Medea and Her Children

CHAPTER 9

Throughout her life Alexandra changed not only her men, of whom she grew bored easily, but also her profession. She met her third husband at the Maly Theater, where she worked from the mid-1950s as dresser to an ancient celebrity. Her husband, while collecting a decent state salary there, restored priceless antiques which the theater élite, the Actors of Merit of the USSR and the Actresses of the Soviet People, who had an eye for fine furniture, bought for a song.

Alexandra, always ready for love, had little interest in wealth but worshiped brilliance. Her marriage to Alexei Kirillovich had not been brilliant. They were the three most boring years of her life, and they ended in scandal: Alexei Kirillovich caught her in flagrante delicto with the handsome deaf-and-dumb boilermaker who serviced the Timiryazev dachas.

Alexei Kirillovich was deeply shocked and walked out forever, leaving his wife in the embraces of her huge Gerasim. Alexandra cried right up until the evening.

She saw Alexei Kirillovich only once after that, in court for the divorce, but right through to 1941 she received alimony from him through the post. Alexei Kirillovich did not require access to his son.

The boilermaker, needless to say, was an episode of no significance. She had various brilliant liaisons: with a dashing test pilot, with a famous Jewish academician who was a witty but indiscriminate philanderer, and with a young actor, a casualty of early fame and even earlier alcoholism.

Her second husband, Yevgeny Kitaev, was a military man, well built, a lover of Ukrainian folk songs with a powerful voice. She had a daughter, Lidia, by him before this marriage too hit the buffers. They didn’t get divorced but they lived apart, and her second daughter, Vera, born just before the war, had a different father, a man with such an illustrious name that Kitaev modestly kept silent about the vagaries of his family life until the day he was killed. Alexandra’s last daughter, born in 1947, three years after his death, also bore his jolly surname.

When Alexandra passed fifty, however, and admirers ceased to swarm to the no longer gleaming beacon of her red hair, she heaved a sigh and said to herself, “Oh, well, time’s up . . .” She cast her keen feminine eye around, and rather unexpectedly it came to rest on the theater’s cabinetmaker, Ivan Isaevich Pryanichkov.

He was not old, about fifty, a year or two younger than she; not tall, but broad shouldered. He wore his hair longer than was customary among the working class, more in the fashion of an actor. He was invariably clean shaven, and his shirts peeped out freshly from beneath his blue work coat. Walking down the corridor behind him one time, Alexandra analyzed the complex and astringent aroma emanating from him and associated with his profession: turpentine, varnish, rosin, and something she couldn’t recognize. The smell struck her as really quite attractive.

The cabinetmaker had a certain special dignity of his own. He did not fit into the usual theater hierarchy. He might have been expected to occupy a modest position somewhere between a stage mechanic and a makeup artist, but he stalked the theater corridors acknowledging greetings with a nod like an Actor of Merit of the USSR and closed the door to his workshop as firmly as an Actor of the Soviet People. One time, toward the end of the working day when the workers in the workshops had not yet left and the actors and all those needed for the production of the night’s performance had already assembled, Alexandra Georgievna knocked on his door. They exchanged greetings. It transpired that he did not know her by name, although by this time she had been working in the theater for three years. She told him about the walnut cabinet she had inherited from her late mother-in-law, cast a quick glance around the walls of his workshop, at the shelves with great bottles of dark and reddish fluids and at the various tools symmetrically hung up or lying around.

Ivan Isaevich was holding a brown hand with a dark outline around the nails on the light-colored top of a dismantled side table, stroking down a jagged flower with a rough finger, and when Alexandra Georgievna finished her tale about the cabinet, he said, without looking her in the eyes, “When I finish this marquetry for Ivan Ivanovich I can come and take a look at it.”

A week later he came to see her in Uspensky Lane, where she lived in two and a half rooms with her daughters Vera and Nike. The bowl of broth he was offered with a piece of yesterday’s meat kulebyaka, and buckwheat porridge which seemed to have been baked in a Russian stove, made a deep impression on Ivan Isaevich, who led a clean, worthy, but nevertheless bachelor existence, without good home cooking.

He liked the solicitous movement with which Alexandra Georgievna took the bread out of the wooden bread bin and opened the napkin in which it was wrapped. An even deeper impression was made by the brief glance she threw at the end of the buffet, where a small icon of the Mother of God of Korsun was hanging and which he had not noticed immediately precisely because it was not hanging in the corner in the officially approved manner, but hidden—and the quiet sigh, “Oh, Lord,” which she had learned from Medea already in childhood.

He was an Old Believer but had left home as a youth, renouncing his faith. Having swum away from his home shore, however, he never did reach another and had lived all his life at war with himself, sometimes appalled at having turned his back on his parents’ world, sometimes anguished by the impossibility of uniting with the thousands of his frenzied and energetic Soviet fellow citizens.

He was touched by her prayerful sigh, but only much later, when he was already her husband, did he realize that the crucial point was the amazingly simple way she had solved the problem which had tormented him all his life. For him the worship of a righteous God simply could not be reconciled with the living of an unrighteous life, but Alexandra brought everything together in a splendidly straightforward way: she painted her lips and dressed to kill, and could throw herself into having fun with total abandon, but when the time came, she would sigh and weep and pray, and suddenly give generous help to someone in need.

The cabinet turned out to be an object of no importance, walnut veneer, with a lost key and damaged key plate. Ivan Isaevich laid out his tools and unscrewed the front leaf while Alexandra Georgievna got herself ready and ran to the evening performance to cloak her decaying prima donna in a merchant’s talma of heavy silk. The old woman played mothers-in-law in Ostrovsky almost all the time.

Ivan Isaevich, left with her daughters, quietly got everything ready, cleaned the surface, removed the veneer where it was damaged in one place, and thought about the widow: a good woman living a pure life; her children well brought up; she herself, he could see, was well educated; although why on earth she was working as dresser to an old dame renowned for her difficult personality he couldn’t imagine.

