Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  “Listen,” he began.

  His subdued voice was that of someone about to make amends; but just then Rose, the new maid, walked into the library with a feather duster and waved it once or twice at the nearest books before glancing over at her armchair and tiptoeing back out—and yet in that moment something had changed in the air between them.

  “So,” he said brightly, “what now? What will you do with the rest of . . . whatever you call this?”

  She sighed. “I’m going to see Maggie off,” she said, attempting to hide her disappointment in idle chatter. “She’ll be finishing high school next spring, she has already been accepted at—”

  He seemed dutifully interested if slightly bored, a well-meaning uncle; when he asked further questions, she found herself glad to return to the firm ground of her love for her husband and her children. She told him about Paul’s recent successes at work; and Celia dropping out in her junior year of college to depart on a journey of self-discovery through the jungles of Asia, driving her mad with worry; and George striking it rich with some newfangled technology idea; and Rich about to graduate from divinity school, such a good boy he had turned out to be, steady as a rock; and Eugene and Adriana moving to Romania, due for a visit at Thanksgiving; and Emma surprising everyone with her marriage and, mere months later, a baby girl, imagine that, she was a grandmother now, she had even taken up knitting—

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “Well, that sounds pleasant enough. Finding happiness in the small things and so on.”

  He yawned and stood, brushing invisible dust off his denim-clad knee, taking a slow, lazy step away from her. All at once she knew that he was about to stroll out of her life forever, and she started out of her armchair, knocking her knitting to the floor.

  “Wait,” she cried, “wait!”

  He paused in the doorway, his face a statue’s eroded blank, his eyes pale and flat and devoid of expression, like painted marble faded by centuries in the sun.

  “Tell me, did you—did you kill Hamlet?”

  “But my dear,” he drawled, “Hamlet is immortal. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and all that.”

  “What? Oh. No. I meant John. My first lover. Did you kill him?”

  The slits of his eyes darkened with sudden life. He stood absolutely still—like a panther in the instant before leaping, she had time to think just as her heart dropped somewhere, her senses snapped wide awake, and every drop of her blood, every inch of her skin, every hair on her head tingled with the old fear.

  He spoke, his voice a slow hiss.

  “Do you really think that you are so important and that everything that happens to you, to those around you, happens for some preordained, divine reason? They had a good word for it in the old days. Hubris, it was called. Excessive pride before the gods. Gods have better things to do than meddle in the lives of every craven little nobody.”

  “Yes,” she gasped, shrinking back.

  “Next you will think that gods sit around counting hairs on everyone’s head, cocking their ears for the sound of whimpering, ready to grant any prayer out of the goodness of their hearts. Please take this cup of suffering away from me. Please make my child well. Please make my father live. Please make my lover leave. Please spare me any real pain, any real joy, any real shame, any real life—yes, please make my life as smooth, as shallow, as easy as it can get, because all I want is to tiptoe on the surface of things, composing little ditties as I do laundry, not knowing gut-wrenching love, not knowing life-shattering loss—and in return I promise I will give up my passion, the only thing that makes me any different from millions upon millions of others, I will throw away every last crumb of inspiration I am granted, every last chance of becoming an artist, I will never break out of the circle of time, I will live a silent life and die a silent death, please, oh please—”

  His tone was mocking, and furious underneath. She stared at him, stunned. His face was not the smoothly attractive face of a mortal man who had come into the library an hour before, but the achingly handsome face of a wrathful angel. She stepped back, and, tripping against the armchair, crumpled into it, and squeezed her eyes shut, expecting to be consumed by his burning ire. And then all was quiet, for almost an entire minute all was quiet—she could hear the rushing of blood in her ears.

  She kept her eyes closed, but dared to draw a breath, to stir a little.

  “Listen,” he said. His voice was scarcely above a whisper, and terrifyingly near. “Very few people are born great poets. Talents are a drachm a dozen, but nothing can be had for nothing. I told you this when you were young, but you didn’t pay attention. Or maybe you just didn’t want it badly enough. You must earn your right to say the things that truly matter—and for that, you pay in years, you pay in sweat, you pay in tears, you pay in blood. Both yours and other people’s.”

  And then, just as she cowered, fearing the rip of a barbed arrow through her heart, she sensed the smile back in his shockingly compassionate voice.

  “Oh, and finding happiness in the small things, my dear, that’s really nothing to brag about—it’s the last consolation of those whose imagination has failed them.”

  She felt her lips lightly brushed by other, smiling lips, and their touch was ice, and their touch was fire—and she was ambushed by the memory of all the times when she had lain in bed at night, always exhausted, often pregnant, occasionally wondering about her husband’s whereabouts, and as her thoughts would stray, she would imagine the soft, sneering curve of someone’s mouth, the light, circling touch of someone’s hand on her neck, and these thoughts would spin out into a tightrope on which she would balance for some minutes over an abyss of loneliness and approaching middle age, until momentary oblivion overtook her. Why, oh why, did you stay away for so long, she thought with a sudden contraction of anguish, not daring to look at him still; and though she did not ask aloud, he whispered against her cheek, so softly she could barely hear him, his words a gentle breeze that seemed to move through her mind: “You realize, of course, that I may not actually be here and that our little chats may be only as illuminating—or as hackneyed—as you are able to make them yourself? And if I live in your head alone, the real question you need to ask is why you haven’t called me for so long.”

