White Walls: Collected Stories

FIRE AND DUST

Where is she now, that lunatic Svetlana, nicknamed Pipka, about whom some people, with the nonchalance of youth, used to say, “But I mean, is Pipka really human?” and others, exasperated: “Why do you let her in? Keep an eye on your books! She’ll walk off with everything!” No, they were wrong: the only things assignable to Pipka’s conscience are a light blue Simenon and a white wool sweater with knitted buttons, and it was already darned at the elbow anyway. And to hell with the sweater! Much more valuable things had vanished since that time: Rimma’s radiant youth; the childhood of her children; the freshness of her hopes, blue as the morning sky; the secret, joyful trust with which Rimma listened to the voice of the future whispering for her alone—what laurels, flowers, islands, and rainbows had not been promised to her, and where is it all? She didn’t begrudge the sweater; Rimma herself had forcibly thrust Svetlana into that little-needed sweater when she threw the insane girl, half dressed as always, out into the raging autumn one cold, branch-lashed Moscow midnight. Rimma, already in her nightgown, shifted impatiently from one foot to the other in the doorway, pressing her shivering legs together; she kept nodding, advancing, showing Svetlana the door, but Svetlana was trying to get something out, to finish what she had to say, with a nervous giggle, a quick shrug of the shoulders, and in her pretty white face black eyes burned like an insane abyss and the wet abyss of her mouth mumbled in a hurried dither—a hideous black mouth, where the stumps of the teeth made you think of old, charred ruins. Rimma advanced, gaining ground inch by inch, and Svetlana talked on and on and on, waving her hands all about as if she were doing exercises—nocturnal, night-owl, unbelievable exercises—and then, demonstrating the enormous size of something—but Rimma wasn’t listening—she gestured so expansively that she smashed her knuckles against the wall and in her surprise said nothing for a moment, pressing the salty joints to her lips, which seemed singed by her disconnected pronouncements. That was when the sweater was shoved at her—you’ll warm up in the taxi—the door was slammed shut, and Rimma, vexed and laughing, ran to Fedya under the warm blanket. “I barely managed to get rid of her.” The children tossed and turned in their sleep. Tomorrow was an early day. “You could have let her spend the night,” muttered Fedya through his sleep, through the warmth, and he was very handsome in the red glow of the night-light. Spend the night? Never! And where? In old man Ashkenazi’s room? The old man tossed and turned incessantly on his worn-out couch, smoked something thick and smelly, coughed, and in the middle of the night would get up and go to the kitchen for a drink of water from the tap, but all in all it wasn’t bad, he wasn’t a bother. When guests came he would loan chairs, get out a jar of marinated mushrooms, untangle rats’ nests of sticky tinned fruit drops for the children. They would seat him at one end of the table and he would chuckle, swing his legs, which didn’t reach the floor, and smoke into his sleeve: “Never mind, you young people, be patient—I’ll die soon and the whole apartment will be yours.” “May you live to be a hundred, David Danilich,” Rimma would reassure him, but still it was pleasant to dream about the time when she would be mistress of an entire apartment, not a communal one, but her own, when she would do major remodeling—cover the preposterous five-cornered kitchen from top to bottom in tile and get a new stove. Fedya would defend his dissertation, the children would go to school—English, music, figure skating.… What else could she imagine? A lot of people envied them in advance. But of course it was not tile, not well-rounded children that shone from the wide-open spaces of the future like a rainbow-colored fire, a sparkling arc of wild rapture (and Rimma honestly wished old man Ashkenazi long life —there’s time enough for everything); no, something greater, something completely different, important, overwhelming, and grand clamored and glittered up ahead, as though Rimma’s ship, sailing along a dark channel through blossoming reeds, were on the verge of coming into the green, happy, raging sea.

In the meantime, life was not quite real, it was life in anticipation, lived out of a suitcase, slipshod, lightweight—a pile of junk in the hallway, midnight guests: Petyunya in his sky-blue tie, the childless Elya and Aiyosha, and others; Pipka’s nocturnal visits and her outrageous conversations. How hideous Pipka was with those black detoothed stumps—yet lots of people liked her, and often at the end of a festive evening one of the men couldn’t be accounted for: Pipka had whisked him away while no one was looking—always in a taxi—to her place in Perlovka. That was where she holed up, renting a cheap little wooden shack with a front yard. At one time Rimma even worried about Fedya—he was flighty and Pipka was crazy and capable of anything. If not for those rotten stumps in her hurried mouth, it might have been worth thinking about not allowing her into the family home. Especially since Fedya often said mysteriously, “If Svetlanka would just keep her mouth shut, you could actually talk to her!” And she was forever trembling, half dressed, or dressed topsy-turvy: crusty stiff children’s boots on bare feet in the middle of winter, her hands all chapped.

