Aetherial Worlds

The Invisible Maiden

We would arrive at the dacha in several shifts.

First—once the last of the black-crusted snow had melted, usually in April or early May—came Mother. Sometimes she’d take me along to help out, but I wasn’t particularly helpful. I was fat, lazy, and prone to daydreaming; all of these attributes were poorly suited to working in the garden, much less lugging firewood from the shed, or water from the lake. Although Mother wasn’t really counting on me for the latter. In fact, she wasn’t counting on any of us; she simply did everything herself. Her silent hard work was to serve as a reproach, a lesson, and an example. But it didn’t.

We would enter the damp rooms, thick with the wonderful scent of stale linen tablecloths; of blankets abandoned for the winter; of plywood from the walls and old glue that seeped from the furniture due to moisture; of ancient rubber boots that were exiled here, to the country, for hard labor. Mother always walked in first, pointing her flashlight, undoing the latches on the wooden shutters that covered the windows from the inside; we would take off these heavy plates together and the moldy rooms would get flooded with sunlight. We’d throw the windows open, the sharp outside air would whoosh in; we’d shiver, wanting to do nothing more than to drink hot coffee in the sunroom—hot coffee premixed with condensed milk, which we had brought with us from the city.

And so that’s what we did. Mama would slice up some bread and cheese; we’d sit in the creaky wicker chairs, squinting at the garden through the clear glass panes and the ones of stained glass, of which there were two: a blood-red rhombus that made the entire world seem pale pink, like overcooked berries in compote, and a green rhombus, which in any season created the illusion of its being July.

Then Mother would get up to light the wood-burning stove, to boil water for cleaning, to lift and move heavy objects such as furniture, and I’d make pitiful contributions—open up drawers to smell the old paper lining, for instance. Or thumb through forgotten notebooks, looking among the mundane lists and business records (baking soda… sugar 5 kg… call A.F…. pulmonologist for Musya… K2-14-68… brown ribbon), hoping against hope to find some mysterious name, a passionate exhale, an imprint of an unknown love.

I’d get stuck on each book on the shelf that I was attempting to sort through. And sorting after the winter was necessary, as there were rats living at the dacha, and they fed on the binders of Novy Mir back issues and the French novels written at the beginning of World War I. The rats feasted on the paste used in the old days to secure the spine; they bit through the canvas that held the binding and sucked on the light-blue ribbons that served as bookmarks. They shied away from synthetic adhesives but enjoyed starch tremendously. And so it was necessary to pick out that which had been gnawed at, to sweep away the rat droppings, to wipe down the shelves.

It was the time of the Khrushchev Thaw; Novy Mir was publishing daring and timely pieces, which, alas, did not hold my interest. But those French novels, which mysteriously found their way to our dacha shelves, spoke of eternal things: searing eroticism, nude women, deceit and betrayal perpetrated by men. When you’re thirteen, that’s all you want, really. And it encourages the study of French.

One of those novels was called Une explosion d’obus—A Shell Explodes. As I understand it now, it was a sort of metaphor: the pretty boy in white pants, his hair slicked back and his mustache twirled (illustration), has experienced an explosion of feeling for the graceful and shapely young lady in an enormous hat that covers her magnificent hair (illustration). Or maybe she experienced the explosion. Anyway, mutual passions came to a boiling point: lace, illicit embraces, two front teeth between parted lips… followed by the bitter realization, eyes cast to the ceiling—“Mon dieu, how could I have been so imprudent?”—hand-wringing and other thrilling French behavior. All this while you, in your rubber boots, are supposed to be lugging firewood.

I was particularly fond of one of the illustrations. The caption read “She boldly entered the sea, unashamed of her near-nakedness, as he greedily looked on.” In fact, she was wearing a full-length gown with long sleeves and a high collar; upon getting into the water she had lifted the hem, which revealed striped pantaloons reaching just below the knee—perhaps that left her “near naked”; on her head was a bird’s nest of ribbons and bows. In the background, the more timid and shy maidens were bashfully peeking out from the bathing machines, the pale lace of the waves lapping around the wheels. Publication year: 1914. The last peaceful summer before the war.

“Mom, what does les cris de passion mean?”

“The cries of passion,” Mom would reply reticently. “Leave this rubbish and go pick up a rake.”

But the picture that, according to the caption, depicted these intriguing cries had been fiercely torn out, and all that was left of Claudine and her voluminous hair was a handful of lace on the floor and a carved leg of the bed where she’d been overcome by the invisible and mustachioed Albert. As always, the most precious, interesting—the most censurable—had been removed.

The second shift was Nanny’s arrival with the children to a scrubbed and clean dacha. The house was already thoroughly heated, it smelled of fried potatoes and canned meat, of hot dried-fruit compote—it was homey, cozy, reliable: All shall be fed, all shall be warm. The wood-burning stove was on; the gas stove was used only intermittently, as gas cylinders were scarce; and the impossibly slow double hot plate, imprinted with a mantra of sorts—“Left only: low heat. Right only: medium heat. Both together: High heat”—was ever ready for action.

Nanny would tote the three-liter, cheesecloth-covered jar with the kombucha all the way from Leningrad and place it on the windowsill. From the day of my birth till the day of Nanny’s death, I looked out our Leningrad kitchen window at the gray six-story building across from us, at the schoolyard with the volleyball net, at the endlessly distant matchstick-thin pipes of the Vyborgsky District peering through this symbiosis of bacteria and yeast, through this jar, through the little amber swamp atop which rested the puffy, pale, fat, layered pancake. It was alive. It needed to be watered with freshly brewed weak tea fortified with a spoonful of sugar. Three days later, this tea would turn into a stinging, tangy, yellowish drink that was allegedly very good for you. Where there is a kitchen, there is kombucha; where there is kombucha, there is caring, loving, nourishing, and anxiety. Kombucha needs to be watered! Did someone water him?

It was like another child in our family—seven of us, plus Kombucha. Us kids, who were blessed to be born with legs and arms, with eyes—and him, prematurely born, eyeless, unable to move, let alone crawl. Yet he was alive. And he was ours. Nanny’s baby. (When Nanny died, there was no one to take care of him. One of the sisters took him in, but forgot to water him as needed; he started to wither, to get murky, and soon decomposed and died.)

Nanny used to place Kombucha on the dacha windowsill; his appointed neighbor was Onion, a mayonnaise-jar resident whose fibrous, whitish roots were dipped in water. The windowsill was where the empty glass jars from the green peas were drying, along with the jars from Nanny’s favorite tomato sauce, which she insisted on calling “red stuff” and nothing else. Our kitchen was dark, sunless, and remote, because our dacha had been built by an imbecile.

All the sun, all the wind, all the flowers were over there, outside the window.

Over there, outside the window, was where the neighbor’s property began; it had been like home to us, but it was no longer accessible. Over there, at the neighbor’s house, we used to rent the entire first floor until Mom bought this dacha of ours, the one built by an imbecile. The neighbor’s plot was enormous: there was a field with potatoes, another one with wild bluebells, and a “third field,” where nothing in particular was growing, it was just there. There was also an apple orchard, a lilac garden, a zucchini patch, a thicket of yellow acacia, a grove of giant knotweed, an unusually large and thick birch tree, a spruce forest that rolled down the western hill, and a pine grove that rolled down the eastern hill. In the pine grove, under a thick carpet of red needles, you could make out the faint outlines of small graves, which resembled suitcases overgrown with moss: the original property owner used to bury his favorite dogs there when they died. All this, this entire world, used to be ours, but now it was cut off by a chain-link fence and we could no longer go there.

