White Walls: Collected Stories

THE CIRCLE

The world is ended, the world is distorted, the world is closed, and it is closed around Vassily Mikhailovich.

At sixty, fur coats get heavy, stairs grow steep, and your heart is with you day and night. You’ve walked and walked, from hill to hill, past shimmering lakes, past radiant islands, white birds overhead, speckled snakes underfoot, and you’ve arrived here, and this is where you’ve ended up; it’s dark and lonely here, and your collar chokes you and your blood creaks in your veins. This is sixty.

This is it, it’s over. Here no grass grows. The soil is frozen, the earth is narrow and stony, and ahead only one sign glows: exit.

But Vassily Mikhailovich was not willing.

He sat in the hallway of the beauty shop and waited for his wife. Through the open door he could see the crowded room, partitioned with mirrors, where three… three women his own age squirmed in the hands of mighty blond furies. Could he call what was multiplying in the mirrors “ladies”? With growing horror, Vassily Mikhailovich peered at what sat closest to him. A curly-haired siren planted her feet firmly, grabbed itby the head, pulled it back onto a waiting metal sink, and splashed it with boiling water: steam rose; she lathered wildly; more steam, and before Vassily Mikhailovich could cry out she had fallen upon her victim and was choking it with a white terry towel. He looked away. In another chair—my God—long wires were attached to a reddened, albeit very happy head, with protruding diodes, triodes, and resistors…. In the third chair, he realized, was Yevgeniya Ivanovna, and he went over to her. What at home appeared to be her hair was now wrinkled up, revealing her scalp, and a woman in a white coat was dabbing at it with a stick dipped in a liquid. The odor was stifling.

“Take off your coat!” several voices cried.

“Zhenya, I’m going for a walk, just a quick circle,” Vassily Mikhailovich said, waving his arm. He had felt weak in the legs since morning, his heart was thumping and he was thirsty.

In the lobby stiff green sabers grew hilt-down out of large pots, and photographs of bizarre creatures with not-so-nice hints in their eyes stared from the walls under incredible hair— towers, icing, rams’ horns; or, ripples like mashed potatoes in fancy restaurants. And Yevgeniya Ivanovna wanted to be one of them.

A cold wind blew, and small dry flakes fell from the sky. The day was dark, empty, brief; its evening had been born with the dawn. Lights burned brightly and cozily in the small stores. A tiny, glowing, sweet-smelling store, a box of miracles, had grown onto the corner. You couldn’t get in: people were pushing and shoving, reaching over heads with their chits, grabbing little somethings. A fat woman was trapped in the doorway, she clutched the jamb, she was being carried away by the flow.

“Let me out! Let me get out!”

“What’s in there?”

“Lip gloss!”

Vassily Mikhailovich joined the jostling. Woman, woman, do you exist?… What are you?… High up a Siberian tree your hat blinks its eyes in fear; a cow gives birth in suffering so you can have shoes; a lamb is sheared screaming so you can warm yourself with its fleece; a sperm whale is in its death throes; a crocodile weeps; a doomed leopard pants, fleeing. Your pink cheeks come from boxes of flying dust, your smiles from golden containers with strawberry filling, your smooth skin from tubes of grease, your gaze from round transparent jars—He bought Yevgeniya Ivanovna a pair of eyelashes.

…Everything is predestined and you can’t swerve—that’s what bothered Vassily Mikhailovich. You don’t pick wives: they simply appear out of nowhere by your side, and you’re struggling in fine netting, bound hand and foot; hobbled and gagged, you’re taught thousands and thousands of stifling derails of transient life, put on your knees, your wings clipped; and the darkness gathers, and sun and moon still run and run chasing each other along a circle, the circle, the circle.

It was revealed to Vassily Mikhailovich how to clean spoons, and the comparative physiology of meatballs and patties; he knew by heart the grievously brief lifespan of sour cream—one of his responsibilities was destroying it at the first signs of mortal agony—he knew the birthplaces of brooms and whisks, distinguished professionally among grains, had in his head all the prices of glassware, and every autumn wiped windowpanes with ammonium chloride to eradicate the ice cherry orchards that planned to grow by winter.

