The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

Elena’s First Notebook

MY LIFE IN AND OF ITSELF IS SO INSIGNIFICANT AND I myself am so insignificant that it never would have occurred to me to write anything down, were it not for the fact that my memory is getting worse and worse. It needs some sort of external reinforcement: smells, sounds, objects, that elicit memories, pointers, references . . . So let there be at least this little notebook, and when my memory fails entirely, I will be able to look at it and remember. It’s so strange how you grow up and acquire knowledge, and past events take on completely different meaning, depth, a sense of God’s agency, and I want to excavate my own life, like an archeologist, uncovering layer after layer, so as to understand what is happening to me and to my life. Where is it taking me, and what is it trying to tell me? I can’t understand; I don’t know how. The most horrifying thing is that my brain has become like an old porcelain cup: it’s filled with tiny cracks. My thoughts suddenly cut off, lose themselves, and it takes a long time to pick up their trail. Periods when I drop out. Sometimes the image of a person takes on a life separate from the name of its owner. A person you know well, have known for a long time, a loved one—suddenly you can’t remember their name, no matter how hard you try. Or just the opposite: you remember a name, but not the person behind it.

I constantly write notes to myself: don’t forget this, don’t forget that. Then I lose the notes. Not too long ago I found one and had a real scare: it was written in my hand, but, my God, what spelling: a letter left out here, whole syllables out of place.

Deep in my heart I suspect that this is the beginning of some terrible disease. I just wrote that and now am entirely convinced of it. And it scares me. No one in our family had anything similar. Although Grandmother, it seems, had an older sister who reverted to her childhood when she got old. It’s awful: your whole life then becomes senseless. If a person has forgotten her own life—her parents, and children, and loves, and joys, and losses—then what was the point of living? The other day I was thinking about Grandmother Evgenia. And I couldn’t remember her patronymic. I’d totally forgotten it. It made me so upset. And then the next day it just came to me on its own: Evgenia Fedorovna.

I have to write everything down—everything. For myself. And maybe for Tanechka. She’s going through this period of distancing herself. She’s totally preoccupied by her studies, wants to become a biologist, and has grown unusually close to her father. But they’ve always adored each other. Only he doesn’t have as good a sense of her as I do. When her head or her stomach hurts, I know exactly how it hurts . . . And the fact that Tanechka seems not to have any interest in my life and leans more toward her father doesn’t really mean anything. I am sure that she will still need me. And she needs to know everything that I know. After all, it’s not just the big, significant events that are important. Surprisingly, the more distant they become, the more important the small, insignificant events are. Especially dreams . . . I’ve always had dreams, and such powerful ones that now my earlier recollections and childhood dreams seem to be intertwined and I can’t say for sure which image is from the real past and which from a dream. Tanechka needs to learn about all my petty trifles while they still haven’t been lost by my faulty memory. For example, it seems to me that I remember how I first learned to walk: I’m alone in a very large room, propped up against a green velvet sofa. It tickles. Kitty-corner in front of me is a white tile stove, a Dutch stove, and I want to touch it. It is smooth and alluring. I collect my strength. It’s very scary. I’m afraid to walk without anyone’s hand, but it seems to me that I could run over to it. I screw up my face with effort, push off from the sofa, and run. Fly almost. And run palms first right into the tile. It is unexpectedly hot. I scream. A large, mustached woman with a swarthy face appears from nowhere and sweeps me up into her arms . . . Where was that? Probably in Moscow, in Grandmother’s apartment. Mother said that I started to walk very early, before my first birthday. Can a child that age really remember anything? Or was it a dream after all? There’s no one to ask.

My father, Georgy Ivanovich, was no ordinary person: he was a dreamer endowed with the rare ability to convince others of his ideas, a homegrown philosopher, from a young age an ardent revolutionary who even hung out with terrorists, but after the events of 1905 he turned to Tolstoyism. After he became a Tolstoyan he professed other ideals, and working the land became his religion. After that he never again lived in the city, but organized Tolstoyan farm collectives in various regions, all of them failures, except the last, the one in Troparevo.

When he was young, Father was very handsome. He had an aquiline nose and bright black eyes. Probably that was his Greek or South Caucasian blood. Mother, on the other hand, does not look very pretty in the photographs taken when she was young: a chubby face, tiny eyes, and a potato nose. When she was older, though, when I already began to understand things, Mama got prettier. She lost a lot of weight, her face acquired more distinct characteristics, became more memorable. Father was a man of unlimited passions. He liked to argue, took offense easily, and was quick-tempered, but incredibly kind. No, not kind, selfless. He was truly a man of the future, as I understand it. He had something in common with PA. He never thought about his own benefit, in fact, he didn’t really understand what that might be. He was ready to give everything away. But except for his books he had nothing, and his library was always communal. His bookplate had a curlicue border with the words “From the Public Library of Georgy Miakotin.”

He professed nonviolence as passionately and energetically as everything else. Now I’m able to judge him soberly: he supported nonviolence in public life, but was a terrible despot at home. He was gifted with the rare ability to instill his ideas in others; there was something infectious about him. Like Tolstoy he had many acolytes and followers. I think that Mama in fact was a victim of his rare, seductive personality. She followed him everywhere, trusted him in everything. He would change his convictions, and she couldn’t keep up with him. For her everything was more superficial, though; for her the main thing was that she loved him immensely, and for his sake she gave up her life as a modest music teacher in the city for life in the countryside. In the countryside she didn’t teach music, but cooked porridge for dozens of people, did laundry, and milked cows. She learned to do it all. All of it was beyond her capabilities, but she made the effort on Papa’s behalf: in addition to everything else, she wanted to be his best student. She did everything he wanted. Except for one thing: she returned to her parents’ house in Moscow to give birth. And left her tiny children with them to raise until we were old enough. I was the last, the third. Father was very angry with her for doing this. Because the other Tolstoyans all raised their children on the land. But this was the only issue that Mama did not concede to Father. Until I was four I was raised by my grandmother, then, at my father’s insistence, taken to live with them in the commune.

After collectivization started, the authorities launched frightening attacks against the commune, although, you would think, it was that same ideal collective farm the Bolsheviks intended to organize throughout the entire country. In the first year of collectivization, they even proposed that my father, an experienced commune manager, join the administration and help organize collective farms. But he refused.

“Our communities are voluntary, and that’s what keeps them alive, but you’re proposing to organize people through the use of force, which does not coincide with my views,” was how he explained it to the party bosses.

At first they left the members of the commune alone, but clearly not for long. Following deliberations and discussions it was decided that they look for new locations, farther away: the village of Troparevo was much too close to the capital. They began their search in 1930, but it was 1932 before they not only found a place but put up their first log houses in the foothills of Altai. Just before they moved, Mama begged Papa to leave me in Moscow. I was fifteen years old, and Grandmother was able to adopt me. I became a Nechaeva. Probably that’s what saved me from arrest—my grandmother’s surname.

