Tamara’s large body possessed an unfeminine physical strength. You could say this strength exceeded the human norm. The school where young Tamara and young Krylov had studied (Tamara was two classes ahead) had given birth to the traditions of Soviet pedagogy and maintained the practice of top students taking laggards under their wing so that the advanced students dragged the dunces through the difficult subjects. Tamara, who excelled more than many in mathematics, arrived at her result by the shortest route. Without wasting words on arousing consciousness, she cracked her patrons over their hard heads with stacks of textbooks. Sometimes she even broke noses, after which her tutees, snuffling, stopped objecting to the figures of elementary functions. Everyone respected the might of Tamara’s thrashings, as if a gold slab lay in the palm of her hand.
There was, however, a second-year boy by the name of Zotov who had no desire to get what was coming to him for his backwardness in algebra. He was a thickset lad with a low forehead, as if someone had added an extra shovel of material to the crude object, and had a nagging thought on his oddly squeezed face. In fact, he could not think, a fact to which the hard-headed mathematician, in turn, had no wish to reconcile herself. Attracted by the clatter of falling chairs, Krylov peeked into the mathematics office just as Tamara and Zotov were rolling on the floor, trying to butt their proud heads. The fact that Krylov managed to jump on the dunce and give Tamara a chance to stick her charge’s ugly face into a textbook let him feel like a man.
My God, how far away and alien poor Ritka and Svetka, the bunny sisters, who were quietly filling out their sexy outfits, quietly getting them dirty on the cellar’s sunken couch, which was splashed with boys’ sperm like pigeon droppings, were to Krylov now. Tamara let Krylov unbutton the top buttons of her navy uniform shirt and went to the movies with him, where they ate hot popcorn and kissed salty lips to the rumble of Hollywood blockbusters. The chinaberry that popped up everywhere was insanely pretty; its jutting thorns reminded him of a young girl’s perky breasts. She didn’t mind at all when Krylov broke off a huge cold bouquet right under the nose of the pale night policemen. Where had it gone, all that amazing new feeling that nothing could touch? Had Krylov foreseen that Tamara’s way of getting results by the quickest means, without wasting time on installing the necessary drivers in other people’s brains, would become the essence of her iron character? A crisis of extreme simplifications—this is what happened to her in mid-life, and not everyone can handle that. Now, once a week, she called Krylov at his workshop, sitting on the edge of her enormous bed made up in shimmering silk over which emptiness loomed.
Krylov’s last telephone conversation with Tamara had completely slipped his mind. In the exact same way he could not recall their last meeting, whether he had gone to see her at her house on Sunday or they had sat in one of those restaurants where each dish costs as much as a jewelry store purchase and where they fuss over a bottle of wine as if it were a newborn babe. Evidently, Krylov really was overflowing with what was happening to him, so that everything else splashed out. As a result the thread of contact had been lost, and as he dialed her number, Krylov suddenly wondered whether he had lost Tamara as well in one of his confused, waking dreams.
She answered immediately, however, and her voice was cheerful.
“Come over right now. I’m at the provincial hospital. I have to stop by the morgue with Papanin; they have those green gates with the canopy. We’re working here setting up stands. I have television at seven, a live broadcast with Mitya Dymov. I’ve got two hours between the two, and I’m giving them to you. Let’s go to the Plow and relax a little.”
“I don’t feel like nightclubs. You and I need to have a serious conversation.”
“Don’t worry so much. I’ll get a separate room.”
In the taxi—an ancient Plymouth, one of those heavy, strange rattletraps that are migrating to Russia in herds under the pressure of world ecological standards—Krylov marveled yet again that Tamara had no thought of ever parting from him. It was he, Krylov, who had parting on his mind, but Tamara sincerely believed that their relationship could and should go on for ever. Meanwhile, the Plymouth shuffled up in a crush of gravel and clouds of peppery dust to the green metal gates where a new electronic sign stood on a tall stand: “The Granite Company. Funeral Services of European Quality.” The guard, who had been forewarned, pressed a button, the gates shuddered and moved aside, and the Plymouth crossed onto the territory of the Fourth Provincial Hospital, which looked sugar-coated and whose windows faced the little morgue, its black tar roof, and the hot rainbowed puddle from the summer rains.