He had to leave before the owner returned, as she was held up longer than usual. The old prima donna had summoned the principal producer after the performance and ordered him to replace a young actress “who’s an uppity young madam, even though she’s incapable of articulating her lines properly herself.” By the time feathers had been unruffled and Alexandra had calmed her grand old lady down and changed her clothes, it was already half-past midnight, and Alexandra had to walk home because that evening the actress either forgot to give her a lift home in her personal taxi, as she usually did, or chose not to.

Ivan Isaevich arranged his dates with the walnut cabinet after first glancing at the theater schedule and choosing days when Ostrovsky was not being performed and Alexandra Georgievna would be at home. The first evening she sat at a side table writing letters; the second, she sewed a skirt for her daughter, then sorted the cereals while quietly humming a catchy melody from an operetta. She offered Ivan Isaevich first tea, then supper. She was taking to “the furniture man,” as she had christened him to herself, more and more for his earnest restraint, his laconic way with words and movements, and for his behavior in general which, although “a trifle wooden,” as she described him to her bosom friend Kira, nevertheless was “all man.”

At the very least he was clearly ahead of her principal suitor, an Actor of Merit recently widowed, with a sonorous voice, garrulous, vain, and as quick to take offense as a schoolgirl. He had recently invited her to his large and splendid Stalinist apartment adjacent to the Moscow City Soviet, and the following day she lengthily derided him on all points to Kira: how he had laid the entire table with old banqueting china, but placed in the enormous crystal cheese dish a solitary dried-out segment of cheese, and in a half-meter-sized hors d’oeuvre dish an equally dried-out piece of sausage; how, with a voice like thunder which filled the whole enormous room right to its four-meter-high ceiling, he spoke first of his love for his late wife and then equally resonantly tried to entice her into the bedroom where he promised to show her what he was capable of; and finally, when Alexandra was ready to go home, he had produced his wife’s jewelry box and, without actually opening it, announced that its contents would all fall to the woman whom he now chose to be his new wife.

“So what did you do, Alexandra, make your excuses or go into the bedroom with him anyway?” enquired her friend, to whom it was vital to know every last detail of Alexandra’s life.

“Shame on you, Kira,” Alexandra Georgievna chuckled. “It was obvious the only place he has unbuttoned his trousers for a long time is the toilet! I pouted my lips and said, ‘Oh, what a shame I can’t go into your bedroom, because today I am menstru-a-ting!’ He almost sat down on the floor. No, no, he’s looking for a cook and I’m looking for a man in the house. He’s out.”

Ivan Isaevich worked unhurriedly; he never did hurry anyway, but on the fifth evening of unhurried work the cabinet was nevertheless finished, and he specially left a little bit early in order to put the last layer of shellac on tomorrow. He would be sorry to leave this house never to return, and he looked hopefully at a dubious moderne three-leaved mirror which was manifestly defective.

He liked Alexandra Georgievna and everything about her house, and he felt as if he were observing her life from a hide created by using the walnut cabinet: unsmiling Vera, the student, always scuffling among her papers like a mouse; deep-pink Nike; and her older son, who dropped in for a cup of tea with his mother nearly every day. He saw here not the fear and respect for one’s parents which he was used to from his own childhood, but the lighthearted love of children for their mother, and a warm friendship between all of them. He was surprised and delighted.

Alexandra Georgievna agreed to the mirror, so now Ivan Isaevich came to see her twice a week, on her days off. She even found his presence slightly wearing: she couldn’t invite guests around and couldn’t go out herself.

The way she saw things, she had the furniture man eating out of her hand, but she herself was unsure: of course he looked like a regular he-man, and he knew his own mind, but he was still a drudge. In the meantime he turned up with a child’s cot shaped like a little boat: “It worked for the children of the gentry, and it’ll be just right for Nike,” he said, and presented it.

Alexandra sighed: she really was tired of being husbandless, on top of which a year ago her patroness had charitably presented her with a plot of land in the Maly Theater’s village to build her own dacha and she could hardly put a house up on her own. Everything was pointing the same way, in favor of slow-moving Ivan Isaevich; and in him too the currents which lead a lonely man to family life were swirling beneath the surface of consciousness.

As the furniture-mending prelude to their marriage continued, he became even more persuaded of Alexandra Georgievna’s exceptional qualities. “She’s a thoroughly decent person, not some kind of flirt,” he thought, having disapprovingly in mind that Valentina with whom he had lived a few good years before she was unfaithful to him with a captain who had turned up from her home province. It was certainly true that his lumbering Valentina lagged far behind Alexandra.

By now winter was coming to an end, and Alexandra’s long-running affair with the ministry official who had once secured for her the job at the Maly Theater was also coming to an end. A bribe taker and thieving bureaucrat, he was generous toward women and had always helped Alexandra; but now he had another strong liaison, saw Alexandra infrequently, and the end result was that she was a bit short of money.

In late March she asked Ivan Isaevich to go with her to the dacha plot, where the building of her house had been begun last year but not finished. From then on he began to accompany her regularly on these Sunday trips.

They met by the booking office at the station before eight o’clock in the morning. He would take from her the bag with the food she had prepared; they would get into the empty train and with barely a word travel to their station, and then walk two kilometers in silence along the main road. Alexandra had her own thoughts and paid little attention to her companion, while he was pleased by her intense silence because he didn’t like to talk much himself and there was in any case very little for them to talk about, since neither of them cared for theater gossip and they had yet to gain a life in common.

Gradually a genuine topic for discussion did arise between them: the practicalities of building a house. Ivan Isaevich’s advice was always intelligent and practical; the workmen who reappeared at the end of April to complete the building they had begun treated him as the owner and, under his watchful eye, worked quite differently from last year.

The question of matrimony was still not moving forward. Alexandra had become accustomed to not lifting a finger without consulting him, and having him there gave her a quite unprecedented feeling of security. The anxieties, extending over many years, of a lone woman wholly responsible for her family had exhausted her, and then the material support of men, of which she had been readily able to avail herself without raising unnecessary moral issues, had somehow dried up of its own accord.

