White Walls: Collected Stories

MOST BELOVED

AT NIGHT spring blows through Leningrad. River wind, garden wind, and stone wind collide, whirl together in a powerful rush, and race through the empty troughs of the streets, shatter the glass of attic windows with a peal and lift the damp, limp sleeves of laundry drying between rafters; the winds fling themselves flat on the ground, soar up again, and take off, speeding the scents of granite and budding leaves out to the night sea where, on a distant ship under a fleet sea star, a sleepless traveler crossing the night will raise his head, inhale the arriving air, and think: land.

But by early summer the city begins to wear on the soul. In the pale evening you stand at the window above the emptying street and watch the arc lamps come on quietly—one moment they’re dead and silent, and then suddenly, like a sick, technological star, a rosy manganese point lights up, and it swells, spills, grows, and brightens until it shines full strength with a dead, lunar whiteness. Meanwhile, outside of town, the grasses have already quietly risen from the earth, and without a thought for us the trees rustle and the gardens change flowers. Somewhere out there are dusty white roads with tiny violets growing along their shoulders, the swish of summer stillness at the summit of century-old birches.

Somewhere out there our dacha is aging, collapsing on one side. The weight of February snows has crushed the roof, winter storms have toppled the double-horned chimney. The window frames are cracking and weakened diamonds of colored glass fall onto the ground, onto the brittle litter of two years’ flowers, onto the dry muddle of spent stems; they fall with a faint chime no one will hear. There’s no one to weed out the stinging nettle and goosefoot, sweep the pine needles from the rickety porch, no one to open the creaky, unpainted shutters.

There used to be Zhenechka for all this. Even now it seems she might be limping along the garden path, in her hand the first bouquet of dill, raised like a torch. Perhaps she actually is somewhere around here right now, only we can’t see her. But the cemetery is definitely not the right place for her—for anyone else in the world, yes, but not for her. After all, she meant to live forever, until the seas dry up. It never even crossed her mind that she could stop living, and, truth be told, we too were certain of her immortality—as we were of our own, for that matter.

Long, long ago, on the far side of dreams, childhood reigned on earth, the winds slept quietly beyond the distant, dark blue woods, and Zhenechka was alive…. And now, from the herbarium of bygone days which grows with every year—green and motley days, dull and brightly colored ones—memory fondly extracts one and the same pressed leaf: the first morning at the dacha.

On the first morning at the dacha, the damp glassed-in veranda still swims in green, underwater shadow. The front door is open wide, cold creeps in from the garden; the pails are in place, empty and resonant, ready for a run to the lake, to the smooth, blinding lake, where the reflected world fell upside down in the early hours of the morning. The old pail gurgles, a distant echo gurgles. You ladle the deep, cold silence, the stilled, smooth surface, and sit for a while on a fallen tree.

Cars will soon start honking outside the gates of the dachas, summer folk will pour out of the automobiles, and, sighing and moaning, a taxi-truck will turn around in the narrow, wooded dead end of the road, scraping on the low branches of maples, breaking off the fragile flowering elder. It will give a gasp of blue smoke and fall quiet. In the returning silence the only sound will be the thunder of the truck’s wood side-panels dropping, and on its high platform strangers’ belongings, crowned with an upturned Viennese chair, will be shamelessly revealed to the eye.

And one automobile will drive straight through the gates, and from the wide-flung door will emerge a firm, elderly hand gripping a walking stick, then a leg in a high-buttoned orthopedic shoe, then a small straw hat with a black ribbon, and finally smiling Zhenechka herself, who will straightaway cry out in a high voice: “Look at the lilacs!” and then, “My suitcases!” But the bored driver will already be standing with the canvas bags in both hands.

Zhenechka will hurry into the house, exclaiming loudly over the aromas of the garden; she’ll push open the casements impatiently, and with both hands—strong like a sailor’s—pull branches of lilac into the rooms, their cold, purple curls rustling with noisy importance. Then she’ll hurry to the sideboard to see whether the winter mice have broken her favorite cup, and the cabinet will grudgingly open its swollen doors, behind which Zhenechka’s treasure whiled away the January nights alone in the stale, empty depths, alone with a graying, forgotten cookie.

She will walk through the rooms, as yet unwarmed by the sun; she’ll unpack, hand out presents crackling with paper, shake fruit fudge and sweet cakes from packets, cram the corners of the rooms with bouquets of wild flowers, hang our smiling photographs above her bed; then she’ll clear the desk, and stack it with textbooks, dictionaries, and dictation books. Not a single idle day will she allow us; she’ll sit us each down for at least an hour of lessons geared to our respective ages. “We are legion—you can’t teach us all!” We’ll wriggle and hop about in front of Zhenechka. “Yes, I can,” she’ll answer calmly, looking for the inkwell. “Take pity on yourself,” someone will whine. “Like Pushkin says, we’re disgusting, lazy—no curiosity….” “All of you are going to grow up to be educated people.” “We won’t grow up! We’re slaves to our stomachs! We’re denizens of the dark kingdom! Take the books and burn them all!” “Never mind, we’ll manage,” says Zhenechka, and she’ll seize us roughly and kiss us each harshly with a convulsive love we accept indulgently: All right, let her love us. Already she’s dragging the first victim to her lesson, saying, as always, “I taught your mama, you know. Your grandmother and I were childhood friends….”

