NINE

by Svetlana Alexiyevich

  The house stood on a hillside. It was slewed relative to everything else; the main road ran below it and another pitted, earthen road ran above the homestead; and a footpath ran close to one side, which was the shortest route to the sea. Against that, the plot itself was delightfully laid out. At the centre of everything stood a large table flanked on all sides by fruit trees; two houses, one opposite the other, a shower, a toilet and a shed enclosed it like a theatre set. Zhenya and Sasha were sitting at one side of the table eating macaroni, but when the whole contingent flooded into the enclosed courtyard they immediately lost their appetite.

  «Hello, hello!» The redhead dropped her suitcase and bag and plonked herselfdown on the bench. «I haven't seen you here before!»

  Everything fell into place. The redhead belonged here. She was the leading lady. Zhenya and Sasha were newcomers, supporting cast.

  «It's our first time here,» Zhenya said apologetically.

  «There has to be a first time for everything,» the redhead replied philosophically, and proceeded to the large room with a verandah, which Zhenya had aspired to until being categorically turned down by the landlady.

  The driver hauled the old lady down in her cage; she was twittering in what sounded to Zhenya like a foreign language.

  Sasha rose from the table and moved away with an air of gravitas and independence. Zhenya collected the plates and took them off to the kitchen. They would have to accept that there was no way of avoiding these people. The redhead's arrival had completely changed the prospect for the summer.

  The boy, pallid, with a markedly snub nose and unbelievably narrow skull, addressed the redhead in what was by now unmistakably English, although Zhenya could not make out what he said. His redheaded mater, however, silenced him with a clearly discernible, «Be quiet, Donald».

  Until that day Zhenya had never set eyes on English people, and English the redhead and her family turned out incontrovertibly to be.

  They became properly acquainted in what, by southern criteria, was late evening, after the children had been put to bed and the dinner dishes washed. Zhenya had thrown a shawl over the table lamp to stop it shining on the sleeping Sasha. She was re-reading Anna Karenina in order to compare certain events in her own disintegrating private life with the real drama of a real woman, a woman with ringlets on her white neck, with feminine shoulders, frills on her peignoir, and who clasped a handmade red bag in her piano-player's fingers.

  Zhenya would never have ventured to intrude on the lighted terrace of her new neighbour, but the latter herself tapped with large, varnished fingernails at her window and Zhenya came out, already in her pyjamas and with a sweater on top. It was cold at night.

  «I was driving past the Party Foodstore. What do you think I did?» the redhead asked her severely.

  As no witty response suggested itself, Zhenya rather unenterprisingly said nothing.

  «I bought two bottles of Crimean port, that's what I did. But perhaps you don't care for port? Perhaps you prefer sherry? Let's go!»

  And Zhenya, abandoning Anna Karenina, followed as if entranced by this sumptuous lady cossetted in a shaggy green and red check garment, half poncho, half tartan blanket.

  Everything was upside down on the verandah. The suitcase and the bag had been unpacked, and it was amazing to see how much they had managed to contain in the way of bright, cheerful clothes. All three chairs, the folding bed and half a table were piled high. Mother was sitting in a collapsible chair, and her pale, twisted little face wore an ingratiating smile she had evidently forgotten some considerable time previously.

  The redhead, without taking the cigarette from her mouth, poured port into two glasses, and rather less into a third which she pushed into her mother's hands.

  «Call my mother Susan Yakovlevna, if you like. Or don't call her anything. She doesn't understand a word of Russian anyway. She did know a little before her stroke, but after it she forgot everything. English too. All she remembers is Dutch. The language she spoke as a child. She is a perfect angel, but completely witless. Drink up, Granny Susie. Chin-chin!»

  The redhead again pressed the glass upon her and she took it in both hands with evident interest. It seemed there were some things she had not forgotten.

