The Big Green Tent (8 page)

“In the depths of antiquity, when human culture was just beginning to emerge, the word was much more intimately connected to music. Verses were recited aloud, to the accompaniment of a musical instrument called the lyre. This is the origin of the term ‘lyric.' Two and a half thousand years later, a great deal has changed: it is rare for poetry to be accompanied by music, although new genres have appeared in which music and words are intrinsic to each other. Any examples?”

The bell rang, but none of them stirred, as though transfixed by his words. Why didn't they slam the lids of their desks shut, tear out of their seats, and hurl themselves toward the door with leaps and wild yelps, blocking up the exit with their jostling bodies—move it! Come on, hurry up! Into the hallway, down to the coatroom, out onto the street!

Why did they listen to him? Why did he feel it was so urgent to stuff their heads with things they didn't need to know? And he was moved by a sense of very subtle power—they were learning to think and feel. What an oasis amid the general dull and meaningless chaos!

Three days later, Stalin's death was announced, and Victor Yulievich felt a small sense of satisfaction—he had predicted it before anyone else. Moreover, he belonged to the absolute minority of people who did not intend to mourn the loss. When he was growing up, his parents had sent him to Georgia for the summers. The last time they had all been to Tbilisi as a family was shortly before his father's death, in 1933.

He knew from his father how much his Georgian relatives all despised and feared Dzhugashvili.

The tyrant was no more. The titan was no more. A loathsome creature that had crawled out of the underworld, ancient and tenacious, with a hundred arms and a hundred heads. And a mustache.

*   *   *

Classes were canceled, and the kids were rounded up for an assembly. Victor Yulievich led his sixth-graders, lined up in pairs, to the auditorium on the fourth floor. Mikha hovered around him, then thrust a piece of paper covered with large lilac handwriting into his hand. It was a poem.

A black frame at the top enclosed the words “Stalin's Death.”

Weep, people, living here and yon,

Weep, doctors, typists, workers galore.

Our Stalin is dead, and never will one

Such as he return. Nay, nevermore.

Well, hello there, Catullus
, Victor thought, stifling his amusement. Then he said quietly, “Well, ‘doctors' makes sense. But why ‘typists'?”

“My aunt Genya was a typist. All right, let it be ‘typers' then,” Mikha said on the fly. “Maybe I could recite it?”

Nothing good could come of this ready enthusiasm.

“No, Mikha, I wouldn't advise it. In fact, I categorically advise against it.”

Mikha wanted to take back the paper, but the teacher folded it deftly in half, pressing it to his chest.

“May I keep it as a memento?”

“Sure!” Mikha said, beaming.

The auditorium was full. Beethoven was playing on the radio. Damp-eyed teachers arranged themselves around a plaster bust. The scarlet velvet of the school banner draped its folds onto the floor. Victor Yulievich stood at the back with a grim look on his face. Borya Rakhmanov, an eighth-grader, was pinned up against a windowsill by the crowd of students. The windowsill was digging painfully into his right side, but there was no room to wriggle free from the torment. This was a light dress rehearsal for what would happen to him only three days later.

After the solemn assembly, with copious sobbing—the teachers provided the example of sincere grief, and the children emulated them, struggling to reach the tragic note—they dispersed and returned to their classrooms. The principal tried to call the school board to find out whether school should be canceled, and for how many days, but the line was always busy. Only at one o'clock was it announced that students should be dismissed and sent home for public mourning. Later they would announce when school was to resume.

When he was sending his students home, Victor Yulievich asked the children to remain there, at home, and to stay off the streets. The best thing of all would be for them to read some good books!

Sanya Steklov was glad to follow his teacher's advice. He was, it seemed, the only one who had the collected works of Tolstoy on his bookshelf at home, and during the four days of official mourning Sanya devoured all four volumes of
War and Peace
(though, it's true, he did skip some of the passages). After he had read the first volume, he gave it to Mikha, but Mikha didn't so much as open it; he had other problems. Aunt Genya had collapsed from a minor heart attack; Minna was having stomach trouble, which happened whenever the going got rough; and Mikha was run ragged, catering to his woeful aunt's every whim for three whole days (although her mad grief was somewhat overblown).

