treat everyone equally, but he did have his favorites—Mikha, emotionally intense and sensitive to a fault; Ilya, energetic and capable; and Sanya, polite and self-contained. The inseparable trio.

He had belonged to just such a triumvirate at one time, and he often thought about his college chums, Zhenya and Mark, who had died in the first days of the war. They were still just boys, really, who hadn't completely outgrown childhood. Full of overblown romanticism, with their infantile verses—“Brigantine! Brigantine!”—who would they have become now, had they lived? The red-haired Mikha could have been their younger brother, and if you looked closely you could read his complicated future on his face. Not that Victor claimed any sort of clairvoyance; he was just concerned.

It was 1953, not yet March, and the anti-Semitic campaign was raging. In those rotten times, the eighth of him that was Jewish moaned in horror, and the fourth of him that was Georgian burned with shame.

Victor Yulievich was a man of mixed ancestry. He had a Georgian name, he was registered as Russian, but he in fact had very little Russian blood. His Georgian grandfather had been married to a German woman; they had studied together in Switzerland, and Victor's father, Julius, had been born there. The ancestry of Ksenia Nikolayevna, Victor's mother, was no less exotic. Her father, the product of the union of an exiled Pole and a Jewish girl, one of the first females to become a trained field doctor, had married a priest's daughter. This ecclesiastical blood was the sole source of Victor's Russianness.

From his Georgian grandfather he inherited his musical talent. From his German grandmother, who carefully concealed her origins and with prudent foresight registered herself as Swiss upon her arrival in Tiflis in 1912, he inherited his rational cast of mind and his prodigious memory. His Jewish grandmother gave him her thick hair and small bones; and from his Vologda grandmother, he got his light-gray northern eyes.

Ksenia Nikolayevna, who was early widowed, was the only surviving descendant of two family lines that had gone extinct during the Revolution. She would carefully wipe dust from bookshelves, battle clothes moths, and water the orange marigolds that bloomed nearly year-round on her windowsill.

She had two favorite things in life: taking care of her son, and painting silk handkerchiefs to sell. She was also good at frying meat patties and making French toast. After Vika (that was what she called him—almost like a girl) returned from the front, she quickly learned to do things for him he couldn't manage with just one hand: slice bread, butter it when butter was to be had. In the mornings, she would make shaving lather for him out of soap.

The one thing that was categorically absent in Victor Yulievich was a proud sense of belonging to some particular people or ethnic group. He felt like an outcast and a blue blood, in equal measure. The Jew-baiting that was endemic to the times was anathema to him primarily on aesthetic grounds: ugly people dressed in ugly clothing whose behavior was ugly, too. Life outside the bounds of literature was harsh and abusive, but the world of books offered living thought, and feeling, and learning. It was impossible to bridge these two realms, and he retreated farther and farther into literature. Only the children he taught could make the nauseating reality outside of books bearable.

And also women. He loved beautiful women. They flashed through his life like brief festivities, often in succession, sometimes even parallel to one another, and all of them were equally beautiful to him.

It must be said that women liked him, too. He was handsome, and even his physical defect (this took him some time to realize) was attractive in its own way. Beautiful women would fall for him not just for the obvious reason that there were fewer men than necessary for the purposes of reproduction, as a veterinarian might put it. What made him especially attractive to women was their mistaken assumption that he would belong to them completely, now and forever, because of his disability.

They were wrong. He had no intention of handing over exclusive rights to himself to anyone, which marriage implied.

In the early twentieth century, Bunin, Kuprin, and Chekhov, in his “Lady with a Dog,” all wrote about “profane” love, a still largely unexplored territory in Russian literature: the sudden blooming of desire, adultery, sexual relations—all that the nineteenth century had deemed “vulgar.”

Not one of these writers was aware of the primary problem of our postwar era, however: the problem of territory, which preoccupied the devotees of divine love, and lovers with the most primitive longings and aspirations, alike. Where? Where could a person who lived in a single room with his mother arrange a lovers' tryst? Where, in a city without hotels, could one experience mutual “sunstroke”
*
with a lady friend? There wasn't even a narrow berth to be had for such purposes. Well, perhaps in summer,
en plein air
; but summers are so brief in our latitudes.

Bringing a girl home and entertaining her behind the tapestry curtain that divided the male, filial half of the room from the female half occupied by his mother was unthinkable. Renting a room just for trysts was both distasteful and expensive. Borrowing the key to the room of one of his single friends was awkward. Fastidiousness stood guard over Victor Yulievich's morality.