Inside, Krylov saw Tamara immediately. She was directing the placement of a coffin. Animated, disheveled, wearing an elegant light-colored suit under which the dove-white cups of her bra were modestly outlined, she gestured to Krylov to wait. He sat down on a random chair and accepted iced tea from the pale secretary, who smelled sharply of deodorant. What was happening in front of him was perfectly in Tamara’s style. The oak coffin placed on the podium—an expensive presentation model—was elegant, like a fine musical instrument; other coffins were being shown on the monitor as computer graphics, which Tamara’s staff programmer was still manipulating, shaking his mane. Young women from the head office were running here and there dragging dried bumpy pine boughs with fancy decorations, like a New Year’s tree. The woman who would be working with clients and selling them all this finery was fixedly paging through the prices. She looked around dazed from time to time, as if she had woken up in an unfamiliar place.
Krylov guessed from the extent of the work going on that he would have at least an hour’s wait. Occasionally Tamara would give him a kiss on his damp forehead as she ran by. Sometimes a tall door would open at the end of the darkish annex, and behind it Krylov would catch a glimpse of several high zinc tables. On the table farthest from the entrance he saw a yellow corpse—a former woman with a round belly and legs stretched out like a frog’s.
It was amazing how excited Tamara was about her relatively new business, which had begun a year and a half before with the purchase of Granite and had now expanded to multifaceted oversight over the four most promising municipal cemeteries. Observing her inspired direction of morgue improvements, Krylov saw with satisfaction that she had literally come to life; a natural flush played under her rouge. Business had done what the injections of rejuvenating chips swimming in Tamara’s veins, like music in an archaic cassette tape, had not been able to achieve. Tamara’s blood, which combined too many components, may not have read the program born by the invisible microcomputers, the woman of this new nationality may not have been susceptible to the procedures that had only just appeared in the most progressive beauty clinics. Tamara had flown back from Switzerland not so much rejuvenated as fluffed up, with information processes under her polished skin trying to turn biological time back and forming something like a subdural brain. Now, despite the recent treatments and the still noticeable thickenings on her enlarged face, she shone with life and blazed with a smile at which even the malcontent pathologist, who skirted the team of outsiders, responded with a yellowish grin.
“Even a corpse would smile at her,” Granite’s former owner, the aging man with a skipper’s beard who had once tried to lure Krylov with the creative possibilities of criminals’ necropolises, said about the new owner. Tamara, appreciative of his branching connections in three district administration, had kept him in the business as a junior partner. Dead or not (the makeup artists at Granite, by the way, were superb and could give frozen mouths a dreamy, feather-soft curve), Tamara contrived to derive joy for the relatives who had suffered this loss by applying almost forcible methods. During the firm’s reorganization, Krylov had seen his fill of these relatives’ smiles—uncertain and hurt ones—but also very ordinary, everyday ones. He had seen weepy women’s eyes, which looked like water-filled ashtrays, suddenly shine with grateful insanity; he had seen apparently hale pensioners sob and bow in thanks, their medals dangling, s
tunned to be informed of the free coffin upholstery and hearse benefits.
Tamara really did do much more for her clients than demanded by the competition, which was, by the way, quite conventional. She had a magic touch for business. Before the criminal structures could gasp, Granite offices had opened up at nearly every municipal hospital, which naturally had their own morgues. The criminal structures, which rightly considered funerals to be a part of their production cycle, had questions on this score, but it was all over before it started, and the goons suddenly pretended they didn’t exist.
Tamara, who up until then had been a standard participant in standard business activity (suburban construction, the building materials trade, an Internet store for loans and securities), suddenly acquired an individuality that no one had expected of her.
