The Big Green Tent

THE FUGITIVE

The storm took place at half past two in the morning. It was like an opera or a symphony—with an overture, leitmotifs, and a duet of water and wind. Lightning bolts flew up in columns, accompanied by incessant rumbling and flashes. Then there was an intermission and a second act. Maria Nikolayevna’s heart pains, which had plagued her all day, stopped immediately, as did Captain Popov’s headache, from which he had been suffering for the past twenty-four hours. He even managed to get some sleep before going to work. The only thing he didn’t manage to do was put a stamp on the document. But he could do that later.

At nine o’clock sharp he rang the doorbell. No one opened for a long time; then he heard a commotion behind the door.

“Who’s there? Who is it?” a tentative female voice called out.

Finally, the door opened a crack; but the chain was still secured. Sivtsev and Emelyanenko shuffled impatiently from foot to foot. They wanted to get this over and done with. Greenhorns. Popov showed his badge in the narrow space between the door and the door frame. Again, there was a commotion, and the door opened.

The witness, his man at the local housing authority, trotted up.

“Does Boris Ivanovich Muratov live here?”

Right then, Muratov appeared. A hefty fellow, about forty years old, with a beard. Wearing a blue robe that looked like it could be made of velvet.

We don’t have robes like that, Popov thought suspiciously. It’s foreign. Where do they get the stuff?

“Passport, please,” Popov said with absolute civility.

Muratov went into the next room, from which his wife was just emerging. She was a real beauty, of course, also wearing a blue robe! Amazing—two of them, exactly alike!

When Muratov returned, Popov held out the search warrant for his perusal.

“Take a look at this, please,” he said, standing some distance away, still clutching it in his hands.

“May I?” Muratov said, reaching out for it.

But Popov refused to part with it.

“What is there to read? It’s a search warrant, you can see that yourself. I’ll hold it, and you can read it if you think it’s necessary.”

“I can see it’s a search warrant. But it isn’t stamped.”

“Oh, hell!” Popov grew irate. “That’s unimportant. A warrant is a warrant; it’ll get its stamp, don’t worry about that.”

“First stamp it, then you can enter,” Boris Ivanovich said haughtily.

“If I were you, I’d try being more polite. Having words won’t help either of us. Now let me get on with my work, please.”

He moved deeper into the apartment, followed by Sivtsev. Emelyanenko stood in the tiny entrance hall, keeping an eye on the door and the living room.

“One moment, please,” Boris Ivanovich said, going into the smaller room.

Popov knew the layout of three-room apartments like this like the back of his hand. First a tiny entrance hall, then a larger pantry space with built-in wall cupboards where they kept everything. He had seen plenty of them.

He blocked the door so Muratov couldn’t enter the larger room. Muratov turned red, moved the captain aside, and went in to rummage through the top drawer of his desk. Popov lost his composure. In this petty struggle, Muratov was right. The warrant, strictly speaking, was invalid.

The captain couldn’t admit defeat, however, and barked out:

“Don’t touch the drawers! We’ll need to look through them.”

But Muratov, apparently, had found what he was looking for. He unfolded a thick piece of paper, yellowed at the edges, bearing an official red letterhead and a profile of the “greatest of the great” leaders.

“My Certificate of Honor.”

The artist thrust the paper at the captain, but at such a distance that he couldn’t read anything it said.

Again, Popov’s head started to throb.

“What is the meaning of this?”

The wife, blue-eyed, in her blue robe, her face pallid, looked beseechingly at her husband. Maria Nikolayevna, his mother-in-law, poured out tea for them as though nothing at all were happening.

Boris Ivanovich held the paper at a more reasonable distance: the captain could see it, but he couldn’t snatch it from him.

“I’ll hold it, and you can read it. I’ll hold it.”

The captain read it through. The captain heeded it. He turned around to go, his detachment following at his heels. They didn’t say a word.

Muratov flung the saving document into a corner.

With a graceful flourish, Maria Nikolayevna placed a teacup and a sandwich in front of Boris Ivanovich.

Boris Ivanovich loved his mother-in-law; in her he saw Natasha, but with a more decisive character. In his wife, Natasha, he saw features of his mother-in-law—the first signs of a gentle fullness, small lines around the mouth, and a burgeoning soft pouch under the chin. Good, healthy stock. The generous plumpness of Kustodiev’s women, but all the more alluring for it.

Natasha picked up the letter, which had been casually cast aside.

“What is this, Boris?”

Boris made a gesture indicating that walls have ears.

“Well, my dear Natasha, I got that Certificate of Honor after my Sculpture and Modeling Plant entrusted me with the task of manufacturing an object with the code name ‘SL,’ in two copies, as a matter of fact. This remarkable object represented, my girl, the sarcophagus of the leader and teacher of all times and peoples, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. And just look at the signatures! The highest authorities express their gratitude to me.”

After this booming announcement, he made an obscene gesture, visible though inaudible, at those very walls.

Maria Nikolayevna smiled. Natasha put her white hands on her still whiter neck.

“What’s going to happen now?” she said quietly.

Boris picked up one of the pages of thin gray paper that were heaped about the room in multitudes, and wrote with a pencil:

“He disappeared to an unknown location.”

And on that same piece of paper he drew his usual cartoon of himself—a large head hunched into his shoulders, a short, straggly beard, and a forehead framed by two bald patches on either side.

“Another cup of tea, please, Maria Nikolayevna!” he said, jangling his cup for effect.

