Olga touched Ilya’s shoulder.
“Let’s go home. I think I’ve had about enough of this.”
Ilya finally managed to find his backpack in the house, and they left the celebration without any ado—they didn’t even bother to say good-bye. They were just in time for the commuter train; they didn’t even have to wait. They boarded, put their arms around each other, and fell asleep. They slept all the way to Moscow.
Early the next morning, the King in his lair set about repairing the tape recorder.
Guests lay scattered about in unlikely places, having dropped off to sleep from an excess of celebratory cheer. Lenka Vavilon woke up and went into the yard, where she saw an unfamiliar man peeing next to the outhouse. She was surprised—he had made it all the way to the outhouse, why hadn’t he done his business inside? She understood the reason when she tried to go into the outhouse herself. She found a comfortable spot in the raspberry bushes, where she discovered that she was not the only one who had come there in search of cozy intimacy.
A flock of sparrows was feasting on the leftovers strewn about the table. Meanwhile, two chickadees were sitting in the branches of an aspen tree, speculating about whether there was room for them among the rabble. Lenka Vavilon gathered up the dirty dishes, poured the rest of the water from the bucket into a large pot, and turned on the gas, preparing to boil water for washing up. She began scraping the leftover scraps of food into the slops pail, fishing out stray cigarette butts that might harm the neighbor’s piglet.
* * *
Shura accompanied Lisa all the way to Leningrad. Lisa bought her a ticket—albeit in a crowded sleeping car, rather than a separate compartment. Shura was offended, but said nothing. She put her sister to bed, then returned to her own car.
“I’m just a spineless idiot. My whole life I’ve let Lisa push me around, even though I’m six years older,” Shura berated herself.
Shura slept the sleep of the dead, but she was the first to rise in the morning and emerge onto the station platform. Lisa was the last. Still not completely sober, she begged forgiveness and kissed Shura’s chapped hands, lingering especially on yesterday’s burn mark. Shura was always flustered and clumsy. She always burned herself on this spot when she took her pies out of the oven.
Although she was not very fresh herself, Lisa was wearing a freshly laundered blouse—Shura had not forgotten to wash and iron one for her. Now her bra was underneath the blouse, where it belonged, and she wore a string of beads she had made herself out of tightly rolled strips of paper from shredded pages of the magazine America. Her fingers, with their stubby fingernails, were loaded down with cheap silver jewelry and stones. She wore a short, light blue skirt. The new stockings that Ville had brought her for the wedding—he had given her a whole pile of them, twelve in all!—already had a very visible run along the calf.
The sisters kissed and embraced one last time, and Lisa barked out her final instructions as Shura retreated.
An hour and a half later, at the Soviet-Finnish border, Lisa was already going through customs control. The Russian customs officers were the first to search her suitcase and her purse. Lisa, still a bit tipsy, pulled out a packet of photographs and showed the officials her father, and her mother, and her older sister, and her hunting trophies, and some pictures of the natural scenery of the Far East. She had no foreign currency; all her Russian money—every last kopeck of it!—she had given to her sister. Her documents were all in order: a new passport, a visa, a marriage certificate. The border guards laughed at her good-naturedly—she was a strange bird! A little prostitute who had found a scrap of Finnish happiness for herself.
One of them with fewer moral scruples had managed to put his hand on her skinny behind, and she giggled. The other one, an older man, had given her some fatherly advice:
“Go easy on the alcohol over there, sweetie. All Finns are drunks, never mind the dry laws!”
The train rolled over the border—an invisible line running through identical unprepossessing forest tracts, bald patches, and boulders.
Then the train halted. The Finnish customs officers and border guards came aboard, and the whole process was repeated—only they didn’t rummage through her suitcase and purse. And it all happened much more quickly and efficiently.
The Finns left, and the train pulled away from the station. Lisa got up, swaying, her little purse swinging on its thin strap, and walked down the aisle to the bathroom. She hung the purse on a hook. She looked at herself in the mirror, and didn’t like what she saw, so she stuck her tongue out. Then she sat on the toilet. From her secret place she pulled out a tube of much smaller dimensions than what it normally accommodated, and peeled the condom off it. She threw the condom in the toilet, and without opening the tube, she put it in her purse. Then she stuck out her tongue at her reflection again. Three microfiches—an entire book—were on a treacherous journey. But the main leg of the journey, the most dangerous of all, had already been traversed.
Ville adored his Russian wife. From the very beginning, he had said: “I know you’ll ditch me. But I never loved anyone until you, and after you I’ll never love again.”
At one time he had worked in Russia as a journalist; now he had lost his job. It didn’t matter. Tomorrow they would fly to Stockholm, and from there on to Paris. And the banned manuscript, the author of which was doing time in the camps, would be lying on the desk of the publisher, who had been eagerly awaiting it for a long time.
Ville hated communism, loved Russia, and adored his wife, Elizabeth. Ilya loved his work. The microfiche of the manuscript, which had been smuggled out of the prison camp by the author’s wife in another of the most secret places, had been expertly photographed. Sergei Borisovich Chernopyatov, who was directing the entire three-stage (at least) anal-gynecological operation, had always known that everything would work out just fine. Lisa never let anyone down.
A TAD TOO TIGHT
After she had seen her sister off, Shura returned to her new husband and the remains of their wedding. Most of the guests had departed, of course, but the truly inveterate revelers were still celebrating on the third day. By this time, they had forgotten all about the host, not to mention the hostess. Shura threw herself into the cleanup. After fashioning new rags out of two old shirts of Artur’s, she began from the kitchen and moved backward through the house like a quiet but powerful tractor, scraping off successive archaeological layers of dirt. Masha assisted her silently: she drew water from the well, washed the windows, and laundered the ancient curtains. Artur didn’t allow them into his room, but Shura knew that sooner or later she would gain admittance to it. Although Artur had ascended to the rank of husband, she continued to regard him as a beloved brother-in-law.
On the fourth day, when all the guests were gone except for a certain Tolik, who still couldn’t manage to sober up, Artur summoned her to his den, opened his desk drawer, and, pointing a huge finger into its depths, said:
“Shura, take money from here when you need it.”
There was a lot of money. Shura felt abashed, and waved her hand dismissively:
“You give it to me yourself.”
Without even looking, he grabbed as much as his hand would hold and thrust it at her. She was surprised: it turned out he was a rich man. Lisa had always claimed that his pockets were empty, that she had to try to make do as best she could. It didn’t tally.
It was awkward enough taking it directly from the drawer, but accepting it right out of his hand like this made her even more uneasy.
She had lived on her own for many years. Her husband had died on the job, log rafting, when Masha was only two.