Masha went to get some. “You play exquisitely,” she heard him telling Lika when she returned.
Hours later, Mariushka came to complain that she needed to set the table.
“Set it,” Masha told her, and Mariushka did, working around the toiling author, who, she reported with even more awe, didn’t once look up but continued streaming ink as though he were some kind of writing machine.
ANTOSHA HAD SCRIBBLED SIXTY KOPEKS’ WORTH, HE claimed at dinner. “But you should see what this maniac produced. A page for my every line.”
“For the money,” the maniac said. “For the money.”
Misha, home now from the tax office, quizzed Ignati on what he was paid for these lines, then bragged that he’d had a story accepted for publication.
“Which one?” Antosha said. “‘The Man with the Big Arse’?”
“No, ‘The Man Who Had a Brother with a Big Arse.’”
After the elders left the table for their geriatric pursuits, Ignati produced a box of cigars. Shortly the room, already filled with Ignati’s booming laughter, filled with smoke.
“May I take a puff?” Lika asked.
Ignati let her, and she nearly coughed her heart onto the table. He rushed to pat her back. Misha pressed a glass of water into her hands. Meanwhile, the doctor sat at the head of the table and did nothing to save her.
“You’ve killed her, Potapenko,” Misha said.
“I hope not. We’ve just met.”
“I’m fine.” Lika gulped the water.
When Ignati casually took out his notebook, Lika put Masha’s comment into words. “You keep writing things down. Read it to us.”
He only pretended to. “‘Beautiful girl longs to be a singer. Career destroyed by cigars.’”
Everyone laughed, and Lika asked, “How did you know I want to be a singer?”
Ignati pointed to Antosha, who smiled inscrutably.
Something occurred to Masha. If Lika was acting, if she was trying to make Antosha jealous, she would fail. But if in the process she actually fell in love with Ignati, wouldn’t that be the best outcome? The protective feeling she’d been harbouring for Lika lifted then, along with her dislike of Antosha’s behaviour. Instead, a wave of gratitude rushed in for this big happy man who had succeeded in infecting them all.
Next Ignati asked Antosha what he was working on, a question Antosha always deflected. He surprised them now by answering.
“It’s about an academic. A nobody who suffers from megalomania. It’s boring, I’m afraid.”
“Nothing you write is boring,” Lika said.
He drew reflectively on the cigar. “I’d like to write a decent play.”
“A play? What about a novel?” Ignati asked.
“With Tolstoy looking over my shoulder? No, thank you.”
“I suppose Pushkin’s ghost is stopping you from writing poetry. And yet the great playwright Ignati Potapenko doesn’t scare you?”
“Who? That hack?” Antosha said, and Ignati roared.
They were purposely lingering, waiting for the fish to start biting. Antosha rose and went to the window, abandoning his cigar.
“Is a play without theatrical effects possible?”
“You do need drama,” Ignati said.
“But must it always be so overwrought?”
“What do you mean?”
Antosha’s back was still turned. “All that breast-beating and sinking to the knees.”
“It’s de rigueur at the Abramova Theatre,” Misha said, scraping the ash off his cigar.
Antosha looked at Ignati over his shoulder. “Couldn’t he love, say, comically? Or silently?”
“How will anyone know he’s in love?” Lika asked.
Now he looked directly at her. “With subtler gestures.”
Her face flushed with confusion. Masha, too, wondered what he meant. Was he hinting at something or joking again?
Then Misha barked out, “She thinks that some people are too subtle as it is.”
Antosha smiled. “But you’re right, dearest Lika.”
She beamed to hear, finally, an endearment.
“The audience wouldn’t understand. And if they did, they wouldn’t like it. No, it’s hopeless. No more tea, thank you, Masha. We’re going out now.”
“Where?” Misha asked. “Oh, fishing. Snore.”
Ignati pushed himself up from the table with both hands, the cigar in his teeth. He paused to say to Lika, “Afterward, we’ll hear you sing.”
While they’d been talking, Masha had taken note of the sky’s concentrating red. The window was open, and they could hear the frogs gathering in their nightly choir. She rose to light the lamps. Lika helped.
