White Walls: Collected Stories

THE POET AND THE MUSE

NINA WAS a marvelous woman, an ordinary woman, a doctor, and it goes without saying that she had her right to personal happiness like everyone else. Of this she was well aware. Nearing the age of thirty-five after a lengthy period of joyless trial and error—not even worth talking about—she knew precisely what she needed: a wild, true love, with tears, bouquets, midnight phone vigils, nocturnal taxi chases, fateful obstacles, betrayals, and forgiveness. She needed a—you know—an animal passion, dark windy nights with streetlamps aglow. She needed to perform a heroine’s classical feat as if it were a mere trifle: to wear out seven pairs of iron boots, break seven iron staffs in two, devour seven loaves of iron bread, and receive in supreme reward not some golden rose or snow-white pedestal but a burned-out match or a crumpled ball of a bus ticket—a crumb from the banquet table where the radiant king, her heart’s desire, had feasted. Well, of course, quite a few women need pretty much the same thing, so in this sense Nina was, as has already been said, a perfectly ordinary woman, a marvelous woman, a doctor.

She had been married: it was as if she’d done an interminable, boring stretch on a transcontinental train and emerged—tired, dispirited, and yawning uncontrollably—into the starless night of a strange city, where the only kindred soul was her suitcase.

Then she lived the life of a recluse for a while: she took up washing and polishing the floors in her spotless little Moscow apartment, developed an interest in patterns and sewing, and once again grew bored. An affair with the dermatologist Arkady Borisovich, who had two families not counting Nina, smoldered sluggishly along. After work she would drop by his office to see him. There was nothing the least bit romantic about it; the cleaning lady would be emptying out the trash cans and slopping a wet mop across the linoleum while Arkady Borisovich washed his hands over and over, scrubbing them with a brush, suspiciously inspecting his pink nails and examining himself in the mirror with disgust. He would stand there, pink, well fed, and stiff, egg-shaped, and take no notice of Nina, though she was already in her coat on her way out the door. Then he would stick out his triangular tongue and twist it this way and that—he was afraid of infection. A fine Prince Charming! What sort of passion could she find with Arkady Borisovich? None, of course.

Yet she’d certainly earned the right to happiness, she was entitled to a place in the line where it was being handed out: her face was white and pretty and her eyebrows broad, her smooth black hair grew low from her temples and was gathered at the back in a bun. And her eyes were black, so that out in public men took her for a Moldavian Gypsy, and once, in the metro, in the passageway to the Kirovskaya station, a fellow had even pestered her, claiming that he was a sculptor and she must come along with him immediately, supposedly to sit for the head of a houri—right away, his clay was drying out. Of course she didn’t go with him; she had a natural mistrust of people in the creative professions, since she had already been through the sorry experience of going for a cup of coffee with an alleged film director and barely escaping in one piece—the fellow had a large apartment with Chinese vases and a slanted garret ceiling in an old building.

But time was marching on, and at the thought that out of the approximately 125 million men in the USSR fate in all its generosity had managed to dribble out only Arkady Borisovich for her, Nina sometimes got upset. She could have found someone else, but the other men who came her way weren’t right either. After all, her soul was growing richer as the years passed, she experienced and understood her own being with ever greater subtlety, and on autumn evenings she felt more and more self-pity: there was no one to whom she could give herself—she, so slim and black-browed.

Occasionally Nina would visit some married girlfriend and, having stopped off to buy chocolates at the nearest candy shop for someone else’s big-eared child, would drink tea and talk for a long time, eyeing herself all the while in the dark glass of the kitchen door, where her reflection was even more enigmatic, and more alluring in comparison with her friend’s spreading silhouette. Justice demanded that someone sing her praises. Having finally heard her friend out—what had been bought, what had been burnt, what ailments the big-eared child had survived—and having examined someone else’s standard-issue husband (a receding hairline, sweatpants stretched at the knees —no, she didn’t need one like that), she left feeling dismayed. She carried her elegant self out the door, onto the landing, and down the staircase into the refreshing night: these weren’t the right sort of people, she should never have come, in vain had she given of herself and left her perfumed trace in the drab kitchen, she had pointlessly treated someone else’s child to exquisite bittersweet chocolate—the child just gobbled it down with no appreciation; oh, well, let the little beast break out in an allergic rash from head to toe.

