He grinned his toothy grin and changed the subject. The Horse liked a mystery.
12
Little Pavlik
Whom God lets fall sinks deep.
Is there room here, perhaps, to tell the story of little Pavlik? Whose diminutive size was the source of so much amusement? “Little Pavlik!” people would call, pretending to search for him. “Have you slipped down behind your bed? Been crushed under your blanket? You’ve not been trying to shave again, have you? How many times have we told you, that’s for big boys, not for little Pavlik.” They’d laugh and Pavlik would summon a smile although, who knows, it may have been then that the proper use of a razor first occurred to him.
Pavlik was, I think, eighteen. He must have been about four foot eleven, very slight and pale, with soft, colorless hair and a large forehead that sloped into a weak chin. His eyes flickered away from direct contact, but his mouth had an aggressive cast that only increased his comic potential. Just occasionally, when he thought himself unobserved, his large head drooped and revealed the nape of his neck. There was something horrifying about its slenderness.
His size, you see, was not hereditary. Pavlik had grown up in a children’s home, fed on porridge and scraps of oily fish. All the inmates of Soviet institutions were badly fed, from the pride of the Red Army to the prisoners in the camps, but the orphans, of course, never recovered from the effects of malnutrition and early misery. Pavlik’s parents had died, and his grandmother, old and weak herself, couldn’t take on the burden of a young child. She had only her pension—how could she feed a growing boy? He’d be better looked after by the state, which cared for each of its children like a father and a mother. She left him at the children’s home with a small bag of clothes and a knitted puppy, promising that if he worked hard she would fetch him soon. Pavlik waited, listening for her voice in his sleep. Years passed, the puppy unraveled under its burden of love. When nothing remained but a soggy woolen ear, Pavlik was called into the director’s office and told that his grandmother had died some time before.
“We decided to wait until you were older before telling you,” said the director. “It’s our policy.”
Pavlik worked hard, just as his grandmother had told him. It was exceptional for a child from a home to get a place at university, but Pavlik had made it. He was an intelligent boy, he would work in an office one day, have a suit, an apartment. But for the time being he lived in the hostel and moved along its greenish corridors with a familiarity that made me sad. He never complained about the showers, like we did, or the claustrophobia. In the afternoons he lay on his bed, which was unusually comfortable by hostel standards. I exclaimed about it once and Pavlik’s face lit up.
“It’s a good bed,” he told me, seriously. He had two mattresses and another standing against the wall to form a sofa back. He patted them with pride. “These are my own, you see. I bought them.”
They were his refuge, his own mattresses. Sometimes he would stay on his bed until the evening, sleeping and eating pieces of bread. He was little enough to stretch out in the institutional iron bed frame, which gave the rest of us cramps and froze our toes. His possessions packed neatly into his locker. Little Pavlik, too short to kiss girls or to be popular. Brought up on Soviet rations, it was as though he had turned out regulation Soviet size, to fit the low-ceilinged rooms and the shoddy furniture without protesting.
During the course of that winter, however, something gave way in Pavlik. The teasing didn’t help. A rumor got around that at least one part of Pavlik had not been stunted by bad nutrition. The boys carried on about it when they came back from the showers, joked, and widened their eyes. Somehow this discovery gave them carte blanche with Pavlik, now that he could be envied.
“Come and have a little drink, little one,” they would invite him.
“Be careful over that crack in the floor,” some joker added.
“Drinking already, so little and yet so experienced—”
“Not so little where it counts!”
The alcohol, which Pavlik never refused doubtless played its part, too. He did not talk much when he was drunk but took to sloping wordlessly along the corridors, clenching and unclenching his fists. The tendons on his neck stood out. He, who had been so peaceable, became angry. Arguments flared up with his roommates: they were keeping him awake, encroaching on his part of the room. He stopped taking showers and grew a tufty, gingery ghost of a beard.
One day a girl from one of Pavlik’s classes dropped by to borrow a book, and he offered her tea. It was the dead time in the middle of the afternoon and soon there was a small group in the corridor marveling loudly at Pavlik’s way with women, the little devil. The girl did not stay long, and once she had left, Pavlik came out into the corridor with a bottle in his hand, opening his mouth to shout at them. No sound came out. Then he dropped the bottle and left the hostel, returning, very drunk, at midnight.
There were apologies the next day. No one really wanted to hurt Pavlik; it was just that we were all cooped up together, bored and thoughtless. From then on the boys exerted themselves to be friendly, but he was never convinced. His eyes, circled by purplish shadows, flickered warily over their faces and went blank: as he’d expected, they didn’t really mean it.
In that blank look I saw disillusion. So this is real life, he seemed to be saying. For this I bore those years in the children’s home, for this I stifled my complaints and starved. All those years you promised me that one day I would leave the institution and be a Soviet citizen, like everyone else. All lies. No one is a Soviet citizen now. Each one of us is alone, each of us is an orphan.
Pavlik cut the arteries in his wrists soon afterward. When Mitya and I came back from the cinema, there was a kerfuffle in the corridor and the komendant was shouting “Open, open up, idiot!” and heaving his shoulder against Pavlik’s door. We leaned our shoulders to the task and the door burst open. Inside Pavlik was lying on his bed smiling faintly. Blood was running down his hands and soaking into his mattresses. Seeing us, he picked up the razor and began to saw at his wounds.
“Leave me,” he whispered.
He screamed as they dragged him down the corridor, and the noise hung in the air long after he had gone. We wiped the stains on his bed halfheartedly and avoided each other’s eyes. Then Viktor announced, “Son of a bitch, I’m thirsty,” and we turned to him in noisy agreement. We sat in Viktor’s room that night.
Pavlik didn’t stay long in the hospital, but by the time he returned his possessions had been moved to a room on a different floor. We saw little enough of him after that. From glimpses in the corridor, I noticed that Pavlik had shaved off his beard and begun to grow a mustache; it aged him. A little later, two friends appeared in his life and the three of them played table tennis together. Pavlik seemed to be surviving, yet when we had first met him, only a few months before, one could see the emotions following one another across his features: fear and boredom and half-credulous hope. Now his face had settled into a single expression: the aggressive stare that had formerly seemed comic. Don’t think me sad because I am alone in the world, it seemed to say. I’ve grown strong, because I rely only on myself. You are weak: you need each other. But one day you will know what I know: each of us is alone, each of us is an orphan.
13
Inflation Fever
Here comes trouble: open the gates wide!