“Misha, go get Mother, and we’ll play whist.”
He’d finished his cigar and was cleaning under his nails with a knife. “Whist? Snore.”
Then, from outside, Antosha called, “Masha! Mother! Come!”
They hurried out and around the house to where they met the awestruck fishermen. An enormous moon, ten times its normal size, crimson, was sinking into the pond and setting fire to the water. Ignati waved his rod in the air.
“Ladies and gentlemen, behold the celestial orb!”
Mother and Father appeared. “What’s happening?” Mother cried. Father took one look and hurried back inside to pray.
“Get your paints,” Antosha told Masha.
Impossible to capture such an event. Lika’s white dress had changed colour, Masha’s too, and the paper trunks of the birches—all washed in a rosy hue. The moon was the painter now.
“Why does it look like that?” Mother warbled. “What’s happening? What does it mean?”
“Fear not, Mamasha,” Antosha told her. “It’s not the end. The world, so harsh and senseless, will go on. It’s a magic trick called refraction.”
“Like a mirage,” Lika said.
“Exactly.”
“Antosha,” Mother began, hand on her heart.
“Yes, Mamasha, I feel it too. A poem.”
Lika set off to walk around the pond. She looked spectral in the gathering dusk, her dress glowing against the darker backdrop of the trees. Antosha followed her with his eyes.
“This afternoon I had a dream. I just remembered it. There was a figure all in black.” He pointed to Lika. “There’s his negative.”
An owl tremoloed in the distance. Then Ignati, watching Lika too, burst into “I Love You” from The Queen of Spades.
Only later did Masha get the chance to ask Antosha about the dream, after the unlucky fishermen returned, and they had all gathered in the parlour. Lika was at the piano, Ignati lifting his violin out of its case. The moon had shrunk to its habitual size by then, but the mystery remained, a feeling in the room.
“That thing you dreamed, brother. It made me shiver. Tell us more.”
“There’s nothing more boring than people’s dreams,” he said.
“No, tell it,” Lika said.
A black-robed figure. Now he thought it was a monk. “Really, it’s dull.” He waved his modest hand and only finished at the insistence of the whole gathering. “It replicated itself. Moved like a skipping rock around the world. That’s all.”
Misha yawned. Ignati tuned his instrument. Masha pressed him. “But what did it mean?”
“It meant”—he leaned forward, kind eyes crinkling—“dinner was as yet undigested.”
Everyone laughed, then Lika began to play. She chose “Angel Serenade,” and Ignati, on the violin, joined his voice to hers.
It had to be as obvious to Antosha as to Masha what Lika was doing. Reminding him of his former jealousy and passion, of when he was free and generous with outward signs. Lika sang to Antosha while Ignati sang to her. He’d already fallen in love with her, had from the first sight of her glumly shelling peas on the veranda.
Antosha watched what was happening, but he was seeing something different. Masha recognized his look, the one that surely appeared on every writer’s face when al
l the pieces of a story finally fall into place.
“Your voice is so beautiful,” said the God of Love when the song ended. “You shouldn’t be singing in parlours, but in concert halls.”
The compliment made Lika lift hopeful eyes to Antosha, just then rising from his chair.
“Thank you, Lika. Everyone? Please, excuse me.”
They watched him open the doors to his study and, with a parting nod, close them behind him.
“He’s going to write,” Misha told the room.
AFTER THAT FATEFULLY TIMED VISIT, LIKA BEGAN visiting Melikhovo with Ignati. For the rest of the summer, the whole family looked forward to the lively concerts they put on—except Masha.
Ignati was married. Lika had found out even before Masha and already resigned herself.
“Antosha only ever needed me when the weather was bad or he was bored,” Lika told her, as though this excused her behaviour. “I wrote and asked if he would even care if he never saw me again.”
“What did he say?” Masha asked.
“He didn’t reply.”
So Lika accepted Ignati as her consolation prize. What a catastrophe. In the fall, she quit the Dairy School again. Ignati wanted her to concentrate on her music. He thought she was good enough to go on stage, not just in Russia. In Europe.
