It was 1953, not yet March, and the anti-Semitic campaign was raging. In those rotten times, the eighth of him that was Jewish moaned in horror, and the fourth of him that was Georgian burned with shame.
Victor Yulievich was a man of mixed ancestry. He had a Georgian name, he was registered as Russian, but he in fact had very little Russian blood. His Georgian grandfather had been married to a German woman; they had studied together in Switzerland, and Victor’s father, Julius, had been born there. The ancestry of Ksenia Nikolayevna, Victor’s mother, was no less exotic. Her father, the product of the union of an exiled Pole and a Jewish girl, one of the first females to become a trained field doctor, had married a priest’s daughter. This ecclesiastical blood was the sole source of Victor’s Russianness.
From his Georgian grandfather he inherited his musical talent. From his German grandmother, who carefully concealed her origins and with prudent foresight registered herself as Swiss upon her arrival in Tiflis in 1912, he inherited his rational cast of mind and his prodigious memory. His Jewish grandmother gave him her thick hair and small bones; and from his Vologda grandmother, he got his light-gray northern eyes.
Ksenia Nikolayevna, who was early widowed, was the only surviving descendant of two family lines that had gone extinct during the Revolution. She would carefully wipe dust from bookshelves, battle clothes moths, and water the orange marigolds that bloomed nearly year-round on her windowsill.
She had two favorite things in life: taking care of her son, and painting silk handkerchiefs to sell. She was also good at frying meat patties and making French toast. After Vika (that was what she called him—almost like a girl) returned from the front, she quickly learned to do things for him he couldn’t manage with just one hand: slice bread, butter it when butter was to be had. In the mornings, she would make shaving lather for him out of soap.
The one thing that was categorically absent in Victor Yulievich was a proud sense of belonging to some particular people or ethnic group. He felt like an outcast and a blue blood, in equal measure. The Jew-baiting that was endemic to the times was anathema to him primarily on aesthetic grounds: ugly people dressed in ugly clothing whose behavior was ugly, too. Life outside the bounds of literature was harsh and abusive, but the world of books offered living thought, and feeling, and learning. It was impossible to bridge these two realms, and he retreated farther and farther into literature. Only the children he taught could make the nauseating reality outside of books bearable.
And also women. He loved beautiful women. They flashed through his life like brief festivities, often in succession, sometimes even parallel to one another, and all of them were equally beautiful to him.
It must be said that women liked him, too. He was handsome, and even his physical defect (this took him some time to realize) was attractive in its own way. Beautiful women would fall for him not just for the obvious reason that there were fewer men than necessary for the purposes of reproduction, as a veterinarian might put it. What made him especially attractive to women was their mistaken assumption that he would belong to them completely, now and forever, because of his disability.
They were wrong. He had no intention of handing over exclusive rights to himself to anyone, which marriage implied.
In the early twentieth century, Bunin, Kuprin, and Chekhov, in his “Lady with a Dog,” all wrote about “profane” love, a still largely unexplored territory in Russian literature: the sudden blooming of desire, adultery, sexual relations—all that the nineteenth century had deemed “vulgar.”
Not one of these writers was aware of the primary problem of our postwar era, however: the problem of territory, which preoccupied the devotees of divine love, and lovers with the most primitive longings and aspirations, alike. Where? Where could a person who lived in a single room with his mother arrange a lovers’ tryst? Where, in a city without hotels, could one experience mutual “sunstroke”* with a lady friend? There wasn’t even a narrow berth to be had for such purposes. Well, perhaps in summer, en plein air; but summers are so brief in our latitudes.
Bringing a girl home and entertaining her behind the tapestry curtain that divided the male, filial half of the room from the female half occupied by his mother was unthinkable. Renting a room just for trysts was both distasteful and expensive. Borrowing the key to the room of one of his single friends was awkward. Fastidiousness stood guard over Victor Yulievich’s morality.
But he lucked out. All his girlfriends had places at their disposal. Lidochka, a divorcee he saw sometimes, with an elegant neck and beautiful breasts, had her own room. Then there was Tanya the tomboy, who was diminutive and seemed to be walking on springs. Her husband worked as an actor in Saratov, and she rented a room on Sretenka Street within walking distance of Victor’s place. There was also Verochka, a well-educated translator of French, who would take him to her parents’ empty dacha.
He never took a single one of these women home with him to meet his mother. Ksenia Nikolayevna couldn’t abide other women. Mother and son lived peacefully together, and Victor Yulievich wasn’t trying to change that arrangement.
On the morning of March 2, they were eating breakfast—French toast, soft and tender on the inside, crisp on the outside. Ksenia Nikolayevna had cut it up into small pieces for her Vika. This kind of meticulous care, sometimes quite gratuitous, took her back to the days when Vika was still a small boy, she was still young and pretty, and her husband was still alive.
She made the tea strong, just as her late husband had preferred it. Their peaceful breakfast was suddenly interrupted by an official announcement informing the nation of Stalin’s illness. Ksenia Nikolayevna threw her hands up, and Victor’s face jerked. He was silent for a moment, then said, “I swear he kicked the bucket. They’ll try to pull the wool over our eyes for a week, then they’ll admit it.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Why impossible? It’s happened before. When Alexander the First died in Taganrog, a courier was sent to Petersburg with news of his death, and even after the courier had made it as far as Moscow, Golitsyn ordered bulletins to be made up and distributed about the state of the Tsar’s health. For a whole week the city police spread this disinformation.”
“Oh, come now! Wherever did you hear such a thing?”
“I first came upon it in the notes of Prince Kropotkin, he wrote about these very bulletins. Later, in the History Library, I found the bulletins themselves. Compose your face, madame, and simulate grief. Change is on the way.”
“I’m scared,” she whispered. “Vika, I’m scared.”
“Don’t worry. Things can’t get any worse.”
And he left for school. A tense silence gripped the teachers’ lounge. No one spoke louder than a whisper, if at all. He greeted the others, took up his attendance book, and went to see his boys.
As he opened the door to his classroom, the Hand began to recite, and the din died away.
Some say a cavalry corps,
some infantry, some again
will maintain that the swift oars
of our fleet are the finest
sight on dark earth; but I say
that whatever one loves, is.
This is easily proved: did
not Helen—she who had scanned
the flower of the world’s manhood—
choose as first among men one
who laid Troy’s honor in ruin?
warped to his will, forgetting
love due her own blood, her own
child, she wandered far with him …*
“Now, who can tell me what a lyric is?” the teacher said, when the lids of the desks had all closed with a thump and it had gone quiet.