The Big Green Tent

THE BIG GREEN TENT

Dear little Olga, like a lovely pinkish-yellow onion bulb, slightly plump in her silky transparent skin, unmarked and smooth, was pleasing to men and women, cats and dogs alike. How was it that she, so healthy and cheerful, with her dimpled smile, had been born to such dour, aging parents, career Party officials whose services to the state were both significant and highly confidential, and who enjoyed all the outward signs of official favor: medals and decorations, private automobiles, a dacha in the Generals’ Compound, and groceries delivered to their door in brown paper bags and cardboard boxes through a closed distribution network?

Even more remarkable was how credulously, in what good faith, she absorbed all the good things they told her, and failed to notice the bad things they did. She grew up honest and principled, always putting collective concerns first, and personal concerns second. From her parents she inherited a hatred for the rich (where were they, anyway?), as well as respect for the working man (or woman)—Faina Ivanovna, their housekeeper, for example, or Nikolai Ignatievich, who chauffeured her father’s official Volga automobile, not to mention Evgeny Borisovich, the chauffeur of her mother’s gray one.

How joyfully easy it was to be a good Soviet girl! The Artek Pioneer Camp, with its blue nights and red bandanas, was perfectly in keeping with the closed grocery distributor; and her parents’ private cars, which dropped her off at the dacha on Saturdays, were not in the least incompatible with equality and brotherhood. She was guilty of nothing, before no one, and she loved Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev, the Motherland, and the Party, with a love both joyous and serene. She was morally stable and highly politically aware, as was noted in her letter of recommendation upon entering the Komsomol in seventh grade.

Afanasy Mikhailovich, Olga’s father, worked in the Army Construction Corps, and her mother was the editor of a magazine that had more to do with upbringing than with literature.

Antonina Naumovna, her mother (the descendant of Orthodox believers who named their children after the calendar of saints, and not in the least Jewish), had graduated from the Institute of Philosophy and Literature, and was thus practically a writer. Olga was being equipped, according to her parents’ wishes, to study in the philology department at Moscow State University.

The first year of university did not portend any ill. The girl eagerly carried out her mandatory stint of social volunteer work, was elected to the Komsomol committee board, studied zealously and with fine results, and acquired a fiancé—an upstanding young man. He was from a military family—a smart fellow, not a philologist, but a student at the Aviation Institute. Senior year. Antonina Naumovna liked Vova, as he was called—he was broad-shouldered, tallish, with fair hair that fell in a wave on his forehead. He was always immaculately clean and wore a hand-knitted reindeer sweater; but in winter he wore a leather bomber jacket, the epitome of chic in the 1930s, which made a strong impression on Antonina Naumovna.

The wedding took place after Olga had completed her first year of study, at the beginning of June so that Olga wouldn’t eventually “rue the day” by marrying in May, as Faina Ivanovna, the housekeeper—a true fountain of folk wisdom—warned.

Vova moved into the general’s apartment, into Olga’s room. The apartment easily accommodated one more person, though they did invest in another, wider bed. Strange as it might seem, it was the general who bought it. Olga refused point-blank to take part in such an ambiguous shopping expedition, and Antonina Naumovna was up to her ears in preparations for yet another congress of Soviet teachers; or was it Soviet doctors? Afanasy Mikhailovich recalled that he had seen a furniture store on Smolenskaya Embankment, and told his wife that he would buy the bed. He went there after work. The store turned out to specialize in antiques. The general wandered among the pieces of furniture of all times and nations, and thought about his grandfather, a mahogany carver. He hadn’t thought about him for some fifty years, and, suddenly, amid the flimsy bamboo whatnots, the monumental writing desks with their secret drawers, the new forest growth of white-and-gold empire chairs and love seats, a scraggly old man, small of stature, with massive blackish brown hands, and sharp eyes with delicate, watery pouches underneath, came back to life. And the smell of his grandfather’s workshop struck his nostrils—turpentine, spirits, lacquer—so thick and palpable he could almost taste it. He remembered how his grandfather had taught him, still a little tyke, to sand, to strip, and polish …

Afanasy Mikhailovich walked and walked, forgetting why he had come. Then he remembered, and bought a Karelian birch double bed, the work of a peasant craftsman with an imaginative bent, not thinking for a minute about the two young Komsomol members, who loved sleeping under the stars in tents and would now have to labor for the future between ornate little scrolls and columns, watched over by four cherubs.

The bed, with all its whimsical splendor, made a strong impression; but it didn’t get in the way of business—his grandson Konstantin was born exactly ten lunar months after the wedding day.

But the general, after that first visit to the antiques store, had begun frequenting it. To the surprise of Antonina Naumovna, he gradually started exchanging their sturdy, Stalin-era furniture for intricate, inspired pieces of ancient vintage that he would refurbish himself.

Afanasy Mikhailovich was older than his wife by ten years. She had long begun to sense the approach of old age in him, and she viewed this new passion of his as an old man’s eccentricity—albeit a fairly harmless one. He fitted out a workshop for himself at the dacha, and puttered around in it happily; meanwhile, his military bravura and political acumen, which his wife had always admired, diminished by the day.

Antonina Naumovna was not particularly thrilled about the birth of a child so early in the marriage. Olga was not yet nineteen when they brought the bundle, wrapped up in a blue silk receiving blanket tied with a blue ribbon, home with them from the maternity hospital. The little bundle turned out to be exemplary, just like its parents: it ate, slept, and pooped like clockwork, made everyone smile, and permitted Olga to continue her literary studies without even taking maternity leave until the child learned to walk.

Faina Ivanovna, who had worked in the family since the war ended and had raised Olga from infancy, had planned to leave after the birth of the child—to work for another family of only two people, who had long been courting her, and where there would be less work—but the baby, Kostya, so captured her heart that she stayed with him until her own death.

Toward the end of her university studies, in which Olga excelled, something happened that would shatter the family’s world. Olga, herself so pure and good, had succumbed to a degenerate influence at the university. One of her teachers, secretly anti-Soviet and an enemy, it went without saying, of the people, was arrested for libel published abroad. Olga and some fellow students, misguided fools, signed a letter in his defense.

As a consequence, she and the other signees were kicked out of the university. Antonina Naumovna repented of ever having sent her daughter to the university, but it was already too late. If he had known that her venerable education would turn out this way, Olga’s courageous and manly father would doubtless have quoted, if only loosely: “Who increases his knowledge, increases his sorrows.” He didn’t know Ecclesiastes, however, and for that reason, when the pernicious influence of a university education affected his daughter so dramatically, he told his wife with bitterness:

“This is what all your university nonsense leads to. I told you that we should live more simply, closer to the people. The girl’s brains have been warped … if we had enrolled her in an engineering school, she wouldn’t have picked up any of that rot … they would have left the girl alone.”

And Afanasy Mikhailovich was most likely right about this. From time immemorial, the university had been a source of intellectual ferment, and the general condemned this not out of his sense of duty to the Party, but from personal conviction.

“Everyone is such a know-it-all,” he said angrily, each time he was faced with something he didn’t understand. And he was more and more baffled by his own daughter. She spoke about even the simplest of matters in such a way that it sounded like nonsense, just to confuse him, it seemed. His son-in-law, to give him credit, did not share Olga’s views. They quarreled now and then—about politics, since there was nothing else to complain about. They had everything they could possibly need: a nanny, a country house, grocery delivery service … and yet the situation got so bad that Vova slammed the door behind him one day, and left to go live with his parents.

If Olga had listened to her parents, if she had repented at the university meeting, cried, and signed a recantation, which is what they had demanded, her expulsion could have been avoided. However, as we know, she had been raised to be honest and principled—her parents had instilled this in her since childhood—and for this reason she refused outright to repent, to admit her mistakes, and to denounce that scum of a teacher, who was also her thesis adviser.

The teacher was arrested at the beginning of September, and Olga was summoned for the first interrogation at the end of the month. The honest girl told the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. What else could she have done? Her truth consisted in the fact that the teacher was, indeed, an outstanding scholar; that he was critical of many aspects of Soviet life, and his criticism was warranted; and that she, as his student, fully shared his views on literature and life.

