Ilya repeated “teddy bear” a few more times, and then began reciting Pushkin:
“When in the country, musing, I wander
and, stopping off at the public cemetery,
survey the gates, small columns, and the decorated graves…”
He recited it to the end.
“More,” Kostya said.
And Ilya, furrowing his brow, fished out another from his afflicted but boundless memory.
He recited for a long time—all the favorite verse of his dead father, with the same intonation, and in a voice that very much resembled his.
Kostya looked at this sick, no-longer-young boy, and remembered his stepfather—quick-witted, lively, talented—and at the same moment realized that he would have to find a similar kind of institution, not public, but private, for the well-off, apply for guardianship, make calculations, and set this strange and uncanny life to rights again.
Then Kostya took his newly discovered brother to a diner. Ilya pointed to a big apple pie.
“Do you want one piece or the whole thing?”
“The whole thing,” Ilya said, looking down shyly.
Kostya thought for a minute, and asked again.
“Do you want the whole pie, or just one portion?”
Ilya, even more shyly, stared down at his enormous sneakers. He didn’t say a word.
“I see. You do follow a certain logic.”
“Logic,” Ilya answered happily, and sat down at the table like an obedient child.
The waitress brought the pie and a cola for Ilya, and mineral water with ice for Kostya. It was only the middle of June, but the New York heat had already set in, and there was no air-conditioning in this run-down little place.
Ilya consumed bite after bite with a plastic spoon, eating with intense childlike pleasure. His head was exactly like his late father’s—curly chestnut-brown hair, with a sprinkling of premature gray. Even his face resembled his father’s, in a slightly caricatural way.
Kostya recalled with cinematic clarity how, when he was around eight, the three of them were sitting on the shore of a lake—Valdai? Ilmen? Pleshcheyevo?—at sunset in front of a campfire, and his stepfather’s long, dirty fingers had cleaned the ash from the baked potatoes. And all along the lake horizon there were ribbons of color—pink, raspberry, yellow—from the setting sun, and Mama, the red highlights in her hair aglow, was laughing, and his stepfather was laughing, and he, Kostya, was happy, and would love them forever and ever.
Poor Ilya! Poor Olga!
POOR RABBIT
When it came time to look back on his life, Dr. Dmitry Stepanovich Dulin was inclined to think that it had been a good one, maybe even undeservedly so. But he rarely thought about such abstract matters. Still, on Saturdays, when his daughter, Marinka, jumping up and down with excitement, pulled a little bunny wrapped in an old towel out of his briefcase, he felt a grateful satisfaction. His daughter looked like a little bunny herself—soft and gray, with an upper lip like a rabbit’s. Where the rabbit’s white ears stuck out, she had blue ribbons hanging down. Too bad he hadn’t taken a photograph of Marinka with the rabbit.
Dmitry Stepanovich gave the rabbit to his daughter, and handed the towel with the hard, dry little pellets to his wife, Nina, which she then shook off into the trash pail before taking the towel into the bathroom to wash. This was the special rabbit towel, in which the little creature traveled home each Saturday, and in which it was wrapped again each Monday to go back to the laboratory.
The little rabbit was a different one each time—whichever one he happened to grab out of the cage where the test animals lived. Dulin, of course, brought home not those that were undergoing testing, but those from the control group. The test rabbits were more or less healthy, but they had been born from alcoholic mother rabbits. The doctor had plied the mother rabbits with diluted spirits from a young age, then mated them with alcoholic father rabbits, after which he studied their offspring. This was the subject of his dissertation—the influence of alcohol on the offspring of rabbits. The effects of alcohol on the offspring of humans was already well known, of course. Masha Vershkova, the lab assistant, who was at his disposal on a part-time basis, was a representative of this sector of the population: her irises trembled—she suffered from nystagmus—and her fingers shook with a tremor as well. She had been born prematurely, at seven months old. Both her parents were alcoholics, but fortunately she was not mentally impaired. Proof that even alcoholics have a stroke of luck now and then.
Marinka had never been in any such danger. Her father could not tolerate alcohol. He didn’t even drink beer; nor did he smoke. He led a healthy life in all respects. Her mother drank about three small glasses a year, on holidays.
Marinka would take the Saturday bunny to her own little corner, put it into her doll’s bed, pretend to wash it, squeeze and cuddle it, and feed it carrots.
Dmitry Stepanovich had been born in the country, and was used to animals. He had remained a country boy until the urban sprawl of the city of Podolsk had swallowed up his unlovely little village and destroyed its rural ways and practices. Still, Dulin’s urban existence hadn’t begun immediately. The new five-story buildings were constructed according to some whimsical plan, by which they didn’t tear down all the peasant cottages at once, but only those that occupied the plots scheduled for construction. The Dulins’ home was one of the houses that remained standing for some time; but their farming and animal husbandry collapsed. The chickens, a cat, and a dog were the only animals left. The goat and the pig were given to his grandmother’s sister in a more remote village.
By that time, they didn’t keep a cow.
For some reason, the well next to the house was filled in, but plumbing was not installed. After that, they had to walk almost a mile to reach a water pump. Thus, the boy Dmitry lived between city and village. He wore raggedy country clothes to a city school, was a poor student, and was despised by the urban majority for being the “country” minority.
His mother punished him for his bad grades. When she wasn’t too tired and careworn, she would thrash him, letting her bony little fists land where they might, and she would shriek in a high, piercing voice until she fell down in exhaustion. Many years later, after Dmitry had become a doctor, he diagnosed her disorder ex post facto as “hysteria.” And her thyroid was involved. But by the time Dmitry made the diagnosis, she was already dead.
Uncle Kolya also gave him a hard time. True, he didn’t hit him; instead, he dragged him by the ear, squeezing the top of it painfully between his thumb and forefinger. Dmitry was hurt that his mother allowed this to happen, and didn’t intervene. Dmitry’s grandmother defended him, however. Uncle Kolya, a country fellow who was desiccated from drinking, paid visits to many of the single women around, Dmitry’s mother among them. Grandmother called him the “traveling ladies’ man.” She despised him, but at the same time feared him. They died at almost the same time—Uncle Kolya of drink, and his grandmother of old age.
In contrast to Dmitry, his mother was a complete failure. When it came time for their house to be demolished and for her to get an apartment in a new building—the one-room apartment with gas and hot water seemed like heaven to her—his mother took a spill and died instantly, as had her mother. She was awarded her heavenly dwelling, not as a result of all the tedious paperwork necessary for the transaction—as a soldier’s widow, an invalid of the paltry third class, and a high-achiever of Communist labor—but just like that, without lifting a finger. The upshot was that Dmitry’s dream of moving his mother to the capital, of shrewdly exchanging the apartment in Podolsk (which she never received) for a single room in Moscow, was all for nought. Through her bad luck, his mother had liberated her son from the fuss and bother of an apartment exchange and a move.