She’s made up her mind and started saving up the pills the doctor prescribed for her when she got out of detox last time.
How’d that come about? Well, he’d been drinking and living his high life for a few months, half-a-year maybe. Not a penny of his wages made it home. That day he came in already loaded, naturally, and it was his payday, she knew his schedule. All right. Dang it, she just had to have this bright idea to get him even more addled and then trick whatever was left of the money out of him. Pull it out of his pocket if she had to. She poured him some, and, the idiot, had one herself – for her nerves. He got woozy all right, but she lost it a bit too. So when she asked, “Where’s the money?” he just started laughing, and then swung at her. She called the police. Well, by the time they got there the son of a bitch had his teeth brushed, and his head freshly washed under the shower, and as soon as they rang the doorbell, he grabbed a pot of pea-soup from the stove and flipped it onto his head. The police comes in and he’s standing there hollering, “Help me guys, she’s blinded me!”
Who? What? How? No one believed her.
“Did you drink?” they asked.
She said she did.
“The man brings you money, what else do you want, stupid?”
She looked: there was the money, on top of the fridge – he managed to lay it out for the cops. She screamed. Something possessed her – she shook and almost threw up – and he just went on with his show, groaning and moaning under the pot. She kept screaming, and screamed at the whole lot of them, as it turned out, enough to land her in the slammer for fifteen days.
Her mother took little Seryozha to stay with her, of course. When she got out, the walls were bare: he’d sold everything and drank through the money. There he was, waiting for her on the couch, grinning:
“Shall we start a new life or what?”
Her knees buckled under her... she fell onto her knees and wailed, and such love came over them both as they hadn’t had since the days when they were making their little Vasya.
Vasya was how it all started. He ran out into the street and got run over by a car. And he was gone, on a trip for work. Her neighbors, kindly souls, made sure he knew she had a party that day – ‘twas her girlfriend’s birthday. And that was it. He beat her – he beat her a lot, and cursed her, then started drinking.
And what about her? She was the mother, was she not grieved? She had to live with her guilt. She had to live with the memory of it – but wasn’t there supposed to be forgiveness in the world somewhere? She was ready to beg for it, do whatever it took when she came out of the detox.
He’s not a man any more – a wild beast from the forest has more heart. And little Seryozha is growing up and watching all this. In the evenings they sit together behind the locked door – she’s got two locks, a guy from work put them in for her – and there he is, banging on the door, yelling, “I’ll kill you!” He’s started stalking her too. And anything she ever does is a crime. And she’s ruined his life.
No, this has to stop. She’s made up her mind – she’s saving up the pills. He’s an alcoholic – she is scared. Men like that – how many people have they killed already? And children too. “Let’s sell the flat and live apart,” she said. Nope, no go. He doesn’t come to sleep with her, but wants to know her every step anyway. And how can she sleep if he’s at the door every damn night... She’s not 20 anymore.
After her detox, he toed the line for a week. He was like before. Then they went to the movies on Sunday and had a bit of champagne after. That was it. He hasn’t been dry since.
If she’d turn him in to the LTP – he’d kill her.20 She’s afraid of him. She can’t forget what she did. She has to live with that. Girls said, screw it, find someone new, let the new guy beat him up. But, how to put it? It’s not about beating him up. The guy who put in the locks for her – he didn’t do it for free, but bumming from man to man like that... it’s not what she’s after. She’s got to stop it once and for all. Autopsy, or no autopsy – she’s got to do it.
Just yesterday, he barely made it – crawled up to her door and lay there breathing, stinking of burnt rubber – they must be getting high on formaldehyde glue. No, she’s got to do it!
In the middle of night she woke up; at first, she couldn’t tell what was happening. He was screaming, howling – she thought, it was the usual thing, but then he fell out into the hallway, she took one look at him and – Lord Almighty! She called the ambulance. They pumped his stomach, but it was no good – he’d drunk acetic acid concentrate. He had some in a vodka bottle under his bed. The doctors decided he’d drunk it by mistake, but she knew better – he’d been threatening to do it for a long time. So he made good on his threat – and she didn’t have to use the pills.
