But most intolerable of all was the new voice of Nadezhda Borisovna: sonorous, fawning, with a giggle at the end of every phrase. No, even more unbearable than that were the nighttime sounds of coupling, of bedsprings, panting and groaning …
It was as though the janitor’s quarters on Potapovsky Lane had encroached on the very place where once Nuta had read her favorite Flaubert and Marcel Proust during sleepless nights.
He couldn’t sleep. He caught small snatches of slumber, but he would start awake and return to the obsessive thoughts: Nuta is gone. Nuta will never come back. Nuta is no more.
He slept at intervals. When he woke up for good, he would fall into his usual despondency. He washed and left the defiled house. If he didn’t have class, he went to see Mikha.
Mikha’s mood was no better. He still couldn’t find a job—no one would hire an ex-convict—and they were broke. Alyona tried to teach some classes. Their friends chipped in to help, and Mikha accepted these alms unwillingly. Marlen finally left for Israel—hurriedly, unexpectedly, and inexplicably—and wrote Mikha letters, trying to persuade him to follow him there. But Mikha rejected the idea of emigrating out of hand.
“Everyone keeps repeating the same thing: emigration, emigration. Everyone has an opinion on the subject—for or against it. I can’t even consider it, Sanya. I’d die there.”
Maya, who adored Sanya and still hadn’t come to trust her newfound father, climbed into Sanya’s lap and tickled him behind the ear. That was a little game they had.
“Mikha, we’re going to die anyway. And music and poetry are everywhere, not only in Russia,” Sanya said.
“Music, yes. But poetry—no. Poetry has its own language, and that language is Russian! I’m a poet—perhaps a bad one, but still a poet!” the usually gentle Mikha burst out. “I can’t live without Russia!”
Sanya was unable to counter this. He couldn’t say: yes, you’re a bad poet. And was it any better for the good ones? Khodasevich? Tsvetaeva? Even Nabokov, for God’s sake?
But Mikha, like a pendulum, kept returning to the same point: Russia, the mother tongue, Russian metaphysics … Russia, the Lethe, Lorelei …
* * *
Sanya attempted to lower the level.
“Well, my friend, leave Russia with your Lorelei, otherwise you’ll drown prematurely in our river Lethe…” And he frowned from the awkwardness of his own joke. “Leave, Mikha. It’s a lost cause. And Nuta is dead.”
He thought about Liza. She had left, abandoned her grandfather, who doted on her, and lived now on the other side of the looking glass. In Vienna, Mozart, Schubert, and the entire Viennese School promenaded along the Ringstrasse.
* * *
Going down the stairs, Sanya began composing in his mind a long, meandering phrase, words set to music—the strings resounded plaintively, the brass crashed, the alto saxophone crooned in a soulful voice. The words were almost lost, but still they surfaced, indistinct but indispensable.
Nuta left, died, flew away, poor thing, her thin fingers, the rings no longer ringing … even her smell is gone.
A short sprint through Mikha’s courtyard, past the corner house, from Chistoprudny Boulevard to Maroseyka.
Mikha, orphaned, kin, terrible childhood, the transparent Alyona, my God, it reeks of madness, it reeks of the mewling of the deaf and dumb, poor, poor everyone.
Woodwinds, advance! The clarinet sobs, and the flute weeps …
Crossing the streetcar rails, where an invisible monument to an underage hooligan, killed on this spot twenty years before, stood.
Fortissimo, percussion.
Brass, brass, brass … and the screech of brakes.
* * *
Unhappy boy in a padded cotton jacket, in a soldier’s cap with earflaps, running, running, cold metal clenched in his fist.
Turn left on Pokrovka, home to the Vanity Chest House.
* * *
Poor fingers, poor fingers, perished forever. For violin, viola, and clarinet, for bayan, accordion, for the baneful balalaika. Oh, piano!
Piano duet! For four hands! The right piano Liza, the left one me. Liza begins the piece, I join in.
And a right turn home to my building, to my side wing. String section. The violins begin. Tipsy, pianissimo. The piano theme builds and develops, attenuates in the string rendition. Rises. And everything concludes in the deep, sad voice of the cello.
Some carry skates in their hands, some shopping bags, briefcases, musical scores, boots from the shoemaker, repaired and repaired again. They carry illnesses, misfortunes, summonses, blood test results, garbage, a dog, a bottle.
* * *
And right in front of his door, his fingers already touching the only remaining bronze door handle in the whole building, he lifted all the music up, then dashed it with all his might to the ground, so that it shattered and rolled away.
If you exist, God, take me away from here and put me in another place. I can’t go on here. I can’t go on without Nuta …
He entered the building. He went up to the second floor. He went into the apartment, and paused. Lastochkin had wrapped Nuta’s blouse around the handle of a gigantic cast-iron frying pan filled with hash browns cooked in lard. He was carrying it from the communal kitchen to their room. It stank.
THE DECORATED UNDERPANTS
In 1961 Peter Petrovich Nichiporuk addressed a Party conference, saying exactly what was on his mind: Stalin’s personality cult had been exposed for what it was, and now, slowly but surely, a new cult was growing up around Khrushchev. Lenin’s precepts had been forgotten, and they had to return to them, to strengthen democracy and the responsibility of elected officials to the people. To achieve this they had to abolish the high salaries of government officials and introduce limited terms in office. He told them exactly what he thought.
He had already “rolled out” all these thoughts for his friend Afanasy Mikhailovich, one of his former college buddies from the General Staff Academy, where they had both studied before the war. Afanasy didn’t approve, though he shared all of his ideas. He didn’t approve, specifically, of the plan to introduce these ideas at a Party conference.
“It won’t have any positive effect, Peter; but the consequences could be dire,” Afanasy said of this harebrained plan.
Peter reproached Afanasy as a coward. Afanasy, usually restrained, suddenly flew into a rage and sent his friend to the place that the old friends were not in the habit of sending each other.
Then Peter Petrovich announced something very unpleasant to his friend’s ears: there is no greater coward than a soldier. And the higher the rank, the more cowardly they are.
Highly trained professionals who had gone through the war, fearing neither enemy fire nor the foe himself, never taking cover behind someone else’s back, were deathly afraid of the powers that be and were now defending, not the Motherland, but their own fat backsides and their own cushy armchairs.
Since this discussion was taking place at Afanasy Mikhailovich’s dacha, he showed his friend the door. Discord arose between them, of the kind recalling Nikolai Gogol’s two Ivans. In this case, however, it was not a “pig” or a “goose” that set it off, but Peter’s “coward,” which had offended Afanasy Mikhailovich to the bottom of his soul.