No one knew where Pipka went, just as no one knew where she actually came from—she had simply shown up and that was that. Her stories were outrageous and confused: It seems she’d wanted to go to drama school and had even been accepted, but in a market she met some pickled-garlic merchants and was gagged and taken off to Baku in a white Volga with no license plates. There they supposedly ravished her, knocked out half her teeth, and abandoned her, naked, on the seashore in a pool of oil. The next morning, she claimed, she was found by a wild mountain man in transit through Baku; he carried her off to his hut high in the mountains and held her there all summer, feeding her melon from a knife through the cracks in his shack, and in the fall he traded her to a visiting ethnographer for a watch with no hands. Still completely naked, she and the ethnographer, who called her Svetka-Pipetka, which is where she got her nickname, holed up in an abandoned watchtower, dating back to Shamil’s time, that was covered with rotten Persian rugs—the ethnographer studied their patterns with a magnifying glass. At night eagles defecated on them. “Shoo, shoo, damn you!” Pipka would act it out, racing around the room with an indignant expression, frightening the children. When winter came, the ethnographer left to go higher into the mountains, and at the first snowfall Svetlana descended into a valley where the people calculated time by the lunar calendar and shot at schoolmarms through the school window, publicly marking the number of casualties with notches on a post in the center of the bazaar. There were more than eight hundred notches; the Regional Department of Public Education couldn’t manage—several pedagogical institutes worked exclusively for this valley. There Svetlana had an affair with the local store manager. But she quickly dumped him, finding him insufficiently manly: instead of sleeping as a Caucasian horseman should, on his back in a papakha fur cap with a sword at his side, fiercely displaying his wide, muscular shoulders, the local store manager would curl up, snuffle, and whimper in his sleep, shuffling his legs; he explained in his own defense that he dreamed of gunfire. Toward spring Pipka reached Moscow on foot, sleeping in haystacks and avoiding the high roads; several times she was bitten by dogs. For some reason she went through the Ural Mountains. But then geography gave her even more trouble than her private life; she called the Urals the Caucasus, and placed Baku on the Black Sea. Maybe there really was some kind of truth in her nightmarish stories, who knows. Rimma was used to them and hardly listened; she thought her own thoughts, surrendering to her own unhurried daydreams. Almost nobody listened to Pipka anyway—after all, was she really human? Only occasionally some newcomer, enthralled by Pipkas nonsense, by the disgorged fountain of tales, would exclaim in joyous amazement, “Boy, does she ever lay it on! A thousand and one nights!” That was the type Pipka usually carried off to her semifantastic Perlovka, if it actually existed: was it really possible to believe that Svetlana was employed by the owners to dig troughs around the dahlias and that she ate fish-bone meal along with the chickens? As always, during a simple gathering of friends, amid the noise and chatter and clatter of forks, a dreamy somnolence overtook Rimma, marvelous dream-visions real as life appeared, pink and blue mists, white sails; the roar of the ocean could be heard, far off, beckoning, like the steady roar that issued from the giant shell gracing the sideboard. Rimma loved to close her eyes and put the shell to her ear—from those monstrous, salmon-colored jaws you could hear the call of a faraway country, so far away that a place could no longer be found for it on the globe, and it smoothly ascended, this country, and setded in the sky with all of its lakes, parrots, and crashing coastal breakers. And Rimma also glided in the sky amid pink, feathery clouds—everything promised by life will come to pass. No need to stir, no need to hurry, everything will come all by itself. To slip silently down dark channels… to listen to the approaching roar of the ocean… Rimma would open her eyes and, smiling, look at her guests through the tobacco smoke and dreams—at lazy, satisfied Fedya, at David Danilich swinging his legs—and slowly return to earth. And it will start with something insignificant… it will start bit by bit…. She felt the ground with her legs, which were weakened by the flight. Oh, the apartment would have to be first, of course. The old man’s room would be the bedroom. Baby-blue curtains. No, white ones. White, silky, fluffy, gathered ones. And a white bed. Sunday morning. In a white peignoir, her hair flowing (time to let her hair grow out, but the peignoir had already been secretly bought, she couldn’t resist)… Rimma would stroll through the apartment to the kitchen…. The aroma of coffee… To new acquaintances she would say, “And in this room, where the bedroom is now, an old man used to live…. So sweet… He wasn’t a bother. And after his death we took it over…. It’s a shame—such a wonderful old man!” Rimma would rock back and forth on her chair, smiling at the still-living old man: “You smoke a lot, David Danilich. You should take care of yourself.” The old man only coughed and waved her away, as if to say, Never mind. I’m not long for this place. Why bother?

