NINE

by Svetlana Alexiyevich

  Irene looked at Zhenya with intent, narrowed eyes as if assessing whether it was worthwhile to continue.

  «Sasha had a looped umbilical cord,» Zhenya said in a quiet, shocked voice. She knew it was very dangerous for a baby, but this was the first time she had seen a mother who had actually lost her child because of this ridiculous noose, which had faithfully served the infant for a full nine months only to suddenly strangle it.

  «Two months later I was pregnant again. You don't know what I'm like. If I want something I'll dig it out of the ground if need be. I'm walking around again. Not so perky this time. Sometimes I feel sick, sometimes I get colic, sometimes I have numbness. But never mind, I'm fine. My husband, a prize dickhead, worked as a car mechanic. I told you, I leapt into marriage with the first thing in pants that I saw. Whatever he earned he drank. He was a complete Alain Delon look-alike, only more solidly built. I sat busily banging away at my typewriter, bringing in a fair amount of money. Enough for Susie's caramels.

  The first time, I had known for sure it was a boy, but this time I decided on a girl. My bulge grew, but I was just enjoying being a woman: the minute I had two rubles to rub together I would skip off to the Children's World department store. Baby socks, little cardigans, romper suits. It was all rough old Soviet stuff, of course. But I had grown up as a tomboy, swinging on fences. My parents had been sent to live in Volzhsk at first, under a false name. I only discovered my real name when I was ten. After my parents were 'declassified' my mother's sister sent our first parcel. It included a doll for me, but I couldn't bear dolls. I didn't want to be a girl. I bawled whenever I was forced to wear a frock. And when my breasts started to grow, I almost hanged myself.» Irene straightened her shoulders, and her great womanly breasts wobbled from her neck to her waist.

  Zhenya looked at her with a tinge of jealousy: this woman had some biography. And you could tell that she was well aware of the fact.

  «My baby girl was so pretty from the minute she arrived. There was nothing newborn about her, no mucus, no redness or roughness. Her eyes were blue, her hair was black and long. She got that from the car mechanic. Her facial features were exactly like mine. My nose, chin, the oval of my face.»

  Zhenya seemed to see Irene for the first time: the vivid redhead looks made it easy not to see just how beautiful she was. Yes, the oval of her face, her nose, her chin. Even her teeth, which in someone else might have seemed horsy, in her were just English: long, white, slightly prominent, but just enough to make her lips part in welcome, in anticipation.

  «I took one look at her and immediately knew that she was a Diana. No two ways about it. She was small, very well proportioned, with long legs and a shapely body. And pert buttocks. She was the prettiest little girl in the world. No, that wasn't just my prejudice as her mother. Everybody admired her. I dumped the car mechanic three days later, just as soon as I was discharged from the maternity hospital. I simply couldn't bear to look at him. The first time he held her I saw quite clearly that Diana should have a different father. It wasn't anything to do with me. I wasn't yet a woman. Things hadn't worked out with the car mechanic, but I didn't even realise that yet. He took her in his arms and I saw him for the slob he was. My daughter showed it to me. She was clever and calm and collected. In my life I've never met another, don't laugh, woman like her. She knew just how to treat different people, and what she could expect from them. Can you imagine, she was really thoughtful towards Susie. She didn't cry if I left her with her grandmother. She understood that was pointless. She was just four months old when I started reading books to her. If she liked them, she said 'ye-ye-ye'. If she didn't, she said 'na-na-na'. By six months she understood literally everything, and she started talking at ten months. She talked baby talk for a month, and then said, 'Mama, fly flying'. And sure enough, there was a fly.»

  «I breast-fed her for a long time. My milk didn't dry up, and she so loved being breast-fed. She would snuggle up, suck, then stroke my breast and say, 'Thank you'. And then I caught 'flu. My temperature soared to over forty. I was poleaxed. I couldn't feed her. My friends came running to help. They fed Diana on yoghurt and porridge. She was almost a year old. She wanted to come to me but they couldn't let her in case she caught my infection. She cried out of her little room, 'Mama, I don't understand'. Susie went down with it too. And what a powerful infection it proved to be. All my friends, one after the other, caught it from me. I don't remember anything.»

