NINE

by Svetlana Alexiyevich

  And when he rang, but not from his phone at work, his first call in three days, when I had delayed leaving home for some reason for five minutes, when I thought, how simple, I am reborn and I've outsmarted the fakir, when I heard his voice, «Hey, it's David, how's things?»… I felt cheated, it was a dirty trick, I seemed to hear the felt mutant laughing over me from his stripy stool on the corner of Jampath Lane and the Tibetan Market… «Marina, why aren't you saying anything? Are we meeting up?» «Why?» «I missed you» «Not today» «Please come» «I don't want to come to the hotel» «I want to see you, stop by and we'll go out somewhere, anywhere»… He wants to see me? Sure, why not, I'm a conformist after all, if somebody wants me… We sat in a Japanese restaurant in the company of a fifty year-old London Jew and his young girlfriend with outsize breasts. An empty conversation, masks of attention, fumbling around on my knees under the table… «Have you seen 'Men in Black'?» «No, what's it about?» «Nothing really in particular, these aliens arrive on Earth…» The Englishman's girlfriend was bored, «What do you do?» «Nothing, I'm not from Moscow» «From where then?» «St Pete» «And what did you do there?» «I was married» «A worthy profession»… I looked at the ceiling and smiled, the Englishman screwed up his eyes and smirked cynically… «me and Ira bought some roller-blades you know, and those kids on Poklonnaya Hill, you should have seen what they could do on them, they spend days on end there, I wonder what they do in winter?» «Play on computers» «Yes, that's for sure, those computers»… I tried in vain to remove David's hand from my thigh, the Englishman leant backwards, «Be careful with that sake, Marina, you can drink it and drink it and then not be able to get up»… A Russian waitress in a kimono, but with a perm, brought some carrot consomme… «Yeah, that's like hash, you smoke it and smoke it and then you can't get up either…» a pause… the Englishman asked, «Can you get us some hash?» «Of course, anything you want… hash, acid, mushrooms»… David tried to change the subject, «You'd be best to tell us a joke» «Oh, the gentlemen want a joke, do they? No problem, here's one: Why do Jewish businessmen like watching porno films backwards? Because they love the bit where the prostitute returns the money» «Ha ha ha… that's a great joke, that's marvellous»… Dinner drew to a close, and while we travelled through night-time Moscow, and my hand was in his and our fingers intertwined and disentangled, he asked «How old are you? I've forgotten how old you are» «I don't remember» '?' «You can never know precisely whether you're fifteen or thirty-seven» «Right, but what does it say in your passport?» «I don't have it on me» «Fine, when's your story being published?»… and once again I felt that breath of energy, that wide pulsing of the ocean, and I wondered, if everything for me is so spontaneous, and he is so calculating, can I really be at ease with a person who thirsts for power, with a person who speaks the language of force? I decided that the Earth does not choose between the cliffs and the deserts, but tolerates a disintegrating road, because strength is temporary and finite, but weakness makes you subtle and free… and I was carried away and crashed back by a gigantic wave, and for the first time I was a cloud and not the dry earth, for the first time the waves crashed through me, and then another, and then another, and another, and again and again…

  …and I know that if you take a decision, and it's genuine and honest, the world will adapt accordingly, and you can lie down on the world and float as on water, and it will support you… but how can you know if it's genuine or not?..the dark yellow sound of the saxophone vibrated in the twilight, oozed among the tables in the cafe, soared up to the ceiling, crept among the chairs' people's legs, reminding one of something well-known and obvious, yet hidden in the warped fabric of the space-time continuum, of something that you can now define only by touch and by smell, like a blind man discerning the approach of a stranger in the village… and I felt that all these people could laugh and smoke and chat and drink juice and whisky and argue and flirt only as long as this sound continued, holding up the earth in one demiurgic tonality, you can never know it by thinking and proving, you can only start to feel it… «So you're staying with me today?» «No, I don't want that, I don't want to see you once a month, I don't need your promises and obligations, but I do want to feel that what we have between us is real» «You know, I couldn't forget you, you touched me somewhere very deeply, and I didn't want that, I didn't want to ring you, understand, I'm at a point in my life now when I can't allow myself these serious relationships» «But for God's sake it was you who rang me, and not the other way round, you'll never allow yourself those relationships, you'll always be waiting for something that will never happen, because everything is already here and now» «That's not true» «And what is true? That you're happy?» «No, but I want to reach the situation where no-one can tell me what to do or where to go» «And so basically you'll never go anywhere, because you'll be an everlasting slave to your precious stones and your cell phone, and your wife will stay at home missing you, because someone at least has to produce your heirs, and your girlfriend in Moscow will miss you, as will a couple more girlfriends somewhere if you have the energy, and…» «You sound just like my mother, but how little you understand…»