Natasha sat rigid in her chair. Maria Nikolayevna went to put the kettle on again.

Boris embraced his wife.

“I knew this would happen. It’s all so awful,” she said.

Then she took a pencil and wrote in the margins of the page:

“They’re going to arrest you.”

“I’m leaving home in half an hour,” he wrote back. And he drew himself somersaulting down the stairs.

The page was filled. He tore it up and burned it. He waited until the flame burned the entire page, nearly to his fingertips, then dropped the vestiges into the ashtray.

He took a new page and drew himself running down the street. At the top of the page he wrote “Train Station,” and showed it to Natasha and Maria Nikolayevna, who had just come back. His mother-in-law grasped the situation faster than his wife, and nodded.

“Right now,” Boris said.

“Alone?” Natasha said.

Muratov nodded.

Then he started rummaging around in those very walk-in cupboards that Captain Popov had been so eager to inspect, and pulled out a folder, in which he kept exactly what the captain had been looking for.

He took out a sheaf of pages, full of drawings, and went out to the kitchen.

Maria Nikolayevna watched him in silent sympathy.

Muratov pulled a baking sheet out of the oven, put several pieces of the paper on it, and lit a match. Maria Nikolayevna snatched the matches from him.

“How many times have I told you not to interfere in my household duties, Boris Ivanovich.”

He was sitting on his haunches in the middle of the floor, looking up at her. Maria Nikolayevna pushed him out of the way, then squeezed past into the corridor, where she pried up the edge of the worn-out linoleum by the wooden threshold. Boris Ivanovich merely shrugged in amazement.

Deftly and in perfect concert, as though they had been doing this their whole lives, they stuffed all the drawings under the linoleum, then tucked the worn-out edge under the threshold again. Everything was just as it had been before, as though nothing at all had happened. Boris Ivanovich kissed Maria Nikolayevna’s cheek gratefully. It would have been a pity to have to burn them.

Then he found some canvas trousers, short in the leg and loose in the waist, in the lower drawer of the dresser. From the cupboard he took out an old straw hat. Both had belonged at one time to his late father-in-law. He did all this without saying a single word.

“He’s gone crazy. He’s gone crazy,” Natasha said. His mother-in-law, pointing to the telephone—she was as sure as Boris that their apartment was bugged—said in a loud voice: “Boris, shall I make meat patties for your lunch?”

“Meat patties sound good.”

Twenty-five minutes later he left the house. He had shaved off his beard, but left a mustache. He’d cut his hair shorter. He walked through the courtyard, so full of rainwater that he could have floated across in a boat. Broken branches protruded from the giant puddle, like trees after a flood. Boris was lugging a big shopping bag in which he had a change of underwear, a sweater, and his favorite little pillow, as well as all the money he had been able to scrape together.

Sivtsev and Emelyanenko, who had stayed behind to keep watch, were lounging on a little bench in the courtyard, smoking. They were deliberating whether to go and get some beer.

Captain Popov arrived at ten fifteen with the required stamp on the warrant. Natasha Muratov, wife and officially registered tenant of the apartment, opened the door right away this time, and said that her husband had gone to work. Popov threw a furious glance at his blockhead underlings.

“He doesn’t have a job!” Popov said. “What kind of work are you talking about?”

“He’s an artist. He doesn’t have a job, but he has plenty of work. You saw yourself: he worked on Lenin’s sarcophagus,” the mother-in-law piped up.

“He was fired after that,” Popov said, offering a belated piece of evidence.

“That’s right, he went out to look for a job,” Maria Nikolayevna retorted.

“Wasn’t he planning to come home for lunch?” the captain asked.

“Of course.” They’d taken the bait about the meat patties, the damned eavesdroppers. They worked fast! “And he ordered meat patties. We’re expecting him home for lunch.”

The captain got down to work. He spared no effort in tackling the mountains of assorted papers. The samizdat were the run-of-the-mill variety that everyone had. The samizdat weren’t what Popov was hoping to find, however.

What he was looking for was lying on his own desk in his office in the form of photocopied pages from Stern magazine. These were cartoons: gigantic letters spelling “Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” and under them a crowd of people and dogs trying to reach the sacred words. The words themselves were made of sausages: boiled salami, with circles of white fat where they had been sliced. They were strung together with rope, from which dangled a price tag reading “2 rub. 20 kop.”

Another cartoon depicted a mausoleum made of the same kind of salami, with the word Lenin written in sausage links.

The third cartoon showed the Volga boatmen from the famous painting by Repin, harnessed together, and pulling, not a barge, but a rocket ship.

The agents had been searching for the malicious cartoonist for a long time, and had discovered him quite by chance. All that remained now was to find the original drawings, sketches, or something similar.

Captain Popov departed late in the evening. He took three bags of samizdat with him. The drawings that Popov had hoped to find were not discovered.

Boris Ivanovich, in the meantime, had taken refuge for the night with an old woman who had been hawking green onions and parsley on the Kimry docks, had sold nothing, but had somehow returned home with a wayfarer who had missed the last boat to Novo-Akatovo. For a ruble she allowed him to spend the night in her barn on a haystack covered with a sheet. At sunrise he washed at the well, and by six in the morning he was on the boat. The old woman was a godsend—she didn’t report him.

On the evening of the second day he was sitting in the remote, nearly inaccessible village of Danilovy Gorki, in an old peasant cottage that belonged to his friend Nikolay Mikhailovich, also an artist. He explained the situation to him and asked permission to live there, in their summer hut, or in the bathhouse, for the time being, in the guise of a cousin or some such relative. Nikolay Mikhailovich shook his head and groaned, but didn’t refuse him. And so began Boris Ivanovich’s life as a fugitive.

