The Big Green Tent

FIRST IN LINE

It was completely natural that the powerful musical ideas that preoccupied Sanya rendered him completely oblivious to domestic political events, large and small. They seemed as distant from him as revolutions in Latin America, crop failures in Africa, or tsunamis in Japan. Even Anna Alexandrovna, who was apt to admire her son uncritically, would sometimes remark, with a tinge of perplexity:

“Sanya, dear, we live here. It’s our country, after all. But you’re almost like a foreigner in your own country.”

Early one morning in January 1969, Alyona rushed over to see him and to tell him about Mikha’s arrest. It was Sanya’s first personal contact with politics. It left him shaken and crushed. Mikha had shown him his magazine, and it was amusing. But it was impossible that a self-published collection on onionskin paper, consisting half of news that was usually heard on Western radio broadcasts, and half of poetry—some good, some indifferent, but still just poetry—could land someone in prison. It wasn’t The Bell, not at all. It was homegrown. Sanya didn’t know about all Mikha’s activities, however. He was unaware of the Tatar connection in Mikha’s life.

Ilya was exceedingly well informed about the progress of the investigation and trial; they summoned him to the KGB headquarters about the case of Edik Tolmachev. They didn’t ask a single question about Mikha, and this surprised Ilya. He was even more surprised when Mikha was arrested three months after Edik.

Alyona came down with strep throat just after Mikha’s arrest. Then and there she chose Sanya as her “girlfriend,” and, somehow, all the responsibility for taking care of her fell on his shoulders. Alyona had never been overfond of Ilya, and she avoided having any dealings with him.

Alyona had all but broken off relations with her father. She suspected him of some kind of foul play, and once she even burst out with the accusation that he was to blame for all their misfortune. She rarely allowed her mother to visit her at home, as though she were trying to punish her for something. Alyona wept a lot at first, and didn’t want to see anyone but Sanya.

Sanya was the first to know about her pregnancy. He had agreed to accompany her to the gynecologist who was supposed to carry out the Soviet woman’s favorite operation. Halfway to the doctor, who was ready to perform the procedure, they turned back, after he persuaded her not to go through with it. Alyona was often offended by something Sanya said or did. She sent him away, made scenes, and kicked up a fuss; and he put up with everything patiently. Alyona rarely left the house all winter—either she was sick or simply didn’t feel up to it.

She’s so cantankerous and bad-tempered! he would think. But he couldn’t resist her capricious charms. Up to a predictable point.

Ilya brought Sanya money to give to Alyona regularly. Alyona didn’t refuse the money, but she didn’t particularly need it. Anna Alexandrovna put together care packages and sent them to her through Ilya. Throughout her pregnancy, Alyona either lay in bed or drew her enigmatic ornamental patterns. During the final months she learned how to draw lying prone on the bed.

When the time came, Sanya took Alyona to the maternity home, then fetched her, now with her newborn daughter in her arms. With a bouquet of carnations in hand, he played the role of husband and father for the nurses. This set a precedent, and afterward he accompanied Alyona and her daughter to consultations at the polyclinic, bathed the baby, fed her … He even liked this intimate bustling and pottering about. At the same time, however, he felt uneasy for his own safety and well-being. The whole time that Mikha was in prison, Alyona was half-unconsciously trying to seduce Sanya. He would adopt a high guard, like a boxer; or simply let the feminine signals pass over him, like air or steam; or quickly make himself scarce, like water running down a drain. Occasionally, Alyona had hysterics, or went into a sulk with him. Several times she even chased him out of the house; but either she would start missing him and call him up, or he would come over without warning with a toy for the little girl, or pastry eclairs for Alyona. In fact, she ate almost nothing the whole three years that Mikha was gone. It was some sort of metabolical hunger strike. She was able to drink tea with bread or sweets, but she couldn’t stomach meat, or cheese, or even soup. It was strange that the more emaciated she became, the more beautiful and ethereal she seemed. Sanya felt this, and feared her morbid attractiveness. It was Sanya who had taken her to see Mikha, before he was transferred to a prison camp. Sanya was the only one who wrote Mikha long letters. Alyona wrote short letters, very beautiful, sometimes even with little drawings. Mikha would write Alyona an open letter once a month—one for everyone, but with a specific message for each person individually. All the people who corresponded with him would gather at Alyona’s for the reading. Alyona usually sat in an armchair with the sleeping baby on her lap, and Sanya set out tea with cookies. He gave the impression of being Mikha’s replacement. This occasioned rumors about a romance between Alyona and the friend of her imprisoned husband. There was no romance. But a tension hung in the air nevertheless.