And on her chest, in the folds of her dress, her hearing aid begins to chirr like a nightingale—the hearing aid that for some reason never works quite right. Well, then, we’re back to lessons again, exercises and dictations; once again, sitting in the creaky wicker armchair, propping her bad leg against the walking stick, Zhenechka, in her measured voice, will begin patiently turning us into educated people, and with the heedlessness of childhood, we will again start to bait her. We’ll crawl into the room where the current captive languishes at the copybook; we’ll crouch behind Zhenechka’s armchair—her hunched linen back, her clean soap smell, the willow creak—and take advantage of her deafness to prompt the giggling victim with wrong or indecent or ridiculous answers, or pass notes with calls to rebel against the slave driver, until Zhenechka notices something’s up and, all in a dither, banishes the spies.

And beyond the windows, beyond the tinted panes: a fresh, flowered stillness, warm shadows beneath the pines, and the midday lake filled with blue, glinting through the boughs, all covered with patches of sun, with fleet wedges of rippled brightness…. But here we are, locked indoors, the table covered in green blotting paper, the thumbtacks rusted over the winter, the ink stains bleeding an official-looking lilac rainbow. And everything Zhenechka says—is boring, correct, old. If only shed go into the garden or go drink coffee! “Zhenechka, how much longer?” “Underline the subject with one line, the predicate with two….” “Zhenechka, the summer will be over!” The willow armchair gives a heavy sigh, the blue eyes gaze with calm reproach, the patient voice says: “There’s a time to sow and a time to reap…. Sluggards never make scholars…. Live and…”

Ohh, isn’t there something she’s dying to do?

The evening fades, the dust on the road grows cold, dogs bark far away. We lie in our beds on cool pillows, listening to the sighs and purrs of the day winding down, the whispers of doors, muffled laughter. From the attic—lighter than shadow, quieter than dust—dreams descend, surging in a transparent wave and confusing what has been with what never was.

Knocking, squeaking, and rustling, groping through the twilight of the house, Zhenechka makes her way to our beds, settles in, and takes up an unending story about bygone years —about the children she taught and loved, about the wind that scattered them throughout the wide world: some disappeared, some grew up and forgot, some returned to dust. Dreams swirl like a warm shadow; from the invisible cloud of soap and mint only her voice emerges, sympathetic and soft, then cooing and enraptured, unhurried, like a blissful June day. Transparent visions float in dozing waters: a boy surfaces, a faraway dark-eyed, light-haired, antique boy, who long, long ago lay just like this in a dizzyingly distant white bed and listened to the murmur, the gurgle, the rise and fall of Zhenechka’s voice—a boat rocking on waves of drowsiness. His eyes drooped and shut, his fingers relaxed, his speechless lips parted—for the dark-eyed boy was mute. That’s why Zhenechka was asked to come: to pity, love, and care for him; to croon lullabies and babble fairy tales about dark forests, about the cat and the wolf, about the seven orphaned goats; and, as the boy fell asleep, his muteness mingled with the night’s, and his bed set sail under the low vault of dreams.

Zhenechka had been in our house from time immemorial, and through the darkness of infancy I can make out her blue gaze bent over me on the day when the good fairies customarily gather with gifts and greetings for the newborn. I don’t know what gift she intended for me: amid the bounty of gifts called life, Zhenechka’s own gift, humble and small, could easily have been lost, or maybe she had nothing to offer but herself, nothing but the steady glow of love and tranquillity that emanated from her smooth, clear soul.

Once she gave one of us, one of her girls, a pretty box: luxurious, satin, full of light blue envelopes for love letters. Embarrassed, she threw back the top, so that its taut blue silk reins quivered; on the inner side, hidden from idle eyes, she had written in her clear schoolteacher’s hand: “If you were to ask for advice, I would say only one thing: Don’t wish to be the prettiest, wish to be the most beloved.” And we did wish this. But nothing came of it, of course, no more than it did for Zhenechka herself.

Her mouth was not made for kissing. No. It was simply a dry, prim, pedagogical mouth, which with age acquired that particular array of surrounding wrinkles that unmistakably indicates honesty, goodness, and simplicity—all those tiresome, well-meant, inarguable truths that its owner hastens to share with you: The north is cold, the south is hot; May mornings are better than November fogs; sun, lilies of the valley, and golden curls are good; tornadoes, toads, and bald patches are bad. And roses—roses are the best thing on earth.

Zhenechka always stuck to her routine, of course. She exercised in the morning. In all seasons, she kept the window cracked open at night, and made a point of waking early—not because she liked gray, dank dawns, but because she could be useful in the mornings. The luxury of idleness was unknown to her, coquetry beyond her ken, playfulness alien, intrigue incomprehensible, that’s the reason Hymen ran from her, not because he was the least bit scared off by her hearing aid or her orthopedic shoe. No, those trifles appeared later—after the war, after the bomb that exploded close to her, when Zhenechka was already over fifty. That wasn’t the reason, of course. After all, even legless people can get married and have a family; it’s the soul that counts. And her soul was—well, they don’t come any simpler.

If our souls are usually constructed like a kind of dark labyrinth—so that any feeling running in at one end comes out the other all rumpled and disheveled, squinting in the bright light and most likely wanting to run back inside—then Zhenechka’s soul was built rather like a smooth pipe, with none of those back streets, dead ends, secret places, or, God forbid, trick mirrors.