She was constantly discovering new virtues in Ivan Isaevich but squirmed every time he clumsily misused the Russian language. Although Alexandra Georgievna’s own education had been nothing special—incomplete secondary schooling and her training as a laboratory assistant—her upbringing under Medea’s tutelage had given her irreproachable, grammatically correct speech, and from the Pontic seafarers she had probably inherited a drop of royal blood and honorary kinship with those queens who always had their profile toward the spectator as they spun wool, wove tunics, and made cheese for their husbands, the kings of Ithaca and Mycenae.

Alexandra was conscious that their mutual inspection was dragging on, but she had not yet freed herself of the quite mistaken belief that she was so much better than he in every respect that he should consider her choosing him to be great good fortune: she took her time, still not giving that wordless indication of consent which Ivan Isaevich was so much waiting for. A great and irreparable misfortune which occurred that summer brought them together and united them.

Tanya, Sergei’s wife, was a general’s daughter, and this was not a stereotypical characterization of her, but a simple biographical fact. From her father she inherited ambition, and from her mother a pretty nose. Through the general’s exertions she received a dowry of a new one-room apartment in Cheryomushki and a large secondhand Victory car. Sergei, who was both fastidious and independent, would not touch the car, and did not even obtain a driving license: Tanya was the driver.

That last preschool summer, their daughter Masha was living at the general’s dacha with her grandmother, Vera Ivanovna, the general’s wife, who had an impossible, hysterical personality, as everybody knew. From time to time, the granddaughter would have a row with her grandmother and call her parents in Moscow, asking them to come and take her home. This time Masha rang late at night from her grandfather’s study. She did not cry but complained bitterly: “I’m bored. She doesn’t let me go anywhere and doesn’t let girls come to play. She says they’ll steal things, but they won’t steal anything, honestly . . .”

Tanya herself had not entirely forgotten her upbringing under Vera Ivanovna and promised to collect Masha in a few days’ time. This entailed major disruption of the family’s plans. They had been intending to drive all together to the Crimea in two weeks’ time, to Medea; the holiday had been written into her timetable, they had arranged it all with her, and it was quite impossible to move the trip forward.

“Perhaps Alexandra could look after Masha just for a week?” Tanya enquired, angling cautiously.

Sergei was not keen to take his daughter from “the Junta,” as he called his wife’s family. He felt it was unfair to his mother, whose dacha had only just been finished, to say nothing of the fact that the Junta’s dacha was enormous and provided with servants, while Alexandra had two rooms and a verandah.

“I do feel sorry for Masha,” Tanya sighed, and Sergei gave in.

They decided to play truant in midweek and set off early in the morning. They never made it to the general’s dacha: a drunk truck-driver swerved over onto the wrong side of the road, crashed into their car, and both died instantly in the head-on collision.

Toward the evening of that day, when Nike was worn out waiting for her much loved friend and cousin, and had arranged her dolls in a row for her, and herself beaten the raspberry mousse, the general’s Volga arrived and the dumpy general climbed out and walked unsteadily toward the house. Seeing him through the net curtain, Alexandra came out onto the verandah and stopped on the top step, anticipating news which had already reached her as a terrible inarticulate heaviness in the thickening evening air.

“Lord, Lord, wait, I can’t, I’m not ready for this . . .”

The general slowed his progress up the path, time slowed and stopped. Only the swing which Nike was sitting on did not stop completely, but very slowly glided down from its high point.

In this moment of frozen time Alexandra saw a large part of her and Sergei’s life, and even that of her first husband, Alexei Kirillovich, in that summer at the Karadag station: the newborn Sergei in Medea’s arms; their joint departure for Moscow in the expensive old-fashioned railway carriage; Sergei’s first steps at the Timiryazev dacha . . . and he in his little jacket, his head shaven, when he went to school. And Alexandra saw much more, like so many forgotten photographs, while the general stood on the path with his leg poised to take a step.

She watched it through right to the end, to Sergei’s coming around to Uspensky Lane the day before yesterday to ask her to keep Masha at the dacha for a few days until they could all go to the Crimea, and his awkward smile, and the way he had kissed her hair, which she wore pinned forward in a roll: “Thanks, Mum, you do so much for us.”

And she had dismissed his thanks: “Nonsense, Sergei. What sort of favor are we doing when we all worship your little Masha.”

General Pyotr Stepanovich Gladyshev reached her at last, stopped, and said in a slow, thick voice: “Our children . . . a crash . . . both of them killed.”

“With Masha?” was all Alexandra could find to say.

“No, Masha is at the dacha. They were on their way . . . they were going to collect her,” the general wheezed.

“Come into the house,” Alexandra ordered him, and he obeyed and climbed the steps.

They had a bad time with the general’s wife, Vera Ivanovna. For three days she shrieked and screamed, hoarsely, dementedly, and fell asleep only when given injections; for all that, she wouldn’t let poor Masha out of her sight. Swollen and bloated, Vera Ivanovna brought Masha to the funeral. The girl immediately rushed to Alexandra and stood, squeezing against her, through the whole immensely long secular funeral service.

Vera Ivanovna beat against the sealed coffin and finally started shouting out snatches of a Vologda folk lament, torn from the depths of a simple, peasant soul which had been spoiled by her exalted status. Alexandra stood like stone with a firm hand resting on Masha’s black hair. Her two elder daughters stood to the right and left of her, and behind them, holding Nike by the hand, Ivan Isaevich protectively stood sentinel over the family’s grief.

The funeral party was held at the general’s apartment on Tinkers Embankment. Everything, including the china, was brought in from some special place which fed high-ranking persons. Pyotr Stepanovich got utterly, terribly drunk. Vera Ivanovna kept demanding that Masha should come to her, but the little girl held on to Alexandra for dear life. So the three of them sat through the whole evening, two mothers-in-law united by a shared granddaughter.