How lovely it was to float and meander through time—and time meanders through you and melts away behind, and the sound of the sea keeps beckoning; time to take a trip to the South and breathe the sea air, stand on the shore stretching your arms and listening to the wind…. How sweetly life melts away—the children, and loving Fedya, and the anticipation of the white bedroom. The guests are envious; well, my dears, go ahead and envy, enormous happiness awaits me up ahead— what kind, I won’t say, I myself don’t know, but voices whisper, “Just wait, wait!” Petyunya, sitting over there biting his nails, is envious. He doesn’t have a wife or an apartment, he’s puny, he’s ambitious, he wants to be a journalist, he loves bright ties, we should give him ours, the orange one, we don’t need it, happiness awaits us. Elya and Alyosha are also envious, they don’t have any children, they’ve gone and gotten a dog, how boring.

Old man Ashkenazi sitting there, he’s envious of my youth, my white bedroom, my ocean roar; farewell, old man, it will soon be time for you to leave, your eyes shut tight under copper coins. Now Svetlana… she envies no one, she has everything, but it’s only imaginary, her eyes and her frightful mouth burn like fire—Fedya shouldn’t sit so close—her talk is crazy, kingdoms rise and fall by the dozens in her head all in one night. Fedya shouldn’t sit so close. Fedya! Come sit over here. She’s spinning her yarns and you’re all ears?

Life was happy and easy, they laughed at Petyunya, at his passion for ties, said he was destined for a great journalistic future, asked him ahead of time not to put on airs if he traveled overseas; Petyunya was embarrassed, and he wrinkled his mousy little face: What are you talking about, guys, let’s hope I make it through the institute!

Petyunya was wonderful, but sort of rumpled, and, moreover, he tried to play up to Rimma, though only indirectly, to be sure: he would slice onions for her in the kitchen and hint that he, frankly, had plans for his life. Oh-ho! Rimma laughed. What plans could he have, when such incredible things awaited her! You’d be better offsetting your sights on Elya, she’ll dump Alyosha anyway. Or else Svetka-Pipetka over there. Pipetka was getting married, Petyunya said. To whom, I’d like to know?

It was soon discovered to whom: to old man Ashkenazi. The old man, feeling sorry for Pipka’s little feet in their children’s boots, for her frozen little hands, distressed about her night-time taxi expenses, and all in all succumbing to a teary senile altruism, conceived the idea—behind Rimma’s back!—of marrying that vagrant who blazed with a black fire and of registering her, naturally, in the living space promised to Rimma and Fedya. A scene complete with sedatives ensued. “You should be ashamed, shame on you!” cried Rimma, her voice breaking. “But I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of,” answered the old man from the couch, where he lay amid broken springs, his head thrown back to stop the flow of blood from his nose. Rimma applied cold compresses and sat up with him all night. When the old man dozed off, his breathing shallow and irregular, she measured the window in his room. Yes, the white material was the right width. Light blue wallpaper over here. In the morning they made up. Rimma forgave the old man, he cried, she gave him Fedya’s shirt and fed him hot pancakes. Svetlana heard something about it and didn’t show up for a long time. Then Petyunya also vanished and the guess was that Svetlana had carried him off to Perlovka. Everyone who ended up there disappeared for ages, and when they returned they were not themselves for quite some time.

Petyunya showed up one evening six months later with a vague expression on his face, his trousers covered to the waist in mud. Rimma had trouble getting anything out of him. Yes, he had been there. He helped Pipka with the work. It was a very hard life. Everything was very complicated. He had walked all the way from Perlovka. Why was he covered in mud? Oh, that… He and Pipka had wandered around Perlovka with kerosene lanterns all last night, looking for the right house. A Circassian had given birth to a puppy. Yes, that’s what happened. Yes, I know—Petyunya pressed his hands to his chest—I know that there aren’t any Circassian people in Perlovka. This was the last one. Svetlana says she knows for sure. It’s a very good story for the “Only Facts” column of the newspaper. “What’s got into you, are you off your rocker too?” asked Rimma, blinking. “Why do you say that? I saw the puppy myself.” “And the Circassian?” “They weren’t letting anyone in to see him. It was the middle of the night, after all. “Sleep it off,” said Rimma. They put Petyunya in the hall with the junk. Rimma fretted, tossing and turning all night, and in the morning she decided that “Circassian” was a dog’s name. But at breakfast she couldn’t bring herself to increase the lunacy with questions, and, anyway, Petyunya was glum and soon left.

