Grandmother took Natasha to the doctor, Natasha swallowed white tablets, and she no longer dreamt of anything except sighing, black waves of air.
After graduating from the institute, Natasha taught geography to schoolchildren. The word “geography” caused vast expanses to unfold in her mind: a hawk glided above the poppy fields, the muffled, nighttime sea roared, poisonous lily-white flowers swayed high overhead, and at the very bottom of the heavy, round earth, where the blue string bag of the meridians tightens into a stiff knot, a frost-covered skier, following the trail of whining dogs, slowly wandered upside down among the delicate ice glades of Queen Maud Land. But she didn’t know how to talk about this, and for that matter, no one asked her to; in fact, there was no science on earth devoted to studying the fragrance of a garden at night, the moan of sea foam, the dark splendor of the ocean’s pearls, and the dull thud of a lonely heart. What if the children were to guess—how shameful— that Natasha, their melancholy, large-nosed teacher, imagined “bauxite deposits” as forest caves from which fat, reddish, short-haired dogs in round boxing gloves tumbled one after another, and “Tung Sten” as a raven-haired Chinese prince in a robe of iridescent cast? So, afraid of being found out, Natasha spoke in a dull, confusing manner, gazed imploringly at the awkward, chapped-knuckled eighth graders, whom she feared, hinted at the answers herself, and drew pretty blue A’s on their papers with a sense of relief.
Time was passing, her heart beat, and no one arrived to love Natasha. But there were omens, premonitions, and visions, those ambiguous signs that fate proffers every so often—hadn’t the Yellow Moon, emerging with a knife from the blue billows of misty clouds, promised her something ominous, enormous, and petrifying? But now the Yellow Moon was silent and only played with the carved black shadows on Grandmother’s grave.
A long communal corridor ran through Natasha’s dwelling; overhead in the half-dark swam washbasin tambourines, dusty Aeolian bicycle harps, and over the exit, rising like a plague cemetery up in arms, the black skulls of electric meters huddled together; as night fell the white stripes of their teeth, each row marked by a single bloody tooth, began madly spinning to the right. In the evening, soccer games whistled and blazed blue behind other people’s doors, other people’s husbands argued loudly; grandmothers sitting on high beds scratched their legs. A cheerful plumber reached for his rosy young neighbor in the kitchen; the neighbor woman flapped her elbows and the cheerful plumber exclaimed delightedly: “Goooood and spunky!”
In the evenings Natasha played poker with yellow, tobacco-permeated Konkordia Benediktovna, who gave her advice on how to dress; Konkordia Benediktovna herself wore a dark, glinting brooch at her breast, she fetched large faceted beads horn little boxes, turned cups over, and tapped her fingernail against the porcelain bottoms with their pale blue pedigree stamps—antiques, ancient antiques. Natasha gazed at the worn little cards and wanted to look like the Russian Queen of Diamonds—soft, blue-eyed, dressed in a white gathered head scarf and a sable vest. The old widower Gagin would stop in, looking like a graying crane in a red muffler; every year he drew a crazed Santa Claus and a violently lunatic Snow White for the windows of the vegetable store: mammoth, red-faced, ready to take on anything, they raced furiously through a curly blizzard on princely sleighs with silver spangles.
In the morning there was the humiliating visit to the toilet with its oozing pistachio walls, carefully torn rectangles of Socialist Industry or The Week, and a swaying dog-leash chain ending in an old-fashioned porcelain pear, on which some wise Englishman, to help things along, had written the black word “Pull” in English and had even drawn a tiny pointing hand in a black cuff: which direction to pull. But just for fun, the cheerful plumber always deliberately disobeyed the Englishman’s directions, and while Natasha fumed indignantly in the slime-covered isolation booth, old lady Morshanskaya, ailing and disheveled in her nightgown, was already pounding on the door, shouting in her whiskered voice:
“Have some consideration for old people!… Natalia, is that you?…. Your insides will fall out!…”
The bathroom window opened onto the back stair, and old lady Morshanskaya, fearing an attack by Young Pioneer scouts out collecting materials for recycling, barricaded it with a wooden washtub—the very same cracked one, the last hand-me-down from the Magic Golden Fish. The bathroom was used exclusively for washing clothes—they went to the baths to wash themselves. Natasha went as welclass="underline" she looked at the strange, undressed women, pink, like wet ham, and found fault with them all. Once, in the steam room, on the slippery, sloping floor, the fat, naked high-school headmistress passed by with a wet knot of hair on her forehead and a tub tucked under her arm like a class register, the same headmistress who, that very morning, had sternly declared: “We, pedagogues, collectively recognize.” And long afterward, whenever the headmistress—her face purple, her medal clinking—yelled at adolescents who giggled during the ceremonial lineup, all Natasha could see was the horrid, red, distended creature that shuffled hurriedly past along the wet, terra-cotta tile.
On the summer boulevards sat old women who had known a better life: gilded cups, the frosty flora of lace hems, the tiny ant-like facets of foreign fragrance vials, and perhaps—indeed, most likely—secret lovers; they sat with one leg crossed over the other, their gaze lifted to where the heavenly evening theater silently lavished burning crimsons, golden treasures; and the loving western light crowned the blue hair of these former women with tea roses.
But nearby, heavily spreading their swollen legs, with drooping hands and drooping heads wrapped in dotted kerchiefs, flames all snuffed out, like dead swans sat those who had lived for years in brown communal kitchens, in dim corridors, those who had slept on iron frame beds next to deep-set windows, where beyond the speckled blue casserole, beyond the heavy smell of fermentation, beyond the tearstained glass, another person’s wall darkens and swells with autumn anguish.
And Natasha began to dream: if old age must come to me as well, then let me turn into a clean, pink, white-haired old lady, a beloved schoolteacher, kind and funny, like a hot cross bun. But she wasn’t made to be a hot cross bun and so was obliged to become a stooped, muddy-gray old lady with jowls.
She only made it to Moscow once, by chance. In a taxi, scared stiff, she zoomed along the nighttime streets squeaky with frost; she gazed up at the enormous buildings—rearing black chests of drawers, the gloomy castles of vanished titans, gigantic honeycombs crowned with bloody embers standing guard. And in the morning she looked out of the hotel window onto a hushed thaw, the soft, gray day, the jumble of little two-story yellow buildings and annexes pierced by morning lights—muslin is drawn back from a small window, a kettle whistles, a grandmother in felt boots entertains her grandson with white rolls— sweet, soft, Russian Moscow!