At times Vassily Mikhailovich imagined that he would finish out this life and begin a new one in a new image. He fussily selected his age, an era, his looks: sometimes he wanted to be born a fiery southern youth; or a medieval alchemist; or the daughter of a millionaire; or a widow’s beloved cat; or a Persian king. Vassily Mikhailovich calculated, compared, deliberated, made conditions, grew ambitious, rejected all suggested possibilities, demanded guarantees, huffed, grew tired, lost his train of thought; and, leaning back in his armchair, stared long and hard in the mirror at himself—the one and only.

Nothing happened. Vassily Mikhailovich was not visited by a six-winged seraph or any other feathery creature with offers of supernatural services; nothing burst open, there was no voice from the heavens, no one tempted him, carried him aloft, or hurled him down. The three-dimensionality of existence, whose finale was ever approaching, suffocated Vassily Mikhailovich; he tried to get off the tracks, drill a hole in the sky, leave through a drawing of a door. Once, dropping off sheets at the laundry, Vassily Mikhailovich stared into the blossoming clover of cotton expanses, and noticed that the seven-digit notation sewn onto the northeast resembled a telephone number; he secretly called, and was graciously welcomed, and began a boring joyless affair with a woman named Klara. Klara’s house was just like Vassily Mikhailovich’s, with the same clean kitchen, although the windows faced north, and the same cot, and as he got into Klara’s starched bed Vassily Mikhailovich saw yet another telephone number in the corner of the pillow case; he doubted that his fate awaited him there, but, bored by Klara, he called and found the woman Svetlana with her nine-year-old son; in Svetlanas linen closet, clean folded linen lay with pieces of good soap in between the layers.

Yevgeniya Ivanovna sensed that something was up, looked for clues, rummaged in his pockets, unfolded scraps of paper, unaware that she was sleeping in the pages of a large telephone book with Klara’s telephone number, or that Klara dreamed in Svetlanas telephone numbers, or that Svetlana reposed, as it turned out, in the number of the accounting department of the social security office.

Vassily Mikhailovich’s women never did learn of one another’s existence; but of course, Vassily Mikhailovich did not pester them with information about himself. And where would he have gotten a surname, a job, an address, or say, a zip code —he, the phantom of blanket covers and pillow cases, born of the whims of chance of the laundry office?

Vassily Mikhailovich stopped the experiment, not because of the social security office; it was just that he realized that the attempt to escape the system of coordinates was a failure. It wasn’t a new, unheard-of road with breathtaking possibilities that opened before him, not a secret path into the beyond, no; he had simply felt around in the dark and grabbed the usual wheel of fate and if he went around it hand over hand, along the curve, along the circle, he would eventually end up with himself, from the other side.

For, after all, somewhere in the bustling crowd, in the thick tangle of back streets, a nameless old woman was tossing a sack of worn linen marked with a seven-digit cryptogram into a small wooden window: you were enciphered in it, Vassily Mikhailovich. In all fairness, you belong to the old woman. She has every right to you—what if she makes her demand? You don’t want that? Vassily Mikhailovich—no, no, no—didn’t want a strange old woman, he was afraid of her stockings, and her feet, and her yeasty smell, and the creak of bedsprings under her white elderly body, and he was sure she’d have a tea mushroom growing in a three-liter jar—a slippery eyeless silent creature, living years very quietly on the windowsill without splashing even once.

But the one who holds the thread of fate in his hands, who determines meetings, who sends algebraic travelers from Point A to Point B, who fills pools from two pipes, had already marked with a red X the intersections where he was to meet Isolde. Now, of course, it was quite some time since she had passed away.