Then, for six months, Masha barely heard from Lika—until, out of the blue, a letter came.
Take pity on me, Masha, and come to say goodbye forever to an unfortunate woman like me. On Saturday evening, I’m leaving for Paris . . .
The two sentences contradicted. If going to Paris to sing was her new dream, why should Masha take pity on her? What was unfortunate about it?
3
MASHA STOOD—ARMS OUT AT HER SIDES, crucified without a cross—while behind her, her dressmaker recounted her oft-told tale of marital affliction.
“I always knew when he was on the vodka because he’d start going through the cupboard. Taking out my dresses. The next place they’d hang would be the second-hand shop, where everybody’d recognize them.”
Masha cringed as the picked seams released her. The dress, her dark green one, had been hanging in Mother’s wardrobe by accident. Last weekend Masha rediscovered it with fond elation, like she was reuniting with a long-lost friend—until she put it on, and the friendship soured. Soured as hers with Lika had, once Lika had started consorting with Ignati.
“I ran away, but he found me. What a thrashing I—”
Masha’s arms were leaden wings. She interrupted. “Why did you marry him?”
“Pardon? Oh, it was arranged. A berry not picked rots in the rain. That’s how it is in the villages and how it will always be. The city’s different. Life’s better here.”
More ripping. Masha could take a full breath again. “It’s the same tedious life, but with trams.”
“No one beats you. I’m happy here. So happy. Yet all the time I know he’s coming for me, and I’ll have to let him in.”
She stepped in front of Masha with her little blade, three pins still jutting from her lips. Tight brown braids criss-crossed her pungent scalp. She lived and worked in this one room. All she had was her machine, a table and chair, and the icons to remind her of her duty to a brute. Yet she was happy. And Lika, who had no duty at all to Ignati, who had sounded so unhappy in her letter, why was she going? At least the dressmaker had religion as an excuse.
A thought escaped Masha. “Women are such idiots.”
Startled eyes flicked up, fearful raisins pressed into the dough of the dressmaker’s face.
“I was thinking of a friend, not you,” Masha told her. “She’s running off to join a married man.”
“That’s a sin.” She finished, her smile disarmed of pins. “All done, Miss. Come back Wednesday.”
After the fitting, Masha took the tram to Muir and Mirrielees for a few things she needed. Keeping busy, so she would be unable to bid the “unfortunate” Lika farewell. Normally Masha wouldn’t even be in Moscow on the weekend, but Antosha had left for a month in Yalta to shake off his worrisome, worsening cough. It would be boring at Melikhovo without him. They’d been getting on well again since Lika took this ill-chosen course and Masha could blame everything on Ignati.
Winter was releasing its icy hold, yet the sidewalks were still slushless. She decided to walk back to her room. On Tverskaya Street, she side-stepped shoppers lingering before the windows. That week she had her pupils memorizing passages from Eugene Onegin. The sleigh, more swift than steady / Bumps down Tverskaya Street already. Something, something, parks and pharmacies . . .
Pharmacies. How romantic.
She could feel Lika’s letter under her skin. Masha had really let Granny down. Then she thought, why am I responsible for Ignati? Why didn’t Lika’s mother protect her, or her father go after the cad? Her father was probably busy with his own mistress. Antosha had his actresses. I’m rotting, Masha thought. She paused before one of the poetical pharmacies and considered going in for valerian drops.
Ahead was the Hotel Louvre, where the celebrities stayed. Just then two women stepped out—a mother and daughter, Masha guessed from their affectionate gestures and the difference in their height, the mother in a red ostentatiously feathered hat. The father stepped out after them, his hat still in his hand. After an effusive exchange of kisses, the three of them parted, the women heading briskly in Masha’s direction.
Valerian drops? She was turning into a spinster hypochondriac. She walked quickly on, away from the thought.
