The Big Green Tent

DEAF-MUTE DEMONS

There is a year, or perhaps a season, in almost every person’s life, when the buds of possibility burst open, when fateful meetings take place, when paths cross, when courses and levels shift, when life rises from the depths and ascends to the heights. When Mikha was twenty-one, he met Alyona and fell in love with her so profoundly and so hopelessly that his entire former life, full of sweet girls, lighthearted and noncommittal rendezvous, and earnest, energetic nights in the dormitory, shattered like glass. Only meaningless shards and slivers of his former enthusiasms remained.

The second event that shook the foundations of his life, one no less significant, occurred a bit earlier. It involved his professional interests. At the beginning of his fourth year, Mikha didn’t exactly renounce his love of Russian literature, but he did discover one more strong attraction. Every day he rushed off to the department of defectology, where he audited classes on pedagogy of the deaf-mute taught by the renowned specialist Yakov Petrovich Rink. Rink represented a whole dynasty of specialists who had been developing speech therapies for the deaf, deaf-mute, and hard of hearing over the past century.

A friend of Mikha’s took him to Rink’s first lecture, and after several weeks Mikha was determined to devote himself to studying the pedagogy of the deaf-mute without having to abandon the department of philology. With Rink’s permission and encouragement, he took several preparatory exams and declared a double major in deaf education and philology.

At first he rushed from one department to the other, but with time he gravitated more and more toward defectology.

Perhaps an astute psychoanalyst could have ascertained the true motivation behind Mikha’s new interest, but this did not happen. The shade of the inarticulate Minna did not trouble him, and the universal sense of guilt that plagued him did not enter into it. Alyona’s arrival in his life swept away all thought of his minor amorous triumphs of the past three years, as well as his memories of this adolescent trauma. And what was there to remember, anyway?

A slow-witted, barely articulate creature, Minna had lived her twenty-seven years almost unnoticed. She never burdened anyone with her presence, and she died just as inconspicuously as she had lived. Aunt Genya viewed the death of her daughter almost as though she had been a household pet. Other people didn’t even notice that the timid, gentle creature with the weak smile, who never caused anyone any harm, had died. And Mikha recalled Catullus’s sparrow, how—what was her name?—Lesbia had wept for it.

Soon after Minna’s trestle bed and the child’s chair she always laid her clothes on before going to sleep were removed from the house, Aunt Genya was liberated from heavy cares, and with deep satisfaction and a shadow of pathological pride, she would lament from time to time, like a litany: “How much misfortune! How much misfortune has fallen on me to bear! I have been the butt of misfortune!”

Mikha had been a boon for her. From the time he moved in with her at the age of twelve, he had been tasked with going to the store, tidying the room, cleaning the communal facilities and the kitchen, as well as—and this was the most unpleasant task for him—carrying out random trivial errands for Aunt Genya, such as rushing off to the drugstore for medicine, taking half a pie to her sister Fanya and picking up a saucer of meat jelly from her other sister, Rayechka.

For almost ten years he had carried out his familial duties, uncomplaining and with a light heart. His aunt, insofar as she was able, loved her charge, and did not intend to part with him if she could help it. But, obeying her Jewish instinct for matchmaking—joining up two free valences so they wouldn’t end up in the wrong place—she occasionally introduced him to nice Jewish girls from her wide circle of family members. Her greatest misfire had occurred on this front: her own son Marlen had slipped out of her fingers and married a Russian girl. She had never been able to reconcile herself to this fact, though she admitted that “this Lida girl” was “quite suitable and decent.”

* * *

At the beginning of October, Aunt Genya invited her distant niece Ella to visit. Quiet, as curvaceous as a bottle, with bottle legs, Ella brought with her a large oval box of chocolates. Aunt Genya wouldn’t touch them, for fear of diabetes. Among her other firmly held beliefs was this one—that diabetes is caused by indulging in chocolate. She placed the box adorned with a running elk on the buffet and served bouillon.

Mikha sat submissively through all three courses of the meal, praising each of them, while the downcast Ella pushed her food around with her spoon silently. It was evident that she, too, suffered through the forced spontaneity of these meals with eligible distant male relatives, none of which culminated in the engagement that was sought. After dinner, Genya raised an eyebrow signaling that it was time for Mikha to take Ella to the metro. When he returned, his aunt, crossly shaking her doll-like head with its narrow part down the middle, said:

“You should have paid more attention to Ella. She has a good education, and she’s an only child. They have an apartment in Maryina Roshcha that you wouldn’t believe! Yes, she’s a bit older than you are, I won’t deny it. But she’s one of ours!”

Still, the last thing she wanted was to be left alone in the communal apartment with the neighbors, who used to be decent, but who had all been replaced by anti-Semites and thieves, as if they had been handpicked exclusively for her.

But at that moment Mikha was thinking only about the box of chocolates. A beautiful girl named Alyona, a first-year student from the department of graphic arts, had invited him to her birthday party. As soon as she had arrived at the institute, she began to attract attention, not so much for her beauty—her face was like those Botticelli had loved, full of bright silence and youthful androgyny—as for her remoteness and haughtiness. Everyone wanted to be friends with her, but she was like water: she slipped out of one’s grasp. Yet the previous evening, she had approached Mikha herself and invited him to her birthday party!

Mikha was not the most eligible young man in the department, since there were also several singer-songwriters, whose fame as wildly popular youthful bards was just beginning. Mikha couldn’t compete with them. He wrote poems, too; but he certainly couldn’t sing and accompany himself on the guitar. Still, he was a striking redhead, exceptionally conciliatory, who enjoyed great success among the girls, in particular those from out of town. His presence was indispensable at every student gathering or party.

Oh, he would have jumped at the chance to go to Alyona’s birthday party; but he didn’t even have the money to buy her the most modest gift. So, out of a sense of pride, he decided not to go. He had no one to borrow it from. Ilya was out of town, and he still owed Anna Alexandrovna fifteen rubles from the month before. He hadn’t taken any money from Aunt Genya since he had started receiving a student stipend. This month, he had run through his funds early.

