NINE

by Svetlana Alexiyevich

  «That's all, Zhenya. I've told you all there is. The oedema was so severe that I saw and felt nothing else. I didn't see the tip truck which crashed into us; I didn't even feel the impact. I was the only survivor. When they put me on the operating table there was no trace of Quincke's oedema. It had disappeared at the moment of the crash. It was completely unbelievable that I was alive.»

  Irene tossed back the hair from the right-hand side of her head. A deep, even operating scar began behind her ear and went aross her skull. For some reason Zhenya ran her finger along it.

  «It is completely without feeling, that scar. I am a medical curiosity. I have almost no sense of feeling. Suppose I cut my finger, I'm not aware of anything. Until I see the bleeding. It's dangerous. But it can be handy too.»

  Irene reached for her bag which was lying on the table, pulled out a case the length of three matchboxes, and took a large needle out of it. She pushed it into her alabaster white skin at the base of her thumb. The needle sank softly into her. Zhenya shrieked. Irene laughed.

  «That's what has happened to me. I've lost my sense of feeling. When they told me, three weeks after the crash, that I had lost my husband and children, it was like this.» Irene pulled the needle out and a small drop of blood appeared. She licked it. «I've almost lost my sense of taste as well. I can tell sweet from savoury, but that's it. I sometimes think I am only remembering the taste, from the times when I could still feel things.»

  Irene dispensed what was left of the port and stood up, pushing back her chair loudly. Her lodgings were the most comfortable in Dora's domain: besides the verandah there was a small separate kitchen in the porch, where Irene had a modest cache of wine. Six bottles bought in anticipation of her friends' arrival tomorrow. She rummaged about in the darkness for a while before producing a bottle of sherry.

  All the tears Zhenya had to shed she had shed yesterday. No new tears had come to replace them. There was a dryness in her throat, and a tightness and a tickle in her nose.

  «That witch Anna Cork turned out to be right: Donald is my fifth child. It's just as she foretold: „You will start at the fifth“».

  First the darkness became diluted, then the air became grey and the birds started singing. By the time the story was at an end it was completely light.

  «Would you like some coffee?» Irene asked.

  «No, thank you. I'll get some sleep.» Zhenya went off to her little room and lay face down in the pillow. Before falling asleep she reflected, «What a stupid life I have. To all intents and purposes it's been no life at all. Fall out of love with one man, fall in love with another. Some drama that's been! Poor Irene, imagine losing four children.» She was particularly sad about Diana, blue-eyed, long-legged Diana who would have been sixteen now.

  Towards evening a whole crowd of people arrived from Moscow: Vera and her second husband Valentine, whose previous, first marriage had been to Nina; Nina and Nina's elder son — of whom Valentine was the father. In addition there were Nina's two younger daughters, by now from her second marriage. Vera had brought two children with her, her youngest son fathered by Valentine and her daughter fathered by who knows whom, or rather, by Vera's first husband whom none of them knew. In fact, it was one big, happy, modern family.

  The sexual revolution was already waning, second marriages were proving more durable than first marriages had, and third marriages were turning out just like real marriages.

  Dora Surenovna's small courtyard was filled with children of all ages, and her neighbours on either side peeped through the fence to right and left and envied her for managing to begin the season a month before and to finish it two months later than anyone else. She had been doing it for years. They had no idea that the secret was Irene: wherever she went a crowd immediately formed, a collective farm with fireworks, a veritable May Day demonstration of brassieres with mammary glands bursting out of them and bikinis and belly buttons and buttocks which aroused such ire in her Crimean neighbours that they would have refused to rent rooms to all these impudent whores, only their greed overcame them.

  Dora herselfset up something approaching a guesthouse: not so much bed-and-breakfast as sleep-on-a-put-you-up-and-dinner. Dora's husband worked at the XVII Party Congress Sanatorium. He drove a bus, collecting holidaymakers from Simferopol and buying groceries while he was there. Dora made meals for all her guests and earned so much money she could afford to buy off the local policeman and the tax inspector without even being ruined.

