The doctor was deeply perplexed. Such tumors can’t dissolve just like that. He probed her underarms, pressed her groin. The lymph nodes had shrunk. But if the tumor had disintegrated, traces of toxicity should be manifesting themselves. And Olga’s jaundice had disappeared; she was even gaining weight. Remission? How? Why?
Half a year later, Olga began going outside, and her friend Tamara stopped visiting so frequently. Tamara was somewhat hurt that Olga didn’t appreciate this miracle of God that had been worked before their very eyes. Tamara kept bringing up the subject of baptism, which she suggested Olga should consider if only out of gratitude to God for what had transpired. Olga laughed, and it was almost her old, childlike laugh, interspersed with little breathless gasps:
“Brinchik, you’re an intelligent, well-educated woman, a scientist—how could you endorse such an absurd faith, a God who expects gratitude, and punishes us like little puppies, or rewards us with treats? You could have at least become a Buddhist…”
Tamara took offense and fell silent; still, she lit candles in church for restoring Olga’s health and offered prayers of petition for her during church services. Despite her preoccupation with her own hurt feelings, Tamara couldn’t help but notice another significant change in Olga. She no longer talked about Ilya. Ever. She spoke no ill of him, nor any praise. And when Tamara herself brought this up, Olga shrugged off the subject:
“Everything’s fine. He’s already made his decision; now it’s just a matter of time. There’s nothing to say.”
And this was a miracle in its own right. After months of talking only about him, and about him only …
Olga, absorbed in her own rejuvenated life, didn’t pay much attention to Kostya’s marriage. Kostya moved away from home, and the newlyweds settled in with his mother-in-law outside of town, in Opalikha. Very soon he became the father of two children—twins, a girl and a boy. Olga was touched by this, but only momentarily. She didn’t have the energy for anything other than healing. All her spiritual resources were devoted to this end.
Although her illness was clearly on the retreat, Olga was tireless in her efforts to chase it away. On the dining room windowsill she grew wheat from seedlings. She scorned the ubiquitous sourdough bread and baked herself flatbreads from bran and straw. She boiled herbs in “silver” water. On the same windowsill stood two pitchers of water containing silver spoons, which was what lent the ordinary tap water its healing properties …
Fate took a deep breath; shaking off the dust here, reevaluting this and readjusting that, a year later Olga’s health had been almost completely restored. She set to work again, hammering on the typewriter six hours a day or more. She now lived alone in the large apartment with her mother.
Olga was so preoccupied with herself, or, to be more precise, with the promise of her impending conjugal happiness with Ilya, that she didn’t notice how thin and wan Antonina Naumovna had grown. Most likely she was suffering from the same illness that had abandoned her daughter. It also began in the stomach, then spread to the intestines.
Olga began looking after her mother with great skill and devotion. It was a strange sensation—almost as though she were taking care of herself, since the same thing had so recently happened to her.
They had never been so close or so tender in their emotions with each other. Now Olga was glad she hadn’t left with Ilya, so that she could stroke her mother’s hand, boil bouillon for her, which she would most likely not be able to get down, smooth out her sheets, and wipe the corners of her mouth. Antonina Naumovna kept asking Olga to have her admitted to the hospital, but Olga just smiled and said:
“Mother, dear, only a healthy person can survive the hospital. Are you uncomfortable here at home? No? Then forget about the hospital.”
Antonina Naumovna’s mind was failing. She forgot huge swathes of her life. Other, more trivial details floated up out of nowhere. During her final days she remembered only the distant past: how all her grandmother’s chickens had died on the same day, one after the other; how a horse had bolted, throwing her mother and herself out of a sleigh; and, at last, how she and Afanasy had met at a Party-education meeting. All of her former life—meetings of the editorial board at the magazine, briefings at the regional Party committee meetings, presidiums, reports, conferences—was consigned to oblivion. Only random vestiges of her childhood remained.
“My goodness, something’s not right with my head, it’s all turned around,” she whispered, and struggled to recall something from the recent past. “It’s like everything fell right through a hole in the ground.”
In the room illuminated only by a green desk lamp, she died alone, easily and unaware, saying, quite audibly, “Mama, Mama, Papa…”
But no one was there to hear the words. In the morning, Olga discovered her mother, already cold. She immediately called the Union of Writers, where there was a special department of funeral services …
Everything was carried out in the most proper and dignified manner. She already had a gravesite marked out for her, next to the general in Vagankovo Cemetery.
The funeral was a sad and bitter affair. Not, however, due to tears and sobbing, loss and grief, or even, perhaps, regret accompanied by a sense of guilt. Rather the contrary. Not one of the mourners shed so much as a tear; there was no sadness, nor even sympathy. Their slightly benumbed faces expressed the decorum appropriate to the occasion. The absolute indifference to the death of the literary worker among those who attended the funeral did not go unnoticed by Ari Lvovich Bas, who officiated at these events of the Union of Writers.
Without much enthusiasm, Kostya returned to Moscow after his grandmother’s death, according to Olga’s wishes. Kostya was in his fourth year of university, and Lena in her third—she had taken a year of academic leave when the children were born.
They changed around the whole apartment, remapping the floor plan. On Olga’s insistence, Kostya took over his grandfather’s former room. It had a large, comfortable desk, and another smaller working space—a fold-down desk. This was the study. His grandmother’s old room became the bedroom. Kostya dubbed it the “Communist nook” because of its spartan government-issue furnishings, the green lampshade on the oaken table, and the picture of Lenin, with a log resting on his shoulder, looking down from the wall. Lena bought a foldout bed to replace the leather divan, and brought in pillows with flounces and frills. She replaced Lenin with some Van Gogh sunflowers.
Olga gave up her room to her grandchildren, and moved into the former dining room. The infamous bed with its fluted columns and cherubim migrated back to the antiques consignment store on Smolenskaya Embankment. They ate in the kitchen now, like ordinary Soviet citizens who by this time had managed to move from their communal apartments into private family apartments, but for whom bourgeois “studies” and “dining rooms” were still out of the question.
The quiet, competent Lena took the household into her own two hands, organized and took care of everything, cleaned and scrubbed, and prepared delicious meals. Every morning, Anna Antonovna, Lena’s mother, would arrive to feed the children, take them for walks, and put them down for their naps.
Her daughter Lena was a paragon. She rushed home from classes, saw her mother out, and took over the next shift. Olga wasn’t involved in taking care of the children, but Lena felt no resentment toward her mother-in-law for this failing. On the contrary, she was grateful. They had spent the first years of their family life in Opalikha, outside Moscow, where they had a small room with two windows and slanting floors; they had to prop up the children’s beds with wooden boards to keep them from sliding away. The four of them all shared a single room. There was no hot water in the dilapidated cottage, though running water and indoor plumbing had been installed two years before the children were born.