This fancy box on the buffet was just the thing, though! A dull-enough present, of course, but one couldn’t arrive empty-handed …

He listened to his aunt’s exhortations about marrying a Jewish girl. Then he asked whether he could take the box of chocolates to someone as a gift. His aunt had other plans for the chocolates, but Mikha turned on the charm and reminded her, as if by chance:

“The day after tomorrow I’m taking you to the cemetery; I haven’t forgotten!”

The trip to Vostryakovo Cemetery took precedence over all other forms of entertainment for her, including the theater, movies, and visits to living relatives. She had never traveled to the distant cemetery alone, however.

His aunt understood the trade-off. Mikha got the box of chocolates and ran off with the elk under his arm to Pravda Street, where Alyona lived. He arrived—and it transpired! He was in love. Helplessly and inextricably, as had happened to him once before in his childhood, when he went to Sanya’s for the first time. This time he fell in love with the household: with the head of the household, Sergei Borisovich Chernopyatov, Alyona’s father; with his wife, Valentina; with the cabbage pies, the beet salad, and the “music on the bones”—records pressed on old X-ray film. Imagine, a rousing Gershwin number resounding from a hipbone! But, most important, of course—he fell in love with Alyona, who was not at all haughty or arrogant at home, but, on the contrary, quiet and sweet, embodying all the feminine charm the world had to offer.

They lost themselves in kisses on the balcony, and a mad tenderness held in check the mad passion that flared up in Mikha at his first touch of her fragile collarbone, her delicate wrists, her limp, childlike fingers.

Some people have talents as straightforward as apples, as obvious as eggs—for mathematics, for music, for drawing, even for mushroom-picking or table tennis. Mikha’s talents were more subtle. In fact, at first glance, he seemed to have none. Rather, he had abilities: poetry, music, drawing.

His true talent was not visible to the naked eye. He was endowed with such emotional sympathy, such an unbridled, absolute capacity for empathy, that all his other qualities were subordinated to this “universal compassion.”

He fulfilled the requirements of his studies in the philological department with pleasure and ease, but his interest in defectology arose from the very depths of his personality, from his gift of empathy. From the beginning he had set his hopes on teaching literature. He hungered to continue the tradition established long ago by Victor Yulievich, and he already saw himself entering the classroom and declaiming the greatest lines of Russian poetry … into the air, into the world, into the cosmos. And the boys and girls sitting around him—some of them! some of them, at least!—would be receptive to these sounds, and the kernels of meaning they contained.

Before getting his work assignment, Mikha went to see Rink, to ask his help in finding an appointment in a school for the deaf. For who else would bestow the treasures of poetry and prose on them?

Yakov Petrovich studied Mikha through his glasses, and asked him more questions about his life than about his profession. He concluded that this was the first time in his experience that a philology student had wished to work in the area of defectology.

“There is a very good boarding school for deaf-mutes where you could be of use, and where you could broaden your skills. It’s a wonderful corrective learning institution, just outside of Moscow; but you would have to live there yourself. They need a good Russian literature and language teacher. Go there and have a look around. If you like what you see, come back and we’ll continue our discussion,” Yakov Petrovich suggested.

It took Mikha three hours to reach the school—he traveled first by commuter train to Zagorsk, then by bus, which he had to wait for, and then a half hour by foot along a forest road. It was early spring, and a light rain was falling, through which the woods showed a pale green. The rain whispered in last year’s grasses, and the new growth was already pushing up through the dead foliage. It seemed that the rustling was the delicate sound of its growing. A bird screeched at regular intervals. Perhaps it wasn’t even a bird, but a wild animal. It occurred to Mikha that the residents of this place couldn’t hear these living sounds. On the other hand, city dwellers didn’t hear them either, since the urban noise drowned them out. And a poem began to take shape in him already:

Out of silence, rain, and growing

grasses, sounds are born midst tender

da-da. Music, da-da, da-da

da-da, da-da harks the sender …

No, it wasn’t coming together.

Out of silence, rain, and growing

grasses, hark!—from embryos spring

symphonies so wild and tender,

da-da music floods surrender …

Well, it had promise. He liked exact rhymes and regretted that all of them had been used many times before. This is what he said about the well-worn railroad ties of poetry that had been laid down long ago. He enjoyed the process of seeking them, but realized that one couldn’t get very far on them. Brodsky had not yet begun his triumphal conquest of the world, compelling, through his long lines and his absolute contempt for this “tic-toc” and “da-da,” the impoverished but inspired doggerel to cease.

Now the forest ended, and the grounds of the school began. A two-story wooden house stood on a small rise surrounded by dozens of small, cottage-like structures. There wasn’t much left of the ancient fence—squat columns crowned with spheres eaten away by time were interspersed with worn gray palisades. The gate had long since vanished. Fat linden trees grew at uneven intervals—the remnants of a tree-lined avenue. It was already past lunchtime, and there was no one to be seen. He walked along the soggy, still bare earth toward the porch and knocked on the door. No one opened. He waited a bit, then the door flew open. A woman with a bucket of water and a dirty rag floating on top was standing in front of him.

He laughed and introduced himself to her. Aunt Genya, a slave to superstitions, signs, and portents, would have deemed this an auspicious beginning: the bucket was full of water, albeit dirty.

And, truly, it would have been hard to imagine a better beginning. In the director’s office three women and an older man with a small mustache were drinking tea with jam. Mikha knew the director was a woman, and he concluded that she must be the Armenian woman, who also had a small mustache.

“Hello. I’d like to talk to Margarita Avetisovna. I’m here on the recommendation of Yakov Petrovich…” Before he managed to say the last name, they all broke out in smiles, and hurried to pour him tea and serve him jam in a little dish.

Suddenly there was a knock at the door and a boy of about twelve came in. He reported something, speaking only in a language of gestures.

