The woman took off her shoes, egesting her filthy bare feet from the remains of her foot rags. Spreading her legs, she set her feet into the warm grass. It felt good . . . Then she took a couple of steps to the side and dropped her pants. Her backside gleamed with an unexpected whiteness. The man commented serenely on the event:
“Piss, bitch . . .”
Then he got the urge himself. He stood up, rolled back the elastic of multiple pairs of sweat pants, and pulled out his tiny tackle. The burdock shook under his healthy stream.
Tanya felt good, better and better as her inebriation increased, until she finally fell asleep right there in the shade of the soaked burdocks.
She was awakened after dark by an acute attack of nausea. She did not immediately realize where she was. She tried to move. She got up on her knees. She vomited violently. Then she wiped her mouth with a piece of rough burdock leaf. The couple was gone. She had to make her way out of there. She moved and was once again overcome by nausea. This time the vomiting spurted violently, and it seemed as if her stomach were ripping apart. Having emptied her stomach, she set out across dark courtyards illuminated only by the weak light of windows. She crossed one, then another, then a third. A tram clanged not far away, and she headed toward its recognizable music. The street was familiar. Tikvinskaya. Quite close to her house.
She felt better again, as if something wonderful had happened to her. Oh, the vagrants . . . Nice people free of all cares . . .
How wonderfully simple life is! I did something to myself . . . Snip! Snip! No more. No more pregnant rats, hydrocephalus, or developing capillaries!
A serene tranquility came over Tanya, the heavenly moment of contentedness and joy that had shone over the drunken pair of vagrants . . .
23
ELENA GEORGIEVNA SAT ON A NARROW WOODEN BENCH behind the collection box and awaited her priest acquaintance. The service was already over. The worshippers had dispersed. The cleaning woman clanged with her bucket. The metal scraping sound suited the church’s hollow silence. In the refectory the priests, the church elder, and the choirmaster were eating dinner, and the smell of fried onions reached Elena. The lighting in the church was absolutely theatricaclass="underline" the twilight was broken by thick columns of sunlight that fell from the high-set windows, and the scoured coverings of the icons caught in these streams of light shone, and the copper candlesticks burned, while in those places where the light did not reach there was only an enigmatic glimmer, patches of light, the quivering glow of candles about to expire . . . Elena’s soul was peaceful and quiet. She came here for moments like this: her worries now seemed mundane, her problems insignificant, and the conversation she had waited for so long—awkward and specious . . . Perhaps she had asked Father Vladimir for a meeting for naught? Perhaps there was no need to tell anybody anything? And how would she put it? Yes, the world was falling apart. But she herself understood perfectly well that it wasn’t the world that was falling apart, but her mind, which was losing precious splinters of knowledge, memory, and life skills . . . She would have gone to a neurologist, to a psychiatrist, instead of to a priest, were the cracks of her consciousness not filled with something not of this world—more precisely, otherworldly—faces and voices, all of them unearthly, disturbing, but sometimes inexpressibly sublime as well . . . Was this a charm? A deception? How could she put it?
The priest was already heading toward her, wiping his mouth, buried under his mustache and beard, with a checkered handkerchief . . .
“Now, my dear, at your service,” he said in an absolutely secular tone, as in the old days when he had worked at the Moscow Architectural Project office and Elena had occasionally done drafting work for him. “What problems are you having?”
ELENA DID NOT HAVE THE KIND OF PROBLEMS THAT COULD be discussed in such a vigorous, businesslike manner.
“I’m having difficulties with my daughter . . . ,” she forced out of herself. She had not planned to talk to him about Tanya, but since the question of Tanya was concrete and readily comprehensible, she spoke about her. A feeling of betrayal clenched Elena. Tanya had not charged her to talk about her affairs with anyone, but there was no alternative, so she continued. “She’s a very capable girl, good at her studies, but now she’s suddenly left her job, does nothing, and spends her days and nights strolling about town, and she never says anything . . .”
“How old is she, twenty?” Father Vladimir ruefully shook his crude thick nose, and his eyes looked out sympathetically from under his one long eyebrow joined at the bridge of his nose. “It’s the same with mine . . . Kolya quit the institute, and Natochka left her husband . . . We raised our children without the church, and these are the pathetic results . . .”
Elena Georgievna felt excruciatingly bored, but leaving right away was impossible, so they spoke another twenty minutes about the harm of an atheistic upbringing, about the need to bring children to church beginning in early childhood, about the benefits of reading the Gospel, about prayer, and about other good and proper things. It was remarkably similar to what Vasilisa talked about in less sophisticated terms.
Shortly after three Elena walked out into the street. The sun shone, and it was still summer, but the place seemed entirely unfamiliar to her, and she experienced the kind of wild terror a child feels at having lost its mother at a crowded train station . . . She stood for a moment and waited: perhaps it would suddenly pass . . . This happened to her sometimes, but only for a moment, like an eclipse. This time her amnesia of the world lasted longer, and she would have to adapt to it.
“It’s a city,” she said to herself. “I’m in Moscow. I came here on the metro . . . Or was it a trolleybus . . . ? I’ll have to ask where the nearest metro station is . . . There’s a station near my building. I don’t remember what it’s called. It has colored stained-glass windows . . . I have a home. There’s a phone in the apartment . . . The number is . . . I don’t remember . . . I should ask the man I was just talking to . . .”
But she was unable to remember to whom she had just spoken and about what . . .
A tall woman in a light-colored suit, a silk scarf with grayish-blue streaks covering her graying hair, stood on the church stairs attempting to find some speck of texture on the empty mirror of the world that had just been filled with color and various details, each of which had a title or a name . . . She set off slowly down the lane. And walked, and walked, past places that were unfamiliar and more pleasant than not, but completely unrecognizable. She tried not to cross streets: that was too terrifying. When she tired, she sat down on a bench in some square. She wanted to ask the woman sitting alongside her what time it was, but she could not formulate the question: the words would not come together or be pronounced. Then someone familiar touched her shoulder.
“Elena Georgievna? Has something happened?”
The voice was a woman’s, concerned. Elena never did remember who it was. This angel brought her home and helped her with the key. For some reason it was already late in the evening. She could not understand where the day had gone. Elena sat down in her armchair in the kitchen and remained there for a long, long time, until she fell asleep . . . Two other people were asleep at home—Pavel Alekseevich in his study, and Toma in the nursery. Alongside Pavel Alekseevich’s couch lay an empty vodka bottle. Toma slept without having washed her earth-stained hands or turning out the light. That evening Vasilisa did not return home. Neither did Tanya . . . but Elena did not notice.