At the top of the hill stood the house itself—“the White House,” as we used to call it. The apocryphal story goes like this: Many years ago, at the end of the nineteenth century, a certain Mister Dmitriev paid a visit to this narrow isthmus—a tongue of land between two lakes—on a hunting trip with his son. The younger Dmitriev so loved the pine grove and the sandy lakeshores and the thickets of willow herb and blueberry bushes that he said to his father: “When I grow up, I’ll build myself a house here.” Junior grew up, became an engineer, got rich and bought the isthmus; on one of the pine hills he built a hunting lodge (it was still there in my childhood but later burned down), and on the other—the White House. The hunting lodge was entered through a small porch, and there were deer antlers hanging over the front door. The White House had two entrances: the back one, through the porch, for routine comings and goings and deliveries, and the front one, through the portico with the white columns; the columns were of wood, covered with stucco. The second floor was a loft with slanted ceilings. They say that the façade was a replica of Tatyana Larina’s house in the 1915 staging of Eugene Onegin.

If you’re a young lady with a braid, of an age of yearning and expectation, and it’s a white night June evening of unfading light, and no one is sleeping, and there is no death, and the sky seems full of music, it feels right to go stand on this portico, hugging a stucco-covered column, watching the sea of lilac bushes cascading down the steps, and breathing in the scent of its white misty foam, the scent of your own pure flesh, the scent of your hair. Life will deceive you later, but not just yet.

We used to live there on the first floor, and I remember the mysterious shadows of the common rooms, the Dutch stove with plain dark-green tiles, smooth and monochrome. Owing to someone’s blunder, or whim, perhaps, two of the tiles were dark blue, and this imperfection evoked a certain pity—or, in other words, love. I remember the basin perched atop a washstand along with a timeworn pitcher, and the arched windows of the upstairs loft—those bedrooms weren’t ours, they certainly didn’t smell like us; when invited, we used to walk up the grayish-blue staircase to get to them. Up on the second floor, between the window frames, there were small shot glasses filled with dark-burgundy and dark-orange liquid; I used to know what they were for, but I’ve forgotten. They’d say it was some kind of poison—either to kill the flies, or to prevent the windows from freezing over in wintertime. When I was a kid, I feared the word “poison,” and I don’t like it now. I used to imagine poison to be the color of port wine, with the stifling, sugary smell of cough syrup.

They also had a trumeau mirror; I was dazzled by this nocturnal-sounding word—“trumeau.” On a wall hook was Aunty Vera’s robe of pale lilac, the color of sighs and murmurs, of white nights, whispers, and otherworldly emotions. Its scent was so enchanting that it nearly stopped your heart. It smelled of the White House, of 1914, of faraway, virginal, immaculate woods.

The hill upon which the White House stood poured down, if you will, eastbound and westbound. At the east side, surrounded by pine trees, stirred a large blue lake with the Finnish name Hepojarvi, still unspoiled and unlittered: the worst one could find at this wonderful lake were thickets of alder—a nasty weed of a bush, the back of its leaves covered with red dots, like warts.

To the west—down a steep path from the top of the hill—was a quiet little black lake, or, more precisely, the bay or a bend of the big lake, though we used to call it “the Little Lake,” considering it the independent younger sibling of Hepojarvi. Growing in it were yellow water lilies that smelled like mermaids. If you dangled your arm off the edge of a boat, submerging it deep enough, and then yanked at just the right moment, you could pick a water lily by its two-meter-long stem, and then, provided you tore the stem apart correctly, you could—and absolutely should—make a cold, wet necklace out of it. In the evenings, the black-mirrored surface of the Little Lake reflected a long-blazing yellow Finnish sunset and fir trees seemingly carved from black paper. A couple more toadstools underfoot and you’d have an Ivan Bilibin illustration. In the daytime the firs retreated, disappearing somewhere, and the waterside was golden-green again, happy. There were leeches in the lake; we used to catch but also fear them. There were water striders that ran across the smooth plane of the water, dragonflies that hovered above it, and on the shore there was a bathhouse where Dmitriev Junior used to bathe—the nineteenth century was slow to leave these shores; it hesitated, showing us how it was before the First World War: the green, blue, sunny world of the not-yet-killed.

Lucky for Junior, he wasn’t killed in that war, or during the purges that followed. They said that he was a VIP in the world of energetics, that he participated in the GOELRO plan, which sought to bring electricity to the entire country, and that this is what saved him. Russian Wikipedia says that in April of 1937 “the main engineer of GOELRO, G. A. Dmitriev, was arrested. Death by firing squad on September 14th.” But this must have been some other Dmitriev, perhaps from Moscow. Neither the age nor the place of residence matches up with ours. If this had been Junior, then they would have come after his heirs, killing them or sending them to work in the uranium mines; the White House would have been turned into some kind of state-run tuberculosis clinic for the bigwigs of the trade unions, and they would have been hacking their profsoyuz snot all over the lilac garden.

Before the Revolution of 1917, Junior installed an electric generator on the shore of the Little Lake, and subsequently the White House had power. When I was a kid, you could still see the limestone slabs, a platform of approximately two square meters, upon which he placed the generator. The grass of oblivion—little three-leaf white clovers—was already forcing its way through the cracks between the slabs. It was sweet, we used to eat it.

Now I alone remember where the generator stood, where the nostrilled limestone slabs disappeared into the ground. The new folks don’t need to know this. And I won’t tell them.

The other thing that was left behind by Dmitriev Junior was a large, yellowing collage: photos of boring mustachioed faces in ovals—engineers, no doubt, who had graduated with distinction (or without) from some Polytechnic Institute and who were burning with desire to apply their knowledge for the glory and benefit of the Fatherland. A carved black frame, dead flies, glass. All those faces in ovals were most probably arrested and executed.

Junior’s heirs held on to both houses for a long while, but then the government started closing in—it was forbidden to have multiple properties—and so they sold the hunting lodge, and then one little piece of the land, and then another. Meanwhile the house grew too small for our clan—there were seven of us by then—and so mother bought the dacha next door. With a view of the White House. Few are so lucky.

A carpenter nicknamed “Curly”—the aforementioned imbecile—built our dacha. One of the kids gave him the moniker. “Mommy, Curly is here!” Finding it endearing, the carpenter started calling himself “Curly” after that. No one remembers his real name. He’d built the house right after the war, for the previous owner, a pharmacist named Yanson, who was planning to rent out the rooms. Curly’s stupidity manifested itself variously; for example, all the rooms on the first and second floors, save for one, faced north, and not a single ray of sunshine ever found its way to them. And so the house grew moldy and rotten, all the quicker because Curly, unable to refrain from stealing building materials, constructed the dacha with no foundation. In the faraway corner of the garden he erected a roomy Finnish outhouse with two seats—a two-holer—but as he absconded with the partition wall, an interesting opportunity presented itself: you could now visit the shitter in pairs. Curiously, no one ever took advantage of this.

Curly was a jack-of-all-trades, gardener as well as carpenter, and he loved his work. Hammering, tearing things apart—he found it all equally interesting. After building our crooked house that listed to one side, he began to feel a sense of ownership: he’d come visit from the city uninvited; he’d enter without knocking, toolbox in tow, all his nails and pliers, and, with the mysterious air of an artisan, he would get to work on senselessly improving something. Sounds of hammering and the wheezing of a hacksaw filled the air, until he emerged from the basement or from the attic, or climbed out from the shed, squinting in the sunlight, and with a log or piece of plywood in his hands and that mysterious artisanal smile still plastered across his face, he’d take it all home. If you weren’t on high alert you could end up losing a balcony: Curly was once caught removing the support beams that held ours up—the very same support beams he’d attached to the wall ten years earlier. We didn’t notice, however, when he managed to disassemble the roof over the firewood shed.