  That first evening was dedicated to a biographical account of the redhead's family — which was dazzling. The witless angel of Dutch origin had been a Communist in her young days, had linked her destiny to that of a British subject of Irish origins, an officer in His Majesty's army and a Soviet spy who had been caught and sentenced to death, bartered for an item of equivalent value, and exported to the motherland of the world proletariat.

  Zhenya listened agog, and quite failed to notice how drunk she was getting. The old lady snored quietly in her chair, then emitted a little stream.

  Irene Leary — what a name! — threw up her hands.

  «I let my mind wander. I forgot to put her on the pot. Oh well, no point in worrying about it now.»

  She carried on relating her enviable family history for a further hour while Zhenya got more and more drunk, but by now not from the port, which they had drunk to the last drop, but from admiration and delight at her new acquaintance.

  It was after two in the morning when they parted, having changed Susie and given her a quick wash. She woke with a start and had absolutely no idea what was going on.

  The following day was full of noise and bustle. In the morning Zhenya cooked the breakfast, making porridge for everyone before taking the two boys for a walk. The English boy, Donald, despite having been born in Russia, had an equally breathtaking pedigree. His paternal grandfather was an even more famous spy, and had been caught and exchanged for an item of even greater value than his maternal grandfather. He proved to be an exceptionally pleasant little boy, courteous, well brought up and, something that disposed Zhenya towards him no less warmly than towards his redheaded mother, he immediately behaved magnanimously and considerately towards the highly strung and nervous Sasha, as an elder towards a junior. He actually was a bit older, already five, and immediately demonstrated a quite adult nobility of spirit by unhesitatingly giving Sasha an ingenious little tip truck, showing him how to raise its body, and when they finally made it to the fizzy drinks kiosk, where Sasha usually started grizzling until Zhenya bought him some carbonated water in an opaque tumbler, the five-year-old declined the proffered tumbler with a wave of his hand and said, «You drink it. I can wait.»

  He was a perfect little Lord Fauntleroy. When Zhenya got back home, Irene was sitting at the table in the courtyard with the landlady, and from the way that self-important Dora was fawning on her new lodger it was plain to see how highly Irene was rated in these parts. They were all treated to the landlady's mutton soup, hot and too peppery. The English boy drank it slowly and with faultless table manners. A bowl was placed in front of Sasha, and Zhenya was preparing to negotiate discreetly with him, because he was very particular about what he would eat, and that was restricted to mashed potato and rissoles, macaroni, and porridge with sweetened condensed milk. And nothing else. Ever.

  Sasha looked across at little Lord Fauntleroy, put his spoon in the soup and, for the first time in his life as far as she could remember, ate something that was not on his list.

  After lunch the children slept but the women sat on at the table. Dora and Irene reminisced about last year's season and talked cheerfully and amusingly about people she didn't know and happenings of long ago in the resort. Susie sat in her chair with a smile as permanently fixed and out of place as the brown mole situated between her nose and her lip. Zhenya sat with them for a time, drank a cup of Dora's good coffee and then went to her room. She lay down beside Sasha and was going to start in on Anna Karenina, but reading a book in the middle of the day didn't seem right, almost improper in fact. She set aside the dog-eared volume and dozed, imagining through sleep how she would sit alone that evening with Irene on her verandah, without Dora, and drink port. What fun it would be. It suddenly dawned on
her from on high, as if from out of the clouds, that it was two days now, from the moment redheaded Irene had arrived, since she had last recalled that life was foul and wretched and that hers was a total disaster, as if a wart-covered black and brown crab were sucking her innards. Well to hell with the lot of it. Lurve wasn't that big a deal. She sank down and down and slept like a log.

  When she woke up she must still have been on a bit of a high, because she was feeling chirpier than she had for a long time. She got Sasha up, pulled on his trousers, put on his sandals, and they went into town where there was a roundabout which Sasha liked, and opposite it was the Party Foodstore.