In Altai, in Solonakcha, their life took a horrible turn. After that I never saw any of them. My brother Sergei was drafted, but refused on ethical grounds: he did not want to carry a gun. He was tried by military tribunal and sentenced to death by firing squad. He was like my father: unbending. But Vasya was a gentle, tender little boy: they called him shepherd boy. He was the only one of us who truly loved the soil and farming not abstractly, out of theoretical considerations, but from the heart. Animals listened to him.

Mishka the bull would follow him around like a puppy. Vasya drowned in the Ob River five days after he was handed a draft notice. The next day he was supposed to appear at the draft board in town. That was 1934. Soon after, my parents were arrested. They were given ten years without the right to send or receive letters. Grandmother tried to track them down: before the war she stood in all sorts of lines. But she never got an answer. She silently maintained that they had all perished because of my father. Basically, that’s how all the Tolstoyans became extinct. I visited Maroseyka Street where there used to be a vegetarian cafeteria. But the place was unrecognizable. No publishing house, no cafeteria . . .

But I wanted to write about something else. Here’s another image from my early childhood: I’m sitting at a large table with huge basins of raspberries in front of me. The berries are almost the size of eggs. I pull the fat white stems out of the centers of the berries and put them in a large cup and toss the berries into a bucket, as if they were no good, trash. It’s the inedible white centers that are valuable. The smell of the raspberries is so strong that it seems as if the air itself is colored with a reddish-blue tint. Inside me churns this difficult, serious question about how what’s most important to some can be trash and garbage for others. Was this a dream?

There are lots more just like this. I’m carrying a bowl of chopped greens for tiny baby rabbits. The stronger of them jump up first, while several little scrawny ones can’t make their way to the food. I have to sort these weak ones out and put them in a separate cage. So the stronger ones wouldn’t trample them. That seems not to have been a dream. But maybe it was a dream? It’s difficult to imagine that such tender liberties were allowed at our commune. Life was very harsh . . .

All these colorful trifles somewhat confuse and, if you will, soften the images of my memories. The commune where I lived from the time I was four, in Troparevo, a not so distant suburb of Moscow, was small: only eighteen to twenty adults and about ten children, all different ages. But we had our own school. We were taught to read using Lev Tolstoy’s primer. And our first books were, of course, Tolstoy’s. The story of the plum pits: how it’s bad to lie. About the wooden trough for the old grandfather: how one should treat one’s parents well. There was almost never enough food, but it was divided equally. When there was a lot—that happened too—it was still shameful to take a lot.

The Teachings of Christ Presented for Children: I have memories of it from early childhood. I read the real Gospels only much later, when I was living with Grandmother . . . To say that the adults in the commune loved Tolstoy would be an understatement: they idolized him. As a small child I had my fill of him. It’s even funny to admit, but they fed me such a steady diet of his articles and philosophy that I wouldn’t go near The Cossacks, Anna Karenina, or even War and Peace. I read his novels only after the war.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. There’s something else. Since I was a little girl from time to time I’ve had moments when I seem to lose touch with the here and now. I think that many people have this experience, but because it’s so enormously complicated to describe these occurrences—for which our impoverished language has neither the words nor the concepts—no one even tries to share their experience with others. I have noticed many times how a child will suddenly stop in the middle of playing, eyes empty, fogged over, and then a second later is once again rolling a truck or dressing a doll. The child just drops out for a while. I’m sure that everyone knows the feeling of stopping dead in your tracks and losing all sense of the passage of time. How can I describe this, especially since I’m not a writer? Yet for some reason it seems important to try to get all this out. Perhaps it’s precisely for this reason that I’ve stopped trusting my own memory, which constantly fails me.

The most frightening experience I’ve ever had—and the most impossible to describe—is that of border crossings. I’m talking about the border between everyday life and various other conditions I’m acquainted with but that are as difficult to describe as death. What can a person who has never died say about dying? But it seems to me that each time you drop out of everyday life you die a little bit. I love my profession of drafting precisely because it has an exact set of rules that can be used to organize everything. There’s a key to the transition from one projection to another. What I’m talking about, though, is when there’s a transition, but from one time to the next you never know what laws govern it, which is what makes it so frightening.

Merciful Lord, all those journeys . . . All of them different . . . The most frightening thing that happened to me—for that matter the most frightening transition I ever underwent—happened just after my grandfather’s death. In order for you to understand this, I need to say a bit more about my family.

Everyone feared my grandfather—my mother and my grandmother included. That I was afraid of him is perfectly understandable. I was a frightened little girl in general. When he died, I was seven years old. In 1922. He was a building contractor, and at one time he had been very wealthy, but had lost it all before the revolution. I know very little about the history of my family, especially this part of it. All that survived in Grandmother’s version was that a train station pavilion he had built caved in, several people died, and he himself was hurt and his leg had to be amputated. There was a court trial, and that was his ruin. After the court case Grandfather never recovered. Usually he would sit in his deep armchair with its back to the bay window, and against the light background his face would seem dark, especially when it was sunny. Grandmother and Grandfather lived in Trekhprudny Lane, in the Volotsky buildings. My grandfather himself had built them, in 1911, I think. It was a garret apartment. The elevator never worked. Climbing up the tall staircase took a long time. Grandfather basically never left the house. He was always ill, breathed with a rasp, smoked smelly tobacco, and walked around the apartment with two canes. He never used a crutch. He just kept it near the couch.

In those years we—I mean the commune—kept cows and brought milk from Troparevo to City Hospital No. 1 on the Kaluga Highway. We had a cart and a communal horse. Mama sometimes took me with her, and after having delivered the milk, we would ride from the Kaluga Highway to the vegetarian cafeteria on Maroseyka Street. I remember carrot tea with saccharine, and soy cutlets . . . In the same building there was a publishing house and the Tolstoy Society’s offices. My father’s relationship with the society’s administration was not very good. It seems strange, but as far as I can judge now, the Tolstoyans were always fighting, arguing, and trying to prove something to each other. My father was an ardent debater. Between him and his father-in-law, my grandfather, there were deep hostilities, for political reasons. As for my grandmother, Evgenia Fedorovna, my father somewhat despised her for her Orthodox Christian beliefs, and though he never argued with her to the point of breaking off relations, he was always instructing her how to practice her faith correctly, the Tolstoyan way . . . Like Tolstoy, he did not recognize miracles or other mystical phenomena; for him the main thing was moral content. And Christ was the epitome of morality. I look back on this all now with a smile, because I constantly have before my eyes our Vasilisa, who has not the least conception of morality. She says, “that’s God’s way” or “that’s not God’s way,” and hasn’t a thought about good and evil, and judges only by her silly heart. While Papa had a theory for everything.

