White Walls

by Tatyana Tolstaya

  Early autumn had already crawled into the town of R. and showed itself here and there—sometimes in brown bushes, sometimes in bald patches on the foliage of subdued trees. The air smelled of chickens, the john, and wet grass, the moon rose so coppery and enormous that it was as if the end of the world had already come; Spiridonov smoked and the music of other worlds issued from his mouth, mingled with the smoke; un-shaven and lame, elderly and not too swift, he had been chosen by someone to give witness to another life—distant, impossible, unattainable—the kind in which there was no place for any of us. The town of R. was our place, it was as familiar as the back of our hands, known by heart, inside out, whether you went to the right or the left or down into the basement or up to the rooftop and, held up by your slipping feet on the rusty tin and clasping the warm, potato-smelling pipe, cried out to the whole world: to the thinning forests, to the dark blue fog in the cold cleared fields, to the drunken tractor drivers crawling into the tractor furrows and to the wolves gnawing at the drivers’ trousers and neck, and to the tiny country store where there’s nothing but packets of gelatin and rubber boots, to the sleeping beetles and cranes overhead, to the black, lonely old ladies who’ve forgotten how they trembled before their wedding and wailed at coffin’s side; go on, cry out—everything’s known ahead of time, everything’s been trampled, verified, searched, settled, shaken out, there’s no exit, the exits have been sealed, every house, window, attic, and cellar has been explored through and through, examined thoroughly. They’ve touched every barrel, tugged on the latches, driven in or pulled out bent nails, rummaged in the basement corners that are either slippery from mold or dried up, they’ve picked at the window frames, peeled off the brown paint, hung and torn down locks, moved piles of loose, discarded paper; there’s not a single empty, somehow accidentally forgotten room, corner, or hallway; there’s not a chair that hasn’t been sat on; not a single stuffy-smelling copper door handle that hasn’t been handled, a catch or bolt that hasn’t been drawn; there’s no exit, but there’s no guard either—leaving just isn’t in the cards.

  But the people who sing noisily in the fire and smoke in the invalid’s illegal mouth—aren’t they also searching for a way out of their own universe, diving, jumping, dancing, glancing from under their hands toward the ocean horizon, seeing off and meeting the ships: Hello, sailors, what have you brought us—rugs? plague? earrings? herring? Tell us quickly, is there another life, and which way should we run to seize its gilded edges?

  Svetlana sighed heavily. She suffered because all over the world there were men, unattainable and magnificent, in the mines and in airplanes, in restaurants and on prison bunks, on night watch and under festive white sails, men whom she’d never meet: small ones and big ones, with mustaches and automobiles, ties and bald spots, long underwear and gold signet rings, with pockets full of money and a passionate desire to spend this money on Svetlana—who’s right here on the evening porch, all curls and powder, ready to fall deeply in love with each and every one who asks.

  Blending with the darkness, Judy sat silently, like everyone else. She hadn’t said anything in a long time, but only now, when Spiridonov played a solo on his horn, could one suddenly hear how deep, powerless, and black her silence was; it was like the lonely obedient silence of a beast—that fantastic beast she wanted to nurse without knowing or seeing who beckoned with a hoof or claw; wrapping herself in scarves and shawls, she boldly set off into the distance, beyond the seas and mountains in search of that beast, in search of a warm, quiet, useful friend with soft wool, with silly dark eyes, with sparse hair on its face and a secret emptiness blowing from the pitted, rosy cartilage of its ear canals, with milk in its satiny stomach or a column of transparent seed in the curly caches of its loins; a beast with long, spiral horns and a tail resembling a geisha’s hair in the morning, with a silver chain on its neck and a daisy in its carefree mouth, an affectionate, loyal, make-believe beast, imagined in dreams.