Ilya didn't give a hoot about his teacher's advice or his mother's pleas. The alarming significance of the event lured him down into the streets. Early in the morning on March 7 he grabbed his camera and left home with the confidence of a hunter anticipating a run of luck.

For three days Victor Yulievich never left the house, and forbade his mother to go outside as well. The bread had run out, but he said, “Bread? What are you talking about? We don't even have any vodka.”

Indeed, on the evening of the fifth he had drunk the bottle his mother kept on hand for special occasions. He had decided that until the moment the Leader was taken away and safely buried, he would stay right where he was.

Dressed in his striped pajamas, he lay down on the divan behind the tapestry curtain with a pile of books beside him. The ultimate happiness.

At ten o'clock on March 9, the body was ceremoniously removed from the Hall of Columns, where it had been lying in state. It was carried out by squat people in heavy overcoats with astrakhan collars.

That was when Victor finally left the house—to get bread and vodka. The streets were almost deserted. Trucks were still lined up. The scene that greeted him was reminiscent of the aftermath of St. Petersburg's infamous flood: crushed shoes and hats, briefcases forever parted from their owners, broken lampposts, smashed-in first-floor windows. By the archway to a building, there was a wall covered in blood. A trampled dog lay in front of it. Victor recalled Pushkin:

Yevgeny—evil is his lot!—

Runs to the old familiar spot

Down the old street—and knows it not.

All, to his horror, is demolished,

Leveled or ruined or abolished.
*

He recited
The Bronze Horseman
to himself from start to finish:

Upon the threshold, they had found

My crazy hero. In the ground

His poor cold body there they hurried,

And left it to God's mercy, buried.

Just there, on a lane a good distance from his home, Victor found a little shop that was open. The stairs led down into what was nearly a cellar. Several women were talking with the proprietor in hushed voices, but fell silent when Victor entered.

It's as though they've been talking about me
, Victor Yulievich said to himself, amused.

One of the women recognized him as the teacher, and peppered him with questions.

“Victor Yurievich, what happened? People are saying that the Jews were behind the stampede, that they organized it. Is this true? Maybe you've heard something yourself? Do you know anything about it?”

She was the mother of a tenth-grader, but he couldn't remember which one. Unsophisticated women often called him by the more common name Yurievich, rather than Yulievich, and this usually annoyed him. But now he was overcome with a strange feeling of humility, uncharacteristic of him.

“No, sweetheart, I haven't heard anything like that. We'll down a glass or two this evening for the repose of the soul and then get on with our lives. Why single out the Jews? They're people just like us. Two bottles of vodka, please, a loaf of white bread, and half a loaf of dark. Oh, and two packages of dumplings.”

He took his groceries, paid, and went out, leaving the women behind in a state of confusion: maybe it wasn't the Jews after all, but someone else. It could have been anyone, they were surrounded by enemies. Everyone envies us, everyone is afraid of us. And their conversation shifted to another key, prouder and bolder.

*   *   *

Victor and his mother sat at the round table dotted with burn marks, a carafe between them. Ksenia Nikolayevna brought in the dumplings, overcooked as usual. She placed the pot on an iron trivet. Victor poured them each a glass. Suddenly, the doorbell rang in the hallway. Three rings—that meant they were calling on the Shengelis, not the neighbors.

Victor went out to open the door and beheld a strange vision standing in the doorway. Wrapped up in a black lace shawl draped over a fur hat, wearing a man's coat with a raccoon-fur collar reeking of mothballs and cats, odors harking back to a distant past, was Nino, his dead father's cousin. She was an aquiline-nosed beauty, a singer, embroiderer, and nun
manquée
, who radiated warmth and laughter.

“Is it really you?”

The last time he had seen her was twenty years earlier. As a child he had stayed in her Tbilisi home, but an aura of doubt clung to this memory: Did that house really exist, or had he just dreamed it? But here she was, the same dear Nino, darling Niniko. She had hardly aged at all.

