“My little girclass="underline" is it really true we lived to see the day . . . Will I really deliver my own grandson?” Pavel Alekseevich said in an old man’s weakened voice, and Tanya suddenly saw how he had aged over the last few years, and, moved to tears and immediately angry at herself for that reason, she remonstrated.
“So why don’t you ask me who I’m marrying? I’m marrying the Goldberg brothers.”
“What difference does it make? So it’s the Goldbergs. The main thing is that you be happy.” He in fact could barely tell the brothers apart and was always joking that one of the brothers was a tad smarter and the other a tad more handsome, but he always forgot which one was which . . .
He sensed nothing amiss in this piece of news. For the first time after many years downhill, of decline—both at home and at his job—he sensed an upsurge of joy: Tanya had not rejected him, and his life’s renewal was promised by the child, who would be his and Ilyusha’s grandson. Wasn’t that a miracle?
“Here’s the official notification of your inheritance.” He handed her the envelope. “Your father, Flotov, as we found out not long ago, did not perish at the front, but somehow wound up in Argentina, where he died not long ago. They’re looking for his heirs.”
“So, like, he remembered me only after he died? What about earlier? No, Dad, I don’t want anything. I don’t need anything.” She pushed the envelope away and never thought of it again in her life . . .
12
IN THE MIDDLE OF JULY THE GOLDBERGS GOT MARRIED: Vitalka and Tanya signed at the Moscow Wedding palace, while Ilya Iosifovich registered his vows with Valentina in a camp in Mordovia. At the camp they completed the formalities without ornamental witnesses—in the presence of the camp’s regimen officer and the Moscow attorney who had managed to obtain permission for a prison marriage. Gena and Toma served as witnesses for Vitalik and Tanya. Toma—in a pink dress and white shoes on stiff heels—looked like the bride. Tanya had not thought of dressing up, but one could not say that she had totally ignored the importance of the moment: she had marked it with the purchase of three absolutely identical yellow and white striped men’s shirts, and in these shirts the three of them looked like they were all from the same children’s home—shorn short, thin, identically dressed, and the same height, five feet seven inches.
Toma was disappointed—no reception, no gifts, and no merrymaking. She wanted grand solemnity and a huge party, but all that was precisely what Tanya could not bear. Their sole wedding gift was an orange-pink orchid, for which Toma the day before had traveled to the home of a friend from the Botanical Gardens and which replaced the traditional fleur d’orange. The mental picture of the brothers Goldberg with Tanya between them bearing a languid wobbly branch with three large drooping flowers—lion’s heads with manes, mouths, and side petals forming a lighter-colored halo, “a rarity of rarities”—would remain in Toma’s memory for the rest of her life.
Vitalik did, though, get one more present. After the newlyweds received their marriage certificate written out on iridescently patterned official paper, Tanya pulled out of the pocket of her yellow-and-white shirt a certificate, folded in half, from the obstetric care center certifying that she was in her eighteenth week of pregnancy. Together these two documents gave Vitalik the right to a deferral from military service.
Having resolutely refused all services offered by the state, from Mendelssohn’s “March” to expensive champagne, and accepting only the pompous congratulations of the Nonna Mordiukova look-alike beneath the red flag with the red suit and the red satin ribbon across her fat chest who had conducted the ceremony, the kids descended the grand staircase of the Wedding Palace, sat down on the steps, and drank a bottle of cheap, sour Rkatsiteli, after which Gena hailed a passing cab, he and Tanya got in, and they drove off.
Toma, stunned and unaware of the true state of affairs, asked the melancholic young husband, “Where are they going?”
“To Obninsk. She’s planning to spend the week there . . .”
Tanya spent not one, but two whole weeks in Obninsk. Back in Moscow, she immediately stopped in at home. She missed them.
She found Elena in her former condition, but very pale and limp, and she even tried to persuade her to go outside for a walk. Elena was so frightened by the offer that what had started as a coherent conversation suddenly came to a halt as she babbled pathetic and incoherent words.
“If it wouldn’t be too much to ask . . . Might I possibly go there . . . You have to ask Pavel Alekseevich. Isn’t that so?”
Tanya was horrified. Her mother’s illness was something unique, unlike anything else, and getting used to it was impossible.
Later Pavel Alekseevich arrived and was delighted to see both Tanya and her belly, which had just begun to show.
“Come on, I’ll tell you about our little boy.”
Neither of them doubted for a minute that Tanya would give birth to a boy, and each time they met, Tanya would ask her father to tell her how the child must look at that point.
She made herself comfortable on the couch, tucked her legs under her, and loosened the button of her jeans. He sat down on a round stool alongside her.
“So, tell me,” she said.
“So, now. First of all, I’m certain that he already feels something. Folk belief has it that the soul enters the child at the midpoint of pregnancy. That is, he begins to move and to feel simultaneously.”
“No, I felt a lot earlier that he was running his finger along inside me,” Tanya objected.
“Well, that means our little boy is an early developer. I’m telling you what happens in the average situation. Your little one is floating now and has no idea of up or down. He’s like this, about a foot long. His head is large and covered with hair, which, if it was light before, has now darkened. He is relatively grown, has acquired more than half of his height, but weighs only a pound and a half. A skinny little thing. And his skin right now is very wrinkled, without any hypodermic fat. But he doesn’t need fat right now. He’s covered with down, and the vernix caseosa is already forming. His face has acquired distinct features. He already resembles you, that is, I hope he resembles you. But the main work going on right now is taking place in his nervous system. A very complex program has to set in for his organs to begin working. It’s forming right now. How? I don’t know. And don’t ask. No one knows.
“There’s a lot I don’t know about what’s taking place in there. But some things I do know. It seems to me that he has already acquired awareness of himself and that precisely in these last few days his sense of ‘I’ has been born. His sense of being apart from the rest of the world. The ‘rest of his world’ is you, my joy. Because until he’s born he’ll know no other world. With men that never happens. Men are never the cosmos. But a pregnant woman—in the second half of her pregnancy, at least—represents the entire enclosed cosmos of another human creature. You know, my dear, it always seemed completely natural to me that there could exist a species of animal where the female would die immediately after giving birth. The cosmos gives birth to the cosmos: who needs this imperfect world? That’s me talking nonsense. He’s floating right now like a rowboat tied to a pier, back and forth. Suspended from a mooring by the cable of his umbilical cord, and listening, probably, as the dense waves come and go, the thick moisture flowing about his sides and his tucked-under legs. They’re crossed, almost in a lotus pose. And the nails on his feet are already forming. And the auricles of his ears have already formed, but they’re still only skin, without any cartilage. And you know, those little ears of his are big. I wonder if he can hear what we’re talking about. You know, I don’t rule that out. Your mother was certain that the larger part of what she knew, even about drafting, she learned before she was born. I can’t say anything of the sort about myself. But then men are much more crudely constructed creatures than women. In biological terms a woman, as I see it, is the more perfect creature. I think that our little boy already experiences changes of mood. Sometimes he’s dissatisfied, sometimes happy. For example, when you eat something tasty, an hour and a half later he can already taste strawberries or grapes.”