The Big Green Tent (70 page)

“Oh my God!” was all Sanya could get out.

“She's planning to marry a conductor there. She met him on her first tour, and they performed together. He's an old man! A terrible loss. The people we love most are all abandoning us. We'll never see Liza again. Maybe you will; but I won't.”

“Vasily, how sad it is! Women always want to get married for some reason; look,” and he gestured with his eyes toward his mother, who was being led by the hand by a man with a hat like a furry pastry on his fat head. “Your son-in-law is an Austrian, and not a German?”

Vasily Innokentievich nodded.

“I just didn't like that fat Boba fellow, and I was glad when they divorced. This new son-in-law, by the way, is a handsome guy. He has a wonderful face. I have a record with his picture on it. Why do women do what they do? Take a look at that … janitor,” Sanya said, looking over at his mother and her fiancé. “Nuta knew everything.”

Mikha came up to them. He gripped Sanya's maimed hand, and bent right down to his ear:

“Your mother is alive, but I have no one. Anna Alexandrovna was closer to me than my whole family put together. I only just now understood that. She's gone away, and now I'm first in line.”

“What? What do you mean?” Sanya said, not hearing or understanding what Mikha said.

“There are no more grown-ups ahead of me. It's my turn next,” Mikha explained.

*   *   *

Two weeks after Anna Alexandrovna's death, the thickset gentleman in the pastry hat who was holding his mother's hand moved into their apartment. His name was Lastochkin, and the name didn't suit him in the least. In no way did he even remotely resemble his namesake, the swallow. They rearranged the furniture, took down the dividing screen, and partitioned the room with a wardrobe and a bookcase. They nudged Sanya over a bit, depriving him of the geometrical security to which he was accustomed.

Anna Alexandrovna's death, sudden, easy, and completely spontaneous, could not be reconciled with life. Sanya awoke in the mornings, heard the unbearable sounds of alien everyday existence, and wanted to fall asleep again, in order to wake up in his normal, habitual home.

But that former home was gone; his grandmother was no longer there, and his mother had undergone some strange transformation, like children under spells in fairy tales. She had changed in a single moment into the opposite version of herself. Whereas before she had been soft and plump, now she was sharp and hard; before she had had light-brown hair mixed with gray, and now she had become a brunette. She began to use lipstick and wear a new astrakhan fur coat, black and unruly, instead of the ancient gray rabbit fur in which they had wrapped Sanya as a baby.

But most intolerable of all was the new voice of Nadezhda Borisovna: sonorous, fawning, with a giggle at the end of every phrase. No, even more unbearable than that were the nighttime sounds of coupling, of bedsprings, panting and groaning …

It was as though the janitor's quarters on Potapovsky Lane had encroached on the very place where once Nuta had read her favorite Flaubert and Marcel Proust during sleepless nights.

He couldn't sleep. He caught small snatches of slumber, but he would start awake and return to the obsessive thoughts:
Nuta is gone. Nuta will never come back. Nuta is no more.

He slept at intervals. When he woke up for good, he would fall into his usual despondency. He washed and left the defiled house. If he didn't have class, he went to see Mikha.

Mikha's mood was no better. He still couldn't find a job—no one would hire an ex-convict—and they were broke. Alyona tried to teach some classes. Their friends chipped in to help, and Mikha accepted these alms unwillingly. Marlen finally left for Israel—hurriedly, unexpectedly, and inexplicably—and wrote Mikha letters, trying to persuade him to follow him there. But Mikha rejected the idea of emigrating out of hand.

“Everyone keeps repeating the same thing: emigration, emigration. Everyone has an opinion on the subject—for or against it. I can't even consider it, Sanya. I'd die there.”

Maya, who adored Sanya and still hadn't come to trust her newfound father, climbed into Sanya's lap and tickled him behind the ear. That was a little game they had.

“Mikha, we're going to die anyway. And music and poetry are everywhere, not only in Russia,” Sanya said.

“Music, yes. But poetry—no. Poetry has its own language, and that language is Russian! I'm a poet—perhaps a bad one, but still a poet!” the usually gentle Mikha burst out. “I can't live without Russia!”

