Nikolay Mikhailovich’s cousin, the vivacious and full-throated Anastasia, came for a three-day visit. From the moment she arrived, she began making eyes at Boris. She turned his head; he was an easy and quick-witted catch. They lost no time about it, and their first night together would have been longer if they hadn’t sat around the table singing songs until all hours. And Anastasia sang remarkably well—with a kind of gypsy flair, sonorous and provocative. His own wife was more attractive than this Anastasia, with her small, childlike breasts and long nose, but Boris Ivanovich marveled about her long afterward: this woman, bony and angular, had been like the water of life for him. It was as though he had been cleansed from inside, picked apart bone by bone, ligament by ligament, then reassembled. He couldn’t recall when he had ever been such a potent and untiring partner. Anastasia sailed away on a little boat on the fourth day of their romance. She was a doctor, moreover the head of her department, and had to return to duty. The whole family went down to the river to see her off, and when she was still on shore she began singing, “Marusenka Was Washing Her White Feet.” For a long time, she waved her handkerchief from the boat that would take her to the big landing stage, where the regular ferry would pick her up.
She’s such a cultured woman; but what a slut! Boris Ivanovich thought in rapturous bewilderment. He had never in his life met a woman like her.
Nikolay Mikhailovich, as though reading his mind, said quietly:
“It’s in Anastasia’s blood—her great-grandmother, or great-great … slept with Pushkin.”
On Transfiguration Day the whole household went to church in Kashino. Starting out in the evening, they traveled first by boat, then by bus. It was an exhausting journey. They were cultured, well-educated people—but religious as well. Boris Ivanovich had never met people like this before, either.
“Your way of life is rather anti-Soviet,” he said in amazement.
“No, Boris, it’s simply a-Soviet,” Nikolay Mikhailovich replied, laughing.
Boris stared wide-eyed at everything. He watched the rising sun, and the shallow water lapping the sandbars, where the minnows and tadpoles darted to and fro as though they had some great business to attend to. He saw the sandy shore with its empty mussel shells and ornately patterned grasses, which he had noticed on icons, but he hadn’t known they really existed in the world. He saw all this, and felt a happy wonder. He and the others tramped into the woods to pick mushrooms, which were sparse in July but much more numerous in August, after the gentle, sweet rains.
Boris Ivanovich turned out to have a passion for hunting mushrooms, and for fishing. He even proved to be adept at peasant labors: he learned to wield an axe like the best of them, helping Nikolay Mikhailovich repair the barn and set the gate upright again.
The days were long, and the evenings, with their endless tea-drinking, were pleasant. The nights passed by in an instant: he would fall asleep and wake up again refreshed, as though no time at all had passed. And Boris Ivanovich felt an unprecedented calm and peace, something he had never known in his Moscow life.
A month and a half passed, and he still hadn’t had any news from home. And, strange as it may seem, he didn’t seek out ways to get in touch with his wife. On the face of it, this was because he didn’t wish to cause her any trouble. But deeper down, he admitted that he felt more tranquil without her agitated caprices, her alarm and fears.
A relative of Nikolay Mikhailovich’s tossed a single postcard in the mailbox from Boris Ivanovich upon her return to Moscow: Don’t worry, everything’s fine. I love and miss you.
In August, Nikolay Mikhailovich’s wife arrived with their oldest son, Kolya. She was the daughter of a famous Russian artist. Both daughters hovered around their mother, pampering her like an honored guest, with a constant refrain of “Mommy, Mommy!” The son, a strapping thirty-year-old, trailed around after his father. Nikolay Mikhailovich’s relationship with his wife was also unusual. They were tender and respectful toward each other, almost formal in their manners and forms of address. They spoke in quiet voices, attentive and courteous to each other. It was hard to believe they had ever made children.
The grown-up children still remained their children, and it was amusing to see how the grandchildren adopted the manners and habits of their parents—bringing them a pretty apple, or a bouquet of late-blooming wild strawberries. Boris Ivanovich, who was staunchly opposed to childbearing, even began to doubt his long-held theory—that producing new human beings in this country, ruled by an inhuman and shameless government, in which they would be destined to a life of poverty, filth, and meaninglessness, was wrong. This was the condition on which he married Natasha.
He and Natasha had been married for eight years already, and she had not yearned for children. But there was another circumstance that irked her. Whether it was because she lacked a sense of humor, or because her husband’s views and ideas weighed too heavily on her, she began to recoil from the cartoons, which had become more strident and bitter with time. They lived very comfortably, compared with others. He had graduated from the department of applied arts and crafts at the Stroganov Institute, so he had never become a “proper artist.” He carried out commissions, and earned more than the real artists at the plant, where he made up to a thousand rubles on a project.
Sometimes he took on private commissions for well-known people, or assisted in creating metalwork décor and panels for all manner of palaces of culture, whether railroad or metallurgical—but invariably socialist. This kind of hackwork filled him with spiteful rage, and he began making ever more acerbic cartoons about this socialist way of life that would any day now become full-blown communism.
He began to indulge his passion for drawing with greater intensity. By trade, he was a craftsman specializing in fine metalwork, but drawing became his source of joy and rest—and an outlet for his frustrations. Once he was invited to take part in an art exhibit held in an apartment, out of sight of the authorities, and after this he was welcomed into a select circle of underground artists.
His underground work even drew admirers. The first to attract attention were the laborer and female collective-farm worker made out of the coveted salami—but only on paper, naturally. Thanks to his friend Ilya, this salami even made it all the way to West Germany and was published in an evil anti-Soviet magazine (like all the magazines over there). After this taste of success, Boris even grew indifferent to large-scale commissions and spent most of his time scratching away with his pencil.
Here, in Danilovy Gorki, Muratov lost all interest in drawing salami. They didn’t have it there, and no one missed it. Neither had he any interest in the quiet sketches of gentle nature that every member of Nikolay Mikhailovich’s family, young and old, was so fond of making. So, during the summer, he refrained from drawing.
It was getting on toward September, and they began to prepare for going back to the city. They stuffed mushrooms, raspberries, and strawberries dried in the oven into pillowcases. They hadn’t made jam that year—there wasn’t enough sugar, and the jars were hard to transport to the city, anyway. They put away the salted cucumbers and mushrooms in the cellar, and buried the early potatoes.
During the winter, Nikolay Mikhailovich and his son always made a trip here from the city on “inspection”—to look at the house, and to fetch provisions to take back to Moscow. The route during the winter, in contrast to the summer “water” route, was far more grueling: first by train, then by bus, then four more miles through the forest. Cars weren’t able to make it to Danilovy Gorki because there was no road; the only way to reach it was by tractor.