Sanya, perhaps more than Alyona, was anxious for Mikha’s return. He sensed her psychological volatility and was afraid—what if her strength gave out suddenly before he came back or his own well-trained resistance failed him? Alyona was perhaps the most attractive of all the women he had ever known: she seemed nearly disembodied, with the long, slow turns of her swanlike neck and head, to the point of conclusion made by her chin, upraised. Or the slow, gentle sweep of the fingers that grazed her temples, and the fingertips coming to rest at the edge of her hairline, pulling slightly at her almond-shaped eyes. It was almost as though her head were hanging on her fingertips, frozen in midair.

Mikha’s family took up a great deal of Sanya’s time, and cut into his musical activities. He suffered over this, and had difficulty concentrating. Preoccupied with household worries and chores, he was forced to find a time and place in which to seclude himself with his beloved music, fleeing his family obligations.

He taught at the Conservatory. He didn’t have a heavy teaching load—it never exceeded twelve hours a week.

Thanks to Alyona, he had stopped being a foreigner in his own country. In any case, now he knew the address of the infant feeding center, and all the surrounding pharmacies and polyclinics. He began his mornings with a run to the infant feeding center, and the evening closed with a scheduled visit to Alyona. He knew he had to force her to swallow at least a spoonful of some sort of nourishment. Without Sanya she never sat down at the table at all. She spent the greater part of the day in bed, with her daughter. When the baby, Maya, got a bit older, Alyona, who was afraid of the people and noise out on the streets, began going out into the more secluded courtyard to walk with her, but only if Sanya accompanied them.

Late in the evenings, Sanya took out a musical score from a pile lying on the floor next to his bed. He lay down and leafed through it. Beauty and wonder. Mozart’s Concerto no. 23 for piano and orchestra. Evgeniya Danilovna had once told him a story about this concerto.

Stalin heard a performance by Yudina on the radio and demanded the record. There was no recording of the concerto on the face of the earth. That very night, they roused Yudina, the conductor, and a dozen members of the orchestra, and took them to the House of Sound Recording, duly recorded it, and by morning the only copy of the record was ready. Stalin generously rewarded Yudina. It is said that he sent her an envelope containing 20,000 rubles. She answered the leader with a letter: she had sent the money to a church, and she would pray for him that God would spare him despite his evil deeds. Stalin forgave her. He said she was a Holy Fool …

Sanya studied the Mozart concerto, and happiness broke over him like a wave, from his head to his feet. Stalin wasn’t the only one to have been overwhelmed on the spot by this piece. Sanya smiled, and closed the text. He turned out the light. Mozart himself was conversing with him. What more could he dream of? What better interlocutor, friend, confessor could he find? And he realized that he could endure Alyona after all.

* * *

Sadly, Sanya’s relations with his grandmother were unraveling. She never asked any direct questions, and Sanya didn’t consider it necessary to enter into explanations. Anna Alexandrovna was convinced that Alyona had lured her boy into an indecent romance with her, and was disappointed in her beloved grandson. At the same time, she saw the burden of care and responsiblity her spoiled Sanya had taken upon himself, and she admired his heroism. She suffered in the knowledge that Sanya was sinking ever deeper into the affairs of Mikha’s family, and was bitterly jealous of the unhappy Alyona, for whom she had so little sympathy. And, however irrational and ridiculous, she was jealous on Mikha’s behalf, considering him to be a deceived husband …

By virtue of the sins she ascribed to Sanya, Anna Alexandrovna felt a share in his guilt, and she didn’t write Mikha a single letter in three years, but sent him food packets and greetings through Ilya. She knew exactly what one needed to send to the prison camps, and she even baked special cookies in which she secreted fat and bouillon cubes, and then wrapped them in paper from the official Privet baked-goods brand. They didn’t allow anything homemade into the camps, but these fake Privet cookies contained an unheard-of number of calories. From time to time, she also sent money for Alyona.

She remembered very well how she had tenderly tried to dissuade Mikha from this marriage. And also: she was the only one who feared Mikha’s return. She anticipated scandal, revelations, unmasking, indecency. No, even more than that, she feared a catastrophe. What did she know, and what was presentiment?

Mikha forbade himself to count the days until his release; but he couldn’t help it. The fewer that remained, the stronger was his anxiety that they wouldn’t let him go. His friends were also counting the days.

It was, of course, very silly of them to assume that Mikha would be released in precisely three years, at exactly midnight on the day he was scheduled to go free. They already knew that he had been brought under convoy to Moscow, and that he was in Lefortovo Prison. They assumed, not without reason, that this was connected with the arrest of Sergei Borisovich, who, as they also knew, was in Lefortovo as well.

Three of them arrived at Lefortovo toward midnight—Ilya, Sanya, and Victor Yulievich. Ilya had an old jacket and new jeans in his rucksack. Ilya also brought a new pair of shoes for Mikha—true, they were one size too big, but they were fine ones.