Apparently he viewed any house he came across as a potential source of building materials that might come in handy somewhere else: he did construction and repairs in other communities, and if he happened to arrive with some bricks or plywood, you could be sure that he’d hacked it off somebody else’s house to attach it to yours. If after Curly’s visit we discovered a shovel, it meant that in Vaskelovo, or in Gruzino, or maybe even in Elisenvaara, a shovel was missing; if Curly, smiling assuredly, carried away a pane of glass, it was immediately clear that it would soon sparkle in somebody else’s window. This man was carrying out a circular organ transplant, so to speak, attaching one person’s ear to another’s leg—I have no doubt he used our outhouse partition to fashion an inelegant garden table for the unsuspecting owners of a tiny plot of land in the unsavory village of Oselki.

So, as it was, the hallway leading to the bedrooms was on the sunny southern side of the house—one obviously couldn’t live in it, as that would have been strange—while all the bedrooms faced north and thus were always cold and dark. We did have woodstoves for heating, but they fell apart and stopped working back when I was a child, and no wonder: the dampers and some of the bricks had “disappeared.” I’ll let you guess where they went.

The upstairs hallway unexpectedly morphed into a sunroom midway through, mirroring the one below it in shape, and it, too, contained the magical rhomboidal panes of red and blue found in the downstairs verandah. I sometimes used to go there to look through the blue.

The third shift saw the grannies—Aunty Lola and Klavdia Alekseevna—come to the dacha. Aunty Lola was our deceased grandmother’s friend. She also considered our dacha to be her home. She always sat in the same old chair, drank from her own special cup, and always slept in the same bedroom on the second floor—the dampest one—which she forbade anyone to use even in her absence, not that anyone wanted to. Anyone else would have simply succumbed to the dampness and died, but Aunty Lola was one of the “Alexander grannies”—born during the reign of Alexander III—and a very sturdy woman, who favored the cold-water cure followed by rubbing oneself with a waffle-weave towel, and so on. In Leningrad, Aunty Lola occupied a room of three square meters in a communal apartment—yes, three square meters exactly. It was originally the janitor’s closet. Her previous home had been blasted to smithereens by the German air raids during the siege of Leningrad. Une explosion d’obus.

I’ve been to that tiny room; strictly speaking, it could fit only a bed. If one were to get up, another person couldn’t even squeeze by. So Aunty Lola used to receive people on the bed: she and her guest would sit side by side, talking. Sometimes she’d go out into the hallway to put the teakettle on—in that case, her guest would lift their legs so Aunty Lola could get past. A minuscule table was wedged in by the head of the bed, because, after all, you need to put your tea down somewhere.

As a result, that damp bedroom in our dacha was like a palace to Aunty Lola. She’d stop by the neighbors who sold flowers and strawberries and buy herself a bunch of pink peonies; she’d spritz herself liberally with a Riga-made perfume called “Acorn,” open the door to the balcony (the very one that Curly tried to dismantle), sit in her wicker chair, and, with her bad leg propped up, she would enjoy a novel in English. Or French. Or German. She was equally adept in all three.

Being a soldier at heart, Aunty Lola adhered to a strict schedule, even of enjoyment—as soon as her leisure time was up, she would limp down to the first floor (the creaking stairs announced her approach—run!) and grab one of us for Russian dictation, or to study English, French, or German grammar. An hour a day. That is, she’d teach one of us for an hour, and then another one of us, and then another…. (Of course, we all saw this as a chore and hated it, but only thanks to Aunty Lola was I accepted to university, and only thanks to her do I still have near-perfect spelling.)

Aunty Lola was obnoxiously honest, unbearably straightforward, suffocatingly slow. She spoke in an elevated literary language, as if she lived inside a Henry James novel, and punctuated what she said with her voice. She was a very good person. She never cheated anyone. Being teenagers, we ran from her for exactly that reason.

Due to Curly’s architectural logic, all the bedrooms in the house were interconnected: if someone entered your room, you could quickly escape through a different door. But there were a lot of us, more than there were doors, so Aunty Lola was usually able to apprehend someone. Placing her cold hands on your waist, firmly holding on as your body tried to wriggle free, Aunty Lola would start up an empty, meaningless conversation: “When I was in the seventh grade at the lycée, we had a geography teacher who thought that the best way to learn the subject was to travel around the countries you meant to study. And I must say, I completely agree with him. Suppose you are learning about Germany or France—”

“Auntylola!” We’d laugh, yelling into her hearing aid, as she was practically deaf from that same explosion d’obus. “What year did he say that? Nineteen fifteen? What about Alsace-Lorraine? It’s both Germany and France at the same time!”

“Well, of course not during the Great War,” Aunty Lola would say, starting up a new thread. “One can only talk about such excursions in peaceful times—”

“Auntylola! Are these peaceful times? Just try getting a visa to stinking Bulgaria, Auntylola! The party won’t allow it! Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate, Auntylola!”

Directly underneath Aunty Lola’s fortress chamber, on the first floor, there was what we called “the Green Room,” its name taken from the green linoleum that Mother had installed there—installed with her two bare hands, of course: moved the furniture, unrolled the linoleum, and nailed it down as needed.

This room saw more foot traffic than any other room in the world. It had one window and three doors: one leading to the sunroom, one to the kitchen, and one to a bedroom shared by four people. It also had an armchair and a TV that was always on. Through this room we’d ferry pots of soup and pans of meat, salad bowls of greens and glass bowls of compote; we’d pass through to bring clean dishes and to carry back dirty ones. You couldn’t possibly live in this room, and yet Klavdiya Alekseevna—Klavsevna—did. Somehow amid the constantly opening and closing doors, the chair and the TV stand, the bookcase and the window, a narrow, maiden’s bed was wedged in. Klavsevna would sleep in it half sitting up, just as in medieval paintings.

A quick estimate: the house had fifteen people, half of whom were children, so that’s more like twenty-five people—kids exist simultaneously in two places, the coordinates of which quantum mechanics does not allow us to identify precisely. Twenty-five people regularly taking their meals three times a day, and irregularly bursting into the sunroom for an apple or a cookie, so that’s another two times—or five in total. Twenty-five times five—I get one hundred twenty-five, what about you?—so that’s one hundred and twenty-five passes through the Green Room just for the food, not counting the TV watching, with shouting matches over what to switch on: cartoons or the evening news? And what if there’s boxing on? Or a movie, especially a crime drama? And what about adults coming and going to sweep the floor, iron the laundry, or lug firewood, not to mention all the children running, screaming, playing tag or perhaps even something more dangerous? In the midst of this purgatory, the meek and docile Klavsevna was able to exist only on condition of her own invisibility—she had perfected the art of living unseen, almost to the point of disappearing completely.

It’s impossible to imagine Aunty Lola invisible. Her special cup—better not touch it! Her special chair—better not move it! Loud and simpleminded stories of a partially deaf person—“And then the doctor says to me: ‘Remember, you have a friend!’ And I thought: He’s talking about himself, and I was so very grateful to him. But he continues: ‘Farmer cheese! Remember that farmer cheese is your friend!’” Aunty Lola would let her presence be known clearly and assertively. She made tracks in our lives; she was a force to be reckoned with.

Or take Nanny, a firm and stiff-necked person who loved us but disapproved of our lifestyle, and who was constantly nagging us—she, too, was a force to be reckoned with, and her presence hung in every room like a lingering scent. During the daytime we were “god-damned blockheads” or “rotten treasures,” and come evening she’d sigh, “You are all so sweet when you’re sleeping.” When the older sisters began sneaking out on dates, she’d grumble, “You should get it all sewn up,” and we younger siblings were dying to know: Get what sewn up, and where? But Nanny wouldn’t elaborate.

