Calligraphy Lesson

by Mikhail Shishkin

  Here you are, Zhenya dear. But I guessed that if you came today everything would be fine. What exactly would be fine, I don’t know. There’s nothing I need, after all. I was like you and I wanted everything. Now I have and need nothing. Alyosha will be here soon with his Vera. He sent a telegram. They wanted to spend longer by the sea, but they only lasted a month. It’s boring there. In the first half of the day, he wrote, they walked along the empty beach and fed the seagulls, and in the evening there was a touring midget theater. Here’s what’s funny. I was in Yalta a hundred years ago, and there were midgets then, too. But Vera keeps getting worse. She’s capricious, has hysterics, makes scenes in public, and cries at night. He’s had it with her. But what can he do? He has to be patient. She doesn’t have long, after all. This is God’s punishment for her, Zhenya dear. He punishes everyone and never lets anything slide. There’s not going to any Judgment Day there. It all happens here. Zhenya, you don’t even know how despicable she is. She cheated on Alyosha. I know everything. Alyosha was on an expedition in Central Asia catching some of his rodents. He asked Vera to come along, but she wanted no part of it, naturally. I was living with them then. Only a year had passed since the wedding. With Alyosha there she kept herself in check, but now it was bedlam. She’d be getting ready to go out and suddenly shout, “Where’s my button?” “You must have lost it somewhere, Verochka, and not noticed.” “But when I came home all the buttons were there!” she said. I reassured her. “Life is funny that way. A button comes off and you don’t notice.” She shouted, “But I’m not crazy! All the buttons were there!” Is that supposed to mean I secretly cut off her lousy button? How many years have passed, yet when I think of that button, I shake with fury. I was supposed to go to Terioki for a rest then. I got to the station, boarded the train, went to get my ticket, and suddenly—Lord, have mercy—no wallet, no ticket, and there was a neat, very straight slit in my purse. I’d been robbed in the crowd at the station. Nothing to be done for it, so I went home. In the pouring rain, with my suitcase. I finally dragged myself there. I looked and there was an unfamiliar umbrella drying in the entry. A man’s raincoat on a hook. It smelled odd, of some stranger, and there was also the smell of fresh nail polish. I listened: water splashing in the bathroom, and someone humming, a bass voice grunting. I opened the door to their bedroom, Alyosha’s bedroom, and Vera was sitting naked in front of the pier-glass with her back to me, her foot resting on the base, polishing her nails. I coughed. She looked up and saw my reflection. I thought she’d cry out, get scared, start squirming and begging my forgiveness. But as if nothing were the matter, she dipped the brush in the bottle and went to smear the nails on her other foot. I said, “Why so quiet, Vera? Say something.” I heard a splash from the bathroom. She replied, “What am I supposed to say?” “What do you mean?” I said. “I just left for the station and here you are…” She laughed. She was sitting with legs splayed, her big toenail red and the rest still bare. “Lord, who on earth are you?” She laughed. “Who? What makes you better than me?” I said, “What about Alyosha?” “What about Alyosha? This doesn’t change anything. What am I supposed to do, jump out the window? If you tell him, he won’t believe you anyway. Leave and don’t come back until tonight.” So I left. I realized right away who it was in the bathroom, Zhenya. But I won’t tell you. Why should I?

  It’s very simple, Evgenia Dmitrievna. Here’s a ruler and a Braille board. One—open; two—close. You use this stylus to punch dots in the paper, but only Turkish-fashion, right to left. To read it, you take out the page, turn it over, and read it normally, left to right. Give me your hand. Feel it? One dot on top is A. Two dots one up and down is B. Two dots side by side is C. By the way, Braille also played music. All of Paris went to his concerts. He played cello and organ. But I have my exam in a week. If I end up failing, we’ll be leaving you. I just feel sorry for Mirra Alexandrovna. For some reason she thinks I’m going to be a great musician. Poor, silly mama! I can’t make her understand that the sensitive ear characteristic of every blind person isn’t enough, that that sensitivity doesn’t mean musical ability and true talent is as rare among the blind as among the seeing. I once heard my professor tell someone, “A pointless undertaking, doesn’t have the hands or the feeling. But I’m still hatching. I have kids at home asking for food. I have three, dear.” When we get home, I’m going to get a job as a piano tuner, that’s good, too. If Fate smiles on me, I’ll marry some kind blind girl. What else does happiness require? Normal young women only marry blind men in novels, Evgenia Dmitrievna. And if they do, it’s out of ignorance. To tell you the truth, blind people are awful, Evgenia Dmitrievna. Spoiled, capricious, wronged, vindictive. The blind man’s subordination in human contact is almost continuous; he doesn’t choose his companion, who is whoever wants to be it. The constant dependence is humiliating and has a putrefying effect on the psyche. Egoism and vanity are the main motives for human actions; all that gets magnified exponentially for the blind. The blind man’s vanity is fueled by the exaggerated admiration the seeing express for him out of pity for the cripple. The blind man is always in someone else’s power, so he can’t help but be suspicious, mistrustful, and vindictive. Marrying a blind man is like sacrificing yourself, only the sacrifice is thankless. People won’t understand you anyway. They’ll pity you and sympathize, as if you’d gone into a convent or become a nurse aide. And you won’t be able to explain. So that everything’s going to turn out just fine, Evgenia Dmitrievna. You’ll see.

