“Well, open your eye, Vasilisa.”
She hesitated. Then opened it. She blocked the other with the palm of her hand. She looked at him with one eye.
“You haven’t changed a bit, Pavel Alekseevich.”
“And the second one?” he asked.
“No, I’ll wait for a while with the second one. I’m more used to it that way. So, have you forgiven me then?”
“I was never mad at you, you fool.”
She laughed again. Her laugh was a girl’s, bashful. Resolutely, he turned her head in its carpet-design headscarf toward him and undid the second eye. She squealed, now entirely like a little child. Then she placed her hand over her mouth and said pleadingly: “All right. You go now. God willing, we’ll see each other again. There are a lot of things to do …”
He rose from the bench, sighed, and asked after all the question that he had been wanting to ask from the very beginning.
“Listen, Vasilisa, why were you using a stick to walk? Doesn’t that third eye see anything?”
“It’s worthless. Doesn’t see a thing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Not quite. I could see from afar what you were really like.”
“And?”
“It’s hard to put into words … In the image and likeness you are …”
He waved his hand and set off.
16
SHE HAD REALLY DREAMED IT. A VERY SIMPLE DREAM—water. It splashed at her ankles, and then rose higher. At first the water rose slowly, then it began to whip from the side and from above, and she was no longer standing on the bottom, but suspended. The water kept coming, poured over her head, filled her nose and mouth, and made breathing difficult. Impossible.
“Now I’ll drown,” she realized, when she was over her head in water. She held her breath, then slowly released the last remains of warm air through her nose and saw a cluster of bubbles float upward. “How stupid it is to drown, when everything has ended so well …”
When holding her breath was no longer possible, she opened her mouth and allowed the water to enter her. But either the water was not really water, or she was not quite herself, because nothing terrible happened; she didn’t choke, although at first she sensed a cool stream filling her throat and lungs.
She dove and swam off. The water penetrated her body, and this was just as natural as if it were air. Floating islands of seaweed and schools of small varicolored fish engulfed her. The layers of water overhead were pale, the color of the northern sky; below—blue dark as ink, with no bottom to be seen. But, when her eyes accustomed themselves, she was able to make out the subtle twinkle of stars. Warmer streams mixed with cold ones, creating a sliding movement, like that of the wind.
Her body did what she wanted it to, but she could not remember having been taught to swim. It seemed that she had not known how to swim before. She pulled her arms above her head, cupped her fingers together, quickly rose to the top, and came up for air. That’s when she woke up.
She exhaled: a small amount of water ran from her nostrils and mouth. A slippery garland of seaweed had tangled itself around her knee. Her hair dripped. Using both hands, as if wringing linen, she squeezed the water out of her hair and walked away from the shrubbery to a sunny place. Her hair dried quickly in the sun, but immediately began to curl above her forehead and along her temples, which she did not like. Straightening out the locks of hair, she pulled them between her fingers, as if through a giant comb.
“Elena.” She heard her own name and turned around. Before her stood her husband, Pavel, neither young nor old, but exactly as he had been when she had met him—forty-three years old.
“Pashenka, finally,” and she pressed her face into the most familiar part of his body, where his clavicles came together.
He sensed how the outlines of her moist, thin body corresponded with precise detail to the breach inside him, closing the lifelong wound that he had borne within him since birth, pained and suffering from melancholy and dissatisfaction without even realizing what hole they resided in.
Elena with all her being wanted only to hide herself entirely inside him, to enter him forever, to give him her defective memory and pale “I,” secure in nothing and adrift in splintered dreams and constantly losing its uncertain bounds.
It was not he entering her like a spouse, filling that narrow aperture of hers that led to nowhere; it was she entering and filling his hollow core, the center he himself had been unaware he had and had suddenly discovered within himself.
“Soul of my soul,” he whispered into the damp curls above her ear as he pressed her tightly to himself.