Her testimony did no great harm to the arrested man, but her parents paid dearly for their daughter’s mistakes. Afanasy Mikhailovich was summoned to a secret place for a very serious conversation, where they put the screws on him (figuratively speaking). Soon afterward, he submitted his resignation and moved to the dacha. In his heart of hearts, he even felt glad about the changes. He liked living outside of town, where he could carry on the tradition of his family craft. While he nursed a quiet hurt and resentment toward his daughter, he didn’t allow his domestic troubles to poison his mood or elevate his blood pressure. What’s more, he had another diversion.

Antonina Naumovna, on the other hand, struck a preemptive blow. Even before the higher-ups could get together to shake their collective fingers at her for the way she had raised her child, she managed to publish a vicious article about the former teacher’s libelous book, and offered to testify as a citizen prosecutor at the trial of the miscreant. After this, her relationship with her daughter foundered once and for all.

Olga felt like a stranger in her own home. She never told anyone anything about herself; she came and went, sometimes taking Kostya out for a walk, sometimes disappearing altogether for a day or two. In February the trial of the teacher and his friend, also a frustrated writer, who had sent their manuscripts to the West for publication, got under way.

Olga would go to the Krasnopresnensky District Courthouse to assume her place in the crowd of young men and women, whose faces all bore intelligent and daring expressions. They all seemed to know one another. Sometimes someone would take a bottle out of his briefcase, or a flask out of his pocket, and pass it around. At these moments Olga felt lonely and unhappy: they never offered it to her. One day, when she stepped into an eatery next to the courthouse, more for the warmth than from hunger, she found herself at a table with this group of people. They accepted her as one of their own when she told them that the accused was her teacher and adviser, and that she had been kicked out of the university because of it.

A tall young man whom she had noticed before in the crowd—because, despite the bitter frost, his head was bare and his curls were dusted with snow, and he pulled out a camera now and then, and thrust pieces of paper at someone occasionally, and had once been packed into a paddy wagon and taken away right in front of their eyes—this very same young man handed her a glass of vodka directly underneath a warning sign that said bringing in and drinking alcoholic beverages on the premises was strictly forbidden. She drank almost half the glass.

And happiness arrived at that very moment. Happiness smelled like overcooked dumplings and damp fur coats and hats, with a slight tinge of chlorine and a whiff of stale alcohol. It smelled of danger and daring; and Olga felt that the group of sympathizers with the accused had finally accepted her. The feeling reminded her of the collective childhood joy of Young Pioneer gatherings, sparks floating above a campfire under electric blue skies, Komsomol trips to harvest potatoes, and singing songs there and back on the commuter train. Only it was clear that all she had experienced in her childhood had just been a substitute, a prelude, to this genuine unity of intelligent, serious, and courageous people. They looked like true comrades, and they clapped one another on the shoulders, sometimes exploding with laughter, but more often whispering something in secret. The most attractive person at the table was the tall, curly-haired one. They called him Ilya. He was also the one in charge of the vodka.

And so it happened that Olga’s family continued to live its former life, and Olga found herself in a completely new one. The trial ended, the anti-Soviets received the prison sentences they had earned and were sent off to serve their terms. And the group of people that had gathered in the courtyard of the Krasnopresnensky District Courthouse grew even closer.

The word dissident had still not entered the Russian language, and the term “men of the sixties” was still associated only with the followers of Chernyshevsky in the previous century; but inside astute and reflective minds, thoughts—quiet as worms and dangerous as spirochetes—were taking shape. Ilya expounded on them to Olga in a form she could grasp during the intervals between their embraces, which took place in the room on Arkhipov Street. This was where Ilya had lived with his mother before he had gotten married; and even afterward, he never completely moved out. He took Olga there from time to time, only during the early hours of the day, as his mother worked as a kindergarten nurse from eight to three.

Ilya had known the imprisoned teacher well. He knew almost all the people who had gathered in front of the court. Moreover, he knew everything there was to know, period; and especially what was written in the fine print. He even created the impression that the smaller the print, the more interesting it was for him. He was especially knowledgeable about what was left out of college textbooks. He gleaned his information from the libraries where he buried himself during his school years and after. To Olga’s great surprise, the erudite Ilya did not even have a college degree. He had graduated from high school, but hadn’t wanted to work for the government; and to avoid being persecuted by the state for “parasitism,” he began to work as a secretary for some professor (a job that existed only on paper).

Olga and Ilya’s romance unfolded for the most on foot, during strolls through the sacred sites of Moscow’s literary past, which Ilya knew well. He would stop in front of a crooked little house with a lopsided porch and tell her: “This house survived the great fire of 1812. Vyazemsky used to frequent it … And here, Mandelstam stayed, with his brother … Bulgakov’s wife, Elena Sergeevna, use to stop by this pharmacy to get medicines for her husband…”

But the subject he knew most about was the Futurists, and the whole Russian avant-garde. He used to spend hours at the counters of antiquarian booksellers, where he also knew everyone, and they knew him, paging through thin volumes printed on damp gray paper. Sometimes he bought them, sometimes he would only smack his lips in delight. Once he made Olga run home to borrow a hundred rubles from her parents so he could buy a rare edition of Khlebnikov.

Thus the year passed, and they continued to stroll through the streets and lanes, drinking with friends of Ilya’s, all of whom were special, like a select group: one a music historian, another a jockey, a third a park ranger whom they went to visit on the Oka River, and yet another, a real Orthodox priest. The sweetest one was a redheaded teacher of deaf-and-dumb children. Olga had never realized how many interesting people there were in the world, and how different they were from one another, all of them with their distinctive philosophies and religions. There was even a Buddhist! Olga read books, and it was like getting a second university education, but much more interesting; and the books Ilya gave her to read were either antique or had been smuggled in from abroad. Once he even asked Olga to translate a book from French—a Catholic book, about miracles at Lourdes.

They were so happy together that Olga found it hard to believe he had a wife somewhere, to whom he would return late in the evening. Then something changed in his family life. He went to see his wife in Timiryazevka less and less often, until he finally moved back into his mother’s communal apartment for good. He introduced Olga to the quiet Maria Fedorovna.

The more distant Olga grew from her parents, the closer Vova grew to them. He would visit on Sundays, and Faina Ivanovna, the nanny, would deliver his son, all dressed to go out and play, into his safekeeping. They would spend the afternoon together, then return in time for dinner. Vova fed his son himself, put him to bed, and then had a meal with his parents-in-law. They pressed him to stay for the meal each time, and each time he made as if to refuse, wanting them to know that he didn’t visit because of the special (though not extravagant) Sunday meal; and it wasn’t Faina Ivanovna’s plump, undersalted pies that kept him coming week after week, but family.

Olga was absent on Sundays, and they usually didn’t mention her. She was a sore spot for all of them, and they shared the same sense of injury, bewilderment, and inexplicable betrayal. The abandoned husband also suffered from a young man’s wounded pride. To his honor, it must be said that he only took his first lover two years after their separation, when Olga demanded a divorce. Until that moment he had felt himself to be a married man, away on an exceedingly long business trip. He maintained a senseless fidelity and paid forty rubles in alimony each month, which no one had asked him for. He kept thinking that Olga would come to her senses and they would pick up their married life where they had left off, when their conjugal life had faltered …

When she found out that Olga had filed for divorce, Antonina Naumovna fell into a quiet rage. But she knew how to restrain herself; her passion seethed in the deepest part of her. The more she restrained herself, the tighter her jaw clamped shut, and the more her pale eyes seemed to bulge in their sockets. She didn’t say a word to Olga, and she didn’t let off steam at home; she knew how to unleash her fury at the editorial office. Her subordinates quaked: one of them resigned from fright, and the secretary, who was devoted to Antonina Naumovna heart and soul, suffered a ministroke.

Since his retirement, Afanasy Mikhailovich had quietly reveled in his uncomplicated existence. He was not as emotionally high-strung as his wife, and he was somewhat reluctant to expurgate his daughter from his life; he simply set her aside. Unlike Antonina Naumovna, he refused to let his suffering get the better of him.