She yawned.

And then came the epidemic of Japanese flu. All the doctors were pulled out of the district clinics for house calls, and Arkady Borisovich went, too, putting on a gauze face mask and rubber gloves to keep the virus from getting a hold on him, but he couldn’t protect himself and came down with it, and his patients were assigned to Nina. And there, as it turned out, was where fate lay in wait for her—in the person of Grisha, stretched out completely unconscious on a bench in a custodian’s lodge, under knit blankets, his beard sticking up. That was where it all happened. The near-corpse quickly abducted Nina’s weary heart: the mournful shadows on his porcelain brow, the darkness around his sunken eyes, and the tender beard, wispy as a springtime forest—all this made for a magical scene. Invisible violins played a wedding waltz, and the trap sprang shut. Well, everybody knows how it usually happens.

A sickeningly beautiful woman with tragically undisciplined hair was wringing her hands over the dying man. (Later on, to be sure, it turned out that she was no one special, just Agniya, a school friend of Grisha’s, an unsuccessful actress who sang a little to a guitar, nothing to worry about, that wasn’t where the threat lay.) Yes, yes, she said, she was the one who’d called the doctor—you must save him! She had just, you know, dropped in by chance, after all he doesn’t lock his door, and he’d never call for help himself, not Grisha—custodian, poet, genius, saint! Nina unglued her gaze from the demonically handsome custodian and proceeded to look the place over: a large room, beer bottles under the table, dusty molding on the ceiling, the bluish light of snowdrifts from the windows, an abandoned fireplace stuffed with rags and rubbish.

“He’s a poet, a poet—he works as a custodian so he can have the apartment,” mumbled Agniya.

Nina kicked Agniya out, lifted her bag from her shoulder, and hung it on a nail, carefully took her heart from Grishunya’s hands and nailed it to the bedstead. Grishunya muttered deliriously, in rhyme. Arkady Borisovich melted away like sugar in hot tea. The thorny path lay ahead.

On recovering the use of his eyes and ears, Grishunya learned that the joyous Nina meant to stay with him to the bitter end. At first he was a bit taken aback, and suggested deferring this unexpected happiness, or—if that wasn’t possible— hastening his meeting with that end; later, though, softhearted fellow that he was, he became more complaisant, and asked only that he not be parted from his friends. Nina compromised for the time being, while he regained his strength. This, of course, was a mistake; he was soon back on his feet, and he resumed his senseless socializing with the entire, endless horde. There were a few young people of indeterminate profession; an old man with a guitar; teenage poets; actors who turned out to be chauffeurs, and chauffeurs who turned out to be actors; a demobilized ballerina who was always crying, “Hey, I’ll call our gang over, too”; ladies in diamonds; unlicensed jewelers; unattached girls with spiritual aspirations in their eyes; philosophers with unfinished dissertations; a deacon from Novorossisk who always brought a suitcase full of salted fish; and a Tungus from eastern Siberia, who’d got stuck in Moscow—he was afraid the capital’s cuisine would spoil his digestion and so would ingest only some kind of fat, which he ate out of a jar with his fingers.

All of them—some one evening, some the next—crammed into the custodian’s lodge; the little three-story outbuilding creaked, the upstairs neighbors came in, people strummed guitars, sang, read poems of their own and others, but mainly listened to those of their host. They all considered Grishunya a genius; a collection of his verse had been on the verge of publication for years, but a certain pernicious Makushkin, on whom everything depended, was blocking it—Makushkin, who had sworn that only over his dead body… They cursed Makushkin, extolled Grishunya, the women asked him to read more, more. Flushed, self-conscious, Grisha read on—thick, significant poems that recalled expensive, custom-made cakes covered with ornamental inscriptions and triumphant meringue towers, poems slathered with sticky linguistic icing, poems containing abrupt, nutlike crunches of clustered sounds and excruciating, indigestible caramel confections of rhyme. “Eh-eh-eh,” said the Tungus, shaking his head; apparently he didn’t understand a word of Russian. “What’s wrong? Doesn’t he like it?” murmured the other guests. “No, no—I’m told that’s the way they express praise,” said Agniya, fluffing her hair nervously, afraid that the Tungus would jinx her. The guests couldn’t take their eyes off Agniya, and invited her to continue the evening with them elsewhere.

