The body was removed later that evening, and the three grown boys sat together. It was almost as if they fused into a single being—with their shared thoughts, feelings, and memories, similarly devastated, similarly forlorn. In the presence of Sanya and Mikha, Ilya’s third eye, or fourth, or whichever one it was—the organ of warmth and sympathy—opened up in him, and they all seemed to breathe the same air, to suffer the same grief.
The funeral was strange in its unevenness and incongruity. A will was discovered in which Anna Alexandrovna gave very precise instructions about how she wanted to be buried. She wanted a funeral service to be held in the Church of Peter and Paul by the Yauza Gates.
There were many people. They distracted Sanya from Anna Alexandrovna, who lay like a white island among the black human waves.
Along with friends and family, the academy directors were present, too—looking puzzled and out of place in their uniforms with blue shoulder straps. Students also came. In those years, they were no longer Chinese, but Cubans and Africans. Anna Alexandrovna had taught them Russian very well. They brought her a pine wreath with a black-and-red ribbon. The wreath chafed Sanya’s eyes.
At the head of the coffin stood Vasily Innokentievich, his gray hair giving off sparks, his face crumpled. Liza was not with him. She was on a concert tour in Germany. Ten or twelve old-lady friends—Evgenia Danilovna, a couple of her gymnasium friends, Eleonora Zorakhovna with two aristocratic white roses—mingled with former colleagues from various walks of life and with Sanya’s friends. Ilya brought Olga. Near them stood Tamara Brin, granddaughter of Nuta’s late girlfriend. Tamara’s face was a rare Levantine type that was instantly recognizable. Sanya remembered her—she had been invited to one of his birthday parties in childhood.
The pallid Mikha stood next to Sanya, and quietly wept into the mohair scarf that Anna Alexandrovna had given him long ago for one of his birthdays. Next to Ilya stood his wife—pale, strawberry-blond, holding hyacinths in her hand. From time to time Sanya’s gaze would come to rest on a thickset man with bushy eyebrows and a broad face. He stood by Sanya’s mother, and for some reason gripped her arm possessively. It was her intended, whom Sanya was seeing for the first time. Why had his mother brought this man along?
* * *
Sanya observed everything happening as if at a remove, like watching it through thick glass. The dead face of his grandmother seemed like an artist’s forgery. Her beauty had taken on a kind of ultimate form, and this absolutely superfluous beauty inspired uncertainty about the world of the living, so bustling and unattractive.
From a side recess, a priest emerged and began the service. Evgenia Danilovna thrust a burning candle into Sanya’s hand. The voice of the priest mingled with the voices of the choir, a music that Sanya had never heard before. It commanded attention, because it contained something very significant, but ineffable.
The priest, who looked Greek, offered prayers with profound attention and without any shortcuts. The whole funeral mass seemed interminable. Sanya noticed that the voice of the priest blended in beautifully with the singing, and the subtle sounds—the crackle of the candles, coughing, soft sobs—also enhanced it. The instrumentation was exquisite. When the candles were extinguished, Sanya thought that the service had ended. But the priest again began reading something out loud, and the choir began to sing again. Sanya was transported by the sounds, the smells, and the sheen of light on the icon settings to a place that, until now, only music had been able to take him.
The choir fell silent, and the priest said that the close friends and relatives could take their leave of the departed. Everyone began to move, forming a line to the coffin.
Anna Alexandrovna hated lines. She said that half her life had been spent standing in line: for bread, milk, potatoes, soap, tickets, letters. She had even perfected a means of defense: she repeated poetry to herself that she knew by heart.
She would say, laughing, that the Soviet authorities had helped her train her memory, forcing her to stand in line so long. She had no doubt never imagined that on her final day on earth there would be such a long line of people waiting to bid her farewell.
Anna Alexandrovna had requested to be buried at the Donskoi Monastery, at her grandfather’s grave. The body was cremated at the Donskoi Crematorium. The monastery cemetery had been closed for a long time already, and it was only possible to bury the urn two weeks later.
It was not a grave, but a crypt; but it had collapsed so long ago that it was only possible to bury her on top of it, next to the listing tombstone. Her grandfather’s name was an aristocratic one, but not very well known.
Unlike the funeral service, there were few people at the burial—only the closest friends and relatives. Vasily Innokentievich stood next to Sanya and kept wanting to say something to him, but couldn’t find the right moment. When everything was over and they were all walking out of the monastery gates, he caught Sanya by the hand and said, very quietly and clearly:
“Sanya! We’ve lost Liza for good. She’s not coming back after her tour. She’s staying in Austria. She called me to say that we would all understand in time, that everything was fine, that she was happy and asks everyone to forgive her. And she loves us all. I told her that Nuta had died, and she cried and asked whether she could call you. I said I’d ask you.”
“Oh my God!” was all Sanya could get out.
“She’s planning to marry a conductor there. She met him on her first tour, and they performed together. He’s an old man! A terrible loss. The people we love most are all abandoning us. We’ll never see Liza again. Maybe you will; but I won’t.”
“Vasily, how sad it is! Women always want to get married for some reason; look,” and he gestured with his eyes toward his mother, who was being led by the hand by a man with a hat like a furry pastry on his fat head. “Your son-in-law is an Austrian, and not a German?”
Vasily Innokentievich nodded.
“I just didn’t like that fat Boba fellow, and I was glad when they divorced. This new son-in-law, by the way, is a handsome guy. He has a wonderful face. I have a record with his picture on it. Why do women do what they do? Take a look at that … janitor,” Sanya said, looking over at his mother and her fiancé. “Nuta knew everything.”
Mikha came up to them. He gripped Sanya’s maimed hand, and bent right down to his ear:
“Your mother is alive, but I have no one. Anna Alexandrovna was closer to me than my whole family put together. I only just now understood that. She’s gone away, and now I’m first in line.”
“What? What do you mean?” Sanya said, not hearing or understanding what Mikha said.
“There are no more grown-ups ahead of me. It’s my turn next,” Mikha explained.
* * *
Two weeks after Anna Alexandrovna’s death, the thickset gentleman in the pastry hat who was holding his mother’s hand moved into their apartment. His name was Lastochkin, and the name didn’t suit him in the least. In no way did he even remotely resemble his namesake, the swallow. They rearranged the furniture, took down the dividing screen, and partitioned the room with a wardrobe and a bookcase. They nudged Sanya over a bit, depriving him of the geometrical security to which he was accustomed.
Anna Alexandrovna’s death, sudden, easy, and completely spontaneous, could not be reconciled with life. Sanya awoke in the mornings, heard the unbearable sounds of alien everyday existence, and wanted to fall asleep again, in order to wake up in his normal, habitual home.
But that former home was gone; his grandmother was no longer there, and his mother had undergone some strange transformation, like children under spells in fairy tales. She had changed in a single moment into the opposite version of herself. Whereas before she had been soft and plump, now she was sharp and hard; before she had had light-brown hair mixed with gray, and now she had become a brunette. She began to use lipstick and wear a new astrakhan fur coat, black and unruly, instead of the ancient gray rabbit fur in which they had wrapped Sanya as a baby.