My mother visited her parents almost secretively. In any case, I somehow realized that I was not supposed to tell my father about our trips to Trekhprudny. It was kind of Mama’s and my secret. Like the several spoons of farmer’s cheese Mama withheld from sale as a present for her parents. Dairy products were not for our consumption. Only the sick and little children were given milk.

Grandmother always received us in the kitchen, which was right next to the entrance. Grandfather never came out of the room at the far end of the apartment, and I did not realize that Grandmother kept our visits secret from him. He extended his dislike for my father to my mother and would get frightfully angry if word got to him that Mama had been at Trekhprudny. A very, very cruel and intolerant person Grandfather was. He barely tolerated his grandchildren.

Mama told me that he had a long and painful death, and cursed terribly until his last minute, damning everyone and blaspheming. They did not take me to his funeral: it was freezing cold. After some time had passed—I think not less than six weeks had passed—Mama brought me to Grandmother’s during Holy Week and left me with her because I had just broken out with chicken pox. While I was sick, I slept in the room where Grandfather had lived. They put me on his couch, which stood rather strangely in the center of the room. Probably in the last months of his life, when he could no longer get out of bed, they had turned the couch in order to be able to approach him from both sides. He was very heavy, and it was very difficult for Grandmother to change his linen by herself . . .

I was very ill for about three days, and then the healing sores just itched. Grandmother gave me some sort of tranquilizer, and I remember that it made me sleep and sleep, so that I confused day and night. Once in the middle of the night I heard a knock that seemed to come from the neighbors’. I was surprised in my sleep. What were they pounding nails at night for? Harder and harder. Each strike hit me right on the bridge of my nose. That’s because I’m sleeping, I explained to myself. I have to wake up. But I couldn’t. Then the blows seemed to coalesce, as if an invisible jackhammer were boring with great pressure into my forehead . . . The drill gnawed deeper, the vibration was unbearable, and it seemed as if all of me were being dragged into a velvet-black, spinning abyss. This was no dream; it was something else. And it lasted long enough for me to figure out two things: first, that what was happening to me was stronger than pain, and the suffering was not physical, but some other kind. Second, the spinning blackness began in the middle of my forehead, formed a funnel, and carried me off beyond time. I was terribly nauseated in a strange way, but if I had been able to vomit, I would have vomited up myself . . . Pain encircled me from all sides; it was bigger than me; it existed before me. I was simply a grain of sand in an unending stream, and what was happening, I guessed, was what is called eternity . . .

All these explanations come to me now. Then, as a little girl, I could never have found the words. But since then, whenever I recollect this event, a vibrating nausea arises just beneath my heart.

But then the drill stopped. I was lying on Grandfather’s couch, but the room with the striped wallpaper, with the darling little bay window, was not there. This was some unfamiliar place that resembled nothing else. It was a low-ceiling space illuminated with a dull brownish light that was so weak that the ceiling and the walls disappeared into the gloominess. Perhaps it was not a room at all, but some terribly closed-in space with what resembled a wretched sky overhead. There were a lot of unpleasant things there, but after all these years I don’t want to strain my memory to resurrect the details, because when I think back to then I begin to feel sick.

A multitude of muddy shadow-people filled the space around me. Among them was Grandfather. They moved about painfully and aimlessly, squabbling slightly, and paying no attention to me. I didn’t want them to see me. Especially Grandfather. He limped, as he had when he was alive, but he had no cane.

This state of powerlessness and sadness was so heavy, so contrary to life, that I guessed that this was death. As soon as I thought that, I saw myself behind our house in Troparevo on a bright summer afternoon with patches of sun and shadow. A large poplar toppled by a recent tornado lay across the path, and I walked along it, stepping over broken branches, slipping on the damp trunk, and inhaling the strong scent of withering foliage. Everything was slightly spongy: the tree trunk under my slight weight and the layers of decaying foliage. A dream inverted: from there to here.

Here, in the place where I was, there was no real light and no shadows. There, behind the Troparevo house, where the fallen tree lay, where the sole of my shoe slid along the velvety tree trunk, there were shadows, and spots of light, and an immeasurable wealth of shades of colors. Here everything was unfixed and brown, but real. There everything was unreal. Here there were no shadows. Darkness doesn’t have shadows. Shadows are possible only where there is light . . .

I lay as if paralyzed, unable even to move my lips. I wanted to cross myself, as Grandmother had taught me, but I was sure that I could not even lift my hand. But my arm lifted easily, and I made the sign of the cross and recited “Our Father” . . .

A man in a clay mask resembling an ordinary oven pot approached me. Through the clay eye slits in his mask he stared at me with bright blue eyes. These eyes were the only thing that had any color. The man sneered.

My prayer hung tangibly over my head. Not that it was weak. It just did not go anywhere. It was cancelled. This dark place was located in some place far away from God’s world, in a solitude so unimaginable that light did not penetrate it, and I realized that prayer without light is like fish without water—dead . . .

I could hear the buzz of a conversation—sad, decayed, and deprived of any sense. Nothing but lethargic irritation, a languid argument about nothing. And Grandfather’s voice: I ORDERED, you ORDERED, I did not ORDER . . . This “ORDERED” was a being . . .

The one in the clay mask bent over me and started to speak. I don’t remember what he said. But I remember that his speech was unexpectedly coarse and vulgar, ungrammatical; he chided me, even mocked me. His words, like the brownish clay on his face, also were a mask.

“He can speak using other words; he’s deceiving me. Liar,” I thought. And as soon as I said that to myself, he disappeared. It seems I had exposed him with my thought alone . . .

SHADOWS FLUTTERED HERE AND THERE, AND ALL OF this lasted timelessly long, until I saw that this place had no walls, that merely the thickened gloom created the appearance of a closed space, while in fact this cramped, dark place was enormous, infinite; it filled everything, and nothing existed besides it. It was a maze with no way out. I became terrified. Not for myself, but for Grandfather, and I began to shout.

“Grandfather!”

He seemed to look in my direction, but either he didn’t recognize me, or didn’t want to recognize me, but just continued mumbling, looking at me with his faded brown eyes: I ORDERED, he ORDERED . . .

Suddenly everything shifted and began to slip away. Like the shadow of a cloud across a field, the dark space began to move off, and I saw first a part of the wall in its striped wallpaper, then all of Grandfather’s room in the gray predawn gloom.

I had not awoken, I simply was not asleep. The morning gloom, depressing and unpleasant on ordinary days, now seemed a live pearl color full of promise, because even the nighttime gloom of this, our world, is a shade of our earthly light. What had been shown to me there was the absence of light, a sad and unwelcoming place. That was it, the shadow of death . . . And when the last edge of the darkness floated out of the room and disappeared somewhere to the north, I heard a clear, youthful, indubitably male voice saying:

“The middle world.”

TO THIS DAY I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THAT WAS . . . OF ONLY one thing am I almost certain: all of that was shown to me because my crippled grandfather with his gloomy face slipped among the crowd of shadows.