“Alexandra, let me come and stay with you, Alexandra,” the little girl whispered in her ear, and Alexandra, who had promised the general not to take away their only child, comforted her by promising to let her stay just as soon as Grandma Vera was feeling a bit better.

“We can’t just leave her all alone, can we now?” she reasoned with Masha, herself thinking how desperately she wanted to take Masha back to her two and a half rooms in Uspensky Lane.

This was the evening when Alexandra first noticed a scattering of ginger freckles on Masha’s pale face, the hereditary freckles of the Sinoply family, little indicators of the continuing presence of long-dead Matilda.

“Masha ought to be taken away from that place. I could help,” Ivan Isaevich murmured late that evening as he saw Alexandra home from Tinkers Embankment, not addressing her directly in order to avoid having to call her Alexandra Georgievna, which by now was just too formal.

“Ought to be, certainly, but how’s it to be done?” she replied equally unspecifically.

Medea did not come to her godson’s funeral. Her late sister Anelya’s adopted daughter Nina was ill in the hospital after a serious operation; Medea had taken her two little children from Tbilisi to stay with her and now had no one to leave them with.

In late August, Ivan Isaevich finished installing fencing around the dacha, put grilles on the windows, and installed an ingenious lock: “No self-respecting thief is going to be breaking in here, and it’s a deterrent to vandals.”

All this dark time, from the day of the funerals, he had not left Alexandra’s side, and here, in this sad place, they began their life as man and wife. The tragedy seemed to cast a shadow on their relations for all time, and Alexandra herself no longer seemed able to throw herself into celebrating life as she had from her earliest youth come war, peace, or universal flood. Ivan Isaevich had no inkling of this. He was a different kind of person, who didn’t have the words in his vocabulary or the sights in his memory that Alexandra had. He saw his wife as a superior, perfect being. Even when he did work out that her youngest daughter Nike could not possibly have been fathered by the Colonel Kitaev whose surname she bore but who had died four years earlier, he would sooner have believed in an immaculate conception than in any other explanation.

Alexandra, purely from a desire to preserve his exalted faith in her, had to concoct a story about how she had been planning to marry a test pilot who crashed the day before the wedding. The story was not a complete fabrication: there really had been a pilot. There was even a photograph of him with a breezy inscription, and alas he really had died in a crash during a test, but there had never been any suggestion of marriage between them, and it was not he who was Nike’s father. He had crashed five years after she was born, and Nike remembered him because he always brought long boxes of chocolates called “Nuts of the South” which you couldn’t get later on.

So positive, however, was Ivan Isaevich’s attitude toward his wife that even in this questionable part of her biography he discerned merit: a lesser woman would have had an abortion or some such disgusting thing, but Alexandra had had the baby and brought it up, denying herself in all things. He was eager to ornament her bitter life by any means within the scope of his imagination: he brought her the best things he could find in Eliseev’s delicatessen; he gave her presents, sometimes completely absurd; he guarded her sleep in the morning. What he most appreciated in intimate relations with his wife was the very fact that they occurred at all, and in the depths of his simple soul at first supposed that his demands could only be a source of vexation to his noble wife. It was some time before Alexandra succeeded in getting him more or less attuned to the extracting of modest and muted matrimonial joys. Ivan Isaevich’s fidelity much surpassed what the concept usually entails. He served his wife with his every thought and every emotion, and Alexandra, taken aback by such an unexpected gift so near to the falling of the curtain on her womanly biography, accepted his love gratefully.

General Gladyshev had built so many military and semi-military installations in the course of his career and had received so many decorations for his broad but short chest that he was almost not afraid of the authorities. Not, of course, in the sense in which a philosopher or an artist in some namby-pamby bourgeois state is not afraid of the authorities, but in the sense that he had held his ground under Stalin and outlived him, had got on fine with Khrushchev, whom he had known from the war, and was confident that he could find a common language with any other authorities.

He was afraid only of his wife, Vera Ivanovna. Only Vera Ivanovna, his faithful spouse and partner through thick and thin, disturbed his calm and jangled his nerves. She regarded her husband’s high rank and senior position as effectively her own private property and was fully capable of demanding all that, in her perception, was her due. When the need arose, she had no hesitation in raising the roof. It was these outbursts that Pyotr Stepanovich feared most of all. His wife had a powerful voice, the acoustical properties of their tall rooms were first-rate and the sound insulation inadequate. When she started shrieking, he surrendered with alacrity: “What must the neighbors think? You’ve completely taken leave of your senses.”

After her hungry Vologda childhood and penniless youth, Vera Ivanovna was knocked sideways by the loot of which Pyotr Stepanovich—who was not a covetous man, but neither was he a fool—shipped back one full goods wagon from defeated Germany at the end of 1945, since which time Vera Ivanovna had been unable to stop herself from buying more and more possessions. Cursing her for a lunatic and a madwoman, he did not consider her to be either of those things in a literal sense. For this reason when one night a few months after the death of their daughter he was awakened by the muttering of his wife, who was standing in a piglet-colored nightgown in front of the open drawer of a lady’s escritoire, from Potsdam as he recalled, it never occurred to him that the time might have come to commit her to a lunatic asylum.

“She thinks she will get all my things now, they’ll all be left to her, the little murderess,” Vera Ivanovna said, wrapping a Chinese fan and some little flasks in a light towel.

“What are you doing at this time in the night, Mother?” Pyotr Stepanovich asked, raising himself on his elbow.

“We need to hide them, Pyotr, hide them. That’s what she thinks will happen.” Her pupils were so dilated they almost merged with the black rims of the irises, and her eyes seemed not grey but black.

The general was so irate that the foreboding which had stirred briefly in his heart promptly dissolved. He hurled a long and elaborate curse in her direction, took the pillow and a blanket, and went to sleep the rest of the night in the study, trailing the long ribbons of his army-issue underpants behind him.