Danilovy Gorki wasn’t exactly a village, but a small settlement of five houses. One of them was Nikolay Mikhailovich’s. Another stood empty, after the death of the owner two years back, and was awaiting a buyer. The owners of the other three hosted vacationers in the summer months. By the end of August, nearly everyone would return to the city.

Nikolay Mikhailovich’s mother was from the nobility; his father had been a priest, and was executed in 1937. Thus, he was under no illusions about the relative seriousness of the situation. He said that until September, while there were still many strangers around the settlement, it would be safe to stay there. When the vacationers left, though, every person for five miles could be seen at a glance.

The cottage was full to the rafters. Children, the elderly, two spinster aunts, all manner of dependents and houseguests. Everyone lent a hand, but on a voluntary basis. They were all busy from morning till night, but all free and unencumbered.

For Boris, this country life was a novelty. He was a city man. His grandfather, who had been a serf, had started to work in Sytin’s lithography plant after 1883. His father had been a typography engraver: a “proletarian of artistic labor,” as he called himself. He settled in Moscow and lost all ties with his Ryazan relatives.

Boris Ivanovich didn’t know much about country life, and was wary of it, but he didn’t like the city, either. He had lived in the Zamoskvorechye district, not far from the typography plant, since childhood, and he and his wife moved to Kharitonievsky Lane when they married.

He felt happiest when he was on the Black Sea, and he vacationed in Sochi or in Gagra every year. He had never really seen the countryside before, and now, for the first time, he was discovering the charms of a secluded little village near a large river, among forests and swamps. He was also charmed by the descendants of this family of the nobility. They had never lived in palaces, or caught so much as a whiff of luxury. For half a century, between poverty and indigence, between banishment and prison, those who had survived had been honed and simplified. They no longer knew a single foreign language, but they had preserved some ineffable quality that Boris Ivanovich never managed to pin down.

Nikolay’s daughters boiled kasha on the Russian stove, baked pies, worked in the vegetable garden, and washed clothing and linens in the river. The grandsons caught fish, the granddaughters and two aunts picked berries and mushrooms in the forest. All of them sang, drew, and put on children’s plays.

Nikolay Mikhailovich’s cousin, the vivacious and full-throated Anastasia, came for a three-day visit. From the moment she arrived, she began making eyes at Boris. She turned his head; he was an easy and quick-witted catch. They lost no time about it, and their first night together would have been longer if they hadn’t sat around the table singing songs until all hours. And Anastasia sang remarkably well—with a kind of gypsy flair, sonorous and provocative. His own wife was more attractive than this Anastasia, with her small, childlike breasts and long nose, but Boris Ivanovich marveled about her long afterward: this woman, bony and angular, had been like the water of life for him. It was as though he had been cleansed from inside, picked apart bone by bone, ligament by ligament, then reassembled. He couldn’t recall when he had ever been such a potent and untiring partner. Anastasia sailed away on a little boat on the fourth day of their romance. She was a doctor, moreover the head of her department, and had to return to duty. The whole family went down to the river to see her off, and when she was still on shore she began singing, “Marusenka Was Washing Her White Feet.” For a long time, she waved her handkerchief from the boat that would take her to the big landing stage, where the regular ferry would pick her up.

She’s such a cultured woman; but what a slut! Boris Ivanovich thought in rapturous bewilderment. He had never in his life met a woman like her.

Nikolay Mikhailovich, as though reading his mind, said quietly:

“It’s in Anastasia’s blood—her great-grandmother, or great-great … slept with Pushkin.”

On Transfiguration Day the whole household went to church in Kashino. Starting out in the evening, they traveled first by boat, then by bus. It was an exhausting journey. They were cultured, well-educated people—but religious as well. Boris Ivanovich had never met people like this before, either.

“Your way of life is rather anti-Soviet,” he said in amazement.

“No, Boris, it’s simply a-Soviet,” Nikolay Mikhailovich replied, laughing.

Boris stared wide-eyed at everything. He watched the rising sun, and the shallow water lapping the sandbars, where the minnows and tadpoles darted to and fro as though they had some great business to attend to. He saw the sandy shore with its empty mussel shells and ornately patterned grasses, which he had noticed on icons, but he hadn’t known they really existed in the world. He saw all this, and felt a happy wonder. He and the others tramped into the woods to pick mushrooms, which were sparse in July but much more numerous in August, after the gentle, sweet rains.

Boris Ivanovich turned out to have a passion for hunting mushrooms, and for fishing. He even proved to be adept at peasant labors: he learned to wield an axe like the best of them, helping Nikolay Mikhailovich repair the barn and set the gate upright again.

The days were long, and the evenings, with their endless tea-drinking, were pleasant. The nights passed by in an instant: he would fall asleep and wake up again refreshed, as though no time at all had passed. And Boris Ivanovich felt an unprecedented calm and peace, something he had never known in his Moscow life.

A month and a half passed, and he still hadn’t had any news from home. And, strange as it may seem, he didn’t seek out ways to get in touch with his wife. On the face of it, this was because he didn’t wish to cause her any trouble. But deeper down, he admitted that he felt more tranquil without her agitated caprices, her alarm and fears.