Later, when I grew up and read the Gospels and the Epistles of Saint Paul, I returned to this event, to this otherworldly encounter, and thought, Does the apostle know that not all of us change, that some do not change at all and preserve forever their lameness and gloominess, and that what’s behind all this is sin? I do not condemn Grandfather, by no means—who in our family can judge whom? But Mama once let slip that when Grandfather’s case with the train station pavilion that had collapsed was under investigation, his guilt had not been proven, but that the accusation had been that he had used poor-quality materials, which caused the ill-fated pavilion to collapse and the workers to die . . . Theft or bribery . . . The usual Russian story. And so, is it going to be this way forever, with no forgiveness whatsoever? Did the apostle promise deliverance from sin only for those without sin? No, I don’t understand . . .

And what about my memory lapses? What if I forget? I forget so much these days, I probably also forget my sins. So then what’s the point of repentance and forgiveness? If there’s no guilt, then there can be no forgiveness.

Tiny pieces of my life seem to have been washed away as if by water. In their place a blank space has formed, as when you wake up after you’ve dreamed that you had a really important discussion with someone inhumanly intelligent but you can’t pull, can’t drag any of it out into your waking life, and everything important stays in the dream. You get this horrible feeling that there are valuables stored in some sealed room that you can’t get into. Although sometimes you manage to return to an old dream, to the same person you were having the conversation with, and continue the conversation where it broke off. And he answers, and everything is clear as day. But then you wake up and once again, there’s just blankness.

I had one of those blank spots appear where I committed a betrayal. I still remember it, but just the fact. For a long time I haven’t felt any repentance or shame. Apparently, I forgave myself. And the way I committed the betrayal: easily, with no pangs of anything, not even hesitation, or thought. I am talking about my dead Anton. There was a poem that was very popular during the war, Konstantin Simonov’s “Wait for me, and I’ll return” . . . At the end it goes: “Only you and I will know how among flames and fire your waiting saved my life . . .” Instead I caused his death by not waiting.

I fell in love with PA not even at first sight, but as if I had loved him even before I was born and merely remembered anew my old love for him. I forgot Anton as if he were just a neighbor, or a classmate, or a colleague from work. Not even a relative. Though I’d lived with him for five years. He’s the father of my only daughter. Your father, Tanechka. I see nothing of Anton or his family in you. You really do resemble PA. Your forehead, your mouth, your hands. I won’t even mention your facial expressions, your gestures, and your habits. But I can’t tell you that PA is not your natural father. So, it turns out that first I betrayed Anton, and then I robbed him, deprived him of his daughter. Can you ever forgive me?

Overall, I’m certain that PA means more for Tanya than I do. He’s meant more for me than I have for myself. Even now when everything is so hopelessly ruined between us, fairness demands I admit that I have never met a more noble, more intelligent, or kinder person. And no one in God’s world can explain to me why this best-of-the-best person has for so many years served the greatest evil there is on this earth. How can these two things coexist in one person? In my heart I sensed it all, knew it all back then when we were in evacuation and he took the Romashkins’ kittens away. At first I couldn’t believe that he had drowned them. Now I believe everything. After all, with just one phrase he crossed out our love, all ten years of our happiness. Destroyed everything. Destroyed me. Cruelty? I don’t understand. But that’s exactly what I don’t want to remember now. For me right now it’s important to restore everything that’s slipping away from me, that always, before PA appeared in my life, played such a large role. My dreams and early memories.

What I see—what’s told to me and shown to me in my dreams—is much richer and more significant than what I can put to paper. I have a wonderful spatial imagination, professional in a certain sense. Probably I am particularly sensitive to space, and for that reason have found myself in its mysterious back alleys, like that “middle world.” On the other hand, nothing comforts me more than my dear mechanical drawing, where each structure is strictly and completely transparent.

The dreams I see exist in some sort of dependency on the everyday waking world, but I won’t even try to describe the nature of that dependency. There is doubtless logic to the transition, only it remains on the other side and never emerges into waking reality. It’s perfectly clear to me that even though my hyperphysical journeys to various strange places violate all possible laws, my presence in those places is no less real than everything that surrounds us here, where I write with a pen in a school notebook Tanya started and abandoned at the very beginning because the school year had ended. No less real than the houses, streets, trees, and teacups here.

But again, the key to it all is sealed in a room, in a room without doors. In general, a lot of different things in my dreams are connected with doors and windows. The first, probably most important, door I saw was a very long time ago, not as a child, but when I was a teenager. I can’t say for sure when, because this vision is always accompanied by a sense of having encountered something already seen before. As if it were possible first to commit something to memory and then to be born into the world with the memory.

This door was in a cliff, but at first I saw the cliff, which was of dazzling fresh limestone so totally and abundantly flooded with sunlight that all the details of its coarse texture, all its uneven surface—a memorial incarnate to a hardworking civilization of small shelled animals long ago extinct—were as visible as if under a magnifying glass. Then my gaze shifted, a screw turned, and a slight swell swept over the surface, and I saw a door with a bas-relief surface cut into the side of the cliff. The relief was very distinct but it didn’t add up to an intelligible image. The smooth lines intersected, weaved, and flowed into each other, until finally my eyes adapted, and then the meaning of the image revealed itself to me. I made out a high pallet containing a smoothly curved body that flowed downward from the top, delicate hands folded in meekness, Jewish heads with tall brows bent low, and, above them all, the lone figure of the Son with the Theotokos as child in his arms . . .

The door was ready to open; a shadow even seemed to flit across a crack in the aperture in the cliff, and I was invited to enter. But I took fright, and the door, sensing my fright, once again reverted into the bas-relief on the white cliff, becoming flatter and flatter as I watched, gradually being covered over by the white meat of the limestone until it disappeared entirely.

I was not ready to enter. But there was nothing irreversible or irrevocably lost in this. I simply wasn’t ready. I’m still not ready.

Then it was as if I were told: Leave. Let your fear expend itself in life’s travails. And when your pain, your longing, and your thirst for understanding exceed your fear, come back again.

That’s approximately what I heard at the door. It was said tenderly. By the way, people always speak tenderly to me.

There was another thing about the door. It led from one space to another. But there weren’t any walls or anything else resembling a barrier between these two spaces. Just a door. Not even a door, a doorway. But everything visible through that doorway was different: the air, the water, and the people inhabiting it. I desperately wanted to go inside, but the space of the doorway was hostile and would not let me through. Its hostility was so great that it wasn’t worth trying. I stepped away. And then it occurred to me: you should try, make an attempt . . . I turned around. But the doorway was no longer there. And the space wasn’t there. Only ripples in the air left by a vanished opportunity.