Klavsevna, however, was invisible. There was an armchair in the sunroom that she really loved, but this chair was considered to be Father’s, and when he arrived on the weekends she’d disappear into thin air as soon as he’d set foot in the house—only her shadow would flicker. I don’t remember her in any of the rooms except for the green one; I don’t believe she ever went up to the second floor; in the kitchen she’d blend in with the appliances, such as the hot plate with the “Left only: low heat” mantra; in the garden she’d blend in with the bushes. Sure, she was subdued and spoke infrequently, but that wasn’t it—she didn’t emit any interference, didn’t send out any signals, didn’t produce any energy waves.

Klavsevna had a distinctive appearance. She was close to seventy, but her face was lively and she must have been very pretty in her youth. A sleek turned-up nose, blue eyes that sparkled with laughter, peach fuzz on her otherwise bald head, impressive height—it was possible to picture, by straining your imagination, how svelte and comely she had once been. Klavsevna wasn’t blessed with brains, however, and this was for the best: thinking would have been a hindrance for her; she believed only Jesus and her doctor, who told her to put yellow drops in her eyes twice daily, to sleep propped up on a big pillow, and to avoid looking in the dark.

Avoid looking in the dark! Klavsevna took that literally, and it was impossible to dissuade her. She made her bed, which was situated at the intersection of all roads, in such a way that at the head was a fortress of pillows and props that precluded her lying down. She’d turn on the lamp and sit in her bed amid the horde, looking straight ahead with the tactful smile of one who doesn’t want to disturb anyone else with her presence, until Morpheus finally would descend to dim her sight. This somewhat unnerved her, for when you close your eyes all goes dark, and the doctor had advised against that. When venturing out to the far corner of the garden to relieve herself into Curly’s brainchild—the communal two-holer—Klavsevna was afraid to look into the darkness there as well, and so she’d use the pit of her choice with the door wide open. This allowed her to see from afar who was approaching with similar purpose via the walkway, and to immediately disappear before disturbing them.

Before her retirement, Klavsevna had been a typist at a company that sold loose face powder (White Nights, Carmen, Lily of the Valley), floral perfumes (Red Poppies, Chypre, Lilac), and other sweet-smelling womanly toiletries. Our neighbor from across the street, a sullen, greedy man by the name of Mikhail Bernig, used to work at the same company as a bookkeeper, and at some point, soon after the war—we were still living in the White House then—he told all his colleagues about the wonderful pine trees in our lake region, about the empty beaches of Hepojarvi, and suggested our slice of heaven as a place to take salubrious strolls with parasols. Klavsevna, then a not-so-young and lonely maiden, came to our community with some friends and, while walking, caught a glimpse of my sister Natasha, then four. Klavsevna’s heart skipped a beat. Everyone’s heart skipped a beat when they saw Natasha. All blond curls and gray eyes—she resembled a magical, sad doll, with a lost gaze, as if all her relatives are gone but she’s not complaining, just quietly grieving. Even those with several children of their own wanted to scoop her up, cover her with kisses, and adopt her. Klavsevna was gone.

She started coming to Hepojarvi just to look at Natasha, who used to go for walks with Nanny. Klavsevna struck up a friendship with Nanny. Nanny was strict—she saw right through Klavsevna’s foxlike cunning, keeping her at arm’s length. But Klavsevna was quiet, harmless, meek, and enraptured; it was the right tactic—Nanny relented, deciding to let Klavsevna be.

A year passed, then two; it was time for Klavsevna to retire, which she did obediently. Her pension was thirty-two rubles for life. In the early 1950s that must not have been so bad, but every year prices went up and her pension remained the same. Being an experienced typist, she was able to find a bit of work at first; she’d take odd jobs home even though she was terrified of getting audited. But then her eyes began to give out, and her doctor prescribed the yellow drops and forbade her to look in the dark. And she couldn’t really see that well in the daytime, either.

Another ten years passed, our younger brother and sister were born, and now they needed someone to take them for walks. Nanny was by then too old, and so she suggested to our mother her (by that time) dear old friend Klavsevna: she wouldn’t be able to manage in wintertime, but in summertime—easy as pie. And so in exchange for room and board as well as a small stipend, Klavsevna began taking the little ones on their walks.

My sister Natasha was no longer that sad doll; she’d grown up, taken up sports, her favorite being the shot put. She was a girl of marriageable age, but Klavsevna still saw in her that erstwhile lost little girl, and when Natasha would come to the dacha, Klavsevna followed her like a shadow.

People in our family are divided into two camps: those who were stung by the White House and those who were not. I’m in the “stung” camp. Whether I’m walking down the street or lying in bed awake, whether my eyes are open or closed, at any moment can I walk up the wooden porch stairs into the back sunroom, open the door, pass through the narrow hallway with its random boxes, summer coats—called “dusters” back then, a forgotten term now—hanging from hooks, and breathe in that air: the infusion of flowers, children’s tanned skin, household soap, and boiled milk; I can touch the railing of the staircase that leads up to the loft, feel its gray balusters, and then take a left into that room with the green-tiled Dutch stove, the one with the two errant blue tiles. It’s July. I’m five years old. Nanny says our new little sister has just been born, her name is Olya, and we’re going for a walk now to meet Mom and Dad, who are driving in with this new addition.

There is a long trek upward—it’s a serious hill, a few years later a competition-sized ski ramp will be built up there. You can see forever from the top—even the faraway shore of the blue Lake Hepojarvi is visible, the far, empty shore. No one lives there and no one can, because of the shooting range where once a day thunder is heard—l’explosion. An invisible canon fires so loudly that the house shakes and the windows rattle, and afterwards we need to invite Curly to spackle. No one has been to the shooting range but everyone knows that it’s there, beyond the hills and the valleys, beyond the marshes with the white mist, beyond the sea of fireweed, and the raspberry and blackberry bushes. We are standing at the top of the hill, looking ahead, blocking the sun with our hands: in the distance, in the outlying forest, is a remote meadow, and there, two trees side by side, like two siblings. That’s where Eden is.

Nanny leads us past the teahouse with its inebriated men, past the kiosk where Mom buys the kerosene for the Primus stove—this is still the age of firewood and kerosene, they aren’t selling gas stoves yet, and the silly mantra of “Right only: medium heat” hasn’t been thought of. We walk into the pharmacy, and there—herbs, herbs, herbs—it smells of sage, chamomile, and dried linden flowers. This is where our Yanson used to work; we don’t yet know that we will be buying his house, leaving the White House forever. Nanny picks out some kind of herb for herself, and we walk out onto the main dirt road. It’s dusty.

Here they come, here is our Pobeda coming to a halt, and inside the car are Mom and Dad, and a satchel that is our new sister; Mom moves the lace away from her red little face. This is Olya. Thirty-six years is all she will get on this earth.

If you look through the blue glass long enough, someone will die. Not completely, not hopelessly—after all, death doesn’t really exist—but they will no longer walk among us. You will no longer be able to touch them, kiss them, to inhale the scent of their hair and neck, to take them by the hand, to ask them a question, to look them in the eye—none of this will be possible any longer. They leave us for that gray, twilit land beyond the blue glass. By bringing my face close to it and looking long enough—through the rustling and the undulation of the garden, the swaying of the branches in the wind, through the melancholy bloom of gray jasmine and the sea of gray lilac—I seem to be able to make out their faces, their hands: they are looking at us and waving, they’ve noticed us. Perhaps there, on the other side, it’s fun for them and bright; perhaps they are playing ball or simply sailing on airships above our gardens—submerging their arms deep into the warm air and yanking flowers by their long stems, and picking petals one by one to tell fortunes. Why wouldn’t they try to tell fortunes? Perhaps from this side of the blue glass we appear to them gray and wistful, locked away and unattainable—I don’t know. But the blue glass is the window of heartache, and one oughtn’t look through it intently or for long.

