Ilya Iosifovich did not go to court, but he also had no intention of going to the clinic: he felt uncomfortable taking sick leave when he was healthy. However, the morning of the next day, at 9:00 A.M., a visitor with the unmistakable look of a gumshoe awaited him at the lab and introduced himself as an investigator. The embezzlement case quickly took a new turn, the hired lawyer who quickly became a friend at first laughed, then pondered, and finally, following extensive mental effort, decided that the best strategy would be a scrupulous defense on each of the eighteen charges of financial irregularity layered at Goldberg with an insignificant admission of financial wrongdoing, such as an unrecorded check, for propriety’s sake, that is, for public censure . . .
The scheme was clever, but failed. Pale and teary-eyed, Natalia Ivanovna gave phantasmal testimony, and Ilya Iosifovich received—as befit the gravity of the financial crime—a full three years in corrective-labor camps. He was taken under guard directly from the courtroom before the eyes of his stunned and indignant staff.
Goldberg’s book was already at the typesetter’s, but neither the author nor Seslavin’s organization knew anything about it. For Goldberg, who had managed yet one more time to outsmart his own fate, a trip north to all-too-familiar territory lay ahead . . .
6
TWO YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE TANYA HAD LEFT HOME, living in various places, with new friends—in the studio of an artist acquaintance on Shabolovskaya Street, in a winterized dacha of someone’s parents near Zvenigorod, or in caretaker quarters her janitor-caretaker girlfriend inhabited on Molchanovka Street . . .
The last six months a jeweler friend, Nanny Goat Vika—an enormous, unattractive woman with an aristocratic surname and commoner’s manners—had sheltered her. She was a cool woman, and Tanya lived with her as sort of an apprentice. As befits an apprentice, she did the housework and ran errands. Nanny Goat’s studio was in a half-basement on Vorovskogo Street, and her apartment in a new construction area. Her family of old Muscovites of God knows how many generations had been resettled from Znamenka Street to the Cheryomushki district, but Vika, after moving her mother, two grandmothers, and son, just could not tear herself away from her old neighborhood, and went home to the new apartment only to sleep, and that not every night. Tanya settled herself in a corner room the size of a closet formerly heaped full of pieces of expensive old furniture rescued from local trash bins.
Nanny Goat had hands of steel, a heart of gold, and the mad sensibilities of a truth-seeker. Ages ago she had graduated from radio-engineering trade school, where she had learned how to dexterously manipulate a soldering iron to just the right place on a circuit board. After having casually repaired a few antique rings and earrings for some elderly acquaintances on the Arbat, friends of her two grandmothers, she turned this otherwise unexciting skill into a new profession. She had a ton of work: fix this, create a setting for a stone, or make some simple earrings . . . After a while she discovered that repairs and resettings demanded highly developed intuition and more experience than creating new pieces. She went to study with a famous jeweler, an artist, and owing to a confluence of various strange circumstances, including those related to housing, married him. A few years later he left her, pregnant, but with compensation: his workshop. Along with the studio Nanny Goat inherited his marvelous bohemian lifestyle, which included the drinking, and the parties, and the interesting people from all sectors of society: prim little customers, various fans of just hanging out, self-declared musicians, poets, and philosophers who had strayed from the path of Marxist-Leninism, simply pleasant do-nothings, and, finally, the night people Tanya had observed during the adventures of her first year of freedom—estranged, belonging to no one, like peculiar animals that lived only at night and disappeared to no one knew where during the day. Tanya, however, now knew where they spent the daytime, which was so dangerous for them: in shelters like Vika’s studio . . . Tanya came to love the visitors to Vika’s studio all at once, in a bunch, almost without making distinctions among them and without studying their faces especially, sensing acutely how different they were from the people she had met at the university and in the laboratory, in stores, and at the conservatory. She learned to distinguish in a crowd those who might show up at Vika’s studio.
