The Big Green Tent (76 page)

Being the master of one's own fate—that's what it meant to be an adult. But egotism was an adolescent trait. No, no, he no longer wanted to be an adolescent.

*   *   *

He went to the bathroom and took a shower. He put on a clean shirt. He went over to the window. The window frame was dilapidated, the glass was dirty, but the windowsill was clean. He opened the window—rain, gloom, paltry city light. The streetlights weren't on yet, but there was a gentle shimmer of illumination.

He took off his shoes so they wouldn't leave dirty footprints and jumped up on the windowsill, resting there for a brief moment. He murmured: “Imago, imago!” And flung himself down lightly.

*   *   *

And the wings? Through a fissure in the chitin, the moist, sharp folds of wing rigging burst forth. With a long, fluid movement a wing works itself free, straightens itself out, dries itself in the air, and prepares for its first beat. Gridded like a dragonfly's, or scaled and segmented like a butterfly's, with an intricate map of venation, unable to fold up, if more ancient, or folding up smoothly and easily, when of newer vintage … and the winged creature flies away, leaving the empty shell of chitin on the earth, empty grave of the airborne, and new air fills its new lungs, and new music sounds in its new, newly perfected organ of aural perception.

*   *   *

His glasses and a piece of paper with his last poem lay on the table.

Once amid the bright flash of the day

The future will shed light upon my credo:

I am in the people, too, I did not forsake you

In any way. My friends, for me please pray.

His friends who were believers bid farewell to the nonbelieving poet, each according to his own lights. In Tashkent, the Tatars honored him: they carried out a memorial rite in the Muslim tradition for him. In Jerusalem, Marlen and his friends commissioned a Kaddish, and ten Jews read aloud the ancient, mysterious words in Hebrew to honor his memory. In Moscow, Tamara, Olga's girlfriend, arranged a funeral mass in Preobrazhensky Cathedral, where a freethinking priest was willing to perform a requiem for a suicide.

The face of the deceased was covered. There were many people, and everyone wept. Victor Yulievich, the former teacher, stood with lowered head, tears streaming down his unshaven, unkempt countenance.

“Poor boy! Poor Mikha! I am to blame here, too.”

Mishka Kolesnik, the childhood friend of the defrocked teacher, accompanied him. He stood next to him: “Three arms, three legs,” as they had called themselves so long ago.

*   *   *

Sanya wept—his tears were never far from the surface. Ilya had his camera, and photographed the memorial. Everyone ended up in the frame: even Safyanov, with the purple growth on his cheek. He had miscalculated, and it had been his downfall. Oh, what a downfall!

Alyona didn't attend the funeral. Her parents decided that it would be better not to inform her of her husband's death when she was in such a frail psychological state. Later they would tell her.

 

A RUSSIAN STORY

In winter, at the height of the Christmas frosts, Kostya's children came down with measles, and his wife, Lena, suffered a sudden attack of pyelonephritis, a chronic kidney infection. Anna Antonovna, Lena's mother, a retired seamstress who always visited from her village, Opalikha, at the first summons, couldn't make it, due to the frosts. She would have to stoke the oven at her house constantly to prevent the pipes from bursting.

So, until the frosts retreated, Kostya was left to run back and forth from bed to bed with medicine, bedpans, cups, and plates on his own. Lena refused to go to the hospital. She lay on her back and wept quietly, from weakness and from pity for her children and Kostya.

Finally, Anna Antonovna showed up, rolled up her sleeves, and sent Kostya off to work. He set out for his laboratory, where work had come to a standstill without him. Kostya resumed his running back and forth to the lab, now with the aim of salvaging the long-term synthesis process that hadn't succeeded without him. They had failed to guarantee the consistency of temperature, and the results were not what had been predicted. But chemistry is a mysterious science, and mistakes in staging experiments sometime yield interesting discoveries.

*   *   *

In the middle of the day he got a call from home. His agitated mother-in-law informed him that a very strange old woman wearing felt boots had arrived. She said she had something important for Kostya, but she wouldn't leave it. She said she would wait until Kostya returned so that she could give it to him with her own hands. She was sitting in the living room, still in her outer clothes. She refused to eat or drink anything, and she stank horribly. Anna Antonovna told Kostya to hurry home.