  The first three days passed in arranging things. Nina, mother of three, was terribly domesticated, spread home comforts all around herself, and had a thoroughly feminine way of organising everyday life. When all the little curtains had been hung up, all the little vases put in place and all the rugs shaken out, she compiled a rota so that each day two mothers looked after all the children while the other two, once they had gone shopping for food in the morning, could take it easy for the rest of the day.

  On the morning of the fourth day, Zhenya and Vera had the day off, as stipulated by the new schedule. They planned to see Valentine to the bus station since, having fulfilled his purpose by delivering the two families, he was returning to Moscow; they would then buy some milk, if fortune smiled on them, and were intending after that to wander through the bare countryside with no footballs, no children, no shrieking or screaming. Everything went according to plan: they waved goodbye to the husband, didn't buy milk since none had been delivered, and then set off down the main road in the direction of hills from which there came a smell of young grass and sweet earth, and where the clouds of pink and lilac tamarisk were in full bloom. They turned off the road, and although the path led upwards the going was easy and relaxing. They didn't even talk all that much, just exchanging a few words.

  They reached a family of acacias, sat in the thin shade of the puny foliage and lit cigarettes.

  «Have you known Irene for long?» Zhenya asked, still, despite the passing of several days, reeling under the impression of the eventful fate of the English redhead; a fate before which the old-fashioned suicide of Anna Karenina paled and seemed the mere whim of a spoiled young madam: «He loves me, he loves me not, he cares for me, not a jot…»

  «We grew up in the same block of flats. She was a class ahead of me. I wasn't allowed to be friends with her. She was a bit of a naughty girl,» Vera laughed. «But I liked her. Actually, everybody did. Half the block was always hanging out in their little apartment. Susan Yakovlevna was such an old dear before her stroke. We called her Madame Caramel — she was forever giving all the children toffees.»

  «What a dreadful life Irene's had,» Zhenya sighed.

  «You mean her father? The spying? What do you mean?»

  «No, I mean the children.»

  «What children, Zhenya?» Vera asked, even more puzzled.

  «Diana, and the twins.»

  «What Diana? What are you talking about?»

  «Irene's children. Which she lost,» Zhenya explained with the beginnings of a terrible foreboding.

  «You'll have to be more explicit. Which children are these that she lost?» Vera raised an eyebrow.

  «David, her first baby, died at birth, entangled in his umbilical cord; then Diana, she was just one year old; and a few years later her husband, the composer, died in a car crash along with her twins Alexander and Yakov,» Zhenya ran through the list, sounding like a gramophone record.

  «Well, I'll be damned,» Vera said, shocked. «And when did this all come to pass?»

  «What, didn't you know?» Zhenya asked in astonishment. «She had David when she was eighteen, Diana when she was nineteen, and the twins three years or so later, I suppose.»

  Vera put out her old cigarette and lit up a new one. The damp cigarette didn't light easily, and while Vera puffed away at it Zhenya was convulsively shaking a new packet but could persuade nothing to come out of it. Vera was silent, inhaled the bitter smoke, and then pronounced:

  «Listen, Zhenya, I am going to have to upset you. Or glad
den you. The point is, all the tenants of our house in Pechatnikov were rehoused ten years ago, in 1968. At that time Irene was twenty-five. To my knowledge, she had got through an army of lovers, had, I should guess, a dozen or so abortions, but there were absolutely no children. I swear! Or husbands, for that matter. Donnie is her first child, and she has never been married, although she has had some very famous lovers. She even had an affair with Vysotsky…»

  «But what about Diana?» Zhenya asked dully. «What about Diana?»

  Vera shrugged.

  «For all the years before that we were living in the same house. Do you really think I wouldn't have noticed?»

  «But what about the scar on her head from the car crash?» Zhenya shook Vera by the shoulders, but she lazily freed herself.

  «Well, what about it? What about it? She got it on the ice slide. Kotik Krotov had blades, you know, racing skates. She fell over and he skated straight over her head. There was so much blood! It's true, he all but killed her. They had to put a lot of stitches in her head.»

  At first Zhenya cried. Then she started hooting with laughter like a madwoman. Then sobbing again. Then they smoked their way through both the packs of cigarettes they had brought. Zhenya finally remembered with a start that she had never before been away from Sasha for such a long time. They hurried back home. Zhenya told Vera the whole of Irene's story, whose final episode had been reached yesterday. And evidently also made up yesterday. In return Vera told her the true story. Both coincided in the most improbable place: regarding the clandestine past of the Irish-British Communist who had been sentenced to death and subsequently exchanged for a Soviet spy.