Evidently, Olga herself sensed her father’s weakness. He was the first one in whom she confided about her changing circumstances, not her mother. But this was a calculated move.

In the middle of February, Olga moved to the dacha. She arrived on the bus like an ordinary person. On a weekday; not in the morning, nor in the evening—but after midday. They had just delivered her father a meal from a nearby military sanatorium where he had a voucher: a three-course meal and a delicious sweet roll from their own bakery. Afanasy Mikhailovich was just busying himself with the lunch pails when Olga showed up. He was glad to see her—it had been a long time, and the memory of the family quarrel was fading. She was cheerful, just like her old self. She shared her father’s meal without balking, and even joined him in a preprandial drink. After their lunch she put her feet up on the leather armchair with the aluminum tag on the neck rest. There were still vestiges of the government-issue furniture that the general had purchased for mere kopecks when he bought the dacha, and Olga chose this monstrosity, so familiar to her from childhood, over her father’s refurbished antiques, made entirely of wood, and devoid of softness and coziness, all of them from the same antiques store where he had found her bed.

“Daddy,” Olga said, calling him by her childhood name for him, “I want to live at the dacha with you. I could bring Kostya, too. What do you think?”

Afansy Mikhailovich felt a surge of happiness. He didn’t even suspect that there might be a catch.

“Sure, live here as long as you like, why bother to ask? But what about work? It will be hard to get around without a car…”

Traveling back and forth to the city was complicated: to Nakhabino by bus, which didn’t run on schedule, but according to whim, and from Nakhabino by commuter train to Rizhskaya Station.

“It’s no problem for me,” Olga said, laughing. “I don’t work, I study.”

Afanasy brightened: his wife hadn’t told him that Olga had gone back to school. But his joy was short-lived. Olga was not studying in the university, she was taking evening courses in Spanish, for some reason. She didn’t have classes every day. And she didn’t intend to reenroll at the university.

Afanasy Mikhailovich was weighing all of this in his mind, trying to understand why his daughter had suddenly taken a notion to make this change, and wondering how his wife would react to it, and whether he should have discussed the matter with her first, before agreeing to it. But Olga cut through the confusion abruptly.

“My friend might come here to live, too.”

The old general choked with indignation: she had divorced without asking them, and now she had taken a lover, whom she wanted to bring home with her, and she was asking for her father’s blessing! But, after a moment of silence, he relented.

“Go ahead, live with whoever you want. Why should I care?”

He frowned, consumed the last of his government-issue meat patty, and went to carry out his postprandial ritual—a nap.

Several days later, an old Pobeda drove into the general’s huge property. Out of it tumbled Kostya in a sheepskin coat, a puppy that seemed to be dressed in an identical fur coat, Olga, with a pile of books in her arms, and a tall, shaggy-looking man with a pair of skis.

The windows of Afanasy Mikhailovich’s workshop, where he was engrossed in his wood, were on another side of the house, and he didn’t see them arrive on the porch, jostling one another, falling down in the snow, and dropping mittens and books along the way.

When he went to answer the doorbell, he saw what appeared to him to be a whole crowd, after the seclusion of his dacha life. Kostya was shrieking, the dog was barking, Olga was laughing artificially, and over all of this mayhem loomed a tall, gangly man—whom the general instantly recognized to be the root of all the evil.

This evil root was Ilya Bryansky. He extended a bony, lean hand. He smelled of cheap tobacco, some familiar chemical reagent, and veiled hostility. Olga also smelled different—audacious and alien. Only his grandson, Kostya, and the mutt of a puppy seemed like his own. But Afanasy Mikhailovich didn’t indulge in analyzing his feelings. He kissed his daughter and grandson and went back upstairs to the second floor, to take up his handiwork again. The smell of varnish, carpenter’s glue, and sawdust soothed him more effectively than valerian. He took the finest grade of sandpaper and began to rub the side of a chair, removing the offensive layer of varnish, and his hand delighted in the curvy smoothness of the scroll that supported the armrest.

From downstairs he heard explosive laughter, snorting and guffaws, trailing off into groans and squealing—sounds not at all befitting a quiet, well-mannered household.

How brazen she is—showing up here with her lover and her son in tow, acting like it’s nothing, thought the general.

They began to live in two households, under one roof. Afanasy Mikhailovich, on his military sanatorium provisions, carried on according to his habitual schedule: rising at seven, dinner at eight, bed at eleven. Olga’s family lived any which way. They would sometimes throw together some insubstantial meal, but mostly just eat sandwiches. All day long they opened and closed the refrigerator. They got up and went to bed when it pleased them, and not by the clock. They would take walks, drink tea in the middle of the night, sleep till all hours, laugh and bang on the typewriter till dawn. And they worked erratically, too. Sometimes they left for work in the morning, sometimes in the middle of the day. Olga left for her evening courses at four and returned on the last bus. Ilya would pick her up at the bus stop. Sometimes with Kostya. But why take the child out at night, in the bitter cold?

Although, it was true, they never left Kostya alone—they took turns going out. And if they would be gone overnight, they called on Faina Ivanovna. During the past two months, they had asked Afanasy Mikhailovich to look after Kostya only once. He had taken him up to his workshop, and the child had lent him a hand. He was a smart boy.

On Saturdays, Antonina Naumovna arrived in the gray Volga, laden with cake and groceries. She organized the Sunday family dinner. The new fiancé avoided running into her for a long time; when the weekend rolled around, he would make himself scarce. Only at the beginning of April did they finally meet. Antonina’s anticipatory hostility was not misplaced: she didn’t like him. How could she? Except for his curly head of hair. But otherwise—his face was gaunt, his nose was like a crow’s beak, his lips were thick and red, like he was feverish. He cut an absurd figure: narrow shoulders, spindly legs; he looked like he might snap in two at the waist. His trousers were tight, and they bulged out in front, as if they were well-packed. But he was a scrawny little runt! Ugh.

Antonina nodded, pursing her lips.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Antonina Naumovna.”

“Ilya.”

“And your last name?

“Ilya Isayevich Bryansky,” he said.

Bryansky is just Bryansky, Antonina Naumovna reasoned, bringing her accumulated expertise in categorizing personnel to bear. But Isayevich! Only priests and Jews were named after prophets … and Old Believers. She knew this issue inside and out, having had to defend herself on this count her whole life.

But what did the girl see in him? She had traded Vova, such a decent sort, and a good husband, for this scraggly beanpole. And, what was worse, Kostya couldn’t take his eyes off him, and crawled up and down him like he was some sort of human tree.

When they were at the table, the young family started giggling. Antonina Naumovna noticed that Ilya had tossed a little ball of bread onto Kostya’s plate, and Kostya sprinkled salt on his, as if by chance. Olga sat there with a dumb grin on her face, screwing up her eyes … Ilya ate two pieces of the cake. He licked the cream off the top, like a cat. And he ate up the rest of Kostya’s. And he sucked on his spoon. Disgusting! Afanasy shouldn’t have allowed them to move in. Let them fend for themselves; they’ve had it far too easy in life. And a spiteful dry tear clouded her eye …

Olga’s poor parents couldn’t imagine what on earth this unprepossessing suitor was up to, why the typewriter keys clattered ceaselessly into the night, and why he always had to rush off, abandoning the peaceful luxuries of the dacha. But Olga knew: she was the one who typed all the anti-Sovietism from the onionskin paper. Granted, Olga was not entrusted with any sizable texts. She had neither the speed nor the skill for that. She opted for the poetry, most often Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. She considered this to be a kind of community service. The thick books were passed on to more dexterous typists, who were paid for the work—either Galya Polukhina, a girlhood friend, or Vera Leonidovna, a professional typist.

Sometimes Ilya delivered the pages to his friend Artur, to be bound, and sometimes he distributed them just as they were. Artur made lovely volumes of poetry covered in chintz. Books of a religious nature were bound appropriately—in leatherette or plain calico. It wasn’t easy to pin him down, though. He forgot about what he had agreed to do, and when it was expected to be finished. Ilya made a living from samizdat. Contrary to most of these other heirs of Gutenberg, his intellectual contemporaries, he felt no moral qualms about material compensation. He expected to be well paid for his time and effort, and he invested his earnings in his photography and his expanding archive.

