I was at the hospital at 1.30.I walked around the building, attempting to guess which windows are Anastasia’s. I remember that the glass in her room had cracks stuck together with strips of paper. But the hospital windows abounded with those strips, they were all over the place – how could you guess? Of course Andersen’s story and the chalk crosses surfaced in my memory. My grandmother read it to me before bed. The reading lost its intonation and then its sound, too, as she read further into the story. Of the two of us, my grandmother would fall asleep first.
Nastya came at exactly two: now that’s precision. She was fragrant with some unfamiliar aromas, delicate and almost imperceptible. Women smelled different in previous times: how could I not recall Anastasia’s hair here? Maybe I’m old-fashioned but that wave of freshness that… I seem to be confused.
What I mean is this. When we sat down on the bench to put on our shoe covers, Nastya leaned back slightly and my face ended up at the back of her head as she was straightening that strange footwear over her sandals: the smell of Anastasia’s hair had broken through Nastya’s delicate perfume! I involuntarily moved closer to her and she turned around right then, as if she sensed everything with the back of her head and caught me in my motion. I blushed: she had sensed and caught me. And might be interpreting everything incorrectly.
A surprise awaited Nastya and me: Anastasia had been transferred to a private room. The hospital’s chief physician came down to greet us in the lobby in order to take us there. He’s a large figure, thickset, with a big head. He is not bowlegged, however, I noted. A white lab coat was thrown over his three-piece suit. There was a stethoscope on his neck: who does he listen to in his office? I wonder.
‘I’m the chief physician of this hospital,’ he said and touched a badge on his lab coat: ‘Chief Physician.’
He smelled of coffee so it was obvious what he had been torn away from. He smelled of a cigarette, too. I had to think he had hurriedly stubbed it out in an ashtray when they’d called him from downstairs. And why, one might ask, did they call? Why did they transfer her to a private room? Had they interpreted my closed eyes as an expression of horror, as my full lack of acceptance of living conditions at the hospital?
‘Even under our complex conditions, we decided to provide Voronina with her own room. The decision was natural, if you consider…’
He was primarily addressing me and only rarely Nastya. I nodded but was not listening, entranced by the rhythm of all the doors flying past us. One of the doors opened and we saw Anastasia. On some sort of technically advanced bed, not even a bed but a vehicle with numerous handles, buttons, and wheels. In snow-white linens. In the center of the room.
It was a strange sight. Anastasia was a part of ordinary life when she was lying in the overcrowded stinking room. She was floating, as it were, in the stream of a daily routine that was doleful but natural. Now she was no longer part of something larger. She was juxtaposed against something larger, like any object pulled from life. The monument in the center of a public square, the coffin in the middle of a church. And Anastasia was also already apart from the realm of bodily discharges. When Nastya took out fresh towels, they told her she need not wash her grandmother any longer; they said they would wash her themselves.
Grandmother.
WEDNESDAY
It was sunny when I woke up. I opened the window: warm weather. Nastya called at around eleven and proposed we meet at metro stop Sportivnaya in an hour. It turns out that metro stop is right near my building, by St Prince Vladimir’s Cathedral. Nastya was already standing there when I came out. With a gray canvas bag and a sweater tossed over the bag. Her shoulders uncovered. Her hair was down, as Anastasia’s was when she would go out to the kitchen in the middle of the night nearly a century ago. I (a gentleman) took Nastya’s bag; a pink streak remained on her shoulder. There were barely discernible freckles around the stripe. Maybe Anastasia had those, too; I had not seen her shoulders. Although no, I had seen them, the day before yesterday.
We went into the metro and Nastya bought tokens.
‘I’ve never ridden on the metro before.’
‘You haven’t missed much.’
We rode down a moving staircase, boarded an underground train, exited it, boarded another train, and this was all for the first time. It seems that I truly hadn’t missed much. It particularly annoys me that there are speakers on all around, for advertising. You can turn away from posters but how can you get away from the sound? I pressed my ears; Nastya laughed.
After leaving the metro, we ended up on a walkway made of concrete squares. I was walking this leg of the journey for the first time. To the left there stretched a row of unpainted garages, to the right a wasteland with stunted birch trees planted in a line. In the midst of dried-out mud with tire tracks, these birches were not nice to look at. Their life was torture. Their squalid flirtatiousness was bleaker than the garages’ rust, which at least had no pretenses. We were walking through a Petersburg that I did not yet know. The hospital arose in front of us about twenty minutes later.
Anastasia was nicely dressed but unresponsive, as before. Sometimes she opened her eyes and it seemed she would begin speaking at any moment. But she did not speak. Only labored breathing escaped from her sunken lips. A nurse was keeping house in the room for the first several minutes (the glassy-metallic clinking of a tray), but then she went out. We sat on chairs to Anastasia’s left. I took her by the hand and pressed lightly. Anastasia opened her eyes. And closed them. Her hand remained in mine. My fingers cautiously drew her fingers apart – we had loved doing that at one time.
When I was convinced that everyone had left the apartment in the mornings, I would go to her room and sit next to the bed. Of course she heard me coming in and taking the chair – I did see her eyelids quivering. We both knew she was not sleeping but that moment when her blue eyes opened was dear to us. We both wanted me to be the first person she saw. I would bend and kiss her eyes, feeling her lashes with my lips. Anastasia would take a hand out from under the blanket and slowly, as if only half-awake, move it toward me. The hand was thin, with dark blue veins, like a special bed snake. Our fingers would join and press against each other, sometimes until it was painful, until something cracked, and only my thumb would remain free and with that – in spite of the pain, or maybe even because of it – I would stroke Anastasia’s hand.
‘My grandmother once said the reason for the catastrophe was some Zaretsky,’ Nastya quietly uttered. ‘That all the troubles began with his denunciation.’
‘One could put it that way…’
I felt her gaze.
‘Or could it be otherwise?’
‘I cannot rule out that everything began even earlier. It’s just unclear exactly when.’
Nastya took me by the arm on the way to the metro. And that was nice.
THURSDAY
Nastya and I met at Sportivnaya again and went to the hospital. I forgot to put on my glasses and people recognized me in the metro. They asked for my autograph, even several at once. We got out at the next station and I rooted around in my bag for a long time: the glasses were found after all. There were television crews at the hospital when we arrived; Nastya noticed them from a distance. I took off my glasses so as not to reveal my alternate image. We walked through a formation of journalists and I didn’t utter a single word. Once we had entered the hospital, a dark-haired young woman with a microphone moved to greet me. I could have walked past her, too, but I stopped. Something about her face won me over.