The young couple didn’t have a wedding celebration, but they received presents from Marlen, from Alyona’s parents, and from an aunt—in the much-maligned but much-needed form of money. After her classes Alyona would scour the stores, buying new plates and pillows, taking quiet delight in her new life. Under the influence of Mikha’s inexhaustible tenderness and active passion, her heartsickness began to retreat, if not altogether heal.
And at that very moment their luck ended. Yakov Petrovich called Mikha in to inform him that his graduate studies were not going to work out. The personnel office had blocked his application. Their collaborative work would continue, however.
“We won’t abandon the dissertation, but, frankly speaking, the road ahead will be a long and fraught one.” Thus the discussion ended not with a period, but with an ellipsis.
At the end of the same month, upon the request of the director, Mikha resigned from the boarding school. She begged forgiveness, she wept, and she tried to justify her actions by saying that her first priority was to keep the boarding school open and not to put the forty-some children in jeopardy.
Mikha, who had caught the drift, said: “They called?”
Margarita Avetisovna nodded.
There was only one possible explanation: he was now in the crosshairs. Mikha resigned “for personal reasons.” Since he needed to give them two weeks’ notice of his resignation, obligatory in this case, the director suggested he spend the time looking for a new job. Two weeks later, he returned to pick up his employment records and to say good-bye to his colleagues. Everyone looked dispirited and upset. Gleb Ivanovich wasn’t there.
When Mikha asked about him, he was told that Gleb Ivanovich had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
Mikha felt an enormous void opening before him. He sensed a great change coming in his life: something completely new would now take root and grow out of this emptiness.
MILYUTIN PARK
No one knows the secret of irresistible attraction, the law that draws a particular man and a particular woman together. Ecclesiastes, at any rate, didn’t know. Medieval legend tries to account for it in the guise of a love potion. Poison, in other words. No doubt the same poison in which the omnipotent Eros soaked his operatic arrows. Modern people find the answer in hormones serving the instinct to preserve the species. Clearly, between this pragmatic goal and platonic love there is a significant gap, even a cognitive dissonance, as a more contemporary idiom might have it. The earnest task of continuing the species takes refuge in all kinds of ritual embellishment—orange blossoms, priests, seals graced with eagles, and so forth, right down to the bloody sheet hung out in the courtyard for public inspection. This aspect of love is more or less straightforward.
But where does that leave friendship? Not a single major instinct supports it. All the philosophers (men, of course—before Piama Gaidenko there were no women philosophers, unless you count the legendary Hypatia) considered friendship to be at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of values. Aristotle provides a wonderful definition, which still rings true right up to the present, in contrast to many of his ideas, which are so quaint and anachronistic as to sound ridiculous. Hence: “Friendship is a specifically human fact, the explanation and goal of which must be sought without recourse to the laws of nature or a transcendent Good extending beyond the framework of empirical existence.”
Thus, friendship is not conditioned by nature, and has no apparent goal. It consists in the search for a kindred spirit with whom to share one’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings—right down to “sacrificing one’s life.” But in order to achieve this happiness, one must feed friendship with time, time that is part and parcel of one’s own, and only, life: going for a walk down Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, for example, and drinking a beer, even if you’d prefer another beverage, since your friend likes beer; or going to his grandmother’s birthday party; or reading the same books and listening to the same music—so that eventually you create a small, warm, enclosed space together, in which jokes are understood by a single word or gesture, opinions are exchanged through a mere glance, and interaction is more intimate than anything one can achieve with someone of another sex. With rare exceptions.
But there was less and less time for friends. There were no more school breaks, walking excursions through Moscow with a favorite teacher on Wednesdays—the sublimely obligatory school-day camaraderie had ended. They came together from time to time out of the inertia of habit, but they dove into their little coves of friendship less and less often. Suddenly they discovered that life had forced them apart, and the need to share their daily experiences and events—whether large, small, or completely trivial—had exhausted itself. A telephone call once a week, once a month, or on holidays was sufficient.
Of course, this growing apart happened gradually. The history of the friendship the three friends shared had an irrevocable significance; but five or six years after graduating from school, it was possible to look back and identify the points or moments when the divergence began. Take Mikha, for instance.
Ilya could remember Mikha’s personal evolution—how he followed a trajectory of enthusiasm for the revolutionary Mayakovsky, the magical Blok, and that Pasternak who could write:
Eight volleys from the Neva,
And a ninth.
Tired, like glory.
Like—(from left and right
They lurch headlong).
Like—(the distances shout out:
we’ll get even with you yet).
Like the straining, bursting
Asunder of joints
Of oaths
Once sworn
To the dynasty …
Ilya tolerated Mikha’s revolutionary sympathies. Sanya smiled wanly. Their friendship easily withstood minor differences, divergences in the placement of accent and tone. Pierre Zand, the festival visitor they befriended, a young Russian-Belgian, troubled Mikha to the depths of his soul with his antagonism toward the Revolution. Mikha decided to establish a personal and dispassionate perspective on communism. This took more than two years. First he read Marx, then he reversed his steps, beating a retreat into the past to read the early socialists, who were all fairly accessible. After that he stumbled over Hegel, and, executing a pirouette, made a beeline for Lenin.
Marlen, his uncle (they had grown steadily closer over the years), viewed his interests with suspicion:
“You’re reading the wrong stuff, Mikha. There were many revolutionaries in our family, and they were all executed, except for Mark Naumovich. And Mark Naumovich survived because he first volunteered to serve in the NKVD, and then hightailed it out to the provinces just in time, as some sort of consultant. A very clever fellow, and a bastard if ever there was one.”
“I need to figure it out on my own,” Mikha said in his own defense.
“Well, figure it out then, figure it out,” Marlen said, conciliatory. “If you want to reinvent the wheel, it’s your business.”
Aunt Genya put a bowl of borscht in front of each of them, then served the main dish: meat patties with potatoes. Her son got three, Mikha got two, and she herself got one.
Marlen laughed, pointing at the meat patties.
“There’s your socialist equality! And everywhere you look, it’s always the same!”
Mikha racked his brains, trying to get to the bottom of things. He read and read; what he read generated many questions, and few answers. He tried to talk about socialism with Victor Yulievich, who just grimaced and said that he had no predilection for social science.
Ilya, who had one of the most inquiring and informed minds of all the people he knew, threw fuel on the fire. The most combustible, in his view, was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, the samizdat they had lost, without ever knowing what it was, in the briefcase of Pierre’s uncle Orlov, the French diplomat, in 1957. Nineteen Eighty-four made a deep impression on Mikha. He was far more receptive to the artistic word than to the dry erudition of socioeconomic scholasticism.