The Big Green Tent

THE HOUSE WITH THE KNIGHT

By the time Ilya left, it was already dark. The rain was still falling. He felt strange. He had lost—dismally, irrecoverably. But he had also, inexplicably, won. Is it possible to win and lose at the same time? He walked slowly up Gorky Street. There really was no way out. Well, perhaps one: the record of his father’s nationality on his birth certificate. His father had been half-Jewish. Ilya could recover the documents, haul out his one-fourth Jewish credentials, and try to apply for an exit visa on those grounds. But that was the very moment they’d try to arrest him.

He turned toward the Aragva restaurant; there was a pay phone there. He deposited a two-kopeck coin, and dialed.

“Katya! Hey, is Victor Yulievich home? On Bolshevik Lane? Thanks. How are things with you? Okay, see you.”

He dialed the old phone number. Ilya knew that after his mother’s death Victor Yulievich often stayed in his old apartment. The neighbor answered. Ilya waited a long time before Victor came to the phone. He asked whether he could visit right away.

He went to Eliseevsky’s and picked up a bottle of five-year-old Armenian cognac. In the early days their teacher had treated them to good Georgian wine; now they treated their teacher to Armenian cognac.

At Pushkin Square he got in a trolleybus and went to Chistye Prudy. Then he walked to the house with the knight standing in a niche above the main door. It felt like coming home. The iron man underneath his pseudo-Gothic arch had outlasted the Revolution and the renaming of the street from Gusyatnikov to Bolshevik, and had no idea what lay in store for him—that he would return to his old address, Gusyatnikov, without budging from his niche.

Ilya went up to the fourth floor. The were five bells on the outside door; above one of them it read “Shengeli.” He rang. There were six bolts on the tall door, placed at quite a height—had the people who lived here before been taller than they were now? All the locks but one were broken.

For how many years had he been coming here? Since 1956? Or was it 1955? Since they were all thirteen years old, at any rate. And now he was as old as his teacher had been then. Just about, anyway. Strange, it was taking him so long to open the door. A rotund neighbor woman in an apron came to the door.

“He’s home. He probably doesn’t hear you.”

The bronze, asymmetrically rounded door handle, in the Art Nouveau style … how many times had he pressed it down until he heard the click of the latch? He entered. His teacher was asleep on the divan, snoring lightly, his head thrown back unattractively and his mouth slightly agape. The sleeve of his sweater was sewn shut from the inside. Ilya wondered what the stump looked like.

He looked like an unshaven, aging man with a yellowish complexion. The dark-red plush tablecloth was turned back halfway, revealing the table’s stained surface, on which a thick notebook, a pen, and a glass of tea, as dark as iodine, were arranged. Of course, it would be impossible to write on that plush tablecloth.

Ilya threw off his raincoat and sat down at the table. He wouldn’t wake the old fellow. Yes, he looked just like an old man. How quickly he had aged. And he was only fifteen years older than they were. Of course, it was not long ago that they had celebrated his forty-fifth birthday. Had a whole year passed already? Poor guy. He had been so brilliant, so elegant, a mix of both Don Quixote and Cervantes. The boys had followed him around in a flock. And the girls, too. He had cleared their minds, but had himself wilted. Gotten old. Katya had left him. Or maybe he was the one who had left her? They fired him from teaching. Then he had worked as a guard at the Museum of the Soviet Army for many years. He said he was writing a book. The museum had a marvelous collection—documents from World War II. He was preoccupied by a new idea: initiation by fear. Where there is no initiation into maturity through positive impulses, initiation through fear takes over.

The post-Revolution generations had been inoculated by fear at a very early age, and it had been so strong that other impulses were weak and ineffectual. This was Victor Yulievich’s discovery. He discussed it with friends and with his former students. Mikha was completely enamored of the idea; it appealed to Ilya, too. They were eager to read the book. They offered to publish it in the West. Victor Yulievich never finished writing it, however. Perhaps he had talked about it too long, and it had become rarified; or perhaps it was now “in the air,” become common knowledge for people who bothered to think about it at all.

In principle, the teacher was right about everything. Ilya closed his eyes. Yes, he’s an ingenious loser. And Mikha is a mediocre poet, an idealist. Sanya is a musician manqué. And now I’ve become a stool pigeon. What a bunch.

Well, I’m actually just doing my job. I want to leave a legacy. If no one knows about it, then it will be like it never happened at all. My archive will preserve this entire pathetic, hopeless, plague-ridden era. And fear? It was, is, and will be …

He had a point; still, he couldn’t understand what had happened to Victor Yulievich himself. He would have to ask him: Why he was lying there all alone, half-drunk, surrounded by the finest works of Russian literature? Maybe it was true that only beauty would save the world, or truth, or some other high-flown garbage; but fear was still more powerful than anything else. Fear destroyed everything: everything born of beauty, the tender shoots of all that was fine, wise, eternal … It was not Pasternak who would remain, but Mandelstam, because his poetry expresses the full horror of his time, and recoils from it. But Pasternak had always wanted to reconcile himself to it, to find a positive way of giving voice to it, of accommodating it.

Ilya was tired of sitting, so he began drumming on the tabletop with his finger. The sleeper was jarred awake, and his mouth snapped shut.

“Ah, I’ve been expecting you, Ilya.”

Ilya pulled a bottle out of the pocket of his raincoat and placed it on the table. Victor Yulievich stood up, swaying on his feet.

“Yes, yes,” he said, starting to bustle about, “just a moment.”

He took two glasses out of a cabinet, smiling weakly.

“There’s no food in the house.”

Ilya dug around in his pocket and pulled out a lemon.

“Let’s at least have some sugar.”

“I do have that.”

He poured them each a glass—round-bellied cognac snifters. The teacher’s hand was beautiful and refined, with long, pale fingers and evenly trimmed nails. He held his glass tenderly by the stem.

“Well, my dear friend! You see what we’ve come to?” Victor Yulievich smiled. Two teeth on the left side of his mouth were missing. And what had Ilya wanted to ask him? What did he want to tell him? Nothing. This was just what he had wanted: to sit down and drink a glass together, to commiserate with each other, to feel mutual sympathy, compassion, love. They drank in silence. And Ilya felt better.