At the place where their skin met she melted with happiness. This was the attainment of the unattainable that brought people who love one another together in conjugal embraces, over and over again, for years and decades, in their unconscious aspiration to achieve liberation from physical dependency. But poor human copulation ends in inevitable orgasm, beyond which there’s no greater corporeal proximity. Because the bounds are set by bodies themselves …
Between them the impossible was taking place. Of what remained within the confines of human comprehension there was still the sensation of their bodies—of one’s own and another’s—although what in earthly existence was known as interpenetration in this other existence expanded beyond all horizons. In this newly formed oneness, this mutual ascent into the orbit of a different world, they discovered a new stereoscopy, an ability to see many things at once and to think many thoughts simultaneously. All these pictures, thoughts, and sensations appeared to them now in a perspective that made Elena simply smile at her former fear of being lost, of losing herself in spaces stretched between unknown systems of coordinates, and of losing the axis she once really had lost—the axis of time …
A final surge of intravision showed that the two arciform branches of her fallopian tubes lay where they were supposed to be, the uterus that had been removed in 1943 was in its former place, and not a trace remained of the scar across her belly.
But that does not mean that what had been was no longer, they—man and woman—guessed. It means that everything—thoughts and feelings, bodies and souls—can be transformed. Even those tiny—nonentities, just about—transparent projections of bodies that had failed to transpire, whose journey on earth had been interrupted by the grim circumstances of disfigured, bloody life …
When they had settled into each other, free and happy, soul to soul, hand in hand, letter to letter, it turned out that between them there was a Third. The woman recognized him immediately. The man—an instant later.
“Was it You?” he asked.
“I,” came the answer.
“Merciful God, what an idiot I was …” the man moaned.
“It’s nothing to fear.” A voice familiar to him since youth calmed him.
There was nothing to fear …
Part Three
1
ELENA AWOKE IN HER OWN BED, IN HER OWN ROOM, BUT in a somewhat strange, not-herself condition: her head was empty and hollow, and when she rose from her pillow, everything keeled over sideways … Adjusting to the unpleasant sensation, she lowered her legs to the floor and attempted to collect her thoughts. The last thing that she remembered clearly was walking out of the church in Obydensky Lane and stopping on the portico. After that there was a gaping void. Then she set her thoughts in the reverse direction: the church portico on which she had stood, the oppressive conversation with the priest before that, and before that, the evening before—her conversation with Tanya. Tanya had informed her with an unexpectedly crude challenge in her voice that she had left her job and was planning to quit the university.
Before that, the evening before, Tanya had quarreled with her father, Vasilisa had reported. Vasilisa had also reported that she had found three empty bottles in Pavel Alekseevich’s study. Everything in their household was upside down, and now her head was falling apart.
Elena once again attempted to get up, but everything again s
wam before her eyes. She asked Vasilisa to call a doctor.
The district doctor, a finicky and good-for-nothing matron, arrived toward evening. She measured her blood pressure. It was normal. But she indicated a tentative diagnosis—a transitory form of hypertension, wrote out a work-release form, and promised to send a neurologist to the house. She did not prescribe any medicine. She was afraid to. For her, house calls to this building filled with distinguished doctors were sheer punishment. Vasilisa cared for Elena all day as best she could: brought her tea with lemon and kept trying to feed her. But Elena did not feel like eating.
Rather late in the evening Pavel Alekseevich arrived. He was disturbed by the news. He dropped into Elena’s bedroom and sat down on the bed, smelling of vodka.
“What happened?”
“Nothing in particular. My head is spinning.” She did not want to mention her loss of memory. It was too terrible for words …
He pressed his hard thumb to her wrist. He listened. Her pulse was normal, and the volume was good. There were no irregularities …
“You’re tired. Upset. Maybe you just need to relax. Should I get you a reservation for the Academy of Science’s sanatorium?” Pavel Alekseevich asked.
“No, Pasha. You see what’s happening with Tanya. How can I leave her now?”