And the face matched the soul: simple blue eyes, a simple Russian nose. It would even have been quite a nice-looking face if it hadn’t taken forever to get from the nose to the upper lip. Short, fluffy hair, a style called “smoke.” Braids when she was young, of course.

She wore simple muslin dresses, undergarments that were clean and cheerless; in winter she put on a shabby quilted cotton coat that she called her “fur,” and covered her head with a tall boyar’s hat; summer or winter she never removed her amber beads, worn not for beauty’s sake but for her health, because she believed some sort of electricity emanated from them.

She taught Russian her whole life, and—if you think about it—how could it have been otherwise?

Giving presents was her favorite activity. Winters in our Leningrad apartment, at the core of my childhood, there would be a ring at the door, and—smiling, squinting, treading heavily on her orthopedic shoe, leaning on her staff—little boyar Zhenechka would enter in her cloth “fur,” a real fur hat over her puffed hair, a fresh ruddiness on her middle-aged cheeks, in her hands a pastry box and other tiny, mysterious bundles.

We would all run out into the foyer; smiling silently, Zhenechka would hand over her things—the staff to the right, the tall hat to the left—and unbutton her heavy coat. Freed from its padding, the hearing aid on her chest filled with our cries and greetings, the smack of our kisses, shouts about how young she’d gotten and how well she looked. Having combed the fluffy smoke at the mirror and straightened the heavy amber beads, Zhenechka got down to passing out her gifts: for the grownups, useful, serious books that got leafed through, set aside, and never picked up again; for us, tiny flasks of perfume, little notebooks, or surprising trifles miraculously preserved from prerevolutionary times—statuettes, embroidered brooches, ancient cups with broken handles—treasures to take any little girl’s breath away. Amazing how all these easily lost, perishable little things filtered down through the years. Time’s meat grinder readily destroys big, solid, cumbersome objects—cabinets, pianos, people—while all manner of fragile odds and ends that appeared on God’s earth to gibes and raised eyebrows—all those little porcelain dogs, miniature cups, minuscule vases, rings, drawings, snapshots, boxes, notes, knickknacks, thinga-majigs, and whatchamacallits—pass through unscathed. Zhenechka’s tiny apartment somewhere on the edge of the city near the sea was crammed with all this marvelous junk, while her sisters—the three here and the fourth, who’d gone to live in Helsingfors, beyond that sea, beyond its sad, gray waters—had vanished like smoke. We were all she had left in the world.

Having handed everything out and received the happy squeals and kisses due her, Zhenechka picked up her pastries and marched off to the parlor to drink coffee.

The pastries, of course, were from Nord—the best. On her bad legs, Zhenechka had stood in a long line for them in that magical basement, that gathering place for all believers in sugary terrestrial bliss, where impatient ladies intent on instant happiness elbow their way over to the side gripping a pastry in tremulous fingers and—pressed by the crowd to the mirrored column, to their own agitated reflections—snort like eager fairy-tale stallions, their nostrils exhaling a double, swirling puff of sweet powder that slowly settles on their silver-fox collars.

Zhenechka would open the box wherein reposed the grand, monarchical pastries Napoleon and Alexander; beside them, like Dmitry the Pretender, the despised shortbread ring, that constant of railroad snack bars, had wormed its way in. No one would eat it, but to Zhenechka it, too, seemed wonderful—the ruddy embodiment of a sated, crumbly dream dreamt during the not-yet-forgotten hungry nights of the wartime blockade.

Until the pastries are gone, being with Zhenechka holds my interest, and then, alas, it’s boring. She talks in detail about her health, the contents of a book she read, the flowers that grow so luxuriantly in summer at a friend’s house near the Peri station (from the station walk straight ahead, turn left, then one more turn, and it’s the second house) but don’t grow at all in winter because of the fact that in the winter the ground is covered with snow, which falls from the sky, and thus unfortunately nothing can grow, but as soon as spring comes and the days get longer and the nights shorter and the sun starts warming things and leaves appear on the trees, then, of course, the flowers will bloom again….

I slip quietly out of the room and off to the kitchen; that’s where real life is! Marfa, the housekeeper, is drinking tea with the lady who operates the elevator. Marfa is a tall, bald, cunning old peasant woman who was washed up at our door by the war; she knows absolutely everything better than everybody.

“…So he says keep an eye on my suitcase, lady, will you? I’ll be back, he says, in the wink of an eye. So she takes it from him. Right away he’s up and gone. Well, he’s gone for an hour, and he’s gone for two, and now she has to go home. She’s bone-tired of waiting. She figures she’ll hand it over to the police, but she thinks, well, I’ll just take a look-see. So she peeks inside.” Marfa raises her eyebrows up high, pokes the sugar lumps with the tongs.

“Well?” says the elevator lady, alarmed.

“Well to you too. A fine how-de-do! She thought maybe there’s valuables in there, or something. Opens it up—Heavenly Mother of God!… A head, with mustaches!”

“Chopped off?!”

“Right to here. Just a head, deary, with mustaches. Some guy, not too old. And the head tells her: Shut the suitcase, he says, and don’t stick your nose where it don’t belong!”

“Oh my! The head says that?”

“Yes. Well, she’s off and running for all she’s worth. And the head yells after her: ‘Shut the suitcase, you stupid fool, or you’ll be in big trouble!’ And he starts cussin’ her something fierce.”

“No!”