What an abundance of poems there was! What lyrical abundance! Never before nor after had there been such a time in Russia. Verses filled the airless space, and themselves became the air people breathed—albeit “stolen air,” in the words of Mandelstam. The Nobel Prize, it seemed, was not the supreme literary honor. Rather, it was the honor of being printed and read on these dry, rustling pages, crudely typed or handwritten, full of misprints and errors, sometimes barely legible—conferred on Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and, finally, Brodsky.

“Our high-school literature teacher, Victor Yulievich Shengeli, is someone you ought to meet. You’d really like him. He hasn’t taught for a long time, though. He works in some museum—trying to escape notice.”

The Soviet authorities persecuted the unemployed, including those whom they themselves banned from official employment. The “parasite” Joseph Brodsky had already been released from exile in the village of Norenskaya, but no one could have anticipated that fifty years hence, a memorial room would be established in the local library in his name, and that a down-at-the-heels woman in her waning years would show people around, calling the tour “Brodsky in Norenskaya.”

Olga became more and more adept at translation. She had studied French at university, and Spanish at night school. She picked up Italian as well, studying it on her own in the commuter train on the way to and from the dacha. She made connections, and was sometimes asked to translate film scripts, a task she was very good at. She did other forms of moonlighting—writing research papers, patents. Her earnings were meager at first, but they grew steadily. These jobs were all “unofficial,” of course—officially she was registered as a research assistant, like Ilya. This was a front used by many people at the time.

After the death of his former father-in-law, Ilya found someone else who would register him as an assistant. For Olga, he found an old professor willing to take her on as a secretary. They both joined some sketchy labor union that seemed tailor-made for people trying to evade the Soviet authorities.

At the dacha, Ilya rigged up a darkroom in the broom closet next to the bathroom. He ran a pipe from the WC into the broom closet, just as he had done back in his school days, and performed his magic there during the nights. Afanasy Mikhailovich didn’t notice a thing, since he bathed only on Saturdays. The rest of the week he never so much as glanced at the bathroom or the broom closet.

What happy years they had together! Ilya divorced his first wife. Eventually, without much fuss or bother, he and Olga got married. Olga devoted herself to him heart and soul. Everything he said or did was fascinating and unprecedented: samizdat, photography, travel—he adored the Russian Far North, the Central Asian south, and often set out for the back of beyond. Sometimes he took Olga and Kostya along with him.

Once they took a trip to the region around Vologda—to Belozersk and Ferapontovo. Kostya remembered this long afterward as a magical journey. Everything that happened, every hour of every day, stayed in his memory like a movie he could watch at will—how they went fishing in a rowboat, and slept in a hayloft; and how they climbed the scaffolding surrounding the monastery and he nearly plunged to his death, only Ilya grabbed hold of his jacket just in the nick of time and saved him. And the horribly amusing story of the bee that he ate along with a piece of homemade jam pie, and how Ilya fished the pie right out of his mouth, and then plucked the stinger deftly from his lip.

Olga had other memories: of the vanishing frescoes of the icon painter Dionysius, the crumbling monastery, and the slow, somnolent beauty of the north, which, from that very first sunset, shimmering and pellucid, she recognized as her true home.

It was here, near Vologda, that she finally came to terms with her keen disappointment in her parents’ ideals, in the whole edifice of power and authority of the country she was born in, in the country itself, with its cruel and inhuman regulations and customs. Now she was overcome by a new and heart-wrenching love for this austere, impoverished north, where her father had been born. Her heart leapt to her throat when she watched the late-evening sun sink into the big lake, and saw how the crimson sky gradually gave way to silver, and how this silver spread over everything else, in turn—the fields, the water, the air. This greenish-silver hue was also a revelation of this journey, and it was Ilya who first noticed it, and spoke of it.

* * *

During these years the general ensconced himself in his workshop for good, leaving it only rarely. Olga’s mother was afraid of losing her position at the magazine, but no one tried to remove her: she was a Party-hack writer, a real bigwig.

When Kostya started school, they moved to the Moscow apartment and Antonina Naumovna began staying overnight at the dacha more and more often. The official automobile went back and forth twice a day, nearly every day—dropping her off and picking her up again.

When they had been together ten years, their marriage started to falter.

Ilya became nervous and importunate: his playful effervescence changed to gloominess. At the beginning of 1980 he announced to Olga that they would have to leave the country. They had been talking about it for a long time, but only in a perfunctory way. Suddenly, out of the blue, Ilya started treating it as a matter of grave urgency.

“I’ll request an invitation for the whole family. If you don’t want to come with me, we’ll have to get a divorce.”

“Of course I want to go with you. But think about it—Vova will never let Kostya leave, if only to spite me. When he turns eighteen it won’t be an issue any longer; we won’t need Vova’s permission.” Olga thought Ilya was being unreasonable and demanding. They hadn’t left ten years ago—what was the big hurry now?

Ilya insisted and kept trying to rush things along. Olga met with her ex-husband to discuss it. It was no go. Vova proved to be as intransigent as she had anticipated. It even surprised her how mule-headed he was. He flatly refused to let her have her way, and even gave her a piece of his mind.

Olga begged Ilya to wait another year. He was in a feverish haste: they had to leave; it was now or never. And he had reason to be nervous about his situation. Unpleasant rumors about him were making the rounds, and he was afraid Olga would get wind of them. One day, almost on the spur of the moment, he announced, without going into much detail, that if Olga couldn’t go with him because of Kostya, they would have to divorce immediately.

For Olga this was akin to a disaster—but a strange one, somehow unnecessary, or avoidable. It wasn’t at all clear why Ilya was so adamant about leaving all of a sudden. If they waited a year, Kostya could go with them. Many of their friends had already emigrated to all corners of the earth. There really wasn’t any hurry.

Finally, things broke down, and they filed for a divorce. Now a honeymoon began, only in reverse. The expectation of having to part ways—for one year? maybe two?—lent a bittersweet poignancy to their relations. Even Kostya was overcome by these tangled emotions. He had reached the age when he should have felt most alienated from his parents, but he clung to Ilya so stubbornly that he proved a constant threat to their solitude and emotional intimacy.

In these trying circumstances, their love reached such a fever pitch that their nocturnal passion destroyed the last boundaries between them—they made crazy vows to each other, oaths and promises so outlandish and unrealizable that they seemed to be fifteen years old rather than forty. They swore that no matter what obstacles arose, they would devote the rest of their lives to reuniting with each other.

The mechanism of departure was set in motion. The process was an unusually speedy one. Two weeks after submitting his documents, Ilya received permission to leave. He flew by the conventional route: through Vienna, then on to anywhere in the world. He had his sights set on America. A place far away.

His going-away party was held at the apartment of some friends. The general’s apartment in Moscow wasn’t suitable for any number of reasons.

The send-off was noisy, with peaks and valleys of emotion—sometimes it felt like a funeral, sometimes like a birthday party. In a way it was both.

At Sheremetyevo Airport, Ilya stood out in the crowd of people who were abandoning the country forever. They were nervous, sweaty, and burdened with children, the elderly, and piles of luggage. He wore a serene expression and carried no luggage. He had sent his collection of books ahead of him in a diplomatic mail pouch, arranged through a friend who worked at an embassy. The same friend had also sent the negatives from Ilya’s photo archive. Colonel Chibikov was unlikely to have been privy to this information.

Many facts remained obscure. Why, for example, had Chibikov, who was by then already a general, helped him to emigrate? What did he stand to gain by it? Was Ilya’s job at Radio Liberty a happy escape into freedom or a continuation of the ambiguous game he was mixed up in until the moment of his death?

It was unlikely that anyone would ever know.

Ilya receded into the black hole that yawned beyond the border guards. A camera with no film dangled from his neck—the film had been confiscated by the officials. A half-empty backpack was slung over his shoulder. In it was a change of underwear and an English grammar book, which he had been carrying around with him for two years.