A relative of Nikolay Mikhailovich’s tossed a single postcard in the mailbox from Boris Ivanovich upon her return to Moscow: Don’t worry, everything’s fine. I love and miss you.

In August, Nikolay Mikhailovich’s wife arrived with their oldest son, Kolya. She was the daughter of a famous Russian artist. Both daughters hovered around their mother, pampering her like an honored guest, with a constant refrain of “Mommy, Mommy!” The son, a strapping thirty-year-old, trailed around after his father. Nikolay Mikhailovich’s relationship with his wife was also unusual. They were tender and respectful toward each other, almost formal in their manners and forms of address. They spoke in quiet voices, attentive and courteous to each other. It was hard to believe they had ever made children.

The grown-up children still remained their children, and it was amusing to see how the grandchildren adopted the manners and habits of their parents—bringing them a pretty apple, or a bouquet of late-blooming wild strawberries. Boris Ivanovich, who was staunchly opposed to childbearing, even began to doubt his long-held theory—that producing new human beings in this country, ruled by an inhuman and shameless government, in which they would be destined to a life of poverty, filth, and meaninglessness, was wrong. This was the condition on which he married Natasha.

He and Natasha had been married for eight years already, and she had not yearned for children. But there was another circumstance that irked her. Whether it was because she lacked a sense of humor, or because her husband’s views and ideas weighed too heavily on her, she began to recoil from the cartoons, which had become more strident and bitter with time. They lived very comfortably, compared with others. He had graduated from the department of applied arts and crafts at the Stroganov Institute, so he had never become a “proper artist.” He carried out commissions, and earned more than the real artists at the plant, where he made up to a thousand rubles on a project.

Sometimes he took on private commissions for well-known people, or assisted in creating metalwork décor and panels for all manner of palaces of culture, whether railroad or metallurgical—but invariably socialist. This kind of hackwork filled him with spiteful rage, and he began making ever more acerbic cartoons about this socialist way of life that would any day now become full-blown communism.

He began to indulge his passion for drawing with greater intensity. By trade, he was a craftsman specializing in fine metalwork, but drawing became his source of joy and rest—and an outlet for his frustrations. Once he was invited to take part in an art exhibit held in an apartment, out of sight of the authorities, and after this he was welcomed into a select circle of underground artists.

His underground work even drew admirers. The first to attract attention were the laborer and female collective-farm worker made out of the coveted salami—but only on paper, naturally. Thanks to his friend Ilya, this salami even made it all the way to West Germany and was published in an evil anti-Soviet magazine (like all the magazines over there). After this taste of success, Boris even grew indifferent to large-scale commissions and spent most of his time scratching away with his pencil.

Here, in Danilovy Gorki, Muratov lost all interest in drawing salami. They didn’t have it there, and no one missed it. Neither had he any interest in the quiet sketches of gentle nature that every member of Nikolay Mikhailovich’s family, young and old, was so fond of making. So, during the summer, he refrained from drawing.

It was getting on toward September, and they began to prepare for going back to the city. They stuffed mushrooms, raspberries, and strawberries dried in the oven into pillowcases. They hadn’t made jam that year—there wasn’t enough sugar, and the jars were hard to transport to the city, anyway. They put away the salted cucumbers and mushrooms in the cellar, and buried the early potatoes.

During the winter, Nikolay Mikhailovich and his son always made a trip here from the city on “inspection”—to look at the house, and to fetch provisions to take back to Moscow. The route during the winter, in contrast to the summer “water” route, was far more grueling: first by train, then by bus, then four more miles through the forest. Cars weren’t able to make it to Danilovy Gorki because there was no road; the only way to reach it was by tractor.

When their departure was imminent, Nikolay Mikhailovich said to Boris:

“Well, do you intend to winter here, Boris Ivanovich?”

Although he had lived there for nearly two months in placid tranquillity, he had nevertheless been contemplating the future, and so was quick to answer:

“I have some trepidation, Nikolay Mikhailovich. Not about the police—but about your stove, about your cottage. One has to know these things from childhood. I may be too old by now to pick these things up.”

“True, our father was a parish priest, and we lived in a cottage like this from childhood. It’s a simple science; but a science nevertheless.”

Nikolay Mikhailovich scratched his scraggly beard, thought for a bit, then said:

“Old Nura’s vacationers have all gone home, and she has been unwell for about a year. Why don’t you stay with her, Boris; I’ll talk to her about it. You can help her get through the winter. I’ll come in December to check in on you. God willing, things will work out.”

They had adopted a practice: If they called each other just by their given names, Boris and Nikolay, they used the formal address. If they used their patronymics, they addressed each other as “thou.”

Muratov gave Nikolay Mikhailovich instructions about what to do once he reached Moscow. He wanted him to stop in at his home one evening without prior arrangement and hand over a letter, without revealing his whereabouts. That was all. And he wanted him to meet with his friend Ilya, convey his greetings, and tell him one word: “Forward.” He would know what to do.

Before Nikolay Mikhailovich’s return to the village in December, Boris requested that he meet with Ilya again, take the money he would have ready, give half of it to Boris’s family, and bring the other half with him here. How much money there would be he didn’t know: perhaps a lot, perhaps not much; perhaps none at all …

Nikolay Mikhailovich fulfilled these requests down to the last detail during the first week after his return to Moscow.

Muratov moved in with Nura. The old woman was shrunken and stooped over. She had a craggy face and gnarled fingers with huge, bulbous knuckles and joints. She held them perpetually in front of her, as though she were holding a cup or a saucer. Her joints no longer worked, and she manipulated her fingers as if they were claws.

