He even said it aloud: “The Alps.”
The old man, who seemed to be dozing, suddenly threw his head back and turned to Ilya:
“Call the stewardess, please. I’m feeling unwell.”
Ilya pressed the call button. The old man closed his eyes. He was yellowish-white, and his open mouth was gasping for air.
“Hurry … a doctor…” he wheezed.
Spasmodically, with deep, hoarse gulps, he sucked in air, then threw himself against the back of the seat. He froze, his mouth agape.
The woman next to him stared at him in horror.
The stewardess came up. She took his hand and felt for a pulse.
The woman, who was now standing in the aisle, was first to understand, and she set up an urgent peasant wail of despair: “Aaaaaah!”
Then Ilya realized that his neighbor was dead.
Edwin Yakovlevich Vinberg’s emigration was over.
DEAF-MUTE DEMONS
There is a year, or perhaps a season, in almost every person’s life, when the buds of possibility burst open, when fateful meetings take place, when paths cross, when courses and levels shift, when life rises from the depths and ascends to the heights. When Mikha was twenty-one, he met Alyona and fell in love with her so profoundly and so hopelessly that his entire former life, full of sweet girls, lighthearted and noncommittal rendezvous, and earnest, energetic nights in the dormitory, shattered like glass. Only meaningless shards and slivers of his former enthusiasms remained.
The second event that shook the foundations of his life, one no less significant, occurred a bit earlier. It involved his professional interests. At the beginning of his fourth year, Mikha didn’t exactly renounce his love of Russian literature, but he did discover one more strong attraction. Every day he rushed off to the department of defectology, where he audited classes on pedagogy of the deaf-mute taught by the renowned specialist Yakov Petrovich Rink. Rink represented a whole dynasty of specialists who had been developing speech therapies for the deaf, deaf-mute, and hard of hearing over the past century.
A friend of Mikha’s took him to Rink’s first lecture, and after several weeks Mikha was determined to devote himself to studying the pedagogy of the deaf-mute without having to abandon the department of philology. With Rink’s permission and encouragement, he took several preparatory exams and declared a double major in deaf education and philology.
At first he rushed from one department to the other, but with time he gravitated more and more toward defectology.
Perhaps an astute psychoanalyst could have ascertained the true motivation behind Mikha’s new interest, but this did not happen. The shade of the inarticulate Minna did not trouble him, and the universal sense of guilt that plagued him did not enter into it. Alyona’s arrival in his life swept away all thought of his minor amorous triumphs of the past three years, as well as his memories of this adolescent trauma. And what was there to remember, anyway?
A slow-witted, barely articulate creature, Minna had lived her twenty-seven years almost unnoticed. She never burdened anyone with her presence, and she died just as inconspicuously as she had lived. Aunt Genya viewed the death of her daughter almost as though she had been a household pet. Other people didn’t even notice that the timid, gentle creature with the weak smile, who never caused anyone any harm, had died. And Mikha recalled Catullus’s sparrow, how—what was her name?—Lesbia had wept for it.
Soon after Minna’s trestle bed and the child’s chair she always laid her clothes on before going to sleep were removed from the house, Aunt Genya was liberated from heavy cares, and with deep satisfaction and a shadow of pathological pride, she would lament from time to time, like a litany: “How much misfortune! How much misfortune has fallen on me to bear! I have been the butt of misfortune!”
Mikha had been a boon for her. From the time he moved in with her at the age of twelve, he had been tasked with going to the store, tidying the room, cleaning the communal facilities and the kitchen, as well as—and this was the most unpleasant task for him—carrying out random trivial errands for Aunt Genya, such as rushing off to the drugstore for medicine, taking half a pie to her sister Fanya and picking up a saucer of meat jelly from her other sister, Rayechka.
For almost ten years he had carried out his familial duties, uncomplaining and with a light heart. His aunt, insofar as she was able, loved her charge, and did not intend to part with him if she could help it. But, obeying her Jewish instinct for matchmaking—joining up two free valences so they wouldn’t end up in the wrong place—she occasionally introduced him to nice Jewish girls from her wide circle of family members. Her greatest misfire had occurred on this front: her own son Marlen had slipped out of her fingers and married a Russian girl. She had never been able to reconcile herself to this fact, though she admitted that “this Lida girl” was “quite suitable and decent.”
* * *
At the beginning of October, Aunt Genya invited her distant niece Ella to visit. Quiet, as curvaceous as a bottle, with bottle legs, Ella brought with her a large oval box of chocolates. Aunt Genya wouldn’t touch them, for fear of diabetes. Among her other firmly held beliefs was this one—that diabetes is caused by indulging in chocolate. She placed the box adorned with a running elk on the buffet and served bouillon.
Mikha sat submissively through all three courses of the meal, praising each of them, while the downcast Ella pushed her food around with her spoon silently. It was evident that she, too, suffered through the forced spontaneity of these meals with eligible distant male relatives, none of which culminated in the engagement that was sought. After dinner, Genya raised an eyebrow signaling that it was time for Mikha to take Ella to the metro. When he returned, his aunt, crossly shaking her doll-like head with its narrow part down the middle, said:
“You should have paid more attention to Ella. She has a good education, and she’s an only child. They have an apartment in Maryina Roshcha that you wouldn’t believe! Yes, she’s a bit older than you are, I won’t deny it. But she’s one of ours!”
Still, the last thing she wanted was to be left alone in the communal apartment with the neighbors, who used to be decent, but who had all been replaced by anti-Semites and thieves, as if they had been handpicked exclusively for her.
But at that moment Mikha was thinking only about the box of chocolates. A beautiful girl named Alyona, a first-year student from the department of graphic arts, had invited him to her birthday party. As soon as she had arrived at the institute, she began to attract attention, not so much for her beauty—her face was like those Botticelli had loved, full of bright silence and youthful androgyny—as for her remoteness and haughtiness. Everyone wanted to be friends with her, but she was like water: she slipped out of one’s grasp. Yet the previous evening, she had approached Mikha herself and invited him to her birthday party!
Mikha was not the most eligible young man in the department, since there were also several singer-songwriters, whose fame as wildly popular youthful bards was just beginning. Mikha couldn’t compete with them. He wrote poems, too; but he certainly couldn’t sing and accompany himself on the guitar. Still, he was a striking redhead, exceptionally conciliatory, who enjoyed great success among the girls, in particular those from out of town. His presence was indispensable at every student gathering or party.
Oh, he would have jumped at the chance to go to Alyona’s birthday party; but he didn’t even have the money to buy her the most modest gift. So, out of a sense of pride, he decided not to go. He had no one to borrow it from. Ilya was out of town, and he still owed Anna Alexandrovna fifteen rubles from the month before. He hadn’t taken any money from Aunt Genya since he had started receiving a student stipend. This month, he had run through his funds early.