“Vika, my boy, you haven't changed a bit! I'd have recognized you anywhere.”

“My goodness, Nino, how are you? How did you get here?”

“Well, invite me in, don't leave me standing here on the threshold!”

They exchanged kisses, stroked each other's hair, pushed away from each other to get a better look, and then kissed again.

Ksenia Nikolayevna stood at the door to their room wondering indignantly—who could Vika be kissing out there? Good Lord, it's Nino! The Georgian cousin, her dearly departed's favorite! It was like she had just stepped out of the distant past. How is it possible? Come in! Sit down, sit down! But wash your hands first!

“By all means! Coming back from the graveyard, the first thing you do is wash your hands,” she said. Her Georgian accent was thicker than it had been before. Her voice was rich with celebratory laughter.

She washed her hands, used the facilities, and washed them again. Ksenia Nikolayevna had already set the table for three. All their plates were old, chipped and cracked all over.

Victor poured out the vodka.

“First, let's drink to our liberation! It's like the forty years in the desert. He's croaked, but we've survived!” she said, flouting the protocol at table that was strictly observed in Georgia. A woman—especially a guest—never spoke first!

They drank. Nino broke off a small piece of a single dumpling with her fork, and popped it daintily into her slightly opened mouth. Victor recalled how she had taught him to eat, to drink, to sit down properly, and to greet people. He had clean forgotten all of it. Yet he still did everything just as she had instructed him to back then, without being aware of it.

*   *   *

“How did you manage to end up here, Ninochka?”

She leaned against the back of the chair, clasped her hands behind her head, and broke into merry, youthful laughter. Then she stopped smiling abruptly, removed the black lace shawl from her shoulders, wrapped it around her head, and stood up. She raised her exquisite, ageless hands above her head and let out a long, ascending wail. When the sound reached its apex, it came crashing down, nearly wordless, because it was mourning the dead. It was an ancient keening beyond the need for words, a howl of despair filled with great pain, and longing, and solemnity.

Nino completed this ancient, wordless utterance and broke into wild laughter again.

She's inebriated, poor thing
, Ksenia Nikolayevna thought.

When her laughing fit was over, Nino told a story that for years afterward would be a favorite among close friends and family.

On March 5, before they had formally announced the death of Stalin, two NKVD officers came to fetch her and take her away. They wanted to take her sister Manana, too, but she had gone to Kutaisi the week before and hadn't yet returned.

“Mama starts to gather my things, she's crying, and she whispers under her breath, ‘He just won't leave us alone, the devil!'

“But the officer, watching Mama pack, understood her, and said, ‘Your daughter will be back home in three days, five at the most. I give you my word.'

“You remember Mama, don't you, Vika? Ksenia remembers, of course! She's ninety years old. Even when she was young she was absolutely fearless; and what is there for her to be afraid of now?

“‘Well, maybe your word is golden. But your hands are like iron!' she says.

“‘There's no need to insult us, Lamara Noevna,' one of the creeps says to her. ‘This is a great honor for your daughter.'

“They took me to the local Party headquarters. What an honor, indeed! The lights are always on there, people rushing to and fro like it's Rustaveli Avenue on a holiday. They take me into a large hall. The hall is full of women—every shape and size. There are village women—but also Veriko, and Tamara, and the Menabde sisters, singers.

“Two men come out—the first one says something like: the world has lost a great leader, the people are inconsolable, grief abounds. And I'm thinking,
This is what they brought me here to tell me?
Then the second one says, we've brought you here because according to ancient Georgian custom women lament the deceased. Only women can do this. We've brought you here to carry out a proper lamentation.

“My goodness, right then and there I wanted to sing, ‘Halleluja!
God shall arise, and his enemies be scattered!
'

“‘We know all about you,' this dirty little spy says. ‘We know you have sung at funerals and know the Georgian laments. We've gotten word from Moscow that they want you to keen for the Great Leader.'