  Irene shielded her eyes with her hands, as if the light was too bright. Her hair almost hid her face. Zhenya already knew that something dreadful was going to happen, had happened then… but allowed herself to hope against hope.

  «Then I got up and went through to Diana. She had a high fever,» Irene continued, and Zhenya noticed how her nostrils and her pale English eylids had reddened. «I called the doctor. She immediately started injecting her with antibiotics. After two injections Diana had an allergic reaction. She was covered in rash. Well, she was my daughter. I'm allergic myself. They prescribed her Seduksen, the same drug I use, only the dosage was twenty times less. I felt worse and worse. My temperature was forty, at times I felt I was floating away. I would come to myself, give Diana yoghurt, give Mother yoghurt. Now and then someone would look in and go away again. I had a shouting match with the doctor who was demanding she should be taken to hospital. I remember glimpses of friends, my neighbour. The car mechanic rolled in, drunk. I kicked him out.»

  I would get up half asleep, put Diana on the pot or change her, give her a tablet. My little angel would turn away from the mirror, saying, «No». She didn't like the rash on her face.

  «Zhenya, the packaging was completely identical, my Seduksen and hers. I don't know how much I gave her. The more so because I had no sense of time. My temperature was forty degrees, what understanding of time did I have? I couldn't tell morning from evening. But I remembered clearly that I had to give Diana her medicine. It was December, dark all round the clock. The twenty-first of December, the day of the winter solstice. I got up, went to Diana, touched her. She was cold. Her temperature had gone down, I thought. The nightlight was burning. I looked. Her face was as white as chalk. The rash had gone. I didn't try to wake her. I went back to bed. Then I got up again, thinking it was time for her medicine. It was only then I took in that my lovely Diana was stone dead.»

  Zhenya could picture the scene as if she were watching a film: Irene wearing a long white nightgown, bending over the child's cot, lifting the little girl out of the cot, also in a white nightgown. Only Zhenya could not see the the little girl's face, because it was hidden by that gleaming red hair, which even now was alive, curling, shining, while Diana was no more.

  Zhenya could no longer cry. Something in her heart had crusted over into a hard scab, and tears no longer came to her eyes.

  «I wasn't there for my little girl's funeral.» Pitiless Irene looked Zhenya straight in the eyes, and Zhenya thought, «My God, how can I be so concerned about all manner of nonsense when things like this happen in the world.» «I had meningitis. For three months I was out of it, being moved from one hospital to another. Then they taught me how to walk again, how to hold a spoon in my hand. I have nine lives, like a cat.» Irene laughed ruefully.

  Yes, Irene had an unusual, unforgettable voice. It was throaty, soft, and you felt that it was the voice of a singer who was holding herself back, because if she were to sing out her voice would have everybody sobbing and weeping, and longing to fling themselves to wherever the siren sound directed.

  Zhenya was finally overwhelmed by her wonderful, if imagined, singing and burst into tears, and the searing grief evoked by this story streamed down her face. Irene supplied her with a lacy white handkerchief, perfumed, which Zhenya soaked instantly.

  «She would have been sixteen now. I know just what she would have looked like. The way she would have talked and moved. Her height, her figure, her voice. I know every detail. I know the kind of people she would have liked, and whom she would have avoided, t
he food she would have loved, and what she would have hated.»

  Irene broke off here, and it seemed to Zhenya that she was peering into the darkness as if there, in the corner, stood her daughter, slender, blue-eyed and black-haired, and completely invisible.

  «She loves drawing more than anything,» Irene continued without for a minute lowering her eyes from the darkness condensed in the corner. «By the time she was three you could already tell that she would be an artist. Her pictures were completely out of this world. By the age of seven she most resembled Ciurlionis. After that her drawing became firmer, although the mysticism and gentleness remained.»

  «She's lost her mind,» Zhenya surmised. «She's really out of her mind. She lost her child, and then she lost her mind.»

