Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  For a moment my world totters on the brink of falling over, as vast, invisible things strain to burst into light. Then the moment moves on. I am overtaken by a marvelous sense of an unexpected, unhoped-for liberation. I am free, I am somehow—finally!—free of this woman who is not me, who has never been me—free of the complacent, materialistic, dim oppression of her timid spirit. Light-headed with the immensity, with the joy, of this new freedom, I look again at Mrs. Caldwell. She continues to sit slumped over in her chair, her face covered by the fallen hair. She is, I imagine, still fuming over the irrelevant movie, insisting that her past is hers alone, planning perhaps to set her husband’s lawyer on her treacherous friend . . . I am wondering if I should speak to her, when I am seized with a sharp, almost animal panic at the thought of lingering another instant in her oddly immobile, heavy-limbed presence.

  Jerking my eyes away from the woman, I pass out of the room.

  I feel another, lighter prick of panic when I realize that I cannot recall having parted the pompous curtains as I stepped over the threshold, but I dispel my fear quickly: I am, it is true, a little hazy about what has happened—about what is happening—to me, yet I am certain there will be plenty of time to sort it out later. For now, it is enough to know I am free. I am ready to go and live fully at last. I have so many plans, I think in a fever of joyous agitation. I will leave this house, I will travel, I will cross unfamiliar roads and turn blind corners without trepidation, I will look up old friends and talk to strangers, I will capture every moment of joy, every crumb of discovery, as I write all the poetry I have ever meant to write.

  I do not remember the last time I felt so alive.

  40. Entrance Hall

  Departures

  And so I have made up my mind to leave. I told Paul I intended to go to Russia for a while, spend a few months in the countryside reliving my childhood, and he did not raise a single objection; in fact, he appeared distraught about something and did not seem to hear me at all. His indifference saddened me a little, but I reminded myself of the journey ahead and felt restored to happiness. I will not go to Russia just yet; I will save it for last. For now, I will follow religious processions through the ancient streets of Spanish towns, I will sit on mud floors in African huts listening to the midnight roar of lions, I will taste unknown fruits in the floating markets of Asia. I will walk through the mountains, the valleys, the forests of the world, all-seeing and all-hearing, greedy for every tiny morsel of life. Perhaps I will come back, perhaps not.

  I have already decided what to bring with me on my travels. I will take almost nothing—just a thick sweater, a pair of sturdy walking shoes, my passport with its pages virginally clear of stamps, a handful of pens, a notebook, my dog-eared volume of Annensky, and Celia’s lopsided blue bunny. I have not actually packed—in truth, things have developed a somewhat disconcerting tendency to pass through my fingers, but I choose not to dwell on such matters; I cannot leave just yet, in any case. Three and a half decades of maternal habits cannot be discarded so easily, and there are still a few loose ends to tie up before I can go: the birth of my second grandchild in February, followed by Eugene’s homecoming over Easter, followed by another reunion in July—

  In between family visits, I wander the house. As often as not, I end up in the entrance hall, and there I sit, going over the packing list in my mind, dreaming of escaping soon, so soon, almost any day now. The entrance hall is a grand space inscribed into the stately arc of the marble staircase, crowded with stuffy, lion-pawed chairs and consoles. One’s entrance hall—my decorator told me once, a third of a century ago now—should serve as a perfect introduction to the house that follows; to the world of people forever kept on its doorstep, peering wistfully over the homeowner’s shoulder (a delivery man, a gardener, a Jehovah’s Witness, God visiting incognito), it should offer a tantalizing hint of the wonders that await the lucky few allowed within. When we first saw the house, I remember the awed sense I had upon entering—that of an immense place, full of possibilities, unfolding inward, like that magic house from a childhood fairy tale that was bigger on the inside than on the outside.

  Now I know it to be the other way around. On the inside, the house is much, much smaller than its sprawling, many-columned façade would lead one to believe.

  As I sit in the entrance hall, revising my list (I will not, after all, need that sweater), I stare at the enormous double doors of brilliantly polished oak reflected in the expanse of the brilliantly polished marble floors. I never throw the doors open, for fear that temptation will move me to make a dash for it before I have quite disposed of the last of my matriarchal obligations. Sometimes I do feel a surge of frustration, as though I am a clockwork toy that has been wound up and cannot act of its own accord until it completes the predetermined range of its mechanical motions. In other, darker moments, my throat tightens with panic—what if it is simply too late, what if over the years I have sprouted such thick roots that I will be unable to walk away? But such thoughts are only signs of weakness, so I force myself to breathe, and busy my mind with shaving more unnecessary items off the list (I decide I do not want the walking shoes either), and muse on my past, on the decisions I have made in my life, on the roads I have followed and not followed. I imagine having had five children, or two, or none; I imagine having left Paul or never having married him; I imagine having gone to Paris with Adam; I imagine not having stayed in America, or not having left Russia; I imagine having crossed that dirt road and kissed that boy; I imagine having never given up my poetry. I remember a little girl who lived in a faraway country with long, cold winters and bright summer stars—a girl who had a mermaid for a mother, a sage for a father, a god for a guide—a girl who loved life and played with words and looked out of the small window of her small room to behold the whole world. And when my memories start crowding my chest with something much like sobs, I distract my attention with the comings and goings of people around me.