I also remember how Grandmother died. As happens with the righteous, she knew in advance of the day of her death. Not long before Grandmother’s death Vasilisa had left for who knows where—she suddenly got the urge, you know how even now that still happens with her. But on the eve of Grandmother’s death she returned. By that time Grandmother had not got out of bed for a week, had not taken any food, and had drunk only small amounts of water. She was not in pain, at least, so it seemed to me. Her whole life no one had ever heard her complain. She did not speak, answering questions only by shaking her head to say no. No to everything. Vasilisa sat alongside Grandmother and read something devout. I think now that it must have been the “Office of the Parting of the Soul from the Body.” But maybe something else. Grandmother was well over eighty years old and looked like antiquity itself, an Egyptian mummy. Despite her horrifying thinness, though, she was very beautiful. Those last days she did not open her eyes. But her face was not unconscious. Just the opposite, it was the attentive face of a person concentrating on some important and weighty question.

On the eve of her death her young neighbor dropped by to borrow wineglasses: it was her birthday. I opened the cupboard and took out several different wineglasses, among which there was one real beauty, an antique with a worn gold pattern. The neighbor started looking it over and began to gush. She spoke rather loudly, and her squeals of delight over this beautiful glass were very inappropriate: Grandmother lay dying in the same room.

“My, they knew how to make things then. They don’t make things that way now. It must cost . . .”

And just then, in a clear and rather sonorous voice, Grandmother—without opening her eyes—fully conscious, and even severely, made a pronouncement.

“My child, you’re disturbing me . . .”

FOR TWO WEEKS SHE HAD SAID NOTHING, AND THE LAST three days it had seemed to us that she was unconscious . . . I don’t know how we disturbed her, what important business we tore her from . . .

A day later, at sunset, when we—Anton Ivanovich, Vasilisa, and I—were sitting at the table, her clear, loud voice suddenly rang out from its weeklong oblivion.

“The doors! The doors!”

Vasilisa flew down the long corridor—clattering with her old shoes that fell from her heels—to open the front door. She switched the latch, and the door flung open. Just then a stream of air rushed through the open window leaf in the direction of the front door, the light, cold draft touching Vasilisa as it blew past . . .

I turned toward Grandmother. She exhaled, and never inhaled again. The draft seemed to dart back. The front door slammed shut of its own, and the window leaf jerked on its hinge. A sunbeam darted from Grandmother’s face to the shifting glass. The sunbeam, a little golden clot, was solid, and as it flashed on the scoured pane we heard the faint sound of shattering glass.

Anton Ivanovich stared at the window leaf and shook his head. Vasilisa, who had sensed everything instantly, crossed herself. I went over to Grandmother, not yet quite believing that everything was over.

Her death had been as serene as it could be. It was “a Christian death, peaceful, painless, and without shame.” But at the time I didn’t know that’s what it was called. Vasilisa knew.

Grandmother’s face turned solemn and joyous. The pale-pink skin of her head peeked through her bluish-gray hair; her forehead and nose hardened and froze like fine porcelain clay, and her wrinkles smoothed out. Her eyebrows were sable, with tiny brushes at the bridge of her nose. It was precisely at that moment that I distinctly realized how much I resembled her . . . Our white cat, Motya, who had lain at Grandmother’s feet since she had taken to her bed, got up, went over to the edge of the bed, and jumped to the floor.

Anton went to see what had happened to the window leaf. He still hadn’t realized that Grandmother had died.

“The draft shattered the glass,” he mused in wonderment, picking off a piece of dried putty. “There’s a big piece of glass in the back stairwell; I can cut a piece of it for the window leaf . . . Good thing that it’s a rectangle; any of the other window panes could be real trouble . . .”

The window, indeed, was semicircular at the top, with small asymmetrical pieces of stained glass, and almost all the pieces were irregularly shaped. The house was in the moderne style, built by Grandfather in better times . . .

Windows and doors . . . Windows and doors . . . Even a child knows the difference. A door is a boundary. Behind a door lies another space. You enter it, and you yourself change. It’s impossible not to change. While a window merely lends its knowledge for a time. You look, and then you forget. But that’s already concerning my dreams.

That day, the day of Grandmother’s death, Vasilisa’s hour arrived. She knew everything about death. How it’s done. How to bathe, dress, and mourn the dead. What clothes to dress them in, what prayers to read, what to eat and what not to eat. I submitted to her completely, without the least hesitation. And not only I, but Anton too. She took everything in stride, issued instructions, and we did as we were told.

By evening Grandmother lay stretched out on the expanded dining room table, her hands crossed in meek submission across her chest and bound together with an old stocking, her chin propped with a headscarf folded over four times into a halter, and her eyes covered with two large worn five-kopeck coins. Where had Vasilisa dug them up? Had she brought them with her?

An icon lamp burned at the head of the table, and Vasilisa read slowly in Church Slavonic before the icon. I sat on a stool next to the table, saying farewell to Grandmother. I was twenty-four years old. Neither my brothers nor my parents were alive at that point, but I learned of my parents’ deaths only many years later: at that time we still didn’t know what “ten years without the right to send or receive letters” really meant . . .

It was the first death I ever witnessed. I can’t say that I was frightened. I stood in profound respect before this incomprehensible event and tried with all my powers to understand what was taking place: the chasm impervious to reason or emotion that separates living and dead, and especially that instant itself when live and warm Grandmother had metamorphosed into a strange, unneeded thing that had to be removed from sight as quickly as possible and tucked away deep in the earth. Everything Vasilisa did—solemnly and unhurriedly—was soothing, precisely because without all her incomprehensible actions it would have been impossible to remove this cold object. The white shirt, the shroud, and the new leather slippers that Vasilisa had examined so nitpickingly, as if Grandmother really needed this light pair of new shoes with blunt toes and metal-lined holes for laces in order to journey the easy roads that lay beyond the grave . . .

Anton Ivanovich requested that the coffin not be taken to church, but that the priest be invited to the apartment. Everyone was under observation and frightened. Pursing her lips, Vasilisa nodded, and late in the evening on the eve of the funeral she brought to the apartment a wee old man to whom she could entrust the departure of her benefactress. Anton Ivanovich left to spend the night at his relatives’ because he didn’t want to know anything about the whole business: he had a good job at the plant and a blemished family history.

The old man who showed up looked like an ordinary beggar. But when he took his vestments and an epitrachilion from his bundle and donned his Iberian cross, he turned into a priest. With greatest piety he spread a piece of embroidered fabric on the desk, which Vasilisa had washed clean. It was the antimension with pieces of relics: on it he consecrated the Eucharist. That was the first liturgy in my life. We had never been taken to church: that had been Father’s condition when he had allowed the children to live at Grandmother’s. The version of Tolstoyan Christianity in which we were raised after Grandmother returned us—three- and four-year-olds—to our parents totally rejected the ceremonial aspect of religion, recognizing neither church, nor the Theotokos, nor icons, nor saints . . . This time I really wanted to take communion, but wasn’t able to say so. The priest then performed burial rites. After the secret prayer service was over, the little old man slipped away imperceptibly into the night. I never saw him again.