“These was a pack of thieves, deary. That’s what they was. They’d take him along in that suitcase, give him to someone in line to hold on to, and from inside there he hears everything— who’s got bonds hidden where, or lengths of cloth.”

“So that’s what they do!”

Horrified, I ask:

“The head, who was it?”

“Who, who, what’s it to you? You go play…. That what’s-her-name of yours—she still here? The one with the beads?”

Marfa doesn’t like Zhenechka: she doesn’t like her shabby coat, her beads, her nose—

“What a nose—a regular hose! If I had me a horn like that, I’d toot it on holidays! Such a laaa-dy! The same old gab all the time—yackety yackety yak…”

Marfa laughs, the elevator lady also laughs, politely, into her hand, and I laugh along with them, betraying poor unsuspecting Zhenechka, may she forgive me! But it’s true, she does go on—yackety, yackety…

“And I heard another,” Marfa starts.

But there’s already a deep blue beyond the windows, and there are voices in the foyer—Zhenechka is getting ready to go home. Exhausted, everyone rushes to kiss her, a bit ashamed that they were so blatantly bored and Zhenechka, a pure soul, didn’t notice anything amiss.

And someone walks her to the tram while the rest watch out the window: under softly falling snow, leaning on her staff, in her tall hat, Zhenechka slowly shuffles away, back to her lonely dwelling.

And the tram will rush past wastelands, snowdrifts, fences, past low brick factories that send a roaring appeal into the steely winter murk, past buildings decimated by the war. And somewhere at the edge of town, where the cold fields begin, a wizened amputee tumbles into the dim, clanking car, stretches out his accordion, and sings, “Oh, woe is me, a poor old cripple, I’m only half a man, they think; if you don’t help, my cares will triple, for I still need to eat and drink,” and warm, shame-ridden coppers fly into his filthy hat.

The snowflakes are thicker, the white shroud denser, the streetlamp sways, seeing off the small, lame figure, the snowstorm sweeps away the faint, barely visible footsteps.

But she was actually young once! Just think—the sky above was not a whit paler than it is now, and the very same velvety black butterflies fluttered above the splendid rose beds, and the whistle of the grass under Zhenechka’s cloth shoes was just as silky when she walked down the drive, canvas suitcase in hand, to her first pupil, the mute, dark-eyed boy.

His parents were good-looking and rich, of course; they had an estate, and the estate had a greenhouse with peach trees, and young Evgeniya Ivanovna, who had just finished school with honors, was photographed among the peach blossoms— homely, smiling pleasantly, with two long, fluffy braids remarkable for the fact that they grew thicker and fluffier at the bottom. The picture faded to an iodine yellow, but Zhenechka’s smile and the peach blossoms still showed, while her mute charge had bleached away entirely—all we could see was a bright patch nestled up against Zhenechka.

When she came to that long-ago family, the boy could speak only his name: Buba. The rest of the world was engulfed in his silence, although he heard everything and loved everyone, and must have come to love Zhenechka especially, for he often sat close by her, gazed at her with his dark eyes, and stroked her face with his little palms.

It was enough to move a person to tears, and the rich parents wept, blowing their noses into lacy handkerchiefs, while the bearded family doctor, whom they paid exorbitant sums to examine Buba, gave his indulgent approval to the new governess, though he didn’t find her pretty. But Zhenechka wasn’t touched and she didn’t weep. All business, she immediately established a daily routine and never deviated from it in all the years that she lived with her charge. After a while, to the amazement of the parents and the envy of the bearded doctor, the boy began to talk—quietly and slowly, glancing at serious, attentive Zhenechka, forgetting by morning the words that he had learned the night before, mixing up his letters and losing his way in the maelstrom of sentences, but, still and all, he did begin to talk, and could even draw some scribbles. The letter izhitsa came out best—the least used, most unnecessary letter in the Russian alphabet.

On Zhenechka’s instructions the rich parents bought dozens of lotto games, and mornings she would wake to a knock at the door; the boy was already waiting for her, holding under his arm a rattling box full of little cardboard squares covered with elusive, difficult, slippery black words: ball, bird, hoopstick.

Once she took a vacation and paid a visit to her Petersburg sisters—she was not destined to see the fourth, the most beloved one, in far-off Helsingfors. Called back to the peach estate by an urgent telegram, she found the rich parents sobbing, the bearded doctor tranquilly triumphant, and the boy silent. The flimsy film of words had washed from his memory during Zhenechka’s absence; the enormous rumbling world, fearsome and noisy, had reared up in menace and crashed down on him in all its nameless inarticulateness, and only when Zhenechka hurriedly unpacked her canvas bag and retrieved the bright ball she’d bought him did the boy cry out in recognition, gasping: “Moon, moon!”

They wouldn’t let Zhenechka go off again; now her Petersburg sisters had to come to her. But her favorite sister somehow couldn’t manage to get away from Helsingfors for a visit. And she never did.

There was some fear that Zhenechka would marry and abandon the peach family—a needless fear: her youth fluttered by and departed without attracting anyone’s attention. There must have been men Zhenechka liked, who appeared and disappeared in her life, just as, if you turn a kaleidoscope for a long time, a rare, yellow shard of glass will occasionally tumble free and bloom like a broken star. But not one of them asked more of Zhenechka than true, steady friendship; there was no one whose eyes misted over at the thought of Zhenechka, and no one who made a secret of his acquaintance with her—such a pure, respectable, ennobling acquaintance. Zhenechka is an extraordinarily good person, someone would say, and everyone else would ardently take up the cry: Oh, yes, wonderful! Simply unique! So honest. And decent. Uncommonly conscientious. A crystal-pure soul!