“I’m an enemy of death,” she stated in an interview for the Riphean insert of Russian Cosmo. “I don’t want death to extend beyond its natural parameters. The people burying their near and dear are alive. We work to make sure our clients have what they need.”
“What would you say to people who are calling you a blasphemous bitch?” inquired a correspondent for all the glossy Riphean publications, a large young woman with a hairdo like a radish top known to her readers by the gentle name Alenka.
“I’d tell them to lay off,” replied Tamara in Alenka’s style. “All over the world, people have two expensive events: their wedding and their funeral. People spend the most money for perceptions, which should be positive. We’re a funeral services company and are merely improving on what has always existed everywhere.”
Her last statement, however, did not correspond to reality. Tamara had disturbed the Riphean capital specifically because she had altered the ritual. Single-handedly she had encroached upon the method of parting with the dead that played out one way or another for all modern city dwellers. It was a miserable method, but it offered rules that one could simply follow and feel that one had fulfilled one’s final duty. No one had had the audacity to modernize an industry where all the props, whether expensive or cheap, were total kitsch. In no other human sphere could all these wax flowers, airbrushing, and gilt—in short, the worst kitsch Russian commerce had to offer—have held on. Forward-thinking people who would never have tolerated painted flowers and cushiony satin anywhere else, here did just what everyone else did, and without a murmur. Here they agreed to what was commonly accepted, just so they wouldn’t have to come up with anything original—because coming up with something that might improve the loss of someone close to you was unthinkable. Only Tamara, that crazy bitch, had suddenly decided to improve everything, and rather than start with the form she took direct aim at the essence.
In the unhappiness—the ritual’s chief substance—she implanted elements of happiness and did so in the simplest way possible: Granite ran a lottery. Clients who made a deposit could spin the transparent drum, where white balls bubbled like eggs in boiling water. Fairly often, a lucky number that the owner could use for a free tombstone with a hologram of the deceased or, for example, a funeral dinner for fifty people at the Riphean restaurant, rolled down the chute all nice and warm. Some Granite offices that were still not fully equipped used a deep velvet bag instead of the drum. Once a poor widow wearing a mourning dress hastily sewn from a coat pulled out the grand prize: a vacation to the Caribbean for three. The television often showed both the clients and the drum with the cheerful balls and asked for quick interviews with the lucky winners, to which some agreed; drunk from grief, they dissolved in thanks to Granite; others turned away brusquely. The Riphean capital’s press subjected Tamara’s activities to harsh comment, and journalists exercised their wit, quite happy with the foolishness of their subject and the easy chance to demonstrate their freedom from moneybags.
Like Tamara’s other schemes, the morgue lottery really did look like a farce, except that Tamara wasn’t stupid. None of the cutting journalists understood her metaphysical objective. No one sensed, for instance, how her attempts differed from Mitya Dymov’s “Decedent of the Year”—an energetic operation with two-seater graves and garlands of dancing girls that were like a friendly caricature of Tamara’s firm, although in fact Mitya catered assiduously to the governor and, accordingly, with his characteristic childlike smile, was rude to the federal viceroy. In short, an atmosphere of cheerful scandal and quiet latent dislike had thickened around Tamara. She took it very hard when the boiling water of lottery happiness scalded the happiness of bared souls.
Her experiments were not without danger. Often the results were opposite to what she had intended. Some client could linger with inviolable calm and pedantically discuss the points of the contract with the operator, but no sooner did she get a coffee grinder from the firm than she had a fit of hysterics. Once, the father of a small boy who had perished in a fire, a very pale man with a blank look, himself groomed as if he were the deceased, hair for hair, suddenly rushed to Tamara, who had personally given him a box of some kind. Evidently, Tamara lost it, or the inconsolable father was insanely strong, but he managed to come crashing down on the rug with her, under the clattering wreaths. There the madman, taking advantage of the fact that security had gone off for a smoke, tried incoherently to crush her long-legged body, as if trying to drown it in his own grief. The confused shouts tore security from the bathroom, and the madman was dragged off with the help of two volunteers, who did not spare their funeral suits. They helped a disheveled Tamara get up. She had lost her left shoe, and her hairdo from the Europa Salon had slipped to one side, like a lacey hat. But she didn’t head straight for the ladies room. Limping on her one remaining boat, she pulled the crushed box over the mixer the man had thrown aside and handed it to him, saying, “Take this. You need it”—which was the truth.