The night after the burial I woke up and went into the kitchen. I don’t know why. Maybe to get something to drink. There in the kitchen in her usual place sat Grandmother in her blue dressy dress with starched lace collar. On the table in front of her there stood a tea glass in a metal holder. She was drinking tea. Everything looked so usual that I began to wonder whether I had dreamed that she had died.

“Tea?” she offered. I nodded. The teakettle was hot. The teapot had a fresh brew in it that was unusually fragrant. I poured myself some tea and sat down next to Grandmother.

“So you didn’t die, did you?” I asked.

She smiled, and her white, even teeth gleamed. She has new false teeth, I thought, but said nothing so as not to embarrass her.

“Die? There is no death, Lenochka. There is no death. You’ll soon learn this.”

I finished my tea. We were silent, and it felt good.

“Go to sleep,” she said, and I went without asking about anything.

I lay down in bed next to Anton, who was mumbling something in his sleep.

And fell asleep immediately. What had that been? A dream? Not a dream? Neither a dream nor not a dream. A third something. I don’t know what to call it. A third state equidistant from the dream world and the waking world . . .

Now, after all these years, I suspect that in addition to this small conversation Grandmother said something else, but the rest of it has not been preserved in my memory. What was preserved for the rest of my life was just my firm knowledge that when you are inside a dream, all of your usual world turns into a dream. Waking reality and dreams: they’re like the front and back sides of the same cloth. And what about that third state? Is it like a top view in mechanical drawing?

Over time, with increasing experience, I have learned how to distinguish one from the other almost infallibly. In the usual daytime world things are totally deprived of mystery and their real content. Although expensive cups get broken and it can be very sad when a favorite thing is ruined, and in our family—out of poverty and family tradition—we used to glue cups back together, repair broken things, darn, and patch coats and pots, still when a thing becomes truly unusable, it gets thrown out.

In dreams, things are not entirely real: a cup might not always hold water—as if it still hasn’t been trained to. Things in general come to exist not of their own, but only at the moment when they are needed, and as soon as the need disappears, they immediately disappear. They are abstract until you think, “What was the picture on that cup?” And then the picture appears. In and of themselves things don’t get damaged and don’t grow old: they are deprived of any independent existence. That’s what I’ve figured out.

But the third realm is something else entirely. Precisely the way things behave makes it easiest to distinguish a real dream from what I call the third realm. For example, the tea glass Grandmother Evgenia Fedorovna was holding was not a glass at all. It was an identity, like Grandmother herself. Possibly, it had its own name, unknown to me. It was large, of a particular size in order to fit an unusually large tea-glass holder, and both of them were custom-made. The tea-glass holder, it seems, is a distinctively Russian object. Nowhere do they drink tea the way they do in Moscow. But this tea-glass holder was particularly Russian, made of thick silver in the shape of a little tree stump, the surface of the silver imitating wood bark and the holder’s handle shaped like a little ax wedged into an upwardly slanted branch covered with tiny glued-on leaves and stalks of leaves blown away either by the peripeteia of kitchen life or the fantasy of an apprentice at the Fabergé factory where the tea-glass holder had been crafted. An ostentatious object designed for merchant tastes, of the kind intended as a gift, with a polished plaque for the inscription: “TO DEAR VASILY TIMOFEEVICH . . .”

Grandmother had smiled a fleeting smile as she drank her fragrant, dark-gold tea from Grandfather’s glass, but the inscription had been missing. Where could it have gone, that piece of rhymed nonsense composed by his colleagues: “Timofeich, time for tea! Some like honey, some like jam, but Vasya is a cookie man!”

. . . On closer examination the tea-glass holder turned out to be more elegant than the original, which has survived to this day. There in the third realm it seemed to look nicer; at the very least it differed from its real-life self just as the fragrant, exotic tea differed from the ordinary yellowish slops that Grandmother Evgenia Fedorovna had drunk all her life, even when she had lived in her rich father’s house . . . She didn’t like strong tea . . .

Approximately the same thing happened with all the objects I happened to see while not in dreams or in memories, but in that third realm: they were, if not more refined, then enhanced to a certain degree of perfection. As if an invisible craftsman had worked on them in order to return to them their dignity and true character. In any case, that’s what could be said with complete confidence about Grandmother’s formerly dressy dress. The next morning, I woke up back in the completely ordinary world and first thing headed for Grandmother’s armoire and pulled the dress out to look at it in the light: it was slightly faded in the shoulders and the drooping collar was mended in several spots. I swear: at night the dress had been new, and the collar solemnly stiff . . .

And the teapot in the kitchen was still warm . . .

The next time Grandmother invited me to tea was in the spring of 1941. You, Tanechka, were two months old; you were a weak, cranky child, and both Vasilisa and I were exhausted. That night Vasilisa had lain down with you in order to give me a chance to get a good night’s sleep. I was awakened by the smell of tea, the same tea—I recognized it immediately. I went into the kitchen. Grandmother was sitting at the table. The teapot was hot, and the silver tea-glass holder stood on the table in front of her, but she was not drinking tea and did not offer me any. She was dressed strangely: in a beret draped over with a country-style headscarf and in an overcoat with large, neat patches, and buttonholes edged with new fabric. As soon as I walked in, Grandmother stood up: she had a big bundle in her arms. She opened it up and shook her head.

“No, it’s too big.”

And the big bundle immediately became smaller. The bundle’s metamorphosis did not surprise me in the least: one word had been enough for everything to become as it was supposed to be. Grandmother began to gather kitchenware in the contracted bag, meticulously examining each object. Three spoons, three cups, three plates. A small pot, a frying pan, and a metal mug for cooking children’s porridge. Then she added salt and dry cereal to it.

Her demeanor was stern and sad. Then she took the tea-glass holder, pulled out the glass, and poured the tea into the sink. Fresh, strong-brewed, fragrant tea. Then she unbuttoned her overcoat, unfastened from the collar a small golden brooch in the shape of an arrow with emerald gemstones, placed it in the tea-glass holder, and put them in the bundle as well. It seemed as if she wanted to say something to me. But she didn’t say anything, and just pointed to the stuffed little bundle.

I told Vasilisa about it. Vasilisa crossed herself, nodding her head up and down.

“Oh, Elena, they’re coming for us. They’re coming for us . . .”

But they didn’t come for us. I remembered all this when three months later evacuation of the plant began. The little bundle, and the brooch. Vasilisa had everything prepared. She knew what the vital necessities were. The only thing that didn’t make sense was why Grandmother had chosen to appear to me and not to Vasilisa. Vasilisa was much more practical, and she had a lot of experience, although at the time Vasilisa had told me nothing of her secret, heroic, and implausible life.

