The remnants of a decorative coverlet hung in front of the entryway. It had never been laundered or dry-cleaned since the day it had arrived. A bare incandescent lightbulb—“Lenin’s Lamp,” as it was called back in the day—dangled from the ceiling. And Grandmother had read him—earnestly and fearfully. Indeed, she was personally acquainted with Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, and People’s Commissar of Education Lunacharsky. She had engaged in cultural work—she had once mentioned something about founding a drama studio for homeless children … What a strange, unlikely world, in which Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Stanislavsky and Evreinov, Andrei Bely and Nikolai Ostrovsky, Rachmaninoff and Grieg, Ibsen and Chekhov, went hand in hand. And, of course, her beloved Hamsun. The starving journalist who had already begun gnawing at his leather shoelaces, and saw lovely visions while hallucinating from hunger, until he was struck by an astonishing idea: why not go out and find work? And he hired himself out as a ship’s boy.
Grandmother had practiced some form of esoteric dancing, then the forgotten and maligned science of pedology, and in her later years referred to herself as an “essayist.” And she lived a spiritual life, as far removed from present-day reality as the Jurassic period. These thoughts washed over Nora like a sudden storm as she stood there, not even taking off her coat, looking at her grandmother, who was gone forever.
How much Nora had learned from her! Grandmother had played on this piano, and Nora had “danced the mood” of the music. Here, on the corner of the table, Nora had drawn a blue horse, much to her grandmother’s delight: it reminded her of Kandinsky’s Blue Rider. They visited the Pushkin Museum together, they went to concerts and plays. How passionately Nora had loved her then—and how cruel Nora had been later, when she grew disillusioned with her and coldly rejected her. Grandmother hated anything that smacked of the bourgeois. She detested philistinism in all its forms, and called herself a “nonpartisan Bolshevik.” Eight years earlier, they had quarreled once and for all—Nora was ashamed to admit it—about politics. How petty and ridiculous …
Nora and her father moved the stiff body onto the table. It was not heavy. Her father went out to the kitchen to smoke. With a pair of scissors, Nora cut through the fabric of the ancient nightgown. It seemed to fall apart in her hands. Then she poured some cool water into a tub and started washing the body. It looked like a narrow boat and surprised her by its physical resemblance to her own: long, thin legs, the high arch of the feet, big toes extending beyond the line of the others, with nails long left unclipped, small breasts with their pink nipples, a long neck and narrow chin. The body looked younger than the face, its skin milky white and hairless.
Her father smoked in the huge communal kitchen crammed with small individual tables, one for each resident or family. Now and then, he went out to the corridor to talk on the ancient telephone, to inform the relatives. Nora picked up the strains of his mournful voice, repeating the same words over and over: “Mama died last night … I’ll call you about the funeral when I know more.”
When the body had been washed and rubbed dry with a torn duvet cover, Nora felt a stream of warm liquid running down her belly. It seemed to shock her awake—how could she have forgotten about Yurik? It was his milk flowing down, useless. She wanted to sit down on the divan, but she noticed that there was a damp spot on the sheet—the last juices and residues of the dead body. Nora ripped off that part of the sheet, crumpled it up, and threw it into the corner. She found another place for herself, in the armchair next to the window, where Grandmother used to sit and read those same books from the bookcase; she had never acquired any new ones for as long as Nora could remember. Under her breast, Nora placed a large mug with a broken handle—she remembered it well from childhood—and expressed milk until it filled the mug almost to the brim. She poured it out into the tub—impossible even to consider carrying those three hundred grams of milk home with her from here. She wiped off her chest with her T-shirt. Everything in the room seemed contaminated with death, including the hapless mug.
She got dressed again and went out into the corridor. Her father, wearing a woolen jacket and a hat, was smoking in the kitchen again. He had just returned from the polyclinic, which wasn’t far away, just over on the Arbat, with the required paperwork.
“I can’t get through to the crematorium; the line’s always busy. I’ll just go there myself. As soon as possible, I want to get all of this…” Here he made some vague circular gesture with his hand, which meant “over and done with.” And he went to make another phone call.
Then Nora dialed her own number. Taisia picked up immediately.
“Don’t you worry about a thing, Nora, honey. I’ve already called home. Sergei can manage on his own, and I can stay here till evening. Yurik’s fine; he’s fast asleep.”
Nora made her way over to the “closet”—a corner behind the buffet. All Grandmother’s things were hanging there on three hangers. What humble poverty: a winter coat with a shawl collar made of lambskin, worn threadbare in spots; a blue skirt and jacket, refashioned from a man’s suit; two blouses … Nora could remember each item from childhood. Judging by the cut, they were all from the late 1920s. Nora picked out the least shabby blouse. You could study the history of costume from these relics of the past. Traces of some pseudo-Egyptian motif were still visible on the sleeves.
The body had grown cool and stiff, like plaster, and she realized she would need to cut through the back of the blouse to get it on. She laid it out next to the body.
We’ll have to be careful moving her into the casket, Nora thought. But I’ll dress her now, so she’s not lying here naked.
Suddenly she felt that the room was cold. Wishing to dress Grandmother in something warmer, she took the jacket down off the hanger. She didn’t have to cut through the skirt—she pulled it up over the legs. Grandmother was a child of the Silver Age—its product and its victim. Two photographs, dusty with age, featuring a young beauty, hung above the piano. Lovely. She had been very lovely.
Nora dragged out a suitcase of old shoes that had been stuffed under the divan. They were now museum pieces—straps on leather buttons, goblet-shaped heels. Grandmother had worn these during the New Economic Policy period. Nora couldn’t put them on her grandmother’s stiff feet.
She did all of this as though she had been doing it every day of her life. In fact, it was the first time. Nora was only six when her other grandmother, Zinaida, had died, and she didn’t remember it. And she had hardly known her grandfathers. It was a matriarchal family. The only man was her father, Genrikh. Had he lived with them on Nikitsky Boulevard for a long time? Amalia had divorced him when Nora was thirteen.
It was too late now to mend things with Grandmother Marusya. It was too late to make peace with her. Now Nora was washing her, getting her dressed, and an old sense of irritation against the entire order of the world, against this awful shell of someone who had once been urgently, deeply loved by her, rose up from the depths of her being. A sarcophagus. Every dead body was a sarcophagus. You could stage a play in which every character occupies a sarcophagus. When they die, they stand up and step out of them. In that sense, everything alive is already dead. She would have to tell this to Tengiz.