Olga demanded sympathy and loyalty from Kostya, the person she felt closest to; he, in turn, stubbornly resisted. He didn’t want to sympathize with her, nor did he wish to take anyone’s side in the matter. He loved his mother, but he loved Ilya, too. He didn’t want to hear his mother’s constant reproaches of his stepfather. Olga was deeply offended by this. She grabbed a handful of fabric on the shoulder of his new black sweater, and hissed:
“From Ilya? It didn’t take much to buy you off.”
Ilya did send parcels addressed to Kostya from time to time. Besides the clothes for him, there were also things “for the house,” which were in fact meant for Olga. Olga fastidiously passed these things on to her mother—newfangled can openers, oilcloth for the table in highland plaids, and other cheap rubbish.
Antonina Naumovna was delighted with any sort of foreign household appliance or trinket, but she attempted to put the infidels in their place:
“In Russia, all our might, all the intellect and know-how of our scientists, is for exploring the cosmos and making atomic power stations. They just invent can openers. Well, I have to admit, they do know how to make those.”
Of all the people involved in the situation, Antonina Naumovna was the only happy one. She basked in her triumph. Olga couldn’t bear to look at her; it filled her with rage.
Kostya kept silent. He didn’t want to hear anyone speak ill of Ilya, never mind foreign can openers. Just then he was completely absorbed in his own feelings—his beloved Lena was in her third month of pregnancy and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He was endowed with the same gift for loving as Olga was.
Olga built up a dossier on Ilya. For some reason, she now felt compelled to prove that her ex-husband was an evil man in every respect, in every sense of the word. She began communicating with her humble and unassuming mother-in-law, who had never inspired any interest in her before now, with Ilya’s female cousins, with his childhood friends, and with anyone whose name appeared in his old address book. It transpired that in the seventh grade Ilya had been kicked out of school for stealing some sort of camera lens from the photography club at the House of Pioneers, and even had a police record for this minor infraction.
He had also been caught forging some documents—not very important ones, just a library card from the History Library. But it was still wrong, wasn’t it? Some things about his first family came to light as well—that the child he had abandoned was sick, and he had never provided the family with any financial support. That his first wife, who was a quiet sort, and none too bright, had nevertheless supported Ilya all the years they were together.
“Yes, it figures!” Olga was almost glad to get the lowdown on Ilya’s shady past from completely random people or those with only the most tenuous connection to him. He had been the same kind of cad and opportunist with her as well! She had worked her fingers to the bone to make a decent living, while he had been sitting in the library, or taking photographs, or riding a bicycle, or traveling; and all on her income! Well, he earned something from his books and photography, it was true; but she never saw a kopeck of it. He spent it all on his own pastimes and pleasures. He was just a plain, old-fashioned parasite—and the Soviet authorities had nothing to do with it!
Her friend Tamara was the first to realize that Olga was losing her mind. It was as though a demon had taken over this once kind and magnanimous person. When Olga talked about Ilya, the tone of her voice changed; her manner of speaking, even her choice of words, was different. The former Olga had not even known such words. Tamara equivocated for a long time, but finally told her friend that she needed to face her obsession head-on and that if she couldn’t rein in her runaway jealousy, she would end up in a psychiatric ward.
Olga was eloquent and articulate, however, and knew how to convince everyone that it wasn’t about obsession or jealousy, but about truth and justice. While she was talking, it all sounded very logical and self-evident, but no sooner had you walked out the door than you sensed that all her arguments were the product of this very madness she tried so hard to deny. Such was the power of Olga’s persuasion that only Kostya was unmoved by it. His love for Ilya remained steadfast, and he had no intention of judging him for any sort of baseness of character or cruelty.
Besides, Kostya was oblivious. These days he belonged heart and soul to his fragile, vulnerable young girl with the hangnails. He had no thought of leaving for anywhere: his whole life was bound up with this place, this person.
“Mama, dear, you can leave if you want to. Without me.”
Olga was also provoked by another incident concerning Kostya. She discovered that he had a whole packet of letters from Ilya that had been sent poste restante to the local post office, which happened to be on the first floor of their building. The first thing she did when her hands and legs stopped trembling was to read the letters. They were long letters, wonderfully expressive—the thoughts and impressions of someone who has left the Soviet Union for the first time. The first letter he wrote Kostya, from Vienna, was very similar to the letter he had written Olga. He wrote about feeling that it was all a mirage, about his sense of disorientation about what was real and what was not, in a place where everything was so different from what his eyes, his nose, his mouth had been accustomed to till now. In another letter, written to Kostya on the eve of his departure from Vienna to America, she read something that cut her to the quick—that “the ability to survive here, in the West, is a function of one’s willingness to reject everything one experienced before, in Russia.” Now she herself was a part of what had to be rejected in order for him to survive.
The next letters were from New York, and much of what he wrote coincided with what he had written to her—about the tragic incommensurability of the two cultures, Russian and American; about the “superficiality” of American culture, not in the banal, generally accepted sense of that term, but from the perspective of superficiality as such: the scrubbed and deodorized surface of the American body, which smelled like chemicals and laundry detergent; the blinding cleanliness of the asphalt; and the fact that every cover, wrapper, or envelope was just as important as what it contained. About how he had once searched all day for a subject to photograph, and finally found one: an enormous heap of garbage, both cast-off building materials and ordinary household refuse, right in the middle of Harlem, with a smiling, toothless black man in a snowy white tank top, his hands gripping a banjo, in the foreground.
The last letter from America was sad and strange. Ilya wrote to the still very young Kostya: “Only shedding your skin completely, acquiring a new surface with new feelers, can ensure your survival here. However strange it might seem, the same does not hold true for one’s inmost self. You can keep your thoughts, however original, however jarring to their sensibilities and at odds with their incomprehensible (to me) way of life, to yourself. No one is interested in them in the least. In order to become part of this society, you just have to carry out their elementary rituals of communication. The idiotic ballet of Western life. I am prepared to do this, though it forces me into a number of painful decisions.”
After reading these letters, Olga felt as though the scales had fallen from her eyes. She even found herself thinking that it might have been easier for her to endure this rupture with Ilya if he had really fallen in love with some brilliant, youthful beauty. But she nipped this feeling in the bud—no, it would have been just as painful. In the long run, wasn’t it all the same, whether he had turned away from her because of a new love or only out of self-interest? Either way she was bereft. The real reason for his departure always eluded her. Her love, trust, naïveté, and spiritual innocence prevented her from seeing it.