“How can you live here?” Tanya, by now used to everything, was amazed.
“It’s not a problem. For the most part I’m in Obninsk. And Dad and Vitalka are here. But we don’t let anyone in the apartment so as not to scare anyone.” He flashed his big teeth, resembling white beans. “It’s even worse in Malakhovka. When Mama was alive there was some order. How she maintained it I have no idea . . .”
“No, no, this is impossible.” Not yet having removed her jacket, Tanya tried to decide which side they should begin cleaning from. “We’ll start with the kitchen,” she announced.
The decision turned out to be the right one. There were fewer papers in the kitchen, and the usual household dirt did not demand as close attention as the paper trash. Multilayered deposits peeled off the stove in sheets; the sewage-gray linoleum easily washed clean thanks to a packet of laundry detergent found in the bathroom. The main rooms went more slowly: the papers begged to be read, and from time to time some particularly intricate sheet would inhibit their progress. The effort required was more than Herculean: horse manure could be thrown out blindly.
From midnight until four thirty in the morning they merrily cleaned four-hand. They chatted, giggled, and recollected childhood secrets; everything was easy, and the filth flowed down the toilet, while the papers got stacked in drawers, which was also rather funny: the desk drawers had all been completely empty. The people who had conducted the quasi-robbery search had taken only what was in the desk; the other papers, of more recent vintage, spread in massive layers on all work and nonwork surfaces, had been left untouched . . .
“Your brother’s strange,” Tanya announced toward the end. “Ilya Iosifovich has been in prison for half a year already, and he still hasn’t cleaned the apartment.”
“You don’t understand: this is a memorial, an apartment-museum . . .”
At half past four a couch covered with a dusty horse blanket emerged from under multiple layers of paper deposits. Tanya collapsed on it, raising a cloud of dust.
“Enough. Time to sleep,” Tanya commanded, and Gena, who had spent several hours suppressing various urges—from sweet tenderness to bestial desire—did not keep himself waiting . . .
After spending the full reserve munitions of a young warrior and not having slept for two full days, he sank into sleep, continuing all the while to be amazed by this state of acute tenderness and equally acute beastliness . . .
“Where does that feeling of having done something underhanded, of some sort of guilt, come from?” he managed to think as he fell asleep. A voice within him answered sternly: “She’s your sister, after all . . .”
Tanya thought of nothing of the sort: the fellow she had been sleeping with most recently was a hard-core geologist, promiscuous to the point of sainthood, with an innumerable number of children by café waitresses and academicians’ wives, and no worse and no better than this sweet little friend of hers since childhood. Tanya saw nothing particularly charming about a roll in the sack in and of itself and was always surprised by her older girlfriends and the way they went crazy over men: in bed all are equal . . . At the time she still did not know that this was not quite so.
They arrived at the Sklif not by nine, as they had planned, but toward noon. At first they could not wake up, then Gena reaffirmed his new rights. By that time Vitalka had been transferred from intensive care to a regular ward: his condition had improved and he had regained consciousness and no longer intended to die.
8
A YEAR HAD PASSED SINCE A MURKY FILM HAD TOTALLY clouded over Vasilisa’s sole eye and darkness had occluded her vision. Blindness, a misfortune and terrible threat for the elderly, had liberated her from constant labor.
So began her lawful release from work, beyond which blind Vasilisa envisioned her final unlimited and boundless recumbency. Her constant activity directed outward now turned inward. Before she had prayed to icons. She had severaclass="underline" a dark three-tone Theotokos from Kazan executed in cursory traveling merchant style, an Elijah the Prophet split in half by some stupid ax and crudely glued together so that the Prophet’s face had been preserved, but the cape that hung from the chariot for the most part did not fall in Elisha’s arms, having broken off to remain as a chip in the village church and to burn up along with it. There was also a Saint Seraphim of Sarov with an earless bear, and a drowning Peter—halo shifted to one side and arm extended toward a Savior walking past him in the opposite direction. Now it was as if she were deprived of all these protectors. She stood on her knees in her usual place where the rug was bald from her kneeling and attempted to resurrect them in her memory, but could not. The darkness that enveloped her hung like a smooth wall with no shades or points of light whatsoever. This went on for a rather long while, and Vasilisa grieved: it seemed to her that her prayers hung in the stale air near her head and rose neither to the Lord, nor to the Lord’s Mother, nor to God’s saintly miracle workers. Then something like a flickering candle flame began to cut through the darkness. The flame was so weak and so unsteady that Vasilisa feared that it might be some charm of her imagination. But it was so alluring, that bright spot, it so gladdened her, that Vasilisa beckoned it from within and tried to hold on to the image of light a bit longer. And the unsteady light grew and became stronger, and shone, visible to no one, in her private gloom, moving her to incessant and almost wordless prayer. Her prayers now were only about the “little flame,” as she called it, that it not leave her. Even in her sleep her prayer did not abandon her, as if it dozed alongside her, like the old Murka who had long ago chosen for her night lodgings the space alongside Vasilisa’s skinny, cold legs.
So it was that Vasilisa thought that she had found a completely new, easier life for herself without her usual never-ending chores—without all those excessive, by her understanding, purchases of food, without washing large loads of hardly soiled laundry, and without enormous deck-swabbing housecleanings—leaving herself only her almost ritual duties of washing Elena in the morning and meeting Pavel Alekseevich after work. The larger part of the day she spent in her pantry in subtle meditation comprehensible only to Eastern monks . . . A blend of prayer-filled contemplation, spiritual communication—with the abbess, Mother Anatolia, with whom, of late, thanks to her blindness, she had grown even closer than before—and loving reminiscence of all those living and dead, close and distant, beginning with her own parents and the eternally memorable Varsonofy and ending with the nameless faces of the nuns of the N monastery, long ago deceased . . . by the light of that tiny flame that she had learned to fan within herself, as she would a coal in a stove . . .
Every day, as he accepted from Vasilisa’s hands his pauper’s dinner, completely indistinguishable from the hospital dinner the practical nurse brought him at work, Pavel Alekseevich reproached himself for not being able to overcome Vasilisa’s stubbornness: he was convinced that all she had was just a banal cataract that could be removed and her sight at least partially restored. He was not some absentminded professor incapable of turning on a gas burner. He could warm up his own food, he could even prepare it, but to deprive Vasilisa Gavrilovna of performing her duties he could not, yet to accept the services of a blind servant was also untenable . . .
Again and again he spoke to her about an operation. Vasilisa, though, did not want to hear about it, invoking God’s will, which determined everything for her . . . Pavel Alekseevich got angry, could not make sense of her, and tried, using her logic, to convince her that God’s will lay precisely in that a doctor given the call to operate on the blind would perform an operation on her, and she would be able to see the light, if only to sing the praises of God . . . She shook her head, and then he got even angrier, accused her of cowardice, illiteracy, and playing the holy fool . . .