  I wanted to hug her, to stroke her fuzzy head, and say: Now now, what do you want from us, foolish woman, how can we help you if we ourselves don’t know whom to call, where to run, what to look for, and from whom to hide? We’re all running in different directions: I am, and you are, and so is Antonina Sergeevna, who sweats from her immense government responsibilities, and so is Uncle Zhenya, who’s already far away, southern, almost otherworldly, comfortably wriggling his toes in his brand-new inexpensive sandals, ready to set out on the walk from which he won’t return; and so is the maiden-knight Olga Khristoforovna, who wanted to do what was best, but was cut down by colleagues who wanted to do even better—the moon rises and torments Olga Khristoforovna with forgotten dreams, forgotten fields torn up by the cavalry’s hooves, the hiss of transparent sabers, the smoke of soundless gunshot, the smell of porridge from the collective pots, the smell of sheepskin, blood, youth, and unreceived kisses. Look around, listen carefully, or even open a book. Everyone’s running, running away from himself or in search of himself: Odysseus runs endlessly, spinning and marking time in the small bowl of the Mediterranean Sea; the three sisters are running to Moscow, motionlessly and eternally, like in a nightmare, moving their six legs, running in place; Doctor Doolittle who, rather like you, got lost in dreams of sick, overseas animals, is also running—“and Doctor Doolittle ran all that day, and only one word would he say: Limpopo, Limpopo, Limpopo!” Moscow, Limpopo, the town of R., or the island of Ithaca—isn’t it all the same?

  But I didn’t say any of this, because at that moment the gate jingled and from the dew-befogged hawthorn bushes emerged Vasily Paramonovich, the devotee of the airways, white in his embroidered shirt, arm in arm with Perkhushkov, the regional ideological dragon.

  “Who’s there?” Vasily Paramonovich hooted, cheerful and alert, from the twilight. “I’ve come to work things out, I’ve got new plans with me, and then I hear: someone’s misbehaving with music. And is this none other than Antonina Sergeevna’s brother come to pay a visit? Welcome home!”

  “What’s that?” said Perkhushkov, roused, sensing Judy’s darkness in the dark. “Don’t tell me the foreign comrades have already arrived? The reservations aren’t till the twentieth.”

  And he returned us to the house, where the sight and effect of tomatoes and cognac revived dim historical memories of the Battle of Borodino. “We’re expecting the air squadron by morning,” said Vasily Paramonovich. “Oh, what a celebration it’ll be!”

  “But where will they land?” said Antonina Sergeevna, surprised.

  “Oh, they won’t land anywhere: they don’t have a permit,” replied Vasily Paramonovich, casting a sidelong glance at Perkhushkov. Perkhushkov nodded. “They’re going to circle and make figures. Tomorrow they’ll rehearse, and then when our sister-regional comrades get here, they’ll give them a real show.”

  “Couldn’t we throw red carnations from the fighter planes? Paper ones?” asked Antonina Sergeevna.

  “We used up our quota of paper way back in June! Now, then, Antonina, just what we need, more paper.”

  “What if we get the private sector in, the ones who knit flowers for the cemetery?”

  “Under no circumstances! They knit roses, not carnations, and roses are apolitical,” interrupted Perkhushkov. “You have to understand the difference. In fact, the cemetery is one of our sorest spots and a source of consternation,” said Perkhushkov sadly, “a neglected plot of ideological work, I have to admit. It has a despondent, depressed spirit and a touch of mysticism uncharacteristic of our society: crosses, crypts, and some people even allow themselves to carve pessimistic inscriptions or erect cement angels, which are essentially unmasked subversions of materialism and empiriocriticism. And just think, on the tombstones and gravestones they carve—completely irresponsibly—not only the date of birth, but the date of so-called death, and most of the time neither have been cleared with the proper authorities. It’s just plain cosmopolitanism. That’s why there’s a move now to enter stern reprimands—stern, mind you!—in the dos
siers of deceased comrades if mystical figures and unauthorized dates appear on their graves—after all, we can’t allow the Three Sources and Three Spare Parts of Marxism to be obstructed and squandered by a bunch of little cherubims introduced from the outside. And take other problem spots. No need to go far—why right over here, two blocks away, in the old-age home, what goes on there if you just scratch beneath the surface. Gaidukov, Andrei Borisovich: an Honored Worker, medals from armpit to armpit, so many of them that at last November’s holidays they had to add panels to his jacket, thrice laureate of the Blue Sword. He’s completely forgotten himself, hunts rabbits under his bed, shames the authorities. Boiko, Raisa Nikolaevna: you’d think that all the necessary conditions had been provided, they brought her to the political seminars on a hospital bed, camphor—be our guest, an IV—to your health, an oxygen pillow—our pleasure, everything’s right at hand. And then she goes and confuses Jaspers with Kierkegaard, can’t name the seventeen reasons of gradual transformation, and insists that Martin Luther King nailed the April theses to the Berlin Wall! What is this? And Ivanova, Sulamif Semyonovna? Quite understandable if she’d had a bad class origin, but no, she’s a first-generation member of the intelligentsia, a doctoral candidate and everything, and at one time she even invented some kind of syrup for calming the nerves that was very popular at the end of the thirties, so popular that Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin himself congratulated her, stuck a medal on her chest, embraced and kissed her, shook her hands, feet, neck, everything—he greeted her very warmly. This Sulamif became horribly senile—though I suspect it’s not senility but a diversion—and pretends she’s a young, capricious girl, moreover of the most vulgar sort: give her some bouquets of lilac, she says, she’ll wallow around in them, and she wants elves with feather fans to blow zephyrs on her, for example, or—horrors!—siroccos. Can you imagine? This is one of our own Soviet old ladies—and to make such a political error. Friends, honestly now, how could there be siroccos in our country?”

