Ada was in top form: she quivered with Nikolai’s tenderness and revealed the depths of his lonely, stormy spirit, insisted on the necessity of preserving the platonic purity of their relations, and at the same time hinted at the destructive passion, whose time to be displayed for some reason had not yet come. Of course, in the evenings, Nikolai and Sonya had to lift their eyes to the same star at an appointed hour. Couldn’t do without that. If the participants in the epistolary novel were nearby at the appointed minute, they tried to keep Sonya from parting the curtains and sneaking a glance at the starry heights, calling her into the hallway: “Sonya, come here a moment. Sonya, here’s what—” relishing her confusion: the significant instant was approaching, and Nikolai’s gaze was in danger of hanging around in vain in the neighborhood of Sirius or whatever it was called—you generally had to look in the direction of Pulkovo Observatory.
Then the joke got boring: how long could they go on, especially since they could get absolutely nothing out of languid Sonya, no secrets; she didn’t want any bosom buddies and pretended nothing was going on. Just think how secretive she turned out to be, while she burned with unquenchable flames of high feeling in her letters, promising Nikolai eternal fidelity and telling him about every little thing: what she dreamed and what she had heard little birds twittering. She sent wagon loads of dried flowers in envelopes, and for one of Nikolai’s birthdays she sent him her only ornament, taking it off her ugly jacket: the white enamel dove. “Sonya, where’s your dove?” “It flew off,” she said, revealing her ivory equine teeth, and you couldn’t read anything in her eyes. Ada kept planning to kill off Nikolai, who was turning into a pain, but when she got the dove she shuddered and put the murder off for a better time. In the letter that came with the dove, Sonya swore to give her life for Nikolai or follow him, if necessary, to the ends of the earth.
The whole imaginable crop of laughter had been harvested, damned Nikolai was like a ball and chain underfoot, but it would have been inhumane to abandon Sonya alone on the road without her dove, without her love. The years passed: Valerian, Kotik, and, I think, Seryozha dropped out of the game for various reasons, and Ada carried the epistolary weight alone, hostilely baking monthly hot kisses by mail, like a machine. She had even begun to turn a little like Nikolai herself and at times in evening light she fancied she could see a mustache on her tanned pink face as she looked in the mirror. And so two women in two parts of Leningrad, one in hate, the other in love, wrote letters to each other about a person who had never existed.
When the war began, neither had time to evacuate. Ada dug ditches thinking about her son, taken out of the city with his kindergarten. No time for love. She ate everything she could find, boiled her leather shoes, drank hot bouillon made from wallpaper—that had a little paste, at least. December came, everything ended. Ada took her father on a sled to a common grave; and then Lev Adolfovich; fueled the stove with Dickens and with stiff fingers wrote Sonya Nikolai’s farewell letter. She wrote that it was all a lie, that she hated everyone, that Sonya was a stupid old fool and a horse, that none of it had been here and damn you all to hell. Neither Ada nor Nikolai wanted to go on living. She unlocked the doors of her father’s big apartment to make it easier for the funeral brigade to get in and lay down on the couch, piling her father’s and her brother’s coats on top of her.
It’s not clear what happened next. First of all, hardly anyone was interested; and secondly, Ada Adolfovna isn’t very talkative, besides which, as I’ve already said, there’s time! Time has devoured everything. Let’s add that it’s hard to read other people’s souls: it’s dark and not everyone knows how to do it. Vague conclusions, attempts at answers—nothing more.
I doubt Sonya received Nikolai’s graveside song. Letters didn’t get through that black December, or else took months. Let’s suppose that raising her eyes, half-blind with starvation, to the evening star over bombed-out Pulkovo, she did not feel the magnetic gaze of her beloved that day and realized his hour had come. A loving heart—say what you will—feels such things, you can’t trick it. And realizing that it was time, ready to turn to ashes in order to save her one and only, Sonya took everything she had—a can of prewar tomato juice, saved for a matter of life and death like this—and made her way across all of Leningrad to the dying Nikolai’s apartment. There was exactly enough juice for one life.
Nikolai lay under a mound of coats, in a hat with ear flaps, with a horrible black face, caked lips, but smooth-shaven. Sonya sank to her knees, pressed her eyes to his swollen hand with its broken fingernails, and wept a bit. Then she spoon-fed him some juice, threw a few books onto the fire, blessed her lucky fate, and left with a pail to get some water, never to return. The bombing was heavy that day.
That, basically, is all that can be said about Sonya. A person lived—a person died. Only the name remains.
“Ada Adolfovna, give me Sonya’s letters.”
Ada Adolfovna rolls from the bedroom to the dining room, turning the big wheels of her chair with her hands. Her wrinkled face twitches. A black dress covers her lifeless legs to her toes. A large cameo is pinned near her throat, someone is killing something on it: shields, spears, the enemy gracefully fallen.
“Letters?”
“Letters, letters, give me Sonya’s letters!”
“I can’t hear you!”
“She never can hear the word ‘give,’” her nephew’s wife hisses in irritation, narrowing her eyes at the cameo.
“Isn’t it time for dinner?” Ada Adolfovna smacks her lips.
What large dark cupboards, what heavy silverware in them, and vases, and all kinds of supplies: tea, jam, grains, macaroni.
In the other rooms there are more cupboards, cupboards, chiffonniers, wardrobes—with linens, books, all kinds of things. Where does she keep the packet of Sonya’s letters, an old package wrapped with twine, crackling with dried flowers, yellowed and translucent like dragonfly wings? Does she not remember, or does she not want to tell? And what’s the point in pestering a trembling paralyzed old woman? Didn’t she have enough hard days in her life? Most probably she threw the packet into the fire, standing on her swollen knees that icy winter, in the blazing circle of a minute’s light, and perhaps the letters, starting slowly at first and then quickly blackening at the corners and finally swirling up in a column of roaring flames, warmed her contorted, frozen fingers, if only for a brief instant. Let it be so. But she must have taken the white dove out of there, I think. After all, doves don’t burn.
THE FAKIR
Filin turned up—unexpectedly as always—on the phone, with an invitation to have a look at his new flame. The evenings program was clear: a crisp white tablecloth, light, warmth, special puff-pastry pirozhki à la Tmutarakan, the nicest music coming from somewhere in the ceiling, and engrossing conversation. Blue curtains everywhere, cupboards with his collections, beads hanging along the walls. Then there might be new toys: a snuffbox with a portrait of a lady in transports over her own pink naked powderiness, a beaded purse, perhaps an Easter egg, or something else useless but valuable.