Mikha shook his head, and waved his hand dismissively. He didn’t even notice himself doing this.
“Look here,” Safyanov said, and showed Mikha a piece a paper that read, “Arrest Warrant.” “It isn’t dated. We can sign it today, or tomorrow. And here is your testimony.” He waved several densely covered pages. “You yourself didn’t give us this testimony. No, you didn’t give it. Here, take a look.”
Mikha took the standard protocol form. It was a new kind, printed on large-format paper and folded in half. Written in blunt words, with grammatical errors, in a woman’s handwriting, a secretary’s, with a thick line for the spine of each letter, it was a denunciation of various people, most of whom he had never laid eyes on.
“This is my final offer. You put your signature here, and I’ll rip up…” And he shoved the arrest warrant under Mikha’s nose.
It’s a risk, but maybe it will buy me another day of freedom? Mikha thought. What was it Ilya had said about that hypnotist, what was his name? Yes, Messing. He could make anyone think or do whatever he wanted them to do. Even Lavrenty Beria … Had he signed something? Or, no; it was what he didn’t sign. He just showed them a blank piece of paper, and they thought they saw a signature there.
He picked up the protocol from the table and began to put his signature to it. He was a teacher, and during the years that he had to sign his pupils’ homework assignments and the roll call, he had elaborated a streamlined signature, like Victor Yulievich—first, “M. Mela…” followed by a long tail that soared upward.
He took the pen, wrote an “N” that resembled an “M,” and put a period after it. Then he wrote “Ofuckingway,” and sent the tail soaring upward. The likeness was uncanny …
“Here you are. But now I have to run home to my wife. She’s very ill. Please sign my pass so I can leave,” Mikha said in an importunate voice, at the same time tensing the part of his head just under the frontal bone, in the very center.
Safyanov caressed the paper with the surprisingly elegant signature, which looked like it hadn’t been written by Mikha’s hand at all, and called someone on the phone. A sergeant with a pass entered.
Sign it, sign it, Mikha commanded Safyanov silently.
The captain signed the pass, and Mikha walked backward toward the door, without removing his gaze from the captain. He exited the room with the sergeant. Now he didn’t care when they would notice his little joke. He had time!
He walked to Chistoprudny Boulevard at a brisk pace. He went into his house, feeling light, almost weightless, not thinking about anything. He went up to the sixth floor on foot. It was just after four o’clock. The elevator was out of order again.
He sat down at the table. He wanted to reread his poems again, but he suddenly felt that there was no time for that. He pushed the whole pile aside. Childish, childish poems. Soon he would be thirty-four. And still his poems were childish. And they would never be grown-up poems. Because I never grew up. But now the time has come for me to take my first step as a grown man. To liberate myself from my own absurdity, my lack of substance. To liberate Alyona and Maya from myself, from the utter failure of my existence, from my inability to live like a normal, full-grown man.
What a simple and certain choice! Why had this way out never before occurred to him? How perfect it was that he had not yet turned thirty-four. Thirty-three was the age when Jesus had committed the deed that proved his absolute maturity: he had willingly given his own life for an idea that didn’t inspire any sympathy in Mikha whatsoever—the sins of others.
Being the master of one’s own fate—that’s what it meant to be an adult. But egotism was an adolescent trait. No, no, he no longer wanted to be an adolescent.
* * *
He went to the bathroom and took a shower. He put on a clean shirt. He went over to the window. The window frame was dilapidated, the glass was dirty, but the windowsill was clean. He opened the window—rain, gloom, paltry city light. The streetlights weren’t on yet, but there was a gentle shimmer of illumination.
He took off his shoes so they wouldn’t leave dirty footprints and jumped up on the windowsill, resting there for a brief moment. He murmured: “Imago, imago!” And flung himself down lightly.
* * *
And the wings? Through a fissure in the chitin, the moist, sharp folds of wing rigging burst forth. With a long, fluid movement a wing works itself free, straightens itself out, dries itself in the air, and prepares for its first beat. Gridded like a dragonfly’s, or scaled and segmented like a butterfly’s, with an intricate map of venation, unable to fold up, if more ancient, or folding up smoothly and easily, when of newer vintage … and the winged creature flies away, leaving the empty shell of chitin on the earth, empty grave of the airborne, and new air fills its new lungs, and new music sounds in its new, newly perfected organ of aural perception.
* * *
His glasses and a piece of paper with his last poem lay on the table.
Once amid the bright flash of the day
The future will shed light upon my credo:
I am in the people, too, I did not forsake you
In any way. My friends, for me please pray.
His friends who were believers bid farewell to the nonbelieving poet, each according to his own lights. In Tashkent, the Tatars honored him: they carried out a memorial rite in the Muslim tradition for him. In Jerusalem, Marlen and his friends commissioned a Kaddish, and ten Jews read aloud the ancient, mysterious words in Hebrew to honor his memory. In Moscow, Tamara, Olga’s girlfriend, arranged a funeral mass in Preobrazhensky Cathedral, where a freethinking priest was willing to perform a requiem for a suicide.
The face of the deceased was covered. There were many people, and everyone wept. Victor Yulievich, the former teacher, stood with lowered head, tears streaming down his unshaven, unkempt countenance.
“Poor boy! Poor Mikha! I am to blame here, too.”
Mishka Kolesnik, the childhood friend of the defrocked teacher, accompanied him. He stood next to him: “Three arms, three legs,” as they had called themselves so long ago.
* * *
Sanya wept—his tears were never far from the surface. Ilya had his camera, and photographed the memorial. Everyone ended up in the frame: even Safyanov, with the purple growth on his cheek. He had miscalculated, and it had been his downfall. Oh, what a downfall!
Alyona didn’t attend the funeral. Her parents decided that it would be better not to inform her of her husband’s death when she was in such a frail psychological state. Later they would tell her.
A RUSSIAN STORY
In winter, at the height of the Christmas frosts, Kostya’s children came down with measles, and his wife, Lena, suffered a sudden attack of pyelonephritis, a chronic kidney infection. Anna Antonovna, Lena’s mother, a retired seamstress who always visited from her village, Opalikha, at the first summons, couldn’t make it, due to the frosts. She would have to stoke the oven at her house constantly to prevent the pipes from bursting.
So, until the frosts retreated, Kostya was left to run back and forth from bed to bed with medicine, bedpans, cups, and plates on his own. Lena refused to go to the hospital. She lay on her back and wept quietly, from weakness and from pity for her children and Kostya.
Finally, Anna Antonovna showed up, rolled up her sleeves, and sent Kostya off to work. He set out for his laboratory, where work had come to a standstill without him. Kostya resumed his running back and forth to the lab, now with the aim of salvaging the long-term synthesis process that hadn’t succeeded without him. They had failed to guarantee the consistency of temperature, and the results were not what had been predicted. But chemistry is a mysterious science, and mistakes in staging experiments sometime yield interesting discoveries.