She allowed Muratov to live with her in exchange, not for money, but for vodka. The old woman turned out to be very fond of tippling, and was quite a character. Early in the morning she would wake up and crawl out of bed, her bones creaking. Then she would cross herself in front of the holy place in the corner, where there was an icon completely covered in soot, and imbibe her first thimbleful. At noon she took another. At some indeterminate point during the day she ate porridge or potatoes. All the other fats, proteins, and carbohydrates a person needs to survive she would get from a further three thimblefuls of the potion. A bottle lasted her a week; she had established this for herself years ago. In the mornings she was barely alive, but by evening she was animated and cheerful, and even did some housework. But she mumbled more and more incoherently as the day wore on.

Three years before, the settlement had been furnished with radio and electricity. The old woman ignored the electricity. She never turned on the light, going to sleep when it got dark, and rising at sunrise. She took a liking to the radio, however. When Muratov learned to decipher the meaning of her mumbling, he would catch merciless and hilarious gibes at the radio broadcasts that she listened to in the mornings. That year, another campaign against drinking had been launched. They issued statements and decrees, and the antialcohol message was sent out over the radio waves.

“Now they’re all worked up about vodka. Who can drink vodka, when there’s not even any moonshine! We don’t need anything from you, leave us to ourselves. You can keep your BAM,* but leave us the vodka.”

When Boris Ivanovich started to understand her indistinct muttering, he came to appreciate the liveliness and wit of her repartee.

“Listen, lodger, that new Stalin, whatchamacallem, he’ll be worse than the old one.”

“Why is that?”

“The old one took everything, and this one is picking through the leftovers. Oh yes, they liberated us from everything, the dears—first they freed us from the land, then from my husband, then from my children, from my cow, my chickens … They’ll liberate us from vodka, and our freedom will be complete.”

Nura’s husband had perished in 1930, during collectivization. Her three sons, who had come of age at the beginning of the war, had died in combat, one after another—the eldest in ’41, the middle in ’42, and the youngest in ’45.

“And they liberated us from God, too.” She peered through the darkness at the icon and muttered: “But maybe He Himself turned his back on us, who’s to say…”

In the evenings there were sometimes visitors—Marfa and Zinaida, both a bit younger, but no less bitter than Nura. They drank Boris Ivanovich’s tea, and Nura praised him:

“God sent me a good lodger. Sometimes he brings me vodka, and sometimes tea…”

Boris Ivanovich hadn’t thought about salami for a long time now. It had completely lost its symbolic significance in these parts, having long ago been out of circulation, and thus forgotten. These women had no money to take a commuter train to Moscow to buy salami, and they would never have laid eyes on an orange if Nikolay Mikhailovich’s family had not presented them with this delicacy from time to time.

Nowadays, Muratov drew only the old women’s meager feasts. He discovered great riches amid the scarcity: small, crooked potatoes, boiled in their jackets, pickled cucumbers, disfigured from being crammed in their barrels, mushrooms—small boletes, stout milk caps, and saffron agarics. And the queen of the table was a turbid bottle of moonshine with a homemade stopper. And vodka, if they were lucky. In the winter, bread supplies were intermittent. They hadn’t gotten any at the village store in the larger settlement of Kruzhilino, four miles from Danilovy Gorki, so the old women took turns baking it themselves.

Boris Ivanovich had quickly used up all the paper he found in Nikolay Mikhailovich’s house. Luckily, he had found ten rolls of wallpaper that had been intended for the attic. The renovation had been put off for several years, and then forgotten. But the wallpaper was just what Boris Ivanovich needed. At first he drew on the back side, which was ash gray; then he started working on the right side of the paper, a lightly stippled yellow background that brought the old women’s faces to life.

They were the last people in the village. The others had already died, as worn out as their ancient clothing, resigned and humble as the potatoes that were their only food, and free as the clouds.

When they drank, they would grow frisky and cheerful, rather than gloomy. They would strike up a song or lose themselves in reminiscences. They laughed, covering their toothless mouths with their blackened fingers. Among the three of them they had only a few teeth left. They cured the toothache with sage and nettles. The village shepherd, Lyosha, had pulled teeth, but after he died, all the teeth left in their mouths fell out by themselves, without any extra help.

The old women’s stories were always the same. New ones were rarely aired. Boris Ivanovich sketched their gatherings with a fine pencil, along with their intriguing quips and words, which he inscribed on ribbons coming from their toothless mouths. And what words they were! There were stories about how, before the war, Party functionaries had come to the village to herd them into a collective farm. The people protested and shouted, but they had to join up, they had no choice. But Nura’s eldest son, Nikola, was a daredevil if ever there was one. He found a rotten egg—they had a chicken who was such a schemer that you couldn’t find where she hid her eggs, and when they would finally rot and explode, the stench was so bad it would hang around for a month. Nikola bent over backward to find a few that hadn’t exploded yet, to put them in the wagon carrying the officials, so that they would break them with their fat behinds along the way. And what do you know, the first Party boss who sat in the wagon broke the rotten egg. There was a soft whistle—and the foul stink spread all over the place. Oh, what a laugh! Another time Zinaida’s tooth was hurting, and Lyosha the shepherd was on a binge, so Zinaida went to Kashino to get her tooth pulled. The dentist sat her down in a chair, and she peed all over herself in terror … Imagine, from Kashino she ran all twelve miles to get home. When she got there, her toothache was gone: the abscess had broken along the way!

