They put a folding bed beside Masha’s, and it was usually Nike who slept there. She was better than her mother at watching over Masha’s fragile sleep and, if she was disturbed, could get back to sleep again right away. Nike was altogether more help to her mother than her older sister Vera, who was a college student, passionately interested in scholarship of every description, and, in addition to her studies at the institute, attending courses in German, Alexandra thought, or in some obscure branch of aesthetics.
Nike was twelve and had already attained a good height and acquired all sorts of feminine skills; a cluster of little spots in the middle of her forehead testified that the time was approaching when her gifts would be called upon.
Masha moved to Uspensky Lane just as Nike was losing interest in the traditional amusement of little girls, playing with dolls, and the live Masha promptly replaced all the Katyas and Lyalyas she had been practicing her inchoate maternal instincts on at such length. The whole contingent of dolls along with a pile of little coats and dresses which nimble-fingered Alexandra never tired of sewing for them passed to Masha, and Nike now felt herself the matriarch of a large family consisting of her daughter Masha and lots of doll granddaughters.
Many years later, after Katya had been born, Nike confessed to Alexandra that she must have used up the first flush of her maternal feelings on her cousin, because she never felt for her own children a comparable all-consuming love, the taking of another person so completely into her heart as she did in the first years Masha lived in their house. It was particularly true of that first year, when her whole life was colored by compassion for Masha, holding her hand at night, braiding her hair in the morning, and taking her out after school for walks down Strastnoy Boulevard. Nike occupied an enormous place in Masha’s life, which it was difficult to define: she was her best friend, her elder sister, the best at everything, ideal in every way.
The following year, when Masha went back to school again, Nike would take her there in the morning and Ivan Isaevich would collect her in the afternoon. After her classes he would either take her home or cart her off with himself to the theater.
Soon after Masha’s arrival Alexandra’s illustrious patroness died, and she stopped working at the theater. Now she was managing a small private atelier which dressed the government’s wives. It was an illegal business activity, but Alexandra still had certain backers from her earlier years.
The crepe de Chine offcuts from vast dresses for government officials’ wives went to provide outfits for the dolls, but both Nike and Masha developed a lifelong aversion to anything pink, light blue, flounced, or pleated. When they were a little older, both of them took to wearing men’s shirts, and jeans when those became available in Russia.
Despite dressing in what seemed to Alexandra a thoroughly unfeminine manner, by the age of sixteen Nike was a runaway success. The telephone rang night and day, and Ivan Isaevich looked at Alexandra, expecting that any moment now she would put a stop to her daughter’s turbulent lifestyle.
Alexandra, however, seemed if anything to be delighting in Nike’s conquests. At the end of the ninth grade Nike embarked on a headlong romance with a youth poet who had become wildly fashionable, and without finishing her last term flounced off with him to Koktebel, announcing this ex post facto by telegram when she was already in Simferopol.
Masha had become Nike’s confidante from the age of eleven, and received her confessions with secret horror and admiration. Nike raked in pleasures large and small with both arms, and any sour little berries or pips she just spat out without giving them a second thought. She also spat out, as it happened, her schooling.
Alexandra did not tell her off, did not go in for senseless dressings down, and, mindful of the days of her own youth, quickly found Nike a place in a college of theater design where she had good contacts from when she worked in the theater. Nike did a bit of drawing, passed the exams with the requisite Grade Fours, and joyfully threw out her school uniform. A year later she was already more or less married.
Masha was now the last child of elderly parents, and the entire life of the family revolved around her. Her night fears had stopped, but her early contact with the dark abyss of madness left her with a subtle awareness of the mystical, a sensitivity toward the world, and an artistic imagination: all the things which go into creating an aptitude for poetry. By the age of fourteen she was wildly enthusiastic about Pasternak’s poetry, adored Akhmatova, and was writing secret poems in a secret notebook.
CHAPTER 10
Toward evening, clouds built up over the mountains in the place known as Rotting Dell, and in the house an atmosphere built up of silent expectation. Nike was expecting Butonov to look in. As she saw it, after their nocturnal romp it was for him to make the next move. The more so since she could not remember whether she had told him she was preparing to leave.
Masha was waiting too, her expectation all the more tense since she could not decide who she wanted to see more: her husband Alik who was taking some of his holiday entitlement to come down for a few days, or Butonov. She could still see him running down the hill, leaping over the thorn bushes and jumping up and down on the scree. Perhaps her infatuation might indeed have been dispelled if she had sat in the kitchen and talked to him.
“He’s completely thick,” she recalled Nike’s words, resorting to a saving but meaningless logic which proposed that someone who was completely thick couldn’t be the object of an infatuation.
The person most acutely tormented by expectation was little Liza. That morning, after all her petty squabbling and displeasure with Tanya the day before, she had discovered that really she couldn’t live without her. She had been waiting all day for her to come, pestering everyone, and now in the evening, tired of waiting, was wringing her hands and throwing a tantrum. Nike never took Liza’s excessive demands on life too seriously, but this time she smiled: she too was having an affair of the heart. “She’s just like me. If I want something, I want it now.”
And right now the wishes of mother and daughter partly coincided. Both were eager to continue their romance.
“Oh, do stop it. Get dressed and let’s go to see your Tanya,” Nike mollified her daughter, who ran to put on her best dress.
With the buttons on the back of her dress undone and with a whole armful of toys, Liza returned to Nike in the kitchen to ask which toy she could give to Tanya.
“Whichever one you don’t mind parting with,” Nike smiled.
Medea looked at her tear-stained granddaughter and thought to herself, “So hot-blooded. How enchanting she is.”
“Liza, come here. I’ll do up your buttons,” Medea commanded, and the little girl obediently came over and turned her back.
It was difficult to get the small buttons into the even smaller buttonholes. Her fair hair still had that familiar sweet baby smell.
Fifteen minutes later they were at Nora’s, sitting in her little house decked with arrangements of wisteria and tamarisk. The tiny summer house had a Ukrainian coziness about it, was cleanly whitewashed, and the earthen floor was covered with mats.
Liza had hidden the hare she had brought under her skirt and was trying to intrigue Tanya, but Tanya had her eyes down and was eating her porridge. Nora, as ever, was complaining mildly that they had got very tired yesterday, that the sun had been too hot, that the walk had really turned out to be very long. She went on and on. Nike sat by the window constantly glancing over toward the owners’ residence.