  For the house, even as it lies fallow during Paul’s business trips, between my children’s and grandchildren’s visits, is never entirely empty. If I sit still enough, letting my mind drift free until it bursts the imprisonment of matter, I begin to see the riches of things that skip, slide, and dance beneath the surface of the world—and I can then sense ghostly women moving through the house. All with their own versions of my elderly face, they walk through the rooms on their different errands, possessed of varied degrees of presence and persistence—some mere echoes, glimpses, faint wisps of holographic lives, others coming through so clearly, so tangibly, it seems as if I could reach out and truly touch them. I understand that they are not really here, of course, for they are only a vast, cosmic branching of endless possibilities, of numberless outcomes—all of them variations on my own fate, passing through mirror dimensions, brushing by me, fading in and out of sight—an endless theater of myself, parading before me as I sit in the entrance hall, ruminating on the packing list (I can do without the passport, I think), dreaming of all the poetry I will compose once I am away.

  The woman I see most often is an absolute bore, an expensively dressed phantom of a person with not an original thought in her exquisitely coiffed head. She spends her days straightening the rooms and leafing through magazines; her visitors are of the most prosaic sort, electricians and rug cleaners and dog walkers; in the evenings, when her husband’s car pulls into the driveway, she dabs a touch of lipstick on her faded mouth before the entrance hall mirror, and waits, smiling meekly, tilting her head at the sound of his key in the lock. Paul is kind to her, if ever so slightly dismissive.

  A more disturbing presence is a Mrs. Caldwell who has only five children and whose husband abandoned her for his secretary two decades before, though leaving her in full possession of the house. She dyes her indecently long hair blond and has dabbled in plastic procedures. Every time the doorbell rings on a Friday night, she clatters across the marble floor in her stilettos, and I catch a terrible
glimpse of my features drawn on a sixty-five-year-old flesh-colored balloon, stretched and bloated. I hurry to avert my eyes, just as she is letting in her much younger boyfriend, to whom she then glues herself in a long, slurping kiss. I believe the man is no good; he is after her money. She has started to write love poetry, too. I find her frankly embarrassing.

  There are a few others here as well—a thin-lipped, dieting, strident Mrs. Caldwell who has gone to work at some downtown office doing who knows what, as well as a flighty Mrs. Caldwell who occupies herself with trying to translate her mother’s poetry and is prone to bursting into tears whenever any of her children visit. My favorite Mrs. Caldwell is plump and energetic, young at sixty-seven, with a bristle of unkempt hair and a marvelous touch with her grandchildren; her house is always overrun with them (Emma is divorced now and living here with her two daughters while she studies for her architect’s exam, and Eugene and Adriana often visit with their baby). She appears genuinely happy, and seems to love everyone, just as everyone loves her, and her entrance hall is always traipsed over with muddy footprints and wet leaves, chaotic with toddler shoes and lunch boxes and mismatched mittens and shed petals of flowers and the bustle of dogs. I think of her belly laugh, her jolly face, to ward off despair whenever I see that other woman, that obese, slovenly, gray-haired and gray-faced woman who lives all alone and drags herself through the house, dressed in a dirty pink robe and dirty pink slippers, sighing wetly, mumbling poems under her breath, never failing to twist my heart with pity. I do not know her story, but I can see death in her stark, empty eyes—a child’s death—and I turn away every time, horrified and ashamed for some reason.