“Our kind of people,” Vika would say with a grin, and no more explanations on the subject were necessary. What precisely did that possessive pronoun entail? Neither social origins nor national identity, neither profession nor level of education, but something elusory connected in part, but not only, with an aversion to Soviet power. In order to be “our kind,” you also had to experience a certain discomfort, a certain dissatisfaction with everything that was possible and allowed, and discontent with the existing world as a whole, from the alphabet to the weather, to the Lord God himself, who had done such a lousy job of putting things together . . . In a word, that sense of Russian metaphysical melancholy that came to the surface, like grass at a springtime trash dump, after the permissive Twentieth Party Congress . . . Those who studied the properties of capillary development in the brain, Chinese grammar, or metal spark machining had no chance of becoming “our kind.” Although their ranks also included secret adversaries of Soviet power, they practiced the rules of disguise: in the morning they tied their ties, did their hair up, and, most important, kept a loyal expression on their face for eight working hours a day, for precisely which reason they remained in the category of “clients.”
“Our kind” of person was uncombed and unkempt and arrived at Vika’s studio toward midnight with a bottle of vodka, a guitar stuffed with “our kind” of songs, a new poem by Brodsky (or one’s own), or a pinch of hashish, and stayed to spend the night either with Nanny Goat or with Tanya, however the cards fell. “Our-kind-of-ness” trumped personal sexual attraction. Occasionally casual affairs would sprout within their own circle, which required the implementation of certain unwritten rules. Nanny Goat herself was a businesswoman who despised all that lovey-dovey stuff and, having been burned when she was young, extirpated all sentiment from her own life and successfully trained Tanya to do the same. Tanya liked these rules, according to which courting rituals of the variety the Goldberg boys had managed to spread over an entire five-year period were abolished, matters being decided in the short span of an evening at the table, and relations by morning either exhausted or continued, with no obligations attached for either of the dallying parties.
Overall, Tanya’s apprenticeship was exceptionally successful, her already disciplined hands readily and joyously acquiring new skills and techniques. She would extract an ingot of silver, formerly a teaspoon, from its soapy mold, pound it with a mallet, heat it on a burner until it turned cherry red, release it, and press it through rollers. Then she pulled it through a wire rolling mill, out of which emerged new thin silver wire . . . The work was not complicated, but Nanny Goat turned out to be a strict teacher and monitored Tanya’s work to make sure she did everything by the rules, as her former husband, a tiresome pedant, had once taught her. Tanya worked with a passion and quickly converted the entirety of Vika’s silver supply into millimeter-sized wire. Now Vika had no choice but to teach Tanya the next important stage of jewelry making, soldering. Here Nanny Goat Vika was a professor. Although she withheld none of the secrets of her craft and generously shared all the mysteries of soft and hard soldering and the slightest differences in color by which to measure the temperature of the melted solder, Tanya never achieved Vika’s level of mastery. On the other hand, she quickly mastered the torch: with a deft and lightning-fast movement of her left hand she raised the versatile flame to shoulder level and affixed it to the stand. She never once burned herself. Time passed, and Tanya began to learn how to do settings. She almost wore her thumb down to the bone with a needle file before she learned how to finish a piece for sale. But it appealed to Tanya that her hands—which she used to care for, growing long nails that she manicured—were now covered with grazes and scars of varying degrees of newness, just like a boy’s . . . She turned body and soul toward masculinity—cut her hair short, slipped on her first pair of jeans, which would replace all other options, bought two boys’ plaid shirts at the Detsky Mir department store, threw out her bras, and gave Toma all her blouses with their round collars and lacy inserts sewn to her mother’s taste . . . A unisex Chinese jacket lined with crude dog fur, dark blue, like everything working-class Chinese, and a rabbit fur cap with earflaps completed her new image, and people on the street would address her as “young man,” which she also liked. Even Tanya’s gait changed, became more abrupt with a swagger to her shoulders . . .