  Zhenya dear, have you gone to bed? Are you asleep? Roman’s going to play a little, just a little, all right? Please forgive us. His exam is soon, and that will be it. The professor said Roman has great talent, that he’ll be a great success. He needs to work. He needs to study hard. Preparing for a performance is very difficult. He has to read the line with one hand and play with the other. Roman is very worried. He puts on a good face and pretends he doesn’t care, but in fact he’s afraid. If he doesn’t get in, Zhenya, it will be a terrible blow for him. Not just a blow—a disaster. You do understand. In his position it is so important to find a place in life, to be essential to someone. Today I’m here, I’m always by his side, but tomorrow he’s alone. How will he live? Who needs him? I think about this all the time, Zhenya. Lord, you look so much like your mama! You know, I should tell you one thing. It’s silly, of course, not worth mentioning, and your dear mama’s long gone, but I can’t get the idea out of my head of how I deceived her. I mean, it wasn’t really a deception, but still. She asked me to sew her a dress, and I promised. We came up with the idea together: a low back and a heart-shaped slit in front. Rustling taffeta with bell sleeves and a full ruffle. Imagine, chiffon ribbons from the fastening on the left and from the side seam on the right tied up in back in a bow. A dream, not a dress. She’d already bought everything: the taffeta, the buttons. I took the material home. You saw me off. You were funny. You said, “Aunt Mika, bring me a wooly-booly!” I promised to bring the dress by her birthday. But I was having so much trouble with Roman, I never got around to the dress. There was never time. I kept putting it off. Of course, I didn’t get it done, and it was time to go. I arrived, I was crying, and I lied that I only remembered on the train—I’d ironed the finished dress, folded it, and forgotten to pack it. She was so upset! Naturally, I would have finished the dress later, but that last time your mama turned up all of a sudden, without warning. She appeared on my doorstep and my first thought was, The dress! But she didn’t remember. Something had happened between her and Dmitry. Or maybe nothing had, she just couldn’t take it anymore. I don’t know how she stood it all. They’d just got married, and he was already very strange. He wouldn’t speak to her for days on end. He’d sit there looking at the wall. I asked, “What’s the matter with him?” But this made her uncomfortable. She smiled and replied, “Pay no attention. Every person needs a wall sometimes.” I didn’t understand their marriage at all. They didn’t know the first thing about each other. Your mother married him in a frenzy
. One day she was trying to convince me that Dmitry was an animal, a lewd pig, a narcissistic nonentity, and the next she announced she was getting married. I said, “Are you out of your mind?” She shook her head. “Don’t ask. I know nothing. And I don’t want to.” Mitya didn’t just not love her, it was as if he were taking something out on her. Even having outsiders in the house didn’t stop them. In my presence there were scenes between them at night that would end with Mitya taking the featherbed and going to the kitchen. She’d burst in and shout that she wouldn’t let him treat her this way, that she was putting up with it for the child’s sake, there was a limit to everything, and she would make him listen to her. But Mitya would interrupt her. “Pipe down, you’ll wake Zhenya!” You would wake up and cry, and your father would pick you up. I would try to calm her down, but she was already hysterical. “You don’t need me, I’m just in your way, you need the child, but you hate me! So know this. You won’t have me or Zhenya!” I kept saying, “Leave him! This won’t end well!” But she put up with it, she was waiting for something. At breakfast she would start poking her fork in the butter and could spend half an hour doing that, an hour. It occurred to me that she was quietly losing her mind. On my last visits her feelings toward you seemed to have changed. The slightest thing irritated her. The minute you acted up at the table, she’d start shouting, smacking you in the face, and pinching you so hard she’d leave bruises. You would cry, of course, and she would hit you even harder. “Quiet! Be quiet!” Then she’d clutch her head, cover her ears, and run away. One time you put on her hat, gloves, and shoes, draped yourself in her beads, took her rings, and smeared on her lipstick—and she lunged at you with a bamboo ski pole from your kiddie skis. We barely got her arms twisted behind her back that time.