Then all of a sudden Svetlana had to move her things from Perlovka to some other place right away—figuring out the geography of it was useless; it had to be by taxi, of course, and for some reason Fedya’s help was absolutely essential. Hesitating a bit, Rimma let him go. It was ten in the morning, so it wasn’t very likely that anything could… He returned at three that night, behaving very strangely. “Where were you?” Rimma was waiting in the hall in her nightgown. “You see, there were a lot of complications…. We ended up having to go to Serpukhov, she has twins in the Children’s Home there.” “What twins?” Rimma shouted. “Tiny ones, about a year old, I think. Siamese. their heads are joined together. Karina and Angela.” “What heads? Are you out of your mind? She’s been coming here for ages. Have you ever noticed her having a baby?” No, of course he hadn’t noticed her having a baby or anything like that, but they really did go to Serpukhov, and they did drop off a package: frozen hake. That’s right, hake for the twins. He himself stood in the cashier’s line to pay for the fish. Rimma burst into tears and slammed the door. Fedya remained in the hall, scratching at the door and swearing that he himself didn’t understand anything, but that they were called Karina and Angela—of that he was sure.

After that Pipka disappeared again for a long while, and the episode was forgotten. But for the first time something in Rimma cracked—she looked around and saw that time kept Mowing on, yet the future still hadn’t arrived, and Fedya was not so handsome anymore, and the children had picked up bad words on the street, and old man Ashkenazi coughed and lived on, and wrinkles had already crept up to her eyes and mouth, and the junk in the hallway was still just lying there. And the roar of the ocean had grown muffled, and they hadn’t gone to the South after all—everything had been put off until the future, which just didn’t want to arrive.

Troubled days followed. Rimma lost heart; she kept trying to understand at what point she’d taken the wrong path leading to that far-off, melodious happiness, and often she sat lost in thought; meanwhile, her children were growing up and Fedya sat in front of the television, not wanting to write his dissertation, and outside the window either a cottony blizzard blew or an insipid city sun peeked through summer clouds. Their friends grew old, it became harder for them to get themselves going, Petyunya had completely vanished somewhere, flashy ties went out of fashion, Elya and Alyosha got another unruly dog, and there was no one to leave it with evenings. At Rimma’s job new coworkers had appeared, big Lucy and little Lucy, but they didn’t know about Rimma’s plans for happiness and didn’t envy her; rather, they envied Kira from the planning department, who had a large, expensive wardrobe, who exchanged hats for books, books for meat, meat for medicine or hard-to-come-by theater tickets, and spoke in an irritated tone of voice to someone on the phone: “But you know perfectly well how much I love jellied tongue.”