Naturally, this abundance of people was unpleasant for Nina. But most unpleasant of all was that every time she dropped by, whether during the day or in the evening after her shift, there was this wretched creature sitting in the custodian’s lodge—no fatter than a fork, wearing a black skirt down to her heels and a plastic comb in her lackluster hair, drinking tea and openly admiring Grisha’s soft beard: a person named Lizaveta. Of course, there couldn’t possibly be any affair going on between Grishunya and this doleful aphid. You had only to watch her extricate a red, bony hand from her sleeve and reach timidly for an ancient, rock-hard piece of gingerbread—as if she expected any moment to be slapped and the gingerbread snatched away. She had rather less cheek than a human being needs, and rather more jowl; her nose was gristly; in fact, there was something of the fish about her—a dark, colorless deepwater fish that slinks through the impenetrable gloom on the ocean floor, never rising to the sunstreaked shallows where azure and crimson creatures sport and play.

No, no love affair, there couldn’t be. Nonetheless, Grishunya, the beatific little soul, would gaze with pleasure at that human hull; he read poems to her, wailing and dipping on the rhymes, and afterward, deeply moved by his own verse, he would blink hard and turn his eyes up toward the ceiling as if to stanch his tears, and Lizaveta would shake her head to show the shock to her entire organism, blow her nose and imitate a child’s sporadic whimpers, as if she, too, had just been sobbing copiously.

No, this was all extremely unpleasant for Nina. Lizaveta had to be gotten rid of. Grishunya liked this brazen worship, but then, he wasn’t picky; he liked everything on earth. He liked swishing a shovel about in the loose snow in the morning, living in a room with a fireplace full of trash, being on the ground floor with the door open so anyone could drop in; he liked the crowd and the aimless comings and goings, the puddle of melted snow in the vestibule, all those girls and boys, actors and old men; he liked the ownerless Agniya, supposedly the kindest creature in the world, and the Tungus, who came for who knows what reason; he liked all the eccentrics, licensed and unlicensed, the geniuses and the outcasts; he liked raw-boned Lizaveta, and—to round things out—he liked Nina as well.

Among the little outbuilding’s visitors, Lizaveta was considered an artist, and indeed she did exhibit in second-rate shows. Grishunya found inspiration in her dark daubings, and composed a corresponding cycle of poems. In order to concoct her pictures, Lizaveta had to work herself into an unbridled frenzy, like some African shaman: a flame would light up in her dim eyes, and with shouts, wheezes, and a sort of grubby fury she would attack the canvas, kneading blue, black, and yellow paint with her fists, and scratching the wet, oily mush with her fingernails. The style was called “nailism”—it was a terrible sight to behold. True, the resulting images looked rather like underwater plants and stars and castles hanging in the sky— something that seemed to crawl and fly simultaneously.

“Does she have to get so excited?” Nina whispered to Grishunya once as they observed a session of nailism.

“Well, I guess it just doesn’t happen otherwise,” dear Grishunya whispered back, exhaling sweet toffee breath. “It’s inspiration, the spirit, what can you do, it goes its own way.” And his eyes shone with affection and respect for the possessed scrabbler.

Lizaveta’s bony hands bloomed with sores from caustic paints, and similar sores soon covered Nina’s jealous heart, still nailed to Grisha’s bedstead. She did not want to share Grisha; the handsome custodian’s blue eyes and wispy beard should belong to her and her alone. Oh, if only she could become the fully empowered mistress of the house once and for all, instead of just a casual, precarious girlfriend; if only she could put Grisha in a trunk, pack him in mothballs, cover him with a canvas cloth, bang the lid shut, and sit on it, tugging at the locks to check: are they secure?