Madness, as anyone knows who has observed it at close quarters, is the more infectious the more sensitive the psyche of the person finding themselves in the proximity of the mad person. The general simply did not notice it. Motya, a distant relative of Vera Ivanovna’s who had been subsisting in their apartment since she was young, did notice certain strangenesses in the mistress’s behavior but paid them no special attention since she, having twice experienced famine in Russia, had long been slightly deranged herself. She lived in order to eat. Nobody in the family saw how or when she did it, although they did know that she ate at night.

She feasted in her narrow, windowless room, intended as a larder, with the latch down. First she gorged on what she had gathered during the day from food left by the family; then what she considered the food due to her herself; and finally, and sweetest of all, what she had slyly stolen with her own hands out of the Kremlin-supplied food orders: a makeweight piece of sturgeon, a lump of dry sausage, and chocolates if they arrived in paper bags rather than sealed boxes.

Her quarters were off limits to all members of the household: not even the cat was allowed in; and even the general, insensitive as he was to anything mysterious, was aware of some kind of unpleasant secret in there. She carried in cereals and flour which she had poured into paper bags, and tinned food. A day before her annual trip to her sister’s in the country, she would slip out the door, unnoticed by her mistress, with two large bags that she would take to Yaroslavl Station and put in the left-luggage section. All these foodstuffs were intended as a present for her sister, but year after year the same story repeated itself: the first evening she was there she would put on the table a tin of stew covered with delicious, cheap oil, intending to present the rest later; but her sick soul prevented her from carrying through this act of heroism, and she would revert to guzzling her supplies at night, in the dark and alone; and her sister, observing the midnight feasts from her place above the stove, only felt great pity for her greed and forgave her. Even though she was older than Motya, she lived off her vegetable garden, kept a cow, and didn’t suffer from gluttony.

It was no wonder, then, that Motya, constantly occupied with her search for food, failed to notice either the stupors into which Vera Ivanovna would fall or the abnormal agitation which would have her pacing around the apartment from room to room like a wild beast in a cage; and if she had noticed anything, she would have given it her customary explanation: “Vera is Satan incarnate.”

Pyotr Stepanovich didn’t notice anything either, since for many years he had been avoiding contact with his wife, getting up early and not breakfasting at home. The moment he arrived at his enormous office, his secretary would bring him tea. He would return home late, in the old days after midnight, having sat out some sixteen hours at a time in his department; what he enjoyed most of all were tours of inspection to installations, and he was often out of Moscow. He did not exchange two words with his wife if he could help it. He came home, had supper, burrowed into her silk-covered, down-filled duvets as fast as he could, and rapidly fell asleep like the healthy man he was.

So it happened that all the monstrous power of Vera Ivanovna’s insanity fell upon Masha. She started school here, on Tinkers Embankment. She was wakened, taken to school, and brought home again by Motya, but from dinnertime on, Masha spent all her time with her grandmother.

Masha sat down at the table. Grandma Vera sat down opposite and didn’t take her eye off her for a moment. She didn’t keep scolding Masha; she just stared at her with grey, unblinking eyes and from time to time whispered something incomprehensible. Masha pushed her silver spoon around in the bowl and couldn’t raise it to her mouth. Under Vera Ivanovna’s chilling gaze the soup quickly got cold and Motya, who had a vested interest, quickly took it off to who knows where and put a large plate with the main course in front of Masha, which very soon was carried off almost untouched to wherever it was the soup had gone. Then Masha ate a piece of white bread with stewed fruit, which was to remain her favorite food for the rest of her life, and her grandmother would say to her, “Let’s be off.”

She would sit down obediently at the piano on three thick encyclopedia volumes and lower her fingers to the keys. In her life she never came across any cold more piercing than the chill that flowed through her bones from the black and white teeth of the hated keyboard. Vera Ivanovna knew that the girl hated these exercises. She would sit to one side of her, watching and ceaselessly whispering something, and tears welled up in Masha’s eyes, ran down her cheeks and left cold, damp tracks.

Then she was sent to the corner room. A framed photograph of Tanya stood in there on a table, and there were many more in a cardboard box. Masha would open her exercise book and push one of her mother’s photographs between the pages, most often the one where she was standing in the doorway of a house in the countryside; to one side you could see part of a hedge and a flowering shrub, and she had such a broad smile that it barely fitted on her narrow face. It was a snapshot Sergei had taken, and the happiness of the summer morning was plain to see, and reflections of the first night they had just spent together after Tanya herself had proposed to Sergei. He had long been silently in love, but hesitating and putting the moment off, embarrassed by the shadow her father’s rank cast over her.

Masha practiced her writing, sometimes staring motionlessly at the photograph for a long time. She sat for hours at her lessons. She was not allowed out for walks for some special reason of Vera Ivanovna’s. Occasionally, Motya would take Masha with her to the shop, or the baker’s or the shoemaker’s. Nearly all the shops were downstairs on the ground floor of their apartment block, so it wasn’t a long walk. Occasionally they walked to Solyanka, where there was Masha’s favorite house, with the caryatids—the giants, as she called them. An even greater delight was that the River Yauza, the little churches, the fences around the building sites which she could see from their window on the eleventh floor suddenly became much larger, didn’t look so toy-like, but in compensation sprouted little details and attractive touches.

At night, after Motya had put her to bed, the most dreadful part began: she could not sleep; she turned over and over in the large bed and kept waiting for the moment when the door would creak and Grandma Vera would come into her room. She came in very late, at an hour which Masha had no way of knowing, wearing a cherry-red dressing gown, and with a long smooth plait down her back. She would sit beside the bed, and Masha would curl into a ball and screw up her eyes. She remembered one such evening particularly clearly because of the illuminations with which the block had been decorated for the October Revolution festivities. The light fell in yellow and red stripes, and Vera Ivanovna, sitting in a shaft of red light, moaned in a clearly audible whisper: “Murderess, little murderess. You phoned them and that’s why they set out . . . you made it all happen . . . live with it now, live with it and gloat over what you’ve done.”