And one evening, when Fedya was watching television and Rimma was sitting with her head on the table listening to the old man coughing on the other side of the wall, in burst Pipka, all fire and flame, rosy-cheeked, looking younger, as sometimes happens with insane people, and smiling, her blazing mouth full of sparkling white teeth. “Thirty-six!” she shouted from the threshold and banged her fist on the top of the doorway. “Thirty-six what?” said Rimma, lifting her head from the table. “Thirty-six teeth!” said Pipka. And she told the story of how she got a job as a cabin boy on a steamer bound for Japan, and since the steamer was already overstaffed she had to sleep in a cauldron with the meat and rice, and the captain had rendered her honor but the captain’s assistant had rent it; and a rich Japanese man fell in love with her on the way and wanted to arrange their marriage by telegraph without delay, but they couldn’t find the right Japanese characters and the deal fell apart; and then—while they were washing the meat-and-rice cauldron in some port or other—she was kidnapped by a pirate junk and sold to a rich plantation owner, and she spent a year working on Malaysian hemp plantations, where she was bought by a rich Englishman for an Olympics memorial ruble, which, as everyone knows, is highly prized among Malaysian numismatists. The Englishman carried her off to misty Albion; first, he lost her in the thick mist, but then he found her, and to celebrate he footed the bill for the most expensive and fashionable set of thirty-six teeth, which only a real moneybags could afford. He gave her smoked pony for the road and now she, Pipka, was finally going to Perlovka to get her things. “Open your mouth,” said Rimma with hatred. And in Svetlana’s readily opened mouth she counted, fighting vertigo, all thirty-six— how they fit in there was beyond comprehension, but they were indeed teeth. “I can chew steel wire now. If you want, I’ll bite off a bit of the cornice,” the monster started to say, and Fedya was watching with great interest, but Rimma began waving her hands: that’s all, that’s it, it’s late, we want to sleep, and she thrust taxi money on her, and pushed her toward the door, and threw her the volume of Simenon. For heaven’s sake, take it, read a little tonight, only just leave! And Pipka left, clutching the walls to no avail, and no one ever saw her again. “Fedya, shall we take a trip to the South?” Rimma asked. “Absolutely,” Fedya answered readily, as he had done many times over the years. That’s all right, then. That means we will go after all. To the South! And she listened to the voice that still faintly whispered something about the future, about happiness, about long, sound sleep in a white bedroom, but the words were already difficult to make out. “Hey, look—it’s Petyunya!” said Fedya in surprise. On the television screen, under palm trees, small and sullen, with a microphone in his hands, stood Petyunya, and he was cursing some kind of cocoa plantations, and the black people passing by turned around to look at him, and his huge tie erupted like a pustular African sunrise, but there wasn’t a whole lot of happiness to be seen on his face either.

Now Rimma knew that they’d all been tricked, but by whom and when, she couldn’t remember. She sorted through it all day by day, searching for a mistake, but didn’t find any. Everything was somehow covered with dust. Occasionally— strange to say—she felt like talking it over with Pipka, but Pipka didn’t come around anymore.

It was summer again, the heat had arrived, and through the thick dust the voice from the future once again whispered something. Rimma’s children were grown, one had married and the other was in the army, the apartment was empty, and she had trouble sleeping at night—the old man coughed incessantly on the other side of the wall. Rimma no longer wanted to turn the old man’s room into a bedroom, and she didn’t have the white peignoir anymore—moths from the junk in the hall had eaten it, without even looking at what they ate. Arriving at work, Rimma complained to big Lucy and little Lucy that moths were now devouring even German things; little Lucy gasped, holding her palms to her cheeks, and big Lucy grew angry and glum. “If you want to outfit yourselves, girls,” said the experienced Kira, breaking away from her telephonic machinations, “I can take you to a place. I have a friend. Her daughter just got back from Bahrain. You can pay later. It’s good stuff. Vera Esafovna got seven hundred rubles’ worth on Saturday. They lived well over there in Bahrain. Swam in a pool, they want to go again.” “Why don’t we?” said big Lucy. “Oh, I have so many debts,” whispered the little one.

“Quick, quick, girls, we’ll take a taxi,” said Kira, hurrying them. “We can make it during lunch break.” And, feeling like schoolgirls cutting class, they piled into a cab, inundating one another with the smells of perfume and lit cigarettes, and whirled off down hot summer side streets strewn with sunny linden-tree husks and patches of warm shadow; a southerly wind was blowing, and through the gasoline fumes it carried the exultation and brilliance of the far-off South: the blazing blue heavens, the mirrorlike shimmer of vast seas, wild happiness, wild freedom, the madness of hopes coming true—