Oh, if only… Yes, then he could have whatever he wanted —even Lizaveta. Let Lizaveta live and scratch out her paintings, let her grind them out with her teeth if she wanted, let her stand on her head and stay that way, trembling like a nervous pillar beside her barbaric canvases at her annual exhibitions, her dull hair decked out with an orange ribbon, red-handed, red-faced, sweaty, and ready to cry from hurt or happiness, while over in the corner various citizens sit at a rickety table cupping their palms to shield against inquisitive eyes as they write their unknown comments in the gallery’s luxurious red album: “Revolting,” perhaps; or “Fabulous”; or “What does the arts administration think it’s doing?” or else something maudlin and mannered, signed by a group of provincial librarians, about how sacred and eternal art had supposedly pierced them to the core.

Oh, to wrest Grisha from that noxious milieu! To scrape away the extraneous women who’d stuck to him like barnacles to the bottom of a boat; to pull him from the stormy sea, turn him upside down, tar and caulk him, and set him in dry dock in some calm, quiet place.

But he—a carefree spirit ready to embrace any street mongrel, shelter any unsanitary vagrant—went on squandering himself on the crowd, giving himself out by the handful. This simple soul took a shopping bag, loaded it with yogurt and sour cream, and went to visit Lizaveta, who had fallen ill. And of course Nina had to go with him—and, my God, what a hovel! what a place! yellow, frightful, filthy, a dark little closet, not a single window! There lay Lizaveta, barely discernible on an iron cot under an army blanket, blissfully filling her black mouth with white sour cream. Bent over school notebooks at a table was Lizaveta’s fat, frightened daughter, who bore no resemblance to her mother but looked as though Lizaveta had once upon a time bred with a St. Bernard.

“Well, how are you doing here?” asked Grishunya.

Lizaveta stirred beside the dingy wall: “All right.”

“Do you need anything?” Grishunya insisted.

The iron cot creaked. “Nastya will take care of everything.”

“Well then, study hard.” The poet shuffled about and stroked fat Nastya on the head; he backed into the hallway, but the enfeebled Lizaveta was already dozing, a stagnant lake of unswallowed yogurt apparently frozen in her half-open mouth.

“She and I should really, er, hook up or something,” Grishunya said to Nina, gesturing vaguely and looking the other way. “You see what problems she has getting an apartment. She’s from way up north, from Totma, she can only rent this storeroom, but what talent, no? And her daughter’s very drawn to art, too. She sculpts, she’s good—and who can she study with in Totma?”

“You and I are getting married. I’m all yours,” Nina reminded him sternly.

“Yes, of course, I forgot,” Grishunya apologized. He was a gentle man; it was just that his head was full of a lot of nonsense.

Destroying Lizaveta turned out to be as hard as cutting a tough apple worm in half. When they came to fine her for violating the residence permit in her passport, she was already holed up in a different place, and Nina sent the troops over there. Lizaveta hid out in basements and Nina flooded basements; she spent the night in sheds and Nina tore them down; finally, Lizaveta evaporated to a mere shadow.

Seven pairs of iron boots had Nina worn out tramping across passport desks and through police stations, seven iron staffs had she broken on Lizaveta’s back, seven kilos of iron gingerbread had she devoured in the hated custodian’s lodge: it was time for the wedding.

The motley crowd had already thinned out, a pleasant quiet reigned in the little house in the evenings, and now it was with due respect that the occasional daredevil knocked at the door, carefully wiping his feet under Nina’s watchful gaze and immediately regretting that he had ever come by. Soon Grishunya would no longer be slaving with a shovel and burying his talent in the snowdrifts; he would be moving to Nina’s where a sturdy, spacious glass-topped desk awaited him, with two willow switches in a vase on the left, and, on the right, from one of those frames that lean on a tail, Nina’s photo smiled at him. And her smile promised that everything would be fine, that he’d be well fed and warm and clean, that Nina herself would go to see Comrade Makushkin and finally resolve the long-drawn-out question of the poetry collection: she would ask Comrade Makushkin to look over the material carefully, to give his advice, fix a few things, and cut up the thick, sticky layer cake of Grisha’s verse into edible slices.