But he lucked out. All his girlfriends had places at their disposal. Lidochka, a divorcee he saw sometimes, with an elegant neck and beautiful breasts, had her own room. Then there was Tanya the tomboy, who was diminutive and seemed to be walking on springs. Her husband worked as an actor in Saratov, and she rented a room on Sretenka Street within walking distance of Victor's place. There was also Verochka, a well-educated translator of French, who would take him to her parents' empty dacha.

He never took a single one of these women home with him to meet his mother. Ksenia Nikolayevna couldn't abide other women. Mother and son lived peacefully together, and Victor Yulievich wasn't trying to change that arrangement.

On the morning of March 2, they were eating breakfast—French toast, soft and tender on the inside, crisp on the outside. Ksenia Nikolayevna had cut it up into small pieces for her Vika. This kind of meticulous care, sometimes quite gratuitous, took her back to the days when Vika was still a small boy, she was still young and pretty, and her husband was still alive.

She made the tea strong, just as her late husband had preferred it. Their peaceful breakfast was suddenly interrupted by an official announcement informing the nation of Stalin's illness. Ksenia Nikolayevna threw her hands up, and Victor's face jerked. He was silent for a moment, then said, “I swear he kicked the bucket. They'll try to pull the wool over our eyes for a week, then they'll admit it.”

“That's impossible.”

“Why impossible? It's happened before. When Alexander the First died in Taganrog, a courier was sent to Petersburg with news of his death, and even after the courier had made it as far as Moscow, Golitsyn ordered bulletins to be made up and distributed about the state of the Tsar's health. For a whole week the city police spread this disinformation.”

“Oh, come now! Wherever did you hear such a thing?”

“I first came upon it in the notes of Prince Kropotkin, he wrote about these very bulletins. Later, in the History Library, I found the bulletins themselves. Compose your face, madame, and simulate grief. Change is on the way.”

“I'm scared,” she whispered. “Vika, I'm scared.”

“Don't worry. Things can't get any worse.”

And he left for school. A tense silence gripped the teachers' lounge. No one spoke louder than a whisper, if at all. He greeted the others, took up his attendance book, and went to see his boys.

As he opened the door to his classroom, the Hand began to recite, and the din died away.

Some say a cavalry corps,

some infantry, some again

will maintain that the swift oars

of our fleet are the finest

sight on dark earth; but I say

that whatever one loves, is.

This is easily proved: did

not Helen—she who had scanned

the flower of the world's manhood—

choose as first among men one

who laid Troy's honor in ruin?

warped to his will, forgetting

love due her own blood, her own

child, she wandered far with him …
*

“Now, who can tell me what a lyric is?” the teacher said, when the lids of the desks had all closed with a thump and it had gone quiet.

The class was rapt with attention. Victor Yulievich savored the moment—he had learned how to create this meditative silence.

“It's about love,” a brave soul piped up.

“Correct, but that's not all. A lyric is about human experience, about the inner life of a human being. And that includes, of course, love. And sadness, and loneliness, and parting from the beloved. And the beloved doesn't necessarily have to be a person. There is a famous poem, written long before our time, about the death of a sparrow. I'm not joking.

“All ye gentle powers above,

Venus, and thou god of love;

All ye gentle souls below,

That can melt at others' woe,

Lesbia's loss with tears deplore,

Lesbia's sparrow is no more:

Late she wont her bird to prize

Dearer than her own bright eyes.

Sweet it was, and lovely too,

And its mistress well it knew.

Nectar from her lips it sipt,

Here it hopt, and there it skipt:

Oft it wanton'd in the air,

Chirping only to the fair:

Oft it lull'd its head to rest

On the pillow of her breast.

Now, alas! it chirps no more:

All its blandishments are o'er:

Death has summon'd it to go

Pensive to the shades below;

Dismal regions! from whose bourn

No pale travelers return …
*

“This is also a lyric.

“We've already discussed Homer, read a bit of the
Iliad.
We know about Odysseus. We learned what an epic poem is. Scholars claim that the epic preceded the lyric. The first poem I recited to you was written in the seventh century BC and mentions Helen. Did anyone guess that this was the same Helen who, according to legend, was the cause of the Trojan War? The speaker in that poem compares the beloved to her. Even today we come across this ‘beautiful Helen,' wife of King Menelaus, who was abducted by Paris. In this way she migrated from the epic to the lyric—an image of a beauty who captivates mens' hearts.