The Big Green Tent

KING ARTHUR’S WEDDING

Even as a child, Olga had known that people were reassuringly predictable. She already knew beforehand what her girlfriend, her teacher, or her mother would say. Her mother in particular. Very early on, Antonina Naumovna began schooling her daughter in the rare virtue of sacrificing one’s own interests for those of society. The girl seemed to have had an innate sense of justice. When one of the children came out to play bearing a precious piece of bread and butter sprinkled with sugar, Olga was the one (and the only one) entrusted with the task of doling it out among all the mouths present in the courtyard. If the piece of bread was misshapen and hard to divide into even pieces, only Olga knew how to add a piece here, and take away a piece there, so that everyone got the same amount. She didn’t know what bread rations were—she had been born at the end of the war—much less labor camp rations. But the instinct for them was bred in the bone.

Antonina Naumovna admired her belated offspring—she was made of the right stuff! She had inherited all her parents’ good qualities. From her mother: integrity and firmness of character. From her father: kindheartedness and good looks, with fair skin and hair. The Greek strain, the black hair and prominent nose from her mother’s side of the family, was nowhere in evidence. Nor did she exhibit any of Afanasy Mikhailovich’s fleshiness, a trait that had been noticeable in him since childhood.

During Olga’s childhood, Antonina Naumovna was the editor in chief of a magazine for youth, and she put her pedagogical and child-rearing theories into practice in her own life, with her own daughter. Her observations and experiences, in turn, became fodder for her articles. After watching her little one at play in the sandbox—pouring water on the sand and building a clumsy sandcastle—she even resorted to artistic imagery: the sand represented disparate individual personalities, and water was the ideology that served to mix and knead the dough. Out of this substance a great building was created. She used this metaphor in both her editorials and her reports. Her speeches were always distinguished by their imagery, especially when she had occasion to speak at official Party events. She had studied at the Literary Institute, which was a rarity in such circles. The writers were unimpressed; they all had a way with words. She had other means at her disposal for them. But in Party circles she was regarded as having a golden tongue.

Still, Antonina Naumovna had never felt as comfortable in the collective as her daughter. With her hand on her heart, Antonina Naumovna had to admit: they envied her! However sad she was to have to acknowledge it, there were still petty people who were jealous of her position, her authority, and the respect she commanded among the higher-ups.

But Olga, as a small child, had always enjoyed the collective experience. The collective of children was healthier, Antonina Naumovna mistakenly concluded. But that had nothing to do with it. In fact, Olga was a born leader, and knew how to use her gifts without being aware of it herself. She employed them without any coercion on her part, and both girls and boys were prepared to go to the ends of the earth for her. Pretty, good-natured, and endowed with cheerful vivacity, she always had a string of girlfriends trailing in her wake. She liked joining in the main current of activity, sometimes heading it up; she liked the feeling of togetherness and unity, which reached its apotheosis during the annual May Day celebrations.

One day her mother had taken her daughter to witness the parade from the guest viewing balcony of Lenin’s Mausoleum. Olga was entranced by the spectacle from the very first moment, but she later remarked:

“Yes, it was really great! But when you’re walking together with everyone else, it’s better still.”

Oh, the sweet sense of togetherness and unity! The equality and interchangeability of grains of sand, their ability to blend into a single, powerful current that sweeps away everything in its path! And the joy of being a tiny particle in it. Beloved Mayakovsky! Beloved Vladimir Vladimirovich!

But Ilya had opened her eyes. Everything that Olga knew, he knew otherwise. The early Mayakovsky was the most valuable part of Ilya’s collection. On fragile yellow newsprint, crumbling, ancient, fiery Mayakovsky … And Ilya had told her so much that she never learned from her textbooks! The Mouthpiece of the Revolution—with his fear of infection, his childish braggadocio, his lifelong love of a woman involved with the secret police—he was far more intriguing and complex than Olga, or millions of her compatriots and peers, had ever imagined. But Ilya himself was most interesting of all. When she was with him, everything seemed different, extraordinary—even the weather seemed unprecedented. And his photographs! Rain, for instance: trees viewed through a window, distorted through the traces of drops along the glass, a fur collar with beads of water stranded in it … a puddle, in the middle of which is a newspaper, with the word Communist sinking under the watery surface.

Before Ilya, Olga was completely unaware of how many interesting people there were living on the earth, how different they all were, with their various philosophies and religions. During her entire life, Olga had met only one absolutely remarkable person, perhaps even a genius. This was the university teacher, her academic adviser, an underground writer who published his books abroad, on whose account she was expelled from the university. Everyone who surrounded Ilya was remarkable, however. Not every person was a writer, of course; but each of them was an outstanding personality with eccentric interests, rare knowledge, or expertise in every imaginable and unimaginable field, and all of it absolutely superfluous to ordinary life.

There was an older woman with kimberlite pipe diamonds, a lame expert in nonexistent (banned) forms of theater, an artist from the outskirts of town who painted garbage dumps and fences, a scholar on UFOs, an astrologer, and a Tibetan translator … and all of them, except the woman with the diamonds, worked as security guards, elevator operators, truckers, fictitious research assistants, were spongers living off their wives or mothers, creative layabouts who never lifted a finger, parasites, pariahs, and outcasts, all of them equally dangerous and fascinating. It was never completely clear whether they refused to work for the state, or the state refused to have anything to do with them.

