Madness Treads Lightly

CHAPTER 8

Ever since she was a little girl, Katya Sinitsyna had considered herself both deeply unfortunate and deeply unlucky. Even in kindergarten she got blamed for other children’s misdeeds. All the way through school, there’d been no end to her troubles.

Katya was a good student and especially liked math and physics. Her classmates copied her homework and tests. Katya sincerely believed she was doing a good deed by letting them copy the answers to a few physics or math problems. She obligingly put her homework notebook on the windowsill in the school toilet so during the long break, a good five or six people could take advantage of it—that is, as many girls as fit with their notebooks on the wide windowsill of the girls’ bathroom.

At tests, Katya managed to write down the answers using carbon paper and pass them on to her suffering neighbors. The first time she was caught was in eighth grade. The bald little physics teacher in his dark blue lab coat pushed her out of the classroom, erased the test from the board, and quickly wrote a new one.

Katya was taken to the principal, her parents were called in, and she was punished as harshly as the rules allowed. She was lucky she wasn’t expelled. Katya thought her classmates should have appreciated her heroism and given her her due for her self-sacrifice, but the reaction was nil. Just as no one had been her friend before, no one had any plans to be her friend now.

The school Katya went to was the best in Khabarovsk. It was a special English school with a concentration in mathematics. Only children of the Communist Party and military elite could get in. Katya’s mother was a dentist at the elite’s military clinic, so her family’s connection wasn’t exactly direct. They’d accepted Katya at the school because her mother treated the principal and the head teacher.

Children of the elite lived by special rules. For them, people were divided into two categories. First and most important was the small handful of the select. For all the rest they used the contemptuous word “populace.” The word, even the very concept, had been borrowed from their parents.

Everything was different for the populace—their way of life, their morals, even their sausage, which was like cardboard, inedible and nasty. The sausage situation had always been bad in Khabarovsk, and the populace stood in long lines to buy it. An elite child looking at that kind of line through the window of his papa’s Volga was only reinforced in his contempt for those who hadn’t had the good fortune to belong to the close and cozy little world of the select.

Starting in first grade, Katya had felt that she would be an outsider to her classmates forever. Her mama, the dentist, was staff, so to speak. The children of the first and second secretaries of the Provincial and City Party Committees, the offspring of prominent trade union officials and military leaders on a provincial level, would never consider some dentist’s daughter their equal.

Still, she stubbornly believed that if she was nice and good, people would like her and want to be her friend. Who cared who her parents were? A dentist wasn’t the lowest rung on the ladder, either. After all, everyone was friends with the son of the director of the city’s principal food store, and he was a lousy student who liked to pick fights.

In the younger grades, Katya would bring in her favorite toys and give them away. She liked to give presents, but most importantly, she wanted everyone to understand that she was a nice, good, generous little girl and to want to be her friend.

A few of her presents were condescendingly accepted, but the majority of the secondhand plastic dolls and shabby plush animals were rejected with disdain. What did elite children care about the tacky, boring toys put out by the local toy factory for the populace? Elite children had German dolls with real hair you could shampoo and Czech stuffed animals with expressive little faces.

Katya’s mama had taught her it wasn’t the present but the thought that counted. But it turned out that Katya’s thought didn’t count to her classmates, none of whom found her interesting, no matter how hard she tried.

Katya wanted so much for everyone to like her. Well, maybe not everyone, but at least a few. She thought she could earn her classmates’ love by explaining what they didn’t understand in physics and math and letting them copy off of her. She was waiting for them to finally understand how kindhearted she was. But no one did. All her kindnesses were treated as part of the natural order of things, as something that was to be expected. Katya’s mama fixed their teeth, and Katya solved their problems.

Another child in Katya’s place might have said to hell with her arrogant classmates and stopped dragging toys from home and letting the other students copy from her tests. Another child might get mad and develop a fierce hatred not only for the elite kids but for all humanity for their stubborn refusal to like or accept her. The older Katya got, though, the deeper she was convinced of her own—and only her own—inferiority.

