She had already turned twenty-two, but seemed to be experiencing her teenage years anew. Although her nocturnal sorties had ended almost entirely, she still treasured nighttime the most, especially those solitary nights when Vika would leave for the evening for Cheryomushki, hauling two bags of food from the Prague restaurant carryout store for her elderly female relatives, to kiss and shower presents on her little Mishka, fight with her mother, make peace with one of her grandmothers, and argue with the other. Relations in their family were stormy: they couldn’t let a day pass without tears, verbal abuse, and passionate kisses. On returning from Cheryomushki, Nanny Goat was always very invigorated and slightly aggressive, as though family turmoil opened up new sources of energy in her.
Tanya visited her own family infrequently. She usually arrived toward evening. The apartment, which had once been very light, now seemed gloomy at all times of day. Tomochka’s tropical vegetation consumed the light. The place was dusty and faded; only the ever-green leaves Toma was never too lazy to wipe down with a damp sponge gleamed with a waxy shimmer. Her mother, sitting in an armchair that had shaped itself to her lightweight body, rustled the woolen yarn that she either knitted—her knitting needles tinkling rhythmically—or undid with a quiet electric-like whirr. Balls of old wool covered with knots and the tails of knots turned softly at her feet. Two striped cats, Murka-mother and Murka-daughter, lazily pawed the rolling gray balls that picked up clumps of the cats’ shed fur and dust balls from the poorly swept floor.
Tanya would sit down alongside her mother, on the spinning piano stool. Elena Georgievna happily smiled when she saw Tanya.
“My little girl, I wanted . . .” Elena began to say, but did not finish her sentence.
“What, Mommy?”
Elena fell silent, having lost the thread of her passing desire. Unlike the broken wool that she caught and knotted together, she could not reconnect either her thoughts or her sentences at the point where they split, and pained by this, she attempted somehow to hide this terrible condition from those around her.
“Would you like me to bring you some tea?” Tanya offered the first thing that came into her head.
“I don’t want tea . . . Tell me . . .” And once again she fell silent.
“What are you knitting?” Tanya made a new attempt at communicating.
“Here . . . I’m knitting this for you . . . ,” Elena answered in confusion and smiled guiltily. “I undid it a bit . . .”
Elena did not know what she was knitting. When her work turned into a rectangle and she needed either to drop a stitch or pick up and knit the collar, she would become confused, undo the whole thing, and start all over again . . . Tanya quickly tired of the strain of their conversation, of the impossibility of communicating: her mother, of course, was sick, but her sickness was something very bizarre . . . A kind of slow deterioration . . .
“Do you want to go for a walk?” Tanya offered.
Elena looked at her in fright: “Outside?”
Following those awful lapses of memory that had happened to her outside the apartment, she completely stopped going out. It was difficult for her even to leave her own room. When she needed to make her way to the washroom or the kitchen, she would pick up a cat, because the cat’s warmth would lend her a sense of balance. Thoughts of the world that lay beyond the confines of their apartment evoked a wild terror in her. She was ashamed of this terror and attempted to hide it.
“Not today,” she would say childishly, and searched with her eyes for one of the Murkas. Her helpless and almost infantile intonation and convulsive searching for a cat flustered Tanya as well.
“Tell me something . . .” Elena asked vaguely.
“About what?” Tanya hid behind the empty words because it was impossible for her to tell anything about her current life.
Elena smiled pathetically. “About something . . .”
Their conversation about nothing lasted half an hour, then Tanya went to the kitchen, put on the teakettle, took note of the household’s degeneration and desolation, the unscoured pots and poorly washed cups . . . But there was food in the house: in the evenings Toma would bring home what she had managed to grab between work and her evening classes.
Then her father would arrive and, he too, instead of his former strength and power, emanated aging and decline . . . His field of energy, at one time so powerful and magnetic, had grown exhausted, and Tanya felt uncomfortable looking at him: it seemed as if he had committed some shameful act and wanted to hide it.
Pavel Alekseevich had shrunk and grown thin, his shoulders drooped, and his forehead and cheeks were deeply furrowed, as if his skin had become a size larger. He was happy to see Tanya, and at first his boxer-looking face would light up with all its doglike furrows, but it quickly paled when he saw Tanya’s sadness and poorly disguised pity. He suffered, like an abandoned lover, but out of pride never initiated the conversation: the easy, happy dialogue that could arise at any point between two people who understood each other no longer existed between them . . .
Vasilisa, now totally blind, would emerge from her pantry. She felt so sure of herself in the kitchen that her blindness was almost not noticeable. She set the table, warmed up soup for Pavel Alekseevich, and even placed a grubby three-ounce shot glass next to his plate . . . She made her way around the apartment by running one hand along the wall, her rummaging hands having traced the dark band of the trajectory of her movements on the blue-and-yellow wallpaper. She moved soundlessly on the mended soles of her old felt boots, and it was amazing how she still preserved her village smells—a combination of sour milk, hay dust, and even, it seemed, a whiff of smoke from a wood-burning stove . . .
Her parents’ house depressed Tanya and saddened her. She rarely ran into Toma these days, but each time she dropped by the house she would leave her a present: a ring with a cornelian, a pendant, or a package of cheap cookies.
At the end of February Tanya had her first sale: she made real money for real work. Fifty rubles for a silver ring with a transparent black smoky quartz, a tender oval stone she had worked on for two days. At one time her salary as a laboratory assistant had been thirty-eight rubles and fifty kopecks, so the jewelry sale seemed like easy mad money, and she decided to spend it all on presents for everyone.
She borrowed a shopping bag from Nanny Goat and did as her mentor: she loaded a bag with pedigree goods from the Arbat—Indian tea, cakes, cookies. For some reason that day they had put on sale a rare shipment of English cosmetics and German cigarettes. She bought those as well. She bought her father a bottle of Armenian cognac, although she knew he preferred vodka. But cognac was classier.