Sanya was unable to counter this. He couldn't say: yes, you're a bad poet. And was it any better for the good ones? Khodasevich? Tsvetaeva? Even Nabokov, for God's sake?

But Mikha, like a pendulum, kept returning to the same point: Russia, the mother tongue, Russian metaphysics … Russia, the Lethe, Lorelei …

*   *   *

Sanya attempted to lower the level.

“Well, my friend, leave Russia with your Lorelei, otherwise you'll drown prematurely in our river Lethe…” And he frowned from the awkwardness of his own joke. “Leave, Mikha. It's a lost cause. And Nuta is dead.”

He thought about Liza. She had left, abandoned her grandfather, who doted on her, and lived now on the other side of the looking glass. In Vienna, Mozart, Schubert, and the entire Viennese School promenaded along the Ringstrasse.

*   *   *

Going down the stairs, Sanya began composing in his mind a long, meandering phrase, words set to music—the strings resounded plaintively, the brass crashed, the alto saxophone crooned in a soulful voice. The words were almost lost, but still they surfaced, indistinct but indispensable.

Nuta left, died, flew away, poor thing, her thin fingers, the rings no longer ringing … even her smell is gone.

A short sprint through Mikha's courtyard, past the corner house, from Chistoprudny Boulevard to Maroseyka.

Mikha, orphaned, kin, terrible childhood, the transparent Alyona, my God, it reeks of madness, it reeks of the mewling of the deaf and dumb, poor, poor everyone.

Woodwinds, advance! The clarinet sobs, and the flute weeps …

Crossing the streetcar rails, where an invisible monument to an underage hooligan, killed on this spot twenty years before, stood.

Fortissimo, percussion.

Brass, brass, brass … and the screech of brakes.

*   *   *

Unhappy boy in a padded cotton jacket, in a soldier's cap with earflaps, running, running, cold metal clenched in his fist.

Turn left on Pokrovka, home to the Vanity Chest House.

*   *   *

Poor fingers, poor fingers, perished forever. For violin, viola, and clarinet, for bayan, accordion, for the baneful balalaika. Oh, piano!

Piano duet! For four hands! The right piano Liza, the left one me. Liza begins the piece, I join in.

And a right turn home to my building, to my side wing. String section. The violins begin. Tipsy, pianissimo. The piano theme builds and develops, attenuates in the string rendition. Rises. And everything concludes in the deep, sad voice of the cello.

Some carry skates in their hands, some shopping bags, briefcases, musical scores, boots from the shoemaker, repaired and repaired again. They carry illnesses, misfortunes, summonses, blood test results, garbage, a dog, a bottle.

*   *   *

And right in front of his door, his fingers already touching the only remaining bronze door handle in the whole building, he lifted all the music up, then dashed it with all his might to the ground, so that it shattered and rolled away.

If you exist, God, take me away from here and put me in another place. I can't go on here. I can't go on without Nuta …

He entered the building. He went up to the second floor. He went into the apartment, and paused. Lastochkin had wrapped Nuta's blouse around the handle of a gigantic cast-iron frying pan filled with hash browns cooked in lard. He was carrying it from the communal kitchen to their room. It stank.

 

THE DECORATED UNDERPANTS

In 1961 Peter Petrovich Nichiporuk addressed a Party conference, saying exactly what was on his mind: Stalin's personality cult had been exposed for what it was, and now, slowly but surely, a new cult was growing up around Khrushchev. Lenin's precepts had been forgotten, and they had to return to them, to strengthen democracy and the responsibility of elected officials to the people. To achieve this they had to abolish the high salaries of government officials and introduce limited terms in office. He told them exactly what he thought.

He had already “rolled out” all these thoughts for his friend Afanasy Mikhailovich, one of his former college buddies from the General Staff Academy, where they had both studied before the war. Afanasy didn't approve, though he shared all of his ideas. He didn't approve, specifically, of the plan to introduce these ideas at a Party conference.

“It won't have any positive effect, Peter; but the consequences could be dire,” Afanasy said of this harebrained plan.

