Ivan Isaevich was holding a brown hand with a dark outline around the nails on the light-colored top of a dismantled side table, stroking down a jagged flower with a rough finger, and when Alexandra Georgievna finished her tale about the cabinet, he said, without looking her in the eyes, “When I finish this marquetry for Ivan Ivanovich I can come and take a look at it.”
A week later he came to see her in Uspensky Lane, where she lived in two and a half rooms with her daughters Vera and Nike. The bowl of broth he was offered with a piece of yesterday’s meat kulebyaka, and buckwheat porridge which seemed to have been baked in a Russian stove, made a deep impression on Ivan Isaevich, who led a clean, worthy, but nevertheless bachelor existence, without good home cooking.
He liked the solicitous movement with which Alexandra Georgievna took the bread out of the wooden bread bin and opened the napkin in which it was wrapped. An even deeper impression was made by the brief glance she threw at the end of the buffet, where a small icon of the Mother of God of Korsun was hanging and which he had not noticed immediately precisely because it was not hanging in the corner in the officially approved manner, but hidden—and the quiet sigh, “Oh, Lord,” which she had learned from Medea already in childhood.
He was an Old Believer but had left home as a youth, renouncing his faith. Having swum away from his home shore, however, he never did reach another and had lived all his life at war with himself, sometimes appalled at having turned his back on his parents’ world, sometimes anguished by the impossibility of uniting with the thousands of his frenzied and energetic Soviet fellow citizens.
He was touched by her prayerful sigh, but only much later, when he was already her husband, did he realize that the crucial point was the amazingly simple way she had solved the problem which had tormented him all his life. For him the worship of a righteous God simply could not be reconciled with the living of an unrighteous life, but Alexandra brought everything together in a splendidly straightforward way: she painted her lips and dressed to kill, and could throw herself into having fun with total abandon, but when the time came, she would sigh and weep and pray, and suddenly give generous help to someone in need.
The cabinet turned out to be an object of no importance, walnut veneer, with a lost key and damaged key plate. Ivan Isaevich laid out his tools and unscrewed the front leaf while Alexandra Georgievna got herself ready and ran to the evening performance to cloak her decaying prima donna in a merchant’s talma of heavy silk. The old woman played mothers-in-law in Ostrovsky almost all the time.
Ivan Isaevich, left with her daughters, quietly got everything ready, cleaned the surface, removed the veneer where it was damaged in one place, and thought about the widow: a good woman living a pure life; her children well brought up; she herself, he could see, was well educated; although why on earth she was working as dresser to an old dame renowned for her difficult personality he couldn’t imagine.
He had to leave before the owner returned, as she was held up longer than usual. The old prima donna had summoned the principal producer after the performance and ordered him to replace a young actress “who’s an uppity young madam, even though she’s incapable of articulating her lines properly herself.” By the time feathers had been unruffled and Alexandra had calmed her grand old lady down and changed her clothes, it was already half-past midnight, and Alexandra had to walk home because that evening the actress either forgot to give her a lift home in her personal taxi, as she usually did, or chose not to.
Ivan Isaevich arranged his dates with the walnut cabinet after first glancing at the theater schedule and choosing days when Ostrovsky was not being performed and Alexandra Georgievna would be at home. The first evening she sat at a side table writing letters; the second, she sewed a skirt for her daughter, then sorted the cereals while quietly humming a catchy melody from an operetta. She offered Ivan Isaevich first tea, then supper. She was taking to “the furniture man,” as she had christened him to herself, more and more for his earnest restraint, his laconic way with words and movements, and for his behavior in general which, although “a trifle wooden,” as she described him to her bosom friend Kira, nevertheless was “all man.”
At the very least he was clearly ahead of her principal suitor, an Actor of Merit recently widowed, with a sonorous voice, garrulous, vain, and as quick to take offense as a schoolgirl. He had recently invited her to his large and splendid Stalinist apartment adjacent to the Moscow City Soviet, and the following day she lengthily derided him on all points to Kira: how he had laid the entire table with old banqueting china, but placed in the enormous crystal cheese dish a solitary dried-out segment of cheese, and in a half-meter-sized hors d’oeuvre dish an equally dried-out piece of sausage; how, with a voice like thunder which filled the whole enormous room right to its four-meter-high ceiling, he spoke first of his love for his late wife and then equally resonantly tried to entice her into the bedroom where he promised to show her what he was capable of; and finally, when Alexandra was ready to go home, he had produced his wife’s jewelry box and, without actually opening it, announced that its contents would all fall to the woman whom he now chose to be his new wife.
“So what did you do, Alexandra, make your excuses or go into the bedroom with him anyway?” enquired her friend, to whom it was vital to know every last detail of Alexandra’s life.
“Shame on you, Kira,” Alexandra Georgievna chuckled. “It was obvious the only place he has unbuttoned his trousers for a long time is the toilet! I pouted my lips and said, ‘Oh, what a shame I can’t go into your bedroom, because today I am menstru-a-ting!’ He almost sat down on the floor. No, no, he’s looking for a cook and I’m looking for a man in the house. He’s out.”
Ivan Isaevich worked unhurriedly; he never did hurry anyway, but on the fifth evening of unhurried work the cabinet was nevertheless finished, and he specially left a little bit early in order to put the last layer of shellac on tomorrow. He would be sorry to leave this house never to return, and he looked hopefully at a dubious moderne three-leaved mirror which was manifestly defective.
He liked Alexandra Georgievna and everything about her house, and he felt as if he were observing her life from a hide created by using the walnut cabinet: unsmiling Vera, the student, always scuffling among her papers like a mouse; deep-pink Nike; and her older son, who dropped in for a cup of tea with his mother nearly every day. He saw here not the fear and respect for one’s parents which he was used to from his own childhood, but the lighthearted love of children for their mother, and a warm friendship between all of them. He was surprised and delighted.
Alexandra Georgievna agreed to the mirror, so now Ivan Isaevich came to see her twice a week, on her days off. She even found his presence slightly wearing: she couldn’t invite guests around and couldn’t go out herself.
The way she saw things, she had the furniture man eating out of her hand, but she herself was unsure: of course he looked like a regular he-man, and he knew his own mind, but he was still a drudge. In the meantime he turned up with a child’s cot shaped like a little boat: “It worked for the children of the gentry, and it’ll be just right for Nike,” he said, and presented it.
Alexandra sighed: she really was tired of being husbandless, on top of which a year ago her patroness had charitably presented her with a plot of land in the Maly Theater’s village to build her own dacha and she could hardly put a house up on her own. Everything was pointing the same way, in favor of slow-moving Ivan Isaevich; and in him too the currents which lead a lonely man to family life were swirling beneath the surface of consciousness.