Here you are, Zhenya dear. But I guessed that if you came today everything would be fine. What exactly would be fine, I don’t know. There’s nothing I need, after all. I was like you and I wanted everything. Now I have and need nothing. Alyosha will be here soon with his Vera. He sent a telegram. They wanted to spend longer by the sea, but they only lasted a month. It’s boring there. In the first half of the day, he wrote, they walked along the empty beach and fed the seagulls, and in the evening there was a touring midget theater. Here’s what’s funny. I was in Yalta a hundred years ago, and there were midgets then, too. But Vera keeps getting worse. She’s capricious, has hysterics, makes scenes in public, and cries at night. He’s had it with her. But what can he do? He has to be patient. She doesn’t have long, after all. This is God’s punishment for her, Zhenya dear. He punishes everyone and never lets anything slide. There’s not going to any Judgment Day there. It all happens here. Zhenya, you don’t even know how despicable she is. She cheated on Alyosha. I know everything. Alyosha was on an expedition in Central Asia catching some of his rodents. He asked Vera to come along, but she wanted no part of it, naturally. I was living with them then. Only a year had passed since the wedding. With Alyosha there she kept herself in check, but now it was bedlam. She’d be getting ready to go out and suddenly shout, “Where’s my button?” “You must have lost it somewhere, Verochka, and not noticed.” “But when I came home all the buttons were there!” she said. I reassured her. “Life is funny that way. A button comes off and you don’t notice.” She shouted, “But I’m not crazy! All the buttons were there!” Is that supposed to mean I secretly cut off her lousy button? How many years have passed, yet when I think of that button, I shake with fury. I was supposed to go to Terioki for a rest then. I got to the station, boarded the train, went to get my ticket, and suddenly—Lord, have mercy—no wallet, no ticket, and there was a neat, very straight slit in my purse. I’d been robbed in the crowd at the station. Nothing to be done for it, so I went home. In the pouring rain, with my suitcase. I finally dragged myself there. I looked and there was an unfamiliar umbrella drying in the entry. A man’s raincoat on a hook. It smelled odd, of some stranger, and there was also the smell of fresh nail polish. I listened: water splashing in the bathroom, and someone humming, a bass voice grunting. I opened the door to their bedroom, Alyosha’s bedroom, and Vera was sitting naked in front of the pier-glass with her back to me, her foot resting on the base, polishing her nails. I coughed. She looked up and saw my reflection. I thought she’d cry out, get scared, start squirming and begging my forgiveness. But as if nothing were the matter, she dipped the brush in the bottle and went to smear the nails on her other foot. I said, “Why so quiet, Vera? Say something.” I heard a splash from the bathroom. She replied, “What am I supposed to say?” “What do you mean?” I said. “I just left for the station and here you are…” She laughed. She was sitting with legs splayed, her big toenail red and the rest still bare. “Lord, who on earth are you?” She laughed. “Who? What makes you better than me?” I said, “What about Alyosha?” “What about Alyosha? This doesn’t change anything. What am I supposed to do, jump out the window? If you tell him, he won’t believe you anyway. Leave and don’t come back until tonight.” So I left. I realized right away who it was in the bathroom, Zhenya. But I won’t tell you. Why should I?
It’s very simple, Evgenia Dmitrievna. Here’s a ruler and a Braille board. One—open; two—close. You use this stylus to punch dots in the paper, but only Turkish-fashion, right to left. To read it, you take out the page, turn it over, and read it normally, left to right. Give me your hand. Feel it? One dot on top is A. Two dots one up and down is B. Two dots side by side is C. By the way, Braille also played music. All of Paris went to his concerts. He played cello and organ. But I have my exam in a week. If I end up failing, we’ll be leaving you. I just feel sorry for Mirra Alexandrovna. For some reason she thinks I’m going to be a great musician. Poor, silly mama! I can’t make her understand that the sensitive ear characteristic of every blind person isn’t enough, that that sensitivity doesn’t mean musical ability and true talent is as rare among the blind as among the seeing. I once heard my professor tell someone, “A pointless undertaking, doesn’t have the hands or the feeling. But I’m still hatching. I have kids at home asking for food. I have three, dear.” When we get home, I’m going to get a job as a piano tuner, that’s good, too. If Fate smiles on me, I’ll marry some kind blind girl. What else does happiness require? Normal young women only marry blind men in novels, Evgenia Dmitrievna. And if they do, it’s out of ignorance. To tell you the truth, blind people are awful, Evgenia Dmitrievna. Spoiled, capricious, wronged, vindictive. The blind man’s subordination in human contact is almost continuous; he doesn’t choose his companion, who is whoever wants to be it. The constant dependence is humiliating and has a putrefying effect on the psyche. Egoism and vanity are the main motives for human actions; all that gets magnified exponentially for the blind. The blind man’s vanity is fueled by the exaggerated admiration the seeing express for him out of pity for the cripple. The blind man is always in someone else’s power, so he can’t help but be suspicious, mistrustful, and vindictive. Marrying a blind man is like sacrificing yourself, only the sacrifice is thankless. People won’t understand you anyway. They’ll pity you and sympathize, as if you’d gone into a convent or become a nurse aide. And you won’t be able to explain. So that everything’s going to turn out just fine, Evgenia Dmitrievna. You’ll see.