He saw Isolde at the market and followed her. A peek from the side at her face blue with cold, at her transparent grapelike eyes, and he knew: she would be the one to bring him out of the tight pencil case called the universe. She wore a shabby fur coat with a belt and a thin knit hat—those caps were offered by the dozens by the stocky, heavy women who blocked the entrances to the market; women who like suicides are banned within the gates, turned away from proper stalls, and whose shadows, hard in the frost, wander in crowds along the blue fence, holding in their outstretched hands piles of wooly pancakes—raspberry, green, canary, rustling in the wind—while the early November flakes fall, fall, blowing and whistling, hurrying to wrap the city in winter.

And Vassily Mikhailovich, his heart contracting with hope, watched the meek Isolde, chilled to the bone, to an icy crunch, wander through the black crowd and drop inside the gates and run her finger along the long, empty counters, looking to see if there was anything tasty left.

The northern blizzards had blown away the hothouse sellers of capricious summer produce, those sweet marvels created on high by warm air from pink and white flowers. But the last faithful servants of the soil stood firm, frozen to the wooden tables, grimly offering their cold underground catch: for in the face of annual death nature gets scared, turns around, and grows head down, giving birth in the final moments to coarse, harsh, clumsy creatures—the black dome of radish, the monstrous white nerve of horseradish, the secret potato cities.

And the disappointed Isolde wandered on, along the light blue fence, past the galoshes and plywood crates, past the tattered magazines and wire brooms, past the drunkard offering white porcelain plugs, past the guy indifferently fanning out colored photographs; past and past, sad and shivering, and a pushy woman was already spinning right before her blue face, and praising, and scratching a bright woolen wheel, tugging at it with a big-toothed metal brush.

Vassily Mikhailovich took Isolde by the arm and offered her some wine, and his words glistened with winy sparkle. He led her to a restaurant and the crowd parted for them, and the coat check took her raiments as if they were the magical swan feathers of a fairy bather who had come from the heavens to a small forest lake. The columns emitted a soft marble aroma, and roses floated in the dim lighting. Vassily Mikhailovich was almost young, and Isolde was like a wild silvery bird, one of a kind.

Yevgeniya Ivanovna sensed Isolde’s shadow, and she dug pits, put up barbed wire, and forged chains to keep Vassily Mikhailovich from leaving. Lying next to Yevgeniya Ivanovna with his heart pounding, he saw with his inner eye the cool calm of fresh snow glowing on the midnight streets. The untouched whiteness stretched, stretched, smoothly turned the corner: and on the corner, a Venetian window filled with pink light; and within it, Isolde lay awake listening to the unclear blizzard melody in the city, to the dark winter cellos. And Vassily Mikhailovich, gasping in the dark, mentally sent his soul to Isolde, knowing that it would reach her along the sparkling arc that connected them across the city, invisible to the uninitiated:

Vassily Mikhailovich chewed through the chain and ran away from Yevgeniya Ivanovna; he and Isolde sat holding hands, and he flung open wide the doors to his soul’s treasures. He was as generous as Ali Babà, and she was astonished and trembled. Isolde did not ask for anything: not a crystal toilette, not the queen of Sheba’s colored sash; she would be happy to sit forever at his side, burning like a wedding candle, burning without extinguishing with a steady quiet flame.

Soon Vassily Mikhailovich had told her everything he had to tell. Now it was Isolde’s turn: she had to wrap her weak blue arms around him and step with him into a new dimension, so that lightning, with a flash, would shatter the ordinary world like an eggshell. But nothing of the kind happened. Isolde just trembled and trembled, and Vassily Mikhailovich was bored. “Well, Lyalya?” he would say with a yawn.

He paced the room in his socks, scratched his head, smoked by the window, and stuck the butts in the flower pots, packed his razor in his suitcase: he planned to go back to Yevgeniya Ivanovna. The clock ticked, Isolde cried, not understanding, promising to die, there was slush beneath the window. Why make a scene? Why didn’t she grind some meat and make patties instead? I said I was leaving, that meant I was leaving. What was unclear about that?

