“No,” she said, “you mustn’t, it wouldn’t be right! You’re Rael’s grandma!”
“Perhaps, yes,” Grandma agreed, calming down, “perhaps it is right for things to be bequeathed down the bloodline. Worldly goods can be passed on down the bloodline, but intellect and spirit cannot… You see, this person receives the intellect, the spirit, but this one does not, she puts her headphones on and does not drink of it…”
And she leaned forward towards Sofia and said, as if disclosing a big secret, “But the truth is that all this is futile, it doesn’t matter what you have here or who you are, no matter how powerful or decent you are. You sense that, but some people, including some great, clever, elderly people, do not. When we go, we leave with nothing, you can’t take anything with you, not your fortune or your self-respect, the only thing that counts is the good you have done here. So ask yourself only one thing: what good did you do? And you can see it all as clear as day. But if you start to brag about it then you will stumble. So if you brag, you will fall immediately, as if the rungs of a ladder had been pulled out from under your feet.”
And Grandma looked at Sofia so seriously, exactingly, as if she were a judge weighing Sofia up and taking the measure of her, that Sofia started to feel genuinely uneasy.
But then Grandma sagged once again into a stooped little old lady and said dolefully, “Not that I’ve got anything to show off. One son who worries only about wealth… nothing… futile… nothing good…”
Sofia fell silent, the paper on her lap, not knowing what to say, although she would have liked to say that there was something good – that it was good that there was a grandma like her to drink tea with in her house from delicate porcelain cups and eat melt-in-the-mouth pastries after reading and listening to fearful stories of fire-breathing dragons that had once trod the earth before people could even walk, in the days when they could only swim in dense, hot steam like tadpoles or aquatic plants and sucked nutritious sap from the earth through their tails, as if they were sucking up milk… Even Rael had started to enjoy the stories – when she saw that Sofia was listening to them – and she told Sofia privately, “Actually, they’re more exciting than the history they teach us at school. Not that we have to believe unconditionally that we’re descended from the apes, of course – believing can be what you like, can’t it? Perhaps there even is a God who made everything? And if there is, then it’s his fault that I’m the way I am, not hardworking, I mean – what can I do about that?”
But the most important thing to Sofia in all this was that everything here, the room where they sat in the gentle light of a floor lamp and drank their fill of tea and stories, everything was enveloped in a great transparent bubble that extended in space and time – and the bubble extended to encompass even the dangling tadpoles and the fire-breathing dragons, and inside the bubble the dragons seemed small and even faintly amusing – and the bubble was a being, a he or a she, not an it, because he or she had a character, and his or her character… his or her character was uncomplicated, good…
Ultimately Natalya thought that there was nothing she could do but go to church, to confession. It was more of a habit really, a custom from home, ingrained from her village: you went to church only on very important festivals such as Easter or the baptism of the Lord, or when you urgently needed holy water. There’d been no church in her own village – there had been one once, of course, in the time of the tsars, but it had been destroyed many decades previously. The nearest church was on the other side of the town, over the river. It took a whole day to get there and back, leaving early in the morning, in the dark, and returning in the evening, in the dark… And people didn’t really want to take children with them – especially schoolchildren in case there was trouble at school… Nonetheless Natalya had liked church – when she was a preschooler, her grandma used to take her. Church sparkled and shone and was full of a wonderful smell and they gave out white bread soaked in wine and a sip of warm, sweet wine. The sip they gave you was so tiny that you were left with a longing for something, for something very good… But here she went to church every day, she could go any working day, so when Sofia set off for school in the morning she would go to church. She went because the life she now had was becoming impossible: as she began praying “Lord, forgive them, forgive them their sins…” she would think only of Dmitri Dmitrievich, and a longing would embrace her and she would begin to calculate whether enough time had gone by yet for Dmitri Dmitrievich to call again. Because he didn’t do anything, just lay beside her and talked now and again, gasping a little – as if for some reason he had difficulty breathing. Actually, the evenings with him had been almost festive. And when Dmitri Dmitrievich had left and the next punter had arrived, Natalya would repeat to herself devotedly, feelingly, “Lord, forgive him, forgive him his sins…” But it was doubly a lie! Because first of all there was no need to pray for Dmitri Dmitrievich because he didn’t do anything that needed forgiving – he didn’t even touch Natalya, just lay gasping next to her — and secondly she should have been praying for her next client, but it was as if he didn’t even exist for her, or rather was no more than a ghastly distraction that only intruded on her prayer…
So she went and talked to the priest – in reality she gabbled, her eyes cast downward: “I want to pray for many people’s sins: Lord, forgive them, forgive them their sins… But I can’t do it properly because there’s only one of them I love and all the while I’m thinking only of that one person – and so there won’t be any point in it for the others, will there?”
But the priest replied to her in a soft, lilting voice: “If there’s nothing else you can do, my good woman, then perhaps pray for just that one person and that one person will sense it and pray for all the others…”
Natalya Filippovna suddenly raised her eyes because the reply surprised her – the fact that she could do that if there was no other option – but even more because that voice was so familiar – although not gasping, but crooning; crooning as Dmitri Dmitrievich’s voice had been that first time when Natalya Filippovna had burst into tears and ruined his evening… The priest wasn’t Dmitri Dmitrievich, he couldn’t be, because the priest had a wonderful dark, bushy beard whereas Dmitri Dmitrievich was clean-shaven… In a rush, Natalya kissed the cross that the priest held out to her and hurried to leave, her eyes cast downward again.
The whole idea was ridiculous, of course. How could she even think of a priest in that way – he was a monk! But they had the same voice, didn’t they? And they had the same eyes, didn’t they? People did have doubles. They also had twins… Perhaps he was Dmitri Dmitrievich’s twin, who knew everything and was asking Natalya to pray for his brother? Not that that was really any business of his!
She would have liked an explanation though. And a completely improper thought entered her head: if she had taken hold of the priest’s beard and given it a tug, everything would have become clear. But the thought was so awful, wild and improper that she quickly rubbed her eyes with her fingers, like after a bad dream… And what was more, Natalya suddenly thought, the priest’s gaze had been strange. His voice had been the same – quiet and soft like Dmitri Dmitrievich’s – but his gaze had been directed past Natalya or through her. Yes, his gaze had been thoroughly strange – would Dmitri Dmitrievich have been able to look at her like that?