Now the two women from the hotel were right in front of Masha. She’d been mistaken. Both were young. The taller in the show-offy hat Masha recognized from her pictures in the paper—none other than Lidia Iavorskaya. Of course. The Louvre was where she had her salon. The smaller, a brunette, was less pretty, but something about her attracted Masha more. A free manner, possibly a corsetless body too. Inquisitive eyes, close-set and brown, flicked over Masha in passing. She smiled. Masha had pupils like this, seldom the prettiest, who shone from the inside. It reminded her of Lika too, back when they’d first met. Was this the person Klara had called a consort? Upside Down? No, Topsy-Turvy.
The left-behind man was still on the steps. As he settled his hat on his head, Masha glimpsed a forehead made prominent by dark retreating curls.
“Isaac?”
“Masha!”
No ambivalence on his face, or caution in his turpentine embrace. He plunged down the steps and seized her. The last time they’d seen each other, he’d been crawling toward her on his knees. He’d run all over town saying he was going to challenge Antosha to a duel. Every human emotion roiled within him, except embarrassment.
The arms around her felt thin, bony even. He held her out and searched her face—for proof of her affection, or to know if she took Antosha’s side in their ongoing dispute? Nearly two years had passed, and Isaac and Antosha still weren’t speaking. She did take Antosha’s side, of course, but how wonderful to see Isaac!
“What are you up to?” she asked.
Instead of answering, he linked her arm with his and led her away from the hotel, his much longer stride making her feel hurried, which was what gave the ruse away. She must have caught him in an assignation. With Lidia Iavorskaya or Topsy-Turvy?
“How’s the painting?” he asked her.
“I’m still at it. I love it actually. It’s the one thing I do for myself.”
“Why don’t you ever bring me something to look at?”
She noticed his pallor then, how it made his eyes seem blacker and more melancholy.
“You were my pupil,” he chided. “All my pupils are close to my heart, you especially. Because of Kolia.”
So Antosha didn’t exist. Masha said, “I paint when I’m at Melikhovo, not in town.”
“Come to my studio. Do you have time? It’s not far. I want to show you a painting I’ve just finished.” He threw an arm in the air to flag a passing a cab. “A storm settled on my canvas. These hands?” He raised them.
“These eyes? They played no part. I want you to see it. Masha, convince me I really painted it. Tell me I’m a genius.”
She laughed. “I can tell you that now, but I’ll come anyway.”
He gave her a skeletal smile as he helped her into the cab. Climbing up after her, his face showed strain. He told the driver the address, then said to Masha, “I haven’t been well. Trouble with some part of my heart, I forget what. Starts with a.”
“Aorta?”
“That’s it. Unheard of in a man so young, the doctor says. But now I have a permanent residency permit. Maybe it will get better.”
The previous summer, Jews had lost the right to live in Moscow. Isaac explained how he’d managed to come back. “Dr. K., with his police connections, got me a temporary permit.”
“Dr. K. did?” Masha asked, astonished.
Isaac leaned in. “As a certain person wrote, ‘That man is killing me with his magnanimity.’”
Smiling, Masha said, “If you can quote from ‘The Grasshopper,’ Isaac, surely you can forgive Antosha.”
He spread his long arms. “I will. As soon as he apologizes.”
There was little chance of that. Masha sighed. “Your painting’s in his study at Melikhovo. The one that used to hang at the bottom of the stairs.”
“I have no quarrel with his excellent taste. And I’m far from the only offended party. Lensky from the Maly? He and Antosha are finished.”
“Why?”
“Your brother called him fat.”
Masha couldn’t suppress her scorn. “If there was a fat man in the story and Lensky saw himself in him, is that Antosha’s fault?”
With no adequate reply, Isaac turned priggish, tugging out his handkerchief and wiping his nose to close the subject. “With regards to my permit, thank God for rich patrons. I’m fixed for life now. I smell coffee.”
Masha patted her bag. “I’ve just come from Muir and Mirrielees.”
“And what about Lika? You heard she’s leaving? I saw her last night. She was twittering away—Paris and Potapenko! Paris and Potapenko!”
Masha turned fully in the seat to face Isaac. “Do you know Ignati?”
A Russian Sister Page 26