Kostya asked what the children's temperatures were, and got a satisfactory answer: they had fallen. This was after five days of temperatures hovering around 104 degrees. Naturally, this was in part due to Anna Antonovna's beneficent influence and care. For a long time already, Kostya had called his mother-in-law “Mother Valerian,” for her pacifying effect on all living beings, from spiteful neighbors to neighborhood dogs, not to mention children and plants. A woman with an open, active heart and soul.

Kostya lingered at the laboratory for another hour, and then went home to deal with the old woman who stank to high heaven.

In fact, the stench in the house was penetrating, but not foul. It was redolent of raw sheepskin, and there was nothing particularly unpleasant about this acrid, rural odor. Evidently, the old woman had agreed to take her outer clothes off and to have some tea, judging by the old sheepskin coat lying on the floor under the coatrack. Kostya wanted to hang it up, but it had no convenient loop under the collar. Next to the coat were thick felt boots, well patched, which smelled of wet fur. The old woman was no longer in the living room. She had moved to the kitchen. She was drinking tea, strong and black.

Her appearance was completely earthy and rural. She was swathed in four different scarves, of which two were on her head—a black cotton one underneath, and a gray woolen one on top of that; a third was wrapped around her waist; and a fourth covered her shoulders.

“Good day, Granny,” Kostya greeted her, smiling at the overall strangeness of the situation. His mother-in-law stood behind him and, contributing to the strangeness, said:

“Here is our young master, Konstantine Vladimirovich, Granny.”

“Oh, my child, my grandson, you don't look a bit like your grandfather, not a bit,” the old woman mumbled, visibly touched, and began to cry, almost as though he did indeed look just like some long-lost unknown grandfather.

Kostya decided not to push things and pester her with questions—he would let the comedy take its own course and play itself out. And things were, indeed, comical. The old granny, herself pinkish, with eyes the color of turquoise beads, nodded her head in its sheath of scarves like a Chinese top, in all directions at once—to the side, to the front, to the side, and back again to the other side. She clapped her little dry red hands together:

“Oh, Kostya, Konstantine, here is the last little branch, here it is, God knows from what a mighty tree sprung forth…”

Kostya fell into the folk idiom himself, and said in response:

“And how might you be called, Granny?”

“Call me Mother Pasha. I am Paraskeva. That's what your grandfather called me.”

“And how by your patronymic might you be called?” Kostya still kept up the game, but was starting to feel a bit abashed, trying to gauge what his grandfathers—his mother's father, the late General Afanasy Mikhailovich, and, on his father's side, Victor Grigorievich, a fighter pilot who had died during the war—could have in common with this funny old woman …

“No one ever called me by a patronymic—Pasha it was, and Pasha alone.”

“Which grandfather of mine are you talking about?” Kostya asked her point-blank.

“Oh, what an old fool I am! I'm not talking about your grandfather, but about your great-grandfather Naum Ignatievich. That was his worldly name; but to us he was His Grace Nicodemus.” The old woman, seeking something with her eyes and not finding it, crossed herself, looking at the window. “Now our protector and patron in Heaven, to be sure!”

Long, long ago, when his grandmother had died, his grandmother's sister Valentina had come to visit them and had brought some ancient family photographs with her. Olga had ordered the most treasured one restored. It was blown up into a portrait, and Olga had liked it so much that she hung it in the bedroom, where it was still hanging.

“Come with me,” Kostya said, nodding to the old woman. “I have something to show you.”

And he led her to the bedroom, where Lena was dozing, her kidney infection beginning to subside.

“Shhh,” he warned.

Very gingerly, so that it wouldn't squeak, he opened the door and pointed to the portrait on the wall.