Hopes for what? God only knows! And in the apartment they entered, holding their breath in anticipation of a happy consumer adventure, there was also a warm wind fluttering and billowing the white tulle on the windows and doors, which were opened wide onto a spacious balcony—everything here was spacious, large, free. Rimma felt a little envious of this apartment. A powerful woman—the mistress of the goods for sale—swiftly threw open the secret room. The goods were rumpled, heaped up in television boxes on an ever-rising double bed, and reflected in the mirror of a massive wardrobe. “Dig in,” ordered Kira, standing in the doorway. Trembling, the women buried their hands in boxes crammed with silky, velvety, see-through, gold-embroidered stuff; they pulled things out, yanking, getting tangled in ribbons and ruffles; their hands fished things out while their eyes already groped for something else, an alluring bow or frill; inside Rimma a vein twitched rapidly, her ears burned, and her mouth was dry. It was all like a dream. And, as happens in the cruel scenario of dreams, a certain crack in the harmony soon emerged and began to grow, a secret defect, which threatened to resound in catastrophe. These things —what is this anyway?—weren’t right, they weren’t what they seemed at first. The eye began to distinguish the cheapness of these gaudy, fake gauze skirts hardly fit for a corps de ballet, the pretentiousness of those violet turkey-wattle jabots, and the un-fashionable lines of those thick velvet jackets; these were throw-aways; we were invited to the leftovers of someone else’s feast; others have already rummaged here, have already trampled the ground; someone’s greedy hands have already defiled the magical boxes, snatched up and carried off those very things, the real ones that made the heart beat and that particular vein twitch. Rimma fell on other boxes, groped about the disheveled double bed, but neither there, nor there… And the things that she grabbed in despair from the piles and held up to herself, anxiously looking in the mirror, were laughably small, short, or ridiculous. Life had gone and the voice of the future was singing for others. The woman, the owner of the goods, sat like Buddha and watched, astute and scornful. “What about this?” Rimma pointed at the clothes hanging on coat hangers along the walls, fluttering in the warm breeze. “Sold. That’s sold too.” “Is there anything—in my size?” “Go on, give her something,” Kira, who was propped up against the wall, said to the woman. Thinking for a moment, the woman pulled out something gray from behind her back, and Rimma, hurriedly undressing, revealing all the secrets of her cheap undergarments to her girlfriends, slithered into the appropriate openings. Adjusting and tugging, she inspected her mercilessly bright reflection. The warm breeze still played about in the sunny room, indifferent to the commerce being conducted. She didn’t exactly understand what she had put on; she gazed miserably at the little black hairs on her white legs, which looked as if they’d gotten soggy or been stored in dark trunks all winter, at her neck, its goosey flesh stretched out in fright, at her flattened hair, her stomach, her wrinkles, the dark circles under her eyes. The dress smelled of other people—others had already tried it on. “Very good. It’s you. Take it,” pressured Kira, who was the woman’s secret confederate. The woman watched, silent and disdainful. “How much?” “Two hundred.” Rimma choked, trying to tear off the poisoned clothing. “It’s awfully stylish, Rimmochka,” said little Lucy guiltily. And to consummate the humiliation, the wind blew open the door to the next room, revealing a heavenly vision: the woman’s young, divinely sculpted daughter, suntanned to a nut-colored glow—the one who had come back from Bahrain, who darted out of swimming pools filled with clear blue water—a flash of white garments, blue eyes; the woman got up and shut the door. This sight was not for mortal eyes.

The southerly wind blew the refuse of blossoming lindens into the old entryway, warmed the shabby walls. Little Lucy descended the stairs sideways, hugging the mountain of things she’d chosen, almost crying—once again she’d gotten herself into terrible debt. Big Lucy kept a hostile silence. Rimma walked with her teeth clenched: the summer day had darkened, destiny had teased her and had a laugh. And she already knew that the blouse she’d bought at the last minute in a fit of desperation was junk, last year’s leaves, Satan’s gold, fated to turn into rotten scraps in the morning, a husk sucked and spit out by the blue-eyed Bahrain houri.

She rode in the saddened, silent taxi and said to herself, Still, I do have Fedya and the children. But the comfort was false, feeble, it was all over, life had shown its empty face, its matted hair and sunken eye sockets. And she imagined the long-desired South, where she’d been dying to go for so many years, as yellowed and dusty, with bunches of prickly dry plants, with spittle and scraps of paper rocking on brackish waves. And at home there was the grimy old communal apartment and the immortal old man, Ashkenazi, and Fedya, whom she knew so well she could scream, and the whole viscous stream of years to come, not yet lived but already known, through which she would have to drag herself as through dust covering a road to the knees, the chest, the neck. And the siren’s song, deceitfully whispering sweet words to the stupid swimmer about what wouldn’t come to pass, fell silent forever.

No, there were some other events—Kira’s hand withered, Petyunya came back for visits and talked at length about the price of oil, Elya and Alyosha buried their dog and got a new one, old man Ashkenazi finally washed his windows with the help of the Dawn Company, but Pipka never showed up again. Some people knew for a fact that she’d married a blind storyteller and had taken off for Australia—to shine with her new white teeth amid the eucalyptus trees and duck-billed platypuses above the coral reefs, but others crossed their hearts and swore that shed been in a crash and burned up in a taxi on the Yaroslavl highway one rainy, slippery night, and that the flames could be seen from afar rising in a column to the sky. They also said that the fire couldn’t be brought under control, and that when everything had burned out, nothing was found at the site of the accident. Only cinders.