There were three places from which Mikha might have been released: through the central entrance, the investigative offices, or the service entrance. The friends kept watch at these doors throughout the night and morning, until noon the next day. Then they went to inquire. A militarized-looking woman at a small window told them that Melamid had already left.

They rushed to call Mikha at home. Alyona came to the phone, and said in a quiet, remote voice:

“He’s home. Come.”

It turned out that they had released him at eight in the morning through the investigative offices, and his waiting friends had simply missed him. They got a taxi, and twenty minutes later they all tumbled into Mikha’s front entrance. The elevator was out of order. Sanya and Ilya flew up to the sixth floor via the stairs, and an aging Victor Yulievich, panting from exertion, followed, two floors behind. They waited until he caught up with them, then rang the doorbell. Mikha himself opened the door. Rather, it was a gaunt, colorless ghost of Mikha … Ilya lost no time remarking on this, trying to avoid any outburst of feeling the situation might otherwise have inspired.

“Well, you’re nothing more than a shadow!”

And Mikha laughed, suddenly himself again.

“I’m no shadow! I’m the skeleton of a shadow!”

Victor Yulievich raised his hand in a gesture familiar to them since childhood, and said:

“This to me

In dreadful secrecy impart they did;

And I with them the third night kept the watch;

Where, as they had delivered, both in time,

Form of the thing, each word made true and good,

The apparition comes…”

And everything seemed to fall back into place. They slapped one another on the back, pestered Mikha, and barged into the living room in a tumult. In spite of the former ideals of severity and asceticism, it was crammed with knickknacks and junk—a chair, a child’s bed, and even a curtain that partitioned the child’s sleeping corner from the rest of the room. The place was fast reverting to the appearance it had had during Aunt Genya’s time.

Maya, who had just been put down for her nap, woke up and began to howl. Alyona darted into the sleeping nook to comfort her, then brought the little girl out to see the guests. Maya stretched out her arms toward Sanya, the only one of the guests familiar to her. Sanya took her in his arms, and jiggled her gently up and down. She threw her arms around his neck, hugging him.

“What did you bring me?” she asked in a voice raspy from sleep.

Then he murmured something in her ear, and she smiled.

“Where?”

Sanya took a bright glass marble out of his pocket, and rolled it around on the palm of his hand. The girl snatched it like a little monkey.

Mikha watched the two of them jealously. The girl didn’t recognize her shy father. He was seeing her for the first time in her life, and he couldn’t yet grasp that this small creature, a living being with curly hair, big eyes, and busy little fingers, had come from him, from his great love for Alyona. It was still not completely comprehensible to him how these two things, the most important things in his life, were connected.

Mikha had already taken a bath before they arrived. He scrubbed the three years of vileness off his skin. He wanted to wash himself from inside out, to clean the prison air out of his nose, his throat, and his lungs, to purge the foul prison food and water from his mouth, his intestines, his stomach …

Seven years! It would take seven years. In seven years, all the cells in the human organism are renewed. Who had told him that? But how long would it take to cleanse the soul of prison filth? Oh, if he could only wash his brain in liquid nitrogen, in hydrochloric acid, in lye, to expunge those three years from his memory! Let it all be washed away, so that he would forget everything that he knew and loved, everything he revered, as long as all trace of these three years would vanish.

His friends stayed a short while, less than an hour, then left. The three of them, their small family, remained. There was a lot they had to talk about. The little girl clung to her mother, pushing her father away. Mikha frowned and wrinkled his nose; she was afraid, and turned away from him.

What a high price to pay. The child doesn’t recognize me, she’ll never recognize me. Mikha didn’t feel things by halves, and he suffered from an acute sense of rejection.

“Let’s all go for a walk. Maya, want to go swing?”

“Yes. With you,” she said, and took her mother by the hand.

“We’ll take Papa with us, too.” And they went outside together.

Maya sat down on the swings, and Alyona pushed her gently.

“They dragged me back here under armed guard five weeks before my release was scheduled, and I realized that they were planning to pin something else on me. It turned out to be the case of Chernopyatov and Kushchenko,” he told Alyona, through Maya’s interruptions. “They didn’t let us meet face-to-face for a confrontation for a long time, but they let me read their testimony. The testimony was dreadful; I didn’t believe a word of it. I thought they were just planting false evidence cooked up by some agents. They named more than thirty names, including that of Edik Tolmachev. But this case wasn’t about Gamayun, but about the Chronicle, about all possible human rights cases. The protocols ran the gamut—sincere confessions, repentance, you name it.”

“I know all of this already,” Alyona said drily, nodding.

