“We need to hide them, Pyotr, hide them. That’s what she thinks will happen.” Her pupils were so dilated they almost merged with the black rims of the irises, and her eyes seemed not grey but black.
The general was so irate that the foreboding which had stirred briefly in his heart promptly dissolved. He hurled a long and elaborate curse in her direction, took the pillow and a blanket, and went to sleep the rest of the night in the study, trailing the long ribbons of his army-issue underpants behind him.
Madness, as anyone knows who has observed it at close quarters, is the more infectious the more sensitive the psyche of the person finding themselves in the proximity of the mad person. The general simply did not notice it. Motya, a distant relative of Vera Ivanovna’s who had been subsisting in their apartment since she was young, did notice certain strangenesses in the mistress’s behavior but paid them no special attention since she, having twice experienced famine in Russia, had long been slightly deranged herself. She lived in order to eat. Nobody in the family saw how or when she did it, although they did know that she ate at night.
She feasted in her narrow, windowless room, intended as a larder, with the latch down. First she gorged on what she had gathered during the day from food left by the family; then what she considered the food due to her herself; and finally, and sweetest of all, what she had slyly stolen with her own hands out of the Kremlin-supplied food orders: a makeweight piece of sturgeon, a lump of dry sausage, and chocolates if they arrived in paper bags rather than sealed boxes.
Her quarters were off limits to all members of the household: not even the cat was allowed in; and even the general, insensitive as he was to anything mysterious, was aware of some kind of unpleasant secret in there. She carried in cereals and flour which she had poured into paper bags, and tinned food. A day before her annual trip to her sister’s in the country, she would slip out the door, unnoticed by her mistress, with two large bags that she would take to Yaroslavl Station and put in the left-luggage section. All these foodstuffs were intended as a present for her sister, but year after year the same story repeated itself: the first evening she was there she would put on the table a tin of stew covered with delicious, cheap oil, intending to present the rest later; but her sick soul prevented her from carrying through this act of heroism, and she would revert to guzzling her supplies at night, in the dark and alone; and her sister, observing the midnight feasts from her place above the stove, only felt great pity for her greed and forgave her. Even though she was older than Motya, she lived off her vegetable garden, kept a cow, and didn’t suffer from gluttony.
It was no wonder, then, that Motya, constantly occupied with her search for food, failed to notice either the stupors into which Vera Ivanovna would fall or the abnormal agitation which would have her pacing around the apartment from room to room like a wild beast in a cage; and if she had noticed anything, she would have given it her customary explanation: “Vera is Satan incarnate.”
Pyotr Stepanovich didn’t notice anything either, since for many years he had been avoiding contact with his wife, getting up early and not breakfasting at home. The moment he arrived at his enormous office, his secretary would bring him tea. He would return home late, in the old days after midnight, having sat out some sixteen hours at a time in his department; what he enjoyed most of all were tours of inspection to installations, and he was often out of Moscow. He did not exchange two words with his wife if he could help it. He came home, had supper, burrowed into her silk-covered, down-filled duvets as fast as he could, and rapidly fell asleep like the healthy man he was.
So it happened that all the monstrous power of Vera Ivanovna’s insanity fell upon Masha. She started school here, on Tinkers Embankment. She was wakened, taken to school, and brought home again by Motya, but from dinnertime on, Masha spent all her time with her grandmother.
Masha sat down at the table. Grandma Vera sat down opposite and didn’t take her eye off her for a moment. She didn’t keep scolding Masha; she just stared at her with grey, unblinking eyes and from time to time whispered something incomprehensible. Masha pushed her silver spoon around in the bowl and couldn’t raise it to her mouth. Under Vera Ivanovna’s chilling gaze the soup quickly got cold and Motya, who had a vested interest, quickly took it off to who knows where and put a large plate with the main course in front of Masha, which very soon was carried off almost untouched to wherever it was the soup had gone. Then Masha ate a piece of white bread with stewed fruit, which was to remain her favorite food for the rest of her life, and her grandmother would say to her, “Let’s be off.”
She would sit down obediently at the piano on three thick encyclopedia volumes and lower her fingers to the keys. In her life she never came across any cold more piercing than the chill that flowed through her bones from the black and white teeth of the hated keyboard. Vera Ivanovna knew that the girl hated these exercises. She would sit to one side of her, watching and ceaselessly whispering something, and tears welled up in Masha’s eyes, ran down her cheeks and left cold, damp tracks.
Then she was sent to the corner room. A framed photograph of Tanya stood in there on a table, and there were many more in a cardboard box. Masha would open her exercise book and push one of her mother’s photographs between the pages, most often the one where she was standing in the doorway of a house in the countryside; to one side you could see part of a hedge and a flowering shrub, and she had such a broad smile that it barely fitted on her narrow face. It was a snapshot Sergei had taken, and the happiness of the summer morning was plain to see, and reflections of the first night they had just spent together after Tanya herself had proposed to Sergei. He had long been silently in love, but hesitating and putting the moment off, embarrassed by the shadow her father’s rank cast over her.
Masha practiced her writing, sometimes staring motionlessly at the photograph for a long time. She sat for hours at her lessons. She was not allowed out for walks for some special reason of Vera Ivanovna’s. Occasionally, Motya would take Masha with her to the shop, or the baker’s or the shoemaker’s. Nearly all the shops were downstairs on the ground floor of their apartment block, so it wasn’t a long walk. Occasionally they walked to Solyanka, where there was Masha’s favorite house, with the caryatids—the giants, as she called them. An even greater delight was that the River Yauza, the little churches, the fences around the building sites which she could see from their window on the eleventh floor suddenly became much larger, didn’t look so toy-like, but in compensation sprouted little details and attractive touches.
At night, after Motya had put her to bed, the most dreadful part began: she could not sleep; she turned over and over in the large bed and kept waiting for the moment when the door would creak and Grandma Vera would come into her room. She came in very late, at an hour which Masha had no way of knowing, wearing a cherry-red dressing gown, and with a long smooth plait down her back. She would sit beside the bed, and Masha would curl into a ball and screw up her eyes. She remembered one such evening particularly clearly because of the illuminations with which the block had been decorated for the October Revolution festivities. The light fell in yellow and red stripes, and Vera Ivanovna, sitting in a shaft of red light, moaned in a clearly audible whisper: “Murderess, little murderess. You phoned them and that’s why they set out . . . you made it all happen . . . live with it now, live with it and gloat over what you’ve done.”
When Vera Ivanovna went away, Masha could finally cry. She buried her face in the pillow and fell asleep in her tears.
On Sundays dear Alexandra, for whom Masha had been waiting all week, would finally come. Masha was handed over to her until dinnertime, a few hours. Downstairs by the entrance Ivan Isaevich would be waiting for them, Uncle Vanya, sometimes alone but more often with Nike, and they would go for an outing: to the zoo, or the planetarium, or to somewhere in Durov. The partings always proved more powerful for her than the meetings, and just the brief outing itself reminded her of other people, who had the good fortune to live in Uspensky Lane.