A tragedy befell our friends, the upstairs neighbors at the White House, the ones living in the loft with the poison and the trumeau and the lilac robe: their housekeeper drowned. She went for a dip in Lake Hepojarvi, swam out into the open waters, and was sucked in by a maelstrom. I remember the frightful commotion that this news created, tearing through all the houses on our pine grove isthmus like a great gust of wind. Some of the grown-ups rushed to the lake; others, blocking the view, wouldn’t let us look. I never saw the drowned woman. Of course, that was the right thing for the grown-ups to do—I wouldn’t have let children of mine see the lifeless young maiden—but because I didn’t get to see her then, now I see her always. I don’t remember her face, I don’t know her name—there were many of them back then, young ladies looking for jobs as house staff after the war to escape the villages they detested, where there were no young men; girls yearning for love, kisses, and freedom where only barnyard work was to be had. I remember these young girls only by the smell of their maiden skin, their sweat, the cheap pink loose powder they used. Men had a different scent, they smelled of motorcycles, you couldn’t confuse the two. Young ladies would go on dates with soldiers from the nearby military base and then inexplicably dissolve into tears, quit their jobs, and disappear. There were Ninas and Valentinas; there was a Liuba, who liked to sew; a Klavdia; and a Zoya, who left behind a pink semicircular hair comb; and the beautiful Marusya, who stayed the longest—she had no suitors because of her withered leg, stricken with polio.

I don’t remember which one of them drowned because the one that did—that invisible maiden, lying on the lake’s shore, on the grass behind all the grown-ups fussing, leaning over her, and blocking the view with their legs—was all of them: Nina, Klavdia, the other Nina, and Zoya. She was all of them—lying on her back, on her side, and facedown; propped up against a tree, covered with a blanket, naked, wearing a blue wool swimsuit, or a cotton one with orange dots or tiny flowers; in her underwear—pink satin or white cotton—or, for some reason, with a long nightgown clinging to her pale young body. She was the sister Alenushka from the fairy tale, calling out from the water’s depths: “My brother, Ivanushka! Heavy is the stone that pulls me down, silky is the seaweed that binds my feet, yellow is the sand that covers my heart!”

Afterwards, the grown-ups explained to us about the bottom of Hepojarvi: at first, everything is smooth and shallow, and then boom! A sharp drop-off, and not just a drop-off but a vortex, with a deep hole, a cave. If you swim above the drop-off, you can get sucked in under its smooth edge, as if under a roof or an awning.

Between the world of our parents—books, science, common sense, encyclopedic knowledge and education—and the world of the nannies—fairy tales, myths, fears, superstitions, things that go bump in the night—was the world of the children, who were trying to understand it all, and who didn’t know how to talk about it.

Puzzling things, puzzling people. A soldier, for example. Say the kids overheard rumblings from the grown-ups’ world about how one of the Ninas went out with a soldier late at night and how, uh-oh, nothing good can come of that. Nanny, in an effort to scare us, would say that a soldier was coming to carry us off in a sack if we didn’t behave. This was alarming, and confusing, but alas, there was proof that this practice of carrying off children in sacks existed: illustrations from the folktale “Masha and the Bear,” in which, as we all remembered, there was a bear walking upright and carrying a little girl through a dark forest in a woven basket full of savory pies.

What horror! The soldier, treading slowly, would enter from the back porch of the White House and gingerly take off his sturdy shoulder bag. Where would he take me? And why? What would happen afterwards? Would he throw me in the lake so that I’d get sucked into a maelstrom, my feet bound by silky seaweed? Would he start sharpening his knife? Or maybe, having mysteriously descended from the large, flyspecked photo collage graduates of the Polytechnic Institute, with their mustachioed faces framed in ovals, would cover me in stifling yellow paper so I would start to choke and kick and I’d wake up with my heart pounding, crying, “Nanny! Nanny!”

The room with the dark-green stove tiles and the two errant blue ones had no curtains. I remember that autumnal morning—gold and translucent—when I woke up from the light and, climbing up to kneel on the windowsill, looked out. The world outside was just as it must have been originally conceived: made of gold, quiet, and kindness. A leaf softly fell to the ground. I was around five years old. I had no thoughts. But I did have—from that morning when it appeared, and staying with me till this day—a sense of self, separate from the others.

And therefore what should have followed was an expulsion from paradise, and that’s exactly what came to pass: we left the White House, and the gates that led inside it slammed shut, the way there blocked to us forever.

Of course, we all loved our crooked, damp, and absurd dacha. It belonged to us and we could do with it as we pleased. For example, Curly started building—though never quite finished—two more rooms in the attic. Each room did have a door and a window, and some sort of ceiling lining—we needn’t dwell on the imperfections. I claimed one of these rooms and for some reason chose to paint the window frame bright red; the result was quite hideous, and I quickly repainted it white, but the red color still showed through, and so I kept covering it with more and more white paint until the window would no longer close.

I found that I enjoyed painting, and so, until I ran out of supplies, I painted everything I could: window frames, doors leading to the sunroom, thresholds. Even the black prerevolutionary cupboard—an heirloom from Yanson—was painted white, to my mother’s dismay.

Every day we used to buy milk—a big, three-liter container—from one set of neighbors and strawberries from the other set. Initially Mother tried to plant some strawberries herself, but soon gave up on the idea. Yanson had left behind a great farm: it had everything from gooseberries to geese; it had chickens, a piglet, an apple orchard, cherry trees, and even a plum tree, which, for a long time, we considered to be some barren, useless alder tree until it went crazy, as trees are wont to do every few years, covering itself first in beautiful flowers, and then in fruit—inedible fruit, but fruit nonetheless.

He even used to have a cow—Yanson, that is—and so the house had a cowshed attached to it. But by the time the house was in our possession, the shed had long been turned into a large storage space with closets and shelves all along the walls, and there was no sign of it—the cow, that is—she had been forgotten and we don’t even know what she looked like, what color she was, what her name was, if she had calves, and what happened to her: Did she end her days ground into meat patties or did she die of an illness or old age? Only on humid days before a storm, when scents begin to rise from the earth, could you smell the presence of an animal, as if blown in from pastures beyond Lethe, the river of oblivion. Through the small window a ray of light would shine, dust floating in it, neither taking off nor settling, but eternally there, eternally circling, as the cow’s shadow would walk from one dim corner to the other, sighing and treading heavily.

There was a time when basically every house in the community had a cow—aside from the White House, which kept no livestock. But at some point the authorities once again imagined something or other, and directives were issued to chop down the apple trees and to surrender all the cows to the collective farm. The dutiful folk shed some tears, chopped up the trees and the cows—you wouldn’t just hand them over to strangers, would you?—but some, deciding that the monarchy’s rage would subside and that the dark skies would clear, kept their animals on the sly. One neighborhood woman, who truly loved her cow, ferried her by boat to an uninhabited island on Lake Hepojarvi—we used to call it “Lily of the Valley Isle”—and the cow would ramble there, chewing the flowers, confused, while the woman would go every day to milk her: in the morning fog over calm waters, and in the evenings, by turbulent waves out of Turner paintings, with a bucket and clean cans for this white, lily-of-the-valley-scented milk.

Yanson didn’t have any children, just a wife—I remember a picture of her with a milkmaid’s yoke, surrounded by chickens, a barn and a pig in the background—and so he was able to devote all his free time outside the pharmacy to the geese and the cherry trees. By contrast, our family had a small child army, and before the youngest had grown up the eldest already had kids of their own. Mother couldn’t keep up with the gardening required, and so the pharmacist’s farm slowly descended into disarray: the apple trees got to be as tall as the pines, the gooseberry bushes grew wild, the Persian lilacs refused to bloom and resembled a mop, the Turkish carnations crept away from their flower beds and we’d find them in the weeds by the fence sometimes.