There was one short, stunted, meager love in Zhenechka’s life; there was someone who troubled Zhenechka’s clear soul—perhaps for a week, perhaps for her whole life; we never asked. But whenever she told the story of how she lived and whom she taught before the war, one episode trembled plaintively through the years; there was one episode she always faltered over, and her high, calm voice would suddenly break for a moment, always on the very same phrase: “Good tea, Evgeniya Ivanovna. It’s hot.” That’s what someone said to her at three o’clock on one prewar February afternoon, in a warm wooden building. At the time, Zhenechka was teaching Russian in a quiet sewing school, vegetating amid the apple trees and kitchen gardens somewhere on the outskirts of the city. Tearing themselves away from the subtleties of constructing “Under-garments, Women’s Winter” and bolero jackets, uncounted generations of young seamstresses plunged into the refreshing, well-ordered streams of Russian grammar, only to forget forever the blur of Zhenechka’s face after leaving their alma mater. They scattered around the world, loving, giving birth, stitching, pressing; they sang, saw husbands off to war, cried, grew old, and died. But, resolutely taught by Zhenechka, even on their conjugal beds they remembered the correct spelling of negative prefixes, and on their deathbeds, in a mortal swoon, they could, if necessary, have parsed a sentence.

Zhenechka traveled to the seamstresses through the black dawn by ice-cold tram; she ran, cold and ruddy, into the thoroughly heated wooden office and immediately looked about for the one she cherished: a rather gloomy, stoop-shouldered history teacher. He would walk toward her without noticing her and pass her by, and she dared not gaze after him. Her face burned, her hands trembled a little as she opened the workbooks, but he—he walked about the same building as she and thought his own thoughts. Such was the love that was her lot.

No one knew, and no one will ever know, what words she silently sent him while he stood by the window of the teachers’ lounge and looked out at the snowy yard, where sparrows swayed like dark berries on branches. She probably yearned to say something honest, serious, and unremarkable, to make a modest request: notice me, love me—but who says that sort of thing out loud? No one knew where he had been before, this man, nor where he went, but he must have come from somewhere. Dark-faced, taciturn—hed been gassed in the first war, people said. He coughed dully in the wooden corridors, clutching his sunken chest in its soldier’s shirt, and he smoked, smoked in the cold vestibule, where clumps of cotton batting stuck out of the insulated doors, where a feeble pink sun shattered against frosty purple stems on the frozen sill. He warmed his hands at the tile stove, smoked another cigarette, and left to lecture the seamstresses on history; the sound of his cough and his quiet, rather strained voice came from behind the tightly closed doors. Such was the man who pierced Zhenechka’s heart, but neither of them said anything important to the other. And then who was Zhenechka to him? Just a good coworker. There was nothing between them except the mugs of tea that she poured for him in the teachers’ lounge after lessons—trembling, her knees weak from her own foolhardiness. Madness, madness… It was no ordinary cup; it was a loving cup, adroitly disguised as a comradely one: Zhenechka poured tea for all the teachers, but she didn’t give everyone so much sugar. A dark blue, chipped mug with a black border—that was all. And he drank it gratefully and nodded: “Good tea, Evgeniya Ivanovna. It’s hot.” And Zhenechka’s love—a homely, barefoot orphan—danced for joy.

That was it, and there was nothing more at all, and soon he disappeared, and there was no one to ask.

Far outside the city, beyond the wasteland of the outskirts, beyond the weedy alder copses, off the big roads, amid the pine forests and glades of fireweed, abandoned, surrounded by overgrown lilac, the dacha quietly ages. The lock is rusting, the porch rots, thistle has strangled the flower beds, and prickly raspberry edges away from the fence and across the garden, timidly at first, then ever more boldly, twining into the nettle to form a burning hedge.

At night the wind rises and flies over the blustery, deserted lake; collecting a misty dust and the hum of uninhabited expanses, it tears an iron sheet from the roof, rumbles it about, and flings it into the garden. The wind-bent grass whistles, wild berries and the seeds of wild plants scatter on the humid night earth, sowing a gloomy harvest of dragon’s teeth. And we thought Zhenechka was immortal.

We didn’t listen to the end of her stories, and now no one will ever know what happened to the mute boy; we threw out unread the books she gave us; we promised to come visit her in her Leningrad apartment but we didn’t mean it; and the older we grew the more excuses we found to avoid her cold, lonely home. And when we finally did come, how she rushed to and fro with joy, how she clutched us—already grown a head taller than she—with small, dry hands, how she flung herself from the table to the stove, where an apple pie was already well under way, how hurriedly she straightened a festive tablecloth on the round table, anchoring it firmly with a vase of autumn roses! And how hastily she smoothed out the high bed’s worn silk coverlet, pale, like the fluid, frayed petal of an enormous rose abandoned by August and possessed by a dusty, indoor spirit, a coverlet so light it couldn’t be thrown over the bed with one broad flap; rumpling in a slow glide, slack and indifferent, it descended unevenly, riding handfuls of stale household air as it fell and shuddering long after it landed, stirred by the thin streams of a warm draft, by the rumble of trucks outside. And, having eaten her pie, we would depart feeling awkward and relieved, and we would relish the autumn air, and laugh at everything, looking all around us eagerly for the arrival of love, which we expected any minute now—long, true love, everlasting and unique—while the love that leaned against the win-dowpane above and watched us go was too simple and mundane for us. But Zhenechka, thank God, didn’t realize that. And she fervently awaited the new summer, awaited her rendezvous with the old dacha, with the new flowers, and with us, her beloved ones.