Anton was certain that he would not be called to the front. He was an engineer, and practically all engineers had deferrals. But owing to confusion and stupidity he was mobilized, while people who knew less than he did remained at the plant. It’s possible this was somehow connected to his unsociable personality. He never was friends with anyone, never trusted anyone. To be honest, I see absolutely nothing in common between the two of you . . .

We didn’t even say good-bye to each other properly. There was terrible panic at the plant: at the end of June rumors were already circulating about the plant being evacuated, and we had to archive part of our work in progress, and the entire section was piled with papers and drawings, while there was already half as many employees, and everything was upside down and hopelessly confused. On top of all that, you were ill, Tanechka, and twice a day Vasilisa brought you to the checkpoint. I would go out to nurse you, but I did not have much milk, and I was nervous and afraid it would disappear entirely.

And so, preoccupied with childhood illness, Anton and I said good-bye, and it was only after he left—the gathering point was on Mytnaya Street for some reason and he had forbidden me to go there, so Vasilisa went—that I realized what had happened.

Having cried the night through, you fell asleep, and I collapsed alongside you. It was very hot. Our apartment was directly under the roof, and in the summer it was intolerable there. So it was hot in reality, and I also dreamed that it was hot.

Whether it was on earth or not, the place was completely unrecognizable. The soil was reddish and dry, dusty, and filled with stones. Strange plants grew—resembling cactuses, but as huge as trees. The thorns on them were sharp and retractable, as if made of blue iron. The trees breathed through these thorns, and they would extend out and then fold back in, like a cat’s claws when it’s asleep. Up ahead, Anton Ivanovich wandered among the prickly trees, not looking back. He wore a military uniform, but the uniform was old-fashioned: tight-fitting leggings, a short jacket, and Anton Ivanovich himself thin and with the build of a young boy. If you two have anything in common, it’s body type. The narrowness in your hips, and that upward stretch of neck and chin. Yes, that’s it. It had never occurred to me before.

So, there he was, walking off, while I rushed after him, wondering why he wouldn’t stop and wait for me. Especially since those cactuses, though they stood in place like plants are supposed to, kept snagging me and scratching me with their claws, no matter how hard I tried to stay as far away from them as possible . . . The distance between us kept increasing, although I was walking fast and he was walking very slowly. But I couldn’t shout. I don’t know why; all I know is that it was impossible, forbidden. He kept moving farther and farther away, and at the last minute I saw him not on foot, but on horseback. He galloped quite skillfully among the trees until he finally disappeared entirely. At that point it was as if I was allowed to return, and the cactuses withdrew their steely claws and grew smaller and smaller, until they were the usual size, like the aloe and kalanchoe plants on windowsills, and the soil was no longer red, but ordinary, with grass that was ordinary but very soft and tender . . .

Vasilisa sometimes does good interpretations of dreams, but that time she said little.

“Each of us travels the preordained . . .”

BUT I KNEW THAT WITHOUT HER. OF COURSE, THE FIRST thing that came into my head was that he would perish at the front. But why that black uniform, those cactuses, those thorns . . . Why was it forbidden to shout? The main point is buried. But the most surprising thing is that ultimately it will all become clear. I am absolutely sure that nothing is shown to us by chance, that nothing is superfluous . . .

But still, lots and lots of things are unclear. For example, in the waking world it’s clear as can be to everyone that life is logically and irreversibly divided into past, present, and future, and all our feelings and all our thoughts are well adapted to this. Even our language and its grammar. At the same time there is a completely amazing unity to each given moment when two people are together, even if just in the same room, and each of them has a different past and—when one of them leaves the room—a different future, too, while for that single instant their present is one and the same. And moments like that occur not all that infrequently. And they leave very strong impressions. And when you remember them, it’s as if they were restored, but in some sort of new grammatical category that doesn’t exist in our language . . . So it’s difficult to explain. I can’t explain . . .

Many things have been shown to me that I can neither understand nor explain. For example, back in Siberia when I was lying in the hospital after my operation, and it wasn’t clear whether I was alive or not, my consciousness just sort of floated somewhere, in some mist, but not in water. Then someone pulled me out of it, and I found myself in a white-painted bed, and PA appeared. And it immediately became apparent that the accumulation of water I had been floating in was the past, and that I had always been acquainted with this man with the round forehead and wide-set eyes. Both in the past and in the future. But he himself belonged to the present. And even now, as I remember back, I sense myself in the present more strongly than ever before. Because PA possesses a special power for residing in the present.

But what variabilities we undergo in the present! A lot slips by without a trace, leaving no impression whatsoever, fleeting by as if it never happened, while other things move slowly, distinctly, meaningfully—as if for a poor student forced to learn everything by rote, without forgetting anything, to the very last letter. Of late, I often feel frightened that I could forget the most important things. And so I’m writing things down, convulsively, understanding well that I’ll forget all the same, but the main thing is that what I write down is only a shadow of what I see and feel . . .

Another experience—or vision?—I had also relates to that realm of the most important which in no way belongs to the present. To what I tentatively call the third realm. “The Great Waters”—I’ll call it that because this condition or event—they’re hardly distinguishable—has to be designated with words of some kind . . . In any event PA wasn’t around then; it happened before him . . . Basically, before he appeared I had been in many places, including the Great Waters . . . But my “I” was somewhat different then than it is now: blurred, small—like a child’s or just undeveloped. And blind, it seems. Because no pictures, no images from those occurrences have been preserved in my memory. There was nothing firm, rigid, or angular, just moisture—encompassing or flowing—and I sensed myself to be more moisture than a hard body. But moisture that doesn’t spread, condensed moisture like a piece of undissolved starch in watery kissel or a jellyfish in the foam along the shoreline. The wealth of impressions I perceived in my blindness was immense, but all of them occurred on the surface of my not entirely delimited body, while my “I” was hidden deep below, in the middle . . . Impressions that were sooner those of food—tasty, not tasty, tender, rough, thick and sticky, sometimes sweet and so sharp they made me shiver and feel feverish, and sometimes simply sweet, or particularly sweet—from which I couldn’t tear myself away, and they seemed to suck in my entire being and lead me off somewhere. I also experienced various kinds of motion, like swimming, but more chaotic and requiring great effort, and while moving I encountered various streams that washed over me sometimes tenderly, and sometimes vigorously, like a massage. They stroked me, made me ticklish, tenderly sucking me in, then letting me go . . .

The main thing was the satisfaction. Of hunger, thirst, the need to be touched, and of the mutual interaction of liquids. Probably this was some primal sexual satisfaction, but not connected with any other particular being. It was a caressing, fertile environment that consisted entirely of turgescence, effusion, and partial dissolution of me in another, and another in me . . .

A blissful state. But long, rare threads of pain would creep into this bliss and induce me to move, and the new movement led to new bliss . . .