  «But why 'Party'? I must ask Irene,» Zhenya thought. Two bottles of port. The wine that year was excellent. Gorbachev had yet to launch his attack on alcoholism, and Crimean wine was being produced by state farms and collective farms, and by good old boys working for themselves; dry, demi-sec, fortified, Massandra, wines from Novy Svet, run-of-the-mill plonk and wines of the highest quality. There was no sugar, butter or milk in the shops, but people overlooked that detail, because so much else was going on in life itself.

  That evening they again drank port on the verandah, only this time mother was packed off to bed early on. She did not protest. Indeed, she only nodded, said thank you in her unknown language, and smiled. Occasionally she would cry out, «Irene!», but when her daughter went to see what she needed, she smiled in embarrassment, having already forgotten why she had called her.

  Irene sat with her elbow propped on the table and her cheek cupped in her left hand. In her right she held her glass. Playing cards were scattered over the table, the remnants of a game of Patience which hadn't come out.

  «This is the second month it hasn't been working. Something isn't coming together for me. What about you, Zhenya? Do you like cards?»

  «How do you mean? When I was a girl I played snap with my grandad at the dacha,» Zhenya said, surprised by the question.

  «Perhaps it's better that way. I love them, though. Both for playing and for fortune-telling. I was seventeen when a fortuneteller made me a prediction. I should just have forgotten it, but I didn't, and everything has come to pass as if my life were following a script. Just as she foretold.» Irene took several cards, stroked their garish backs, and tossed them face upwards on the table. The nine of clubs was on top.

  «I can't stand her, but she always dogs me. Away with you! She gives me heartburn.»

  Zhenya thought for a moment before asking, «You mean, you always know how everything is going to end? Doesn't that make life boring?»

  Irene cocked an ochre eyebrow.

  «Boring? You really don't know anything about it, do you? No, it isn't boring. If I were to tell you…»

  Irene poured out what remained of the first bottle between the two of them. She took a sip and moved the glass away.

  «Zhenya, you must realise by now what a chatterbox I am. I tell people everything about myself. I'm no good at keeping secrets. Mine or anybody else's. Don't say you haven't been warned. There is one thing, though, that I've never told to a soul. You shall be the first. For some reason I suddenly want to.»

  She gave a half-smile, and shrugged.

  «I'm surprised at myself.»

  Zhenya too propped her elbow on the table and cupped her cheek in her hand. They were sitting opposite each other, gazing at one another with an abstracted, meditative expression as if looking in a mirror. Zhenya too was surprised that Irene had suddenly chosen her for her revelations. And flattered.

  «My mother was extremely beautiful — the spitting image of Deanna Durban, the film actress. And she was always an idiot. Well, no, not an idiot, but feeble-minded. I love her very much, but she has always been muddle-headed: on the one hand, she is a Communist, but on the other she is a Lutheran; then again, she is an admirer of the Marquis de Sade. She was always prepared to give away everything she had without a moment's hesitation, and she could get hysterical with my father because she suddenly desperately needed that swimming costume she bought in 1930 on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, on the corner near the Jardin du Luxembourg. When my father died I was sixteen, and she and I were left together. I have to give my father his due: I can't imagine how it was possible, given their unbelievably hard life, but she was always notable for her complete, triumphant helplessness. She never did a day's work because, despite being bilingual in English and Dutch, she could never learn Russian. In forty years! My father worked in broadcasting and she could have got a job through him. But even though you don't really need Russian to work there, you do have to be able to say „Zdrastvuite!“ or to read a notice saying „Silence. Recording in progress“. She couldn't. The moment my father died, I went out to work. I had no education at all, but I am a very good typist. I can type in three languages.»

  So then, about the prediction. I had an old friend, an Englishwoman marooned in Russia in the 1920s. There is a little colony of Russian Englishmen and Englishwomen like that. I know them all, of course. They are either Communists, or techies who stayed behind in Russia for some reason or another, practically from the time of the New Economic Policy. Well, this Anna Cork washed up here because she was in love. Her lover was shot, of course, but she was luckier and survived. She was imprisoned, naturally, and lost a leg. She hardly left the house. Gave English lessons, told fortunes. She never took money for her fortune-telling, but she did accept gifts. She taught me a thing or two, and I was able to help her also.

