“I saw you yesterday at the concert with a beautiful lady; I wonder, who was she?” Sonya would ask a bewildered husband as she leaned across his stiffened wife. At moments like that, the mocker Lev Adolfovich would purse his lips, arch his eyebrows, and shake his head, his shallow glasses glinting. “If a person is dead, that’s for a long time; if he’s stupid, that’s forever.” Well, that’s just what happened, time merely confirmed his words.
Lev Adolfovich’s sister, Ada, a sharp, thin woman of serpentine elegance who was once discomfited by Sonya’s idiocy, dreamed of punishing her. Just a little, of course, so they could have a laugh and give the little fool some amusement. And they whispered in a corner—Lev and Ada—plotting something witty.
So, Sonya sewed—And how did she dress? Most unbecomingly, friends, most unbecomingly. Something blue, striped, so unflattering. Just imagine: a head like a Przewalski’s horse (Lev Adolfovich noted that), under her jaw the huge dangling bow of her blouse sticking out from her suit’s stiff lapels, and the sleeves were always too long. Sunken chest, legs so fat they looked as if they came from a different person’s set, enormous feet. She wore down her shoes on one side. Well, her chest and legs, that’s not clothing—Yes it is, my dear, it counts as clothing too. You have to take features like that into account, some things you just can’t wear at all—She had a brooch, an enamel dove. She wore it on the lapel of her jacket, never parted with it. And when she changed into another dress, she always pinned on that dove.
Sonya was a good cook. She whipped up marvelous cakes. And then that, you know, offal, innards—kidneys, udders, brains—it’s so easy to ruin them, but she made them wonder-fully. So those dishes were always assigned to her. It was delicious and an excuse for jokes. Lev Adolfovich, pursing his lips, would call across the table: “Sonechka, your udders simply astonish me today!” And she would nod happily in reply. And Ada would say in a sweet voice, “I, for one, am enraptured by your sheep’s brains.” “They’re veal,” Sonya would reply, not understanding, smiling. And everyone enjoyed it; wasn’t it just too much?
She liked children, that was clear, and you could go on vacation, even to Kislovodsk, and leave the children and the apartment in her care—why don’t you live at our place for a while, Sonya, all right?—and find everything in perfect order upon your return: the furniture dusted, the children rosy-cheeked and fed, and they played outside every day and even went on field trips to the museum where Sonya worked as some sort of curator; those museum curators lead a boring life, they’re all old maids. The children would become attached to her and be sad when she had to be transferred to another family. But you can’t be egoists and hog Sonya; others might need her, too. In general, they managed, setting up a sensible queuing system.
Well, what else can I say about her? Basically, I think that’s it. Who remembers any details now? Fifty years later there’s almost no one left alive. And there were so many truly interesting, really worthwhile people, who left behind concert recordings, books, monographs on art. What fates! You could talk endlessly about any of them. Take Lev Adolfovich, a bastard basically, but a brilliant man and in some ways a pussycat. You could ask Ada Adolfovna, but she’s pushing ninety, I think, and… you understand… Something happened to her during the siege of Leningrad. Related to Sonya, incidentally. No, I don’t remember it very well. Something about a glass, and some letters, a joke of some sort.
How old was Sonya? In 1941—when her tracks break off— she should have been forty. Yes, I think that’s it. From that it’s easy to figure out when she was born and so forth, but what difference could that make if we don’t know who her parents were, what she was like as a child, where she lived, what she did, and who her friends were up to the day when she came into the world out of nebulousness and sat down to wait for the pepper in the sunny, festive dining room?
Of course, we must believe she was a romantic and, in her own way, lofty. After all, those bows of hers, and the enamel dove, and the poetry quotations, always sentimental, that flew from her lips inappositely, as if spat by her long upper lip that revealed her long ivory-colored teeth, and her love of children—and any children at that—all that characterizes her quite unambiguously. A romantic creature. Was she happy? Oh, yes! That’s certain. You can say what you want, but she was happy.
And just think—life is full of such tricks—she owed her happiness completely to Ada Adolfovna, that snake. (Too bad you didn’t know her in her youth. An interesting woman.)
A whole group of them got together—Ada, Lev, and Valerian, Seryozha, I think, and Kotik, and someone else—and worked out this practical joke (since the idea was Ada’s, Lev called it “a plan from Ades”), which turned out to be a great success. This must have been around 1933. Ada was in her prime, though no longer a girl—marvelous figure, dusky face with dark rose cheeks, she was number one at tennis, number one at kayaking, everyone thought she was terrific. Ada was even embarrassed by having so many suitors when Sonya had none. (What a joke! Suitors for Sonya?) And she suggested inventing a mysterious admirer for the poor thing, someone madly in love with her but who had reasons why he couldn’t meet her personally. Excellent idea. The phantom was created instantly, named Nikolai, burdened with a wife and three children, and moved into Ada’s father’s apartment for purposes of correspondence—here protests were voiced: what if Sonya learns, what if she sticks her nose in there?—but the argument was rejected as insubstantial. First of all, Sonya was stupid, that was the point; and secondly, she had a conscience—Nikolai had a family, she wouldn’t try to break it up. There, he wrote quite clearly, Nikolai did: darling, your unforgettable visage is imprinted forever on my wounded heart (“Don’t write ‘wounded,’ she’ll take it literally that he’s an invalid!”), but we are fated never, ever to be near because of my duty to my children… and so on. But my feeling, Nikolai continues—no, sincere feeling is better—will warm my cold members (“What do you mean, Adochka!” “Don’t bother me, you idiots!”) a pathfinding star and all that other moon-june-spoon. A letter like that. Let’s say he saw her at a concert, admired her fine profile (here Valerian fell off the couch laughing), and now wants to start up a lofty correspondence. He found out her address with difficulty. Begs for a photograph. Why can’t he meet for a date, the children won’t be in the way for that? He has a sense of duty. But for some reason they don’t keep him from writing, do they? Well, then he’s paralyzed. From the waist down. Hence the chilled members. Listen, stop fooling around. If necessary, we’ll paralyze him later. Ada sprinkled Chypre cologne on the stationery, Kotik pulled a dried forget-me-not from his childhood herbarium, pink with age, and stuck it in the envelope. Life was fun!
The correspondence was stormy on both sides. Sonya, the fool, went for it right away. She fell in love so hard you couldn’t drag her away. They had to rein in her ardor: Nikolai wrote about one letter a month, braking Sonya and her raging cupid. Nikolai expressed himself in poetry: Valerian had to sweat a bit. There were pearls there, if you understood—Nikolai compared Sonya to a lily, a liana, and a gazelle, and himself simultaneously to a nightingale and an antelope. Ada wrote the prose text and served as general director, stopping her silly friends and their suggestions to Valerian: “Write that she’s a gnu. In the sense of an antelope. My divine gnu, I perish anew without you.”