“What happened, Sasha?” they asked in a chorus. “Well, tell us, you know how. Speak, speak, you can do it.”

“Da dag wan awa.” He struggled to articulate the sounds.

All four of them surrounded him, and a short woman with a thin plait wrapped around her head asked him loudly, stressing every sound:

“Which dog? Nochka or Ryzhik?”

“No-ka,” the boy said.

“Nochka. Don’t worry, Sasha. She’ll come back.”

The boy made another gesture—placing one hand on another, and making an upward movement. This was a question.

“She’ll get hungry and come back for food,” the woman with the mustache said.

That has to be the director, Mikha thought.

The boy said something else with his hands.

“Listen to me, Sasha. She’ll get hungry and come back for food.”

When she made the sound “oo,” she pursed her lips, pushing them as far forward as she could.

The boy nodded and left.

“Sasha has only been here six months. And he began learning very late,” the woman with the plait said.

“Yes, it’s only six months,” the one with the small mustache confirmed.

“Five months, Margarita Avetisovna,” Gleb Ivanovich, who had his own mustache, said. Very politely, so Mikha knew that she was indeed the director.

Ten minutes into their little tea party, Mikha knew that if they wouldn’t take him on as a teacher, he would stay here and work in any capacity: whether as a janitor, a stoker, or a gym teacher.

They showed him the classrooms; there were four of them. And only forty-two children in all.

In one of the classrooms a girl was standing at the chalkboard and communicating something with her hands. The others listened to her—by watching.

“We don’t renounce sign language completely. But we feel that if one begins teaching our methods early enough, most children can learn to speak.”

“I would like to work here. I lived in an orphanage until I was seven, until my relatives took me in. I know I’m probably not the sort of person you’re looking for … I’ve already begun studying sign language, but I’m not proficient yet. But if you would agree to take me on…”

They welcomed him with open arms.

He signed a contract that no one else would have accepted, and started work without even taking the vacation that was his due as a recent university graduate.

Everyone was dissatisfied with Mikha’s departure for the boarding school: Aunt Genya, who cried on the day he left as though he were departing for the next world, although he would return again the following Sunday; Marlen, who would inherit some of Mikha’s responsibilities for looking after his mother; Alyona, with whom his on-again, off-again romance was at a low point, but who shrugged her shoulders in consternation nevertheless, saying, “Why a boarding school? Why?” Alyona’s father, the extremely clever Chernopyatov, felt that the closer one’s job was to the city center, the better the job. And the provinces, anything beyond the capital city limits, were not even fit for living.

Even Anna Alexandrovna expressed concern—not about his career, but about the hygienic conditions there. She believed Mikha would be lice-ridden and dirt-encrusted in no time. Sanya thought about how long it would take to travel from that back of beyond to the Conservatory, but he didn’t say anything. Ilya was upset that he was losing his friend just at the moment when they might have been able to earn a decent income working together.

Mikha was now teaching Russian language and literature to deaf-mute children. He worked alongside a speech therapist, and things were going very well. Mikha developed an approach that even earned the praises of Yakov Petrovich. He introduced rhythm exercises into the lessons. He clapped out the various poetic meters, and the children hummed their iambs and trochees. How happy they were when he expressed his delight with them; and how generous he was with his praise!

The school was unique in both its poverty and its plenty. The government subsidies were paltry, and even with extra compensation the salaries of the staff were incommensurate with their qualifications and with the time they invested in their work. The materials they had at their disposal were insufficient. But the absolute dedication of the teachers, their selflessness, and their pride in the results of their efforts, which were evident to all, outweighed all these other factors. Not to mention the atmosphere of creativity and love.

Almost a third of the children had been chosen from orphanages. The rest had been brought by their parents, who hoped that the school would enable them to communicate with the world more easily. The children from orphanages had an easier time than the others, since they were already used to life in an institution. The children with families usually stayed for only a year or two, at most.

Almost every Sunday Mikha returned to Moscow. He visited Aunt Genya and caught up on all the chores and errands he had missed during the week—from washing the floors and windows to buying groceries. Since the time Mikha had started college and the financial help from his relatives to his aunt had stopped, she had become tight-fisted and capricious. The sausage had to be Mikoyan, the cheese had to be Poshekhonsky, the milk Ostankino, and the fish—fresh carp or frozen perch—from a store that was closed on Sundays. So Mikha occasionally came to town on Saturdays just to buy this carp, if it was available.

After finishing his household chores and errands, he flew over to Alyona’s. She would either be waiting for him with mascara on her lashes, which meant that she had turned her face toward him that day, or without any makeup at all. This suggested that her thoughts were elsewhere. Why her moods were so volatile he didn’t know. He would try to find out from her, but she would just shrug her hair off her shoulders and slip away without explanation.

Then he would sit down with Sergei Borisovich in the kitchen and drink tea or vodka, depending on the time of day, the presence or absence of guests, and the mood of the host.

What an incredible human being! What a life! Mikha marveled at Chernopyatov. Sergei Borisovich Chernopyatov’s father, born in Batumi, had been one of Stalin’s closest companions. He was killed later than all the others, in 1937, when the leader had already done away with most of the friends of his youth. Sergei Borisovich was still just a boy the first time he was imprisoned, several weeks after his father’s arrest. This was just a trial run—a children’s penal colony. When he was eighteen they transferred him to a prison camp. In 1942, he was released from the camp and sent into exile. In Karaganda he met an “Algerian”—his future wife, Valentina. That was when he learned the meaning of that satanic geographical moniker, ALZHIR. It meant: Akmolinsky Camp for Wives of Traitors of the Homeland. Among the thousands of women were the mothers of Maya Plisetskaya, Vasily Aksyonov, and Bulat Okudzhava. Alyona’s grandmother on her mother’s side was the widow of a prominent Party member from Ryazan.

Valentina fell under the “FMTH” category: Family Members of Traitors of the Homeland. She was seventeen when they executed her father and arrested her mother. She managed to escape the fate of 25,000 FMTH minors who were sent to orphanages. She followed her mother, and ended up in the village of Malinovka, a forced-labor settlement. Her mother died a year later.

