They recalled their husbands, and even argued a bit: Marfa remembered how Zinaida had seduced her husband in 1926. Zinaida, in her turn, reported that Lyosha the shepherd had stolen milk right and left from the entire herd. And Lyosha was Marfa’s own brother. Words were exchanged, and they almost got into fisticuffs. But Nura saved the day by singing an off-color little ditty apropos of the situation, about who had sneaked into where and filched what, and they both started laughing.
And again they reminisced about things long past but not forgotten—about how the “Commonists” had starved the village and stolen its men. When they fell silent, they would drink a thimbleful. Then they’d burst out laughing and drink some more. But they didn’t allow sad stories to creep in and put a damper on things. They derived pleasure from the most trivial matter; they laughed on the slightest pretext, or for no reason at all. They cracked jokes, mocked and made fun of one another, danced and sang, a bit for show, with Boris Ivanovich in mind as their audience, but mainly for one another, in the most candid and heartfelt manner.
Nikolay Mikhailovich’s house yielded yet another gift to Boris Ivanovich: three boxes of children’s colored pencils. He had no respect for his metallurgical hackwork, considering himself to be a graphic artist; but these simple colored pencils awakened the painter in him, and applying strokes alternately in blue, green, and black, he created something of strange, multilayered beauty.
Now he felt he was a scholar, a scientist, documenting a disappearing world in images. Laughing, the old women told their intricate stories, their wrinkled faces joyous, and Boris Ivanovich sat at the table, dashing off his marvelous pictures. He was already well into his supply of wallpaper.
The snow fell, and autumnal bleakness, the dreary brown wetness, gave way to the whiteness of winter. It stayed in Boris’s memory as a brilliant, bright patch, a sunny clearing in the dull, gray background of his life.
Boris Ivanovich spent every daylight hour, which were few at the end of November, wandering around the village. The swamps were frozen over, and it was possible to walk out on them, but so much snow had fallen that it was already higher than the tops of his boots.
One day he returned home, frozen to the bone, and found all the old women scurrying around in the yard. They had decided to subject themselves to a major cleansing in anticipation of the next day’s holiday.
“What kind of holiday is it? It’s not November seventh, the reddest of red-letter days; and it’s surely not the fifth of December, the day of the Soviet Constitution, is it?” Boris Ivanovich said.
“We call it the Great Presentation.”
But who was presenting what to whom, they couldn’t say. They all agreed, as one person, however, that they had to bathe. And it was time, in any case. The last time they had washed was for the Feast of the Intercession, when the first snow had fallen.
Only Nikolay Mikhailovich had a decent bathhouse. The old women’s bathhouses had all fallen into disrepair long before. So much snow had piled up in Nikolay Mikhailovich’s garden that it would have taken a whole day to dig a path through it. They decided to bathe in Nura’s cottage, as they had done last time. If they had been younger, they could have bathed right in the stove, but now that they were old they were afraid they might burn themselves to a crisp.
Boris Ivanovich decided not to ask too many questions. He rolled the tubs from the outer entrance into the main room of the cottage. He hauled water from the well. He chopped wood for them, and brought it inside—the outer entrance was filled up with it. They began heating the water in the morning. It was so hot in the cottage that all the windows were steamed up, and tears ran down the panes, bathing them as well as the old women.
Everything was ready; they had even steamed the birch switches. Then they wondered: Where would they put the lodger? He would freeze outside, how could they chase him out of the house while they bathed? They couldn’t hide him in the stove, he’d burn up. The cottage wasn’t divided into separate rooms; there was only one place they could put him—behind the stove. But would he try to take a peek at them from there? Then they started laughing at themselves: Why would a young lad like him want to look at their old bones, anyway?
They put Boris Ivanovich behind the stove and pulled a curtain over it. He sat there with a book, but didn’t read anything. The light from the lamp was as weak as candlelight, and didn’t reach as far as where he was sitting. So he listened to the old women’s conversation.
At first they giggled, saying that they had grown so dry the dirt wouldn’t stick to them anymore. Then Zinaida said that she had already stopped stinking: when they were young they had smelled like pussy, but now they just smelled of dust and mold. Then the washing started. They groaned and whined, they poured the water and clattered the tubs. Then one of them slipped, fell down with a plop, and shrieked. Boris Ivanovich started, and jumped up to see whether she needed his help. He drew himself up to his full height and looked over the curtain. Zinaida and Marfa were picking Nura up off the floor, dissolving into childlike laughter.
Boris Ivanovich froze. He’d grown used to their wrinkled faces, to their dark, knotty hands and their blunt, shapeless feet, to everything that their ancient, faded clothing didn’t conceal. But now—good God!—he saw their bodies. He couldn’t take his eyes off them. Their long, loose gray hair streamed down over their bumpy spines. Their hands and feet seemed enormous and even more misshapen. Broken by working the earth, twisted like the roots of old trees, their fingers had taken on the color of the soil in which they had been digging for so many decades. The skin of their bodies, however, was so white it looked bluish pale, like skimmed milk. Marfa still had breasts, with dark animal-like nipples; but the breasts of the other two seemed to have evaporated, leaving only soft, translucent sacks that hung down to their bellies. Zinaida had long, shapely legs—or what remained of them. Their behinds had been rubbed away to a smooth flatness, and only the folds of skin underneath indicated where their round buttocks had once been.
“I’m telling you, Nura, I can’t pick up anything heavy anymore; my womb starts falling out whenever I do,” Marfa said, challengingly, and with some sort of secret pride. Just then, Boris Ivanovich noticed that a gray bag the size of a tobacco pouch was dangling down between her legs. He grimaced, but still couldn’t tear his eyes away from these three cronelike graces.
Marfa squatted and nimbly pushed the little pouch back under the hairless, wrinkled mound, into the depths of what had once been a woman’s body.
Boris Ivanovich was not an autodidact. He had graduated from art school, and his father had been, after all, an artist-engraver. From childhood he had been familiar with Doré’s illustrations for The Divine Comedy. He had examined that book in the latter years of childhood and early adolescence, when the female body held a burning interest for him. But these crooked, bent creatures who were pottering about just six feet away from him were the living vestiges of bodies, and only with a great effort of the imagination could he discern a female form in their contorted bones, their drooping flesh.