During the night, after Ilya’s departure, Olga started bleeding profusely. She was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. The illness, which had in fact begun long before, had chosen this day to manifest itself.

The first year of Ilya’s absence was marked by feverish correspondence as well as bouts of fever. Olga lost her appetite, grew alarmingly thin, and had to force herself just to eat three spoonfuls of oatmeal a day. Her old friends rallied around her in sympathy. Antonina Naumovna also felt sorry for Olga, and the more she pitied her, the more she hated her former son-in-law.

Ilya had already made it to America by this time. Things were far worse there than he had imagined they would be. Moreover, the German to whom he had entrusted his collection of avant-garde literature, which he had begun amassing in his school years, was dragging his feet about sending it on to him. The value of the books, according to the auction catalogs, was far greater than Ilya had supposed.

Ilya wrote infrequently, but the letters were fascinating. Olga lived from one letter to the next. She inundated him with her missives, paying no heed to the vagaries of postal delivery: for every one he sent, she replied with ten.

A year later, Olga received a terrible blow. Some mutual friends of theirs informed her that Ilya had gotten married. She wrote him a wrathful letter. She got a tender and repentant letter in reply: yes, he had gotten married, the flesh is weak, his marriage was virtually fictitious, he wasn’t actually living with his wife, since she lived in Paris. And she, Olga, must understand—here in America things were just not working out. He had to try to relocate to Europe. Marrying a Russian-French woman would give him that opportunity. It was the only way out.

Then there was a little throwback to the past/glimpse of the future: it was a temporary detour, unavoidable, their happiness still lay ahead of them … and a gentle reproach: you could have left Kostya there for a year, and we would have come back for him …

Olga was consumed with jealousy: Who was this woman, what kind of woman was she, where had she come from? She found out her name from her friends. She had been born in Kiev, had married a Frenchman, lived many years in France, and was then widowed. She was obviously no longer young. That was the only information she could dig up. Olga decided to go to Kiev, where they had mutual acquaintances galore. Truthful by nature, she nevertheless started lying to her Kiev friends right and left, and they told her everything she wanted to know. She even managed to wheedle a photograph of the newlyweds out of one of the bride’s more gullible friends. The photograph showed a plump, middle-aged woman, her fleshy hand resting brazenly on the shoulder of a smiling Ilya. It had been taken at the Paris City Hall. This hand became the primary piece of documentary evidence in the case against him.

Olga carried out a full investigation and uncovered a plethora of details and facts. She returned home, reeling from the heaps of contradictory information, but certain that Ilya had deceived her and that the marriage was in no way fictitious.

When she got back to Moscow, she ended up in the hospital again. More hemorrhaging. The doctors removed a large part of her stomach, a measure that was necessary to save her life. But the main culprit, the biggest ulcer, was the colored photograph of the newlyweds, wrapped up in a plastic bag and tucked away in her cosmetic case. The misdeeds of her ex-husband were all she could talk about. When she came out of the anesthesia, the first thing she said to her friend Tamara, who was sitting next to her and taking care of her, was:

“Did you see the flowers in the picture? That bouquet was huge, wasn’t it?”

The doctors had taken out a part of her stomach, but they couldn’t remove the bleeding wound of her heart.

Olga expected the whole world to take her side in the conflict. Really there was only one side to take: a divorced man had gone away and married someone else at the other end of the earth. The promises, oaths, and vows of eternal love didn’t add up to a side in the conflict at all; they were just words …

In the meantime, Olga’s son, Kostya, was preparing to deal her another blow. He had fallen in love with a girl he had met in college, and they were going to live together for all eternity. The most improbable, and perhaps banal, part of this whole story is that Kostya and Lena, his first and only love, are still living in the general’s Moscow apartment today, with their already grown children.

Olga demanded sympathy and loyalty from Kostya, the person she felt closest to; he, in turn, stubbornly resisted. He didn’t want to sympathize with her, nor did he wish to take anyone’s side in the matter. He loved his mother, but he loved Ilya, too. He didn’t want to hear his mother’s constant reproaches of his stepfather. Olga was deeply offended by this. She grabbed a handful of fabric on the shoulder of his new black sweater, and hissed:

“From Ilya? It didn’t take much to buy you off.”

Ilya did send parcels addressed to Kostya from time to time. Besides the clothes for him, there were also things “for the house,” which were in fact meant for Olga. Olga fastidiously passed these things on to her mother—newfangled can openers, oilcloth for the table in highland plaids, and other cheap rubbish.

Antonina Naumovna was delighted with any sort of foreign household appliance or trinket, but she attempted to put the infidels in their place:

“In Russia, all our might, all the intellect and know-how of our scientists, is for exploring the cosmos and making atomic power stations. They just invent can openers. Well, I have to admit, they do know how to make those.”

Of all the people involved in the situation, Antonina Naumovna was the only happy one. She basked in her triumph. Olga couldn’t bear to look at her; it filled her with rage.

Kostya kept silent. He didn’t want to hear anyone speak ill of Ilya, never mind foreign can openers. Just then he was completely absorbed in his own feelings—his beloved Lena was in her third month of pregnancy and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He was endowed with the same gift for loving as Olga was.

Olga built up a dossier on Ilya. For some reason, she now felt compelled to prove that her ex-husband was an evil man in every respect, in every sense of the word. She began communicating with her humble and unassuming mother-in-law, who had never inspired any interest in her before now, with Ilya’s female cousins, with his childhood friends, and with anyone whose name appeared in his old address book. It transpired that in the seventh grade Ilya had been kicked out of school for stealing some sort of camera lens from the photography club at the House of Pioneers, and even had a police record for this minor infraction.

He had also been caught forging some documents—not very important ones, just a library card from the History Library. But it was still wrong, wasn’t it? Some things about his first family came to light as well—that the child he had abandoned was sick, and he had never provided the family with any financial support. That his first wife, who was a quiet sort, and none too bright, had nevertheless supported Ilya all the years they were together.

“Yes, it figures!” Olga was almost glad to get the lowdown on Ilya’s shady past from completely random people or those with only the most tenuous connection to him. He had been the same kind of cad and opportunist with her as well! She had worked her fingers to the bone to make a decent living, while he had been sitting in the library, or taking photographs, or riding a bicycle, or traveling; and all on her income! Well, he earned something from his books and photography, it was true; but she never saw a kopeck of it. He spent it all on his own pastimes and pleasures. He was just a plain, old-fashioned parasite—and the Soviet authorities had nothing to do with it!

Her friend Tamara was the first to realize that Olga was losing her mind. It was as though a demon had taken over this once kind and magnanimous person. When Olga talked about Ilya, the tone of her voice changed; her manner of speaking, even her choice of words, was different. The former Olga had not even known such words. Tamara equivocated for a long time, but finally told her friend that she needed to face her obsession head-on and that if she couldn’t rein in her runaway jealousy, she would end up in a psychiatric ward.

Olga was eloquent and articulate, however, and knew how to convince everyone that it wasn’t about obsession or jealousy, but about truth and justice. While she was talking, it all sounded very logical and self-evident, but no sooner had you walked out the door than you sensed that all her arguments were the product of this very madness she tried so hard to deny. Such was the power of Olga’s persuasion that only Kostya was unmoved by it. His love for Ilya remained steadfast, and he had no intention of judging him for any sort of baseness of character or cruelty.

Besides, Kostya was oblivious. These days he belonged heart and soul to his fragile, vulnerable young girl with the hangnails. He had no thought of leaving for anywhere: his whole life was bound up with this place, this person.

“Mama, dear, you can leave if you want to. Without me.”