And summer came.

The era of cooks passed. Fed up, Marfa left, taking away in her trunk the little capital she’d accumulated from milk bottle deposits; the silver fox furs rotted in the storerooms, the factory fences fell apart, and Leningrad gardens turned crimson with wild roses. The school years were coming to an end, the examinations loomed ahead, and energetic Zhenechka prepared for a decisive summer of work. But all this voluntary service— drumming Russian grammar into the heads of ungrateful, sarcastic lazybones day after day; clearing the jungles of dense, stubborn, wily ignorance; planting the cleared terrain with shapely grammatical trees, their spreading branches sibilant with the fuzzy suffixes of Russian participles; trimming away dry knots; grafting flowering branches into place and gathering the fallen fruit—all this toil was apparently not enough for her. The uneasiness of the eternal cultivator drove her into the garden, once as untended and wild as the heads of her pupils. We would urge her to stretch out in the chaise lounge in the sun: what could be better for an old person—just cover your head with burdock leaves and doze till dinnertime. But instead it was we who collapsed in the chaise lounge, languid from sun and adolescence, while Zhenechka tied a kerchief on her head and marched into the overgrowth with shears and a rake. Who had the time to notice that in place of molehills and mountains of stinging nettle, swaying flowers rose in a gentle froth. In her hands flowers seem to soar: ornate pink hydrangeas like bombs ready to burst into red, or else blue ones like a mousse of whisked sky tinged with smoky thunderheads; thick peonies of dark, swooning velvet; and some frizzy, nameless trifle that was splashed all about like a quivering white rain. Only her beloved roses did poorly, no matter how hard she tried. We knew that Zhenechka dreamed of a genuine red rose, pure and deep like the sound of a cello; but either the meager northern warmth held them back, or the earth in our garden rejected the timid roots—the roses grew small, waifish, consumptive.

Zhenechka would come onto the veranda greatly distressed, and casting an alarmed look at us, she’d say, “Worms are eating the roses.” “Give ’em the old one-two,” we answered, bored. “Make an example of them.” “Cut off their quarterly bonus.”

But she was afraid of them—of flower worms, and rain worms, and especially of mushroom worms; it was difficult to slip a basket of mushrooms past her watchful eye. Arrest, inspection, and destruction threatened our booty, so we had to hand the basket straight through the low kitchen window while someone stood watch. Hastily dashing icy well water over the slippery, jumping, liplike brown boletuses stuck with leaves, or the pale, wide russulas that crumbled like shortbread and squeaked in our hands, we would throw them into the noisily boiling pot, using a straining spoon to hold back the mushrooms crawling over the rim and to skim off the turbid foam full of dead, floating worms. At the clunk of Zhenechka’s orthopedic shoe we would work faster, bustling and giggling, and by the time she ceremoniously entered the kitchen, pushing open the door with a royal gesture, the burbling broth already shone with a dark, transparent purity.

“No worms?” she would ask, grave and anxious. “No, no, Zhenechka, perfectly wonderful mushrooms each and every one!” And she would calm down, never dreaming that we could possibly fib, while behind her back, wild with adolescent laughter, someone would wipe the straining spoon clean of the dried gray foam teeming with white corpses.

And everyone else would look away in embarrassment, as if we’d deceived a child.

…August approaches, evening descends; the dark forest stands with its back to us, facing the sunset, and watches the liquid crimson islands burn out in orange seas high overhead. The first star is out. The night damp gathers. Women sitting on porches pull the hems of their skirts over their knees, speak more softly, raise their dark faces to the heavenly stillness. A black tomcat steps noiselessly out of the black grass, places a black mouse on the stoop. Soon the last heavenly island will be extinguished, darkness will move in from the east, the lake will speak in heavy, muffled waves; the wild lake wind will billow, straighten out, and moan, tearing off into dark, unpeopled expanses to bend bushes, fell ripe seeds, drive nameless, prickly orbs through cooling clover valleys and through untrodden copses; with a drone, it will ascend to the agitated sky in order to blow away the first wisps of feeble, ephemeral stars as they slip into the abyss. Soon it will be time to get up, sigh, shake off specters, walk across the old boards; cups will clink, gas burners will flare like blue asters, the evening tea will trill. Refrigerators will clank open, and the women, back from the stars, will stare mindlessly into their rumbling, dimly lit interiors, slowly recognizing the contours of terrestrial cutlets or dense, frozen cottage cheese.

Zhenechka, quietly aging, goes through the house, opens the kitchen drawers, whisks some sort of rag about, and steps out onto the silenced porch, holding her breath so as not to frighten the stillness. She puts her hands on my shoulders—dry old hands, chilled to the marrow—and I suddenly feel how small and light she is, how easily the night wind could carry her away to the dark, clamoring distances.