They recalled their husbands, and even argued a bit: Marfa remembered how Zinaida had seduced her husband in 1926. Zinaida, in her turn, reported that Lyosha the shepherd had stolen milk right and left from the entire herd. And Lyosha was Marfa’s own brother. Words were exchanged, and they almost got into fisticuffs. But Nura saved the day by singing an off-color little ditty apropos of the situation, about who had sneaked into where and filched what, and they both started laughing.

And again they reminisced about things long past but not forgotten—about how the “Commonists” had starved the village and stolen its men. When they fell silent, they would drink a thimbleful. Then they’d burst out laughing and drink some more. But they didn’t allow sad stories to creep in and put a damper on things. They derived pleasure from the most trivial matter; they laughed on the slightest pretext, or for no reason at all. They cracked jokes, mocked and made fun of one another, danced and sang, a bit for show, with Boris Ivanovich in mind as their audience, but mainly for one another, in the most candid and heartfelt manner.

Nikolay Mikhailovich’s house yielded yet another gift to Boris Ivanovich: three boxes of children’s colored pencils. He had no respect for his metallurgical hackwork, considering himself to be a graphic artist; but these simple colored pencils awakened the painter in him, and applying strokes alternately in blue, green, and black, he created something of strange, multilayered beauty.

Now he felt he was a scholar, a scientist, documenting a disappearing world in images. Laughing, the old women told their intricate stories, their wrinkled faces joyous, and Boris Ivanovich sat at the table, dashing off his marvelous pictures. He was already well into his supply of wallpaper.

The snow fell, and autumnal bleakness, the dreary brown wetness, gave way to the whiteness of winter. It stayed in Boris’s memory as a brilliant, bright patch, a sunny clearing in the dull, gray background of his life.

Boris Ivanovich spent every daylight hour, which were few at the end of November, wandering around the village. The swamps were frozen over, and it was possible to walk out on them, but so much snow had fallen that it was already higher than the tops of his boots.

One day he returned home, frozen to the bone, and found all the old women scurrying around in the yard. They had decided to subject themselves to a major cleansing in anticipation of the next day’s holiday.

“What kind of holiday is it? It’s not November seventh, the reddest of red-letter days; and it’s surely not the fifth of December, the day of the Soviet Constitution, is it?” Boris Ivanovich said.

“We call it the Great Presentation.”

But who was presenting what to whom, they couldn’t say. They all agreed, as one person, however, that they had to bathe. And it was time, in any case. The last time they had washed was for the Feast of the Intercession, when the first snow had fallen.

Only Nikolay Mikhailovich had a decent bathhouse. The old women’s bathhouses had all fallen into disrepair long before. So much snow had piled up in Nikolay Mikhailovich’s garden that it would have taken a whole day to dig a path through it. They decided to bathe in Nura’s cottage, as they had done last time. If they had been younger, they could have bathed right in the stove, but now that they were old they were afraid they might burn themselves to a crisp.

Boris Ivanovich decided not to ask too many questions. He rolled the tubs from the outer entrance into the main room of the cottage. He hauled water from the well. He chopped wood for them, and brought it inside—the outer entrance was filled up with it. They began heating the water in the morning. It was so hot in the cottage that all the windows were steamed up, and tears ran down the panes, bathing them as well as the old women.

Everything was ready; they had even steamed the birch switches. Then they wondered: Where would they put the lodger? He would freeze outside, how could they chase him out of the house while they bathed? They couldn’t hide him in the stove, he’d burn up. The cottage wasn’t divided into separate rooms; there was only one place they could put him—behind the stove. But would he try to take a peek at them from there? Then they started laughing at themselves: Why would a young lad like him want to look at their old bones, anyway?

They put Boris Ivanovich behind the stove and pulled a curtain over it. He sat there with a book, but didn’t read anything. The light from the lamp was as weak as candlelight, and didn’t reach as far as where he was sitting. So he listened to the old women’s conversation.

At first they giggled, saying that they had grown so dry the dirt wouldn’t stick to them anymore. Then Zinaida said that she had already stopped stinking: when they were young they had smelled like pussy, but now they just smelled of dust and mold. Then the washing started. They groaned and whined, they poured the water and clattered the tubs. Then one of them slipped, fell down with a plop, and shrieked. Boris Ivanovich started, and jumped up to see whether she needed his help. He drew himself up to his full height and looked over the curtain. Zinaida and Marfa were picking Nura up off the floor, dissolving into childlike laughter.

Boris Ivanovich froze. He’d grown used to their wrinkled faces, to their dark, knotty hands and their blunt, shapeless feet, to everything that their ancient, faded clothing didn’t conceal. But now—good God!—he saw their bodies. He couldn’t take his eyes off them. Their long, loose gray hair streamed down over their bumpy spines. Their hands and feet seemed enormous and even more misshapen. Broken by working the earth, twisted like the roots of old trees, their fingers had taken on the color of the soil in which they had been digging for so many decades. The skin of their bodies, however, was so white it looked bluish pale, like skimmed milk. Marfa still had breasts, with dark animal-like nipples; but the breasts of the other two seemed to have evaporated, leaving only soft, translucent sacks that hung down to their bellies. Zinaida had long, shapely legs—or what remained of them. Their behinds had been rubbed away to a smooth flatness, and only the folds of skin underneath indicated where their round buttocks had once been.