Olga was also provoked by another incident concerning Kostya. She discovered that he had a whole packet of letters from Ilya that had been sent poste restante to the local post office, which happened to be on the first floor of their building. The first thing she did when her hands and legs stopped trembling was to read the letters. They were long letters, wonderfully expressive—the thoughts and impressions of someone who has left the Soviet Union for the first time. The first letter he wrote Kostya, from Vienna, was very similar to the letter he had written Olga. He wrote about feeling that it was all a mirage, about his sense of disorientation about what was real and what was not, in a place where everything was so different from what his eyes, his nose, his mouth had been accustomed to till now. In another letter, written to Kostya on the eve of his departure from Vienna to America, she read something that cut her to the quick—that “the ability to survive here, in the West, is a function of one’s willingness to reject everything one experienced before, in Russia.” Now she herself was a part of what had to be rejected in order for him to survive.

The next letters were from New York, and much of what he wrote coincided with what he had written to her—about the tragic incommensurability of the two cultures, Russian and American; about the “superficiality” of American culture, not in the banal, generally accepted sense of that term, but from the perspective of superficiality as such: the scrubbed and deodorized surface of the American body, which smelled like chemicals and laundry detergent; the blinding cleanliness of the asphalt; and the fact that every cover, wrapper, or envelope was just as important as what it contained. About how he had once searched all day for a subject to photograph, and finally found one: an enormous heap of garbage, both cast-off building materials and ordinary household refuse, right in the middle of Harlem, with a smiling, toothless black man in a snowy white tank top, his hands gripping a banjo, in the foreground.

The last letter from America was sad and strange. Ilya wrote to the still very young Kostya: “Only shedding your skin completely, acquiring a new surface with new feelers, can ensure your survival here. However strange it might seem, the same does not hold true for one’s inmost self. You can keep your thoughts, however original, however jarring to their sensibilities and at odds with their incomprehensible (to me) way of life, to yourself. No one is interested in them in the least. In order to become part of this society, you just have to carry out their elementary rituals of communication. The idiotic ballet of Western life. I am prepared to do this, though it forces me into a number of painful decisions.”

After reading these letters, Olga felt as though the scales had fallen from her eyes. She even found herself thinking that it might have been easier for her to endure this rupture with Ilya if he had really fallen in love with some brilliant, youthful beauty. But she nipped this feeling in the bud—no, it would have been just as painful. In the long run, wasn’t it all the same, whether he had turned away from her because of a new love or only out of self-interest? Either way she was bereft. The real reason for his departure always eluded her. Her love, trust, naïveté, and spiritual innocence prevented her from seeing it.

Olga reproached Kostya for betraying her, though she was aware of the unfairness of her judgment. Nevertheless, she confiscated the letters from him. Kostya held his tongue.

He also felt sorry for his mother; still, he couldn’t agree with her. He felt especially violated by the fact that not only had she broken into the desk drawer where he kept the letters, but that he had a stash of condoms in the far corner of the same drawer. This both embarrassed and infuriated him. He didn’t realize that, blinded by her jealousy, she hadn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to the paper package or its contents.

Meanwhile, it emerged that the cousin of one of her university friends was living in Paris, and knew Oksana from Kiev very well. She shared new information that confirmed Olga’s worst suspicions. It was not a fictitious marriage at all! Oksana, the old vixen, was very much in love with Ilya, and had even given up her two-room apartment for a larger, three-room flat, anticipating the arrival of her young husband.

Tamara begged her: “Olga, enough is enough! Stop dwelling on it. He’s gone—consider him dead. Live your own life!” Olga brushed off her pleas.

Not a year had passed since Ilya’s departure, when Afanasy Mikhailovich died. He was buried at the Vagankovo Cemetery, in a good spot, with other soldiers of the highest rank, but without a salute. No one recalled how, exactly, he had been made a general. During the war he had traversed all of Europe on foot, ending up in Vienna as a lieutenant colonel. He was certainly no armchair officer. He had constructed bridges and built ferries.

Olga hardly noticed her father’s death.

She was furious that now she would be stuck in this Party-owned apartment with her mother, who was on the verge of retirement, and with Kostya and his sweetheart Lena. What would become of her?

What a fool she was not to have left with Ilya when she had a chance! Now everything had been shot to hell, it was all a shambles. This was the hardest thing of all to reconcile herself to. If she had left when the time was ripe, her life would have taken another course.

As the tempestuous hurts and grievances occasioned by her ex-husband turned into rigid, formulaic mantras, her livid anger turned into a hatred every bit as livid. She continued to lose weight and started turning yellow, like a withered onion; her stomach hurt, and she suffered other unpleasant symptoms, besides.

By this time, Ilya had learned to make his way in the West, but success still evaded him. Olga’s correspondence with Ilya was cut short after Olga sent his wife Oksana the letter he had sent her about the necessity of entering into a fictitious marriage to further his plans in life, and about their love, eternal and immortal.

During the second year of their separation, Olga was diagnosed with cancer. She began to undergo treatment at the Oncological Institute, but her condition steadily worsened. The doctors told her friend Tamara, in so many words, that the process was irreversible and that they should prepare for the worst. Antonina Naumovna stopped going to the hospital. She feared more than anything that Olga would die in her presence.

Tamara, a recent convert to Christianity, was tireless in her efforts to guide Olga onto the righteous path of reconciliation and love. To no avail: Olga was completely indifferent to the Church, she refused to see a priest, and was even alarmed when Tamara mentioned one. She blamed all her suffering and misfortune, including her fatal illness, on Ilya. By this time, Ilya had managed to rise out of poverty and obscurity and had moved to Munich, where he worked at Radio Liberty. He broadcast to Russia. Olga never missed a program. At night she would turn on the transistor radio and listen in rapt attention to the penetrating voice out of Munich that defied the censor’s scrambling. What must she have felt during those nights?

Tamara, seeing the bitterness etched on Olga’s face, decided to write to Ilya, informing him that Olga was dying, that God expects forgiveness and love from all of us, and that Ilya would have to make the first move …

The letter contained nothing that Ilya didn’t know already, since he had been corresponding with Kostya and was aware of the sad situation. He was not callous. He spent a long time composing a letter to her, weighing every word, contriving every phrase, and tailoring it to Olga’s needs and expectations.

It was the end of December, and many patients checked out of the hospital for the New Year; some were even allowed to spend several days at home.

Tamara went to Olga’s doctor to ask whether Olga could celebrate the New Year at home too. “I assume all responsibility,” Tamara said.

The doctor looked at her searchingly and said:

“All right, Tamara Grigorievna, we’ll discharge her. If she makes it till then…”

That was when the letter from Ilya arrived. Letter? No, it was a masterpiece. He glorified their past, describing their time together as the best days of his life. He repented of his sins, asked for forgiveness, and hinted (laying it on a bit thick, but still not missing a beat) at their imminent reunion, which grew nearer with each passing day.

And the letter caused a turnaround in Olga’s life and in her illness. She read the letter, put it aside, and asked Tamara for her cosmetics. Looking at her reflection in a small mirror, she sighed and powdered her nose—the powder showed up as a pink blotch on her waxen yellow skin, which didn’t escape Olga’s notice. She asked Tamara to buy her some more powder in a lighter tone.

“This light pink will look like rouge on my complexion!” And she smiled her former smile, which featured four dimples at once—two round ones at the corners of her mouth and two longer ones in the middle of her cheeks.

She reread the letter, reached for her cosmetics, and corrected her face again. Before Tamara left she asked her to bring a good large envelope the next day.

She wants to reply to the letter, thought Tamara. But she was wrong. The next morning Olga placed the envelope with the foreign stamps into the larger one, and stashed it away on the bottom shelf of the bedside table. Tamara had expected that Olga would read her the letter from Ilya; this took her by surprise. At last, Tamara couldn’t contain herself any longer and asked what Ilya had written. Olga smiled a ghostly smile and replied enigmatically.

“You know, Brinchik,” she said, calling Tamara by her nickname. “He didn’t write anything in particular. It’s just that everything seems to have fallen into place. He’s an intelligent man, and now he understands. We just can’t live apart.”

On that very day, Olga got up and made her way down to the dining room.

They say that this is not unheard of; it does happen sometimes. Some backup program in the body kicks in, a blocked switch turns on, something rejuvenates itself or springs to life, who the hell knows … God only knows … the very same thing that happens in miracle healing. Saints who perform wonders in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ know nothing about biochemistry, and biochemists, who are well aware of the destructive processes associated with oncological diseases, are at a loss to explain the workings of the magic button setting in motion this backup program that Father John of Kronstadt or the Blessed Matrona of Moscow knew to press.