“I didn’t believe it until the very end. Actually, I still can’t believe it. But we met face-to-face. And what I heard was an echo of the protocols. What they did to them I don’t know. Maybe they beat the confessions out of them. I denied everything. Except that Sergei Borisovich was your father and my father-in-law. I was sure they were going to tack this case on me, too. Until the last day I couldn’t believe they would set me free. I still can’t believe it, really.”

Alyona didn’t raise her eyes to him. The expression on her face didn’t even seem to register his presence. Mikha put his hand on top of hers.

“I just can’t wrap my head around it, Alyona. Sergei Borisovich couldn’t possibly have said all that. But I heard him say it with my own ears. Don’t think that I love him any less, Alyona. I’m just terribly, terribly sorry for him.”

“I don’t know, Mikha. I don’t think I am. Since childhood, I always believed I had a hero for a father.” Alyona did lift her eyes, but stared at one place under the swing, at the confused shadows made by the seat that carried her daughter back and forth, back and forth.

“You’re not swinging me right, Mama!” the little girl said sternly. Mikha grabbed hold of the chain of the swing.

“Don’t touch it!” she said even more sternly.

Toward evening Zhenya Tolmacheva and an acquaintance from Alyona’s institute stopped over and stayed for a long time. They sent them away at nine, saying the little girl needed a bath.

In the communal bathroom, they placed the children’s tub on a stool, filled it with warm water, and placed Maya in it. She washed her dolly and her rubber dog diligently, then just splashed around. Mikha watched from the doorway and was filled with an unparalleled new love for the wet child, her darkened curls sticking to her forehead.

“Get the towel,” Alyona said, and he took the fragile back into the large towel. It was the first time he had held his own child in his arms. She was very light, but weighty. Small, but enormous; bigger than Mikha, bigger than the whole world. And that’s what she was—the whole world.

My little world, my giant world,

A world all eyes, light-brown, and moist,

One sleepy green eye, shade unfurled,

Ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum …

The little girl had fallen asleep. Mikha embraced his wife. She covered his lips with her hand and said:

“You haven’t told me anything I wasn’t already aware of. I know everything. I spoke to his lawyer. You don’t know her, Natalia Kirillovna. She’s wonderful. I asked her to tell him I didn’t ever want to see him again.”

She didn’t say the word father. She said “him.” Mikha took her hand away.

“Alyona, that’s crazy. You can’t do that to him. He deserves only pity…”

* * *

Everything was just as it had been before—the courtyard, the neighbors, the broken floorboard in the corridor, the poplar trees outside the window, the ancient curbstones that marked out what had once been a flower bed, the former skating rink … the saleswomen in the bakery and the fish store, the building manager. Yet it seemed as though thirty years had passed, and not just three. One false move and everything might split open with a resounding crash—the house, the courtyard, his little daughter, his wife, the whole city. And April, so warm and welcoming this year.

Anna Alexandrovna was the first person Mikha visited after his release, in the evening on his second day of freedom. She was the one he told, on that same day, that Alyona’s father was giving evidence and that he was afraid it would land him back in prison.

Anna Alexandrovna had prepared for Mikha’s arrival: she had spent the whole day before his visit in the kitchen.

“You know, Mikha, there’s nothing new under the sun. My husband’s own brother sent him to prison. They both perished. It’s fate that decides, and not our own actions or behavior, whether good or bad. Please eat, I made it for you.”

Three years in prison camps had changed him beyond recognition: a dark, haggard face, thinning hair, eyes faded almost to yellow. And the way he thought about everything seemed to have somehow shifted.

Anna Alexandrovna had not changed in the least. Her face was overlaid with a dense, fine net of wrinkles, as though carved with a burin. It had appeared very early and had frozen in place, without disfiguring her in the least. Now, when she was nearing eighty, she appeared to be very youthful. Looking at her, pondering her enigmatic words, Mikha realized that Anna Alexandrovna was a strikingly beautiful woman. And much more than beautiful. Through the veil of wrinkles, through the abyss of years, he saw her face suffused with light and loveliness.

“Anna Alexandrovna, I’ve so missed your home … If you only knew how much I love you…”

She laughed.

“Well, it’s about time! Mikha, I prepared you a ‘Jewish-style pike.’ That’s what Molokhovets calls it in her cookbook. I just threw it together, never having made it before. Taste it and tell me what you think.” And she placed an oval dish with pieces of pale fish in front of him.

“It’s delicious! Especially considering I’ve never eaten such a delicacy in my entire life!” At that moment, Mikha realized he was truly home. He beamed, smiled, talked, and ate all at the same time, forgetting for a time about the constant gnawing pain in his stomach.

Anna Alexandrovna, on her part, felt relieved. Perhaps everything would fall back into place. Mikha would assume his rightful role as father of his family, and Sanya would return, freed from his worries and cares about Alyona. Everything would go back to the way it was before, and all the complications, real and imagined, would disappear of themselves.