“In the past he would have said ‘reservations,’” Elena noted to herself. “We haven’t been anywhere together in eight years …”
They talked about Tanya. Pavel Alekseevich felt that it would all work itself out.
“A growing-up crisis. I think we should give her the opportunity to make some decisions on her own.”
Elena lethargically agreed. In fact, she had hoped that her husband would be able to do something quickly and wisely that would clear up all of Tanya’s troubles, and that everything would be all right again. But Pavel Alekseevich merely asked if he should arrange for a decent neurologist. Elena declined: one was coming from the local polyclinic tomorrow.
“Why didn’t I offer to go to the sanatorium with her?” Pavel Alekseevich reproached himself as he walked out of the room.
Everything between them was just a hair off.
Each of them had an opinion about the abrupt turn in Tanya’s life. Strangely enough, the sternest judge turned out to be Toma. The girls had lived together in one room for eight years. By now Toma understood—not merely in some wordless, malleable childish way, but with the logic of a maturing person—just what a lucky number she had drawn on the day of her mother’s death …
The thoroughly bourgeois values she had been afforded, first in the form of clean sheets and decent food on her plate, and later more subtle things of a refined nature—such as gentility and reserve, cleanliness not only outward, but inward and known as decency, and a sense of humor among them that assuaged all situations in which other people Toma knew would begin to shout or even strike each other—all of these values, both physical and spiritual, Tanya was betraying, declaring with her behavior alone that she spat in the face of their world order.
That spit both stunned and outraged Toma. She had so internalized the lessons of family life that she expressed her opinion, as best she could, quaking at her own daring and fear of losing Tanya’s goodwill as a result of her comment. Complex things connected with how life works or a person behaves, when translated into her impoverished language, read approximately as follows: “Your parents have done so much for you, while you, you ungrateful girl, just spit on all of this and, to top it off, you’ve dropped out of school!”
For Toma the last was the most sensitive point because now in her second year at the landscaping department, where she fawned over domestic asters and Holland tulips, she had experienced certain stirrings inside: for the first time in her life she wanted to go to school. She had not expressed this to anyone aloud yet, but in her head she had been calculating whether it would be better for her to go to technical school or to aim higher—for the forestry institute.
Vasilisa’s take on Tanya’s odd transformation was simpler: the girl was out for a good time.
Elena essentially shared Vasilisa’s point of view, but in milder terms. She saw the reason for her daughter’s changed behavior not in Tanya herself, not in her spiritual life, but in certain external events, in the bad influence of new people in her life whom Elena did not know.
Pavel Alekseevich postulated that Tanya was undergoing an overdue youth crisis. Likely he was closest of all to the truth. While attempting to analyze the mechanism of this breakdown, he nevertheless ruled out that the reason lay in that completely—from his point of view—insignificant episode with the stain and the dead fetus that Tanya had related to him with such emotion. It seemed to him that the reason lay somewhere deeper down. In addition, he was disturbed by that phone call from Professor Gansovsky, who first went on at great length about Pavel Alekseevich’s exceptional scholarly reputation, then—with the help of the generalizing pronoun “we”—led him to understand that he included himself among the few researchers who were conscientious, and, at the end, gave Tanya an outstanding recommendation, offered to hand back her resignation, to give her time (two months even) to have a good rest, and then in September to leave behind all her silly whims and return to her work as his personal, not MarLena Sergeevna’s, laboratory assistant. He asked Pavel Alekseevich to pass on to Tanya that he expected to see her during his office hours that Tuesday, after twelve noon …
After hanging up the phone and thinking about the conversation, Pavel Alekseevich arrived at the conclusion that Tanya had got into some professional conflict with MarLena Sergeevna, whom Tanya had too quickly, from her first day on the job, set as her model.
Tanya’s life no longer coincided with the family’s schedule: by the time her father came home from work she was already gone and, showing up before dawn, she slept until noon, so it took no small effort for Pavel Alekseevich to intercept her and convey to her the contents of his phone conversation with Gansovsky. Tanya just shrugged.