Nina allowed Grishunya a final good-bye to his friends, and the innumerable horde poured in for the farewell supper—girls and freaks, old men and jewelers. Three balletic youths with women’s eyes arrived prancing on turned-out toes, a lame man limped in on crutches, someone brought a blind boy, and Lizaveta’s now nearly fleshless shadow flitted about. The crowd kept coming; it buzzed and blew around like trash from a vacuum cleaner hooked up backward; bearded types scurried past; the walls of the little house bulged under the human pressure; and there were shouts, sobs, and hysterics. Dishes were broken. The balletic youths made off with the hysterical Agniya, catching her hair in the door; Lizaveta’s shadow gnawed her hands to shreds and thrashed on the floor, demanding to be walked all over (the request was honored); the deacon led the Tungus into a corner and questioned him in sign language on the faith of his people, and the Tungus answered, also by signs, that their faith was the best of all faiths.

Grisha beat his porcelain brow against the wall and cried out that fine, all right, he was prepared to die, but after his death— you’ll see—he’d come back to his friends and never be parted from them again. The deacon didn’t approve of such proclamations. Neither did Nina.

By morning all the scum had vanished, and, packing Grishunya into a taxi, Nina carried him off to her crystal palace.

Ah, who could possibly paint a portrait of one’s beloved when, rubbing his sleep-filled blue eyes and freeing a young, hairy leg from beneath the blankets, he yawns with all his might. Entranced, you gaze at him: Everything about him is yours, yours! The gap between his teeth, and the bald spot, and that marvelous wart!

You feel you’re a queen, and people make way for you on the street, and your colleagues nod respectfully, and Arkady Bori-sovich politely offers you his hand, wrapped in sterilized paper.

How fine it was to doctor trusting patients, to bring home bags full of goodies, to check in the evenings, like a solicitous sister, to see what Grishunya had written during the day.

Only he was a frail thing: he cried a lot and didn’t want to eat, and he didn’t want to write neatly on clean paper but, out of habit, kept on picking up scraps and cigarette packs, and doodling or else just drawing flourishes and curlicues. And he wrote about a yellow, yellow road, on and on about a yellow road, and high above the road hung a white star. Nina shook her head: “Think about it, sweetheart. You can’t show poems like that to Comrade Makushkin, and you should be thinking about your book. We live in the real world.” But he didn’t listen, and kept on writing about the road and the star, and Nina shouted, “Did you understand me, sweetheart? Don’t you dare write things like that!” And he was frightened and jerked his head about, and Nina, softening, said, “Now, now, now,” and put him to bed. She fed him mint-and-lime-blossom tea, infusions of adonis and motherwort, but the ungrateful man whimpered and made up poems that offended Nina, about how motherwort had sprouted in his heart, his garden had gone to seed, the forests had burned to the ground, and some sort of crow was plucking, so to speak, the last star from the now silent horizon, and how he, Grishunya, seemed to be inside some hut, pushing and pushing at the frozen door, but there was no way out, there was only the pounding of red heels in the distance…. “Whose heels are those?” demanded Nina, waving the piece of paper. “I’m just interested—whose heels are they?”

“You don’t understand anything.” Grishunya snatched the paper.

“No, I understand everything perfectly well,” answered Nina bitterly. “I just want to know whose heels they are and where it is they’re pounding.”

“Aaa-agh!!! They’re pounding in my head!!!” screamed Grishunya, covering his head with the blanket, and Nina went into the bathroom, tore up the poems, and scattered them into the watery netherworld, the little domestic Niagara.

Men are men; you have to keep an eye on them.

Once a week she checked his desk and threw out the poems that were indecent for a married man to compose. And once in a while she would rouse him at night for interrogation: was he writing for Comrade Makushkin, or was he shirking? And he would cover his head with his hands, lacking the strength to withstand the bright light of her merciless truth.