For the next two weeks, Mikha was often at the Steklovs’. Everything seemed fine with Alyona, and their daughter was for him a miracle from above. Still, everything else that surrounded him was bad, far worse than before he was sent to prison.

Nevertheless, in Anna Alexandrovna’s home, he was happy. As before, Sanya was rarely home, but his absence was comforting. It meant that Sanya was gradually returning to his element. He again spent his evenings at concerts, and in the Conservatory dorms, where he had many friends. It seemed that the electrical charge that had been building up during the years when Mikha was in the camps had been defused.

In the first weeks after his release, Mikha managed to stop by to see Anna Alexandrovna several times. Two of those times Sanya was at home, and the aura of closeness that they had shared in childhood and youth returned. They understood each other implicitly; and what they didn’t understand about each other inspired interest and sympathy.

Mikha was also happy that Anna Alexandrovna was, as before, the grown-up, and he was still the child. And, like a child coming home from a walk, he brought Anna Alexandrovna little tributes from his excursions: a pine branch with a cone still on it, a funny drawing of Maya’s.

One evening he dropped in to see Anna Alexandrovna after returning from Tarasovka, where he had visited his old friend Artur Korolev, the bookbinder. He and Korolev had drunk vodka together, but the visit hadn’t lasted too long, and Mikha returned to the city before nightfall. He had nothing special to give Anna Alexandrovna, so he bought some lollipops in the shape of roosters from a gypsy at the train station. He presented the handful of fiery roosters on sticks to his elderly girlfriend like a bouquet. She placed the roosters in a glass, and they gleamed with festive brightness. Mikha suddenly noticed that the whole house had become rather old and shabby.

The heart is home. The heart is glad. For what?

The shades of home? The garden shadows? I don’t know.

The ancient garden, all the aspens bent and withered. Horror!

The house in ruins … the scum that lines the ponds …

So much is lost! Brother against brother … what wrongs!

Decay and dust … it lists and crumbles; but still stands …

Whose home is here? Whose ashes on the ground?… Whose corner, this?

Dead pauper’s lair, without a hearthstone or a stove …

The hands of the old woman, as fragile and thin as porcelain, poured the weak tea into semitransparent cups. “You remember Annensky … It’s so very sad … Look how plain our tea ceremony is today—just tea with sugar and lollipops. Sanya will be coming soon. He promised to go to the store on his way home. Can you wait?”

She stood up and pulled out the potbellied sugar bowl and tongs from the cupboard—the sugar was cubed.

Anna Alexandrovna and Mikha sat in front of their weak tea. There were no cookies, no gingersnaps, not even dry crusts of bread. For the second week in a row Anna Alexandrovna hadn’t left home because of the unusual fatigue that had come over her. She hadn’t taken sick leave, but asked a teacher who taught only part-time to take over her lessons. A week had already gone by, and she didn’t feel any better. She complained to Mikha that she felt terribly lazy: she didn’t go to work, and she was letting things slide at home, too—she didn’t even have anything to offer him to go with his tea.

“Tomorrow I’ll pick up my old bones and go out. But Sanya’s not pulling his weight either—he couldn’t even bring home a loaf of bread! And I won’t even start in on Nadezhda. Ah, you haven’t heard the news! My daughter has gotten herself involved in a romance. She doesn’t sleep at home these days. Imagine! It’s indecent.” She laughed, as though she were talking about a fifteen-year-old scamp of a girl, and added, with her characteristic directness:

“She’s going to marry him. What idiocy…”

And she frowned.

It seems like she’s not feeling at all well, Mikha thought. He was used to Anna Alexandrovna always serving fresh tea. Even if the old pot had just been brewed a few hours before, she tossed it away without a moment’s hesitation.

“Well, how are things going with you?” Anna Alexandrovna said. Mikha began telling her about what pained him the most: he couldn’t find a job. He had looked high and low. No one would hire him. “The local police keep coming by and asking me when I’ll start working…”

She listened to him attentively, mechanically kneading her self-rolled cigarette and thumping the empty mouthpiece against the tabletop. Suddenly, she dropped it, leaned back against the chair, and, looking somewhere into the distance, said:

“Mikha, I don’t feel well … I’m unwell.”

She opened her mouth and let out a few spasmodic gasps, one after another, through tensely drawn lips. Her hand scrabbled across the table, knocking over the red roosters. Her eyes stared so intently and fixedly at a place somewhere behind Mikha’s head that he turned around to look. No one was there. The gold spines of the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedias gleamed on the bookshelf.

Mikha caught her and carried her to the divan. She was light, and hung over his arms like a down comforter. He laid her down, propping two cushions behind her back. She continued to stare straight ahead—not at him. He pressed her wrist in the wrong spot, where there’s no pulse even among the living.