  I was gazing through the window, as I had before, and saw a cloud that looked like a dragon made from poplar fluff, and an empty road winding round a corner, and lights on the bridge, and on Avenue Foch a street lamp blazed and went out after convulsively winking its dying light, and a raven hovered low over the bushes of tangled brushwood, and I noticed for the first time the dry old freckles of leaves on the tarmac, and Nijinsky danced his last dance in honour of the baby born to the Yaje woman in the House of the Waters in the lower reaches of the Vaupes river, while floating over the city to the tune of the dark-skinned saxophonist angel, and my head was spinning, and when I looked down I saw a man and a woman by the window talking to each other, holding hands, and he sat with his back to me and the woman had half-turned to the window, and when our glances met I didn't know where I was, and when I sailed away between the spires of the new hotel and went out onto the empty road and round the corner, I saw a man in a spot of light by the hotel entrance and I knew that the fakir had made a fool of himself, he had lost to me there, on the corner of Jampath Lane and the Tibetan Market, he was wrong: there was no America…

  LUDMILA PETRUSHEVSKAYA

  WATERLOO BRIDGE

  THE HOUSE WITH A FOUNTAIN

  WATERLOO BRIDGE

  The reader may recall the British film «Waterloo Bridge» starring Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh. It was extremely famous in Moscow in the 1950s when the story takes place.

  Translated by Sally Laird.

  These days — in the street or on the bus — they'd call her «aunty» or «gran».

  And she was in fact Granny Olya to her grandchildren. Her daughter, a big heavy woman, a full-grown geography teacher, still lived with her mother, while the daughter's husband, a small-time studio photographer (a misalliance stemming from a holiday romance) — this husband of hers came and went, sometimes appearing, sometimes not.

  Granny Olya herself had long lived without a husband; he kept going off on business trips, and finally returned — but not back home; said to hell with it and chucked all his possessions, clothes, shoes, his film books — left her all this stuff she had no use for.

  So she and her daughter drooped, the two of them, and did nothing about returning the things to the runaway; it was painful to start phoning, searching for so-and-so, let alone meeting so-and-so face to face.

  The Dad clearly wasn't too keen either, it was obviously awkward — the happy newlywed husband, complete with little son, turning up to claim his property at the nest of his grandchildren and granny-wife.

  Maybe, reckoned Granny Olya, it was HER, the new wife, who'd said to hell with it, we'll buy what we need in the morning.

  Or maybe she was rich, unlike Granny Olya, who'd got used to potato salad and vegetable oil and bought her boots at the orthopaedic shop for the handicapped — poor, childish things w
ith laces, extra-wide to allow for bunions.

  She was shabby, Granny Olya, meek and goggle-eyed beneath her glasses, with a bit of down for hair, full figure and stout legs.

  She was, however, a remarkably kind creature, forever taking care of somebody, staggering off with shopping bags to mouldy old relatives, wending her way round the various hospitals, even making the journey to tend the graves — and always unaccompanied, mind you.

  The geographer-daughter lent no support in these enterprises of her mother's, though she'd lay herself out to assist her so-called friends, feeding them, listening to their tales but not Granny Olya's, no way.

  In short, Granny Olya was always out and about — she'd cobble together her potato salad, fry up a bit of cheap fish and be out of the house, while the geographer-daughter, a stay-at-home type like many family people, would summon her friends round for wide-ranging discussions of life, involving many examples from personal experience.

  The geographer's husband, the man from the studio, was generally absent; as a rule he led his existence on the side, under the red light of the photo lab, where all sorts of things might be happening. Once upon a time the geographer-daughter had passed through this red light herself — she'd returned swell-looking from holiday, a hulking great wench in glasses with puffy eyes and a mouth that looked somehow frozen, then went and brought home this photography worker (divorced to boot, with no home of his own) to her respectable Mum, and in those days Dad, in their three-room professor's apartment, the fool.

  That was all history, water under the bridge, and Granny Olya, herself left with nothing after the professor's departure — no work experience, no prospect of a pension, not a ruble to call her own and, what's more, with just a thoroughfare to live in (the photographer and geographer had quickly taken over the separate room, the so-called study, after Dad had left; previously they and the children had lived just in the back room, but now they could spread themselves out — a great help where family life's concerned — while Granny Olya slept on the couch in the living room, and now she was stuck there.)

  Nowadays, in her new profession, Granny Olya did plenty of tramping and trekking about among the puddles: as a newly-hatched insurance agent she went knocking on strangers' doors, got herself invited in, wrote out insurance policies on kitchen tables, forever with her stout briefcase, a kindly lady with a sweaty nose and a flabby neck like a mother goose's.