When Vera Ivanovna went away, Masha could finally cry. She buried her face in the pillow and fell asleep in her tears.

On Sundays dear Alexandra, for whom Masha had been waiting all week, would finally come. Masha was handed over to her until dinnertime, a few hours. Downstairs by the entrance Ivan Isaevich would be waiting for them, Uncle Vanya, sometimes alone but more often with Nike, and they would go for an outing: to the zoo, or the planetarium, or to somewhere in Durov. The partings always proved more powerful for her than the meetings, and just the brief outing itself reminded her of other people, who had the good fortune to live in Uspensky Lane.

Alexandra took Masha there several times. She could see the little girl was unhappy, but could never have imagined that what was upsetting her most was the appalling accusation of the crazy old woman. Masha said nothing about it because what she feared most of all was that her beloved Alexandra and Nike would find out what she had done and stop coming to see her.

Late in the autumn Masha had a terrible nightmare for the first time. In it nothing happened at all. It was just the door to her room opening, and someone terrifying was going to come in. She could feel the monster coming nearer down the corridor, and the horror grew and grew until Masha woke up with a scream. Who was pushing the door open and why? And it was never quite where the real door was . . . Motya usually came running in when she screamed. She would tuck her in again, stroke her, and make the sign of the cross, and then when it was already almost morning Masha would fall soundly asleep.

If before she had been unable to sleep, waiting for her grandmother to come, now even after she left, Masha could not sleep for a long time, terrified of the nightmare which visited her more often the more she feared it. In the mornings Motya had trouble getting her out of bed. She sat half-asleep through her lessons, came back home half-asleep and performed her musical servitude in front of Vera Ivanovna, and then she fell into a fitful catnap which saved her from nervous exhaustion.

The location above the River Yauza where their apartment block stood had long been considered an unholy spot. Above it was Louse Hill, and along the shore itself there once sprouted the hovels of tinkers and potters. On the opposite bank had sprawled Khitrov Market, whose environs were populated by rag-and-bone men, prostitutes, and tramps. It was their descendants who inhabited the tenements built here at the turn of the century, and these were the people, crammed now into moldering communal flats, who pointed to the vast building which rose up higher than any of the neighborhood churches, a flight of architectural insanity not without irony, with a spire, arches, colonnades above tiers of diverse heights, and said, “That’s an unholy place.”

Many residents of the block died unnatural deaths, and the narrow windows and stunted little balconies attracted suicides. Several times a year the emergency services would drive up to the block with sirens wailing and scrape up the flattened human remains which some compassionate soul had covered with a sheet. Statistics, a science so much cherished in Russia, had long ago established that the number of suicides rose on sunless winter days.

That December was unusually dismal. The sun did not once break through a blanket of cloud. It was the ideal time for a last flight.

The Gladyshevs usually dined in the dining room but ate their supper in the kitchen. One evening as Masha was finishing the potato fritters which Motya had cooked country style, Vera Ivanovna came into the kitchen. Motya informed her that someone else had “made the leap” today. The daughter of a famous aircraft designer had thrown herself from the seventh floor.

“Unlucky in love, I expect,” Motya commented.

“They spoil them. That’s what it leads to. You shouldn’t let girls out,” Vera Ivanovna responded sternly. She poured some boiled water into a glass and went out.

“Motya, what happened to her?” Masha asked, tearing herself away from the potatoes.

“What do you mean? She killed herself. It’s stone paving down there you know, not straw. Oh, this sinful world.” She sighed.

Masha put her clean plate in the sink and went to her room. They lived on the eleventh floor. There was no balcony in her room. She moved a chair over and climbed up onto the broad windowsill. A rudimentary little balustrade was squeezed in between the tenth and eleventh floors. Masha tried to open the window, but the bolts were paint-stuck.

Masha got undressed and put her things on the chair. Motya came in to say good night. Masha smiled, yawned, and fell asleep instantly. For the first time in her life at Tinkers Embankment, she fell into a light, happy sleep; for the first time she did not hear the quiet curses with which Vera Ivanovna came into her room at midnight; and the door of the terrifying nightmare did not open that night.

Something had changed in Masha from the day she heard about the girl who had “made the leap.” Evidently there was a possibility she hadn’t known about, and knowing about it made her feel better.

The next day Alexandra rang to see if she would like to go with Nike to a winter camp run by the Theater Society. Masha would have liked to go anywhere in the world with Nike. Nike was the only girl left from her old life: all her other friends in the southwest region of Moscow, where she had lived before, had vanished without trace, as if they too had been killed along with her parents.

For the few days remaining before New Year, Masha lived in a state of happy anticipation. Motya packed her case, covered it in protective canvas, and sewed a white square to it on which she wrote Masha’s name. The general’s chauffeur brought over her skis from the southwest. He couldn’t find the poles but bought some new red ones in Children’s World, and Masha stroked them and smelled them. They smelled more delicious than any food.

She was to be taken to Pushkin Square on the morning of December 31. She would meet Nike at the place from which the buses would be leaving. She imagined that all her friends from her old home would be there too: Olya, Nadya, and Alyona.

On the evening of the thirtieth her temperature rose to almost 104 degrees. Vera Ivanovna called the doctor and rang Alexandra Georgievna to inform her. That was the end of the trip.

Masha lay for two days in a high fever, opening her eyes from time to time and asking: “What’s the time? It must be time to go. Aren’t we going to be late?”

“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” Motya kept saying, hardly leaving her bedside.

In occasional lucid moments Masha saw Motya and Alexandra, Vera Ivanovna and even her grandfather, Pyotr Stepanovich. “When am I going to the camp?” Masha asked in a clear voice when the illness released its grip on her.

“But the holidays are over, my dear. What camp could you be going to?” Motya responded.

It was the end of the world.

In the evening Alexandra came and comforted her for a long time, promising to take her to stay in the summer at her dacha in Zagoryanka.

