The Big Green Tent

A GOOD TICKET

By the time she was thirty, Lyudmila had come to terms with being an old maid, and even found many advantages to this state. Her married girlfriends, having given birth to children and now divorced, or joylessly bearing all the burdens of running a household, did not inspire envy in her. The years when she wanly expected first a prince, then some kind of lover, any kind at all, and, finally, just a decent man had given way to a measured, rather tedious, but completely calm existence.

Ilya had appeared gradually. She began to recognize his lanky figure and curly head of hair among dozens of regular readers at the library. Glances of recognition were replaced with nods. Once, right before the library closed, they ran into each other next to the cloakroom, and they went out together—unintentionally. They went toward the metro, conversing politely. They exchanged names: Lyudmila, Ilya.

Six months later, Ilya walked Lyudmila home. She was lugging five rather thick books home for her father. He was an academic—not a bona fide one, in Ilya’s view, since he was an agronomist. Lyudmila’s family also lived in the vicinity of Timiryazevsky Academy, which took an hour to reach by bus from the Novoslobodskaya metro station. It turned out that they lived not in an ordinary building or house but in a large old dacha, built at the end of the nineteenth century for the agriculture professors.

It was already late evening. The buses had abandoned their routes, heading back to the bus depot for the night, and Lyudmila suggested that Ilya stay the night. The professor, never having lost his rural habit of turning in early and rising at the crack of dawn, had gone to bed long before. Nanny Klava, who had raised Lyudmila after her mother died when Lyudmila was still a child, had left that day on a visit to her sister. If Nanny Klava had stayed home that day, things might have gone in quite another direction.

After a simple meal, which was served in the dining room—featuring a small table for the samovar, a sideboard with colored glass, an étagère, and napkins—Lyudmila showed Ilya to the divan, pointed out where the bathroom was, and left him, wishing him good night. After some time, she returned with a towel.

“I forgot to give you this,” Lyudmila said, smiling.

She had already changed for the night, and was wearing a blue flannel robe, from under which peeped a blue nightgown with a fancy ruffle. She had already loosened her hair from its bun, and her messy plait fell against her chest when she bent over to place the towel on a chair next to the divan. The light from the full moon, blue and intense, the gleaming snowdrifts outside the window, and the old-fashioned coziness (Like an aristocratic home, Ilya thought in passing) awakened romantic impulses in him. He pulled Lyudmila toward him, and she clung to him compliantly.

In the morning, Ilya left, not in the least troubled about the adventures of the previous night. At the end of the week, he met Lyudmila in the library, then accompanied her to Timiryazevka. Again he stayed overnight. Nanny Klava was absent, as before.

They were not having a relationship. That, at least, was Ilya’s view of the matter; and he knew a thing or two about romantic entanglements, falling in love often with pretty girls, and even enjoying a reputation among his friends as a skilled ladies’ man and seducer. But in this case, getting the girl—unprepossessing, and already wilting, without ever having bloomed, it seemed—did not require any effort. She fell out of the blue into his embrace.

Ilya had no thought that these chance meetings, devoid of any festive brightness or intensity, would turn into a dull but tolerable marriage.

In the third year of their uninspired relationship, Lyudmila got pregnant. She was thirty-four years old, ten years older than Ilya. They registered their marriage not long before the birth of their child—and, it must be said, without any special urging on Lyudmila’s part. When Ilya suggested they should get married, she was not over the moon with joy, which disappointed him somewhat: he was rather proud of his noble gesture.

After the birth of their child—named Ilya, whether after his magnanimous father or after Ilya Ivanovich, his indifferent grandfather, the professor—Ilya moved in with Lyudmila more or less for good. He even moved the most valuable part of his book collection out to the dacha. Nanny Klava, whose small room was right next to Lyudmila’s, did not give it up for the young husband. He was given a room on the second floor, which was rather chilly, but spacious.

Lyudmila was in charge of some sort of agronomy research laboratory. She had long before finished her master’s thesis and qualifying exams, and would have gotten her doctorate had it not been for her pregnancy. But the baby, although quiet and uncomplaining, and almost wholly in the care of Nanny Klava, seemed to sap Lyudmila’s enthusiasm for science, and she never managed to defend her dissertation.