When she tried to share her accumulated insult with her mama, her mama would cut her off.

“Look inside you for the reason! Why is it no one wants to be your friend? Surely you don’t believe that everyone else is bad and you’re good.”

Katya didn’t believe that. She believed more and more deeply that she was the bad one.

There was a terrible rainstorm on the evening of her graduation, leaving the streets extremely muddy. Katya left home in a flimsy white dress she’d sewn herself for her first real dance. When she ran across the school yard barefoot, holding an umbrella in one hand and her white patent sandals wrapped up in the other, a black Volga from the City Party Committee rushed past her at full speed.

Its wheels sent up a fountain of mud that drenched Katya from head to toe. Not only was her white graduation dress covered in mud but so was her carefully made-up face and her short, reddish hair. Two of Katya’s classmates were in that Volga.

The son of the City Party Committee’s second secretary had pestered his father for permission to drive to graduation night in his official car and to let his best friend accompany him in the passenger seat. It had been for the sake of that very same boy, for the sake of the manly, broad-shouldered Party secretary’s son, that Katya had made such an effort, spending nights sewing the white dress and applying makeup in front of the mirror for three hours.

They hadn’t doused her with mud on purpose. She didn’t go to the graduation dance. She didn’t even wash the dress. She just threw it out and tried to forget all about the elite school and the boys and girls who hadn’t wanted to be her friend.

With the highest grades, Katya headed for Moscow, where she had been accepted into MAI—the Moscow Aviation Institute. Now she was surrounded not by the children of the select, but by children of the populace. However, her experience in the elite school in Khabarovsk had taken its toll. Katya didn’t know how to behave normally with people. Before they ever even met, she suspected each one of them of despising and disliking her. She couldn’t even say the simplest things to her dorm mates. She apologized forty times a day, wouldn’t look anyone in the eye, and earned a reputation as being “a little odd.” Once again no one was her friend—not because she was a dentist’s daughter, but because of her impenetrable reticence.

She didn’t get along with the boys at MAI, either. She didn’t go to the parties, and no one noticed her at the institute. She roamed the halls like a shadow, ducked her short ginger head, didn’t talk to anyone, and when someone said something to her, she turned red and looked away, as if she were guilty of something. If Katya did like some boy, she would try her hardest to hide it and not to come into his field of vision.

When Mitya Sinitsyn came into her life, he arrived like lightning out of a clear sky. Katya was in her third year. The student club at MAI had a songwriters’ concert just before New Year’s. After the concert, a cheerful group of students invited a few of the performers to the dorm.

Katya was lying on her bed, alone in her empty dorm room, reading Dostoyevsky’s Diary of a Writer. She heard them singing and having fun in the next room, but she didn’t care. All of a sudden the door opened, and there stood a tall boy wearing a black sweater and black jeans. His curly blond hair was cut short, and his bright blue eyes were full of kindness.

“Good evening,” he said in a low voice. “You don’t happen to have a little bread, do you? My apologies for barging in. They sent me because I’m the only sober one left.”

Without waiting for her answer, he crossed the room and sat right down on Katya’s bed.

“Yes, I think we do.” Katya tried to jump up from the bed, but he held her by the arm.

“You’re reading Diary of a Writer? Everyone’s drinking and you’re here quietly communing with Dostoyevsky? Why didn’t I see you at the concert?”

“I didn’t go.” Katya freed herself, jumped away, and slid her feet into her slippers. “What kind of bread do you want? White or black?”

“Why didn’t you go to the concert? Don’t you like songwriters?” He seemed to have forgotten all about the bread.

“Why do you say that? I do. It’s just… I wanted to be alone and read.”

Katya was standing in the middle of the room in oversized, worn-out slippers, thin stockings, and a long, loose sweater.

“Do you always look so frightened?” he asked. He got up from the bed, walked over to her, and took her hand. “And are your hands always so cold? My name’s Mitya.”

“Katya.” She could feel herself blushing.

“Pleased to meet you! Could I take them the bread and come back and sit with you a little?”