  Her eyes flew open. “No, I don’t believe that—you—”

  The library was deserted.

  She felt that the fierceness of regret, the knowledge of all the things wasted, the sorrow of a life half lived—a life not lived—would consume her whole.

  “No, wait!” she cried. “Tell me just one thing—are you saying that I got it wrong—that I could have been—”

  But already she heard the maid’s footsteps in the next room, and knew that, like all revelations, this too would soon be forgotten, and she let her voice die a death of resignation in the dark-paneled, leather-padded, respectable silence of the book-filled room. Her old volume of Pushkin still lay in her lap, opened to his poem “The Prophet.” Her eyes trailed over the words, underlined, with excessive exuberance, by an elated fifteen-year-old in another place, in another age.

  Exhausted by spiritual thirst,

  I wandered in a gloomy desert,

  And at the forking of the roads

  A six-winged seraph came before me.

  His fingers light as dreams,

  He touched my eyes,

  And the sibylline eyes unsealed

  Like those of a startled she-eagle.

  He touched my ears,

  And clamor and ringing filled them,

  And I heard the shuddering of the heavens,

  And the lofty flight of angels,

  And the underwater movement of sea beasts,

  And the languishing of a lone vine in a valley.

  And he clung to my mouth

  And tore out my sinful tongue, />
  Given to both lies and idle chatter,

  And with his bloody right hand pressed

  The forked tongue of a wise serpent

  Into my stilled mouth . . .

  “I see you are awake now, Mrs. Caldwell,” said Rose, entering the library with the duster and vigorously setting about the books. Clouds of ancient gray pollen rose into the air; no one had touched most of these volumes in years, if not decades.

  She found herself sneezing, her eyes filled with tears.

  “Sorry, sorry,” said the maid. “So much dust.”

  39. Home Theater

  A Small Foretaste of Death

  She did not want anyone to be in the house when she watched it. If she watched it at all—and she was not sure she would—she would be alone. She waited until Paul departed on another of his business trips, and Rose had finished with the afternoon chores. She ate a light supper—an apple, a handful of blueberries, she was never hungry these days—then walked through the rooms, picking up a misplaced magazine here, a teacup there; but the endless drift of books, clothes, phones, keys had ceased since the last of her children had moved away, and the house had lost its daily mutability—everything tended to stay in its place now, unchanged and unchanging for weeks on end. It was not yet eight o’clock when she found nothing but time stretching before her like an open sea—inviting, deadly. Even then, she was not sure she would watch it. She pretended not to think about it for a while, but no matter what she occupied herself with—perusing a cookbook in search of next Sunday’s dinner, watering plants—she was always aware of the movie in its sealed case lying on the table at the foot of the staircase, waiting, waiting.

  Giving up at last, she descended to the basement, scooped the movie off the table, and, tearing the plastic wrapping as she walked, proceeded to the home theater. The movie cover showed an imposing glass-walled office high up in a skyscraper, and, propped on a leather armchair behind the desk, the top half of a human-size matryoshka with the photograph of the famous actress playing the lead role pasted over the doll’s rouged, round-eyed face. The doll’s lower half lay tipped on its side on the plush carpet, and three or four smaller dolls had spilled out of it—the next-largest bearing the heavily made-up, obscene face of a young stripper, the smallest one that of a serious dark-eyed girl of about five. Quotations in square red letters, all the R’s backward to signify the Russianness of the proceedings, promised “HEAЯT-STOPPING EXCITEMENT!” and stated underneath, in less prominent print, “Original screenplay by the award-winning author of—”

  She parted the curtains that separated the movie room from the rest of the basement, maneuvered through the rows of built-in chairs. When she had first seen the house, thirty-two years ago now, she had been struck dumb by the cup holders in the armrests and the golden tassels on the decadent velvet of the curtains. Now everything appeared vaguely dated, and musty, and neglected. Paul and the children had watched numerous movies here, eating the inevitable popcorn, making shadow puppets with their hands in the beam of the projector during the credits; but now the children were gone, Paul was busy, and she herself could recall suffering through only half a dozen films in all her time in the house. She had no affinity for sitting in the dark, invisible and passive, following the peregrinations of someone else’s life—it felt to her like a small foretaste of death.

  Except this time, it would not be someone else’s life: it would be her own.