But at the funeral, when the priest said to say goodbye, the girls couldn’t pull her away from the coffin – she was screaming. Steam trains used to scream like that when she was little – it was frightful to hear them up close.
20. LTP stands for “Labor therapy preventative clinic,” a variety of Soviet penal institution which basically amounted to a forced-labor detox facility.
Fortress
Through the thin air of an early morning, through the city drenched in sunlight, down its streets flush with the new greenery of cottonwoods and lindens, among sparse pedestrians, moves a small man. He is not young, but neither is he old enough that one could call him “grandpa.” More than any physical signs of age, it is his appearance that ages him – a look he adopted once and has stuck to ever since, having fixed it in his peculiar clothes: a small gray hat, wrinkled but donned carefully and handled lovingly, like an adopted mutt in a lonely home. Then – a pair of glasses with special lenses: barely concave, and with thick glass disks cut into the middle – and his eyes behind them, washed out with work, eyes that sometimes look gullible but more often detached, almost haughty in their refusal to focus on the quotidian. Lower lies the collar of the man’s thick, unseasonably warm coat, with a thick belt and a fat black button that locks the mighty gates of this worsted fortress. Lower still are trousers that lack any conclusive personality, and heavy boots of the ugly stitched variety cranked out by the local factory. A brown briefcase in his hand.
Thus he moves, through a spring-time city, as if completely oblivious to the kind of pure beauty that descends on it only once a year, this armored little man – because he does not walk, not at all, he has to move, to heft and roll. He is a fortress, walled off and locked to the outside world not because he does not give a damn about it, but, it seems, because, having once detached himself from this world, he sees himself as having very little to do with it. He advances with a slight forward tilt – not like a man bent down by illness or frailty, but rather like someone fighting against a strong wind: his work sitting daily behind a desk has given him this shape.
The little man bears right from the bridge, past The Young Sailors Club, through the back alley of Public Bathhouse No. 1, through stacks of the brewery’s old crates, until he makes his way to the five-domed Church of Jacob and Anna, “on the gorges.” He climbs to the gallery, pushes the heavy door of the city archives open, enters and greets the guard.
Pavel Anatolyevich Ogorodnikov always arrives 20 minutes before the start of the workday. He takes off his coat neatly and hangs it on a hanger in the wardrobe. He remains in a checkered jacket, worn over a checked flannel shirt closed at the throat with a solid tie with a pin. Then he puts on his over-sleeves. He pulls out his pencils and pens, his razor and his pen-knife, his sharpener and his erasers – the red one with powdered glass and the gray Coh-i-nor one with the tiny mammoth on it, his black-ink fountain pen, and a second one exactly like the first – a spare, just in case. Then: a light switch clicks; a green-shaded desk lamp comes on, as it always does, even on a bright spring day, even in the middle of the stuffy Stargorod summer: Pavel Anatolyevich’s nook is walled off from the archive’s shelves with large oak wardrobes moved here from the diocesan offices in March of 1919. He flexes and warms his fingers. He sits down to his desk, pushes his chair in, nice and tight, and takes the first folder from the pile on his right: opens it, leafs through, counts pages, checks the count against the last inventory. Then he studies it closer – he savors it, reads it, moving his lips along the more rhythmic formulas: “And by the order of our lord the Tsar it was decreed to carry out such acts in perpetuity...” or “and the cannoneers’ children, should they resist learning and despise letters, to be found and, at first, warned with ferocity,” or “by the mercy of God and through your Lordship’s blessed governance this was so done. And I, your humblest servant, do now have the honor of laying this petition at your Lordship’s feet,” or “a Pyramid is a Body, sometimes dense and sometimes vacant inside, with a base that is broad and commonly of four corners, ending on top in a pinnacle.” Who can write like that today?