The first of these people Ilya took Olga to meet was Artur Korolev (Arthur Kingsley, in English—hence his nickname: King Arthur). He was a retired sailor. He lived in Tarasovka in a large, dilapidated old house with a wood-burning stove, a well by the gate, and an old wooden outhouse in the far corner of the property. The gate was affixed with a rusty lock, and Ilya had to knock for a long time on the metal sheeting that backed the gate and propped it up. At last Artur appeared on the porch—an enormous bald man in an officer’s black uniform jacket. He sauntered leisurely up to the gate with a sailor’s rolling gait and flipped a latch with one of his fingers. It swung open easily. He thrust his giant hand, which resembled a shovel, at Ilya. His fingers were like large carrots, and they were rosy yellow, as though they had just been hard at work in a laundry tub. Olga had never in her life seen such a person. She peered at him closely—and saw something that took her aback: he had no eyebrows. He was florid, like a peasant; even his bald head was sunburned. His voice was a booming bass, stentorian—but he laughed softly, as though the sound came from another body. He didn’t give Olga a second glance after they were introduced. He hadn’t even told her his name. Olga was flustered: what a boor! And he was a former naval officer, too!

The host led the way up to the house. She noticed he was wearing flip-flops—in the snow! What an oddball. And the house was par for the course: dusty, full of clutter. They stood by the door and heard rustling all around them: the fire in the big peasant stove, mice between the walls, old books piled up everywhere in small hillocks, bales, and bundles. There were books on the floor, on the table, and on the workbench, which stood right inside the room.

Ilya shrugged off his big camping backpack and took out a bottle of vodka. The host sat down in an armchair with patched armrests, and looked at the bottle disapprovingly. Ilya caught his glance.

“Your highness, you don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to.”

The King snorted:

“Well, what are we going to do with it, then? Go set the table, beautiful. The silverware is out there. Everything you need. I’m the first to admit that I don’t like domestic chores.”

Olga gasped with indignation. Of all the nerve! What impudence! “Beautiful”! What next, “sweetheart”?

She shot Ilya a look of fury, but he seemed to be either laughing or just winking at her.

Unable to elicit the sympathy she was seeking, Olga smiled, flashing her famous dimples. Looking directly at the King, she said simply:

“I’m the first to admit I don’t like domestic chores, either. Especially in someone else’s house.”

“Got it,” the host said with a nod, and walked out to get the tableware. It was all very natural.

“Touché, Olga!” Ilya whispered. And Olga felt a rush of happiness, pride, and vindication.

King Arthur brought back a black pot, three stacked bowls that served as a cover, and on top of them, in a mound like a pyramid, a large pickle, a loaf of roughly sliced bread, and three shot glasses. The forks jangled in the pocket of his jacket. He moved with the slow grace and precision of an athlete or a dancer—small objects stuck to his hands like magnets. Nothing lost its balance and fell; everything stood upright, as though anchored to the spot on which he had placed it. He fished around in his pocket and pulled out an onion and a large clasp knife. He cut off the end, then sliced it into quarters, not bothering to peel off the skin. The onion lay in the middle of a wooden cutting board, its insides exposed, arranged like the petals of a white water lily. He put a plate in front of each of them—the pot contained potatoes, still in their jackets and steaming hot. He reached behind him without looking, then swung his long arm back around and placed a silver salt bowl in the shape of a swan on the table. Everything was just as it should be. Happiness was spreading inside Olga like yeast; she felt she was rising like leavened dough.

“Well, open it,” Artur said gently to Ilya, who tore off the tin cap from the greenish bottle.

Ah, that’s why they call vodka the “green wine”—the flasks are green, Olga mused.

Olga covered her glass with her palm.

“No thank you. I don’t want vodka.”

“Cognac?” the host asked.

“No thank you. Not in the middle of the day.”

He nodded.

He cut the pickle into thin slices, took a potato and stripped its jacket off, and then cut it into pieces, too. He and Ilya drank. Pinching the salt from the small bowl with his fingertips, he salted the pieces and ate them with his hands; but his mannerisms seemed elegant, even aristocratic.

“How’s Lisa?” Ilya asked. He had already told Olga on the way there that Artur’s lovely wife had recently left him.

“She’s still around. She came by a few days ago.”

“Is she begging you to take her back?”

“No, Ilya, she’s not coming back. But she can’t stay away, either. She filed for a divorce, she’s planning to marry someone else—but she doesn’t have the guts to leave. We’ll see what happens. We’ve been together for fifteen years. She wants to get out of the country, to go abroad. She found herself a Finn.”

“Really? I thought there was some guy from Iraq.”

“There was. He was loaded. But she got rid of him. Said that a European woman like herself couldn’t survive in the Middle East. The Finn is from Lapland. Lisa’s used to the cold—she grew up in the Far East. She actually had her heart set on Italy, but no Italians have turned up.”

Olga sat wide-eyed listening to their conversation. What kind of girl was this, who had her pick of foreigners? Was she some sort of prostitute? She would have to ask Ilya about it later.

Afterward they drank tea. Artur brewed it slowly, enacting a ceremonial ritual around the teapot. The teapot was, it must be said, unlike anything she had ever seen. It was made of enameled metal and adorned with dragons and tongues of blue flame.

