Inadvertently spraying droplets from her hair around the tabletop, Taisia reached out her hand to pluck the confection of her choice from the expensive box of sweets. Suddenly, her hand still hovering in midair, she said, “Hey, Nora, are you even married?”
She’s inducting me into the secrets of baby care, and now she wants my secrets. In exchange for her tip on children’s soap, Nora thought. Tengiz had taught her to analyze dialogues between characters, to grasp their internal workings, in just this way.
“Yes, I’m married.”
Don’t divulge too much; you might spoil everything. The dialogue has to unfold, it has to suggest itself.
“A long time?”
“Fourteen years. Since graduating from high school.”
A pause. It was falling into place nicely.
“Then how come you’re always alone when I come over? He never helps out, and you always come to clinic appointments by yourself.”
Nora stopped to think for a moment. Should she say that he was a ship captain, off sailing the seven seas? Or that he was doing time?
“He comes and goes. He lives with his mother. He’s an unusual person, very talented, a mathematician. But as for survival skills in life, he’s about on a par with Yurik.” Nora told the truth—about a tenth of it.
“Oh, I know of another case just like yours!” Taisia said, animated.
Just then Nora’s keen ear picked up a slight noise, and she went to check on the little one. He woke up and looked at his mother as though in surprise. Taisia was standing right behind her, and he stared at her.
“Yurik, sweetie, have we woken up?” Taisia said in melting tones.
Nora picked up her son. He turned his head toward the nurse, watching her expectantly.
Nora didn’t have a diaper-changing table. She used an old-fashioned desk with a folding top, which Yurik was already outgrowing. And Nora didn’t put him in regular diapers. She had two special romper suits made for him at a sewing-and-alterations workshop, where the seamstresses had “overhauled” some foreign model. Taisia grumbled about the capitalist underpants lined with rubber that chafed his little rumples of fat when they were wet. Then she kissed the baby on his bottom and ordered Nora to spread a clean sheet on the divan while she got the vaccination ready.
She mixed something from one vial with another, drew the liquid up into a syringe, and jabbed him gently with the needle. The baby screwed up his face and was about to bawl, but then changed his mind. He looked at his mother and smiled.
What a smart little fellow; he understands just what’s going on, Nora thought in delight.
Taisia went out to dispose of the cotton wad. From the doorway, she bellowed, “Water! Nora, the bath is running over! It’s a flood!”
The bathtub had indeed overflowed, and water was streaming down the hallway, reaching nearly to the kitchen. They plumped Yurik down in his crib, evidently in too much haste, and he started to cry. Nora turned off the tap, threw a towel down on the floor, and began sopping up the water. Taisia helped her with dexterous alacrity. Just then, amid the howls of the child abandoned in the crib, the telephone rang.
It’s the neighbors; their ceiling is already leaking, Nora thought, and ran to pick up the phone to tell them it was all under control.
But it wasn’t the neighbors. It was Nora’s father, Genrikh.
Bad timing, as usual, Nora just had time to think. Yurik had set up an indignant wail for the first time in his life at full volume, and water was no doubt already gushing down into the neighbors’ apartment …
“Dad, the apartment’s flooded, I’ll call you back.”
“Nora, Mama passed away,” he said, with slow, decorous solemnity. “Last night … at home…” Then he added, without any trace of solemnity, “Hurry over, please, as fast as you can! I don’t know what to do.”
Nora, barefoot, flung the still-dripping towel onto the floor. Again, bad timing. Why did her relatives always choose the most inconvenient moment even to die?
Taisia grasped the situation in an instant.
“Who?”
“Grandmother.”
“How old?”
“Over eighty, I should think. She lied about her age her whole life. She even managed to change it on her ID. Will you take over for a few hours while I’m gone?”
“You go ahead. I’ll stay here.”
Nora went to wash her hands again, quite unnecessarily, after the flood. Then she rushed over to Yurik and gave him her breast. At first he refused the nipple haughtily, but Nora coaxed him by putting it to his lips. Then he began to suck and gulp, and went quiet.
Meanwhile, Taisia had stripped off her skirt and blouse. She deftly sopped up the water and emptied it into a bucket, and afterward dumped it into the toilet down the hall. Her pink slip and short white cotton camisole, and thick streams of hair that had escaped from the clasp, flashed into view at the end of the murky hallway. Nora couldn’t suppress a smile at her agility, her beauty, and the precision of her movements.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. I’ll call you. She lives nearby, on Povarskaya Street.”
“Go on—I’ll call off my next two visits. But express some milk, just in case. You might be a long time. When things like this happen…”
Well, what do you know, Nora thought. You’ve only seen her a few times in your life, but she jumps right in, at a moment’s notice, when you need her. What a godsend!
Ten minutes later, Nora was rushing down the boulevard. She turned the corner at the Nikitsky Gates, and in another ten minutes was ringing the doorbell of a communal apartment under which hung a small copper plate with the inscription “The Ossetskys.” The names of the other seven families were written on plain cardboard.
Her father, the chewed-up end of his now extinguished cigarette dangling from his lips, gave her a weak embrace, and began to cry. Curbing his emotions, he said: “Can you believe it? I called up Neiman to tell him Mama had died, and it turns out that he’s dead, too! I already have the death certificate from the doctor, and now I need some other paper from the polyclinic. And we have to decide where to bury her. Mama said it’s all the same to her, as long as it’s not next to Jacob.”
All this he told Nora as they were walking down the long corridor. A fat neighbor, Grandmother’s enemy Kolokoltsev, poked his head out the door of one room, and the squat Raisa looked out of another. Walking toward them down the corridor was Katya “Firstonehere” (as she had baptized herself). Her mother had lived here as a servant since the building was new. Katya was born in the little room off the kitchen. She knew everything about everyone, and to this day wrote ungrammatical, barely legible letters denouncing the other residents—which was no secret to any of them. In fact, she was so artless and ingenuous that she had warned them all beforehand, “Watch out, I’ll rat on all of you!”
Grandmother’s dusty room reeked of tobacco—Nora’s father had been smoking there—and of the eau de cologne her grandmother had sprayed around her with an atomizer her entire life. This procedure took the place of tidying up. Now she lay on the rustic, hand-built divan in her white nightgown, its oft-mended collar covered with a maze of tiny stitches. She looked small, her head thrown back proudly, her eyes not completely shut. Her jaw was slack, her mouth hung open slightly, and the shadow of a smile hovered on her face.
Nora’s throat constricted in pity. She looked around her and saw the bitter dignity of her grandmother’s life. Poverty by choice. Bare windows. Curtains, according to her grandmother, were a petit-bourgeois affectation. The enfilade doorways on either side of the room, no longer functional, were blocked with a bookcase on one wall and a buffet on the other. There was as much dust in the bookcase as there were books. Since childhood, Nora’s allergies had always kicked in when she spent the night here—during those years when she still called her grandmother Purr-Purr and adored her with passionate, childlike intensity. Every single book was familiar to her. They had been read and reread, over and over again. To this day, Nora battled all forms of ignorance with the weapon of culture, and culture in its entirety originated for her in these several hundred tomes, pored over like books on a desert island, their margins swarming with tiny pencil marks and notations. From the Bible to Freud. Well, the island was not exactly deserted. It was densely inhabited: flocks of bedbugs grazed in these parts. They had feasted on Nora in childhood, but Grandmother hardly noticed them. Or maybe they had hardly noticed her?