We’ll choose a day, lock the doors behind us, descend the cold staircase, go out into the stuffy morning city, and leave for the dacha. Out there, pink grass sways and rustles in the warm wind, pine needles cover the old porch; with a slight shush there passes through the emptied, abandoned house the shadow of a shadow of she who once lived, simple as a leaf, clear as light, still as morning water: she who once naively desired to be most beloved.
We’ll step off the train onto the bare cement platform, walk under the aspen hum of the wires and on—through marsh and thicket, across hills and copses—to where the empty house sleeps beyond the glades of overgrown fireweed, where lilac has gone wild, where a crow taps his beak along the porch, where mice say to one another: “Let’s live here for a while.”
We wade through the grass, parting the dense overgrowth with our hands like swimmers; we find the long-forgotten keys and look around, stretching arms numb from the weight of the bags. It’s a damp, lushly blooming northern June. The old, crooked dacha sinks into the grass like a half-drowned boat. Lilac darkens the rooms, pines have crushed the veranda’s fragile breast. The brittle fifes of bedstraw have opened their white umbrellas; disturbed, a mysterious young bird cries loudly; and tiny veronica blossoms litter every sunny clump of dry earth with dark blue.
There are no roads or paths in the ocean of grass yet, the flowers are not yet crushed, only a slight corridor can be discerned where we walked from the gates to the porch. It’s a shame to break the dense, stiff clusters of lilac—a blue, snowy shadow lies on them as on a new-fallen, sparkling crust of ice. It’s a shame to trample the quiet, thick grass forests.
We drink tea on the veranda. Let’s spend the night. Why don’t we ever come here? We could live here! But it’s a long way to lug supplies. We should weed out the nettle. Plant some flowers. Repair the porch. Prop it up somehow. The words fall into the stillness, the impatient lilac has burst through the open windows and sways as it listens to our empty promises, our impossible projects, our rosy dreams fading in an instant: it’s not true, no one will come, there is no one to come, she’s gone, she’s a shadow, and the night wind will blow away her dilapidated dwelling.
Once again Zhenechka packed her bags to go visit her Finnish relatives: for the baby an ABC book, for the nephews something stronger. She was only waiting for the letter, and it arrived. The relatives came straight to the point—they couldn’t invite dear Eugénie to visit them anymore. She would understand, of course; after all, she had reached such a venerable age that what had happened to their neighbors’ Aunt Nika could happen to her any minute. And enclosed was a photograph of this aunt in her coffin, all dressed up and motionless, surrounded by Russian Orthodox lace and Finnish bouquets. Look how badly Aunt Nika behaved; if dear Eugénie were to do the same thing during her visit there might be complications, trouble, misunderstandings… and who would pay for it all? Had dear Eugénie considered this? And she needn’t write anymore, why strain her eyes—and she might get a cramp in her hand!
Zhenechka stood and stared at the photograph of an unknown old lady in a neat coffin, a graphic reproach to Zhenechka’s lack of foresight. And the nightingale that had sung songs on her chest for many years grew deaf and shut its eyes tight. And fate, like a black wind flying into an open window, turned, stuck out its tongue, and shouted, “Just try and be most beloved!” and with a deafening cackle snuffed the candle out.
…A light Karelian night. There’s neither darkness nor crimson dawn: an endless white dusk. All the colors have drained away; the grainy half-moon seems a cloudy brushstroke in the luminous heights; gray garden shadows and crevasses of clotted twilight crawl along the earth; between the tree trunks in the distance, the flat lake glimmers in lackluster coves. A mosquito whines, eyes close. There’s a rustling in the gray grass, the creak of cracked shutters. Overnight yet another colored pane will fall from the veranda, overnight the grasses will rise still higher, the path we walked in the morning will be swallowed up and our footsteps will vanish; fresh mold will bloom on the front porch, a spider will spin the keyhole shut, and the house will fall asleep for another hundred years—from the underground passages where the Mouse King roams, to the high attic vaults from which the fleshless steeds of our dreams take flight.
THE POET AND THE MUSE
NINA WAS a marvelous woman, an ordinary woman, a doctor, and it goes without saying that she had her right to personal happiness like everyone else. Of this she was well aware. Nearing the age of thirty-five after a lengthy period of joyless trial and error—not even worth talking about—she knew precisely what she needed: a wild, true love, with tears, bouquets, midnight phone vigils, nocturnal taxi chases, fateful obstacles, betrayals, and forgiveness. She needed a—you know—an animal passion, dark windy nights with streetlamps aglow. She needed to perform a heroine’s classical feat as if it were a mere trifle: to wear out seven pairs of iron boots, break seven iron staffs in two, devour seven loaves of iron bread, and receive in supreme reward not some golden rose or snow-white pedestal but a burned-out match or a crumpled ball of a bus ticket—a crumb from the banquet table where the radiant king, her heart’s desire, had feasted. Well, of course, quite a few women need pretty much the same thing, so in this sense Nina was, as has already been said, a perfectly ordinary woman, a marvelous woman, a doctor.
She had been married: it was as if she’d done an interminable, boring stretch on a transcontinental train and emerged—tired, dispirited, and yawning uncontrollably—into the starless night of a strange city, where the only kindred soul was her suitcase.
Then she lived the life of a recluse for a while: she took up washing and polishing the floors in her spotless little Moscow apartment, developed an interest in patterns and sewing, and once again grew bored. An affair with the dermatologist Arkady Borisovich, who had two families not counting Nina, smoldered sluggishly along. After work she would drop by his office to see him. There was nothing the least bit romantic about it; the cleaning lady would be emptying out the trash cans and slopping a wet mop across the linoleum while Arkady Borisovich washed his hands over and over, scrubbing them with a brush, suspiciously inspecting his pink nails and examining himself in the mirror with disgust. He would stand there, pink, well fed, and stiff, egg-shaped, and take no notice of Nina, though she was already in her coat on her way out the door. Then he would stick out his triangular tongue and twist it this way and that—he was afraid of infection. A fine Prince Charming! What sort of passion could she find with Arkady Borisovich? None, of course.
Yet she’d certainly earned the right to happiness, she was entitled to a place in the line where it was being handed out: her face was white and pretty and her eyebrows broad, her smooth black hair grew low from her temples and was gathered at the back in a bun. And her eyes were black, so that out in public men took her for a Moldavian Gypsy, and once, in the metro, in the passageway to the Kirovskaya station, a fellow had even pestered her, claiming that he was a sculptor and she must come along with him immediately, supposedly to sit for the head of a houri—right away, his clay was drying out. Of course she didn’t go with him; she had a natural mistrust of people in the creative professions, since she had already been through the sorry experience of going for a cup of coffee with an alleged film director and barely escaping in one piece—the fellow had a large apartment with Chinese vases and a slanted garret ceiling in an old building.