The suggestion was such a surprise that Katya didn’t answer, she just pulled her head down into her shoulders, freed her hand from his warm grip, slipped over to the shared refrigerator, and pulled out half of a white baguette.

“I’m sorry. I guess there isn’t any black,” she mumbled, holding out the bread.

He returned five minutes later, carrying his guitar.

“Since you weren’t at the concert, I want to sing for you. There”—he nodded at the wall, on the other side of which they heard laughing and cheerful whoops—“everyone is drunk and crazy. You and I may be the only sober people in this whole building.”

He sat down on a chair, tuned the guitar, and started singing for her. Katya listened as if enchanted. She couldn’t tell whether the songs were good. She didn’t understand a word of them. She just looked into his kind, bright blue eyes and was afraid to breathe.

After he was finished singing, Mitya moved to the creaking bed, set aside the guitar, took Katya’s face in his hands, and pressed his mouth to her tense, clamped lips.

At age twenty, Katya was kissing for the first time in her life. Naturally, what happened after that was for the first time, too. It was something she’d only read about and seen in movies. Before that night, it was like she hadn’t been living at all but just looking at a movie about an alien life. Everything had seemed bright and significant for other people. But for her, the nondescript, browbeaten Khabarovsk girl, nothing of significance could ever happen. She’d long made her peace with the idea that she would grow old, unnoticed and unloved, and die an old maid in dreary solitude.

A stranger, strong and handsome, had kissed her slowly and tenderly. Knowledgeably. Mitya Sinitsyn had plenty of experience with women. True, he’d never liked a woman like Katya before. He liked mature women who were uninhibited and sophisticated. He’d been attracted by the kind of women about whom he would say, “Woman exists according to a formula: legs—breasts—lips. If the legs are long, the breasts heavy and firm, and the lips full, the rest doesn’t matter.”

What he’d felt when he saw the skinny ginger sparrow on the dorm bed could have been called pity. This touching little girl was sitting reading Dostoyevsky against the backdrop of the drunken laughter coming from the next room. Her huge eyes, frightened, were also intelligent.

He felt like staying with her, singing for her—without any ulterior motive. She held her breath listening, and her eyes were full of so much admiration, gratitude, and love. Mitya felt big, strong, and good.

At first he wanted just to put his arms around those sharp little shoulders, stroke that short, tousled hair, and console the defenseless, skinny being on the bed. And the moment he touched his lips to her pursed lips, he suddenly discovered with amazement that he felt a sharp urge he’d never felt before.

Katya’s head was spinning. She’d forgotten the world outside her room—her arrogant classmates in Khabarovsk, her stern and cold mother. It turned out that she was alive, tender, and sensitive, that she could be loved and admired, too; she could have words whispered in her ear by hot lips that made shivers run over her skin.

“You’re still a virgin?” she heard his hot, questioning whisper, which to her sounded like magical, unearthly music.

This discovery that he would be her first frightened him, but it also excited Mitya. He’d had many women in his life, but up until this moment he had not been the first for any of them.

Mitya had no problem spending the night in Katya’s dorm room. Katya’s roommates tactfully didn’t show up until morning. And in the morning, they woke to a completely different Katya. In the morning she could see that she actually was very pretty and feminine. From that morning on, she stopped pulling her head into her shoulders. She walked tall and wasn’t afraid to look people in the eyes and smile—and live.

Mitya Sinitsyn asked her to marry him just two days later, on the last day of December, when the clock struck midnight, ringing in 1991. Katya had no doubt they would never be parted. It was as if they’d been created for each other.

The Sinitsyn family welcomed Katya good-naturedly. They could tell right away that this quiet, intelligent girl from Khabarovsk was no provincial angling for a Moscow residence permit. She looked at Mitya with such adoration, she was so modest and well-bred, that neither Mitya’s mother nor his sister had any suspicions about her motives for marrying Mitya.

Everything was going so well for them. At first they rented a room in a communal apartment, but soon after, Mitya’s sister helped them get an apartment. True, the apartment was on the outskirts of town, in Vykhino, and on the first floor, but it had two rooms and its own kitchen and bath.

