She was met by Pavel Alekseevich, who had already consumed his evening dose. He pressed her head in its gray rabbit fur fitfully to his chest and winced.
“Tanya, there’s been such trouble . . . They beat up Vitalik Goldberg. Genka came in from Obninsk and called. I just came back from the Sklifosovsky Hospital. His condition is serious. I talked to the doctor. He has a skull fracture. His arm is broken, his nose too. He still hasn’t regained consciousness . . . Ilyusha’s book has come out in the States . . . It’s a mess . . .”
Tanya did not even set the heavy bag on the floor, but just stood there in the doorway, stunned by the news. Although of late she had hardly any contact with them, the Goldberg boys were more relatives than friends.
Tanya set the bag on the floor and began to cry. Pavel Alekseevich pulled the wet rabbit cap and heavy jacket off his daughter.
“The KGB?” Tanya suddenly asked soberly.
“Looks like it. He got pounded by professionals. They didn’t want to kill. If they had wanted to, they would have.”
Vasilisa stood in her usual place in the corridor near the corner between the kitchen and the entrance hall, and seemed to be looking in their direction.
“Tanya, is that you?”
“It’s me, me, Vasya. I brought presents.”
“Presents? For what?” Vasilisa was amazed. It was Lent, hardly the time for presents.
“I bought you some Armenian cognac.” Tanya smiled with moist eyes, and Pavel Alekseevich perked up, not at the cognac, of course, which to this day his patients brought him in quantities that exceeded human consumption, but at Tanya’s smile, just like before, her usual former smile, as if all the recent years of alienation had not happened between them.
“Let’s go see Momma, and then you and I will drink some of your cognac. Okay?” Pavel Alekseevich proposed and nudged Tanya in the direction of her mother’s room.
“Did you tell her about Vitalik?” Tanya asked in a whisper.
Pavel Alekseevich shook his head: “We shouldn’t.”
They sat together, the three of them, for the first time in several years. Elena in her armchair, Tanya on her bed, which smelled either of cats or stale urine. Pavel Alekseevich drew closer, together with his round stool.
“So should we have a little drink, girls?” he asked buoyantly, then suddenly stopped short. Elena looked at him with horror.
“Have a drink, have a drink, Mom,” Tanya shouted unexpectedly, instantly bringing her cognac in from the corridor.
Pavel Alekseevich went to get glasses.
“Do you think that . . . Is it true . . . Pavel Alekseevich says . . .” Elena uttered uncertainly and incoherently, but doubtless in protest.
“Mom, one glass . . .”
Pavel Alekseevich stood in the doorway with three unmatched wineglasses. It turned out that Lenochka had not forgotten everything on earth: she had just remembered that her husband was an alcoholic. The sight of the bottle made her nervous for her husband . . .
“It’s good for you, Lenochka. It’s good for your circulation.” Pavel Alekseevich grinned.
Elena extended her hand uncertainly and awkwardly clutched the wet green wineglass. Her knitting slid off her knees and fell to the floor. Murka Jr. pawed it immediately. Elena got upset, the wineglass tipped, and a bit of cognac spilled out.
“Look, Tanya . . . It’s all fallen down . . . Like that . . . Wet . . .” She was not able to put down the wineglass and pick up her knitting: that was too complicated a sequence of actions . . . Pavel Alekseevich picked up the knitting and placed it on the bed. He poured for himself and for Tanya.
“To your health, Mommy.”
Elena moved the wineglass in the air in front of her, Tanya leaned the glass toward her mouth, and she drank it. They sat together for almost an hour, silent and smiling. They slowly drank the cognac and ate the cakes. Then Elena suddenly uttered completely coherently and distinctly, as she had not spoken for years already: “What a nice evening it is today, Tanechka. How nice it is that you came home. Pashenka, do you remember Karantinnaya Street?”
“What Karantinnaya Street?” Pavel Alekseevich was surprised.
Elena smiled, the way adults smile at children who don’t yet understand. “In Siberia, remember? The place you brought us from to the hospital . . . We had a good life there. At the hospital.”
“We don’t have it too bad now either, Lenochka.” He placed his hand on her head and stroked her cheek. She caught his hand and kissed it . . .
The strangest things would happen: Pavel Alekseevich could not remember any Karantinnaya Street. But Elena remembered. How could memory be so whimsical? Twenty years spent living together, of which one of them remembered one thing; the other—something else. To what extent had that life been spent together, if their memories of one and the same thing were so different?
Gena Goldberg arrived shortly after. He told what little he had found out about yesterday’s incident. His brother had returned home late and was beaten up in the entrance to their building. He had been found only in the early morning by a neighbor of theirs hooked on jogging who had come out after six in the morning to perform his athletic feats. Vitaly’s coworkers said that over the past week he had received several threatening phone calls.
“Did they call you?” Tanya asked.
“What’s the point of calling me: I’m far away from all that.” Gena seemed to be justifying himself.
By all appearances the matter appeared to be linked with the fact that Vitaly had just returned from Yakutia, where he had been gathering anthropological data on northern peoples. He had been summoned by the security services and requested to hand over all the material he had collected on his research trip on the grounds that his topic was about to be classified as secret. He refused. The secret had been known to the whole world for a long time already: ethnic groups in the North were drinking themselves to death, and the populations of Yakuts and other tribes had shrunk four times over the last twenty years. All of this fit Ilya Goldberg’s theory about the genetic decimation of the Soviet people perfectly logically, but it did not fit the conception underlying that golden wonder at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition known as the “Fountain of Friendship of Nations.”
A bit later Toma arrived. They invited her to drink together with everyone else what was left at the bottom of the bottle. One glass made her drunk and she began to laugh loudly. The evening was ruined. Tanya kissed her mother and her father, put on her Chinese coat, and remembering Vasilisa, went already dressed to say good-bye to her. She entered the tiny pantry and switched on the light. The lightbulb had burned out long ago, but Vasilisa did not know that. She turned her head at the sound of the switch.
“Tanya?”
Tanya kissed Vasilisa on the crown of her head, covered with her black headscarf.
“Tell me what to bring you?”
“I don’t need anything. Just bring yourself,” Vasilisa answered disagreeably.
“I do come by . . .”
Tanya walked out into the street with Gena. He wanted to see her home.
Toma led Elena into the bathroom to replace with a dry layer the multilayered rags rolled into a soft pad inside her old bathing suit stretched over even more spacious underpants. Toma paid not the slightest attention to her shamed resistance: she did this every evening, and every evening she chanted her tongue twister, without the slightest note of reproach.
“Now hold on, Mommy, hold on. We have to change the wet ones . . . You’re making it difficult for me.”
Then she washed and dried poor Elena, doing it all dexterously and roughly, like underpaid attendants in hospitals. Elena was so ashamed that she closed her eyes and just switched off. She had this little, subtle movement called “Imnothere.” Then Toma nudged Elena ahead of her, led her into her bedroom, and tucked her in. After that she called Vasilisa, who sat at Elena’s feet and took to muttering her evening encomium—a long, scrunched prayer pasted together from scraps of prayer formulas, psalms, and her own vociferations, the most frequently reminisced of which was “a Christian death, peaceful, painless, and without shame . . .”