After the New Year, Olga didn’t return to the hospital. She began to heal herself, like a sick cat who steals into the woods to eat healing grasses and herbs. Now Olga surrounded herself with herbalists and wisewomen. The well-known herbal healer from Pamir was summoned, and he prescribed infusions and potions. She ate the earth from sacred spots, drank urine. And sages and soothsayers came to see her as well. Where on earth did she dig them up?

Antonina Naumovna, already reconciled to her daughter’s death, was disconcerted by all of this. Death from cancer was more comprehensible than all this healing by methods bordering on the indecent. The doctor who had foreseen Olga’s imminent demise made a house call, examined her, probed and pressed her, and asked her to undergo further tests and analyses. But the patient merely smiled her enigmatic smile and shook her head: no, no, what need is there for that?

The doctor was deeply perplexed. Such tumors can’t dissolve just like that. He probed her underarms, pressed her groin. The lymph nodes had shrunk. But if the tumor had disintegrated, traces of toxicity should be manifesting themselves. And Olga’s jaundice had disappeared; she was even gaining weight. Remission? How? Why?

Half a year later, Olga began going outside, and her friend Tamara stopped visiting so frequently. Tamara was somewhat hurt that Olga didn’t appreciate this miracle of God that had been worked before their very eyes. Tamara kept bringing up the subject of baptism, which she suggested Olga should consider if only out of gratitude to God for what had transpired. Olga laughed, and it was almost her old, childlike laugh, interspersed with little breathless gasps:

“Brinchik, you’re an intelligent, well-educated woman, a scientist—how could you endorse such an absurd faith, a God who expects gratitude, and punishes us like little puppies, or rewards us with treats? You could have at least become a Buddhist…”

Tamara took offense and fell silent; still, she lit candles in church for restoring Olga’s health and offered prayers of petition for her during church services. Despite her preoccupation with her own hurt feelings, Tamara couldn’t help but notice another significant change in Olga. She no longer talked about Ilya. Ever. She spoke no ill of him, nor any praise. And when Tamara herself brought this up, Olga shrugged off the subject:

“Everything’s fine. He’s already made his decision; now it’s just a matter of time. There’s nothing to say.”

And this was a miracle in its own right. After months of talking only about him, and about him only …

Olga, absorbed in her own rejuvenated life, didn’t pay much attention to Kostya’s marriage. Kostya moved away from home, and the newlyweds settled in with his mother-in-law outside of town, in Opalikha. Very soon he became the father of two children—twins, a girl and a boy. Olga was touched by this, but only momentarily. She didn’t have the energy for anything other than healing. All her spiritual resources were devoted to this end.

Although her illness was clearly on the retreat, Olga was tireless in her efforts to chase it away. On the dining room windowsill she grew wheat from seedlings. She scorned the ubiquitous sourdough bread and baked herself flatbreads from bran and straw. She boiled herbs in “silver” water. On the same windowsill stood two pitchers of water containing silver spoons, which was what lent the ordinary tap water its healing properties …

Fate took a deep breath; shaking off the dust here, reevaluting this and readjusting that, a year later Olga’s health had been almost completely restored. She set to work again, hammering on the typewriter six hours a day or more. She now lived alone in the large apartment with her mother.

Olga was so preoccupied with herself, or, to be more precise, with the promise of her impending conjugal happiness with Ilya, that she didn’t notice how thin and wan Antonina Naumovna had grown. Most likely she was suffering from the same illness that had abandoned her daughter. It also began in the stomach, then spread to the intestines.

Olga began looking after her mother with great skill and devotion. It was a strange sensation—almost as though she were taking care of herself, since the same thing had so recently happened to her.

They had never been so close or so tender in their emotions with each other. Now Olga was glad she hadn’t left with Ilya, so that she could stroke her mother’s hand, boil bouillon for her, which she would most likely not be able to get down, smooth out her sheets, and wipe the corners of her mouth. Antonina Naumovna kept asking Olga to have her admitted to the hospital, but Olga just smiled and said:

“Mother, dear, only a healthy person can survive the hospital. Are you uncomfortable here at home? No? Then forget about the hospital.”

Antonina Naumovna’s mind was failing. She forgot huge swathes of her life. Other, more trivial details floated up out of nowhere. During her final days she remembered only the distant past: how all her grandmother’s chickens had died on the same day, one after the other; how a horse had bolted, throwing her mother and herself out of a sleigh; and, at last, how she and Afanasy had met at a Party-education meeting. All of her former life—meetings of the editorial board at the magazine, briefings at the regional Party committee meetings, presidiums, reports, conferences—was consigned to oblivion. Only random vestiges of her childhood remained.

“My goodness, something’s not right with my head, it’s all turned around,” she whispered, and struggled to recall something from the recent past. “It’s like everything fell right through a hole in the ground.”

In the room illuminated only by a green desk lamp, she died alone, easily and unaware, saying, quite audibly, “Mama, Mama, Papa…”

But no one was there to hear the words. In the morning, Olga discovered her mother, already cold. She immediately called the Union of Writers, where there was a special department of funeral services …

Everything was carried out in the most proper and dignified manner. She already had a gravesite marked out for her, next to the general in Vagankovo Cemetery.

The funeral was a sad and bitter affair. Not, however, due to tears and sobbing, loss and grief, or even, perhaps, regret accompanied by a sense of guilt. Rather the contrary. Not one of the mourners shed so much as a tear; there was no sadness, nor even sympathy. Their slightly benumbed faces expressed the decorum appropriate to the occasion. The absolute indifference to the death of the literary worker among those who attended the funeral did not go unnoticed by Ari Lvovich Bas, who officiated at these events of the Union of Writers.

Without much enthusiasm, Kostya returned to Moscow after his grandmother’s death, according to Olga’s wishes. Kostya was in his fourth year of university, and Lena in her third—she had taken a year of academic leave when the children were born.

They changed around the whole apartment, remapping the floor plan. On Olga’s insistence, Kostya took over his grandfather’s former room. It had a large, comfortable desk, and another smaller working space—a fold-down desk. This was the study. His grandmother’s old room became the bedroom. Kostya dubbed it the “Communist nook” because of its spartan government-issue furnishings, the green lampshade on the oaken table, and the picture of Lenin, with a log resting on his shoulder, looking down from the wall. Lena bought a foldout bed to replace the leather divan, and brought in pillows with flounces and frills. She replaced Lenin with some Van Gogh sunflowers.

Olga gave up her room to her grandchildren, and moved into the former dining room. The infamous bed with its fluted columns and cherubim migrated back to the antiques consignment store on Smolenskaya Embankment. They ate in the kitchen now, like ordinary Soviet citizens who by this time had managed to move from their communal apartments into private family apartments, but for whom bourgeois “studies” and “dining rooms” were still out of the question.

The quiet, competent Lena took the household into her own two hands, organized and took care of everything, cleaned and scrubbed, and prepared delicious meals. Every morning, Anna Antonovna, Lena’s mother, would arrive to feed the children, take them for walks, and put them down for their naps.

Her daughter Lena was a paragon. She rushed home from classes, saw her mother out, and took over the next shift. Olga wasn’t involved in taking care of the children, but Lena felt no resentment toward her mother-in-law for this failing. On the contrary, she was grateful. They had spent the first years of their family life in Opalikha, outside Moscow, where they had a small room with two windows and slanting floors; they had to prop up the children’s beds with wooden boards to keep them from sliding away. The four of them all shared a single room. There was no hot water in the dilapidated cottage, though running water and indoor plumbing had been installed two years before the children were born.

The general’s apartment was always full of commotion. The furniture that had been acquired and lovingly refurbished by Kostya’s grandfather was not spared, and was constantly being pushed around from place to place. The two-year-old Mishka and Verochka clutched and poked at the Karelian birch with their little paws, and Mishka developed a passion for trying to pry off the birds’ heads adorning the living room furniture. Finally, Kostya decided to take the entire set back to the antiques dealer’s. The manager, who was by now an old acquaintance, offered an unusually large sum of money in exchange.