“Just a minute, just a minute … medicine … an ambulance…” Mikha mumbled, already fearing it was too late.

He dashed to the telephone. The Steklovs were the only ones in the communal flat with a telephone in their own room, though they shared the line. He picked up the receiver and heard a snatch of the neighbor’s conversation:

“How many times did I try to warn her, you’ve got to keep your eye on him! She just laughed; and now she’s had her laugh! He’s a respectable man, which is rare in our day and age…”

Mikha rushed out into the corridor:

“Quick! Anna Alexandrovna’s ill! Call an ambulance!”

The neighbor, Maria Solomonovna, a pharmacist with gold teeth spotted in red lipstick, greatly admired and respected Anna Alexandrovna.

“Well, that’s all for now. The neighbors need the phone. It’s an emergency. But don’t forget to remind her: how many times did I warn you…”

The latch on the entrance door to the flat rustled, then clicked open. Sanya walked in. He was carrying a bag of groceries. On the way he had stopped in at the store and bought everything they needed, even a chicken, and was proudly bringing home the provisions to his grandmother. Perhaps for the first time in his life …

“Anna Alexandrovna is unwell … the ambulance … it seems very bad…” Mikha mumbled. Sanya tore into their room, with Maria Solomonovna waddling right behind him.

Fifteen minutes later, before the doctors had even arrived, Vasily Innokentievich called. It was his daily call and mantra—“How’s life?”—which was a source of slight annoyance to Anna Alexandrovna. He rushed over immediately. Their lifelong romance, which had lasted for nearly sixty years, with breaks and interruptions for Nuta’s marriage and infatuations, was coming to an end. Rejected countless times and returning to her over and over during the most difficult times of her life—when her husbands and lovers were imprisoned and shot—now he had to bury his great love, without hope for another resurrection. It was over.

Ilya arrived simultaneously with Vasily Innokentievich. He was an infrequent visitor. Thus, all Nuta’s favorite people had gathered around her body, already growing cold, before the doctor had even come to pronounce her dead. Only Nadezhda Borisovna was missing—she was spending the night at a rented dacha, where there was no telephone. She found out about the death of her mother only on the morning of the next day.

The body was removed later that evening, and the three grown boys sat together. It was almost as if they fused into a single being—with their shared thoughts, feelings, and memories, similarly devastated, similarly forlorn. In the presence of Sanya and Mikha, Ilya’s third eye, or fourth, or whichever one it was—the organ of warmth and sympathy—opened up in him, and they all seemed to breathe the same air, to suffer the same grief.

The funeral was strange in its unevenness and incongruity. A will was discovered in which Anna Alexandrovna gave very precise instructions about how she wanted to be buried. She wanted a funeral service to be held in the Church of Peter and Paul by the Yauza Gates.

There were many people. They distracted Sanya from Anna Alexandrovna, who lay like a white island among the black human waves.

Along with friends and family, the academy directors were present, too—looking puzzled and out of place in their uniforms with blue shoulder straps. Students also came. In those years, they were no longer Chinese, but Cubans and Africans. Anna Alexandrovna had taught them Russian very well. They brought her a pine wreath with a black-and-red ribbon. The wreath chafed Sanya’s eyes.

At the head of the coffin stood Vasily Innokentievich, his gray hair giving off sparks, his face crumpled. Liza was not with him. She was on a concert tour in Germany. Ten or twelve old-lady friends—Evgenia Danilovna, a couple of her gymnasium friends, Eleonora Zorakhovna with two aristocratic white roses—mingled with former colleagues from various walks of life and with Sanya’s friends. Ilya brought Olga. Near them stood Tamara Brin, granddaughter of Nuta’s late girlfriend. Tamara’s face was a rare Levantine type that was instantly recognizable. Sanya remembered her—she had been invited to one of his birthday parties in childhood.

The pallid Mikha stood next to Sanya, and quietly wept into the mohair scarf that Anna Alexandrovna had given him long ago for one of his birthdays. Next to Ilya stood his wife—pale, strawberry-blond, holding hyacinths in her hand. From time to time Sanya’s gaze would come to rest on a thickset man with bushy eyebrows and a broad face. He stood by Sanya’s mother, and for some reason gripped her arm possessively. It was her intended, whom Sanya was seeing for the first time. Why had his mother brought this man along?

* * *

Sanya observed everything happening as if at a remove, like watching it through thick glass. The dead face of his grandmother seemed like an artist’s forgery. Her beauty had taken on a kind of ultimate form, and this absolutely superfluous beauty inspired uncertainty about the world of the living, so bustling and unattractive.

From a side recess, a priest emerged and began the service. Evgenia Danilovna thrust a burning candle into Sanya’s hand. The voice of the priest mingled with the voices of the choir, a music that Sanya had never heard before. It commanded attention, because it contained something very significant, but ineffable.