Ilya grew to like living at Lyudmila’s more and more. The city was encroaching on one side of the dacha community, but on the other side it was adjoined by fields for research experiments. Beyond that stretched Timiryazevsky Park, with its ancient lime trees and avenues of pine, its ponds and old feeding troughs for hoofed wildlife, which hadn’t been seen in those parts for a long time already.

Sometimes Ilya would stay home without going anywhere for a whole week; then he would leave for several days. Lyudmila never asked him to account for his comings and goings, neither did she ask him for money. He would arrive, and she seemed happy; he would leave, and she didn’t reproach him. She simply asked him to warn her beforehand, if possible.

The boy took after Ilya, with his curly hair and narrow face. He rarely cried, and rarely smiled. Ilya thought the child had inherited his mother’s character. By the time he was three, they began noticing peculiarities in him. He had a large passive vocabulary, and had even learned by heart some difficult poems that they read to him. But when they would ask him, “Do you want it?,” he would answer “You want it.” Nanny Klava thought he was fine, and the only unusual thing about him was that he was smarter than other children, and that he was destined to become an academic. By the time he was five, he could recite all of Pushkin’s rhymed fairy tales aloud, to Nanny Klava’s delight; but the small aberrations in his speech remained. A specialist was consulted, and he was diagnosed with autism. This explained his peculiarities of speech and the developmental abnormalities: gloomy concentration, incommunicativeness, inability to converse. And, according to the doctor, the prognosis was not promising.

In the year that little Ilya was supposed to begin school, his father stopped showing up at the house at Timiryazevka altogether. Just as gradually as he had appeared, and then married, he gradually left them.

That same year, Lyudmila’s father, Ilya Ivanovich, died. A new professor was appointed, and he expressed the desire to live in the house of his late predecessor. After a short legal battle—although Lyudmila was the head of a laboratory, her rank didn’t qualify her for a dacha—she was awarded a three-room apartment not far away, on Krasnostudenchesky Lane, in exchange. Ilya helped her with the move, wrapping up the books in small bundles, packing dishes into boxes, then loading everything into a truck.

* * *

But he didn’t even stay for one day in the new apartment. He took the suitcase with his collection, intending to transport it to the apartment of his new wife, about whose existence Lyudmila had a vague suspicion. At the door, when he was ready to leave, Ilya kissed his son on the head.

“Be good, don’t upset your mom,” he said to his son.

“Don’t upset your mom,” his son replied.

Ilya cringed inside. This trivial parroting of other people’s speech, weak echoes of other people’s words, sounded all too often like mockery.

The heavyset Lyudmila, covered in dust from the move, her hair suddenly gray, stood in the doorway. Ilya, who was abnormally large for his age, pressed against his mother.

“Next time you come, you wouldn’t hang up the shelves for me, would you?” Lyudmila asked.

“Wouldn’t hang up the shelves, wouldn’t hang up the shelves,” the boy repeated.

* * *

Olga was like a pink-and-yellow flower bulb, with laughter always playing around the corners of her mouth, and dimples in her childlike cheeks. By bus to Novoslobodskaya, from there to Rizhskaya, and by commuter train to Nakhabino. Then, the final leg of the trip, a packed bus to the dacha, where his beloved, and a squealing puppy, snowball fights, skiing, hills and slopes, and talkative Kostya, all awaited him … and the typewriter tapping away till all hours of the night, and the closet with the red lights and the black cuvettes, and Olga’s laughter, and tickling, and heat and love …

* * *

Ilya visited his son only occasionally. With books and building blocks. And each time it was the same, but worse: the full-figured, silent Lyudmila, the shriveled-up, spiteful Nanny Klava, and little Ilya, whose curly head was shooting upward, but whose body was long and feeble, like a plant growing in a pot too small for its roots. He sadly repeated fragments of everyone else’s sentences. His favorite toy was a tape recorder. He listened to verse, and the lines lodged effortlessly in his memory. But what he understood them to mean, no one knew. When asked, he could declaim poetry for hours on end, reproducing the intonations of the narrator. He never learned to read, but he could do calculations in his head very quickly. He was always happy to listen to music on the radio, and he loved programs about animals. He was afraid, however, of the real live cat that lived with them, as well as the dogs he saw on the street when he went out walking with Nanny Klava.

Ilya and Lyudmila divorced. Soon afterward, Nanny Klava died. Six months later, when Ilya was visiting for only the second time since the divorce, Lyudmila requested his permission to take the child to Israel. This was just the time when everyone in Ilya’s circle was trying to emigrate; but, coming from Lyudmila, it was a shock.

