“Come into the house,” Alexandra ordered him, and he obeyed and climbed the steps.
They had a bad time with the general’s wife, Vera Ivanovna. For three days she shrieked and screamed, hoarsely, dementedly, and fell asleep only when given injections; for all that, she wouldn’t let poor Masha out of her sight. Swollen and bloated, Vera Ivanovna brought Masha to the funeral. The girl immediately rushed to Alexandra and stood, squeezing against her, through the whole immensely long secular funeral service.
Vera Ivanovna beat against the sealed coffin and finally started shouting out snatches of a Vologda folk lament, torn from the depths of a simple, peasant soul which had been spoiled by her exalted status. Alexandra stood like stone with a firm hand resting on Masha’s black hair. Her two elder daughters stood to the right and left of her, and behind them, holding Nike by the hand, Ivan Isaevich protectively stood sentinel over the family’s grief.
The funeral party was held at the general’s apartment on Tinkers Embankment. Everything, including the china, was brought in from some special place which fed high-ranking persons. Pyotr Stepanovich got utterly, terribly drunk. Vera Ivanovna kept demanding that Masha should come to her, but the little girl held on to Alexandra for dear life. So the three of them sat through the whole evening, two mothers-in-law united by a shared granddaughter.
“Alexandra, let me come and stay with you, Alexandra,” the little girl whispered in her ear, and Alexandra, who had promised the general not to take away their only child, comforted her by promising to let her stay just as soon as Grandma Vera was feeling a bit better.
“We can’t just leave her all alone, can we now?” she reasoned with Masha, herself thinking how desperately she wanted to take Masha back to her two and a half rooms in Uspensky Lane.
This was the evening when Alexandra first noticed a scattering of ginger freckles on Masha’s pale face, the hereditary freckles of the Sinoply family, little indicators of the continuing presence of long-dead Matilda.
“Masha ought to be taken away from that place. I could help,” Ivan Isaevich murmured late that evening as he saw Alexandra home from Tinkers Embankment, not addressing her directly in order to avoid having to call her Alexandra Georgievna, which by now was just too formal.
“Ought to be, certainly, but how’s it to be done?” she replied equally unspecifically.
Medea did not come to her godson’s funeral. Her late sister Anelya’s adopted daughter Nina was ill in the hospital after a serious operation; Medea had taken her two little children from Tbilisi to stay with her and now had no one to leave them with.
In late August, Ivan Isaevich finished installing fencing around the dacha, put grilles on the windows, and installed an ingenious lock: “No self-respecting thief is going to be breaking in here, and it’s a deterrent to vandals.”
All this dark time, from the day of the funerals, he had not left Alexandra’s side, and here, in this sad place, they began their life as man and wife. The tragedy seemed to cast a shadow on their relations for all time, and Alexandra herself no longer seemed able to throw herself into celebrating life as she had from her earliest youth come war, peace, or universal flood. Ivan Isaevich had no inkling of this. He was a different kind of person, who didn’t have the words in his vocabulary or the sights in his memory that Alexandra had. He saw his wife as a superior, perfect being. Even when he did work out that her youngest daughter Nike could not possibly have been fathered by the Colonel Kitaev whose surname she bore but who had died four years earlier, he would sooner have believed in an immaculate conception than in any other explanation.
Alexandra, purely from a desire to preserve his exalted faith in her, had to concoct a story about how she had been planning to marry a test pilot who crashed the day before the wedding. The story was not a complete fabrication: there really had been a pilot. There was even a photograph of him with a breezy inscription, and alas he really had died in a crash during a test, but there had never been any suggestion of marriage between them, and it was not he who was Nike’s father. He had crashed five years after she was born, and Nike remembered him because he always brought long boxes of chocolates called “Nuts of the South” which you couldn’t get later on.
So positive, however, was Ivan Isaevich’s attitude toward his wife that even in this questionable part of her biography he discerned merit: a lesser woman would have had an abortion or some such disgusting thing, but Alexandra had had the baby and brought it up, denying herself in all things. He was eager to ornament her bitter life by any means within the scope of his imagination: he brought her the best things he could find in Eliseev’s delicatessen; he gave her presents, sometimes completely absurd; he guarded her sleep in the morning. What he most appreciated in intimate relations with his wife was the very fact that they occurred at all, and in the depths of his simple soul at first supposed that his demands could only be a source of vexation to his noble wife. It was some time before Alexandra succeeded in getting him more or less attuned to the extracting of modest and muted matrimonial joys. Ivan Isaevich’s fidelity much surpassed what the concept usually entails. He served his wife with his every thought and every emotion, and Alexandra, taken aback by such an unexpected gift so near to the falling of the curtain on her womanly biography, accepted his love gratefully.
General Gladyshev had built so many military and semi-military installations in the course of his career and had received so many decorations for his broad but short chest that he was almost not afraid of the authorities. Not, of course, in the sense in which a philosopher or an artist in some namby-pamby bourgeois state is not afraid of the authorities, but in the sense that he had held his ground under Stalin and outlived him, had got on fine with Khrushchev, whom he had known from the war, and was confident that he could find a common language with any other authorities.
He was afraid only of his wife, Vera Ivanovna. Only Vera Ivanovna, his faithful spouse and partner through thick and thin, disturbed his calm and jangled his nerves. She regarded her husband’s high rank and senior position as effectively her own private property and was fully capable of demanding all that, in her perception, was her due. When the need arose, she had no hesitation in raising the roof. It was these outbursts that Pyotr Stepanovich feared most of all. His wife had a powerful voice, the acoustical properties of their tall rooms were first-rate and the sound insulation inadequate. When she started shrieking, he surrendered with alacrity: “What must the neighbors think? You’ve completely taken leave of your senses.”
After her hungry Vologda childhood and penniless youth, Vera Ivanovna was knocked sideways by the loot of which Pyotr Stepanovich—who was not a covetous man, but neither was he a fool—shipped back one full goods wagon from defeated Germany at the end of 1945, since which time Vera Ivanovna had been unable to stop herself from buying more and more possessions. Cursing her for a lunatic and a madwoman, he did not consider her to be either of those things in a literal sense. For this reason when one night a few months after the death of their daughter he was awakened by the muttering of his wife, who was standing in a piglet-colored nightgown in front of the open drawer of a lady’s escritoire, from Potsdam as he recalled, it never occurred to him that the time might have come to commit her to a lunatic asylum.
“She thinks she will get all my things now, they’ll all be left to her, the little murderess,” Vera Ivanovna said, wrapping a Chinese fan and some little flasks in a light towel.
“What are you doing at this time in the night, Mother?” Pyotr Stepanovich asked, raising himself on his elbow.