This fancy box on the buffet was just the thing, though! A dull-enough present, of course, but one couldn’t arrive empty-handed …
He listened to his aunt’s exhortations about marrying a Jewish girl. Then he asked whether he could take the box of chocolates to someone as a gift. His aunt had other plans for the chocolates, but Mikha turned on the charm and reminded her, as if by chance:
“The day after tomorrow I’m taking you to the cemetery; I haven’t forgotten!”
The trip to Vostryakovo Cemetery took precedence over all other forms of entertainment for her, including the theater, movies, and visits to living relatives. She had never traveled to the distant cemetery alone, however.
His aunt understood the trade-off. Mikha got the box of chocolates and ran off with the elk under his arm to Pravda Street, where Alyona lived. He arrived—and it transpired! He was in love. Helplessly and inextricably, as had happened to him once before in his childhood, when he went to Sanya’s for the first time. This time he fell in love with the household: with the head of the household, Sergei Borisovich Chernopyatov, Alyona’s father; with his wife, Valentina; with the cabbage pies, the beet salad, and the “music on the bones”—records pressed on old X-ray film. Imagine, a rousing Gershwin number resounding from a hipbone! But, most important, of course—he fell in love with Alyona, who was not at all haughty or arrogant at home, but, on the contrary, quiet and sweet, embodying all the feminine charm the world had to offer.
They lost themselves in kisses on the balcony, and a mad tenderness held in check the mad passion that flared up in Mikha at his first touch of her fragile collarbone, her delicate wrists, her limp, childlike fingers.
Some people have talents as straightforward as apples, as obvious as eggs—for mathematics, for music, for drawing, even for mushroom-picking or table tennis. Mikha’s talents were more subtle. In fact, at first glance, he seemed to have none. Rather, he had abilities: poetry, music, drawing.
His true talent was not visible to the naked eye. He was endowed with such emotional sympathy, such an unbridled, absolute capacity for empathy, that all his other qualities were subordinated to this “universal compassion.”
He fulfilled the requirements of his studies in the philological department with pleasure and ease, but his interest in defectology arose from the very depths of his personality, from his gift of empathy. From the beginning he had set his hopes on teaching literature. He hungered to continue the tradition established long ago by Victor Yulievich, and he already saw himself entering the classroom and declaiming the greatest lines of Russian poetry … into the air, into the world, into the cosmos. And the boys and girls sitting around him—some of them! some of them, at least!—would be receptive to these sounds, and the kernels of meaning they contained.
Before getting his work assignment, Mikha went to see Rink, to ask his help in finding an appointment in a school for the deaf. For who else would bestow the treasures of poetry and prose on them?
Yakov Petrovich studied Mikha through his glasses, and asked him more questions about his life than about his profession. He concluded that this was the first time in his experience that a philology student had wished to work in the area of defectology.
“There is a very good boarding school for deaf-mutes where you could be of use, and where you could broaden your skills. It’s a wonderful corrective learning institution, just outside of Moscow; but you would have to live there yourself. They need a good Russian literature and language teacher. Go there and have a look around. If you like what you see, come back and we’ll continue our discussion,” Yakov Petrovich suggested.
It took Mikha three hours to reach the school—he traveled first by commuter train to Zagorsk, then by bus, which he had to wait for, and then a half hour by foot along a forest road. It was early spring, and a light rain was falling, through which the woods showed a pale green. The rain whispered in last year’s grasses, and the new growth was already pushing up through the dead foliage. It seemed that the rustling was the delicate sound of its growing. A bird screeched at regular intervals. Perhaps it wasn’t even a bird, but a wild animal. It occurred to Mikha that the residents of this place couldn’t hear these living sounds. On the other hand, city dwellers didn’t hear them either, since the urban noise drowned them out. And a poem began to take shape in him already:
Out of silence, rain, and growing
grasses, sounds are born midst tender
da-da. Music, da-da, da-da
da-da, da-da harks the sender …
No, it wasn’t coming together.
Out of silence, rain, and growing
grasses, hark!—from embryos spring
symphonies so wild and tender,
da-da music floods surrender …
Well, it had promise. He liked exact rhymes and regretted that all of them had been used many times before. This is what he said about the well-worn railroad ties of poetry that had been laid down long ago. He enjoyed the process of seeking them, but realized that one couldn’t get very far on them. Brodsky had not yet begun his triumphal conquest of the world, compelling, through his long lines and his absolute contempt for this “tic-toc” and “da-da,” the impoverished but inspired doggerel to cease.
Now the forest ended, and the grounds of the school began. A two-story wooden house stood on a small rise surrounded by dozens of small, cottage-like structures. There wasn’t much left of the ancient fence—squat columns crowned with spheres eaten away by time were interspersed with worn gray palisades. The gate had long since vanished. Fat linden trees grew at uneven intervals—the remnants of a tree-lined avenue. It was already past lunchtime, and there was no one to be seen. He walked along the soggy, still bare earth toward the porch and knocked on the door. No one opened. He waited a bit, then the door flew open. A woman with a bucket of water and a dirty rag floating on top was standing in front of him.
He laughed and introduced himself to her. Aunt Genya, a slave to superstitions, signs, and portents, would have deemed this an auspicious beginning: the bucket was full of water, albeit dirty.
And, truly, it would have been hard to imagine a better beginning. In the director’s office three women and an older man with a small mustache were drinking tea with jam. Mikha knew the director was a woman, and he concluded that she must be the Armenian woman, who also had a small mustache.
“Hello. I’d like to talk to Margarita Avetisovna. I’m here on the recommendation of Yakov Petrovich…” Before he managed to say the last name, they all broke out in smiles, and hurried to pour him tea and serve him jam in a little dish.
Suddenly there was a knock at the door and a boy of about twelve came in. He reported something, speaking only in a language of gestures.
“What happened, Sasha?” they asked in a chorus. “Well, tell us, you know how. Speak, speak, you can do it.”
“Da dag wan awa.” He struggled to articulate the sounds.
All four of them surrounded him, and a short woman with a thin plait wrapped around her head asked him loudly, stressing every sound:
“Which dog? Nochka or Ryzhik?”
“No-ka,” the boy said.
“Nochka. Don’t worry, Sasha. She’ll come back.”
The boy made another gesture—placing one hand on another, and making an upward movement. This was a question.
“She’ll get hungry and come back for food,” the woman with the mustache said.
That has to be the director, Mikha thought.
The boy said something else with his hands.
“Listen to me, Sasha. She’ll get hungry and come back for food.”
When she made the sound “oo,” she pursed her lips, pushing them as far forward as she could.
The boy nodded and left.
“Sasha has only been here six months. And he began learning very late,” the woman with the plait said.