“Mama’s over there,” he said, and led them to the veranda.
Olga was sitting in a wingback chair, her head resting on a tapestry pillow, her little feet in thick knitted slippers, propped up on a low bench. Her hand, which looked more as if it were carved from ivory than like human flesh, lay on a side table that was next to the chair. Everything incidental had drained from Olga’s face; all that was left was a sharp, naked beauty and the illness itself. Her small head was wrapped tightly in a silk kerchief. Then she pulled the kerchief off, revealing the sparse, uneven growth, resembling an auburn hedgehog, underneath. After the chemo, her hair was growing back like a child’s, new and buoyant.
Half a year had passed since Olga had discharged herself from the clinic and had categorically refused any medical treatment. The letter from Ilya had done its work. Now everything was happening not according to science, but according to magic.
Kostya brought sandwiches with caviar and smoked sausage out to the veranda. Antonina Naumovna’s supplies of provisions had not been cut off, Galya observed, accustomed to the government feedbag herself. On this day she had come to say good-bye to Olga, as it had seemed then, forever. But she couldn’t find the words to communicate this: as usual, Tamara’s presence daunted her.
Right before she left, she said she was saying good-bye for a long time, because she and her husband were going abroad. Olga, with seeming indifference, asked her where.
Galya grinned. “Just imagine, we’re going to the Middle East. I can’t say where exactly. Tamara would get too jealous.”
There was no room for doubt about the precise destination. Tamara turned away her head, with its shapely afro. Tamara’s neck was extravagantly long, even disproportionately so; Olga used to joke that she seemed to be able to turn it 360 degrees.
During their school years, Tamara had considered Galya to be a necessary appendage to her beloved Olga, or like a levy placed on her own friendship with her. She merely tolerated her. And she would never have admitted to Olga what she thought of Galya—that she was a lowly plebeian sort, a pest and a nuisance, lacking in wit and talent, and also unkind … not to mention a traitor. Tamara had never forgotten about the typewriter.
Tamara looked in the direction of the pond. So they’re over there, too, those KGB thugs. They’re everywhere, there’s no escaping them … not even in Israel! There’s nowhere to hide from them.
“Oh,” Olga said. “The Middle East. You should learn French.”
“Why French?” Galya said, surprised. “I’m studying English.”
“Will you be gone long?”
“Three years, most likely.”
* * *
Afterward, when she was home on leave, Galya visited Olga—both times during Olga’s fantastical four-year remission, which lasted from the moment Olga received Ilya’s letter until she received the news of his death.
She brought souvenirs with her: Jerusalem crosses, icons, amulets. Olga wasn’t interested in these trinkets for the pious, and all of them migrated gradually into Tamara’s possession. She was thrilled to have them. Olga had become her old self, cheerful and energetic.
The third time Galya came to Moscow, Olga was no longer among the living. Galya already knew about her death. She called Kostya and went to visit their home, which they hadn’t changed or rearranged at all after Olga had died. The only difference was that now it was in complete disarray. Galya brought expensive gifts for Kostya’s children: plastic soldiers with mechanical innards, battery-powered toy cars, and a long-legged doll with clothes that fit her.
When she got home, she cried long and hard over Olga, then called Tamara. It was early evening and they both wept into the telephone. Then Galya asked whether she could come to see her.
“When? Could you come over right now?”
Galya caught a cab and fifteen minutes later she was with Tamara. You couldn’t say they talked—rather, they cried in each other’s arms all evening, their tea growing cold on the table in front of them. They didn’t even bother to turn on the lights. First they cried about Olga, whom they had both loved deeply, then about themselves, and about everything that life had promised and not given, interrupting their tears with silence, and their silence with tears. Then they cried about each other, sympathizing with each other about the things they could never say, and again about Olga. Then Tamara found half a bottle of cognac, and they each drank a glass, and Tamara finally asked the most important question—about the typewriter—for all the betrayal had begun with this machine.
“Didn’t Olga tell you? I told her about it as soon as I found out. My brother, Nikolay, God be with him”—here Galya crossed herself with a sweeping gesture—“took the typewriter and The Gulag Archipelago to the district branch of the KGB. He would never have done anything like that himself. Raika, his wife, God be with her, too”—again she crossed herself, but with less vigor—“she had always hated me, and she talked him into it. They showed Gennady the text of his letter. ‘To intercept an anti-Soviet conspiracy by enemies of the people and to evict my sister Galina Yurievna Polukhina from the apartment,’ Nikolay wrote. The housing authorities were kicking them out of the basement and resettling them in a new apartment, and Raika thought they might end up with a bigger space if I was out of the picture. In the new apartment, they died in a fire that started when they were both drunk.” Again she crossed herself ceremoniously.
Apparently, the mutual shedding of tears softened the invisible crust around Tamara’s heart. She, too, told Galya about what she had kept to herself for so long. After telling her these things, she beseeched, under her breath: “Lord, Lord, forgive me!”
After Marlen’s departure for Israel, and perhaps even before, Tamara had come to love Jesus Christ deeply. This had changed her in many ways.
Why have I hated this unfortunate little fool for so long?
Galya would have liked another drink, but she was too shy to ask. For the first time, Olga’s girlfriend, the clever Tamara, who had hardly paid the slightest bit of attention to her, was opening up to her.
It seems that Olga has brought us together, Galya thought tenderly.
Then Tamara showed her their new, but already aging, apartment. Galya had been to their old room in the communal flat on Sobachaya Square several times, but she had never been invited here. All the furnishings were from their previous life: the piano, an armchair, bookshelves, and photographs. Only the pictures were missing. Galya asked about them, and Tamara laughed.
“You noticed? The paintings are gone.”
“I remember them. There was an angel with an enormous head, blue. Yes, Tamara, I was at your old house a few times. Olga took me with her. I remember the pictures, and I remember your grandmother.”