That night the nightmare came back. The door from the corridor opened and somebody terrifying was slowly approaching her. She wanted to scream but couldn’t. She sat bolt upright, jumped out of bed in a strange state between sleeping and waking, moved the chair over to the windowsill, climbed up on it, and heaved the bolt with a strength which came from who knows where. The inner window frame opened. The second opened easily, and she slipped down off the sill before she even had time to feel the icy touch of the tin cowling. The hem of her nightdress snagged on its jagged edge, pulling her in just enough for her to fall lightly onto the snow-covered balustrade of the tenth floor.

An hour later Motya finished gorging herself and came out of her storeroom. A cold draft blew over her. Ice-cold air was coming from the open door of Masha’s room. She went in, saw the open window, gasped, and rushed to shut it. On the windowsill a small, uneven pile of snow had drifted. Only after she had closed the window did she notice that Masha was not in bed. Her legs buckled under her and she fell to the floor. She looked under the bed. She went over to the window. It was snowing heavily. She could see nothing other than the slow snowflakes.

Motya shoved her bare feet into felt boots, threw on a shawl and an old overcoat of her mistress’s, and ran to the lift. At the bottom she ran through the large vestibule with its red carpeting, squeezed through the massive door out to the street, and ran around the corner of the house. The snow was loose and level and sparkling prettily.

“Perhaps she’s been covered over already,” she thought, and walked along, kicking through the thick snow under the windows of their apartment with her boots. The little girl wasn’t there. Then she went back up and woke the master and mistress.

Masha was out on the balustrade for a further hour and a half before she was found. She was unconscious but hadn’t a scratch on her. Pyotr Stepanovich went out to the ambulance with the girl tucked up in blankets and then came back to his apartment. Vera Ivanovna sat throughout that hour and a half on the edge of her bed, not moving an inch or saying a word. After Masha had been taken away, the general led Vera Ivanovna into his office, sat her in the cold leather armchair and, taking her firmly by the shoulders, gave her a good shake: “Tell me what happened!”

Vera Ivanovna smiled an out-of-place smile. “She was behind it all. She killed my Tanya.”

“What?” Pyotr Stepanovich demanded, guessing at last that his wife was mad.

“She’s a little murderess, she was behind it all, she . . .”

The next ambulance took Vera Ivanovna away. The general didn’t wait for morning but called it immediately. That night he went down in the lift for a second time to liaise with the emergency services. Coming back up, he vowed not to spend another day under the same roof as his wife.

In the morning he rang Alexandra Georgievna, told her very tersely what had happened, and asked her to take Masha to live with her as soon as she was discharged from the hospital. The next day the general went off on a tour of inspection to Vladivostok.

Masha saw her grandmother only once more after that, at her funeral. Pyotr Stepanovich was as good as his word: Vera Ivanovna lived out the eight years of life remaining to her in a privileged clinic far from all her antique furniture, porcelain, and crystal. Masha did not recognize the dead, wizened old woman with sparse grey hair as the fine-looking Grandma Vera with the splendid mane who used to come in a cherry-red dressing gown into her room when she was seven years old to utter whispered curses at her in the night.

A week after this disaster with a relatively happy ending, the nondescript, provincial-looking Jewish Dr. Feldman pushed Alexandra Georgievna into a lumber room under the stairs which was piled up with old hospital beds, bundles of torn laundry, and boxes, and sat her down on one rickety stool and himself on another with three legs. An old knitted shirt with a stretched collar and a badly knotted tie looked out of the opening of his hospital coat. Even his bald head seemed untidy, with irregularly sized little clumps of hair resembling fur about to molt.

He folded his Hippocratic hands professionally in front of him and began: “Alexandra Georgievna, if I’m not mistaken. It’s completely impossible to speak privately here. This is the only place we won’t be interrupted. I have something serious to say to you. I want you to understand that the mental health of this child is entirely in your hands. The girl has been so profoundly traumatized that it is difficult to foresee the remoter consequences. I am quite sure many of my colleagues would insist that she become an inpatient and be given serious drug-based treatment. That may not yet be necessary: there’s no way of establishing a clear prognosis, but I think that there is a chance of burying the whole sorry business.” He looked awkwardly aware of having used an inappropriate expression. “I mean that the mind has formidable defense mechanisms, and perhaps these will become operative here. Fortunately, Masha is not fully aware of what happened. She hadn’t consciously formulated the intention of committing suicide, and is not aware of having attempted it. What happened to her may be regarded rather as a reflex, like when someone quickly pulls back their hand when they’ve taken hold of something hot. I have spoken to Masha a lot. She is reluctant to open up, but when she does, she talks sincerely, honestly, and you know”—he abandoned his quasi-scientific discourse—“she is an enchanting little girl, so clever and bright eyed, and somehow with very good moral instincts. A delightful child.” His face lightened and he even became likable.

“Just like someone else I know,” darted through Alexandra’s mind.

“Some people are crippled by suffering, but others, you know, are somehow raised up by it. What she needs right now is a hothouse, an incubator. I would take her out of school this year in order, you know, to rule out mischance: a bad teacher, unkind children. It would be better to keep her at home until next year; and make sure she has a very, very protective environment.” He became animated. “And absolutely no further contact with that grandmother! None at all. She has instilled a guilt complex in her for the death of her parents, which is something not every adult could cope with. All of this can be squeezed out. Try to avoid reminding her about this period, and it would also be best not to remind her about her parents. Here is my telephone number. Call me.” He took out a slip of paper he had already prepared. “I am not going to abandon Masha. I shall be keeping an eye on her. Thank you, that’s all I needed to say.”

Alexandra had not expected Masha to be allowed out so soon. Her belongings, moved for the second time in half a year to a new home by the general’s chauffeur, hadn’t yet been sorted and stood there together with the no longer needed suitcase and skis. Alexandra went home immediately after her talk with the doctor to get Masha’s things, and the same day took her back to Uspensky Lane.