  Perkhushkov burst into tears, shaking his head, and Svetlana, drawn to male secretions—even if only tears—like a snake to heat, nestled up against the weakened commissar and set about drying all forty of his eyes with her fair locks, which she had dipped in sugar water for strength and set in strips of the newspaper Red Star the evening before.

  And on the whole, said Perkhushkov, plunging into melancholy, how frightening and difficult it is to live on this earth, my friends. What dramas, collisions, hurricanes, tempests, tornadoes, cyclones, anticyclones, typhoons, tsunamis, mistrals, barguzins, khamsins, and North Winds, not to mention shaitans, occur at every step of our spiritual life. O! Literally this summer, just this August, this very August, Perkhushkov lived through a drama that no pen would dare take up—the Homer has not yet been blinded who could tackle this theme. Hell—Perkhushkov recounted bitterly—was nothing but a party with girls, just an amusement park, to put it mildly, compared to what he went through. That universal fool Dante, who supposedly roamed around the circles of hell with his pal Virgil, would have hanged himself on the spot if he’d had to go through anything like this; he wouldn’t have bothered suffering. From the first to the fourteenth of August—days of mourning, weeks of woe—Perkhushkov suffered the hell of separation from his homeland. Yes. He went to Italy. Yes. He went there in an airplane, and came back—to increase his torment—by train. The result: he went gray overnight (Perkhushkov moved Svetlana aside and showed his gray hair), and bitter wrinkles sprouted over his entire face, ears, and even the nape of his neck.

  How to describe it?—after all, Perkhushkov isn’t Homer or Lope de Vega, or even the Pleiades poets. How to describe the loneliness, the feeling of breakdown, the profound, interminable depression? And the oppression which seemed to suffuse the very air? In Italy there’s always a gray, gray sky, Perkhushkov related, low, leaden clouds gather over the flat roofs and press on you heavily, crushing you. The howling wind only slightly enlivens the empty, pitiful streets. Bent low, an old lady will hobble past, a beggar will crawl by waving the bloody stump of a limb wrapped in filthy rags, and then silence descends once again. An occasional snowflake, swirling slowly, falls in the horrifying, stifling atmosphere. Industrial smoke covers the crooked lanes of the cities in black billows so thick that you can’t see farther than your outstretched arm—and there’s nothing to look at anyway. The Italians are a gloomy, morose people, hunchbacked from centuries of excessive labor; they have sunken, consumptive chests and are constantly hawking blood, so that the streets are entirely covered with bloody tubercular spittle. Rarely, oh, so rarely, a weak smile illuminates the pale, haggard face of an Italian, exposing his bloodless, toothless gums—and this happens only if he encounters one of us, a Soviet citizen; then the Italian will stretch out his thin, rag-covered arms and quietly wheeze: “Comrade! Kremlin!”—and again let his weakened limbs fall powerlessly to his side.

  In the middle of Italy rises a black, gloomy fortress—the Vatican. A horrible, foul-smelling moat surrounds the fortress on all sides, and only once a year a squeaking drawbridge lowers its rusty chains to let in trucks full of gold. Crows circle the Vatican cawing ominously, and higher up helicopters zoom around, and even higher—Pershing missiles. Once in a while a wheezing laugh sounds from within the fortress walls—it’s the pope of Rome, a dreary old man whom no one has ever seen. He’s well-fed and rich, of course; he has his own fields and flocks, so he eats sausage, fat, and dumplings every day, and pizza on holidays. In the Vatican cellar there’s a harem: hundreds of magnificent girls languish there, including some of our Soviet girls who traded their native expanses for a pottage of lentils. Well, they miscalculated—they’re only given lentils once a year, on International Women’s Day, most of the time they only get gruel. And the piss pots aren’t even emptied every day.