They managed this way for two years, but Grishunya, though surrounded by every care and concern, did not appreciate her love, and stopped making an effort. He roamed the apartment and muttered—muttered that he would soon die, and the earth would be heaped over him in clayey, cemeterial layers, and the slender gold of birch coins would drift over his grave mound like alms, and the wooden cross or pyramid marker (whichever they didn’t begrudge him) would rot beneath the autumn rains, and everyone would forget him, and no one would visit, only the idle passerby would struggle for a moment to read the four-digit dates. He strayed from poetry into ponderous free verse as damp as pine kindling, or into rhythmic lugubrious prose, and instead of a pure flame a sort of white, suffocating smoke poured from his malignant lines, so that Nina coughed and hacked, waved her hands about, and, choking, screamed, “For heaven’s sake, stop writing!”

Then some kindhearted people told her that Grishunya wanted to return to his little house, that he had gone to see the custodian hired in his place—a fat woman—and bargained to see how much she would ask for handing him back his former life, and the woman had actually entered into negotiations. Nina had connections in the Municipal Health Department, and she dropped hints that there was a wonderful three-story building in the center of town, it could be taken over by an institution, hadn’t they been looking for something? Municipal Health thanked her, it did suit them, and very soon the little building was no longer a custodian’s lodge: the fireplace was torn out, and one of the medical institutes settled its faculty there.

Grisha fell silent, and for about two weeks he was quiet and obedient. Then he actually cheered up, took to singing in the bath and laughing—but he completely stopped eating, and he kept going up to the mirror and pinching himself. “What are you so cheerful about?” Nina interrogated him. He opened his identity card and showed her the blue margins freshly stamped with fat lilac letters reading “Not Subject to Burial.” “What does that mean?” asked Nina, frightened. Grishunya laughed again and told her that he had sold his skeleton for sixty rubles to the Academy of Sciences, that “his ashes he would outlast, and the worms elude,” that he would never lie in the damp ground, as he had feared, but would stand among lots of people in a clean, warm room, laced together and inventoried, and students—a fun crowd—would slap him on the shoulder, flick his forehead, and treat him to cigarettes; he’d figured it all out perfectly. And he wouldn’t say another word in answer to Nina’s shouts; he simply proposed that they go to bed. But she should keep in mind that from now on she was embracing government property and thus was materially responsible before the law for the sum of sixty rubles and twenty-five kopecks.

And from that moment on, as Nina said later, their love seemed to go awry, because how could she burn with full-fledged passion for public property, or kiss academic inventory? Nothing about him belonged to her anymore.

And just think what she must have gone through—she, a marvelous, ordinary woman, a doctor, who had indisputably earned her piece of the pie like everyone else, a woman who had fought for her personal happiness, as we were all taught to do, and had won her right in battle.

Despite all the grief he’d caused her, she was still left with pure, radiant feelings, she said. And if love didn’t turn out quite the way she had dreamed, well, Nina was hardly to blame. Life was to blame. And after his death she suffered a good deal, and her girlfriends sympathized with her, and at work they were kind and gave her ten unpaid days off. And when all the red tape was done with, Nina made the rounds of her friends and told them that Grisha now stood in the little house as a teaching aid, tagged with an inventory number they’d given him, and she’d already gone to have a look. And everything was actually just as he had wanted: the students joke with him, they tug on his wrist to make him dance about, and they put a white cap on his head. The place is well heated, at night he’s locked up in the closet, but otherwise he’s always around people.

And Nina also said that at first she was very upset about everything, but then it was all right, she calmed down after a woman she knew—also a lovely woman, whose husband had also died—told her that she, for one, was even rather pleased. The thing was that this woman had a two-room apartment and she’d always wanted to decorate one room Russian style, just a table in the middle, nothing else, and benches, benches all around the sides, very simple ones, rough wood. And the walls would be covered with all kinds of peasant shoes, icons, sickles, spinning wheels—that kind of thing. And so now that one of her rooms was free, this woman had apparently gone and done it, and it’s her dining room, and she always gets a lot of compliments from visitors.