  By the time they got back to the house, Zhenya felt gutted. The children had already had their supper and were playing junior bingo at the big table: instead of numbers the cards had turnips, carrots and mittens. Sasha, clutching his bingo card, waved to his mother, cried, «Hurray! I've got a hare!» and covered it with a picture. He was an equal among equals, neither slow, nor ill, nor overwrought.

  The others were sitting on Irene's verandah drinking sherry. Susie was taking little gulps from her glass with a blissful expression on her face. Vera went up on to the verandah and sat with the rest of them.

  Zhenya went to her room. They invited her to join them, but she called back that she had a headache. She lay on the bed. Actually this was one evening when her head was not aching, but there was something she needed to do for herself. She needed to perform an operation of some kind before she could once more drink wine, chat with these friends, and enjoy the company of other, more educated and intelligent friends she had left behind in Moscow.

  The children finished their bingo. Zhenya washed Sasha's feet, put him to bed and put out the light. One of the friends invited her to come with a stage whisper which was little short of a shout:

  «Zhenya! Come and have some pie!»

  «Sasha isn't asleep yet. I'll come in a minute,» she responded in an equally theatrical voice.

  She lay in the darkness and researched her spiritual wound. There were two wounds. One was from the misdirected compassion she had lavished on brilliantly invented and brutally murdered, nonexistent children, especially Diana. It was like the pain from an amputated leg, felt even though the leg is no longer there. Phantom pain. Worse than that: this leg had never been there. The second was a feeling of hurt for herself, a pathetic rabbit which had had a senseless experiment performed on it. Or perhaps there had been some sense, only none that she could understand.

  Somebody again knocked quietly at the window. Her name was called, but Zhenya did not respond. She simply couldn't imagine the expression on Irene's face, who would guess immediately that she had been unmasked. Or Irene's voice. Or her own embarrassment at Irene's embarrassment. Zhenya lay there, not sleeping, until the light was turned off on the verandah. Then she got up, lit the small wall lamp, and piled everything into her suitcase: clean clothing and dirty, toys and books. She paused only to carefully wrap Sasha's gumboots in a used towel.

  Early in the morning Zhenya and Sasha left the house with their suitcase. They went to the bus station, and Zhenya had no idea where they would go after that. Moscow perhaps. But at the bus station the one and only bus, old, almost pre-war, bore the legend «Novy Svet», and they boarded that, and two hours later were in a quite different place.

  They rented a room by the sea and spent another three weeks there. Sasha behaved perfectly: none of the hysterical outbursts which so alarmed Zhenya and the doctors. He walked barefoot along the waterline, sometimes running into the shallow water and stamping his bare heels in it. He ate, he slept. He seemed to have outgrown a phase. So did Zhenya.

  Novy Svet was wonderful. The wisteria was still in bloom and they were beside the mountains: immediately behind the house a rocky hillside rose, which you could climb and in two hours reach a neatly rounded summit which looked positively Japanese. And you could look down from there to a shallow bay, and rocks with ancient Greek names which had jutted out of the water here since the world began.

  Only occasionally did her heart feel a pang: Irene! Why did she have to murder all of them? Especially Diana.

  END OF STORY

  The middle of December. The end of the year. The end of her tether. Darkness and wind. A hitch in her life. Everything has juddered to a standstill in just the wrong place, as if a wheel is stuck in a pothole and is rocking back and forth. In her head two lines of a poem are going back and forth too: «With half my span on earth now left behind me, I stood bereft in brooding forest gloom…» The gloom is all around, no sign of light in the darkness. Shame on you, Zhenya, shame on you… Two boys are sleeping in the little room, Sasha and Grisha. Her sons. Here is the table, her work on it. Sit down, take up your pen and write. There is the mirror. It reflects a thirty-five-year-old woman with large eyes, the outer corners sagging slightly; with large breasts, also sagging slightly; and with nice legs and slender ankles who has driven out of the house a man who was not the world's worst husband, and what's more not her first, but her second… The large mirror reflects also part of a small but admirable apartment in one of the most attractive quarters of Moscow, on Povarskaya Street, away from the road and with a bay window looking out on to a front garden. Later, of course, everyone is going to find themselves rehoused, but for now, in the mid-1980s, life is not bad at all.