  There may also be a Mrs. Caldwell who is moving away—though, strangely enough, neither she nor Paul is organizing the move; it is only the children, much older now, who come to the house, arriving in somber groups of two and three. Maggie and Celia, I notice, have been crying, Emma is white-lipped as she speaks to Eugene on the phone, giving him details of some funeral arrangements, asking when his flight from Bucharest is due to land, and I overhear Rich consoling George as they stand in the doorway surveying the boxes. For the entrance hall has been filling up with boxes upon boxes in the past few weeks—boxes of porcelain, boxes of silver, paintings wrapped in cocoons of padded paper, precious plates buried in crates of packing peanuts, contractors and realtors coming and going, two electricians carrying the dining room chandelier trussed up like a slaughtered boar on a pole between them. As the movers shuttle in and out on moving day, the double doors stand open for hours at a time, and hour after hour I sit in the hall, revising the packing list in my head (I have resolved to leave the notebook and the pens behind) and staring outside, at the rectangle of the gray November sky above the movers’ heads, at the waving of the oak tree’s naked branches. When the final boxes depart, I feel relieved to be rid of all that useless stuff at last, but a bit depressed too. I catch a glimpse of a “For Sale” sign stuck in the lawn outside, and then the doors close, and the house stands empty and dark, a winter draft from below the doors blowing a dead oak leaf across the filthy floor. To the left, then to the right, then to the left again, flutters the leaf. I wonder if it has my name written on it, and attempt to smile at the thought; but I do not get up to look. The lights of the grand chandelier above me no longer come on, for the electricity has been turned off; I can sense the long winter night moving in.

  The old panic takes hold of me roughly.

  How would I know, I think wildly, if I were not myself, but one of these other apparitions instead—and if so, how would I know which one? How would I know if I were only a footnote in a story that has gone on without me—if some other, braver woman has not led an entirely different, wonder-filled existence in my name, never even setting foot in this house, never even coming near all this? How would I know if I were the ghost of someone long dead within these walls, unable to leave, trapped here as punishment for my waste of a life—as failed at death as I was at living? And if this really is some kind of purgatory, how will I know when I am forgiven for my sins, when I am allowed to leave it all behind?

  But quickly I push these dark thoughts away. Because of course I am going to leave, I am going to leave just as soon as Christmas is over. In the meantime I continue whittling down my list—I have decided to take nothing but Celia’s one-eared bunny and the volume of Annensky, and soon the volume of Annensky seems superfluous too, as I find I remember his poems with perfect clarity, even as I can no longer recall a single line of my own. I recite his words for hours, for days, for months on end, sitting in the entrance hall, looking at the closed door.

  Do you not imagine sometimes,

  When dusk wanders through the house,

  That here, alongside us, lies another plane,

  Where we lead entirely different lives?

  It is not a bad way to spend one’s time. It could have been so much worse. This morning, for instance, I heard a siren wailing outside. The next thing I know, the doors are being flung open, and two men in white burst in, a stretcher between them, and disappear at a run inside the house. I sit in the darkened entrance hall, waiting for them to return. After a while they walk back across the hall, slowly now, bent under the weight of the body on the stretcher. I glimpse a limp strand of gray hair, a dangling pink slipper, a hanging fold of a dirty pink robe. I do not look closely; I do not want to know what the matter is with her. I just whisper a quick prayer for the poor soul, and feel grateful for having been spared, and, as I hear the ambulance start, say to myself: There but for the grace of God go I.

  The men in white, I notice with a sudden jolt, have left the doors standing wide open. I look at the glorious blue sky of April, or is it July—the light pouring through is radiantly clear, a luminous invitation. I realize that I do not, after all, need to bring Celia’s bunny. As I stand up and walk empty-handed toward the shining rectangle of light, I think of all the secrets, all the marvels of the world I am about to see.

  Part Five

  The Future

  THE END

  Acknowledgments

  As ever, I am deeply grateful to Warren Frazier, my agent, and Marian Wood, my publisher and editor—without their friendship, judgment, and faith in my work, none of this would have happened. Thanks are also due to everyone at the Penguin Group who helped make this book a reality, especially Ivan Held, for all his support; Alexis Sattler, for assisting with so many details; and my indefatigable copy editor, Anna Jardine, who spared me many an embarrassment, among them the militant image of an elderly professor rifling, rather than riffling, through index cards. I would also like to thank Alexander Hollmann for his artistic input, and my first readers and oldest friends, Olga Levaniouk and Olga Oliker, for their immensely helpful insights—I couldn’t wish for better readers, first or otherwise.

  Finally, special thanks go to my family—my mother, Natalia Kartseva, who was always there for me, and my children, Alex and Tasha, who became so delightfully curious about all the stages of making a book. Eleven-year-old Alex helped with designing the sketches, six-year-old Tasha made a sign—“Do not disturb, I need time”—for my office door, and both of them tolerated their share of Chinese takeout dinners and pizza deliveries while I was busy describing the culinary accomplishments of Mrs. Caldwell. Thank you for letting me write, most of the time—and for making me happy, always.

  Looking for more?

  Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.

  Discover your next great read!

 

 

 
100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share