The loyal Tamara stopped in fairly regularly. But the stronger Olga’s health became, the more things fell into their old pattern: Olga gave orders, Tamara carried them out. Their friend Galya was preparing for a transition in life. She studied a foreign language at night school and rarely had time to socialize. Besides, Galya’s husband, Gennady, was opposed to their friendship—Olga was bad news!

It was almost as though Olga had forgotten about Ilya. Tamara was glad that the delusion had fled, and was surprised at how closely bound up with the illness it had been …

But there were things Tamara didn’t know. Olga was keeping an eye on Ilya from a distance. Although their communications had seemed to break off again after his farewell letter, she now knew that Ilya had made a life-changing decision and it was just a matter of time before the final victory. Olga knew that Kostya continued to correspond with his stepfather. She saw the signs of their interaction—unusual children’s toys and foreign-made clothes kept appearing out of nowhere. Now, however, this didn’t exasperate her. Rather, it offered proof that change was in the offing.

In addition, Olga had a secret informer who told her that Ilya’s wife had taken to drink, and that she embarrassed him. He never wanted to be seen with her in public, and from time to time he sent her away from Munich, back to Paris. She was an albatross around his neck.

This information was a great comfort to Olga. She kept to herself and waited; soon, very soon, Ilya would show up. That was enough.

Olga’s health had stabilized completely, and she was again inundated with work. She spent long hours with her dictionaries and papers, and worked with even more enthusiasm and enjoyment than before. At night she listened to Radio Liberty, eager to catch Ilya’s voice over the sound waves. She was sure that now everything would end well … She was still receptive to “opposition to the Soviet regime,” but her former indignation and outrage had cooled significantly since Ilya’s departure.

Olga was now translating technology patents, and the pay was excellent. Before her illness, she had attended courses to receive the proper qualifications. From time to time she mustered up the energy to go to the Central Telegraph Office and book a prepaid call to Paris. Sometimes there was no answer, but often she heard a woman’s voice on the other end. The later the hour, the more slurred her speech was: “J’écoute! Allô! J’écoute!” Olga would hang up immediately. Ilya never once came to the telephone. It was obvious they had divorced or, at the very least, separated.

Thus, working hard and anticipating the imminent fulfillment of her fate, Olga remained absolutely certain that everything would resolve itself soon, and that she and Ilya would again be together.

The day came when Ilya himself called from Munich. The voice was recognizable, but sounded weak with exhaustion.

“Olga! I think about you all the time! I love you. You are my whole life! I’ve caught up, and even overtaken you. I have kidney cancer, they’re operating next week.”

“How do you know it’s cancer? Nothing is certain until they do a biopsy! I know everything about it. You know that I recovered! On my own!” She screamed into the phone, but he remained silent and didn’t even try to interrupt her. “The main thing is not to let them operate!”

But the main thing was something else entirely: he loved her, only her, and would love her forever.

The second time he called was from the clinic after the operation. Now they spoke nearly every day. He read her the results of the tests, and she replied with a long list of the medicinal herbs he should be taking. She bought them in Moscow from her herbalists and apothecaries, and sent them through friends traveling to Munich. She sent him ointments and creams, with detailed explanations about when and where to apply them. When they began giving him chemotherapy, she flew into a rage and screamed into the receiver that he was destroying himself, that the drugs were always far more damaging than the cancer itself.

“Check out of the hospital immediately and come back! I know all about this! I’ll pull you out of it, I pulled myself through all on my own!”

There was something in the air, and Olga, although she had completely distanced herself from her former dissident friends, could feel it. The eighties, heavy and moribund, were in decline, staggering to a halt, and her urgent cry for Ilya to return no longer seemed like complete madness. He gave her the answer she most wanted to hear:

“No, Olga, it’s not possible just now. If I get out of this alive, we’ll arrange for you to come here to me.”

He continued to call her, but his voice became ever weaker, and the calls more and more infrequent. Then came the last call, sounding as though it came from the bowels of the earth:

“Olga, I’m calling you on a mobile phone! My friend brought it right to my bedside. Imagine, things have come that far! That’s what you call progress. And I’m covered in tubes and wires, like a cosmonaut. The countdown has started, and I’m ready for takeoff…”

And he laughed quietly, the same choking, slightly shrill laugh.

Two days later, Olga received a call from Munich informing her that Ilya had died.

“Oh, so that’s how it is,” Olga said enigmatically, and fell silent.

In the evening, Tamara came over. In silence, they each drank a glass of vodka to his memory. Kostya officiated, pouring the vodka and serving them a plate of cheese and sausage.

Several days afterward, Olga discovered some strange growths on her head, like little balls of fat. They rolled around painlessly under her skin. Under her armpits, too, she found these little balls, attached somewhere like a cluster of grapes.

The news of Ilya’s death sapped Olga of all her strength. She lay down and didn’t get up again. Tamara stopped in every evening and sat with her until late at night, trying all the while to persuade her to see a doctor. But Olga just smiled vaguely and shrugged. Although she had studied endocrinology her whole life, and had a Ph.D., Tamara had never practiced medicine, never treated the sick or examined patients. Still, she understood that a violent metastasis was under way, and that Olga urgently needed chemotherapy. But Olga merely smiled her beatific smile, stroking Tamara’s hand and whispering brightly, “Brinchik, you still don’t understand.”

One evening, Olga told Tamara about a dream she had had the night before. In the middle of an enormous carpet of meadow, a large green marquee rose up into the air. It was like a huge tent, and there was a long line of people waiting to get in, ever so many people. Olga went to stand at the back of the line, because she just had to get into the tent.

Tamara, her burgeoning mystical sensibilities on the alert, froze:

“A marquee?”

“Well, sort of—like a circus tent, a big-top canopy, but much larger. I look around and see that all the people in the line are people I know—girls from Pioneer camp that I haven’t seen since we were kids, teachers from school, friends from college, our professor … it was like a demonstration!”

“Was Antonina Naumovna there?”

“Yes, Mama was there, of course, and my grandmother, whom I never once laid eyes on, and all the other familiar faces—Mikha, with some little kids, and Sanya was there, too, and Galya, with that creep of hers.”

“You mean the dead and the living were there together?”

“Well, yes, of course. And some little dog kept getting underfoot, and seemed to be smiling. And there was a sweet young girl named Marina. I’ve forgotten the name of the dog … Hera! Yes, the dog’s name was Hera! And there were many, many other people … And suddenly, just imagine, in the distance, right by the entrance, I see Ilya, and he waves to me from the very front of the line and calls out: ‘Olga! Olga! Come here! I’ve saved you a place!’

“And then I start to push my way toward him, and everyone gets upset because I’m going out of turn, and Mama asks me why I’m budging in line ahead of everyone else. Then a big old man with a beard appeared, he had a wonderful face, and I understood that this was my own grandfather, Naum. He waved his hand over the crowd to disperse them, and I ran up to the marquee. But it wasn’t a green marquee at all, it was a pavilion, all shining and golden. I look—and there’s Ilya, smiling, and waiting for me. He looks fine, very healthy and still young. He pulls me into the line next to him, placing his hand on my shoulder. And then Oksana appears, and she keeps trying to wriggle her way up to him, but he seems not to see her. And there was not really a door at all, but a thick piece of cloth, like a curtain, and then this curtain folds back, and there’s music coming from inside—I can’t describe it, and there’s a particular scent, something you can’t even imagine, and everything is shining.”

“A palace,” Tamara said breathlessly.

“Oh, Brinchik! What the hell kind of palace could it be?”

“Olga, don’t say hell!” Tamara said, horrified.

“Oh, all right, calm down. Have it your way—a palace, then. Words can’t describe it, in any case. So we went inside together.”

“And what did you see there, inside?” Tamara could hardly get the words out.

“Nothing. That’s when I woke up. A good dream, don’t you think?”

Olga died on the fortieth day after Ilya’s death.