454 I Joseph Brodsky 5
Apart from an excess of thirteen square meters, we were terribly lucky because the communal apartment we had moved into was very small. That is, the part of the enfilade that constituted it contained six rooms partitioned in such a way that they gave home to only four families. Including ourselves, only eleven people lived there. As communal apartments go, the dwellers can easily amount to a hundred. The average, though, is somewhere between twenty-five and fifty. Ours was almost tiny.
Of course, we all shared one toilet, one bathroom, and one kitchen. But the kitchen was fairly spacious, the toilet very decent and cozy. As for the bathroom, Russian hygienic habits are such that eleven people would seldom overlap when either taking a bath or doing their basic laundry. The latter hung in the two corridors that connected the rooms to the kitchen, and one knew the underwear of one's neighbors by heart.
The neighbors were good neighbors, both as individuals and because all of them were working and thus absent for the better part of the day. Save one, they didn't inform to the police; that was a good percentage for a communal apartment. But even she, a squat, waistless woman, a surgeon in the nearby polyclinic, would occasionally give you medical advice, take your place in the queue for some scarce food item, keep an eye on your boiling soup. How does that line in Frost's "The Star-Splitter" go? "For to be social is to be forgiving"?
For aU the despicable aspects of this mode of existence, a communal apartment has perhaps its redeeming side as well. It bares life to its basics: it strips off any illusions about human nature. By the volume of the fart, you can tell who occupies the toilet, you know what he/she had for supper as well as for breakfast. You know the sounds they make in bed and when the women have their periods. It's often you in whom your neighbor confides his or her grief, and it is he or she who calls for an ambulance should you have an angina attack or something worse. It is he or she who one day may find you dead in a chair, if you live alone, or vice versa.
What barbs or medical and culinary advice, what tips about goods suddenly available in this or that store are traded in the communal kitchen in the evening when the wives cook their meals! This is where one learns life's essentials: by the rim of one's ear, with the corner of one's eye. What silent dramas unfurl there when somebody is all of a sudden not on speaking terms with someone else! What a school of mimics it is! What depths of emotion can be conveyed by a stiff, resentful vertebra or by a frozen profile! What smells, aromas, and odors float in the air around a hundred-watt yellow tear hanging on a plait-like tangled electric cord. There is something tribal about this dimly lit cave, something primordial—evolutionary, if you will; and the pots and pans hang over the gas stoves like would-be tom-toms.
6
I recall these not out of nostalgia but because this was where my mother spent one-fourth of her life. Family people seldom eat out; in Russia almost never. I don't recall either her or my father across the table in a restaurant, or for that matter in a cafeteria. She was the best cook I ever knew, with the exception, perhaps, of Chester Kallman; but then he had more ingredients. I recall her most frequently in the kitchen, in her apron, face reddened and eyeglasses a bit steamy, shooing me away from the stove as I try to fish this or that item from the burner. Her upper lip glistens with sweat; her short, cropped, dyed-red but otherwise gray hair curls disorderedly. "Go away!" she exclaims. "What impatiencc!" I won't hear that anymore.
Nor shall I see the door opening (how did she do it with both her hands holding a casserole or two big pans? By lowering them onto the latch and applying their weight to it?) and her sailing in with our dinner/supper/tea/dessert. My father would be reading the paper, I would not move from my book unless told to do so, and she knew that any help she could expect from us would be delayed and clumsy anyway. The men in her family knew more about courtesy than they themselves could master. Even when they were hungry. "Are you reading your Dos Passos again?" she would remark, setting the table. "\Vho is going to read Turgenev?" "What do you expect from him?" my father would ccho, folding the paper. "Loafer is the word."
7
How is it possible that I see myself in this scene? And yet, I do; as clcarly as I see them. Again, it is not nostalgia for my youth, for the old country. No, it is more likely that, now that they are dead, I see their life as it was then; and then their life included me. This is what they would remember about me as well, unless they now have the gift of omniscience and observe me at present, .«sitting in the kitchen of the aparhnent that I rent from my school, writing this in a language they didn't understand, although now they should be pan-glot. This is their only chance to see me and America. This is the only way for me to see them and our room.
8
Our ceiling was some fourteen, if not more, feet high, adorned with the same Moorish-style plaster ornamentation, which, combined with cracks and stains from occasionally bursting pipes upstairs, tiurned it into a highly detailed map of some nonexisting superpower or archipelago. There were three very tall arched windows through which we could see nothing except a high school across the street, were it not for the central window, which also served as a door to the balcony. From this balcony we could view the entire length of the street, whose typically Peters- burgian, impeccable perspective ended up with the silhouette of the cupola of St. Panteleimon's Church, or—if one looked to the right—the big square, in the center of which sat the Cathedral of the Savior of Her Imperial Majesty's Transfiguration Battalion.
By the time we moved into this Moorish wonder, the street already bore the name of Pestel, the executed leader of the Decembrists. Originally, though, it was named after that church that loomed at its far end: Panteleimonovskaya. There, at the far end, the street would fling around the church and run to the Fontanka River, cross over the Police Bridge, and take you into the Summer Garden. Pushkin once lived on that part of the street, and somewhere in a letter to his wife he says that "every morning, in nightgown and slippers I go across the bridge for a stroll in the Summer Garden. The entire Summer Garden is my orchard ..,"