  Unattractive, garrulous, devoted, arousing in others total trust and goodwill (though not in her daughter, who didn't give a pin for her mother and sided completely with the departed Dad) — such was Granny Olya, who lived not at all for herself, stuffing her head with other people's affairs and in passing relating to new acquaintances her own life-story as a brilliant singer, a graduate of the music academy, who'd married and followed her husband to his job in a wildlife reserve at the back of beyond, where he wrote his dissertation and she raised children, etcetera etcetera, in proof of which Granny Olya would even sing a snatch from the romance «My song for you, so languorous and gentle…», laughing together with her astonished listeners, who were quite taken aback by the effect, with the glasses all ringing in the sideboard, and the pigeons taking flight from the windowsill.

  It goes without saying that the daughter, and indeed the grandchildren, couldn't stand the old bat's singing, especially since the academy had trained Granny Olya for operatic rather than home singing, with the rare timbre, moreover, of a dramatic soprano.

  But even old dames can make fools of themselves, and in this instance the burden and bother of making fruitless calls at strangers' doorsteps apparently got too much for Granny Olya, who all of a sudden fluttered off to the cinema just to please herself: there it would be warm, there was a cafe, a foreign film, and — this was interesting — lots of her contemporaries were crowding the entrance, old dears like herself with shopping bags.

  There was a veritable witches' sabbath going on round the doors of the little theatre, and Granny Olya, persuading herself, against her better judgement, that she could do with a little treat, and drawn on irresistibly by strange sensations, made her way towards the box office, bought herself a ticket, and entered the unfamiliar warmth of the cinema.

  The cafe was teeming with people, young couples among them, and Granny Olya too bought herself a sandwich, a pastry and some dubious sweet drink — all costing a ridiculous sum, but an outing's an outing — then, wiping her nose with her husband's checked hankie, and seized by an inexplicable excitement, she entered the cinema along with the crowd, seated herself, took off her fur hat with its elastic band, removed her scarf, unbuttoned her threadbare winter coat, a once-elegant gabardine with fox-fur collar that didn't bear close scrutiny in the mirror — and at this point the lights went out and paradise arose.

  Granny Olya saw upon the screen all her dreams come true: herself when young in the wildlife reserve, with a pure lovely face, slender as a reed; and her husband, too, as he should have been, in that other life which for some reason she had never had.

  Life was full of love, the heroine was dying, as all of us will die, in illness and distress, but on the way there there had been a waltz by candlelight.

  By the end Granny Olya was weeping, and others around her were blowing their noses. Then, dragging her feet, Granny Olya set off once more like a worker bee to collect her dues, once again kissed two locked doors and, defeated on the professional front, crept home.

  A bus with steaming windows, the steaming metro, one block on foot, third floor, rich smells of home, children's piping voices in the kitchen, one's own, dear, familiar — stop.

  And suddenly Granny Olya, as if in day-dream, saw before her — so full of tenderness and concern — the face of Robert Taylor.

  The following day she rushed off again, early in the morning, to her assigned district, found her clients at home, collected their money, made several new acquaintances in the communal kitchens, persuaded them to take out an advantageous life insurance policy and en route — this was the greatest temptation of all — to collect, by way of a bonus, compensation for all their injuries, fractures and operations; and people listened to her eagerly and pondered their fate, business was going well, and then Granny Olya dashed headlong for the familiar cinema in time for the matinee.

  But another film, a film for kids, turned out to be on that day.

  At the box-office, however, Granny Olya ran into a half-familiar face, one of yesterday's old ladies — not quite so old yet — in an astrakhan hat; she too had rushed in early to the cinema and, much put out, was now enquiring where the film programme could be found, obviously intending to go off to another cinema where her favourite movie was showing.

  Granny Olya pricked up her ears, made the same enquiry, got to the root of the matter and the following day — only the following day — minced her way in solitude to a rendezvous with her beloved, and once more returned to that enchanted world of her other life.

  On this occasion she felt less self-conscious with the other old ladies, and indeed with herself; and at the exit she saw the happy, tear-stained faces and wiped her own eyes with the big man's hankie that had been left her as a souvenir, along with woolen men's underwear — soldier's underwear, they called it; she put it on in frosty weather, and wore the long johns at night, and her daughter wore her dad's checked shirts to school under her pinafore: life has to go on!

  «Oh Lord», thought Granny Olya, honest and pure as a crystal, «What's happening to me, I've been bewitched. And the worst of it is, these old ladies run round from show to show — quite dreadful…»

  She didn't consider herself an old lady — there was so much to look forward to still: Granny Olya was valued at work, her clients respected her, she was the mainstay of the family now — she'd even bought an aquarium for her grandchildren, had gone with them to the Pet Market to purchase the fish, hoping to forget THAT, the main thing (Granny Olya was able to control her passions, able to sacrifice herself — take, for instance, her life at the wildl
ife reserve.)

  But there was no getting round it, Granny Olya said to herself after a routine visit to her clients: again and again, no matter what the subject of conversation, she'd find herself uttering the beloved name — Robert — and the title of the film — «Waterloo Bridge» — and all the details of the actors' lives.