“I’m telling you, Nura, I can’t pick up anything heavy anymore; my womb starts falling out whenever I do,” Marfa said, challengingly, and with some sort of secret pride. Just then, Boris Ivanovich noticed that a gray bag the size of a tobacco pouch was dangling down between her legs. He grimaced, but still couldn’t tear his eyes away from these three cronelike graces.

Marfa squatted and nimbly pushed the little pouch back under the hairless, wrinkled mound, into the depths of what had once been a woman’s body.

Boris Ivanovich was not an autodidact. He had graduated from art school, and his father had been, after all, an artist-engraver. From childhood he had been familiar with Doré’s illustrations for The Divine Comedy. He had examined that book in the latter years of childhood and early adolescence, when the female body held a burning interest for him. But these crooked, bent creatures who were pottering about just six feet away from him were the living vestiges of bodies, and only with a great effort of the imagination could he discern a female form in their contorted bones, their drooping flesh.

“Old age is sexless,” Boris Ivanovich thought, and felt a sudden horror: “And me? Will this happen to me, too? No, no, I don’t want it to happen to me! I’d rather exit on my own than fall into this sort of decrepitude, this sort of nonbeing.”

Just then, there was a screech of laughter; the old women had caught him in the act!

“Oh-oh, that lodger of yours, Nura, he’s peeking at the girls!”

“Let’s whip him with the birch switch so he won’t be naughty again!”

Nura screamed. “Stinging nettles! We’ll whip him with stinging nettles, since he peeked!”

“Oh, come off it, what do I need with a bunch of old grannies like you? I thought I might need to rescue whoever it was that slipped and fell. You should be glad!”

And he retreated behind the curtain again. He spent several days afterward drawing this “Bath of the White Swans,” as he called it, in secret.

He filled up the last remnants of the wallpaper with this strange work. He remembered how he had been taught to do life studies in art school, but this quest for form by means of a child’s pencil had nothing at all to do with that slavish shading, that endless struggle of light and shadow. The pictures that emerged were grotesque and terrifying—but for some reason, amusing at the same time.

He was able to draw about twenty of them before the paper ran out. Just when Boris Ivanovich was starting to feel bored, Nikolay Mikhailovich and his son returned from the city to inspect his household. He brought Boris Ivanovich a great deal of money from Ilya, more than he had ever expected. He also brought greetings and a letter from his wife.

Together they set out for a store in the neighboring village, a distance of about four miles.

Verka, the shopkeeper, knew Nikolay Mikhailovich well. She had great respect for him. She pulled out the hidden vodka from under the counter. Nikolay had brought two bottles from Moscow, but Boris Ivanovich couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend his newly earned riches. He had avoided going to the store, for fear of the locals: What if they informed on him, saying there was a stranger wandering around these parts?

They emptied out almost all the meager inventory of the store into two rucksacks: cookies, sticky candy without wrappers, sprats, vegetable oil, barley, a package of dried peas, briquettes of cherry kissel, cheese spread, and two packs of salt. Boris Ivanovich scoured the shelves in the hopes of finding some real food. Verka examined the customer, trying to size up whether he would do for any other kind of business. To all appearances, he would—but his eyes were roving over the foodstuffs, not over her, the beauty …

Nikolay Mikhailovich, after working his shoulders under the straps, gave them a good shrug to settle the purchases in the bottom of the rucksack; the bottles clanked together softly and invitingly.

“Have you come to stay for a while? Stop in and see us!” Verka propped her round cheek on her beet-red fist.

“No, Verka, thank you. I’m only here for a day. I didn’t even bother heating the house, it would just waste firewood. We’re going to stay the night at Old Nura’s, then go home.”

“Well, you could send your friend over to us,” Verka said with a giggle. “Otherwise, we girls might get bored. He’s been living here so long already, and he hasn’t gotten to know anybody.”

Ah, so the grapevine had been in good working order all along. They even knew in nearby villages that someone was living here who hadn’t been accounted for. The artists exchanged a significant look.

“We’re leaving tomorrow. You’ll get to know each other in the spring, when we come back.”

Upon their return, the men found that Nura had baked potato pies for them and had herself retreated behind the stove. Zinaida and Marfa stayed away, out of politeness.

“Maybe we should call them?” Boris Ivanovich said. He had made his decision: he would have to leave this marvelous place, where he had already stayed too long.

“No, they won’t come today. They’re well-brought-up peasant women. They would never come over on the first day. I don’t know why—whether for fear of bothering someone, or not to seem to beg for gifts or favors. They had a sound upbringing, not like today’s young local women. Verka, the shopkeeper, is just a broad, not to mention a thief. She’s Zinaida’s niece. According to the rules, she should come to visit her aunt and bring her gifts and provisions, but she doesn’t. Zinaida’s son has been doing time for two years already. His wife drinks. One of her grandsons drowned last year, and now there’s just a slow-witted granddaughter left.” Nikolay Mikhailovich gestured dismissively. “But what do our country dramas mean to you, Ivanovich…”

Kolya arrived, his arms full of supplies from the cellar.

“Everything’s okay, Dad. Nothing froze. The potatoes are well protected. I don’t think we could make it to the station without them freezing, though. I’d take the cucumbers and mushrooms, but I wouldn’t touch the potatoes.”

“Too bad. But you’re right, Kolya. The frosts are getting stronger, and even in the bus the potatoes would freeze.”

