Each time he drank just a bit more than usual, Pavel Alekseevich started in anew with Vasilisa. But no line of reasoning could move her. Then once, Toma, without at all having spoken with Pavel Alekseevich, but simply having hauled an enormous bundle of linen from the laundry up five flights of stairs (the elevator was not working that day) and completely drained, accidentally uttered the only words that would convince her.
“Look, Aunt Vasya, you’re so strong and healthy you could haul water, but all you do is pray . . . Why don’t you at least come with me . . .”
Despite her scrawniness, Toma in fact came from a hardy breed: she spent whole days on end pottering with her green babies, pushing her nose to the ground, tirelessly digging and weeding. The blood of the peasant had spoken in her: what she had not wanted to do for trite beets and carrots she did with tenderness and passion for rhododendrons and choisya.
She had never liked doing housework, which now required more and more of her time, and now she was enrolled at an evening trade school and in fact very busy.
For a whole day Vasilisa carried this reproach—vented by Toma in a fit of temper—inside her. As always, she thought slowly and assiduously, calling upon Mother Anatolia for help. Finally, on Sunday evening, after supper, she informed Pavel Alekseevich that she was agreed to an operation.
“But you didn’t want to do it.” Pavel Alekseevich was surprised. “First we need to show you to an oculist. For a consultation . . . Maybe they won’t agree to do it . . .”
“Why not? I’m agreed. Let them cut . . .”
The doctors found no contraindications. Two weeks later Vasilisa Gavrilovna was operated on at the eye institute on Gorky Street. Sixty percent of her sight was restored, and Vasilisa returned to her former household chores—once again she did the shopping, stood in lines, cooked their food, and did the laundry. Only her step remained unsure, wary, as if she were carrying some fragile precious object—her only seeing eye. Pavel Alekseevich’s words about God’s will effected by the hands of doctors had touched her heart. Although she remembered perfectly the entire operation—performed under local anesthetic—from the first acutely painful shot in her eye until the moment when they removed the bandage and she saw people, vague and quivering, like trees in the wind, she was constantly reminded of the New Testament story of Christ healing the man blind from birth, and she linked the doctors’ fiddling with her numbed eye with the Savior’s touching of the young blind man’s dead eye.
No one in the house guessed the extent to which Vasilisa’s attitude toward herself changed after she recovered her sight: she became filled with respect for her strong, eternally virginal body, for her muscular, calloused feet and hands, and especially for her unseeing, tearing eye which had upped and begun to see. The inner light that had illuminated her in times of total blindness had left her, and now, in her restored sightedness, she could not see it at all. She longed for her lost “little flame,” but remained strongly convinced that it would return to her again when her temporarily resurrected eye would once again go out.
Having reacquired her lost sight, she understood in what vain and fruitless fear for her last eye she had spent the larger part of her life. Only after having lost what remained of her sight was she able to liberate herself from that fear, and now, after the operation, having seen God’s earth anew, she found new faith not in God—her faith in God had never required reaffirmation—but in God’s love directed at her personally, at bent, stupid, and ignorant Vasilisa. She began to respect that same Vasilisa as the object of God’s personal love . . . Now she knew for sure that the Lord God set her apart from the enormous human multitude . . .
A completely new, outlandish thought crept into her head: that God loved her even more than others . . . Take Tanya: beautiful, wealthy, talented from birth, but she had left home to live the life of a vagabond, in other people’s spaces, and not out of need, but of her own free will . . . Or Pavel Alekseevich: what an imposing, famous man, the doctor of all doctors. How many children had he done away with: countless numbers, over his head in sin. Plus he drank, like a lowlife loser, like her deceased brother, God be with him . . . There was nothing to be said for Elena: what had happened to her was obvious as the palm of your hand. Kind, and quiet, and compassionate, she felt sorry for every last cat, but had forgotten about Flotov! Wasn’t that on her conscience? What else was God punishing her for? He’d taken away her mind and all her senses. She lived like an animal . . .
Vasilisa now treated Elena condescendingly, like a domesticated animal that needed to be fed and cleaned . . . She spoke with her as with a cat: into the air with inarticulate words of approval or discontent . . . No, there was nothing to discuss here—if the Lord had singled out anyone, it was she, Vasilisa. First He had taken her eye away, and then returned it . . . How else could you make sense of it?
9
TANYA WENT TO THE HOSPITAL EVERY DAY AND ASSISTED Vitalka with his needs, from bathing to eating. His right hand was in a cast, and with only the left he had a hard time reading—turning pages was a challenge . . . He somewhat exaggerated his infirmity and allowed himself even to be capricious. Every day, with Vika’s shopping bag—which she had not yet returned—Tanya traveled from Profsoiuznaya to Sklifosovsky Hospital. Friends of the Goldbergs contributed a pile of money, and Tanya translated it into various culinary delicacies. Her workouts at the stove entirely replaced her exercises in jewelry-making. Tanya dropped in at Vika’s studio only once, grabbed three pairs of underpants, woolen socks, and her notepad—everything she owned.
Every Saturday Gena came in from Obninsk. They would eat supper, drink a bottle of Georgian wine, sleep on the couch pressed flat by bony old Goldberg, and travel together to visit Vitalka at the hospital. The childlike ease of their relations perplexed Gena: it was as if they were five years old, playing on swings or at blindman’s bluff, guessing in the dark, touching the face and shoulders of whoever happened to fall into their casual embraces . . . Nature had provided them each other for their needs, and no superfluous words occurred between them . . .
Vitalik lay in the hospital for a month and a half. His injuries ultimately proved to be not as grave as they were complex. His broken nose was reset, the new one no worse than the old, and his concussion also was nothing out of the ordinary, but his broken elbow required some serious tinkering. They performed one operation, which turned out not as well as it might and led to pseudarthrosis. The doctors had to perform a second operation, after which the joint lost all flexibility. Either those masters of fisticuffs really knew how to produce the worst possible fractures, or Vitalka’s particular brand of bad luck had been at work.
Be what may, they released him at the end of winter, and Tanya brought him home with a great deal of celebration and even arranged a small party for close friends to mark the occasion. The next Saturday, as usual, Gena arrived from Obninsk. Vitalik had been home three days already. Crossing the threshold, Gena immediately sensed that he had been replaced. He was madly disappointed, but not surprised. He looked Tanya right in the eye, but she felt not the least discomfort. The three of them ate dinner together. On the table there was a fat yeasty pie that breathed warmth and homey comfort. Tanya served Vitalka as if he were a child, and Gena understood that his brother, apparently, had had a stroke of luck. He also wondered whether his brother understood that he had stolen his lover . . .