That was where she met Sergei. They were both twenty years old, and both of them dreamed of having a family. They married young, thus saving each other’s life. Alyona was born in 1943. In 1947 they received permission to return to Russia, and they moved to Rostov-on-Don, where they found Valentina’s relatives. Sergei Borisovich passed his high-school graduation exam, then entered college. The life about which they had dreamed began. In 1949, he was sent to prison again. Stalin’s hand refused to loosen its grip. He was released in 1954; and his life began again for the third time …

Alyona was sick to death of hearing these stories. She would lock herself up in her room and turn on loud music. Sometimes she sat in her room for hours on end, scribbling with a slate pencil on rough paper: whimsical patterns of curlicues and cascades. Sometimes she simply left, without saying a word, ignoring Mikha altogether.

* * *

Mikha sat with Sergei Borisovich, picking up commonsense wisdom. And what a talent he had for sharing it! You would say something to him, and he would hold it up to scrutiny and then reveal its full significance to you, like a picture that blossomed into color when you held it underwater. He had such a deep understanding of life, of its inhumanity and absurdity and cruelty!

And the people! The guests who visited Sergei Borisovich, for all their diversity, had one thing in common: they were inveterate, implacable enemies of the authorities. They understood the nature of the system, its deep-rooted injustice. One was a geneticist, another a philosopher, yet a third a mathematician. And at the very center of all of them stood Sergei Borisovich—hardheaded, astute, clever—actively committed to the public welfare.

Mikha loved him, too, because he was the male embodiment of everything that attracted him to Alyona: barely discernible wrinkles in the corners of the eyelids that rose slightly upward, small folds pointing downward at the corners of the mouth, the small bones and lightness of movement characteristic of dwellers of the Caucasus. True, Alyona had inherited a delicate pallor from her mother, but Sergei Borisovich, with his admixture of Circassian blood, was dark-haired and swarthy. He was a real man—a father, brother, friend. An antidote to Mikha’s fatherlessness, something he had never yet managed to come to terms with. Sergei Borisovich treated Mikha with kindness, but too much condescension. That was, in fact, how he treated most people—he seemed to look down on them slightly.

Sometimes Alyona, having done her eyelashes, seemed kindly disposed toward Mikha. At those times he would follow her wherever she wished; they would walk around Moscow, her limp, fine-boned hand in his—what intense joy!—and he would touch her hair, breathing in its pungent, feathery scent. He would speak off the top of his head, and from the bottom of his soul, reciting poetry. He had already gone through Mayakovsky, had absorbed Pasternak, and was in those days brimming over with Mandelstam. Brodsky began a bit later with him. She listened, fell silent, hardly deigning to respond. Also with condescension.

Sometimes, during these felicitous periods—there were three such during Mikha’s life in Milyaevo: the winter of 1962, at the very beginning of Mikha’s stay in the boarding school; then in the spring of 1963; and at the end of 1964—she suddenly came to him in the middle of the week, and stayed overnight with him in the utility room that had been allocated to him. Mikha was nearly beside himself with unexpected joy.

The greater these intervals of happiness, the more bitter were those periods when she would cool toward him and withdraw her affection. At those times he would throw himself into his work. His commitments to the deaf children filled his life to the point of overflowing, so that he had almost no time for misery and longing.

The boarders were also lacking fathers, and they clung to the male teachers—Gleb Ivanovich and Mikha—vying for their attention and affection. The older ones were more restrained, but they also gravitated toward the male teachers.

Yakov Petrovich Rink invited Mikha to participate in seminars once a month, trying to involve him in the project to which he had devoted the better part of a decade. He was engaged in a struggle to found a deaf children’s learning center in Moscow, either at the pedagogical college or at the Academy of Medical Sciences. The authorities had already approved the project in principle, but the inertia of the government machine was so great that the span of one human life was simply not enough to create something new, unless it concerned either the military-industrial complex or the cosmos. Rink was counting on Mikha becoming one of the handpicked protégés who could continue his life’s work.

Yakov Petrovich mentored Mikha, gave him studies to read by contemporary French and American researchers, and, finally, advised him to write an article himself—which Mikha did with great enthusiasm. Yakov Petrovich read through the industrious scrawl—the boy could write!

He had bred his students and assistants over the decades for quality—selecting them for size, taste, shade … After three years of voluntary slavery in the boarding school, Rink broached the subject of graduate studies to Mikha—albeit in absentia. But Mikha himself preferred this. He had no intention of parting with his charges.

Mikha passed the qualifying exams for graduate school with flying colors, and was waiting for his enrollment papers. This was in fact just a formality. He was not interested in abstract, theoretical scholarship. Rather, he was looking forward to real, applied scholarly research, such that the results would be immediately evident after several years of implementing the proper methods. The blind did not yet see, the deaf did not hear, and the dumb did not speak; but some of them were learning little by little to articulate words and to enter a world that till then had been closed to them … and what a joy it was to lead them by the hand!

Contrary to all expectation, Mikha seemed to be the most successful of the Trianon members. Sanya had dropped out of the Institute of Foreign Languages and begun his studies at the Conservatory again. Ilya had forgotten all about his intention to study at the Leningrad Institute of Cinema Engineering, assuming that he could teach photography himself if he wished and that there was no need for him to continue his education. He had accumulated friends and acquaintances, and interesting connections, especially in the new democratic human rights movement. Ilya and Mikha continued to share a common interest in poetry. Ilya still made the rounds of antiquarian booksellers, and his collection of rare and valuable books was growing apace.

Ilya was the one Mikha chose to confide in about his fantastic new prospects. Ilya’s reaction was tepid. He had been lucky that day, too. He had a new acquisition. It was an absolute rarity—one of the few remaining copies of Vladimir Narbut’s collection Alleluja, which had been published in St. Petersburg in 1912 and immediately banned by the Holy Synod, condemned to destruction “by means of rending and tearing.”