“What’s the point of going? I’m not going back there anyway.”
“Tanyusha, that is certainly your right. But don’t forget that I made that request on your behalf and brought you to the laboratory myself. Don’t put me in an awkward position. Ultimately, one has to observe certain proprieties,” he said, more than diplomatically.
Tanya vituperated: “How I hate all your proprieties!”
He took her by the head and stroked it.
“What do you want to do, little one, change the world? That’s already been done …”
“Dad, you don’t understand anything!” She bawled into his chest.
Then ran off, leaving Pavel Alekseevich dismayed: the girl was twenty years old, but acted liked a teenager …
2
THE LATE SLUGGISH SUMMER DREW TO ITS END WITH AN August heat wave. Tanya had been living her strange nocturnal life for two months and was increasingly more drawn into it. The geography of her lonely walks expanded. She traipsed the lanes of old Moscow and developed a particular fondness for the Zamoskvorechye region with its stocky merchant houses, enclosed gardens, and an unexpected chain of ancient trees that stood like guards before nests of gentle people demolished long ago. She often strolled along Patriarch Ponds, exploring the baffling confusion of its connected courtyards. She liked to go by way of Trekhprudny Lane and the Volotsky buildings that her great-grandfather had built, approaching from the side of the Shekhtel building, then turning left and ending her tour at the ponds, just before dawn, dozing a bit on her favorite park bench on the side facing Bolshoy Patriarshy Lane.
The night people there, with whom she occasionally struck up conversations, were entirely unlike ordinary day people who filled the streets when it was light out. Morosely sobering drunks, unlucky prostitutes, the twelve-year-old boy who had run away from home, homeless couples who for the sake of their refugeless lovemaking nested in entranceways with wide windowsills and unlocked attics … Once, on the uppermost landing of a staircase that l
ed to a locked door onto a roof she stumbled on a sleeping man and was horrified: was he dead … ?
The other thing about night people was that they came in shifts depending on the hour: before one in the morning, you could still encounter a lot of decent couples on their way home. In fact, these were not night people, but day people simply slightly delayed. After one, they were replaced by loners, inebriated for the most part. They were not dangerous, although sometimes they accosted her. They would ask for something: a cigarette, matches, a two-kopeck coin for the phone booth; or offer something: to have a drink, to make love … She sometimes had conversations with these inebriated loners … The most dangerous people, it seemed to Tanya, came out between three and four thirty. In any case, her most unpleasant meetings occurred at that particular time.
She spat out like a plum pit all her former knowledge from school and from books. What interested her now was a different kind of experience, the kind that privileged unexpected maneuvers and nimble moves: she delighted every time she found a new courtyard that connected two dead-end lanes or a building with entrances at both sides—the façade side and the servants’ entrance side. She knew Moscow’s last water pump, forgotten by the waterworks’ authorities and still functioning in the area of the former Bozhedomka, and she discovered an apartment in a half-basement—a thieves’ den?—where very criminal-looking types gathered at night. The miles she trekked at night were paved with reflection: until recently, life had seemed to her an even uphill journey, a gradual ascent, the goal of which was a scientific accomplishment combined with merited success and even, perhaps, fame. But now instead of this heroic picture she saw a trap, and science seemed as much an idol as that wretched imposed socialism which of late radio announcers had started to pronounce as “socialeezism,” trucking up to the barely literate Khrushchev, who could hardly put two words together … When she had been little, the world had naturally divided itself into “grown-ups” and “children,” “good people” and “bad people.” Now she had discovered a new dimension: “the obedient” and “the disobedient.” This was not about children, but about adults—intelligent, enlightened, and talented adults … Tanya decisively and happily crossed over to the second category. True, she was still not quite clear where her father stood: he did not fit in either category. He seemed to be socially useful, that is, obedient, but he always acted of his own accord, and forcing him to accept someone else’s opinion or to submit was impossible …
The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel Page 30