Yevgeniya Ivanovna was so glad she baked a carrot pie, washed her hair, polished the floors. He celebrated his fortieth birthday first at home, then in a restaurant. They packed the uneaten fish and jellied meat in plastic bags, and there was enough for lunch the next day. He got good presents: a radio, a clock with a wooden eagle, and a camera. Yevgeniya Ivanovna had been dreaming of being photographed at the beach in the surf. Isolde did not control herself and sort of ruined the party. She sent some stuff wrapped in paper and an unsigned poem, in her childish handwriting:

She was no longer alive.

And now he was sixty, and the wind blew up his sleeves, into his heart, and his legs refused to go. Nothing, nothing was happening, nothing lay ahead, and really there was nothing behind, either. For sixty years he’d been waiting for them to come and call him and show him the mystery of mysteries, for red dawn to blaze over half the world, for a staircase of rays to rise from earth to heaven and archangels with trombones and saxophones or whatever they used to blare their unearthly voices to welcome the chosen one. But why were they taking so long? He’d been waiting his whole life.

He hastened his step. While they shaved Yevgeniya Ivanovna’s neck, boiled her head, and bent her hair with metal hooks, he could reach the market and have some warm beer. It was cold, his fur coat was cheap, a fur coat in name only—fake leather lined with fake fur—which Yevgeniya Ivanovna bought from a speculator. “She skins crocodiles for herself, though,” thought Vassily Mikhailovich. They had gone to the speculator—for crocodile shoes, the fur coat, and other trifles—in the evening, searching a long time for the right house. It was dark on the landing, they felt around, having no matches. Vassily Mikhailovich swore softly. To his amazement he felt a peephole at knee level on one of the doors.

“That’s the right place, then,” his wife whispered.

“What does she do, crawl around on all fours?”

“She’s a dwarf, a circus midget.”

With bated breath he felt the nearness of a miracle: beyond the vinyl-covered door, perhaps the one and only door in the world, gaped the passageway into another universe, breathed living darkness, and a tiny, translucent elf soared among the stars, trembling on dragonfly wings, tinkling like a bell.

The dwarf turned out to be old, mad, mean, and didn’t let them touch any of the things. Vassily Mikhailovich surreptitiously looked at the bed with the stepladder, the children’s chairs, the photographs hung low, just above the floor, testimony to the faded charms of the lilliputian. There, in the pictures, standing on the back of a dolled-up horse, in ballet togs, in glass circus diamonds, happy, tiny, the young speculator waved through the glass, through time, through a lifetime. And here, pulling enormous adult clothing out of the closet with tiny wrinkled hands, the evil troll ran back and forth, the guardian of underground gold, and the Gulliver shadow cast by the low-hanging lamp also ran back and forth. Yevgeniya Ivanovna bought the fur coat, and the crocodile shoes, and a winking Japanese wallet, and a scarf with Lurex threads, and an arctic fox skin for a hat from the horrible child, and while they made their way down the dark stairs, supporting each other, she explained to Vassily Mikhailovich that you clean arctic fox with farina grains heated in a dry skillet, and that the skin side of the fur should be kept away from water, and that she now had to buy a half meter of plain ribbon. Vassily Mikhailovich, trying not to remember any of this, thought about what the dwarf had been like in her youth, and whether dwarfs can marry, and that if they were to jail her for speculation, the prison cell would seem so big and frightening to her, every rat would be like a horse, and then he imagined that the young speculator was imprisoned in a gloomy barred castle with nothing but owls and bats: she wrung her doll-like hands, it was dark, and he was creeping toward the castle with a rope ladder over his shoulder through the evil grounds; only the moon ran behind the black branches like a silver apple, and the dwarf clutched the bars of her window and squeezed through, transparent as a lollipop in the moonlight, and he climbed up, tearing his fingers on the mossy medieval stones, and the guards were asleep leaning on their halberds, and a raven steed pawed the ground below ready to gallop around the sawdust arena, on the red carpet, around and around the circle.

