Before that, the evening before, Tanya had quarreled with her father, Vasilisa had reported. Vasilisa had also reported that she had found three empty bottles in Pavel Alekseevich’s study. Everything in their household was upside down, and now her head was falling apart.
Elena once again attempted to get up, but everything again swam before her eyes. She asked Vasilisa to call a doctor.
The district doctor, a finicky and good-for-nothing matron, arrived toward evening. She measured her blood pressure. It was normal. But she indicated a tentative diagnosis—a transitory form of hypertension, wrote out a work-release form, and promised to send a neurologist to the house. She did not prescribe any medicine. She was afraid to. For her, house calls to this building filled with distinguished doctors were sheer punishment. Vasilisa cared for Elena all day as best she could: brought her tea with lemon and kept trying to feed her. But Elena did not feel like eating.
Rather late in the evening Pavel Alekseevich arrived. He was disturbed by the news. He dropped into Elena’s bedroom and sat down on the bed, smelling of vodka.
“What happened?”
“Nothing in particular. My head is spinning.” She did not want to mention her loss of memory. It was too terrible for words . . .
He pressed his hard thumb to her wrist. He listened. Her pulse was normal, and the volume was good. There were no irregularities . . .
“You’re tired. Upset. Maybe you just need to relax. Should I get you a reservation for the Academy of Science’s sanatorium?” Pavel Alekseevich asked.
“No, Pasha. You see what’s happening with Tanya. How can I leave her now?”
“In the past he would have said ‘reservations,’” Elena noted to herself. “We haven’t been anywhere together in eight years . . .”
They talked about Tanya. Pavel Alekseevich felt that it would all work itself out.
“A growing-up crisis. I think we should give her the opportunity to make some decisions on her own.”
Elena lethargically agreed. In fact, she had hoped that her husband would be able to do something quickly and wisely that would clear up all of Tanya’s troubles, and that everything would be all right again. But Pavel Alekseevich merely asked if he should arrange for a decent neurologist. Elena declined: one was coming from the local polyclinic tomorrow.
“Why didn’t I offer to go to the sanatorium with her?” Pavel Alekseevich reproached himself as he walked out of the room.
Everything between them was just a hair off.
Each of them had an opinion about the abrupt turn in Tanya’s life. Strangely enough, the sternest judge turned out to be Toma. The girls had lived together in one room for eight years. By now Toma understood—not merely in some wordless, malleable childish way, but with the logic of a maturing person—just what a lucky number she had drawn on the day of her mother’s death . . .
The thoroughly bourgeois values she had been afforded, first in the form of clean sheets and decent food on her plate, and later more subtle things of a refined nature—such as gentility and reserve, cleanliness not only outward, but inward and known as decency, and a sense of humor among them that assuaged all situations in which other people Toma knew would begin to shout or even strike each other—all of these values, both physical and spiritual, Tanya was betraying, declaring with her behavior alone that she spat in the face of their world order.
That spit both stunned and outraged Toma. She had so internalized the lessons of family life that she expressed her opinion, as best she could, quaking at her own daring and fear of losing Tanya’s goodwill as a result of her comment. Complex things connected with how life works or a person behaves, when translated into her impoverished language, read approximately as follows: “Your parents have done so much for you, while you, you ungrateful girl, just spit on all of this and, to top it off, you’ve dropped out of school!”
For Toma the last was the most sensitive point because now in her second year at the landscaping department, where she fawned over domestic asters and Holland tulips, she had experienced certain stirrings inside: for the first time in her life she wanted to go to school. She had not expressed this to anyone aloud yet, but in her head she had been calculating whether it would be better for her to go to technical school or to aim higher—for the forestry institute.
Vasilisa’s take on Tanya’s odd transformation was simpler: the girl was out for a good time.
Elena essentially shared Vasilisa’s point of view, but in milder terms. She saw the reason for her daughter’s changed behavior not in Tanya herself, not in her spiritual life, but in certain external events, in the bad influence of new people in her life whom Elena did not know.
Pavel Alekseevich postulated that Tanya was undergoing an overdue youth crisis. Likely he was closest of all to the truth. While attempting to analyze the mechanism of this breakdown, he nevertheless ruled out that the reason lay in that completely—from his point of view—insignificant episode with the stain and the dead fetus that Tanya had related to him with such emotion. It seemed to him that the reason lay somewhere deeper down. In addition, he was disturbed by that phone call from Professor Gansovsky, who first went on at great length about Pavel Alekseevich’s exceptional scholarly reputation, then—with the help of the generalizing pronoun “we”—led him to understand that he included himself among the few researchers who were conscientious, and, at the end, gave Tanya an outstanding recommendation, offered to hand back her resignation, to give her time (two months even) to have a good rest, and then in September to leave behind all her silly whims and return to her work as his personal, not MarLena Sergeevna’s, laboratory assistant. He asked Pavel Alekseevich to pass on to Tanya that he expected to see her during his office hours that Tuesday, after twelve noon . . .
After hanging up the phone and thinking about the conversation, Pavel Alekseevich arrived at the conclusion that Tanya had got into some professional conflict with MarLena Sergeevna, whom Tanya had too quickly, from her first day on the job, set as her model.
Tanya’s life no longer coincided with the family’s schedule: by the time her father came home from work she was already gone and, showing up before dawn, she slept until noon, so it took no small effort for Pavel Alekseevich to intercept her and convey to her the contents of his phone conversation with Gansovsky. Tanya just shrugged.
“What’s the point of going? I’m not going back there anyway.”
“Tanyusha, that is certainly your right. But don’t forget that I made that request on your behalf and brought you to the laboratory myself. Don’t put me in an awkward position. Ultimately, one has to observe certain proprieties,” he said, more than diplomatically.
Tanya vituperated: “How I hate all your proprieties!”
He took her by the head and stroked it.
“What do you want to do, little one, change the world? That’s already been done . . .”
“Dad, you don’t understand anything!” She bawled into his chest.
Then ran off, leaving Pavel Alekseevich dismayed: the girl was twenty years old, but acted liked a teenager . . .
2
THE LATE SLUGGISH SUMMER DREW TO ITS END WITH AN August heat wave. Tanya had been living her strange nocturnal life for two months and was increasingly more drawn into it. The geography of her lonely walks expanded. She traipsed the lanes of old Moscow and developed a particular fondness for the Zamoskvorechye region with its stocky merchant houses, enclosed gardens, and an unexpected chain of ancient trees that stood like guards before nests of gentle people demolished long ago. She often strolled along Patriarch Ponds, exploring the baffling confusion of its connected courtyards. She liked to go by way of Trekhprudny Lane and the Volotsky buildings that her great-grandfather had built, approaching from the side of the Shekhtel building, then turning left and ending her tour at the ponds, just before dawn, dozing a bit on her favorite park bench on the side facing Bolshoy Patriarshy Lane.