The three men sat around the table, talking companionably and eating the pies and all manner of country delicacies. To mark the occasion, they cleaned some potatoes to eat, and doused them in vegetable oil. They didn’t open any of the canned preserves; they left them for the old women for their Christmas repast. The Nativity fast had just begun; but their fast lasted all year without interruption, not counting a chicken they might boil up now and then.

When it was already late, around ten o’clock, there was a knock at the door. Nikolay Mikhailovich leapt to his feet, thrust the plate and glass into Boris’s hands, and bundled him behind the stove with the old woman. And it was the right thing to do: at the door stood Nikolay Svistunov, a distant relative and a policeman. Family ties weren’t all that significant anymore, since half the people were Svistunovs, and the other half Erofeevs, in the three surrounding villages. And every other fellow was named Nikolay.

Svistunov took off his hat, then unbuttoned his uniform coat. Without a word, Nikolay Mikhailovich took a clean glass and filled it just over halfway for him.

“I stopped off in Gorki when I noticed that you weren’t heating your stove and there was no light on in your cottage,” Svistunov said.

“Well, you have to heat it for three days to get it warm. We just dropped in to look around and pick up some cucumbers and mushrooms from the cellar. We’re staying here at Nura’s, then heading back to the city.”

There was no road out of Danilovy Gorki, not even a ski run. Nikolay and Boris had tamped down a fresh path, and this was what the policeman had followed. The newly fallen snow had already powdered over the recent tracks, however.

“It’ll take more than an hour to get back,” Svistunov said, and started hurrying. Wolves had been spotted last week in Troitsky. Svistunov didn’t want to meet up with them, so he didn’t stay at the old woman’s for long. Never mind what someone had seen, or what someone said. He had stopped by, checked documents; they were familiar vacationers, well known in these parts, lived in a house they had bought themselves, and he hadn’t seen any strangers about the premises at all.

But, just for the record, he asked: “Nikolay Mikhailovich, you haven’t see any strangers around here, have you?”

“Strangers?” the artist said. “No, no strangers. Only our own.”

And officer Svistunov made his way back home along the narrow path through the woods. He ran into no strangers; he ran into no wolves.

Boris Ivanovich came out from behind the stove, where old Nura had been sleeping a childlike slumber; she was herself the size of a child. The men finished off a second bottle of vodka, and afterward drank tea. Then Boris wiped off the table and laid out three piles of his drawings. In one pile there were drawings of the old women’s feast, with traces of their conversation. In another there were still lifes, with potatoes and salted cucumbers lying among curious nameless objects of questionable purpose, long ago fallen into desuetude: some sort of tongs, wooden pincers, little shovels, and clay vessels that could either be for drinking, or children’s toys. In the third pile, the largest, were pieces of wallpaper covered with drawings on both the front and back. These were the naked old women, their bony protrusions, their sacks and pouches and folds of skin, their wrinkles. Only it wasn’t “Hell” of any kind. They were laughing, smiling, guffawing. They were happy—from the hot water, from the ritual bathing.

Nikolay Mikhailovich examined them for a long time, groaned, sniffed, then said drily:

“Boris, I had no idea what a real draughtsman you were. Of course you can’t remain here any longer. I don’t know what you have in mind, how you intend to live your life further, but I’m taking these drawings with me to Moscow. I’ll keep them safe until you return…” He smiled. “If I can stay safe myself.”

“Do you really think they’re any good? I wasn’t thinking about that—whether they were good or not. Don’t keep them at home, though. Give them to Ilya. Maybe he’ll find a place for them,” Boris Ivanovich said.

He was very, very happy. Nikolay Mikhailovich was highly respected among artists, known for his severity of judgment and his scant praise.

They left the next day, Nikolay Mikhailovich and his son in the direction of Moscow, Boris Ivanovich in the direction of Vologda.

Boris Ivanovich evaded arrest for four whole years. He had already grown used to the thought that they would catch him in the end, anyway, and he lived recklessly, frivolously, first in the Vologda region, then for three months or so in the city of Tver with the vivacious and full-throated Anastasia. Then, growing bolder, he moved back closer to Moscow and lived in a relative’s dacha outside of town. Then it occurred to him: maybe no one was looking for him after all.

His friend Ilya helped him enormously—he kept his entire collection, except for the works he had managed to deliver safely to the West. Everything was going beautifully there. At the end of 1976, an exhibit was organized in Cologne with the title “Russian Nature Laid Bare.” The old women, naked and terrible, frolicked. They were enjoying themselves.

And that’s when it happened. They caught him, four years after his timely flight.

They only gave him two years, and they came up with an astonishing charge: pornography. They didn’t nail him for the anti-Soviet salami, or for the sausage mausoleum, or even for the shocking portrait of the Leader made of ground sausage and holding a cut-off piece of ear on the tines of a fork. No, they nailed him for pornography! Considering that no one had ever been imprisoned in the USSR for pornography, it was some sort of record.

After spending two years in a camp near Arkhangelsk, he was released, and soon after that he emigrated to Europe with his new wife, Raika, a small Jewess, as agile, neat, and compact as a little boat, and somewhat reminiscent of the long-lost Anastasia. Until recently they lived there still.

The lovely Natasha also fared well. While Boris Ivanovich was on the run, she found herself a completely ordinary engineer, with whom she had a daughter of the same Kustodiev-type Boris Ivanovich had once liked. Maria Nikolayevna looked after her granddaughter and prepared their meager meals. She liked her current son-in-law—he was a decent person—but he didn’t measure up to Boris Ivanovich!

All the old women in Danilovy Gorki died long ago.

Everything is just as it should be.