Tamara’s truth was concrete; actions that shocked the public symbolized nothing. However, the hundreds of appliances the firm had given away were already in use in modest kitchens and were now covered with the film of daily life—permanent beet juice stains, coffee dust, saucer circles. Herein lay a lesson, inexpressible by any other means, that people were afraid to understand.
But Tamara continued to insist. A report about the fate of a widow who had gone to heaven did not stop her. For a while, an old Russian woman in a coat of heavy fat was a sight at a Caribbean paradise; a lonely dark spot on the long mirror of the beach, far from the noisy human rookeries, she spent days doing nothing but gaze at the gentle sea mist, perhaps searching for motionless spots like herself, grains of sand like her in the mollusk flesh of emptiness. Who knows what thoughts were born in her head, which was wrapped in a white kerchief? Soon after, a tropical hurricane came up that was shown on the world news programs, and there, amid the swaying palms and flying native huts, an amateur camera caught a clumsy figure lifted into the air. First it was taken for a cow, but when it was blown up it turned out to be human. There was no more news about the widow or the three other Russian tourists; however, Tamara refused to see a warning sign in this death-by-paradise.
She was apparently expecting some kind of miracle from her work. Once Krylov found her doing something resembling laundry. Tamara was rummaging in a polished oak coffin, slowly studying this parcel box as if she were trying to plunge up to her elbow in the next world and bring back something that had drowned there. The expression on her handsome face made Krylov shudder. It was exactly the same as on Granite’s clients when they frowned and reached into the velvet lottery bag.
Right now Krylov was observing the restructuring of one of the firm’s main bases. A new operator, a heavy but handsome brunette with a hairdo like a mound of turf, had evidently presented the standard destined to replace the diversity of employees at hospital morgues and thereby express Granite’s philosophy. Any of the operators who could not squeeze herself into this maternal outfit and give herself a chignon and the same kind of turned-up nose as the new woman was threatened with dismissal under some clever point of her labor agreement. Krylov tried to imagine wha
t exactly had driven the firm’s psychologist to take this new woman as the model operator. Maybe her abundance of vital juices, their weight and density, evoked associations with the bounty of the earth where the cold client was going as he left his inconsolable relatives. As a new element in the world of appearances, the world of likenesses without originals, the woman was the image of a prosperous peasantwoman, which, considering the specifics of the farming at Granite, suited the firm’s general spirit and its positive nature perfectly.
Lost in thought, Krylov nearly missed the new staff’s appearance onstage. Granite’s former owner stumbled through the sun-blurred glass door. He was pale from the heat, and there was a wire of some kind running from his wrinkled ear, which looked like a dead potato, to his trouser pocket; a dark circle around his left eye looked just like a panda’s.
“You’re late, Peter Kuzmich,” noted Tamara coldly, tearing herself away from her monitor. “I’ve been waiting for you to take over from me, but you appear to have fallen asleep somewhere.”
“I had a gypsy problem, Tamara Vatslavna!” Granite’s former owner barked like an artillery commander, in a strange voice, probably having been listening to his MP3 player. “Those gypsies are swine. Apparently they didn’t gild the earrings!”
“What earrings? What are you talking about?” Tamara was suddenly cautious, holding onto her purse.
“The earrings on the monument! The wife of one of our barons is lying there in North!” the sprightly old men kept shouting, stumbling to the rhythm of the music. “They gilded the bracelet, the ring, and the pendant, but they thought the earrings, they were just her curls.”
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