The priest, who looked Greek, offered prayers with profound attention and without any shortcuts. The whole funeral mass seemed interminable. Sanya noticed that the voice of the priest blended in beautifully with the singing, and the subtle sounds—the crackle of the candles, coughing, soft sobs—also enhanced it. The instrumentation was exquisite. When the candles were extinguished, Sanya thought that the service had ended. But the priest again began reading something out loud, and the choir began to sing again. Sanya was transported by the sounds, the smells, and the sheen of light on the icon settings to a place that, until now, only music had been able to take him.

The choir fell silent, and the priest said that the close friends and relatives could take their leave of the departed. Everyone began to move, forming a line to the coffin.

Anna Alexandrovna hated lines. She said that half her life had been spent standing in line: for bread, milk, potatoes, soap, tickets, letters. She had even perfected a means of defense: she repeated poetry to herself that she knew by heart.

She would say, laughing, that the Soviet authorities had helped her train her memory, forcing her to stand in line so long. She had no doubt never imagined that on her final day on earth there would be such a long line of people waiting to bid her farewell.

Anna Alexandrovna had requested to be buried at the Donskoi Monastery, at her grandfather’s grave. The body was cremated at the Donskoi Crematorium. The monastery cemetery had been closed for a long time already, and it was only possible to bury the urn two weeks later.

It was not a grave, but a crypt; but it had collapsed so long ago that it was only possible to bury her on top of it, next to the listing tombstone. Her grandfather’s name was an aristocratic one, but not very well known.

Unlike the funeral service, there were few people at the burial—only the closest friends and relatives. Vasily Innokentievich stood next to Sanya and kept wanting to say something to him, but couldn’t find the right moment. When everything was over and they were all walking out of the monastery gates, he caught Sanya by the hand and said, very quietly and clearly:

“Sanya! We’ve lost Liza for good. She’s not coming back after her tour. She’s staying in Austria. She called me to say that we would all understand in time, that everything was fine, that she was happy and asks everyone to forgive her. And she loves us all. I told her that Nuta had died, and she cried and asked whether she could call you. I said I’d ask you.”

“Oh my God!” was all Sanya could get out.

“She’s planning to marry a conductor there. She met him on her first tour, and they performed together. He’s an old man! A terrible loss. The people we love most are all abandoning us. We’ll never see Liza again. Maybe you will; but I won’t.”

“Vasily, how sad it is! Women always want to get married for some reason; look,” and he gestured with his eyes toward his mother, who was being led by the hand by a man with a hat like a furry pastry on his fat head. “Your son-in-law is an Austrian, and not a German?”

Vasily Innokentievich nodded.

“I just didn’t like that fat Boba fellow, and I was glad when they divorced. This new son-in-law, by the way, is a handsome guy. He has a wonderful face. I have a record with his picture on it. Why do women do what they do? Take a look at that … janitor,” Sanya said, looking over at his mother and her fiancé. “Nuta knew everything.”

Mikha came up to them. He gripped Sanya’s maimed hand, and bent right down to his ear:

“Your mother is alive, but I have no one. Anna Alexandrovna was closer to me than my whole family put together. I only just now understood that. She’s gone away, and now I’m first in line.”

“What? What do you mean?” Sanya said, not hearing or understanding what Mikha said.

“There are no more grown-ups ahead of me. It’s my turn next,” Mikha explained.

* * *

Two weeks after Anna Alexandrovna’s death, the thickset gentleman in the pastry hat who was holding his mother’s hand moved into their apartment. His name was Lastochkin, and the name didn’t suit him in the least. In no way did he even remotely resemble his namesake, the swallow. They rearranged the furniture, took down the dividing screen, and partitioned the room with a wardrobe and a bookcase. They nudged Sanya over a bit, depriving him of the geometrical security to which he was accustomed.

Anna Alexandrovna’s death, sudden, easy, and completely spontaneous, could not be reconciled with life. Sanya awoke in the mornings, heard the unbearable sounds of alien everyday existence, and wanted to fall asleep again, in order to wake up in his normal, habitual home.

But that former home was gone; his grandmother was no longer there, and his mother had undergone some strange transformation, like children under spells in fairy tales. She had changed in a single moment into the opposite version of herself. Whereas before she had been soft and plump, now she was sharp and hard; before she had had light-brown hair mixed with gray, and now she had become a brunette. She began to use lipstick and wear a new astrakhan fur coat, black and unruly, instead of the ancient gray rabbit fur in which they had wrapped Sanya as a baby.

