The love fest between Amalia, dying of a fatal disease, and Andrei Ivanovich, helpless to do anything to prevent it, played out in the next room, behind a tightly closed door. The door to the second bedroom was also constantly closed, but from it escaped snatches of melodies that Nora was already sick of—Beatles, and more Beatles. She already knew every song by heart, both text and melody, because Yurik sang them all, imitating now Lennon, now McCartney. Fairly accurate renditions. Nora asked her mother one day whether the music disturbed her.
“What music?” she asked, and Nora realized how far she had already traveled from this world.
For three and a half months, Andrei Ivanovich held fast to Amalia’s arm. For three and a half months, he carried her to the bathtub, washed her, wiped her dry, dressed her again, put her to bed, and lay by her side. If he was absent, she began to cry, and there was nothing Nora could do to comfort her. But when Andrei Ivanovich returned, Amalia took his hand and held it, and calmed down immediately. Then she fell asleep. Like a nursing child who was given the breast.
From time to time, the doctor from the polyclinic came, measured her blood pressure, and ordered blood tests. Then the nurse came. When the nurse came for the last time, Andrei Ivanovich happened not to be at home. Nora took her into her mother’s room. Amalia lay on top of three pillows, sitting almost upright. She held out her withered hand trustingly, and the nurse stabbed her finger with the needle. From the incision it made oozed a transparent reddish-yellow drop. Nora started in horror—the red blood cells had died.
When the nurse left, Nora returned to her mother. She was smiling the smile of a child. Her teeth were the same as Yurik’s—bright white, a bit uneven at the sides. They were the most alive thing in her dry, diminished little face.
“What do you think, child—if they give me an invalid’s pension, will it increase by much? Because, the way it is now, we can’t raise dogs for money anymore.”
On the evening of that same day, she went into a coma, and only woke up once, in the middle of the night. Seeking Andrei Ivanovich with her eyes, she said, “Have you had your dinner, Andrei?”
For another whole day her breathing was labored, spasmodic; then it stopped. It was in the predawn hours. Andrei Ivanovich held her hand until it grew cold. Nora’s tears poured down her face, and from Yurik’s room came strains of “Yesterday.” For some reason, she felt there should be silence. She opened her son’s door and said, “Yurik, Grandmother died.”
He kept on playing the song. When he finished it, he said, “I sensed it.”
And so he played his Beatles until morning, and for the first time in years, these sounds were not jarring to Nora’s ears. They didn’t irritate her in the least. In his breaking, thirteen-year-old voice, at the top of his lungs, he sang “Your Mother Should Know,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She’s Leaving Home.” The music suddenly seemed appropriate and necessary. It was astonishing: he didn’t say a word, but the music that had irritated Nora a hundred times over sounded bitterly sad, and even exalted.
Andrei Ivanovich remained by Amalia’s side, holding the hand of his beloved wife, and Nora had no desire to make practical decisions and plans: requiem service–funeral repast … It was all meaningless and in vain … What a pity that I didn’t love her as I should, that I couldn’t forgive her her love, that I didn’t understand her giftedness, her genius and uniqueness, which she invested almost solely in this love …
Nora sat next to Andrei Ivanovich, feeling empty, completely empty, then gradually filling with tenderness and a sense of guilt and repose that it was over, this sad suffering of Amalia’s parting from the world—her world, which consisted almost entirely of her love for this balding old man. Andrei Ivanovich held Amalia’s dead hands in his own. She had broad palms; short, triangular fingernails; strong, confident fingers. How self-assured and precise, even elegant, the movements of her hands were when she sat at the drafting table, Nora thought, recalling a memory from childhood. She was the one who taught me to hold a pencil. And wasn’t able to teach Yurik.
How is it I never realized this before? My hands, which resemble Marusya’s so much outwardly, are actually Mama’s, in their grip, in their feeling for pencil and line, in their innate confidence of movement.
Genrikh came to the requiem in the church with a bunch of red carnations, and stood at a distance from the others. There weren’t a lot of mourners: a few former friends and colleagues, neighbors from Nikitsky Boulevard, and one or two from Prioksko. Next to Nora stood Andrei Ivanovich and Yurik, with his guitar, and Nora, glancing at Genrikh, sensed the kind of abandonment and loneliness he must have been feeling.
When the service ended, she went up to him and asked whether he would go to the cemetery with them. He hemmed and hawed, and mumbled something along the lines of “I don’t know if she would have wanted it … if he would like it.” But he got into the funeral bus with everyone else and went to Vagankovo Cemetery, where Amalia’s parents, Zinaida Filippovna and Alexander Ignatievich Kotenko, were buried under an enormous wooden cross erected by the Church of St. Pimen in 1924 for its former precentor. Then Genrikh came to the funeral repast in the house where he had once lived with Amalia, sat at the same table with Andrei Ivanovich, and kept looking at him, wondering why Amalia had left him, a fine fellow, for this scraggly, balding man who looked so simple and ordinary. Andrei Ivanovich didn’t even notice that he was there.
That evening, Nora could never have imagined that her respite from misfortune would be so brief. Three months later, it was Genrikh’s turn. He was diagnosed with cancer, too. Lung cancer. He needed an operation. Genrikh’s wife came to see Nora—the fat Irina, in her fat boots, shedding fat tears as Nora poured her some tea. While Genrikh was in the hospital, undergoing his examinations and tests, Irina’s daughter gave birth to her second child, and now her daughter, her daughter’s two children, and her husband had all moved in, and were staying in Irina’s living room.
“What was I to do? I couldn’t chase my own daughter out!” It was impossible for Irina and Genrikh to occupy the tiny bedroom together, because of the cancer, because he smoked, because the children cried. “You take him, Norka. They’ve promised my son-in-law an apartment, and as soon as he gets it, they’ll move out. It will definitely happen this year—they promised him. Then I can take Genrikh back.”
This will be the end of me, Nora thought. She was filled not with pity but with rage. And complete helplessness. Not because Genrikh had paid for their apartment, and this banishment would be a severe blow. She felt she just didn’t have the strength to bear up under another illness when she had just traveled that road. There were no two ways about it, she had loved her mother; but her father? To be honest, absolutely honest, she didn’t love him. She didn’t like him. She knew, she understood, but it was still hard to love him. She wouldn’t say it out loud, of course. Not to this cow, in any case. Nora was allergic to him. And she didn’t want to do it. Out loud she said, “When should I pick him up?”
Irina cheered up, not expecting such an easy victory. “Oh, Norka, Norka!”
At this point, Nora lost her composure. “Don’t call me Norka; I’m Nora! You know, Ibsen has a play called A Doll’s House. Nora is the main character. Nora Helmer. And my highly cultured grandmother Marusya named me after her.”
“Yes, that’s what I said, Norka. Nora, I mean!” Irina said, correcting herself.