  I found out you’d arrived, my kind Alexei Pavlovich, and rushed off to the vivarium like a woman possessed. I made my way there as if sleepwalking, not myself, which was why I knew I was just about to see you, and suddenly a degenerate old cesspit of a woman approached me at a streetcar stop. She had blue prison tattoos on her arms and even her forehead. She wanted me to buy withered roses from her—lifted, obviously, from the statue of Gogol on the boulevard. “Buy them, girlie,” she wheedled, “for good luck. You’ll see, they’ll come back to life.” What did I do? I gave her a ruble, which the crone doubtless spent on drink, and immediately I felt that the witch, who stank of prison, had not in fact misled me and I was perfectly happy. Fool that I am, at that minute, at that stop, I would have happily died before the streetcar came. I stood and smiled, not in my right mind, and kept bringing the wilted fragrance to my nostrils and sniffing. When I arrived, some people were there. You were angry, excited, not yourself. You were shouting that they were all idlers and thieves, that you couldn’t leave for a minute, that you knew everything: they were feeding the dogs dog meat, and you knew where the meat allotted for them was going. For a long time you couldn’t calm down, you kept snatching walnuts from the bag left over from the monkeys, squeezing three at a time, and the walnuts cracked, shooting off rotten dust. You started in again about how the nuts were dog shit, not nuts. Then someone came to see you and I slipped out because I didn’t want to see you like that. They were drowning puppies there. Having nothing to do to keep me busy, I started helping. I’d pour water into the bucket, toss in the pups, and insert a second bucket into the first, also filled with water. I walked past the croaking jugs again for the umpteenth time, between the stands of trays where the white, sharp-clawed blobs bred faster than they could be done in. The dogs would quiet down and then the howling would start up from all the cages. Finally we were alone. I said, “Thanks for the postcard.” You pretended you didn’t know what I was talking about. “What postcard?” You held me in your arms and started kissing me. I asked whether you believed that we’d have to answer for all our actions on Judgment Day, and you said, “Let’s go before someone else shows up.” You pulled me by the arm, and we crawled into the farthest dog cage, where we put down straw. From directly above us came the barking of crazed canines trying to poke their snouts through the bars and sputtering spit. The sight of bloody cotton wool bothered you. You mumbled, “Zhenya, this can’t be good.” I objected, “It’s fine.” I reached under your shirt and ran my hands over your back and shoulders, feeling the tiny moles. You startled a few times—you kept thinking someone was coming. When they did come from the department to pick up frogs, you had a pleased look on your face, that you’d had time. I said in parting, “I’m going to go to your house to pay Vera Lvovna a visit. Say hello for me.” You mumbled, frightened, “Zhenya, I beg of you, don’t. Don’t come! I can’t take it when you’re together. It’s awful for me.” At home, at dinner, I upset the sauceboat by accident and it all spilled in Mika’s lap. She jumped up, waved her arms around, wailed about how I’d ruined her suit on purpose because I always did everything to be mean, because God created me bad and ugly, with a face to stop a clock, and now here I was having my revenge for being an unattractive nobody. I said that Mika was trash because she wanted to marry my father and I was in the way. My father jumped up and slapped my cheek. I said, “I hate you all!” and ran out. I wanted ice cream but I had to make do with snow. Braille isn’t nearly as clever as it seems at first glance. Here, this is about me and you:

  Zhenya, is that you? Alexei Pavlovich isn’t here. How good you’ve come! I’ve missed you. This is just how it is, Zhenya. Healthy and pretty, everyone needed me, but I’ve grown fat and old, and now that I’ve got this horrible-looking face and missing parts as well, no one gives me the time of day. Don’t think I’m hurt. What for? You weren’t the one who thought this up and neither was I. We’re not the first and we won’t be the last. As if I haven’t known for five years that one day they’d bury my body. In Yalta people kept asking me, “Why are you so cheerful?” I said, “Just look at that!” A magician there kept pulling a ribbon from his nose. I laughed till I dropped. They looked at me as if I were nuts. But I pitied them all for not laughing. They didn’t think it was funny because they didn’t understand something important. But I did.