A lengthy, tranquil moment sets in, one of those moments when superstition says an angel is passing over, and Zhenechka begins, “Now, I remember…,” but we’ve all come to, started talking, and stood up; the porch clatters under our feet, and Zhenechka rushes to tell us the rest, but it’s too late, the angel has come and gone in a gust of wind that covers her words. I see her lips moving, her naive, loving gaze reach out; the wind grabs Zhenechka, the years spill from the sky like stars and fall onto the greedy earth where they grow like thistle, goosefoot, and couch grass; the grasses rise higher, close in; the old house chokes and dies, footsteps are erased, paths are lost, and oblivion blossoms everywhere.

An old person is like an apple tree in November: Everything in him is falling asleep. In anticipation of night the sap stops flowing, the insensitive roots grow chill and turn to ice, while slowly, slowly the split branch of the dusty Milky Way spins overhead. With its head leaning back, its dry stumps stretched to the frost-furred stars, the obedient, perishable creature waits, submerged in somnolence, expecting neither resurrection nor spring, waits for the dull, speechless swell of time to roll over it, carrying everything along.

Time passed, and we became adults. Busy with our urgent affairs and our friends, our books, and our children, we brushed Zhenechka’s life aside; it was harder and harder for her to leave her house, and she would phone to relate things that interested no one.

For a minute or two, I listen to her slow voice, then lay the receiver softly on the telephone table and run off: in the kitchen pots are boiling, hot oil is shooting from the skillet; in the dining room there’s lively conversation, laughter, and news, and they’re calling me to share it all. The doorbell rings, a frozen, rosy crowd enters in raucous fur coats, there’s the clatter of skis, the thud of feet, the floors shake, the windowpanes shake, and beyond the windowpanes the frosty trees shake, bathed in a dusky winter gold.

Zhenechka’s voice lies cozily on the tablecloth, unhurriedly telling the telephone book, ashtray, and apple core about its joys and worries. Complaining and marveling, admiring and wondering, her soul flows from the telephone receiver holes in an even stream, spills over the tablecloth, evaporates like smoke, dances like dust in the last rays of the sun.

“Why is the receiver off the hook?” someone asks. I grab the phone with barely wiped wet fingers, and shout: “Yes, Zhenechka! Of course, Zhenechka!” and rush away again. Her hearing aid sings and chirps; she doesn’t notice a thing.

“Well, what’s she saying?” asks a passing member of the household.

“Let me listen…. Something about some Sofia Sergeevna who went to the sanatorium last summer and the roses they had there…. She says the roses were red and their leaves were green… in the sky was the sun… but at night the moon… and the sea was full of water… people swam, and got out of the water… and dressed in dry clothes and the wet clothes dried out… oh, and she asks how we are. Fine, Zhenechka! I said, we’re fine, Zhenechka! Just fi-ine! Yes! I’ll tell them! I’ll tell them!”

We were all she had left in the world.

But there came a day in the middle of winter when—shaken to the depths of her soul, armed with a cracked walking staff, the remains of her boyar hat pulled low—Zhenechka appeared on the threshold with a long blue envelope in her hands.

Words buzzed and fluttered in the envelope, telling her that she was not alone in this world; that quite close by—just a stone’s throw away, beyond the cold gulf, beyond the arc of green ice and the swishing pines, in the snow-covered city of Helsinki (formerly Helsingfors), in an A-frame house, around a cheerful fireplace—there lived the offspring of Zhenechka’s long-lost favorite sister; that these offspring were waiting, couldn’t wait for dear Aunt Eugénie to enter under the peaked roof, into their hospitable half-Finnish embraces, and to lay cellophane-wrapped flowers on the grave of her dear sister, who rests in a neat Finnish cemetery.

We saw Zhenechka off at the station. She was flustered and embarrassed, like Cinderella stepping into the pumpkin carriage drawn by mice; she clutched her canvas suitcase with her toothbrush and a change of underclothes inside it. We had seen these undergarments at the dacha, on the lakeshore at dawn, when Zhenechka did the hygienic exercises suitable for her age. The shifts consisted of rectangular, sackcloth panels, meticulously joined with a solid, eternal seam; these severe, soldierly items knew neither darts, nor flounces, nor any other tailor’s mischief—they were just sturdy panels, like the white pages of a story about an honest, hardworking life, usefully lived.

A month later we went to meet her at the same station, ran the entire length of the train, and couldn’t find her. From one car emerged an impressive old lady with eyebrows black like a fallen angel’s and thickly blushed cheeks, dressed in fluffy furs and a dignified hat. The porter carried her scented suitcases. Someone recognized Zhenechka by her orthopedic shoe.

“Well?” we asked.

“They’ve got everything over there,” she said. And, overcome, she nearly fainted.

We took her home and made her tea.

After that, Zhenechka went to Finland every spring. And then each summer—shining and crazed, happy and youthful, she grew unheard-of flowers from Finnish seeds in the fragrant, revitalized garden of our dacha. Zhenechka’s lacy underwear, celestial and lemon-colored, hung on a line above the flowers, and in her room incredible objects were heaped on her shelf: perfumes, lipsticks, nail polish. And the roses—red roses which had behaved capriciously for many years—suddenly flourished under Zhenechka’s hands, shooting out new buds in swift succession. The Finnish fertilizer must have helped.

Zhenechka would catch us at the front door or in the garden, and excitedly thrust photographs at us for the umpteenth time: Zhenechka on a Finnish sofa in the living room, Zhenechka with her great-nephew—her new, adored pupil—clinging poignantly to her hand (what’s his name again, Zhenechka? Koko or Pupu?), Zhenechka in the dining room at dinner: lettuce leaves and a couple of green weeds.