  Zhenya's family is also admirable: a large family with aunts and uncles, first and second cousins, all of them highly educated, respectable people. If one is a doctor, he or she is a good doctor; if a scholar, then a very promising one; if an artist, then a successful one. Not as successful as the redoubtable Ilya Glazunov, no doubt, but with commissions from publishing houses, almost one of the top book illustrators. Appreciated by his peers and colleagues. More of him shortly.

  Besides the first and second cousins, a whole numerous new generation of nephews and nieces has come into the world, Katyas and Mashas, Dashas and Sashas, Mishas and Grishas. There is among them one Lyalya, thirteen years old and already with breasts. She hasn't outgrown her spots yet, and she has a long nose which, alas, she is never going to outgrow, although in the future plastic surgery will be able to take care of it. But only in the future. She also has long legs. Admirable legs, although nobody is paying any attention to them yet. Her emotions, however, are raging right now. She has a mad crush on her uncle, the artist. Long-nosed Lyalya had once come to her relatives' house to see her second cousin Dasha, and had stumbled upon Dasha's dad. He is sitting there at home, in a remote room, drawing. His pictures are so sweet: birds in cages, with poetry. He's a book illustrator, and he's got long, wavy black hair. Down to his shoulders. He wears a little dark blue jacket, and a red and dark blue check shirt under it. He has a cravate tucked into his shirt which has the tiniest little flower pattern, almost like commas, that's how tiny the flowers are. In fact they probably aren't even flowers or commas, but sort of little gherkins. Really, really tiny. She fell in love.

  Lyalya comes to see h
er grown-up relative, Auntie Zhenya, who at that time of the year, in December, really doesn't want to be bothered with her second cousin once removed. She is, however, also related to the artist: he's her first cousin. Young Lyalya confesses she's in love, and tells the whole story: how she went to see Dasha, and he was sitting in this remote room drawing these birds, and he had these gherkins on his cravate. And she tells about how she came back afterwards, when Dasha wasn't there, and sat in his room, and he was drawing, and she just sat there. In silence.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays Mila, the artist's wife, has a morning surgery from eight o'clock. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, her surgery is in the afternoon. She is a gynaecologist. Dasha goes to school every day. She takes the bus to Prospekt Mira, to the French School. She leaves home at seven twenty-five. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, only not every week, just one week on a Tuesday and the next on a Thursday, Lyalya arrives at the remote room at eight-thirty. One week she misses a history and an English lesson, and the next she misses a double period of literature. Yes, she's thirteen. Well, what can she do? Really, what can she do? If they're madly in love? He's dying oflove for her. His hands shake when he's undressing her. It's fantastic. The first man in her life. She knows there'll never be another. What if she gets pregnant? No, she's not worried. Well, actually, she hasn't really thought about it much. After all, there are pills you can take. «You couldn't phone Mila, I suppose, and ask her to prescribe some — pretend they're for you?»

  Zhenya is beside herself. Lyalya is the same age as Sasha. Thirteen. But thirteen girl years are obviously quite different from boy years. All Sasha thinks about is astronomy. He is reading books in which Zhenya can't even work out what the table of contents means. This daft little thing, meanwhile, has discovered love and, what's more, she's chosen her, Zhenya, to be the repository of the secrets of her heart. And some secrets they are! A respectable forty-year-old man is abusing his under-age niece, his daughter's friend, in his own house, while three blocks away his wife is conducting a surgery for women on Molchanovka Street and, to tell the truth, could run home for a moment, for a cup of tea, for instance… And what about Lyalya's parents? Her mother, Zhenya's great fat cousin Stella, what does she imagine is going on? That her daughter has gone off to school, swinging her scuffed little schoolbag? And her daddy, Konstantin Mikhailovich, a nutty mathematician, what is he thinking? As for what her late Aunt Emma, the sister of Zhenya's father, might have had to say on the subject, it simply doesn't bear thinking about.