“Lyudmila, why Israel all of a sudden? I don’t understand.”

“My mother was unbelievably fastidious, you know. She never lost track of a single piece of paper or document. After her death I had already found the death certificate of my maternal grandmother. She died in 1922. Her name was Barbanel. Alta Pinchasovna Barbanel. Her father was Pinchas Barbanel, from a famous line of rabbis. My mother saved all the papers—my grandmother’s birth certificate, and a note about the change of her family name after marriage. She became Kitaeva after she got married. And my mother’s papers have all been preserved as well. When Jews hear the name Barbanel, they nod their heads and cluck their tongues in recognition.” She spoke, as always, in a listless, expressionless voice—only her face was sweet and soft, with a perpetual half-smile.

A Proto-Slavic face, rounded mouth and brows …

“Why Barbanel? Where is it from?”

“It’s a distortion of the name Abrabanel. I discovered that it’s a well-known, ancient Sephardic family of Talmud scholars.”

“Amazing! I can’t wrap my head around it. You—in Israel! It’s all so unexpected. What are you going to do there?” Ilya said, incredulous.

“It’s all the same to me—maybe I won’t even stay there. I have an invitation to go to Israel, but where I’ll end up I have no idea. Maybe America.”

“All right, all right … but how in the world did you come up with the idea? Can you just explain that to me?” Ilya was terribly agitated.

“What is there to explain, Ilya? I’m nearly fifty, my heart isn’t very good. My mother died of a heart attack at forty-three. I have no one to leave Ilya with. And they have good medical facilities there. They’ll take care of him; he won’t perish. But here—can you imagine what would happen to him without me?”

Little Ilya came into the room. He was enormous for his age, and deformed from illness: his arms and hands were elongated, with thin, dangling fingers; he had a tiny chin and sunken eyes … poor, poor thing … In addition to autism, they had discovered another syndrome; but autism alone would have been bad enough …

“Without me, without me, without me…” He uttered the words almost threateningly.

Lyudmila sat him down and gave him an apple.

“Good clinics, humane interaction and care, the best possible treatment—it’s our only choice,” Lyudmila said calmly.

“Our only choice, our only choice,” little Ilya said with an absurdly happy intonation.

That same evening, Ilya signed the document that Lyudmila had already prepared. He didn’t raise any objections.

He saw his son a few more times after that. The last time was when he took them to the airport.

Before he left for the airport, Olga thrust an enormous stuffed teddy bear into Ilya’s arms.

“Give this to your little boy so he has something to remember you by.”

“It’s a pretty hefty bear,” Ilya said, feeling the weight of it in his arms.

“Like your son. He’s rather large himself, from what I know.”

Ilya had never given any stuffed toys to his son, and he was already getting too old for them. But little Ilya beamed when he saw the bear. He ripped off the cellophane wrapping and pressed his prematurely old face into its soft belly.

“Olga and Kostya asked me to give you this teddy bear,” Ilya mumbled, and was surprised at himself: he had said the names of his other family, names his unfortunate son was hearing for the first time.

“Teddy bear, teddy bear,” young Ilya said joyously, while his father frowned from embarrassment and pain.

Ilya was already approaching Rechnoi Vokzal metro station at the same time that Lyudmila was asking the flight attendant to move them to the front row, where the boy’s long legs would have more room.

Young Ilya settled in to his seat, repeating the last words he had heard in his homeland:

“A good ticket, a good ticket…”

* * *

In America, Lyudmila agonized for a long time before placing Ilya in a home. She might not have done it, had it not been for the fact that he had become more aggressive with time, and she found it increasingly difficult to manage him. He stayed in the home for two years. Then they transferred him to a special institution, where he was given job training so that he had skills for doing some limited but useful tasks.

Lyudmila visited him on Sundays. She brought him white chocolate, which he loved, and a big bottle of cola. It took her two hours, one way, to get there—from Brighton Beach, where they had settled her in low-income housing, to a distant part of Queens. Six hours every Sunday she devoted to her son, and each time, after she returned home, she would collapse onto the double bed given to her by a charity organization, close her eyes, and give thanks to God that the boy was well nourished, warm, and receiving good medical care. One Sunday she didn’t show up, but he didn’t seem to notice.