  One time when I was hanging around there, a beautiful woman came to see her, the wife of a general or a party boss. Either she couldn't have babies, or she was wondering whether to adopt a child. My Anna spoke to her in her usual way, in God knows what language, with a really heavy accent, although she could speak Russian, believe me, no worse than you or I. She had, after all, spent eight years in labour camps. But when she thought it politic, she could put on that accent. She could swear too: the Moscow Art Theatre had nothing on her. But now to this beauty she didn't say «yes» and she didn't say «no», but spoke ambiguously and portentously as a good fortune-teller should — and left it unclear whether she should or shouldn't have a child, but implied it would be better if she didn't.

  Then she suddenly turned to me and said, «But you will start at the fifth. Remember that, the fifth.»

  «What would I start at the fifth? Gobbledygook. I forgot it immediately. But I was to remember it again when the time came.»

  Irene cupped her chin in her hand again. She was lost in reverie. Her eyes had a slight animal sheen, like a cat's, suggestive of cosiness, tenderness, and a veiled anxiety.

  Zhenya had friends she had been to University with, friends with whom she discussed large, important matters, like art and literature, or the meaning of life. She had written her degree dissertation on the Russian modernist poets of the 1910s. Her topic had been very rarefied for those times — about the poetic resonances between the poets of the modernist tendencies and the symbolists of the 1910s. Zhenya had been unusually fortunate — her supervisor was a lady professor of advancing years who knew her way around Russian literature much as she knew her way around her own kitchen. Professor Anna Veniaminovna was idolised by her students, especially the girls, and knew all these poets not from hearsay but from personal acquaintance. She had been almost a friend of Anna Akhmatova, had drunk tea with Mayakovsky and Lily Brik, had heard Mandelshtam recite, and even remembered the living, breathing Mikhail Kuzmin. Through her proximity to Anna Veniaminovna, Zhenya herself had acquired important friends, moving among the intellectuals of the arts and having pretensions to becoming important herself with time. And, to tell the truth, never in her life had she heard such banal prattling as she had that evening. Oddly, however, these banalities had contained something important, substantial, and very much alive. Perhaps even the elusive meaning of life itself?

  Revelling in the sweet port-induced intoxication, the stillness and the darkness outside her window in which the light from a streetlamp reflected like a quive
ring mark on the leaves of a great fig tree, Zhenya was also enjoying what she suspected was only a temporary respite from the stubbornly unresolved state of some important (if they were important) questions regarding what she wanted to do with her life.

  Irene swept the cards off the table — some of them fell to the floor, others landed on a chair.

  «Susie would be lying on the sofa with a book from morning till evening, sucking a caramel. I understand now: she was clinically depressed, but all I saw at the time was that she was turning into my baby. Don't forget, this was long before her stroke. I wasn't actually spoon-feeding her, but if I didn't pour the soup into her bowl she could go three days without eating. I decided I urgently needed to have a baby of my own, a real baby, because turning into the mother of my own mother was something I most certainly did not want. This way she might at least become a grandmother and have a pram to push. I got married in a rush to the first man I set eyes on. The boy next door, good looking but a complete moron. I got pregnant and walked around for nine months flaunting my belly like an award for gallantry. They talk about toxicosis, how you feel, blood pressure. What else do pregnant women get? Well, I had none of it. I went straight from my typewriter to the delivery ward. I didn't even have time to finish the typing and hand the work in. Right, I thought, I'll just quickly have the baby and finish the typing after I'm a mother. There was two days' work still left to do. Things did not turn out that way, though. The umbilical cord became entangled. My baby was dying. The delivery nurse was young, the doctor was a total prat. Between the two of them they killed my baby. All I needed was a good old-fashioned midwife. I was eighteen and a complete fool. Count it on your fingers: my firstborn was dead. David, I was going to call him, in memory of my father. I was gushing milk, and tears were pouring from my eyes.»