None of us children liked working in the garden; we enjoyed sitting on the porch in the evenings, playing cards or charades, reading or making up nonsense rhymes, one person writing two lines and then passing the sheet of paper to the next. Sometimes Father would join in and the rhymes would acquire a certain compactness as well as a hint of political sedition.

Mama would walk past us with a pruner or a rake; she would work in the garden till dark, teaching us hard work by example—to no avail, as we never budged from our spots to help her unless she asked, and she rarely did. Occasionally a paroxysm of guilt would overtake one of us and we’d yell in her direction, “Mama, c’mon, I’ll weed there tomorrow!” But she’d impartially answer, “Morgen, morgen, nur nicht heute, sagen alle faulen Leute,” which was German for “Morrow, morrow, not today, that’s what lazy people say.”

(Years later, when the Soviet regime fell apart and was succeeded by democratic times, when working for the common good was considered a laughable and contemptible anachronism, the courtyards of Saint Petersburg were choked with garbage, and no one came out to clean them. That is, no one except two people: the janitress and Mother. Mother was by then close to eighty. She’d put on canvas gloves, secure her hair with a headscarf, and set out to pick up the bottles peeking through the melting snow, to sweep up the frozen dog poop, to gather up paper, plastic bags, and discarded syringes. On TV, Sobchak was barking about democratic principles and we all watched in rapture; but Mother would walk past us, in silence. “Mama, c’mon, sit down, relax!” “Garbage doesn’t pick itself up. We want to live with a clean courtyard, don’t we?”)

Besides that Lily of the Valley cow, there was the Eimans’ cow, but we were too lazy for the long walk to their place—it was about a quarter of a mile up a road overgrown with thick grass. The house belonged to a large extended family and one of the inhabitants was Vera Eiman, a mysterious woman, enveloped in sadness, who knew how to get rid of warts using a quarter of an apple: you secured one quarter to the wart and then buried the other three while saying these magic words: “You three, riding on a mare! Take this wart away from here!” A week later the wart would be gone without a trace—the three horsemen abided. At some point before 1914, this Vera was a personal dresser for the ballerina Anna Pavlova; she used to enrobe and disrobe this distinguished woman, clean her swan tutus reverently, travel the globe with her. She’d bring out autographed photo albums covered in velvet to show us: “For dearest Vera…” You’re standing there, with a three-liter milk can tugging on your arm—“All right, can I please go now?”—but Vera is still flipping through the formerly cream-colored pages with trembling hands. “You see? And here again: ‘To dearest Vera…’” Anna Pavlova decided to stay in England, and Vera came back to Russia to get married.

And get married she did, or rather, thought she did, but the consummation never occurred, les cris de passion never rang out in the dark vaults of Vera’s bridal chamber: her husband would gently kiss her on the forehead and leave the room, closing the door behind him. Vera was an innocent maiden but nonetheless possessed some vague notions about the mechanics of matrimony; days followed days and nights followed nights.

Finally, tired of waiting for the caresses promised her at the altar, unable to understand what all this meant, and not knowing where to turn, she got up from her cold marriage bed and knocked on her mother-in-law’s door for advice. Oh, the horror; oh, the depths of despair: the dim light of a kerosene lamp, shadows, lace, and scattered bedsheets. Yes, her husband was indulging in passionate lovemaking with his own mother in the very same bed where she’d birthed him, and where, as it turned out, after making him her lover for thirty years she still wouldn’t let go.

Vera hanged herself. But her husband rescued her from the noose, brought her back to life, and then promptly hanged himself. No one tried to resuscitate him, it should be noted.

She didn’t remarry, and she grew barren among the velvet-covered albums full of someone else’s exhilarating beauty. They say that after what had happened, men inspired only horror in her. I don’t know—when handing us a full three-liter milk can, having carefully placed it inside a checkered bag, did she sometimes think about what could have been, that it was possible to forget, to overcome, to fall in love again, to have children, to nurse them with her own milk, her own body whose earthly time had been so uselessly spent on the side of life’s road? Or did she completely dissolve into the swanlike whiteness of the past, into the dreamy sublime sadness, into those pointe shoes, ribbons, and flounces—the flounces and lace that she used to bleach with her very own hands, used to press with a sad iron?

Anna Pavlova’s name has been immortalized by one KLM airplane, by an Australian dessert, and even, God help me, by some haptophyte algae; it still resounds, and all this is well and good; yet it might still please her—now on the other side of that blue glass—to know that even here, in the shade of the White House, amid the pines in the middle of nowhere, Vera, the eternal maiden, spent her long, sad life loving her, and that after each evening’s milking she’d smooth out Anna’s silky photographs the way she used to smooth out her tutus.

The house was overrun with children, and Klavsevna was hired to take the little ones—Olya and Ivan—for walks, so they wouldn’t be in the way. You’d amble somewhere, not doing anything in particular, and here they are—situated by a pile of sand, next to a fallen pine tree, Klavsevna sitting down on the tree’s roots, her red jacket visible from afar, while Olya and Ivan are making mud pies or playing with toy trucks: beep beep. I don’t know exactly what she would talk to them about or how she entertained them, but at some point an imaginary character by the name of Fedor Kuzmitch entered the picture.

He, as I understand it, bore no relation to any historical figure. He just materialized out of nowhere and there he was. Fedor Kuzmitch was a role model: he always finished his supper, he never licked his plate even after raspberry jam, he never spat cherry pits out onto the table, but only onto his spoon, then carefully placing them on the edge of his plate.

Before entering the house, Fedor Kuzmitch always shook the sand off his sandals, as well as the pine needles from his clothes: he was considerate of Mother’s having to sweep the floor. Fedor Kuzmitch didn’t dangle his feet and kick under the table, didn’t pick his nose, didn’t draw on the tablecloth with colored pencils. And he never—NEVER!—brewed tea in the buckets of fresh water just brought back from the lake, as Olya used to do; never stomped his feet over the blueberry pies covered with tea towels on the table as, again, Olya did. And he never mixed salt and sugar—quickly and deftly—while looking with innocent and impudent eyes when caught in the act, Miss Olya! Sure, you’re five years old, and yes, you’re the most uncontrollable creature around for miles—button nose, corkscrew curls—but Fedor Kuzmitch, dignified and exemplary, does not approve of such shenanigans.

I’d overhear bits and pieces of this epos: Klavsevna gently rustling, the rug rats possibly absorbing some of the lessons.

Now that Olya is long gone, and we have lived out most of our lives and will ourselves soon be going beyond the blue glass, I called my brother Ivan to ask: What was all that about? And who was this Fedor Kuzmitch? Where did he come from and where did he go? But Ivan doesn’t remember. Fedor Kuzmitch just was. So I guess, once again, I’m the sole witness of the existence of these titans and their dilapidated worlds.

I was twelve years old when I picked up a thin old book from the shelf and read these verses by Nikolai Gumilev. It seemed like they were speaking to me. When a line in a book says “Remember?” then it seems to me as if I do remember. Yes, I think I remember. Something rings a bell. I don’t really know what a “shabraque” is and I’m still too lazy to look it up, that’s more up your alley, Mister Gumilev, but “the skies uncharted”—let that be mine. I read this and dutifully remembered. Immediately the palace of giants appeared to me as the White House: the white columns, the dark-green tiles, the smooth blue-gray balusters disappearing high up the stairs, all seemed colossal in my childhood; and the loft window rested directly against the crown of the pine tree, the pine cones knocking against it in the storm—you could just reach up and touch the ledge where the heavens parted.