“Chinese,” King Arthur said tenderly, stroking its convex flank. He caressed it with his eyes just as tenderly, like a man caressing a woman. “I bought it in Singapore. A real beauty!”

That’s what Ilya had told her—that Artur had worked on a merchant marine vessel and had sailed all the oceans and seas. Olga’s eyes were already growing used to this unusual fellow. She liked him more and more. Although, upon closer inspection, his hairlessness had something strange about it—as though no hair had ever grown upon his head, or on his childishly soft face. And something else—his hands trembled ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly.

The King removed the plates in the same manner he had brought them in, piling them on top of the black pot. He wiped off the table, and Ilya put down a large bundle of typed pages. The thin paper rustled.

“I don’t have any fitting material, only chintz,” Artur said.

“Just so long as it’s not floral.”

“It will be a dark blue binding,” the King said, nodding.

Then, with an even more solemn expression, he went into the other room. When he came back, he was carrying an ancient book in a dark leather binding. He passed it fastidiously to Ilya.

“Unbelievable! Eighteenth century—1799! The Compleat Distiller. Everything you ever wanted to know about moonshine? I’m floored!” Ilya sighed, then laughed out loud.

“That’s not the point. Look at the title page. Then you can ooh and aah!” And King Arthur opened the cover of the book.

Ilya whistled under his breath.

“This beats all … From the paper collection center? It was trashed?”

“Yep. It bears the inscription of the owner—none other than Berdyaev. Of course, it needs to be verified.”

“You need an expert—I can show it to Sasha Gorelik,” Ilya said.

“No, I’m not letting it out of my sight. You can bring him here. I’ll stand him a bottle.”

“He’ll stand you one. He might even buy the book.”

“There’s no way I’m selling this.”

Olga took a peek over Ilya’s shoulder. She saw the name Nikolai Berdyaev, written in lilac ink.

The name seemed familiar; she had heard the name mentioned among Ilya’s friends. She didn’t dare ask, though, so as not to compromise the aura of sophistication she was cultivating. Besides, it was already obvious that Ilya, who had no formal university training whatsoever, knew much more about literature than she did. And she would soon be graduating. Judging by the books that packed the room, this retired sailor was a well-educated man. Her surmise was confirmed when he pulled out a palm-sized volume of Dickens from behind the divan.

“Here is a truly remarkable writer, Ilya. Oh, the rubbish they made us read as children!” He laughed, waving his hand dismissively. “Actually, I read almost nothing as a child. In the entire city of Izyum, I don’t think there was a single English book. It’s a Cossack settlement. They put boys on horses before they can walk. They can wave their sabers around, but they don’t even know the alphabet.”

Although she had promised herself to keep quiet, Olga couldn’t resist asking: “So you know how to use a saber?”

“No, my child, I’ve hated all that Cossack derring-do since I was small. I ran away from home when I was thirteen. I entered the Nakhimov Naval Academy. I was a romantic. An idiot, in other words. I had no idea what the military was all about.”

“My child”—that was patronizing, of course; but Artur’s tone was completely friendly and open. He looked directly into her eyes, not past her.

Soon they got ready to leave. Ilya put a packet of books, neatly wrapped in newspapers and tied with twine, in his nearly empty backpack. He gave King Arthur a small pile of bills in return. Then they hurried to the station. It was nearly ten o’clock, and the electric commuter trains came less frequently. Along the way, Olga asked Ilya about Artur, and he replied briefly. “Yes, he’s a former naval officer who survived some sort of blast. He was discharged, with a detour through a psych ward, receives a small pension, works as an assistant at the paper collection center.

“At first he didn’t know a lot about book collecting, but over the years he learned the tricks of the trade. He developed a feel for it. And it would have been hard not to—people bring in books by the bagful. It’s amazing what turns up among the old newspapers and the scribbled-over textbooks—an original edition of Karamzin, or Khlebnikov. A Rudolf Steiner. You can’t find those at the antiquarian booksellers—turn-of-the-century editions.

“You don’t know him? It’s not my kind of thing, but you need to know who he is. Artur has taken up yoga recently. He found a volume of Vivekananda at the collection center. He practices meditation.”

“I also want … Vivekananda.” Olga wanted everything: all the books, all the conversation, and music, and theater and film, and Berdyaev, and the Indian Vivekananda, and she wanted to read Dickens in English right away. And, as in childhood, when she wanted to hurry to join the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol Youth Group so she could be in the vanguard, she now wanted to be accepted by Ilya’s amorphous group of acquaintances—King Arthur, and the others whom she didn’t know yet, but about whom she had heard. They were the ones who had been standing outside the courthouse when her professor was on trial, and being part of their company was far more appealing to her than serving on the Komsomol committee of the philology department.

Ilya gave Olga both Berdyaev and Vivekananda, as well as Orwell, who truly astonished her. After her expulsion from the university, Olga now had plenty of free time. She lolled around in her room for days at a time while Faina took care of Kostya, feeding him, taking him out for walks, and putting him down for naps. Toward evening, when her mother came home from work, Olga would go out to meet Ilya. They had several favorite meeting places: by the monument to Ivan Fedorov, the printing pioneer; by the Kitai-Gorod wall; at an antiquarian bookseller’s; in the old apothecary’s on Pushkin Square. When the weather got warmer, they started meeting at the Aptekarsky Garden, a small botanical garden founded by Peter the Great.