That’s it approximately . . .

Then something new and horrible set in. Were it not so absolutely dark, you might say that Gloom had set in. It was greater than any form of consciousness, all-penetrating, like water or air, and uncontrollable, like the elements. And at the core of my tenuous body my little “I” writhed with the anguish of fear.

It was not a human pain, which has its dimensions—beginning, end, rise, fall. The anguish I experienced had no dimensions. It was absolute, like a geometric point. Aimed entirely at me. I experienced something similar in childhood when I wound up in the place once inhabited by my dead grandfather.

I felt a particular kind of nausea. But it wasn’t my stomach or its contents, but my own “I” that was ripping itself from inside my body and, unable to find a way out, shaking me with spasms. My inviolable, secret, and precious core—protected by the mass of my fluid body from external streams of cold, warmth, acidic sourness, and excessive sweetness—trembled harder and harder, more and more agonizingly, while my body with all its jellylike blood vessels, sensitive, tender pores that absorbed thick sour streams, and fingerlike protrusions of various types capable of excreting their own liquid, which had been created anew within my flesh—my entire complexly organized body yearned to contract, to leave, and to hide from the moist horror that like an ocean covered the surfaces of all bodies . . . My body seemed to know that the horror was penetrating it through and through and not just flowing over its surface . . .

These two desires met each other halfway: my core impregnated with horror from within, pushed outward, while my corporeal part, attempting to escape an external horror, pushed inward. At the moment when it all grew entirely unbearable, my whole being contracted, collapsed, and almost ceased to be . . .

Although the spasms and cramps rent me apart, there was a shade of pleasure in this hellish pain.

A slight vibration—which at first I hardly felt and which formed a kind of weak background—intensified, taking the form of a funnel-shaped shell, and began to suck me in, intensifying the gloom—which had seemed to have reached its limits—by yet another degree. At that point my being could no longer withstand, something inside me snapped and shifted, and I turned myself inside out and immediately realized that the whole world was turning inside out together with me . . .

It was agonizing, but reassuring. I was participating in this inside-out movement, almost like a woman in labor who physically and spiritually facilitates a process that would take place even without her participation . . . it would just take longer and be more difficult. Like a woman in labor, I too tried to push myself out better, hiding all my elongated organs that used to be suspended freely in water, and pushing out the innermost part of myself. I felt it working. My strength was ebbing, the horror had almost receded, when a new feeling arose, one I had never experienced before: I had to hurry. In this new and not yet entirely evolved incarnation, a new dimension—that of time—was already ticking, already marking out invisible boundaries. I tried to hurry—and an invisible film snapped with a deafening ring. I turned myself outward. I had pulled myself out.

Bliss is the state of non-pain. Until I knew pain, I was unable to imagine bliss. There was no more horror and no more pain (a variation of horror). The whole world had become different; I had become different. Only a small part of my “I” remained unchanged, but it was so small that it barely contained itself and was entirely on the verge of dissolution, on the verge of disappearing.

The great novelty was that my body, accustomed to locating itself around its own undefined center, now was entirely inside, and my innermost core was now on the outside and experienced a weak current, a light sensation of movement along its newly constituted surface. Probably my body, accustomed to deriving everything it had needed for its composition and movement from the external world, had not gone entirely inside: at the very least, one large protrusion remained on the surface and opened itself up. Not moisture, not water, but air filled my inner body. It expanded slightly, then fell again. My breathing engaged. But I had not even succeeded in thinking through my new thought about how every imaginable form of bliss, like pain, always has yet another degree, when something on my surface broke and new apertures opened up, and I saw Light. Had my “I” acquired vision? Or had something happened in the world that had not happened before? I don’t know. Light had formed. And Eyes had formed. And I closed them, because at the pinnacle of bliss there was pain . . .

For whom and for what am I writing this Diary of a Madman? Who will believe me if I don’t entirely believe myself? Will you read all this to the end? Will anyone read this at all? And why? Perhaps you shouldn’t bother . . . I’m talking to you, Tanechka, but at times I forget and write whatever comes into my head so that it won’t dissolve into nothing.

Yesterday I came home from work, and Vasilisa said, “Someone called for you . . .” Five minutes later I couldn’t remember the name of the person she said had called. I asked her again. Once again Vasilisa said who. But this morning I again couldn’t remember. What’s more, it seems to me that yesterday I had spoken with one of my friends on the phone, but I can’t remember with whom . . . It’s a strange kind of absentmindedness, a total lack of attention. I do what I can so that no one notices. It seems to me that this unfortunate quality displays itself least at work. There I don’t forget anything or mix anything up. Except I couldn’t remember the name of the new draftswoman. I had to write it down on a piece of paper and put it in my pencil jar. “Valeria.” To tell the truth I committed it to memory right away. There, now I finally remember who called yesterday: it was Valya, Ilya Goldberg’s wife. She called from a phone booth, said something I couldn’t quite understand. She asked that PA get involved in something. And I forgot to give him the message . . .

It seems that PA has noticed that something’s wrong with me. Sometimes I catch his “medical” gaze on me. Since the day Lizaveta the janitor died, more than half a year ago now, our relationship has fallen apart completely. He tried to explain himself to me several times, and I see that he’s suffering because of our falling-out, but there’s nothing I can do with myself. The words he spoke that night still stand between us, and I don’t know whether I could ever forget them. “You are not a woman. You don’t have that organ.” It’s true. But why is that so offensive?

Things at home are very bad. For everyone. The only one who feels great is our little foster child. She sprinkles sugar on buttered white bread. And eats a loaf of white bread a day. With a happy, self-forgetful look on her face. At the same time, though, she’s always looking askance, as if she were guilty or had stolen something. She’s gained weight. Tanechka has helped her catch up with her schoolwork. In the end it’s simply mind-boggling: I lost PA because of her.

Tanechka, why am I writing about this to you? You’re only twelve years old. But one day you’ll grow up and fall in love with someone, and then you’ll forgive me all this nonsense.

He drinks a lot. He always smells of vodka—either just consumed or the reek of yesterday’s. He’s very gloomy, but I am certain that it’s not just because of me.

For Old New Year’s—Vasilisa observes only the old calendar—she prepared a table, baked her clumsy cabbage pie, thick as your foot, and made potato salad with bologna sausage. She boiled up beef-hoof aspic. The house reeked all day from it. Her eternal fasting has ceased temporarily. In the evening PA came out to the table and put a newspaper in front of me. One of the articles was circled—about doctor-murderers. I looked at the list: half of them were his friends. The majority—Jews. He poured a glass of vodka, and chased it with a piece of cabbage pie. Then he winked at Tanechka, petted Toma on the head—she beamed—and returned to his study . . . I really wanted to talk to him, but it was impossible.

I went to bed and before falling asleep asked: Tell me what’s happening, what will happen to all of us? But nothing was shown to me.