Katya graduated with honors and got a job at a machine-building institute as a junior research associate, but she realized very quickly that this wasn’t a job, but a waste of her time. She wasn’t especially concerned about building a career. The main thing in her life was family, that is, Mitya. More than anything in the world, she wanted to give him a child. Her entire being was focused on having a child. She couldn’t think or talk about anything else. But three pregnancies ended in miscarriages, and the doctors eventually gave her a diagnosis as hopeless as death: infertility.

Mitya tried to console her. He said there were many families without children, and maybe one day they could adopt a baby from the orphanage; there were so many abandoned children nowadays. But all his consolations were useless. Katya’s inferiority complex, a feeling instilled in her since childhood, blazed up stronger than ever. She started to feel she was ruining Mitya’s life, that it was only out of pity that he wasn’t abandoning her—infertile and useless as she was.

She was so repulsed by herself that she didn’t want to go on living. That was when a lab tech from her institute who’d found her crying in a secluded corner of the empty smoking room suggested she shoot up.

“Shoot up. You’ll feel better,” he said so gently and sympathetically that Katya, without giving real thought to what his words meant, offered her arm to the needle.

“Well, how is it? Are you getting off?” the lab tech asked, looking in her eyes.

“What?” Katya didn’t understand.

“Well, the high…”

“The high? I don’t know. I guess it’s a little better,” Katya answered uncertainly.

As the drug spread through her body, she was delighted and surprised to discover that the desperate sadness that had been crushing her soul lately was evaporating. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt light and cheerful.

“What was that?” she asked tech boy.

“Morphine,” he answered matter-of-factly. “If you want more, I can get you as much as you need.”

Katya did want more. As soon as the shot’s effects dissipated, she felt terrible again, worse than before. At first she had enough money, but before too long she had to get it from Mitya by lying to him.

Soon, she was an addict, though she didn’t think of herself that way. Her life with Mitya became a constant struggle. He dragged her to different doctors, drug experts, and hypnotherapists to try to cure her, though to her it felt as though he just wanted to take away the only joy in her life.

Despite the depth of her addiction, Katya realized how important it was not to make friends in the complicated and dangerous drug world. She believed her morphine use was a temporary distraction, that she could quit at any time. Tomorrow, next week, next month—her stash would run out and she’d quit. Just not right now, not this minute. How could she refuse herself a hit when it was right there in front of her and all she had to do was slip a slender needle into her vein?

Later—tomorrow or next month—she would definitely quit. The main thing was to be sensible and cautious, to leave herself a way out, not to forget that the more druggies you have around you, the harder it is to quit. And anyway, a morphine high is such a subtle and intimate thing, it’s better to experience it alone.

Katya quit her job. She’d stopped wanting to be around people. She bought her drugs in places she knew and from people she trusted: on the Old Arbat, from a few pharmacies scattered across Moscow, sometimes at hotels and bars. She tried to buy in a different place each time so as not to come across the same dealers too often. Dealers were always trying to get to know you, to solidify the contact. They could tell at a glance that Katya was hooked, and they had an interest in making her a steady customer. But Katya held firmly to her principle and made no connections.

Mitya made his last attempt to drag his wife out of her addiction just six weeks before his death. He introduced Katya to a well-respected and expensive psychotherapist, Regina Valentinovna Gradskaya.

“You have a very serious addiction, and it’s going to be very hard for you to quit cold turkey. You have to act cautiously and gradually, lowering the dose a little at a time,” Regina Valentinovna told Katya.

Other people said that the most important thing was to make a firm decision, that it was better to quit cold turkey. It would be horrible at first, but then it would get better.

Only Gradskaya didn’t demand drastic action. She was subtler and more attentive than the others Mitya had sent her to. She, the famous psychotherapist, treated Katya entirely for free. The others hadn’t understood Katya. They’d wanted to doom her to the savage agonies of withdrawal, to the torture of abstinence. Who could she trust if not Regina Valentinovna?