Half a year passed before Ilya invited Olga to Tarasovka again, this time for a wedding. Olga was surprised. Who would want to marry such an eccentric man?

“Olga, you don’t know what you’re saying! Before he married Lisa, women were lining up for the privilege to become his wife. They dreamed of the honor of laundering his trousers! A famous actress flew all the way from Vladivostok to Moscow twice a month, just to get screwed by him. She arrives, and he says: ‘Sorry, I’m not on furlough today.’ And he goes off with the barmaid. When Lisa appeared on the scene, all that ended. He became a faithful husband. He never so much as glanced at another woman. Then Lisa began whoring around, too,” Ilya said, and laughed.

Olga always admired how freely and simply he spoke about things that she couldn’t even have named before she met him. Olga couldn’t say the word shit out loud—it stuck in her throat; but coming from him, even the most unmentionable vulgarities sounded natural and amusing.

“Who’s he marrying?” Olga said.

“It’s a curious story, as you might imagine. He’s marrying Lisa’s elder sister. It’s something Lisa cooked up herself. You’ll see.”

King Arthur’s wedding took place in mid-July. The summer was still fresh. It was the first sunny day after a month of steady rain. On the eve of the wedding, Maria Fedorovna, Ilya’s mother, went to visit her sister in Kirzhach. That evening, Olga went to see Ilya at home. For the first time they were able to spend a night together alone, without hurry, interruption, or the furtive awkwardness Olga always felt in the strangers’ beds that Ilya took her to from time to time.

In the morning they felt calm and spent, emptied out, and this rapturous vacancy lent them a sense of weightlessness, both physical and emotional. They were both aware of the unprecedented nature of what had happened to them: through bodily self-expression, extreme and urgent, bordering on the edge of possibility, through the feat of the sexual act, they had traversed a generally prescribed boundary—as though making a discovery where they had least expected to find it. Beyond the supreme pleasure of sex, another, inexpressible kind of bliss opened up to them—the dissolution of the individual self, of the “I,” into an ineffable, hitherto unknown freedom of soaring flight.

“It’s so wonderful, it’s even frightening,” Olga whispered when they were already sitting in the commuter train.

“No, it’s not frightening. We were shown what they call seventh heaven. I feel I need to perform an act of gratitude.”

“What kind?” Olga said. “What kind of act could it be?”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe we should get married? Then I can fuck you like an honest man.” And he laughed out loud, as though he had said something quite witty.

Olga felt seared by the expletive, but for some reason her body responded with immediate assent. She blushed—I’ve completely lost my mind—and said awkwardly:

“No. I think we need to have a baby after all of this.”

Ilya stopped laughing abruptly. His experience with fatherhood was terrible, and he had no wish to repeat it.

“No, that’s going too far. No way, never. Remember that.”

Something collapsed inside her: what a roller coaster ride! What was this? Cruelty? Stupidity? How could he say such a thing? But he was neither cruel, nor stupid: he realized immediately that he had offended her. He took her arm above the elbow and squeezed it.

“You don’t understand. Only freaks of nature are born to me. I’m a freak myself. You can’t bear any child of mine.”

Olga grabbed hold of his hand. Her hurt was transformed into poignant sympathy; he had hinted to her before that his child was not entirely healthy. Now she understood that he had not been talking about an ordinary childhood illness; he was talking about an unmitigated catastrophe. They both fell silent, and stared out the window. The leafy green verdure beyond the window, so fresh, and washed clean by the long rains, seemed to call for silence. After this confession, their intimacy grew even more profound than they could have imagined possible.

Tables had been shoved together and placed along the path leading up to the house. The grounds around the house were so overgrown with burdock, raspberry, and nettles that there was no other place to set them up. There were about forty guests, and not everyone had arrived yet. At the back of the property wood was burning in a makeshift outdoor grill. Smoke was rising into the air, and it smelled of wet grass and jasmine. Two young men were fussing happily around the grill.

No one was sitting down yet, although bowls of various kinds of salads crowded the middle of the long table. Some of the guests had already started drinking, having sought out comfortable, conducive spots—in the ramshackle gazebo, long on the verge of collapse, next to the rain barrels, or on a stump near the outhouse. Loud peremptory cries could be heard coming from the house—Lisa was taking charge of everything. Then she emerged onto the porch: a real beauty, a sex bomb, a starlet—from her slender, shapely legs in spiked heels to the fountain of hair on her head and the oversize, slightly tinted glasses. She smiled, revealing a pair of sharp, fanglike teeth on either side of her mouth. What was she, a vampire? A witch?

“Pannochka!” Olga whispered to Ilya. “It’s like she just stepped off the movie screen. She should be playing Pannochka!”

“Maybe,” Ilya said.

Then Olga saw the King. He was sprawled on a chaise longue, either meditating or just sleeping. His eyes were closed, his large, smooth chin pointed up to the sky.

“Your Highness! Come to the table!” Lisa shouted, and the King opened one eye. “Why are you being such a layabout? We can’t start without you!”