  The Vatican guards are terrifying—whoever approaches is shot without warning. A step to the left or right is considered an attempt on the pope’s life. That’s why no one can do anything with him. Well-trained German shepherds and electrified barbed wire complete the oppressive effect.

  Rats dart about Italy in such numbers that cars can hardly get through. And anyway, who has the money for cars? Perkhushkov cried bitterly. Only fat cats and the rich! They ride around happy as clams in linguini, drinking wine day and night in luxurious palaces and cathedrals and laughing loudly at simple Italians, who can only clench their gaunt fists powerlessly. The shelves in the stores are empty, and often, constantly even, you see little children—every last one of whom is on crutches, by the way—fighting in the garbage over a piece of bread.

  “Who throws away bread, if there’s nothing in the stores?” said Antonina Sergeevna, starting up in horror.

  “The Mafia,” Perkhushkov said sternly. “The Mafia throws bread away.”

  “My G-o-d . . .”

  “Yes. And I can say this out loud to you, because you and I have nothing to fear, but for exposing this secret the Mafia killed all the police commissars, all the republic’s prosecutors, all the carabinieri, and now it’s holding the members of their families—including great aunts—hostage to unceasing terror. And the Mafia itself lives in luxurious palaces and cathedrals and laughs loudly.”

  Perkhushkov was so upset by the sight of the luxurious palaces and cathedrals built with loathing by the simple oppressed medieval masses that he couldn’t even look at these odious edifices, which were barely perceptible through the smoke, and so covered his eyes with his hands; in fact, the entire Soviet delegation walked along with their eyes shut tight. A completely different, noble feeling seized him at the sight of the dilapidated hovels of simple Italians, and it was with particular warmth and tenderness that his eyes followed simple unemployed folk and the simple oppressed masses crawling by on crutches, and he even caught up with one of them and gave him a ruble with Lomonosov’s profile. If he ran into someone wealthier, Perkhushkov clenched his fists and ground his teeth in rage, and between his eyebrows a fierce fold appeared instantly, smoothing out
for good only on the way home when the train switched wheels at the border in Chop. From the very beginning Perkhushkov was tormented by homesickness. He began pining and feeling uncomfortable while still waiting for his passport to be issued. Worse! As soon as the word “Italy” had been pronounced, Perkhushkov was pierced by such intolerable anguish that he flew out into the courtyard like a pterodactyl and embraced a birch tree planted recently during a voluntary labor day in such a death grip that he had to be torn off together with the leaves and bark: before parting he had wanted to at least drink his fill of birch sap. Sitting in the airplane he pined: he pressed greedily to the window and watched with swollen eyes as his homeland slipped back. When the airplane crossed the border, Perkhushkov felt as though he’d been pierced by a white-hot rod, he was overcome, stricken. He tore himself from his seat, knocking over the packets of sugar and salt, the plastic cup with mineral water, and the meat patty in tomato sauce—so beloved and familiar!—and dashed, sobbing, to the emergency exit to unclamp the locks. It was only with great difficulty that he was held back by two stewardesses, the flight engineer, and the second pilot, whose eyes were also swollen from tears and longing for our native buckwheat expanses. Similar attacks of nostalgia, ever more frequent, overwhelmed him in Italy as well: at night he tossed about and bit his clenched, whitened fists; and during the day he sat in his room on the bed with a lackluster gaze, his head lowered, his arms limp as seaweed at his side, and continually muttered: “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.” His comrades invited him to go to dilapidated theaters, drink disagreeable wine, ride in a leaky gondola—how could he? So it’s understandable that on encountering a compatriot—one of our guys, from Tver—Perkhushkov threw himself on the fellow and clutched him so powerfully that the guy suffocated in Perkhushkov’s embrace, in connection with which there was even a bit of unpleasantness about the corpse, an explanatory note had to be written to the institution which had sent the deceased to the capitalist country and a little fuss made about a pension for the widow and orphans, but that’s unimportant, what’s important is the agonizing patriotic feeling which seized Perkhushkov on his return: a feeling of pride in his homeland, her skies and other analogous spaces, her majestic achievements, broad step, steady stride, and high dairy yield.