Peter reproached Afanasy as a coward. Afanasy, usually restrained, suddenly flew into a rage and sent his friend to the place that the old friends were not in the habit of sending each other.

Then Peter Petrovich announced something very unpleasant to his friend's ears: there is no greater coward than a soldier. And the higher the rank, the more cowardly they are.

Highly trained professionals who had gone through the war, fearing neither enemy fire nor the foe himself, never taking cover behind someone else's back, were deathly afraid of the powers that be and were now defending, not the Motherland, but their own fat backsides and their own cushy armchairs.

Since this discussion was taking place at Afanasy Mikhailovich's dacha, he showed his friend the door. Discord arose between them, of the kind recalling Nikolai Gogol's two Ivans. In this case, however, it was not a “pig” or a “goose” that set it off, but Peter's “coward,” which had offended Afanasy Mikhailovich to the bottom of his soul.

Peter Petrovich was punished for his scandalous speech. They gave him a new job and transferred him to the Far East—basically sending him into exile—where he was less likely to cause trouble. At first he pined, and life in the remote provinces bored him; but then he resumed his activities. He organized a union of like-minded people who, like him, wanted to get the entire lopsided, meandering country back onto the straight and narrow (as Lenin had envisioned) again. This underground activity, with secret meetings, and even leaflets, didn't last long. Peter Petrovich was arrested. First he was kicked out of the Party, then he was tried in a closed court and given a paltry three years. By way of additional punishment, he was demoted to the rank and file. The condemned general was stripped of his title, his military decorations, his pension, and all privileges conferred on him by dint of his former services, now rendered null and void.

And so began Peter Petrovich's new biography. He gradually shed, along with extra pounds, his ramshackle, down-at-heel notions about life. He spent three years in prison, was released, and was thrown in prison again. He recalled his former, “academic” life, as he now mockingly termed it, and deemed it juvenile.

The general had a good head on his shoulders. It was not for nothing he had once headed the Department of Military Tactics at the academy. But he had entered into an unequal battle with the authorities, which fought not with brains, but by brute strength. What use were tactics, not to mention strategy, here? Wherever the authorities, humiliated and scorned by a former general, sent him—prison, the labor camps, exile, a psychiatric institution—he always emerged from the ordeal and picked up where he had left off.

In the spring of 1972, he was given a little respite—he was freed. By this time, he was no longer part of the rank and file, but had become a true general of the small army of dissidents. Some people are born generals.

Nichiporuk knew that the authorities never forgave domestic enemies, and realized that he didn't have long to kick up his heels in freedom. He enjoyed to the hilt his home life, socializing with people, even a little stroll through the city. Freedom! Sweet freedom!

But this freedom was an illusion. All the while his telephone was tapped, and the shadowing had never stopped. Peter Petrovich decided to go to Minsk. He had business to attend to there. He didn't tell his wife, Zoya, what kind of business it was—and she, an experienced friend, didn't ask.

He bought a ticket for the evening train, came home, and packed a few things—a change of underwear, shaving kit, the two last issues of
Novy Mir
, already dog-eared, and a stuffed animal for the granddaughter of a friend.

They had just sat down to dinner when the doorbell rang. It was Zoya's friend Svetlana, dear to both of them. She came bearing news: yesterday there had been a search at Kharchenko's, and at Vasilisa Travnikova's. They had taken Kharchenko away but left Vasilisa behind.

Peter Petrovich shrugged; there was nothing at home to incriminate them.

“They don't know that. They'll come and turn the whole place upside down,” Svetlana said.

“Oh, wait!” Peter Petrovich had just remembered something. “My decorations! They stripped me of them on paper, but all the medals are still here. I don't want to give them away. We'll have to do something about it, Zoya. Could you get them out of here, Svetlana?”

“We'll get rid of them. But I'd rather send my girls. It's safer. This evening.”

And, true to her word, that evening, after Peter Petrovich had already left to catch his train, two girls, both of them about fifteen, arrived. One was called Tonya. She was plump and had chubby cheeks. The other was called Sima, and she was very plain. Both of them were wearing identical caps and scarves. Svetlana was a teacher, and these were her pupils.