  She said nothing out loud. Irene, however, laughed, tossed her mane of copper wire, and her hair even seemed to give a metallic rustle.

  «Call it madness, if you like. Although madness always has a rational explanation. Something of her soul has lodged in me. At times something comes over me, and I have a desperate urge to draw. I do draw, what my Diana would have drawn. In Moscow I will show you whole folders of pictures Diana has drawn in the course of these years.»

  The port had long been despatched. It was past three in the morning, and they parted. There wasn't a single word that could be added to what had already been said.

  In the morning they set off on a long walk together. They came to the post office, rang through to Moscow, then had lunch on the embankment in a cafe selling crisp meat chebureki. Zhenya was certain the enticing smell of the chebureki would lure them into some gastric misfortune straight out of the medical encyclopaedia, like dysentery, but reassured herself with the thought that Sasha's alimentary minimalism would cause him to reject the aromatic triangular pies. Sasha, however, said «yes» and again, for a second time, consumed a product not on his sacramental list.

  Their evening port-drinking, at least on such intimate terms, would soon be over. Tomorrow two friends of Irene would be arriving, one of whom, Vera, was also well known to Zhenya. It was she who had given Zhenya this address on Primorskaya Street. Zhenya was feeling a little sad in anticipation of no longer being able to enjoy a private friendship with Irene.

  Their last evening together began later than usual, because Sasha was difficult for a long time. He wouldn't let Zhenya out of his sight. Already asleep, he would wake up, whine, and fall asleep again. Zhenya curled up beside him and dozed. If Irene had not knocked at her window when it was already past eleven, she would have slept through the night just as she was, in her slacks and sweater.

  Again they had two bottles of Crimean port, and again it was dark outside the window, without even the streetlight this time, because there was a power cut that day, and the terrace was lit by two thick white candles brought from Moscow for just such an eventuality. Susie and Donald had long been asleep in the room, but Irene was out sitting in a deep armchair on the verandah, swathed in her red and green tartan blanket and with the cards spread in front of her.

  «This is Road to the Scaffold, an old French version of Patience. You're lucky if it comes out once in a year. I was just waiting for you to come, and lo and behold, it fell into place. That is a good sign for this house, this time and this place. To some extent, for you also, although you have quite different guardians, from a different element.»

  Zhenya was vaguely attracted to the occult, if rather ashamed of such atavism, but ventured to ask the proffered question:

  «What is my element?»

  «You can tell it from a hundred miles away. It's water. You're an aquarian. You don't write poetry, by any chance?» Irene asked briskly.

  «I used to. Actually I wrote my dissertation on early twentieth-century Russian poetry,» Zhenya admitted guiltily.

  «What I see is — Pisces, the poetically inclined… live in water.»

  Zhenya was shocked into silence: her star sign really was Pisces.

  «When I was twenty, Zhenya, I had already lost two children,» Irene resumed without prefatory remarks from where they had stopped yesterday. «Two more years of my life went in learning to go on living. I had help. If it hadn't been for that…» she made an indefinite gesture more or less heavenwards. «And then I met the man I was destined for. He was a composer, a Russian aristocrat from a family which fled to France during the Revolution and returned after the Second World War. He was fifteen years older than me and, strange as it may seem, he'd never been married, although his life had been richly endowed as regards women. His father had been private secretary to a minister, and at one time a member of the State Duma. In one sense he was the complete antithesis of my Anglo-Dutch communist forebears. For all that, his father, Vasily Illarionovich — I won't mention his surname, it has too many connotations in Russia — resembled my own father quite amazingly, both in outward appearance and in personality. They greatly disliked all communists, but they accepted me, in spite of my communist tail. Then again, they had no choice: Gosha and I had fallen passionately in love. We fell into each other's arms immediately, and in the morning he took me to the registry office, considering the matter settled once and for all. My second life began, in which there was nothing of the old one other than my mother who, bless her, was unaware anything had changed. Only don't imagine this was after her stroke. It was before! She really didn't notice a thing. From time to time she would call my new husband by the name of my first, but Gosha and I just laughed. He had been educated in France and England, they returned to Russia in 1950, and for a short time lived in exile. Well, you know how it was, the usual story. We met the year the family were finally given permission to live in Moscow and allocated a two-room apartment in Beskudnikovo — as descendants of the Decembrist revolutionaries. In return for the villa they had had near Alushta and their St Petersburg residence on the Moyka Canal.»

