No, this was all extremely unpleasant for Nina. Lizaveta had to be gotten rid of. Grishunya liked this brazen worship, but then, he wasn’t picky; he liked everything on earth. He liked swishing a shovel about in the loose snow in the morning, living in a room with a fireplace full of trash, being on the ground floor with the door open so anyone could drop in; he liked the crowd and the aimless comings and goings, the puddle of melted snow in the vestibule, all those girls and boys, actors and old men; he liked the ownerless Agniya, supposedly the kindest creature in the world, and the Tungus, who came for who knows what reason; he liked all the eccentrics, licensed and unlicensed, the geniuses and the outcasts; he liked raw-boned Lizaveta, and—to round things out—he liked Nina as well.
Among the little outbuilding’s visitors, Lizaveta was considered an artist, and indeed she did exhibit in second-rate shows. Grishunya found inspiration in her dark daubings, and composed a corresponding cycle of poems. In order to concoct her pictures, Lizaveta had to work herself into an unbridled frenzy, like some African shaman: a flame would light up in her dim eyes, and with shouts, wheezes, and a sort of grubby fury she would attack the canvas, kneading blue, black, and yellow paint with her fists, and scratching the wet, oily mush with her fingernails. The style was called “nailism”—it was a terrible sight to behold. True, the resulting images looked rather like underwater plants and stars and castles hanging in the sky— something that seemed to crawl and fly simultaneously.
“Does she have to get so excited?” Nina whispered to Grishunya once as they observed a session of nailism.
“Well, I guess it just doesn’t happen otherwise,” dear Grishunya whispered back, exhaling sweet toffee breath. “It’s inspiration, the spirit, what can you do, it goes its own way.” And his eyes shone with affection and respect for the possessed scrabbler.
Lizaveta’s bony hands bloomed with sores from caustic paints, and similar sores soon covered Nina’s jealous heart, still nailed to Grisha’s bedstead. She did not want to share Grisha; the handsome custodian’s blue eyes and wispy beard should belong to her and her alone. Oh, if only she could become the fully empowered mistress of the house once and for all, instead of just a casual, precarious girlfriend; if only she could put Grisha in a trunk, pack him in mothballs, cover him with a canvas cloth, bang the lid shut, and sit on it, tugging at the locks to check: are they secure?
Oh, if only… Yes, then he could have whatever he wanted —even Lizaveta. Let Lizaveta live and scratch out her paintings, let her grind them out with her teeth if she wanted, let her stand on her head and stay that way, trembling like a nervous pillar beside her barbaric canvases at her annual exhibitions, her dull hair decked out with an orange ribbon, red-handed, red-faced, sweaty, and ready to cry from hurt or happiness, while over in the corner various citizens sit at a rickety table cupping their palms to shield against inquisitive eyes as they write their unknown comments in the gallery’s luxurious red album: “Revolting,” perhaps; or “Fabulous”; or “What does the arts administration think it’s doing?” or else something maudlin and mannered, signed by a group of provincial librarians, about how sacred and eternal art had supposedly pierced them to the core.
Oh, to wrest Grisha from that noxious milieu! To scrape away the extraneous women who’d stuck to him like barnacles to the bottom of a boat; to pull him from the stormy sea, turn him upside down, tar and caulk him, and set him in dry dock in some calm, quiet place.
But he—a carefree spirit ready to embrace any street mongrel, shelter any unsanitary vagrant—went on squandering himself on the crowd, giving himself out by the handful. This simple soul took a shopping bag, loaded it with yogurt and sour cream, and went to visit Lizaveta, who had fallen ill. And of course Nina had to go with him—and, my God, what a hovel! what a place! yellow, frightful, filthy, a dark little closet, not a single window! There lay Lizaveta, barely discernible on an iron cot under an army blanket, blissfully filling her black mouth with white sour cream. Bent over school notebooks at a table was Lizaveta’s fat, frightened daughter, who bore no resemblance to her mother but looked as though Lizaveta had once upon a time bred with a St. Bernard.
“Well, how are you doing here?” asked Grishunya.
Lizaveta stirred beside the dingy walclass="underline" “All right.”
“Do you need anything?” Grishunya insisted.
The iron cot creaked. “Nastya will take care of everything.”
“Well then, study hard.” The poet shuffled about and stroked fat Nastya on the head; he backed into the hallway, but the enfeebled Lizaveta was already dozing, a stagnant lake of unswallowed yogurt apparently frozen in her half-open mouth.
“She and I should really, er, hook up or something,” Grishunya said to Nina, gesturing vaguely and looking the other way. “You see what problems she has getting an apartment. She’s from way up north, from Totma, she can only rent this storeroom, but what talent, no? And her daughter’s very drawn to art, too. She sculpts, she’s good—and who can she study with in Totma?”
“You and I are getting married. I’m all yours,” Nina reminded him sternly.
“Yes, of course, I forgot,” Grishunya apologized. He was a gentle man; it was just that his head was full of a lot of nonsense.
Destroying Lizaveta turned out to be as hard as cutting a tough apple worm in half. When they came to fine her for violating the residence permit in her passport, she was already holed up in a different place, and Nina sent the troops over there. Lizaveta hid out in basements and Nina flooded basements; she spent the night in sheds and Nina tore them down; finally, Lizaveta evaporated to a mere shadow.
Seven pairs of iron boots had Nina worn out tramping across passport desks and through police stations, seven iron staffs had she broken on Lizaveta’s back, seven kilos of iron gingerbread had she devoured in the hated custodian’s lodge: it was time for the wedding.
The motley crowd had already thinned out, a pleasant quiet reigned in the little house in the evenings, and now it was with due respect that the occasional daredevil knocked at the door, carefully wiping his feet under Nina’s watchful gaze and immediately regretting that he had ever come by. Soon Grishunya would no longer be slaving with a shovel and burying his talent in the snowdrifts; he would be moving to Nina’s where a sturdy, spacious glass-topped desk awaited him, with two willow switches in a vase on the left, and, on the right, from one of those frames that lean on a tail, Nina’s photo smiled at him. And her smile promised that everything would be fine, that he’d be well fed and warm and clean, that Nina herself would go to see Comrade Makushkin and finally resolve the long-drawn-out question of the poetry collection: she would ask Comrade Makushkin to look over the material carefully, to give his advice, fix a few things, and cut up the thick, sticky layer cake of Grisha’s verse into edible slices.
Nina allowed Grishunya a final good-bye to his friends, and the innumerable horde poured in for the farewell supper—girls and freaks, old men and jewelers. Three balletic youths with women’s eyes arrived prancing on turned-out toes, a lame man limped in on crutches, someone brought a blind boy, and Lizaveta’s now nearly fleshless shadow flitted about. The crowd kept coming; it buzzed and blew around like trash from a vacuum cleaner hooked up backward; bearded types scurried past; the walls of the little house bulged under the human pressure; and there were shouts, sobs, and hysterics. Dishes were broken. The balletic youths made off with the hysterical Agniya, catching her hair in the door; Lizaveta’s shadow gnawed her hands to shreds and thrashed on the floor, demanding to be walked all over (the request was honored); the deacon led the Tungus into a corner and questioned him in sign language on the faith of his people, and the Tungus answered, also by signs, that their faith was the best of all faiths.