There was a stirring in the thickets and the undergrowth—the guests, some of them already in their cups, made their way to the table and settled onto the benches. Ilya was one of the first to throw a leg over a bench and sit down. Olga sat beside him. She knew some of the people there, though not all.

But what people they were! All ages—young and middle-aged, two octogenarians, and one very amusing elderly lady. And all of them less than Soviet in their persuasions—to be more precise, they were downright anti-Soviet! Marvelously anti-Soviet! And, of course, her imprisoned professor had been part of this circle.

“Tell me who’s who,” Olga whispered.

“Which one in particular do you find interesting?”

“Well, the red-haired one, for example.”

“Ah, that’s Vasya Rukhin, a philosopher and theologian. He’s extremely erudite. Fascinating conversationalist. He gets drunk quickly, though, and all he can talk about then is the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy.”

The philosopher-theologian was completely sober, and maybe for that reason he seemed rather downcast. He poured some generic alcoholic liquid into a glass, and the woman sitting next to him, whose hand kept straying to the tightly braided bun at the back of her neck, quietly protested. A stooping, almost hunchbacked man with the chiseled features and decorative mustache common among people from the Caucasus Mountains, raising his right arm and gesturing broadly with his left, began slowly declaiming what sounded like verse:

“Alas, the printed word has scruples, but the lyre favors nonsense…”

“That’s Damiani. He’s a genius. A modern Khlebnikov. He writes palindromes, acrostics, all kinds of formal wordplay. And his poems are brilliant. He’s a true genius. He was born too late. If he had lived at the turn of the century, Khlebnikov wouldn’t have been able to hold a candle to him. I haven’t seen Sasha Kuman yet. They’re like bosom enemies. They always go everywhere together. Sasha is also a poet, but of a different stripe. They’re always at each other’s throat, and poetry is the bone of contention.”

Ilya was no longer waiting for Olga to prompt him with her questions. He waxed loquacious.

“And those two are human rights activists. The fat one is a mathematician, his name is Alik. Theoretical mathematics. His logic is ironclad. I guess he’s the only one the KGB is afraid to tussle with. You can’t have a conversation with him—he proves every point. No one can keep up with him; his mind is like an automatic weapon. And the one sitting next to him, in the cowboy hat, a born-again Jew—his name is Lazar—is the inventor of machine translation. He’s a linguist and a cyberneticist. And next to him, in the blue dress, is his wife, Anna Reps. Also a poet. A fair-to-middling one, I’d say.”

“How did the King come to know all of them?” Olga asked.

“It’s a circle of like-minded people. They all live and breathe books. The King is a fine bookbinder. Everyone knows him, and has good relations with him. There are several different groups of people who are connected only through the King. It’s a circle,” Ilya said, stressing the word again, as though it summed everything up.

At that moment, Lisa’s cry—“Shura! Shura! Where’s the pie?”—carried up to the porch. The door opened, and a large, red-faced woman stuffed into a white dress two sizes too small for her appeared in the doorway. In her outstretched hands, she held a baking sheet with a voluminous home-style pie. She had a fresh red burn mark on her forearm. A young girl, with an equally red face, also wearing a white dress, peeked out from behind her shoulder. She was carrying two large buckets. Olga craned her neck to get a better look—the buckets were full of sliced meat. The shish-kebab experts jumped up, grabbed the buckets, and disappeared.

“Olga, that one there, the thin one with the dark eyes, is the famous Sinko. We listened to recordings of his songs at Bozhenov’s, remember?”

“Yes, of course I do. Wonderful songs.”

“He has a guitar with him, so he’s going to sing.”

“Shura, put down the pie and go get the herring. Did you forget it?” Lisa admonished the plump one, her voice raised again. The sharp end of Lisa’s nose wriggled like that of a small creature, and Olga realized that her name was a reference to lisá, meaning “fox” in Russian, rather than a nickname for Elizabeth. Her pointy little nose was so mobile and alert, it seemed to have a life of its own. The plump one ran into the house, her behind jiggling. Lisa shook her head and smiled a condescending smile, as if berating a dull and inept assistant. The young girl in white went up to Lisa and told her something, but Lisa dismissed it with a wave of her hand:

“Your job is to help. You didn’t bring the aspic!”

And the younger one also trotted back to the house at a rapid clip.

At last, King Arthur peeled himself from the chaise longue and went to sit at the head of the table. He sat in his armchair with the patched armrests. A girl with an expressive eastern countenance, large eyes, lips, and nostrils, her hair cut short, and wearing white jeans and a white T-shirt, sat down next to Artur on a bentwood chair. He put his arm around her.

“What a stylish bride!” Olga whispered to Ilya.

“No, that’s Lenka Vavilon. She has nothing to do with Artur at all. She’s Ossetian; she graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages. She knows all the languages of the Caucasus. And Persian, too. I’ve never laid eyes on the King’s bride myself.”

At that very moment, Lisa went up to the stylish young woman and yanked the chair out from under her.

“Lenka, that chair’s not for you.”

Lenka remained unruffled.

“Lisa, don’t order me around.”

“Well, you get out of that chair, it’s for the bride!” Lisa shouted at her raucously. Lenka turned the chair with its back to the table, and then got up to sit in Artur’s lap.

He didn’t seem to mind.