Zhenya dear, have you gone to bed? Are you asleep? Roman’s going to play a little, just a little, all right? Please forgive us. His exam is soon, and that will be it. The professor said Roman has great talent, that he’ll be a great success. He needs to work. He needs to study hard. Preparing for a performance is very difficult. He has to read the line with one hand and play with the other. Roman is very worried. He puts on a good face and pretends he doesn’t care, but in fact he’s afraid. If he doesn’t get in, Zhenya, it will be a terrible blow for him. Not just a blow—a disaster. You do understand. In his position it is so important to find a place in life, to be essential to someone. Today I’m here, I’m always by his side, but tomorrow he’s alone. How will he live? Who needs him? I think about this all the time, Zhenya. Lord, you look so much like your mama! You know, I should tell you one thing. It’s silly, of course, not worth mentioning, and your dear mama’s long gone, but I can’t get the idea out of my head of how I deceived her. I mean, it wasn’t really a deception, but still. She asked me to sew her a dress, and I promised. We came up with the idea together: a low back and a heart-shaped slit in front. Rustling taffeta with bell sleeves and a full ruffle. Imagine, chiffon ribbons from the fastening on the left and from the side seam on the right tied up in back in a bow. A dream, not a dress. She’d already bought everything: the taffeta, the buttons. I took the material home. You saw me off. You were funny. You said, “Aunt Mika, bring me a wooly-booly!” I promised to bring the dress by her birthday. But I was having so much trouble with Roman, I never got around to the dress. There was never time. I kept putting it off. Of course, I didn’t get it done, and it was time to go. I arrived, I was crying, and I lied that I only remembered on the train—I’d ironed the finished dress, folded it, and forgotten to pack it. She was so upset! Naturally, I would have finished the dress later, but that last time your mama turned up all of a sudden, without warning. She appeared on my doorstep and my first thought was, The dress! But she didn’t remember. Something had happened between her and Dmitry. Or maybe nothing had, she just couldn’t take it anymore. I don’t know how she stood it all. They’d just got married, and he was already very strange. He wouldn’t speak to her for days on end. He’d sit there looking at the wall. I asked, “What’s the matter with him?” But this made her uncomfortable. She smiled and replied, “Pay no attention. Every person needs a wall sometimes.” I didn’t understand their marriage at all. They didn’t know the first thing about each other. Your mother married him in a frenzy. One day she was trying to convince me that Dmitry was an animal, a lewd pig, a narcissistic nonentity, and the next she announced she was getting married. I said, “Are you out of your mind?” She shook her head. “Don’t ask. I know nothing. And I don’t want to.” Mitya didn’t just not love her, it was as if he were taking something out on her. Even having outsiders in the house didn’t stop them. In my presence there were scenes between them at night that would end with Mitya taking the featherbed and going to the kitchen. She’d burst in and shout that she wouldn’t let him treat her this way, that she was putting up with it for the child’s sake, there was a limit to everything, and she would make him listen to her. But Mitya would interrupt her. “Pipe down, you’ll wake Zhenya!” You would wake up and cry, and your father would pick you up. I would try to calm her down, but she was already hysterical. “You don’t need me, I’m just in your way, you need the child, but you hate me! So know this. You won’t have me or Zhenya!” I kept saying, “Leave him! This won’t end well!” But she put up with it, she was waiting for something. At breakfast she would start poking her fork in the butter and could spend half an hour doing that, an hour. It occurred to me that she was quietly losing her mind. On my last visits her feelings toward you seemed to have changed. The slightest thing irritated her. The minute you acted up at the table, she’d start shouting, smacking you in the face, and pinching you so hard she’d leave bruises. You would cry, of course, and she would hit you even harder. “Quiet! Be quiet!” Then she’d clutch her head, cover her ears, and run away. One time you put on her hat, gloves, and shoes, draped yourself in her beads, took her rings, and smeared on her lipstick—and she lunged at you with a bamboo ski pole from your kiddie skis. We barely got her arms twisted behind her back that time.