I took ill a couple of days later, too. I felt happiness as I sensed the inflammation creeping along my throat with every passing hour. Anastasia and I had one illness for two people. Now Anastasia came to my room and read aloud to me, lying next to me. We understood that what was happening between us went slightly beyond the bounds of taking care of the ill, but we never spoke of that and made no attempt to call it anything. If you call it something, you will frighten it off. If you define it, you ruin it. And we wanted to preserve it.
FRIDAY
One autumn, about two years before graduating from grammar school, Seva came to see me in the Petersburg (which was then already Petrograd) Side. His face was enigmatic. The thing is, he was born with a very expressive face. It was rapt, crafty, understanding, or sad at various times, but this time it was not even a face, it was a mystery. Seva went into my room right away, without saying a word. After asking if there was anyone else in the apartment (there was not), he locked the door behind him with a key anyway. That key had been sticking out of the lock for many years and nobody ever used it. I would not have been surprised if it hadn’t turned, thanks to its inherent pointlessness (it had grown into the door, crumbled) or simply because that bungler Seva was turning it. But the key turned.
Seva tilted his head and leaned theatrically against the wall. The sides of the small traveling bag he was pressing to his stomach moved in time with his quickened breath. After restoring his breathing, Seva opened the bag and took out a sheaf of papers.
‘Here…’
He gave me the entire sheaf, though the contents of all the sheets were identical. They turned out to be news-sheets. The news-sheets called for an immediate change in political power.
‘Where did you get these?’
A man approached me when I was on my way to the grammar school. A stranger. He asked me to distribute them to students.’
And what did you say?’
‘I said I’d distribute them. This concerns saving the Fatherland, you do understand. And in circumstances like that, of course, I…’
A bottle of wine turned up in the bag, too, along with the news-sheets. Seva placed it on the table with a confident thud.
‘Did he give you the bottle, too?’
‘No, I filched the bottle at home. To mark the beginning of the revolutionary struggle. Bring some glasses.’
He had not commanded like that in a long time. I brought glasses. Seva was simply glowing from the realization of his involvement in a mystery. After we drank down one glass each, I asked him if he had read the novel The Possessed. For some reason Seva began to speak to me condescendingly and nasally:
‘You know, there’s no need to bring novels into it, all right? That’s all in the past, a hundred years ago. There’s an objective necessity now for taking power into one’s…’
‘Fine, no novels. Coup d’état attempt. Five years of hard labor, if not ten. Farewell, grammar school; farewell, Petersburg. Are you prepared for that?’
It became clear right then that my cousin was not prepared for that. It was only because I had begun to pity him that I did not laugh out loud. Seva was rosy-cheeked after the wine but paled noticeably and his lips, as it happens, began quivering:
‘It just seemed to me…’
I could say that the hair on Seva’s head stood on end because of a breeze from the window. Perhaps I will say that: what that expression covers does correspond to his condition. Seva was still speaking muddled-headedly and I was looking at him without listening. Why, I thought to myself, had I scared him so much? Why did I interrupt his flight – when, in all seriousness, who would touch him, a grammar-school student? Well, in the worst case, they’d flog him, but even that was unlikely.
Seva was so upset that he did not even drink all the wine. He left the news-sheets and the bottle with me and requested that I destroy them. Of course I destroyed them because neither alcohol nor coups attracted me. I took the bottle with the unfinished wine out to the rubbish bin – it turned out Seva had filched it for naught. I threw the news-sheets in the stove and those nuggets of revolutionary thought burned without a trace. Their contents completely escaped my memory.
What remained was a warm September day that strode into my room through an open window. An open window in autumn is such a rarity. The quivering of a palm on a carved (roses and lilies) stand.
A slanted ray of sun that alit on the desk. In focus: a stack of books. A light, thin coating of dust unnoticeable without the sun. A ladybug on a history book.
SATURDAY
Lera Amfiteatrova asked:
‘So do you want me?’
I was seeing Lera for the first time but answered in the affirmative, for how else could I answer at the age of fifteen? It was the so that struck me more than anything: it aspired to be the result of some sort of communication but, as it happened, there had been no such communication. There had been several glances – mine – at a young woman standing at the other end of a parlor. She caught them. There was more provocation in how she did that than in the glances themselves. Did I want her? I don’t know. Maybe I did want her. But I looked at her because she was unusual. I knew from the courageous cut of her dress that she was an emancipated woman.
In our class, people didn’t hold back when talking about emancipated women, describing, in detail, their outward appearance and moral laxity (Lera presented all that immediately), so I identified her without difficulty. She behaved in full accordance with the commonplace description, with the exception, perhaps, of not having short hair; she fulfilled her part, as they say, ‘to a T.’ What was surprising was that I, someone not at all remarkable, became the object of her attention. Or maybe that’s not surprising. Why display your progressiveness to someone who is already fairly progressive?
She took me decisively by the hand and led me toward the exit as music played in the parlor. It seemed that we were moving in time with that music and that our rhythmic movement was paralyzing what remained of my will. I am now attempting, unsuccessfully, to recall what parlor this was, what music it was. That doesn’t matter anyway; it all disappeared immediately. I remember Lera’s sweaty palm, despite the fresh breeze outside. Wandering through dark, walled-in courtyards in search of the apartment her girlfriend had lent to her (she said us). Lera held the apartment key at the ready in her free hand, and that hand reached in the direction we were moving. Both the key, taken out in advance, and the reaching hand gave our motion a striving as well as an even greater degree of theatricality.
We soared to the top floor on pocked steps. Here, Lera finally used her key and we entered a small room. The only furniture was a bed, table, and chair. Behind the chair was the white flash of a small door that apparently led to a kitchen. Lera walked right up to me. She was slightly taller than I and my nose drew in her moist breath. She tilted her head. Touched her lips to mine. Ran her tongue along my lips. Slowly turned her back to me.
‘Now unlace my dress…’
Ash-brown ringlets quivered on her neck. I began unlacing.
‘Are you unlacing a dress for the first time or what? And is all this also for the first time?’
‘All this for the first time…’
Lera sighed deeply. The dress was unlaced and removed. After the dress there followed a light blouse and a petticoat with flounces. Pantaloons and a chemise. A corset that I also needed to unlace (once again to Lera’s sighs). I fiddled for a long time with garter fasteners: in the end, Lera undid them when she took off the corset. She sat on the chair. I crouched and removed the stockings from her legs. My hands with the black stockings descended along Lera’s white skin. Surprisingly white. Women did not sun themselves then.