“Shura, let’s get started! Come to the table!” Lisa screeched. The door flew open, and Shura appeared with a dish towel in her hands.

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” On the way, she wiped her hands off with the dish towel, then fanned herself with it, saying quietly to Lisa (though Olga managed to catch what she said): “Lisa, tell Masha to sit down. You know she won’t, unless you tell her to.”

Masha came out balancing a large oval platter of herring on the outspread fingers of each hand.

Shura, going up to the bentwood chair, turned it around toward the table again, hung the dish towel over the back, and sat down heavily. This was the bride. In the meantime, Lenka Vavilon had vanished from Artur’s lap as though she had never been there at all. Shura’s hair was a hopeless mess. Early in the morning she had rushed out to the hairdresser’s, where they had whipped her hair into a tower of curls. This made Lisa furious. She harangued her sister, then ordered her to wash her hair at once, getting rid of both curls and hairspray. Shura used an entire bottle of her sister’s foreign-made shampoo. Now her hair was cleaner than it had ever been before; but it was so limp and flyaway that no amount of pinning and clipping could contain it. Shura kept reaching up to fiddle with her plain reddish locks, revealing dark stains under the armpits of her white dress. Her face was as flushed as if she had just emerged from a steam bath. It was clear she had been laboring in front of the stove all day.

Now Lisa’s voice, with a metallic edge, rang through the air again:

“Well, come on, pour us a glass! Fill up the glasses, Artur! Why are you such a deadbeat? Get up, bridegroom! Who’s going to make a toast? Sergei Borisovich, you’re the head honcho here!”

A short, small-boned man in glasses, who looked about fifty, with an unhappy, self-contained air, refused outright.

“Lisa, you dragged us all into this farce; you see it through to the end.”

“Who is that?” Olga said, startled by the exchange.

“Chernopyatov. A lot depends on him. He’s a strong, uncompromising man. He was sent to the labor camps when he was only fourteen. He was still in school. I’ll tell you more about him later.”

Lisa waved her hand indignantly.

“Fine! It’s my wedding, after all. My own husband is marrying my own sister.”

She gestured toward her sister dismissively, as if brushing her aside. Shura stood up, and Lisa jumped up onto her chair. Her getup was like something from another world. She had on a white silk blouse, on top of which was a black lace bra; short shorts peeked out from under her shirttails. She stood on the chair unsteadily; the chair legs wobbled, sinking into the soft, uneven ground. Her spiked heels only made matters worse. Strands of unruly hair blew around in the breeze. Artur, watching the orator attentively, prepared to catch her if she lost her balance. On the other side of her, Shura shuffled around in place, arms outspread, watching the precariousness of the situation in alarm. Still, Shura hadn’t foreseen just how precarious the situation was—suddenly it dawned on her that Lisa was totally smashed.

“Hey, where’s the champagne? Pass me a glass!”

Someone gallantly thrust a glass into her hand. She raised it into the air and shouted:

“It’s bitter!”*

Artur grabbed her. She clung to his neck and began kissing him: on his bald head, on his cheek, on his nose—until she came to his mouth, when she fastened her lips to those of the imperturbable King.

“I am giving my beloved husband away in marriage! To my dear sister! Hey, Masha! Hey, where’s my niece? Come over here, Masha! I’ve found a daddy for you!”

Masha was standing next to her mother; the expression on her face was no laughing matter.

No one knew what would happen next, but it was clear there was trouble afoot.

Olga was riveted by the scene and didn’t notice that Ilya was gone. He reappeared a few minutes later laden with shish kebab skewers. He was accompanied by one of the grill tenders.

Lisa grabbed a skewer and thrust it at the King.

“Shura! Look at me, goddammit! The first piece always goes to him! Masha, you too! I’ll tear your eyes out if I have to!”

But there was no need to tear out Shura’s eyes—they were already filled with tears, and she wanted to die of shame. She stood rooted to the spot. Ilya passed out skewers, and the shish kebab distracted the attention of the guests from the main wedding ritual—the bittersweet kissing.

“Ilya, she’s just a rogue, she thrives on chaos!” Olga fumed, when Ilya brought her the shish kebab.

“Of course she’s a rogue! A brilliant rogue. She’s the one who got the King out of prison and into the loony bin, then got him discharged. She paid some, turned tricks for others. She became a lawyer. No, it’s true! She graduated from law school, taking evening courses. You can’t imagine what all she’s done. I knew her first, before I met the King. She was a girl from the Far East, her father was a hunter. She went out hunting in the taiga with him when she was just a little tyke. And she can hold her liquor; she keeps up with the best of them. She’s an iron lady, except when she’s got the hots for someone. That’s her only weakness. And the King is impotent, which she herself will announce shortly.”

And that was just what happened. There was a lull in the drama while the guests were amicably partaking of the grilled meat. It ended when Lisa, having polished off her shish kebab, started brandishing her skewer.

“Friends, I take my leave of you! That’s it—I’m going to the land of the Finns. I’ve fucking had it with all of you!” She wriggled her nose and tittered. “But I adore you. Remember that I’m coming back to check up on you! You can’t hide from me! The KGB is amateur hour next to me! I’m a one-woman secret agent bureau! Don’t you dare insult the King! Or Shura, either. She may be just a dairy cow, but she’s a good person. Good Doctor Ouchithurts will heal the masses; she’ll feed one and all. She’s a nurse. If you need a shot, whether it’s in the ass or in your arm, you can count on her. But don’t put the moves on her, she hates that. Her hormones are on strike. Whereas mine are raging! They make the perfect pair: one more impotent than the other!”