Fedor Kuzmitch must have come from a clan of Titans that populated the earth even before the appearance of man. He was a dazzling resident of the mythological Golden Age, close but not equal, of course, to Dmitriev Junior the Demiurge, who created our world according to his personal whim and who saw that it was good. Blind aoidoi in dusty and loud markets, in the shade of reed canopies, sang about the twelve labors of Fedor Kuzmitch; for a small price, cunning entrepreneurs showed the bluffs where Fedor Kuzmitch’s cyclopean bed-sized feet stomped, and the vertical wall, overgrown with ivy, that Fedor Kuzmitch poked with his staff to create a spring of sweet water. Here Fedor Kuzmitch healed a quadriplegic, and over there is where he overcame the Minotaur. A rainbow in the sky, a thundering explosion on an invisible shooting range, twin trees on a faraway, unreachable shore—all these were the tracks of Fedor Kuzmitch that lingered long in this world, until the Golden Age ended. I blinked and missed how that happened and he was replaced with Krinda and Splat.

Ivan told me, in a sad telephone voice, that he remembers clearly: after Fedor Kuzmitch were Krinda and Splat. Yes, he was five, and Olga was six.

Thus shrink generations, thus decline the tsars, thus great kingdoms meet their demise as the sands bury the Sphinx to her breast. Where temples once towered, all that remains are white column shafts, and they are beset with scarlet poppies come springtime.

Our sister Katerina had three children, and, being the eldest and by her own lights the most conscientious of us all, she decided to make things easier for Mom, and at the house in general, at least for a month. We were already sleeping there in layers and eating in shifts. She found a young nanny named Tosya, a sixteen-year-old girl with a tapirlike nose and the resulting nasal habits of speech. It was easy to see that she was an unreliable and dopey sort, but Katerina was fond of brave social experiments and firmly believed—against all common sense—in the equality of all living beings. She bought train tickets to Feodosia: the end goal for all of us was always Koktebel, its essential value being not just the beach and the sea, but its sacredness. Our grandfather was friends with Maximilian Voloshin in the days of yore when this famous poet’s house was still the only one on the deserted beach; the distant silhouette of the bluffs at the water’s edge back then still resembled his profile perfectly. Father was friends with Voloshin’s widow, and whenever he came to visit, she’d set up a bed for him and Mama in the studio. He later told me that this is where I was conceived, under the visage of the Egyptian princess Taïakh—her yellowish head blindly and mysteriously looking into the distance, her enigmatic features revealing nothing. It must have smelled of wormwood that day; all the grass had already dried out. Invisible cicadas clipped the hot air with tiny shears. August was under way; the waves beat ceaselessly against the empty beach.

Three generations had already visited this house, and Katerina was on her way with the fourth. Mother was a little worried; she was waiting for a telegram to find out how the journey went. On the third day after Katerina’s departure, one of us went to the outhouse but found it occupied. It was still occupied ten minutes later, then twenty. We did a quick roll call—everyone was accounted for. After waiting a little while longer, we went out there to yank on the door, which was locked from the inside. Father pulled the handle strongly and broke into Curly’s handiwork. Inside, white as a sheet from fear and desperation, was Tosya the nanny.

“What happened? Where is Katya?” exclaimed my parents.

Tosya was silent.

“Where is Katya? Where are the kids? What happened?!”

The nanny could only shake her head. She was pulled out and taken back to the house, given hot tea. Fearing the worst, we pressed her, demanding: What happened? What?

Finally she unclenched her jaw.

“Flw ld ff trn.”

“What?!”

“Flw ld ff trn.”

More tea, more alarmed exclamations, crazy thoughts, near-coronary panic. (Father: “Ooooh, I can’t take this anymore, I demand to know what happened!” Mother, as always, cool as a cucumber.) Finally the vowels returned to the young lady, and, barely moving her tongue, she got the words out:

“Fellow lead off train.”

Lead whom off? Lead where? At this very moment a telegram arrived. The post office lady was apprehensive about walking through the gate, since our dog Yassa was full of hatred toward all government employees: postmen, land inspectors, soldiers—basically anyone who came for official reasons and wearing boots; Father dragged the angry dog from the gate and frantically grabbed the telegram. Katerina wrote: “Nanny ran off with a Georgian comma everything OK comma fruit galore full stop.”

Later, piecing together the mosaic of information, it came to light that shortly after Kaluga, but before the air turns sweet, southern, and languid; before the ladies selling baked potatoes and sour pickles become ladies offering sunflower seeds and hot corn on the cob through the open train windows, marriage grifters are already hard at work. The gorgeous Georgian “fellow,” twisting his sable brows above his intensely piercing eyes, performed a well-rehearsed routine of sudden passion, allegedly inflamed by the short-legged and long-nosed Tosya, promising her love till death did them part and giving her a pair of lacquered heels as proof. “Come with me, and even death won’t separate us.” Tosya ran to Katerina: in a rickety old train car, between the boiler with metallic-tasting hot water and the WC with rattling hinges, gear-locking mechanism number 3, and such, a Love was born. That’s exactly how love comes. “Please let me go!” Katerina tried to stop her: “Do not fall for men’s cunning tricks!” But the young lady was head over heels in love, and in tears, a state that did wonders for her looks; so Katerina, who gave her blessing to all emotions, let her go.

After that, everything happened fast, too fast, and according to the script: the Georgian sat Tosya down in the Bryansk train station waiting room, taking all her money and the lacquered heels as well; he needed to buy tickets to his native Sukhumi. “Wait here.” She waited until nightfall before accepting that this was it. The end. It’s unclear why she came back to our dacha, how she made it there with no money, and why she locked herself, cowering in fear, in our outhouse.

We talked about her for a long time after that: How would she live in this world, being so naive. How do such people survive?

How does anyone survive?

It’s easy to enter the past: just keep looking straight ahead and walking. There will be no fences, no locks, the doors will open by themselves to let you in. Flowers won’t wilt, berries will know no season, apples won’t fall from tall-as-pines apple trees but will reach the ledge where the heavens part and turn into stars and grapes. Here is old man Dobroklonsky, an art historian, taking his four dachshunds out for a walk. He also lives in the White House—he must have moved in after us, because I can see him only from our side of the fence; we can no longer go for walks and play ball on the enormous field with its bald spot in the middle, but he can; he’s bending over, unclasping the leashes so his frail, bowlegged dachshunds can run every which way in the grass. One of them, with cloudy cataracts in her bluish old eyes, hobbles my way to yap from across the wire fence. Yassa, locked inside the house, is worn out from indignation, she bangs her paws on the window, her bark hoarse: How dare they??? How dare they???

Mother walks to the lake with water buckets; Dobroklonsky greets her by lifting his black academic’s skullcap. Mother says: He was friends with Benua and Yaremich, he used to be the director of the Hermitage. Father says: He lost both his sons in the war.

Dobroklonsky crosses the meadow that no longer belongs to us, he disappears behind the lilac bushes that are also no longer ours; I won’t see him again. You don’t know, do you, the names of his dachshunds. But I do! Another fifty years from now—even a hundred, or two hundred—and I’ll still be able to hear his noble clarion voice:

“Myshka, Manishka, Murashka, Manzhet!”

Those were their names, and always in that order.

First Nanny passed and it was unclear how to go on. Nanny had lived in our family since my mother’s birth in 1915, that faraway and already not-so-peaceful year when the first hammers started clanging at the future site of the White House. She’d leave, come back, suffer from asthma; she’d light a red lantern by an icon at night. She darned cotton stockings on a wooden mushroom; she kept a tin filled with various buttons, bits of lace, and flat elastic bands for rethreading into warm flannel pants. She let me sort the buckwheat: I’d scatter it on the oilcloth, and make a circle with my fingertip around the foreign elements: black thingies, oat-seed thingies, and tiny barrel-shaped thingies—all that weird stuff that you inexplicably find in buckwheat. Nanny smelled of clean, warm groats heated up in a pan. The lines on her face were checkered and soft.