Mikha opened to a random page—it was indeed “Alleluja,” Psalm 148.

Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps:

Fire, and hail; snow, and vapor; stormy wind fulfilling his word:

Mountains, and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars:

Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl …

* * *

Ilya took the volume from Mikha gently.

“That’s a well-known psalm. Let me show you something else. Here.”

It’s a standing bog that sings,

and not a murmuring river!

A rust of ancient red gilding

settles on him. Light is

the long-legged spider’s flight

across the rippling water.

Green roads float away—

but blood flows nowhere.

“But who knows Narbut now? He floated away! And how much else has floated off! Do you hear anything that’s going on, out there with your deaf ones?”

“What are you talking about?” Mikha felt a vague sense of alarm, as though he had missed something important.

“They’ve arrested two writers.”

The inquisitive Mikha was already aware of this arrest, having heard about it on a nighttime radio broadcast. He had forgotten their names. Ilya reminded him. They had sent manuscripts of their books to the West, and they had been published there.

Mikha expressed an interest in reading them. Ilya told him that he didn’t have them, but his friend had a photocopy. Ilya had made the photocopy himself; but he didn’t tell Mikha, just to be on the safe side. He was sitting on a powder keg. He had removed everything from his house, and stored it with friends.

“Only you’ll have to get it from him yourself. You can take it and keep it for a while. I’ll pick it up later, when things simmer down.”

On conspiracy alert, they went outside and called the friend, whose name was Edik, from a pay phone on Pokrovka. Ilya spoke into the receiver in a loud, careless manner:

“Hey, Edik, I left a sausage roll over at your place yesterday. A friend of mine is stopping by to pick it up. Thanks. See you!”

The unmasked writer, who had gone under the pseudonym Nikolay Arzhak, was actually Yuli Daniel, a literature teacher in a Moscow school! Amazing—just like our Victor Yulievich! A literature teacher! And he, too, had fought on the front and been wounded, and was also a philologist!

Mikha was already impressed by the coincidences before he read the manuscript. He went over to get it from Edik, a comical, long-legged fellow. There turned out to be two sausage rolls. One was called This Is Moscow Speaking, and the other was Redemption.

Mikha picked up two fat manila envelopes. He began to read the first one.

It scalded him like boiling water, even though he had already read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, a brilliant, horrifying book. Nineteen Eighty-four was an invented country, neither here nor there—but this one was about Daniel’s own circumstances, his own time. It took place on Russian soil, which made everything that much more urgent and immediate. For this reason Moscow Speaking was even more terrifying than Nineteen Eighty-four.

And it was unclear which was worse: the right, bestowed by ukase, for each to kill any on a certain day; or the same right arrogated by the government to kill any citizen, on any day of the month, for years to come.

Redemption was perhaps the most frightening of all. It turned out you could not only kill, but destroy a person by the most subtle and ingenious methods—accuse an honest man of being a stool pigeon, an informer, to make him lose his mind. And the worst thing was that one couldn’t prove anything to anyone, and there was no way of vindicating oneself.

This Victor Volsky was a wholly sympathetic and believable character, slandered and driven out of his mind by his friends, who chose to believe the false accusations about him. When he was locked up in his psych ward, he no doubt recalled Pushkin:

Let me not go mad—

Better a beggar’s crook and pouch;

No, hard labor and hunger …

This is the curse: go mad,

and, as though you suffer from the plague,

They’ll lock you up, banish you for good …

How had Pushkin known? Could it be that even then … Oh, of course, the Decembrists! The same thing had happened back then already—denunciations, betrayals. Maiboroda, the informer. And he had taken his own life many years after the trial. He had probably suffered all those years. He really had signed a letter of denunciation; but Victor Volsky was not guilty of that act. No, it was better to forgive a true informer than to ruin an innocent man that way.

Mikha read the whole night through. He was so engaged, so lost in the book, that in the morning he was disoriented and didn’t quite realize he had to be at the boarding school at eight o’clock.

His recent successes suddenly seemed insignificant, and the future didn’t beckon quite so brightly. It all seemed trivial and unimportant. He even felt ashamed. Yes. He felt guilty for merely living, while Daniel, this marvelous writer, had penetrated to the very essence of their current life, and was now being held in solitary, undergoing interrogation. God knew what was in store for him.

Mikha, snapping out of his reader’s reverie, realized that he was already late for work, and that if he really hurried he would only make it for the fourth lesson. But soon the two-hour lunch break between commuter trains would begin, so he would most likely arrive too late, and the day would be a total loss. He tried to call the school to inform them, but the telephone line was down.

His colleagues rose to the occasion and covered for him. Katya, the speech therapist, called off her individual tutoring and took over two of Mikha’s lessons. Gleb Ivanovich stepped in to teach the other two. But when Mikha arrived, the classes had already ended. The children had eaten their midday meal, and had been sent off for their “dead hour,” a postprandial rest period. It was so late that by now they had already eaten their afternoon snack. Gleb Ivanovich was sitting in the cafeteria drinking the last of the fruit compote and eating it with white bread—his favorite treat.

Mikha rushed over to thank him. Gleb Ivanovich didn’t view his actions as heroic in the least. It was just what one did. But Mikha insisted on trying to account for his lapse. He told him that he had stayed up the whole night reading. When he was finished, he looked at the clock—and it was already after ten in the morning!

“But the books, the books! What books they were…”

“What were they?” Gleb Ivanovich asked between his second and third glasses of compote.

And Mikha immediately pulled out the two manila envelopes containing the photocopied pages. The print was very small.

The children were doing their lessons in study hall. A young teacher was sitting with them. It was her first year of teaching, and Gleb Ivanovich was supervising her, just in case she had any difficulties. She was a nice young woman. Gleb Ivanovich glanced into the classroom, sat down in the back row, and put on his reading glasses.

Fifteen minutes later, he woke up Mikha, who hadn’t been able to sleep on the commuter train and was dozing in the utility room.