  A vague, nascent thought about a mysterious law which could bring together such rare, specially invented people as the daughter of a Russian spy of British origins and a descendant of the Decembrists born in Parisian exile, did enter Zhenya's head, and she was even tempted to mention it to Irene, but didn't want to interrupt her slow, almost meditative, story.

  «I became pregnant straight away,» Irene smiled, not at Zhenya but at a place far away. «Gosha did not know that I had already lost two children. I kept quiet about that. I didn't want him feeling sorry for me. It was the easiest pregnancy of all time. My stomach grew at an incredible rate, and Gosha would rest on it at night, listening.»

  «What are you listening to?» I would ask.

  «What they are talking about.» He was certain we were going to have twins.

  «In the end the doctors did establish that there were two heartbeats. I gave birth to two lovely boys, one redheaded, the other dark-haired. Both of them were over three kilograms. Believe it or not, from their first hour they took against each other, and so much so that they managed to divide their parents too: Alexander, the redhead, chose me; Yakov, the dark one, chose Gosha. It was dreadful. When one was going to sleep the other would be crying. While I was feeding one, the other would be howling his head off, even though he'd just been fed. Then they discovered how to bite, and spit, and fight. If one got to his feet, the other would promptly knock him down. You couldn't leave them together for a minute. But you had only to separate them for them to want desperately to be together again. When one of them saw the other, he would run to him and kiss and immediately start fighting again. My twins had a special, intense relationship which was all their own. I spoke English to the children and Gosha spoke French to them. When they started talking, they divided on language as well. Alexander talked English, Yakov talked French. Well, that was only to be expected. Between themselves they spoke Russian. But don't imagine they were taught to do that. They chose everything for themselves: it was impossible to coerce them or force them to do anything. When Gosha and I looked at them we were over the moon: this was our legacy — these terrible genes of wilfulness and stu
bbornness.»

  «We lived all the year round in Pushkino, renting a well insulated winter dacha, and Granny Susie moved in with us too. At that time she was in fairly good shape. By that I mean she was still reading novels. You never did get any sense out of her, and she was never any help. Gosha was eventually accepted to teach at a music college. The composition class. He was super-overqualified for the work. He should have been working at the Conservatory. But his western schooling scared everyone off. Sometimes he wrote background music for films. Mainly he earned money by translating. I carried on typing, although he was terribly cross when I took in work. He had a frightful car, a Moskvich which he drove into Moscow and had to repair every time he came back. It was well-trained. It always broke down outside our house. We were terribly happy, but collapsing from exhaustion.»

  «I am always ill in the spring, when the flowers come into bloom. I suffer from hay fever. That spring the blossom was particularly plentiful and I was constantly wheezing and choking. While it was wet I could just about get by, taking pills. But then we had a hot spell and on the second day I really began suffocating. It's called Quincke's oedema. The nearest telephone was at the post office. In those days the Pushkino ambulance was a bird as rare as an ostrich. Gosha woke up the boys in the night, hastily dressed them and put them in the back of the car; we couldn't leave them with Susie, she would never have coped. Having been woken in the middle of the night they were unusually placid and didn't even fight. They settled down in the back seat with their arms around each other. Then Gosha dragged me out of the house, put me in the front and drove me to the local hospital. He drove like a maniac, because I was barely wheezing and the colour of a boiled beetroot.»

  Irene closed her eyes, but not completely. A little chink still showed, like light seeping under a door. Zhenya thought she might have lost consciousness and jumped up and shook her by the shoulders. Irene seemed to come to herself. She laughed her special laugh, the opera singer's laugh.