Going limp, she clung to the King’s neck again, then set up an urgent, primal peasant’s wail, singing:

“Oy, sweet lord of my soul, you poor little thing! Poor impotent King! Well, why are you all smirking and grinning? He’s better than any one of you! If he could get it up, his worth would be beyond compare!”

The King patiently indulged his ex-wife in her wailing. He was completely impassive in the face of her public indictment, which would so devastate any ordinary man. He towered over the rest of them in height, and nobility, and dignity—even in the privilege of impotence among all the sexually obsessed and tormented lovers, the beloved, and the forlorn and unloved, men and women.

He’s a king among men, thought Olga.

Shura and Masha hid away in shame in the house, in the kitchen. Shura howled, and her daughter comforted her:

“Mom, stop—you know what Auntie’s like! She’ll go away, and everything will go back to normal again.”

Masha was indifferent to all this sophisticated riffraff. She had her own plans: to settle down in Moscow, to marry a man with an apartment, and to graduate from college. She was just as ambitious as her aunt, but she had been hewn with an axe, rather than a fine chisel.

The wedding party was gaining momentum. An enormous bottle of Absolut that had been bought in a Beryozka store was put away in minutes. The supply of home brew bought from the neighbors in three-liter jars, however, never ran out. The bitter Bulgarian Gamza, in pretty bottles covered with woven straw, was nearly untouched, though an entire case of cheap port had already been consumed. An Ampex tape recorder, one of the King’s trophies from his final voyage, had been set up on a table pushed against the window. Bebop music, powerful and exuberant, poured into the yard. Everything seemed jarring and incongruous, almost a travesty—the American tape recorder, a true rarity, the epitome of a boyhood dream come true; the refined, inspired music of another culture; the awkward, reeling drunken wedding against the background of lush July greenery, in which the single indispensable thing was lacking: mutual love between the man and the woman. Soon the tape recorder, exhausted, emitted a little hiss and then fell silent.

Sinko picked up his guitar then, and everyone gathered around him. He brushed his elongated fingers, with their long, chipped fingernails, over the strings of the guitar, and they seemed to coo like a woman. He touched his fingers to the strings again, and they answered him in kind.

“It’s almost like his fingers are talking to the guitar,” Olga marveled.

Ilya put his hand on her shoulder, and she felt happy. They had been sitting at the table for several hours already, and she longed to touch Ilya, to experience the “awareness of the body” that had begun to melt away. She was too shy to be the first to touch his hand or his shoulder. But he touched her, and this was proof that the feeling was still present.

“Have you never heard him live?”

“No, only on recordings.”

“That’s completely different. He’s a true artist. He sings Galich’s songs better than Galich himself.”

* * *

Lisa left for Helsinki the same evening. By train. At half past nine Sergei Borisovich Chernopyatov, who had been keeping a close eye on Lisa the whole time, went up to her, put his hand on her shoulder, and said:

“It’s time to go, Lisa.”

Lisa seemed to shrink back, but she went into the house with Chernopyatov. Soon they emerged with a suitcase. Sergei Borisovich was taking Lisa to Leningradskaya Station; they had agreed on this beforehand. Everyone streamed out into the road to gather around the car. Sergei Borisovich wore an air of practical efficiency, and looked irritated. He opened the trunk of his old blue Moskvich. At that moment, Lisa began to hum and spin like a top. She clung to the King’s neck again, scolding him rather incoherently for past sins, and again reminding him of his impotence. Artur stroked her head with his hairless pink hand, and suddenly began trying to persuade her to stay:

“Forget about that Finn, Lisa. Stay with us, no one is driving you away!”

Lisa suddenly howled in rage and let her ex-husband have it.

“Not driving me away! What about Shura? I’ve arranged for Shura to live here with you! Where would she go now? She sold her house! She came here with her child in tow! No way, I’m no longer your wife! Enough! Shura’s your wife!”

Then she turned to Shura.

“Well, why are you standing there with your eyes bugging out? Get ready! You’re coming with me, to see me off! Artur doesn’t need you here to scratch his back—there’s always Lenka Vavilon. You’ll scratch his back, won’t you, Lenka? Shura, get a move on! Let’s go!”

Chernopyatov stopped Lisa.

“Listen, I’m not driving all the way back here again. How is she going to get to Tarasovka from the station in the middle of the night?”

Lisa took a sizable packet of money out of her purse and waved it around.

“My sister’s coming with me to Leningrad. Aren’t you, Shura?”

Shura looked haggard and drawn. She hadn’t eaten a thing all day—she had only drunk one glass of champagne. Her head ached and her stomach was cramping from hunger.

“Wait a minute, I’ll just get my jacket.”

Sergei Borisovich’s face darkened. He stood next to the car, its doors agape, then got behind the wheel impatiently. Lisa had sobered up a bit. She shoved Shura, clutching her jacket, into the car. Lisa got in behind her. She rolled down the window, and shouted:

“Hey, people, keep it up! Keep it up! In our village, weddings last at least three days!”