Gleb Ivanovich sat down next to him on a stool and said, in a frantic whisper:

“Do you have any idea what you just gave me to read?”

Mikha felt like he had been caught out. He tried to extricate himself from the awkward situation by mumbling some nonsense about the profound truth he had discovered in these books, at the same time offering his apologies for having alarmed Gleb Ivanovich with such dangerous literature.

Gleb Ivanovich’s whispers became ever louder, until he was actually shouting. He accused Mikha of every kind of transgression: lack of gratitude to the authorities who had rescued his Jew-face from fascism; treason; hostility to the state; and taking part in criminal anti-Soviet activity.

It was all extremely awkward and idiotic. Five minutes later they were already locked in a shouting match, banging their fists on the table and itching to bash each other’s face in. All the sympathy that they had felt toward each other had vanished. Now each of them considered himself to have been cheated and robbed, having wasted so many good feelings on such a worthless nonentity. In an instant, the sense of camaraderie, which had bound them together in their shared joys and misfortunes, had collapsed. Mikha, who was by nature mild-mannered, had rid himself of his anger by shouting and waving his arms around. He was ready to return to their original state of mutual peaceful misunderstanding, to consider, calmly this time, all the ridiculous arguments that Gleb Ivanovich had put forward. But Gleb Ivanovich was not agreeable to this. He was primed for battle. Now he began enumerating a long list of Mikha’s mistakes and transgressions—which, according to him, were just short of criminal acts.

Gleb Ivanovich turned out to have greater endurance and strength in verbal warfare. The voice that rose out of his scrawny neck was strong and low, more like that of a big potbellied man than the undersized weakling he appeared to be.

Mikha was tired. He let Gleb Ivanovich shout his fill, and then tried to reclaim the manila envelopes with the photocopied books.

“You leave those pernicious things right here with me! I’m not letting you take a single page out of here, not a single line!” Gleb Ivanovich screamed when he saw Mikha reaching for the envelopes, and grabbed hold of them himself.

There was a tug of war, each of them gripping a side of the envelopes. Under other circumstances, Mikha would have burst out laughing long before; but for laughter, one needs to be met with a favorable disposition. And what he witnessed here was some sort of madness. Gleb Ivanovich began barking out words and phrases that had no relation whatsoever to what was happening.

“Up against the wall! Forward! Kosachev, move it! Kosachev, get back! Motherfuckers!”

Most surprising were the exhortations to Kosachev, since Kosachev was Gleb Ivanovich himself.

Polina Matveevna, the cleaning woman, looked in when she heard the shouting, then backed out again. A minute later she returned with a white cup, which she pressed Gleb Ivanovich to drink, clutching his unevenly balding head in her gentle hands.

“Careful now, careful. Take a little sip of this, Gleb Ivanovich, and watch out that you don’t spill water all over yourself,” she urged him.

At last, Mikha realized that he was dealing with a mad person, and that Mikha himself had provoked the outburst when, unbeknown to him, he had pressed some psychological trigger.

Polina Matveevna made signs at Mikha, which all the residents of the boarding school knew immediately how to interpret, signifying that he should clear out. And Mikha, grabbing up the envelopes, did.

Volsky! Volsky! Daniel’s protagonist, dying in a mental hospital! But Gleb Ivanovich was a victim as well! And the very same forces had driven him mad. Demons, demons. What had Voloshin said? “They walk the earth, blind, deaf, and dumb, and draw fiery signs in the spreading gloom…” He repeated it to himself, noting an irregularity in the stress pattern. Nevertheless, it was a great poem.* And he went back to thinking about Gleb Ivanovich. He wasn’t really to blame for anything, either. During the bus ride to the commuter train that would take him home, he pondered all these things with a heavy heart.

* * *

Gleb Ivanovich had been hospitalized for psychiatric disorders, and was on the registry. He had a checkered past. He had been fired from SMERSH, the counterintelligence organization, during the war. At the boarding school his official job description was physical-plant manager, not teacher. This was not merely for the sake of convenience. Because of his medical history, he was barred from working with children. He was a good man; he loved children, and he was honest and upright almost to a fault, with an almost German ardor and fastidiousness. Perhaps this was the quality, which bordered on the extreme, that led him to write a denunciation of Mikha the very next day.

Mikha had no idea that Gleb Ivanovich’s denunciation was already crawling, slowly but surely, to the place where all waterways cut off and all roads ceased.

Due to the general laxity of Soviet life, as well as the law of coincidence of misfortune, Mikha’s application for enrollment in the graduate program in absentia matched the unhurried progress toward the institute of the denunciation against him. When, two weeks later, two documents landed simultaneously on the desk of Comrade Korobtsov, head of the first section, he called in Yakov Petrovich. The seventy-eight-year-old corresponding member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences trotted down to see Comrade Korobtsov, already a captain at the age of thirty-six, who gave him a proper dressing-down.

* * *

Though Yakov Petrovich Rink was fairly old, he looked younger than his years. He had been dressed down over and over again. He had devoted his entire life to deaf-mute pedagogy. He had helped the hard of hearing; and the deaf had, in turn, been his salvation. In the offices where semiliterate lieutenants and poorly educated captains decided the fate of science, the professor’s work seemed so innocuous and absurd that they left him alone. He was German—but a Russian-German. His ancestor had been invited into the Russian Academy of Sciences one hundred fifty years before, and the family had been firmly settled on Russian soil ever since. Luckily, his nationality was registered as Russian in his documents. Unlike his cousins, who had been banished to Kazakhstan at the beginning of the war, he had never been subjected to political repression. He was well aware that this was a gift of fate. Each time that Yakov Petrovich was summoned to the offices of the lieutenants and the captains, he expected to be unmasked. Even now, twenty years after the war had ended.

Pursing his lips in the tight, straight line that signified a smile, he told his close friend and associate, Maria Moiseevna Bris:

“You have it good, Maria Moiseevna. You are a bona fide Jew, and there is no need to unmask you. Half my life I feared being taken for a Jew, and now I live in fear that they will unmask me as a German. And all the while, you and I are just ordinary Russian intellectuals.”

