“But you’ll barely be able to turn around.”
“Ah, but wait, you haven’t heard the brilliance of the plan. Entirely separate parts, yet linked at one vital point.”
“The kitchen?”
“Better than that. The refrigerator. I’ve designed a two-doored refrigerator—she stocks it from her side, and I eat from mine. Mother love at its most elemental.”
Lapochka got out a papirosa and began to tap the tobacco onto the ground. “You’d have to talk to each other through the refrigerator, past the milk products. It’d be good. You’d never argue, would you? Hard to argue with a yogurt?”
Petya passed a matchbox to Lapochka, who poured a little pile of marijuana from it into his palm. All that was left of the papirosa was an empty tube of cardboard and cigarette paper, which Lapochka began to pack with grass.
“Look,” said Mitya, “look at the fishermen.”
From the hot-water pipes we gazed out at the reservoir, now a snowy plain dotted with figures. They sat beside the holes they’d sawed out for themselves, motionless, dark and furry as otters. They neither talked nor looked at the scenery. They peered intently at their lines vanishing under the shadowy blue ice. It was clear that in only a matter of moments a monster, a prizewinner, would leap out at them.
As Lapochka twisted the end of the joint, Smokey turned up with another friend. The Narcomen, as this lot were known, had perfect timing in these matters. Petya Pravda claimed he could smell a joint from half a kilometer off, and determine its quality, strength and entertainment value at one hundred meters. The last consideration outweighed the rest—the Narcomen had a horror of being bored. It was an oversensitivity caused by the monstrous tedium of much of Soviet life. Lines, bureaucracy, the dreary verbosity of officialdom, the uniform architecture—the Narcomen were in vigorous protest against them all.
“When you are on the train to boredom, it’s simple,” explained Petya to me, speaking slowly in case the concept was hard to follow. “All you do is smash the window and jump out to an unknown fate. Understand?”
Sticking to this edict was not always easy. Drink and drugs helped, of course, but they were not the only ways to jump off the train. Ideas were just as important to the Narcomen—theater design, philosophy, Latin American literature, performance art, anything new. Books and tapes were passed from hand to hand, and suddenly the talk would be all Borges, or Zoroaster, or Massive Attack. In this, Voronezh had not changed since the eighties when, by the process known as magizdat, cassettes of dissident music circulated the country, recorded and rerecorded until they were barely audible. Mitya had a tape that had been made in some apartment in Moscow before perestroika. Through the crackle you could just make out the sounds of a party, people chatting, calling for more vodka, and then the hoarse, amused voice of a Russian punk, Petya Mamonov, singing: “I eat rubbish, I drink from puddles, I’m a filthy”—here he achieved a tone of some menace—“pigeon. And yet… I can fly.” This could have been the Narcomen’s anthem.
We smoked the joint and Petya began messing around; he took a run and launched himself onto an ice slide that some kids had made. He skated for twenty meters, knock-kneed and gangly, and landed with a crash.
The light enveloped everything; we were six dark spots on a landscape of blazing white reflection. Above us the glassy blue eye of the heavens was empty. I lay back and gazed into it, and after a minute or two the world flipped over and I was suspended above the sky, feeling the tug of its gravity deep in my solar plexus.
“Don’t fall asleep, or you’ll freeze,” said Mitya. “Let’s go.”
There was one more wonder awaiting me that day. We wandered along the edge of the reservoir past the bridge to where the beach was in summer; behind a grille lay a stack of paddleboats covered in snow. A solitary figure stood by the paddleboat hut. As we came closer, I realized he was taking off his clothes. Hat, scarf, coat; then the sweater, shirt and undershirt came off to reveal a bony chest. The man was a little fellow with a wispy beard; he wore a composed, sensible expression as he slipped off his boots, two pairs of socks, trousers, and baggy pink long johns. Each article was folded neatly and placed behind him.
Petya Pravda grinned at my horrified expression. “He’s a walrus,” he said, as if explaining.
“And you’re George Harrison! Are you sure it’s not suicide?”
“No, no—watch,” they shushed me.
Now dressed only in black underpants, the walrus took a metal bucket in both hands. He raised it over his head and tipped it up, and we heard a strangled croak, as a small sea bird might emit at the sight of a polar bear’s tonsils. Two gallons of icy water sluiced over the wretched man. But no sooner was it done than the walrus caught sight of us and, merrily toweling his back and his pitiful, blue-toned little belly, hallooed a welcome.
“Fine day, isn’t it!” he shouted, whipping on his long johns, the trousers, boots, undershirt, sweater, coat, and hat in a trice. His beard was frozen into crinkly panels and his face glowed a fiery red.
“One of the finest!” Lapochka called in reply.
The walrus stuffed his towel into a little knapsack and swung it over his shoulder, coming toward us with springy steps. “Aaaaah, that feels good!” he announced. “I never miss a day. Normally I go in the water, of course, but the hole froze so solid last night I didn’t have time to break it open. Until last year, my father and I always swam together, but now he’s seventy the doctors say he shouldn’t. Fools!”
He saluted us and stomped off, and once he’d rounded the corner, the others looked at my expression and started laughing. For some reason, heaven knows why, it struck them as funny; Petya Pravda, in fact, was so overcome that he was forced to bend over and stamp his foot several times. That moment felt as though we had achieved some snowy, bright, breathless peak; we were light-headed and triumphant, and there seemed to be no good reason for us ever to come down.
“Mityush,” I said when we arrived back at the hostel. “We’ll always be together, won’t we?”
“Of course,” he answered. There was nothing more to say.
If I had to produce proof of a compassionate God, this would be one of my first exhibits: the blissful, lunatic assumption of the happy man that, for him alone, time does not exist. Even Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam felt it. Just months before Osip was arrested for the second time, as they moved back to Moscow from Voronezh, Nadezhda wrote, “Improbable as it may seem, we fell into an inexplicable state of calm and believed for some reason that our life was at last secure…”
Anna Akhmatova, visiting them in Voronezh in 1936, saw their position more clearly:
10
New Year, New Happiness
In general, our people are not too successful with representative institutions.