“How you used to cry ‘Nanny, don’t leave! Nanny, dearest, don’t leave!’—but it was time for my vacation, I had to go back to my village, to see my brother Petrusha, he was waiting and waiting for me, my little brother Petrusha…” “‘Nanny, don’t leave!’” she’d repeat dreamily to me, or oftentimes to herself: she’d stand by the window, looking out somewhere in the distance and repeating my impassioned pleas to herself. Yes, I did cry—we were still living in Eden then, and I still believed that you could make someone stay with tears and love.

Then Aunty Lola passed, we no longer heard the tap tap tap of her cane on the staircase; it was now possible to sit and relax in the sunroom without the fear of being caught and taken upstairs for French lessons. Her personal cup—the one she drank her tea from and forbade us to touch—now idled in the sideboard; now you could just take it, but no one wanted to anymore; it seemed to be a peculiar porcelain gravestone, white with orange maple leaves and worn-away gilding. The smell of pink peonies and Acorn perfume lingered for years in Aunty Lola’s bedroom, or perhaps it just seemed that way, was just our wishful thinking.

Once, long ago, Aunty Lola’s nephew came to visit her at the dacha. He was an art student, and he spent the day at the lake drawing a study of sky and clouds. Nothing else. The grown-ups had little to say after looking at his creation. But I liked the clouds, they were of the cumulus variety, my favorite, eternal wanderers, clean celestial mountains. They’d hung above Lake Hepojarvi for a while that day, and then left. The cardboard painting was placed on top of the sideboard; it soon fell into the crack between the sideboard and the wall.

But then—a few years later—I found it; bending some wire into a poker, I pulled it out, along with a thick layer of dust, dead flies of years past, and a green leg from a plastic toy hippo. I took the cardboard picture and thus appropriated a singular day of eternity. In it is summer, and midday, and immortality. Certainly immortality.

Then others passed away—first this one, then that one. Each one had their own important life theme, their own love—real or imagined, happy or unrequited. Each one must have had a person, or a dream, or an idea, or a garden, or a house around which their life orbited, as if around the sun. They passed on, their personal suns went out, and there was no one left to speak of them, to think of them and to tell stories, to laugh and shake one’s head while remembering.

Even Curly, whose life’s purpose seemed to be to continually prove the law of conservation of mass—whatever is removed in one place is invariably added back in another—even he was, as we found out accidentally, an ardent supporter of Nikolaev, the one who killed the prominent Bolshevik leader Kirov (or was appointed in name as his killer; it’s all terribly dark, unclear, and complicated). I was already an adult, Curly was old and frail, and Mother sent me to bring him some medicine. I found his apartment on the Petrogradsky side, hidden in one of the gloomy courtyards: a narrow room with windows that didn’t open, dust, summer, and stale air. Tables, stools, shelves fashioned out of planks, all do-it-yourself, all from stolen boards and appropriated plywood; every surface covered with ancient magazines, stuffed and overflowing envelopes, documents that had descended from the sofa to the floor like glaciers.

“I keep writing!” Curly complained woefully. “I keep sending letters to historical magazines! To professors in Moscow, to party bigwigs, trying to explain that it wasn’t him, it wasn’t him! I knew him! Nikolaev just couldn’t have done it, he was slandered! And they keep sending rejection letters: ‘Thank you for your interest….’ They don’t want to get to the bottom of this.”

He wanted to talk, to explain to me his theory about what actually happened; the people around him must have grown tired of his truth by now: “What’s it to you, it’s over.” I was a fresh—albeit unexpected—visitor. But I, too, couldn’t be bothered to listen, and all the while, even as I walked down the dilapidated, treacherous staircase, Curly kept talking from the dimly lit landing; he kept talking and talking, his gray, but still curly, simpleton’s head hanging low.

And then he passed away, too.

Natasha usually brought Klavsevna a kilo of sausages; Natasha was forever Klavsevna’s lost little girl. This time she couldn’t make it: students, kids, heavy bags, the need to transfer from one trolleybus to another. So she asked me to go instead. It was the first time she had, strangely enough. It took me awhile to find the entrance. It was an old building on the Griboyedov Canal, on the seventh floor of a walk-up, and as I was climbing up this unpleasant stairway off the back entrance, out of breath, I kept thinking: How does she manage? She must be eighty-six by now.

This was one of the cleanest and most spacious communal apartments that I ever did see, and in Klavsevna’s room, where she lived and lived, time magically stood still; it was the emptiest of rooms and it got the most light, and I didn’t immediately realize why. A narrow bed with two stiff pillows and a thin blanket was nestled by the wall. In the space between the two windows, a table made of yellow plywood and a mirror in a plain frame, and, fastened with a thumbtack, a fan of postcards: the operetta star Georg Ots in a carnival mask for the role of Mister X, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and a portrait of someone unidentifiable. No drapes on the windows—the doctors advised against “looking in the dark”—so the white night evening was equally bright outside, on the empty street, and inside, in the empty room. In the window, faraway rusty roofs, chimneys, a tree growing through someone’s balcony.

She was still pretty, Klavsevna, nimble and snub-nosed, and even leggy. We had nothing to talk about, but convention seemed to dictate that we talk, and so she unexpectedly told me her life’s story—out of the blue, seated on her maiden bed, the sausages in her lap.

In 1914, Klavsevna had a fiancé—he was handsome, he was in love with her. They were walking hand in hand along Nevsky Prospect, not far from where we were sitting, by the way. On the bridge across the Griboyedov Canal they came upon some Gypsies. They laughed, decided to get their fortune told. The Gypsy told Klavsevna that anyone who married her would die. They laughed some more. Then the war started. Klavsevna’s fiancé was killed.

And in the 1920s, after she’d had time to mourn and to move on, a wonderful young man, an engineer, asked for her hand. She was planning to marry him, but he died. She remembered the Gypsy woman and became alarmed. And in the 1930s, while traveling somewhere by train, in the compartment she met a lovely older gentleman, a professor. He kept looking at her, and then followed her into the rattling train corridor to say: “You’re so beautiful! Would you be my wife? I am a widower, my kids are grown, I have money, I’ll turn your life into a fairy tale.”

She asked for three days to think it over. After the three days were up, she declined the professor’s offer: he was so lovely and she didn’t wish to be the cause of his demise.

And that was that. No more suitors, no more love, and no children—nothing but vitamin drops in her eyes and big stiff pillows in her bed.

“Would you… would you buy a postcard from me? And a plate? I need three rubles,” said Klavsevna.

I gave her three rubles for the postcard and the plate.

On the plate, the edges of which were wrapped in kitschy gilded lace, trembled a poorly painted skylark; a reproach was written in Slavic script: “Still asleep, little man? Spring has sprung, get to work.” The postcard was of a soldier with a harmonica, with an inscription that read: “Farewell to my family, farewell to my friends, farewell to my lady, all’s come to an end.”

What was written on the other side, with a piece of paper glued over it, we are not meant to know.

“How is little Olya doing?” asked Klavsevna.

“Wonderful,” I lied.

“What a chiseled figure she has,” sighed Klavsevna.

“Yes.”

I wanted to remind her that it’s best to keep the sausages in the fridge, but she, most likely, didn’t have one.

She didn’t have anything.

That’s why her room was so spacious and full of light.

“Something to remember me by.” Klavsevna motioned with her eyes toward my pitiful acquisitions. “Maybe you’ll think about me sometimes.”

Once at the threshold, I turned back to look, but she had already dissolved into the air and blended in with the white evening light.