* * *

“Who are these people you’re taking on as graduate students this year, Yakov Petrovich?” Korobtsov said, not offering him a seat.

How sick I am of him, how sick I am of him, how sick I am of all of them …

“Are you lacking some documents, Igor Stepanovich? There’s a student named Sasha Rubin, and an in absentia student—one Mikha Melamid. They’re good kids, both graduates of our institute.”

“Sit down, sit down, Yakov Petrovich. We have some things to talk about. Sasha Rubin is fine—good recommendations, he’s a Komsomol organizer. But how well do you know this Melamid?”

It was plain as day. They didn’t like Melamid. There was something about him that gave them pause. Maria Moiseevna had been right: he shouldn’t have allowed Jews to take two spots in the program. They’d seize upon it. There was one young man from Moldavia, but he didn’t have a very strong academic background. They would have accepted him, but he hadn’t passed his entrance exams …

“He just published a very interesting article. He’s already working in the field. Well-read. Keen on his subject. He has all the makings of a scholar,” said Yakov Petrovich.

“Um-hmm…” Korobtsov paused. “And why him in particular? Other kids took the entrance exams, too. Take a look…” He rifled through some papers, and read out a name syllable by syllable: “Pe-re-po-pes-cu, Ne-do-po-pes-cu, something along those lines. From Moldavia, an ordinary fellow. And you give us these Melamids, Rabinoviches…”

How I hate you, how I hate you, how I hate you …

“Melamid is one of our own graduates, and he has a job we recommended him for. He’s a talented and serious young man!”

“Umm. Well, Yakov Petrovich, you tell this serious young man that the first section wouldn’t let him in. If he has any questions, he can come to me, and I’ll explain.”

“Do you mean to say that you won’t okay the application?”

“Exactly. Why are you looking at me that way? We’re looking out for your interests, the interests of the institute, and the country as a whole! Are you willing to answer for him, Yakov Petrovich, if he gets mixed up in some sort of trouble? Personally vouch for him?”

Go to the devil, go to the devil, you can all go straight to the devil …

“I’ll think about it, Igor Stepanovich. I’ll think about it.”

* * *

In fact, there was nothing to think about. Financial backing for the laboratory, Maria Moiseevna’s doctoral dissertation, which she hadn’t been able to defend since 1953, the opening of the learning center, colleagues and associates, students and graduate students—Yakov Petrovich couldn’t afford to beat his head against a brick wall.

* * *

In the fall, so many things happened in Mikha’s life, both good and bad, almost simultaneously, that they all blended into one patchy, vibrant mass. Alyona’s behavior toward him suddenly changed, and their nervous relationship, with its thaws and its cold snaps, accompanied by Alyona’s constant emotional fireworks, suddenly grew calm and close. Mikha didn’t understand why the change had occurred; Alyona didn’t consider it necessary to explain to him that she had broken off with a married man she had been in love with since the age of sixteen. She put him out to pasture and decided to marry Mikha. Mikha was overjoyed.

He hadn’t yet managed to come to terms with all the implications of this imminent change in his life, to think through the myriad quotidian issues it raised, and to which Alyona was oblivious, when things were resolved in a very unexpected way: Aunt Genya died suddenly and without any fanfare.

She had planned on living a long time, and getting properly sick before the end. She had already accumulated a sizable list of illnesses; but she was deceived. She went to bed in the evening and died in her sleep, thus magnanimously resolving, in a way completely uncharacteristic of her, Mikha’s greatest worry—where to live.

* * *

It so happened that on the day of Aunt Genya’s death, Mikha didn’t spend the night at home. He and Alyona had gone to the dacha of a girlfriend of Ilya’s. It was a small gathering of friends against the backdrop of nature. When Mikha returned home late in the evening of the following day, Aunt Genya didn’t greet him with her usual reproaches or complaints. She was, rather, completely cold and calm.

* * *

Now he was the only registered person in that home, master of a 150-square-foot room in the center of town. Marlen had been registered at his wife’s address for a long time already. The room was supposed to have been left to Minna, and Mikha, according to the same strategic family plan, was supposed to receive a job appointment and go live somewhere else.

Marlen was a pragmatic man. Three years before he might have been distressed about losing the room and not carrying out the family plan, but at this point everything in his life had changed. He had taken the plunge into Judaism. He had started studying Hebrew, reading the Torah, corresponding with Zionists, and preparing himself for a long struggle for the right to be repatriated to Israel. The biggest obstacle for him on the path of his journey was his mother. Aunt Genya hated Israel, which, according to her, was the cause of all Jewish suffering. She had already informed her son that she had no intention of leaving her homeland and would never grant him permission to leave himself.

The death of his mother hastened Marlen’s reunion with Zion.

When Mikha asked Marlen what to do with Aunt Genya’s belongings, he merely shrugged:

“Ask the other aunts. They can take what they want. Throw everything else away.”

But by this time the aunts had already taken everything that was worth anything.

Alyona came to Mikha’s house for the first time after Aunt Genya had died. She walked through the door, paused on the threshold, and looked around her. She saw a crystal chandelier with missing baubles, and other luxuries amid poverty: broken vases; two paintings in thick, gilded plaster frames; a potted geranium; an aloe plant; and a three-quart jar with a Japanese mushroom purported to aid digestion sitting on the windowsill. There was a photograph of a fairly pretty woman with a permanent wave and two children—an intelligent-looking adolescent boy and a plump, smiling little girl. The girl looked about three, and her fat tongue was protruding from her mouth.

“Is that Aunt Genya and her children?” Alyona asked.

Mikha nodded. He suddenly felt ashamed of the squalor of his home, and, at the same time, uncomfortable that he was betraying his poor aunt by feeling this shame.

“Was the little girl sick?” She indicated with her eyes that she meant little Minna.