The old woman took one look at the picture and fell to her knees. “Father! Oh, Father! And how young he was! And so handsome! There in the flesh, with Mama, and with all of his children! And when you think of everything he would have to endure, it takes your breath away. He endured it all, and he saved himself, and he is praying for us, he will save us, too…”

She half-whispered, half-sang the words, and Kostya began to feel uncomfortable, because it was hard for him to empathize with her—the whole story had always been so garbled and obscure, told in snatches, the interstices filled with silence. Yes, it was true, his grandmother had renounced her own father, a priest, and he had died in the camps—that much was certain. Mama had told him a few things, but nothing else was known for sure.

In the meantime, the old woman had fumbled for Kostya's hand, and was covering it with kisses.

Lena woke up, and propped herself up on the pillows. Vera and Misha were whimpering in their room.

“This is nonsense, some kind of mad idiocy,” Kostya said, growing irate with himself, and pulling his broad paw out of the clutches of the little red hands.

The old woman crumpled to her knees again, now right at Kostya's feet.

“My boy, please help, you are our only hope. No one will accept our petition. They say only his kinfolk can do it. And we need to rebury him. My house, they're tearing it down, and with it the honest grave, right below the altar, together with the house. They've been talking about tearing it down for many years already. And at the Patriarchate they said he was a heretic, a Catacombian who believed in the Living Church. He was no bishop, they said, but a pretender!”

Lena looked at the scene playing out before her and wondered whether she had succumbed to some sort of feverish delirium.

They went back to the kitchen again, and Anna Antonovna set food out on the table. Mother Pasha sat down to a bowl of borscht, expressed her thanks, then said she was full and didn't need to eat anything else.

After that they drank tea, and their tea-table conversation lasted until two in the morning. Kostya couldn't understand everything Pasha told him. He would ask her for clarification, as if she were speaking a foreign tongue: Mother Pasha, say that again, Mother Pasha, I didn't get that, Mother Pasha, what do you mean? Please explain it to me …

And she would elaborate, explain, demonstrate, sing, weep. In the doorway, Anna Antonovna stood listening, her eyes wide with wonder.

Pasha wasn't good with dates. It was impossible to understand from her narrative when his great-grandfather had been imprisoned, and when he had been released. He was first exiled and lived in the Arkhangelsk region. There he became a widower, after which he returned to where he was born, and was arrested.

“And when he ended up in Solovki, they chirotonized him,” the old woman said, closing her eyes as a sign of respect.

“Mother, what did they do to him?” Kostya said.

“They made him a bishop. In secret, of course,” she said, and smiled at his ignorance of such simple matters.

“Then His Grace was freed, before the war; but he never made it home before they captured him again. During the war he managed to escape, and ran away and hid for many years in the Murom Forest. He lived as a hermit. That was when Mama took me to him for the first time, and after that I served him until the end of his life. Just as my mother had served him, she ordered me to serve him, too. He allowed us to visit him twice a year. People came to see him from all over Russia, religious and worldly people alike.

“One time the enemy came upon him—he kept a cat, and the cat led them right to his door. They destroyed the hut, but he wasn't there. There was another
starets
who lived there, too, about six miles' distance, and His Grace had gone to give him communion, since he was in very poor health. Someone warned His Grace, and he didn't come back. He went still farther into the forest to live. Good people helped me to find him there. That was when my mother died. Sometimes I would stay there by his side and live with him for a time.”

“What year was this?” Kostya asked. Suddenly, it seemed to him that the story was set in some centuries-old ancient past.

“I don't rightly remember. He lived there after the war, many years. But in '56—this I remember very well, I was there myself—he became very ill. He had a strangulated hernia that gave him great pain, and he started to die. And we all prayed for him—Mama was still alive then, but she couldn't make it to where he lived. Sister Alevtina was there, and Sister Evdokia, Anna Leonidovna from Nizhny Novgorod, his goddaughter, and me.

“His Grace said farewell to us and prepared to die, but Anna Leonidovna was very commanding, and she said, ‘I'm going for the doctor. There's one in Murom.' And she brought a surgeon to him, a believer. He was a good doctor, may he rest in peace. He died young. He was called Ivan, though he was an Armenian. He cried first, and swore that he couldn't do anything unless we got him to a hospital.