“They’re very thrifty. And they follow a strict diet.”

We looked at Zhenechka’s belatedly blackened eyebrows and yawned, listening as she sang her hymns to the untold riches of the fish stores.

“But Zhenechka, do they have sprats in tomato sauce?”

“No, now I don’t think I saw any sprats.”

“Well, there you are. How about Wave fish paste?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, then! They’re way behind us! Just look, our shelves are filled with them!”

And earnest Zhenechka did her best to argue and persuade.

“And where did you go while you were there?”

“Oh, I stayed at home. I took care of my great-nephew.”

“And them?”

“They went to the Azores. They’d already bought the tickets,” she said in justification.

So while the relatives lolled about on ocean beaches, the infatuated Zhenechka watered, weeded, and coddled her new sapling with the stubbornness of an insane gardener; she drew the barbarian alphabet on blue paper, so that the boy could meet his suntanned parents with a Russian poem or unpronounceable greeting. On her return to Leningrad, she took to writing postcards, choosing the prettiest: bouquets, golden Petersburg bridges, and the statue of the Bronze Horseman (her relatives mistook Peter the Great on his horse for the anarchist Kropotkin). And new love, which never comes too late, thundered and raged and cascaded over her from head to toe.

And we believed that Zhenechka was immortal, that youth can return, that a candle once lit will never go out, and that virtue, whatever we might think of it, will eventually be rewarded.

We’ll choose a day, lock the doors behind us, descend the cold staircase, go out into the stuffy morning city, and leave for the dacha. Out there, pink grass sways and rustles in the warm wind, pine needles cover the old porch; with a slight shush there passes through the emptied, abandoned house the shadow of a shadow of she who once lived, simple as a leaf, clear as light, still as morning water: she who once naively desired to be most beloved.

We’ll step off the train onto the bare cement platform, walk under the aspen hum of the wires and on—through marsh and thicket, across hills and copses—to where the empty house sleeps beyond the glades of overgrown fireweed, where lilac has gone wild, where a crow taps his beak along the porch, where mice say to one another: “Let’s live here for a while.”

We wade through the grass, parting the dense overgrowth with our hands like swimmers; we find the long-forgotten keys and look around, stretching arms numb from the weight of the bags. It’s a damp, lushly blooming northern June. The old, crooked dacha sinks into the grass like a half-drowned boat. Lilac darkens the rooms, pines have crushed the veranda’s fragile breast. The brittle fifes of bedstraw have opened their white umbrellas; disturbed, a mysterious young bird cries loudly; and tiny veronica blossoms litter every sunny clump of dry earth with dark blue.

There are no roads or paths in the ocean of grass yet, the flowers are not yet crushed, only a slight corridor can be discerned where we walked from the gates to the porch. It’s a shame to break the dense, stiff clusters of lilac—a blue, snowy shadow lies on them as on a new-fallen, sparkling crust of ice. It’s a shame to trample the quiet, thick grass forests.

We drink tea on the veranda. Let’s spend the night. Why don’t we ever come here? We could live here! But it’s a long way to lug supplies. We should weed out the nettle. Plant some flowers. Repair the porch. Prop it up somehow. The words fall into the stillness, the impatient lilac has burst through the open windows and sways as it listens to our empty promises, our impossible projects, our rosy dreams fading in an instant: it’s not true, no one will come, there is no one to come, she’s gone, she’s a shadow, and the night wind will blow away her dilapidated dwelling.

Once again Zhenechka packed her bags to go visit her Finnish relatives: for the baby an ABC book, for the nephews something stronger. She was only waiting for the letter, and it arrived. The relatives came straight to the point—they couldn’t invite dear Eugénie to visit them anymore. She would understand, of course; after all, she had reached such a venerable age that what had happened to their neighbors’ Aunt Nika could happen to her any minute. And enclosed was a photograph of this aunt in her coffin, all dressed up and motionless, surrounded by Russian Orthodox lace and Finnish bouquets. Look how badly Aunt Nika behaved; if dear Eugénie were to do the same thing during her visit there might be complications, trouble, misunderstandings… and who would pay for it all? Had dear Eugénie considered this? And she needn’t write anymore, why strain her eyes—and she might get a cramp in her hand!

Zhenechka stood and stared at the photograph of an unknown old lady in a neat coffin, a graphic reproach to Zhenechka’s lack of foresight. And the nightingale that had sung songs on her chest for many years grew deaf and shut its eyes tight. And fate, like a black wind flying into an open window, turned, stuck out its tongue, and shouted, “Just try and be most beloved!” and with a deafening cackle snuffed the candle out.

…A light Karelian night. There’s neither darkness nor crimson dawn: an endless white dusk. All the colors have drained away; the grainy half-moon seems a cloudy brushstroke in the luminous heights; gray garden shadows and crevasses of clotted twilight crawl along the earth; between the tree trunks in the distance, the flat lake glimmers in lackluster coves. A mosquito whines, eyes close. There’s a rustling in the gray grass, the creak of cracked shutters. Overnight yet another colored pane will fall from the veranda, overnight the grasses will rise still higher, the path we walked in the morning will be swallowed up and our footsteps will vanish; fresh mold will bloom on the front porch, a spider will spin the keyhole shut, and the house will fall asleep for another hundred years—from the underground passages where the Mouse King roams, to the high attic vaults from which the fleshless steeds of our dreams take flight.