But most intolerable of all was the new voice of Nadezhda Borisovna: sonorous, fawning, with a giggle at the end of every phrase. No, even more unbearable than that were the nighttime sounds of coupling, of bedsprings, panting and groaning …

It was as though the janitor’s quarters on Potapovsky Lane had encroached on the very place where once Nuta had read her favorite Flaubert and Marcel Proust during sleepless nights.

He couldn’t sleep. He caught small snatches of slumber, but he would start awake and return to the obsessive thoughts: Nuta is gone. Nuta will never come back. Nuta is no more.

He slept at intervals. When he woke up for good, he would fall into his usual despondency. He washed and left the defiled house. If he didn’t have class, he went to see Mikha.

Mikha’s mood was no better. He still couldn’t find a job—no one would hire an ex-convict—and they were broke. Alyona tried to teach some classes. Their friends chipped in to help, and Mikha accepted these alms unwillingly. Marlen finally left for Israel—hurriedly, unexpectedly, and inexplicably—and wrote Mikha letters, trying to persuade him to follow him there. But Mikha rejected the idea of emigrating out of hand.

“Everyone keeps repeating the same thing: emigration, emigration. Everyone has an opinion on the subject—for or against it. I can’t even consider it, Sanya. I’d die there.”

Maya, who adored Sanya and still hadn’t come to trust her newfound father, climbed into Sanya’s lap and tickled him behind the ear. That was a little game they had.

“Mikha, we’re going to die anyway. And music and poetry are everywhere, not only in Russia,” Sanya said.

“Music, yes. But poetry—no. Poetry has its own language, and that language is Russian! I’m a poet—perhaps a bad one, but still a poet!” the usually gentle Mikha burst out. “I can’t live without Russia!”

Sanya was unable to counter this. He couldn’t say: yes, you’re a bad poet. And was it any better for the good ones? Khodasevich? Tsvetaeva? Even Nabokov, for God’s sake?

But Mikha, like a pendulum, kept returning to the same point: Russia, the mother tongue, Russian metaphysics … Russia, the Lethe, Lorelei …

* * *

Sanya attempted to lower the level.

“Well, my friend, leave Russia with your Lorelei, otherwise you’ll drown prematurely in our river Lethe…” And he frowned from the awkwardness of his own joke. “Leave, Mikha. It’s a lost cause. And Nuta is dead.”

He thought about Liza. She had left, abandoned her grandfather, who doted on her, and lived now on the other side of the looking glass. In Vienna, Mozart, Schubert, and the entire Viennese School promenaded along the Ringstrasse.

* * *

Going down the stairs, Sanya began composing in his mind a long, meandering phrase, words set to music—the strings resounded plaintively, the brass crashed, the alto saxophone crooned in a soulful voice. The words were almost lost, but still they surfaced, indistinct but indispensable.

Nuta left, died, flew away, poor thing, her thin fingers, the rings no longer ringing … even her smell is gone.

A short sprint through Mikha’s courtyard, past the corner house, from Chistoprudny Boulevard to Maroseyka.

Mikha, orphaned, kin, terrible childhood, the transparent Alyona, my God, it reeks of madness, it reeks of the mewling of the deaf and dumb, poor, poor everyone.

Woodwinds, advance! The clarinet sobs, and the flute weeps …

Crossing the streetcar rails, where an invisible monument to an underage hooligan, killed on this spot twenty years before, stood.

Fortissimo, percussion.

Brass, brass, brass … and the screech of brakes.

* * *

Unhappy boy in a padded cotton jacket, in a soldier’s cap with earflaps, running, running, cold metal clenched in his fist.

Turn left on Pokrovka, home to the Vanity Chest House.

* * *

Poor fingers, poor fingers, perished forever. For violin, viola, and clarinet, for bayan, accordion, for the baneful balalaika. Oh, piano!

Piano duet! For four hands! The right piano Liza, the left one me. Liza begins the piece, I join in.

And a right turn home to my building, to my side wing. String section. The violins begin. Tipsy, pianissimo. The piano theme builds and develops, attenuates in the string rendition. Rises. And everything concludes in the deep, sad voice of the cello.

Some carry skates in their hands, some shopping bags, briefcases, musical scores, boots from the shoemaker, repaired and repaired again. They carry illnesses, misfortunes, summonses, blood test results, garbage, a dog, a bottle.

* * *

And right in front of his door, his fingers already touching the only remaining bronze door handle in the whole building, he lifted all the music up, then dashed it with all his might to the ground, so that it shattered and rolled away.

If you exist, God, take me away from here and put me in another place. I can’t go on here. I can’t go on without Nuta …

He entered the building. He went up to the second floor. He went into the apartment, and paused. Lastochkin had wrapped Nuta’s blouse around the handle of a gigantic cast-iron frying pan filled with hash browns cooked in lard. He was carrying it from the communal kitchen to their room. It stank.