  For when she finally switched off the lights and settled into one of the rigid-backed chairs to watch the movie, she saw the view of the eternal construction site from the window of her Moscow apartment, and a caricature of her bearded, pipe-smoking father, who spoke in somber truisms, and a mother who collected porcelain cups and came across as superficial and insensitive, and a dacha neighbor for whom the heroine decorously pined while reading Turgenev. She stared at the screen in disbelief, her hands gripping the armrests. The actors sported laughable accents, the teenage heroine cavorted under onion domes and birch trees—and yet it was, undeniably, her childhood, her youth, at least up to a point. For after a particularly ham-fisted, cringe-worthy scene in the country, in which the heroine mused about her impending adulthood, the story veered off: the girl went on a moonlit walk with the dacha boy, and there followed her first kiss in the shade of an old oak tree and a subsequent anguished romance in the streets of Moscow, which scarred her deeply and made her swear off marriage and children, and move to America. With that, the exposition sequence over, the dreamlike sepia tone gave way to harsher colors that signified the present day and place, and the movie proper began. She found herself watching a thriller she could not follow, its fast-paced, intricate plot involving a corrupt American politician, and the Russian mafia, and the heroine, now a courageous New York lawyer, doing something brave yet sexy with a briefcase full of incriminating documents, and a manly colleague who resembled the dacha boy just enough to justify the lengthy backstory—

  She stopped the movie, backtracked, watched the beginning again. Her heart felt crammed into her chest, its every beat a painful scrape against her rib cage. When the heroine burst out of her door and ran across the dirt road, hurrying to her first assignation with the dacha neighbor, she screamed and flung the remote control hard against the wall. It broke apart with a dry plastic crack, and the screen went black.

  She sat unmoving in the dark, her temples damp, her mind full of poison.

  Bitch, you bitch. How could you do that to me? You think you can steal from people like that, gut them, betray them, as long as you claim to do so in the name of art? But you are no artist—just a cliché-ridden hack, driven by nothing but the urge to escape from the emptiness of your own life. Because your life is empty, and you are alone, you have no husband and no children and no proper home—you have nothing, you are nothing, nothing, nothing, do you hear me . . .

  The fury wound tighter and tighter in her chest, until something within it seemed to give way, to sag sidewise. Suddenly frightened, she pressed her clammy fingers to her forehead and took a shallow, labored breath, and another. All at once the darkness of the room was stifling her, threatening her somehow; she wanted to turn on the lights, but she felt queasy, and oddly exhausted, and the image of herself stumbling through the black void, bumping into unseen corners and edges, made her press hard into the back of her chair and close her eyes against the darkness, and for one moment give all her attention to the sweating, melting, skipping, somersaulting thing that her heart seemed to be doing against her will, of its own volition. Perhaps, she thought, I really ought to stand up and get hold of the telephone, call an ambulance or something; and the thought sent a stab of terror through her, which radiated like pain from her chest and deposited the telephone neatly in her hand. Yet when she dialed, it was not the ambulance, it was Olga’s number instead; and though she had long forgotten the number, if indeed she had ever known it, her fingers, flying over the buttons, magically summoned the right combination to life—and though the number could have changed, and though Olga was never at home, if indeed she had ever existed, she answered on the first ring.

  Why did you do it to me? Mrs. Caldwell demanded, not bothering with small talk; for there was no time for that. Is it because your father drank, your mother slapped you, your childhood was a low-ceilinged, dismal trap? Did you think the poverty of your life gave you the right to steal from me, as you have done for years—for I see everything now, all those books of yours with their ballet dancers and precious heirlooms and cuckoo clocks, even the names, even the faces, you used my friends, you used my family, you used me, turned me into a cipher on a page, on a screen—why, why? Was it not enough for you to have taken the boy I liked all those years ago, must you now try to take my past as well? Olga sounded apologetic but firm, sure of herself. She talked about art, no, Art—Mrs. Caldwell could hear the solemn rise in her tone each time she said it—and the illusory nature of memory, and the purgative power of the autobio
graphical impulse, and the greater artistic truths revealed sometimes by borrowing, sometimes by distorting, what might be called reality; not to mention the fact that whatever she might have borrowed from Mrs. Caldwell was now immortalized, an indelible footprint in the sands of time—

  But already, tiring of the imaginary conversation, she released her immaterial hold on the nonexistent receiver, and briefly opened her eyes—and the darkness of the room crowded her still, and the dizzying pain was still there; so, closing her eyes, she thought, fighting through the chaos of her mind: But this does not matter, this isn’t important, I shouldn’t waste another moment thinking about it, for no one can take my past away from me, it’s mine alone, and it’s here, it has always been here, and if I float away from this pain that has narrowed and sharpened until it has become the piercing needle on whose tip the universe is spinning so quickly—if I walk away into this glowing mist, into this welcoming warmth, I will once again feel the trickle of lukewarm water down my back, and hear my grandmother’s voice, and smell the sweet tang of the soap, and see the tree, the great ancient tree at the heart of the world, and sense the boundless promise of the future unfolding before me, and no one, no one, will ever take that away from me . . .

  Overwhelmed by confusion, I stare at Mrs. Caldwell slumped over in her chair. I do not quite know how I got to my feet, nor do I remember turning on the lights, yet I see things so surely, down to the smallest of details—the beige carpet stained by countless soda spills, the tassels on the velvet curtains tied into messy knots by the busy hands of restless children, the strands of Mrs. Caldwell’s hair plastered over her moist forehead. Everything is bright and clear and precise and, at the same time, slightly off, as though every object has moved an inch to the side and now shimmers with a doubled contour—the way things appear sometimes when your eyes are brimming over with tears, in the second before you blink them away.