The car started moving, carrying off the King’s wives. The King waved magnanimously.

Olga touched Ilya’s shoulder.

“Let’s go home. I think I’ve had about enough of this.”

Ilya finally managed to find his backpack in the house, and they left the celebration without any ado—they didn’t even bother to say good-bye. They were just in time for the commuter train; they didn’t even have to wait. They boarded, put their arms around each other, and fell asleep. They slept all the way to Moscow.

Early the next morning, the King in his lair set about repairing the tape recorder.

Guests lay scattered about in unlikely places, having dropped off to sleep from an excess of celebratory cheer. Lenka Vavilon woke up and went into the yard, where she saw an unfamiliar man peeing next to the outhouse. She was surprised—he had made it all the way to the outhouse, why hadn’t he done his business inside? She understood the reason when she tried to go into the outhouse herself. She found a comfortable spot in the raspberry bushes, where she discovered that she was not the only one who had come there in search of cozy intimacy.

A flock of sparrows was feasting on the leftovers strewn about the table. Meanwhile, two chickadees were sitting in the branches of an aspen tree, speculating about whether there was room for them among the rabble. Lenka Vavilon gathered up the dirty dishes, poured the rest of the water from the bucket into a large pot, and turned on the gas, preparing to boil water for washing up. She began scraping the leftover scraps of food into the slops pail, fishing out stray cigarette butts that might harm the neighbor’s piglet.

* * *

Shura accompanied Lisa all the way to Leningrad. Lisa bought her a ticket—albeit in a crowded sleeping car, rather than a separate compartment. Shura was offended, but said nothing. She put her sister to bed, then returned to her own car.

“I’m just a spineless idiot. My whole life I’ve let Lisa push me around, even though I’m six years older,” Shura berated herself.

Shura slept the sleep of the dead, but she was the first to rise in the morning and emerge onto the station platform. Lisa was the last. Still not completely sober, she begged forgiveness and kissed Shura’s chapped hands, lingering especially on yesterday’s burn mark. Shura was always flustered and clumsy. She always burned herself on this spot when she took her pies out of the oven.

Although she was not very fresh herself, Lisa was wearing a freshly laundered blouse—Shura had not forgotten to wash and iron one for her. Now her bra was underneath the blouse, where it belonged, and she wore a string of beads she had made herself out of tightly rolled strips of paper from shredded pages of the magazine America. Her fingers, with their stubby fingernails, were loaded down with cheap silver jewelry and stones. She wore a short, light blue skirt. The new stockings that Ville had brought her for the wedding—he had given her a whole pile of them, twelve in all!—already had a very visible run along the calf.

The sisters kissed and embraced one last time, and Lisa barked out her final instructions as Shura retreated.

An hour and a half later, at the Soviet-Finnish border, Lisa was already going through customs control. The Russian customs officers were the first to search her suitcase and her purse. Lisa, still a bit tipsy, pulled out a packet of photographs and showed the officials her father, and her mother, and her older sister, and her hunting trophies, and some pictures of the natural scenery of the Far East. She had no foreign currency; all her Russian money—every last kopeck of it!—she had given to her sister. Her documents were all in order: a new passport, a visa, a marriage certificate. The border guards laughed at her good-naturedly—she was a strange bird! A little prostitute who had found a scrap of Finnish happiness for herself.

One of them with fewer moral scruples had managed to put his hand on her skinny behind, and she giggled. The other one, an older man, had given her some fatherly advice:

“Go easy on the alcohol over there, sweetie. All Finns are drunks, never mind the dry laws!”

The train rolled over the border—an invisible line running through identical unprepossessing forest tracts, bald patches, and boulders.

Then the train halted. The Finnish customs officers and border guards came aboard, and the whole process was repeated—only they didn’t rummage through her suitcase and purse. And it all happened much more quickly and efficiently.

The Finns left, and the train pulled away from the station. Lisa got up, swaying, her little purse swinging on its thin strap, and walked down the aisle to the bathroom. She hung the purse on a hook. She looked at herself in the mirror, and didn’t like what she saw, so she stuck her tongue out. Then she sat on the toilet. From her secret place she pulled out a tube of much smaller dimensions than what it normally accommodated, and peeled the condom off it. She threw the condom in the toilet, and without opening the tube, she put it in her purse. Then she stuck out her tongue at her reflection again. Three microfiches—an entire book—were on a treacherous journey. But the main leg of the journey, the most dangerous of all, had already been traversed.

Ville adored his Russian wife. From the very beginning, he had said: “I know you’ll ditch me. But I never loved anyone until you, and after you I’ll never love again.”

At one time he had worked in Russia as a journalist; now he had lost his job. It didn’t matter. Tomorrow they would fly to Stockholm, and from there on to Paris. And the banned manuscript, the author of which was doing time in the camps, would be lying on the desk of the publisher, who had been eagerly awaiting it for a long time.

Ville hated communism, loved Russia, and adored his wife, Elizabeth. Ilya loved his work. The microfiche of the manuscript, which had been smuggled out of the prison camp by the author’s wife in another of the most secret places, had been expertly photographed. Sergei Borisovich Chernopyatov, who was directing the entire three-stage (at least) anal-gynecological operation, had always known that everything would work out just fine. Lisa never let anyone down.