It was the middle of January. The New Year’s tree had not yet been taken down, the table was still moved to one side for the holiday, and they even had a visitor: Alexandra’s oldest daughter Lidia, who was pregnant. The food was nothing special, not fare for a celebration: a pickled salad, rissoles with macaroni, and some slightly burned biscuits which Nike had cooked in a rush just before Masha arrived.

But then again, as far as the love prescribed by the doctor was concerned, things could not have been better: Alexandra’s heart was simply overflowing with prayerful gratitude that Masha’s life had been spared by a miracle and that she was well and living in her home. None of her own children seemed to her at that moment as dearly loved as this fragile, grey-eyed little girl who didn’t seem at all like the rest of them.

Nike cuddled her and hugged her and did everything she could think of to keep her amused. Masha sat at the table for a time and then moved to a little child’s wicker armchair which Ivan Isaevich had brought from somewhere a few days before her arrival: he had spent two days mending a broken arm and fixing a piece of red material and a fringe to the seat.

Made drowsy by her pregnancy, Lidia soon left. She and her husband were living in Ivan Isaevich’s old room now.

Although the whole family had been looking forward to Masha’s arrival, her timing was unexpected, and the result was that they had nowhere for her to sleep. Nike went off to sleep in her mother’s bed, and Masha was put in Nike’s little boat, which she had almost grown out of over the summer. Masha’s eyes were drooping, but when they put her to bed, sleep departed. She lay there with her eyes open and thought about going to the winter camp with Nike next year.

Having washed the dishes and put them away, Alexandra came over and sat down beside the little girl.

“Can I hold your hand?” Masha asked her.

Alexandra took Masha’s hand, and she was soon asleep. But when Alexandra tried to carefully free her hand, Masha opened her eyes and said, “Can I hold your hand?”

Alexandra sat this way till morning beside her sleeping granddaughter. Ivan Isaevich wanted to relieve her at her silent vigil, but she just shook her head and motioned to him to go off to bed. It was the first night of many. Without someone to lead her through the night, her grandmother or Nike, Masha could not sleep, and even after falling asleep she sometimes woke with a scream, and then Alexandra or Nike would take her to their own bed and comfort her. It was as if there were two little girls: the daytime Masha, calm, loving, and outgoing, and the nighttime Masha, haunted and afraid.

They put a folding bed beside Masha’s, and it was usually Nike who slept there. She was better than her mother at watching over Masha’s fragile sleep and, if she was disturbed, could get back to sleep again right away. Nike was altogether more help to her mother than her older sister Vera, who was a college student, passionately interested in scholarship of every description, and, in addition to her studies at the institute, attending courses in German, Alexandra thought, or in some obscure branch of aesthetics.

Nike was twelve and had already attained a good height and acquired all sorts of feminine skills; a cluster of little spots in the middle of her forehead testified that the time was approaching when her gifts would be called upon.

Masha moved to Uspensky Lane just as Nike was losing interest in the traditional amusement of little girls, playing with dolls, and the live Masha promptly replaced all the Katyas and Lyalyas she had been practicing her inchoate maternal instincts on at such length. The whole contingent of dolls along with a pile of little coats and dresses which nimble-fingered Alexandra never tired of sewing for them passed to Masha, and Nike now felt herself the matriarch of a large family consisting of her daughter Masha and lots of doll granddaughters.

Many years later, after Katya had been born, Nike confessed to Alexandra that she must have used up the first flush of her maternal feelings on her cousin, because she never felt for her own children a comparable all-consuming love, the taking of another person so completely into her heart as she did in the first years Masha lived in their house. It was particularly true of that first year, when her whole life was colored by compassion for Masha, holding her hand at night, braiding her hair in the morning, and taking her out after school for walks down Strastnoy Boulevard. Nike occupied an enormous place in Masha’s life, which it was difficult to define: she was her best friend, her elder sister, the best at everything, ideal in every way.

The following year, when Masha went back to school again, Nike would take her there in the morning and Ivan Isaevich would collect her in the afternoon. After her classes he would either take her home or cart her off with himself to the theater.

Soon after Masha’s arrival Alexandra’s illustrious patroness died, and she stopped working at the theater. Now she was managing a small private atelier which dressed the government’s wives. It was an illegal business activity, but Alexandra still had certain backers from her earlier years.

The crepe de Chine offcuts from vast dresses for government officials’ wives went to provide outfits for the dolls, but both Nike and Masha developed a lifelong aversion to anything pink, light blue, flounced, or pleated. When they were a little older, both of them took to wearing men’s shirts, and jeans when those became available in Russia.

Despite dressing in what seemed to Alexandra a thoroughly unfeminine manner, by the age of sixteen Nike was a runaway success. The telephone rang night and day, and Ivan Isaevich looked at Alexandra, expecting that any moment now she would put a stop to her daughter’s turbulent lifestyle.

Alexandra, however, seemed if anything to be delighting in Nike’s conquests. At the end of the ninth grade Nike embarked on a headlong romance with a youth poet who had become wildly fashionable, and without finishing her last term flounced off with him to Koktebel, announcing this ex post facto by telegram when she was already in Simferopol.

Masha had become Nike’s confidante from the age of eleven, and received her confessions with secret horror and admiration. Nike raked in pleasures large and small with both arms, and any sour little berries or pips she just spat out without giving them a second thought. She also spat out, as it happened, her schooling.

Alexandra did not tell her off, did not go in for senseless dressings down, and, mindful of the days of her own youth, quickly found Nike a place in a college of theater design where she had good contacts from when she worked in the theater. Nike did a bit of drawing, passed the exams with the requisite Grade Fours, and joyfully threw out her school uniform. A year later she was already more or less married.

Masha was now the last child of elderly parents, and the entire life of the family revolved around her. Her night fears had stopped, but her early contact with the dark abyss of madness left her with a subtle awareness of the mystical, a sensitivity toward the world, and an artistic imagination: all the things which go into creating an aptitude for poetry. By the age of fourteen she was wildly enthusiastic about Pasternak’s poetry, adored Akhmatova, and was writing secret poems in a secret notebook.