Ah, that’s why they call vodka the “green wine”—the flasks are green, Olga mused.
Olga covered her glass with her palm.
“No thank you. I don’t want vodka.”
“Cognac?” the host asked.
“No thank you. Not in the middle of the day.”
He nodded.
He cut the pickle into thin slices, took a potato and stripped its jacket off, and then cut it into pieces, too. He and Ilya drank. Pinching the salt from the small bowl with his fingertips, he salted the pieces and ate them with his hands; but his mannerisms seemed elegant, even aristocratic.
“How’s Lisa?” Ilya asked. He had already told Olga on the way there that Artur’s lovely wife had recently left him.
“She’s still around. She came by a few days ago.”
“Is she begging you to take her back?”
“No, Ilya, she’s not coming back. But she can’t stay away, either. She filed for a divorce, she’s planning to marry someone else—but she doesn’t have the guts to leave. We’ll see what happens. We’ve been together for fifteen years. She wants to get out of the country, to go abroad. She found herself a Finn.”
“Really? I thought there was some guy from Iraq.”
“There was. He was loaded. But she got rid of him. Said that a European woman like herself couldn’t survive in the Middle East. The Finn is from Lapland. Lisa’s used to the cold—she grew up in the Far East. She actually had her heart set on Italy, but no Italians have turned up.”
Olga sat wide-eyed listening to their conversation. What kind of girl was this, who had her pick of foreigners? Was she some sort of prostitute? She would have to ask Ilya about it later.
Afterward they drank tea. Artur brewed it slowly, enacting a ceremonial ritual around the teapot. The teapot was, it must be said, unlike anything she had ever seen. It was made of enameled metal and adorned with dragons and tongues of blue flame.
“Chinese,” King Arthur said tenderly, stroking its convex flank. He caressed it with his eyes just as tenderly, like a man caressing a woman. “I bought it in Singapore. A real beauty!”
That’s what Ilya had told her—that Artur had worked on a merchant marine vessel and had sailed all the oceans and seas. Olga’s eyes were already growing used to this unusual fellow. She liked him more and more. Although, upon closer inspection, his hairlessness had something strange about it—as though no hair had ever grown upon his head, or on his childishly soft face. And something else—his hands trembled ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly.
The King removed the plates in the same manner he had brought them in, piling them on top of the black pot. He wiped off the table, and Ilya put down a large bundle of typed pages. The thin paper rustled.
“I don’t have any fitting material, only chintz,” Artur said.
“Just so long as it’s not floral.”
“It will be a dark blue binding,” the King said, nodding.
Then, with an even more solemn expression, he went into the other room. When he came back, he was carrying an ancient book in a dark leather binding. He passed it fastidiously to Ilya.
“Unbelievable! Eighteenth century—1799! The Compleat Distiller. Everything you ever wanted to know about moonshine? I’m floored!” Ilya sighed, then laughed out loud.
“That’s not the point. Look at the title page. Then you can ooh and aah!” And King Arthur opened the cover of the book.
Ilya whistled under his breath.
“This beats all … From the paper collection center? It was trashed?”
“Yep. It bears the inscription of the owner—none other than Berdyaev. Of course, it needs to be verified.”
“You need an expert—I can show it to Sasha Gorelik,” Ilya said.
“No, I’m not letting it out of my sight. You can bring him here. I’ll stand him a bottle.”
“He’ll stand you one. He might even buy the book.”
“There’s no way I’m selling this.”
Olga took a peek over Ilya’s shoulder. She saw the name Nikolai Berdyaev, written in lilac ink.
The name seemed familiar; she had heard the name mentioned among Ilya’s friends. She didn’t dare ask, though, so as not to compromise the aura of sophistication she was cultivating. Besides, it was already obvious that Ilya, who had no formal university training whatsoever, knew much more about literature than she did. And she would soon be graduating. Judging by the books that packed the room, this retired sailor was a well-educated man. Her surmise was confirmed when he pulled out a palm-sized volume of Dickens from behind the divan.
“Here is a truly remarkable writer, Ilya. Oh, the rubbish they made us read as children!” He laughed, waving his hand dismissively. “Actually, I read almost nothing as a child. In the entire city of Izyum, I don’t think there was a single English book. It’s a Cossack settlement. They put boys on horses before they can walk. They can wave their sabers around, but they don’t even know the alphabet.”
Although she had promised herself to keep quiet, Olga couldn’t resist asking: “So you know how to use a saber?”
“No, my child, I’ve hated all that Cossack derring-do since I was small. I ran away from home when I was thirteen. I entered the Nakhimov Naval Academy. I was a romantic. An idiot, in other words. I had no idea what the military was all about.”
“My child”—that was patronizing, of course; but Artur’s tone was completely friendly and open. He looked directly into her eyes, not past her.
Soon they got ready to leave. Ilya put a packet of books, neatly wrapped in newspapers and tied with twine, in his nearly empty backpack. He gave King Arthur a small pile of bills in return. Then they hurried to the station. It was nearly ten o’clock, and the electric commuter trains came less frequently. Along the way, Olga asked Ilya about Artur, and he replied briefly. “Yes, he’s a former naval officer who survived some sort of blast. He was discharged, with a detour through a psych ward, receives a small pension, works as an assistant at the paper collection center.
“At first he didn’t know a lot about book collecting, but over the years he learned the tricks of the trade. He developed a feel for it. And it would have been hard not to—people bring in books by the bagful. It’s amazing what turns up among the old newspapers and the scribbled-over textbooks—an original edition of Karamzin, or Khlebnikov. A Rudolf Steiner. You can’t find those at the antiquarian booksellers—turn-of-the-century editions.
“You don’t know him? It’s not my kind of thing, but you need to know who he is. Artur has taken up yoga recently. He found a volume of Vivekananda at the collection center. He practices meditation.”
“I also want … Vivekananda.” Olga wanted everything: all the books, all the conversation, and music, and theater and film, and Berdyaev, and the Indian Vivekananda, and she wanted to read Dickens in English right away. And, as in childhood, when she wanted to hurry to join the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol Youth Group so she could be in the vanguard, she now wanted to be accepted by Ilya’s amorphous group of acquaintances—King Arthur, and the others whom she didn’t know yet, but about whom she had heard. They were the ones who had been standing outside the courthouse when her professor was on trial, and being part of their company was far more appealing to her than serving on the Komsomol committee of the philology department.
Ilya gave Olga both Berdyaev and Vivekananda, as well as Orwell, who truly astonished her. After her expulsion from the university, Olga now had plenty of free time. She lolled around in her room for days at a time while Faina took care of Kostya, feeding him, taking him out for walks, and putting him down for naps. Toward evening, when her mother came home from work, Olga would go out to meet Ilya. They had several favorite meeting places: by the monument to Ivan Fedorov, the printing pioneer; by the Kitai-Gorod wall; at an antiquarian bookseller’s; in the old apothecary’s on Pushkin Square. When the weather got warmer, they started meeting at the Aptekarsky Garden, a small botanical garden founded by Peter the Great.