The time allotted to Vassily Mikhailovich was running out. The ocean was behind him, but the unexplored continent had not blocked his path, new lands had not floated out of the mist, and with depression he could make out the dreary palms and familiar minarets of India, which the miscalculating Columbus had thirsted for and which meant the end of the road for Vassily Mikhailovich. The trip around the world was coming to an end: his caravel, having circled life, was sailing up from the other side and was entering familiar territory. The familiar social security office, where the pensions fluttered on flag poles, hove into view, then the opera house, where Svetlana’s son, wearing stage eyebrows, sang about the ephemerality of life to the loud applause of Yevgeniya Ivanovna.

“If I run into Isolde,” Vassily Mikhailovich made a bet with fate, “my path is over.” But he was cheating: Isolde had passed away a long time ago.

Sometimes he still got signals: you are not alone. There are clear meadows in the groves of people, where in hermits’ cabins live the ascetics, the chosen who reject the bustle, who seek the secret loophole out of prison.

News arrived: strange objects were appearing, at first glance insignificant, useless, but imbued with a secret meaning; indicators leading to nowhere. One was Cheburashka, a daring challenge to school Darwinism, an old shaggy evolutionary link that fell out of the measured chain of natural selection. Another was Rubik’s cube, a breakable, changeable, but always whole hexahedron. Having stood four hours in the cold along with thousands of grim fellow sect members, Vassily Mikhailovich became the owner of the marvelous cube and spent weeks twisting and twisting its creaking movable facets, until his eyes grew red, waiting in vain for the light to another universe to shine at last from the window. But sensing one night that of the two of them, the real master was the cube, which was doing whatever it wanted to with helpless Vassily Mikhailovich, he got up, went to the kitchen, and chopped up the monster with a cleaver.

In anticipation of revelation he leafed through typewritten pages that taught you to breathe a green square in through one nostril at dawn and to chase it with mental power up and down your intestines. He spent hours standing on his head with his legs crossed in someone’s apartment near the railroad station, between two unshaven, also upside-down engineers, and the rumble of the trains outside the house speeding into the distance shook their upraised striped socks. And it was all in vain.

Ahead was the market, spattered with booths. Twilight, twilight. Illuminated from inside were the icy windows of the booth where winter sells a snowy pulp covered with chocolate on a splintery stick and the colorful gingerbread house where you can buy various kinds of poisonous smoke and a folding spoon and chains of special very cheap gold; and the desired window where a group of black figures huddled, hearts warmed by happiness, and where a beery dawn glowed translucently with wandering flames in the thick glass of mugs. Vassily Mikhailovich got in line and looked around the snowy square.

There was Isolde, legs spread apart. She was blowing beer foam onto her cloth boots, horrible-looking, with a cracked drunken skull and red wrinkled face. Lights were coming on and the first stars were rising: white, blue, green. The icy wind came from the stars to the earth, stirring her uncovered hair, and after circling around her head, moved on to the dark doorways.

“Lyalya,” said Vassily Mikhailovich.

But she was laughing with new friends, stumbling, holding up her mug: a big man was opening a bottle, another man struck the edge of the counter with a dried fish, they were having a good time.

“My heart sings with joy,” Isolde sang. “Oh, if I could feel this way forever.”

Vassily Mikhailovich stood and listened to her sing without understanding the words and when he came to, a struggling Isolde was being led away by the militiamen. But that couldn’t be Isolde: she had passed away a long time ago.

And he, it seemed, was still alive. But now there was no point to it. Darkness pressed against his heart. The hour of departure had struck. He looked back one last time and saw only a long cold tunnel with icy walls, and himself, crawling with a hand extended, grimly smothering all the sparks that flashed on the way. The queue shoved him and hurried him, and he took a step forward, no longer feeling his legs, and he gratefully accepted from gentle hands his well-earned cup of hemlock.