“Yes, she had Down syndrome. It was only when I went to the institute that I understood. Aunt Genya was told it was some kind of endocrinological disorder. She died.”

Alyona nodded, and remained silent for several minutes. Then she said:

“What a sad, awful home. This was just how I imagined it. Well, not exactly, but almost.”

She entered the room, sat down at the table covered with maroon-colored plush. She ran her finger over the dusty nap and said plaintively:

“Mikha, this is no place to live.”

“It will be fine, Alyona. I’ll renovate it. The other guys will help me.”

“No, it’s not about the condition of the room…” Alyona sighed, and sank into a heavy despondency that covered her like a rain cloud.

Her married lover had received her in just such a room. The same round table with a plush tablecloth, the same kind of chandelier with missing crystal baubles hanging above it, the same photograph of a pretty woman with a permanent wave—but in that one she had been holding a fan. Alyona looked at the two shelves with books. Even the books were the same, though the married man had had far more of them. And that room had been three times bigger than this, and partitioned with a curtain.

Mikha wanted with all his heart and soul to reach out to her, but he was afraid to touch her. He couldn’t summon up the courage, and he waited for a sign from her. She came to him, and ran her fingers through his thick red locks. And he took heart; because just a moment before he had been certain that he was such a blockhead, that with all his shortcomings and disadvantages he was no match for Alyona, and that not only would she never agree to marry him, she wouldn’t even want to look at such a nonentity anymore.

Something of the sort had occurred to her; but she stroked his hair, and said over and over again:

“Mikha, you’re so good. You’re too good for me, you know.”

She already knew in advance that all these qualms, these second thoughts, would disappear, that Mikha was not only a sweet and pure human being, but also the most reliable, and loyal, and the finest of the lovers she had known till then. The married man, though, always a bit tipsy and coolly relaxed—she couldn’t quite shake him. What was it that bound her to him? She had an inkling, but she was unable to express it, to fathom it completely.

* * *

The springs in the lumpy divan creaked wildly, but it held out the entire night and half the following day. All the oppressive, alien thoughts fled from their young heads, and when they awoke, both of them felt giddy, weightless, and empty, and basked in the triumph of a battle won.

Mikha’s happiness knew no bounds. He felt it would last him the rest of his life. In the daytime, when Alyona was with Mikha, she felt fine, but she dreaded the evenings. She would fall asleep instantly, but an hour later she would wake up in unendurable nocturnal torment. Toward morning she would fall asleep again, and when she woke up, her pain would leave her, and she would even marvel at the depth of the anguish she had felt the night before.

They had to do something about this, and one day, after a typically sad and exhausting night, she and Mikha went to file for a marriage certificate. Then they went back to Mikha’s, on Chistoprudny Boulevard, and threw out all that remained of Aunt Genya’s junk, which even her sisters had rejected. It was the sad dust and clutter of an ordinary life: plates held together with yellowing glue, pots and pans with missing handles, half-used lipstick tubes, old newspapers, tatters, rags, and scraps, half a porcelain bear, and a little May Day flag.

In the evening Ilya and Sanya came by to help Mikha drag out the heavy furniture: the buffet, cupboard, wardrobe, and Aunt Genya’s divan.

Alyona washed the floors and felt that in this empty room she would be able to live. They slept on the floor for several nights on a spread-out sleeping bag. Alyona slept deeply and soundly, without dreaming, in Mikha’s embrace, and it seemed to her that he would hold her safely in his arms forever.

While the renovations were in progress, they went to stay with the Chernopyatovs for a few nights. Sergei Borisovich, who adored his daughter, grieved that she planned to move away from home. Valentina even started talking about an apartment exchange—their two rooms and Mikha’s one room for a three-room apartment where they could all live together. But Alyona didn’t want this.

She wanted to move into Mikha’s renovated room as soon as it was ready. When the smell of paint had finally dissipated, they moved into the clean, empty room, which already seemed to have no past, except the view from the window: a littered courtyard, visually transfigured by the sixth-floor vantage point.

All that remained of the past were two cardboard boxes, a pile of books, and bundles of old letters that had been discovered at the bottom of the listing old wardrobe. Marlen had asked that they be saved; he intended to come by to fetch them. Alyona moved her easel into the room, which stood by the window and gave the place an artistic air. They also moved in a drafting table that Sergei Borisovich himself had made for her, and five large portfolios with old (which meant three years ago) work, almost all ornate, abstract designs.

The young couple didn’t have a wedding celebration, but they received presents from Marlen, from Alyona’s parents, and from an aunt—in the much-maligned but much-needed form of money. After her classes Alyona would scour the stores, buying new plates and pillows, taking quiet delight in her new life. Under the influence of Mikha’s inexhaustible tenderness and active passion, her heartsickness began to retreat, if not altogether heal.

And at that very moment their luck ended. Yakov Petrovich called Mikha in to inform him that his graduate studies were not going to work out. The personnel office had blocked his application. Their collaborative work would continue, however.

“We won’t abandon the dissertation, but, frankly speaking, the road ahead will be a long and fraught one.” Thus the discussion ended not with a period, but with an ellipsis.

At the end of the same month, upon the request of the director, Mikha resigned from the boarding school. She begged forgiveness, she wept, and she tried to justify her actions by saying that her first priority was to keep the boarding school open and not to put the forty-some children in jeopardy.

Mikha, who had caught the drift, said: “They called?”

Margarita Avetisovna nodded.

There was only one possible explanation: he was now in the crosshairs. Mikha resigned “for personal reasons.” Since he needed to give them two weeks’ notice of his resignation, obligatory in this case, the director suggested he spend the time looking for a new job. Two weeks later, he returned to pick up his employment records and to say good-bye to his colleagues. Everyone looked dispirited and upset. Gleb Ivanovich wasn’t there.

When Mikha asked about him, he was told that Gleb Ivanovich had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

Mikha felt an enormous void opening before him. He sensed a great change coming in his life: something completely new would now take root and grow out of this emptiness.