The socialization program went very smoothly, and a year later he received his first job: twice a week he sold papers in a kiosk one stop from his institution. He got ten dollars for the work he did, and in a tiny store where they already knew him, he bought some treats for himself—a bar of white chocolate, a bottle of cola, and a lottery ticket. He pointed his thumb at the candy bar, and the black salesclerk said:

“Chocolate?”

“Chocolate, chocolate,” Ilya replied.

Then he pointed to a lottery ticket, and the salesclerk held out the printed paper to him, saying, “Here’s a good ticket for you…”

“A good ticket,” Ilya replied.

His whole life seemed to fall in place. He had friends that he could watch television with. After Lyudmila stopped visiting him, Russian words seemed to evaporate completely from his strange memory, which still contained many verses, however. Now they had become foreign to him.

During the last week of May, Ilya worked in the kiosk until noon, received his ten dollars, and bought a bar of chocolate, a cola, and a lottery ticket. The ticket turned out to be better than just good—he hit the jackpot, winning $4.2 million.

His residence was intended for low-income people. They didn’t keep millionaires there.

The millionaire couldn’t quite fathom the complexity of the new situation. According to the law, Ilya was considered incompetent to deal with it. His mother had died. They tried to find his father, Ilya Bryansky. After lengthy correspondence and numerous inquiries, they established that his father lived in Munich. When they tracked him down, it turned out that he had died not long before. Then the lawyers contacted his stepbrother, Konstantin (Kostya).

Kostya was summoned, and he flew to New York. He remembered dimly that Ilya Isayevich had a son from his first marriage. The doctors warned him about his newfound brother’s illness. On seeing Ilya, Kostya was taken aback—but the expression on his face didn’t betray his shock. He clapped the skinny giant on the shoulder and said in Russian:

“Hey, brother!”

Ilya broke into a grin.

“Hey, brother!”

Kostya pulled a photograph of his stepfather out of his wallet.

“Here’s Ilya.”

Ilya took the photograph, and his face lit up.

“Ilya.”

“And I’m Kostya.”

Ilya dimly grasped who he was, and said with some effort:

“Teddy bear.”

But Kostya knew nothing about Olga’s parting gift.

Ilya repeated “teddy bear” a few more times, and then began reciting Pushkin:

“When in the country, musing, I wander

and, stopping off at the public cemetery,

survey the gates, small columns, and the decorated graves…”

He recited it to the end.

“More,” Kostya said.

And Ilya, furrowing his brow, fished out another from his afflicted but boundless memory.

He recited for a long time—all the favorite verse of his dead father, with the same intonation, and in a voice that very much resembled his.

Kostya looked at this sick, no-longer-young boy, and remembered his stepfather—quick-witted, lively, talented—and at the same moment realized that he would have to find a similar kind of institution, not public, but private, for the well-off, apply for guardianship, make calculations, and set this strange and uncanny life to rights again.

Then Kostya took his newly discovered brother to a diner. Ilya pointed to a big apple pie.

“Do you want one piece or the whole thing?”

“The whole thing,” Ilya said, looking down shyly.

Kostya thought for a minute, and asked again.

“Do you want the whole pie, or just one portion?”

Ilya, even more shyly, stared down at his enormous sneakers. He didn’t say a word.

“I see. You do follow a certain logic.”

“Logic,” Ilya answered happily, and sat down at the table like an obedient child.

The waitress brought the pie and a cola for Ilya, and mineral water with ice for Kostya. It was only the middle of June, but the New York heat had already set in, and there was no air-conditioning in this run-down little place.

Ilya consumed bite after bite with a plastic spoon, eating with intense childlike pleasure. His head was exactly like his late father’s—curly chestnut-brown hair, with a sprinkling of premature gray. Even his face resembled his father’s, in a slightly caricatural way.

Kostya recalled with cinematic clarity how, when he was around eight, the three of them were sitting on the shore of a lake—Valdai? Ilmen? Pleshcheyevo?—at sunset in front of a campfire, and his stepfather’s long, dirty fingers had cleaned the ash from the baked potatoes. And all along the lake horizon there were ribbons of color—pink, raspberry, yellow—from the setting sun, and Mama, the red highlights in her hair aglow, was laughing, and his stepfather was laughing, and he, Kostya, was happy, and would love them forever and ever.

Poor Ilya! Poor Olga!