  Verochka Lvovna, tell me about my mama.

  Your mama loved candy. Mitya brought her over to meet us, and I put a box of Viennese pralines on the table, a huge one, tub-size—and she ate half the box. But that’s not the point, Zhenya. The point is that your father loved one woman very much. But she didn’t. It happens. She liked it that way. She—how can I put this—toyed with him. It flattered her that he suffered so over her. She didn’t even marry just anyone but his friend. And then when Mitya married the first girl to come along, he came to his senses. That happens, too, Zhenya. You’ll see for yourself.

  Verochka Lvovna, why are you lying?

  Why indeed? You should always tell the truth. That woman was me, Zhenya. All those years your father and I would meet. And your mama knew about it. I told her all about it. But that namby-pamby, that Little Gray Neck, only whimpered. She asked, “What did I ever do to all of you? What?”

  I’m going.

  Go. Only listen to what else I have to say. In Yalta I realized why I’m not afraid. Everyone’s afraid, but I’m not. Because I loved your father my whole life. I still do. I even wanted to write him about it. But I never did. Or rather, I sent a blank card. It’s silly, of course. It never arrived, it got lost somewhere. I say this and I’m lying again because I’m afraid anyway. And also. You and Alexei Pavlovich could at least have waited until I croaked. Or do you think I don’t see?

  I don’t care, Vera Lvovna. I don’t believe in God and I smell of apple soap.

  My handsome, intelligent, inimitable, delightful, prickly, unlucky Alexei Pavlovich, by the power of imagination invested in me I’ll make you who you are because I want to. Your hair is falling out, tufts of it get left in your comb. Your skin is getting flabby and wrinkled. You’re developing a soft, almost feminine belly. After four flights of stairs now you have to catch your breath. You can’t see close up, you’re afraid of glasses, and yo
u read holding the book at arm’s length. Your soiled and chalk-stained jacket hanging on a nail in the classroom by the board automatically spreads its sunlight-reflecting elbows. In the bathroom I scrub your mangled name off the walls. You’re ordinary and not that smart. Remember how we started telling our fortunes out of boredom? Your page, my line. We got: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” You said, “We’ll find a rope, but where are we going to get the stone?” I made-believe I was tightening a noose and stuck my tongue out to the side. We burst out laughing. You and I. You’re a silly man. After all, I was the one who needed the millstone. You were one of the little ones. And now, like a foolish child, you think someone’s angry at you for something, but you don’t understand what, and you’re lost in speculation as to why people avoid you, you’re looking for explanations, seeking out meetings, even writing notes that really don’t become you. You’re ridiculous and repulsive both. You pulled an underhanded trick, announcing loudly in front of everyone that I should come by your lab after the lecture. I came and became the unwilling heroine of an extremely vulgar scene. I didn’t even realize at first that you were asking my forgiveness for the row of our lesser brothers preserved in alcohol with their guts hanging out. You started trying to convince me that you still loved me and that the lack of attention and caresses was simply out of sensible caution because no one should know anything before it was time. “We have to keep a low profile, Zhenya,” you explained. “You have to be patient.” I said all I needed was purity and I left. As it turned out, you didn’t understand anything. And now this awful yesterday. Or maybe, on the contrary, you did understand and that’s why it all happened like that. Kind Alexei Pavlovich, do you even remember what happened? You showed up at my father’s birthday totally drunk. You wouldn’t let anyone get a word in and badgered everyone about what a remarkable father and worthy man he was and poured yourself shot after shot. You pestered Roman to play. The poor boy didn’t know where to hide, but you sat next to him, put your arm around him, and wouldn’t let him go. You shouted in his ear, “Roman, do you think you’re the blind musician? Silly! It’s him!” He lifted a forkful of herring toward the ceiling and the sauce dripped down his fingers into his sleeve. “Him! He pounds on us like keys, like this and this!” Mika jumped up. “What are you talking about! You don’t even know what you’re babbling!” I went to my room and lay down so I wouldn’t have to see or hear you. You knocked on the door. I thought it was my father, but it was you. You collapsed to your knees and started kissing my feet and exclaiming that you couldn’t go on like this, that you would throw her on the garbage heap, that you had no one and nothing in life but me. I said, “Go away! Get out!” You kept trying to kiss me and I kicked you away. You fell to the floor. They ran into the room. My father dragged you to the front door. You were laughing, trying to break away, and repeating over and over, “Thinking pistil! Thinking pistil!”