473 / In a Room and a Half 19
The biggest item of our furniture—or rather, the one that occupied the most space—was my parents' bed, to which I think I owe my life. It was a large, king-sized affair whose carvings, again, matched to a certain degree the rest, yet they were done in a more modem fashion. The same vegetation motif, of course, but the execution oscillated somewhere between Art Nouveau and the commercial version of Constructivism. This bed was the object of my mother's special pride, 'for she had bought it very cheaply in 1935, before she and my father got married, having spotted it and a matching dressing table with three mirrors in some second-rate carpenter shop. Most of our life gravitated toward this low-sitting bed, and the most momentous decisions in our family were made when the three of us gathered, not around the table, but on that vast surface, with myself at my parents' feet.
By Russian standards, this bed was a real luxury. I often thought that it was precisely this bed that persuaded my father to get married, for he loved to tarry in it more than anything else. Even when he and my mother were engaged in the bitterest possible mutual acrimony, mostly on the subject of our budget ("You are just hell-bent to dump all the cash at the grocer's!" comes his indignant voice over bookshelves separating my "half" from their "room." "I am poisoned, poisoned by thirty years of your stinginess!" replies my mother), even then he'd be reluctant to get out of it, especially in the morning. Several people offered us very good money for that bed, which indeed occupied too much space in our quarters. But no matter how insolvent we were, my parents never considered this option. The bed was clearly an excess, and I believe they liked it precisely for that.
I remember them sleeping in it on their sides, backs turned to each other, a gulf of crumpled blankets in between. I remember them reading there, talking, taking their pills, fighting this or that illness. The bed framed them for me at their most secure and most helpless. It was their very private lair, their ultimate island, their own inviolable, by no one except me, place in the universe. Wherever it stands now, it stands as a vacuum within the world order. A seven- by-five-foot vacuum. It was of light-brown polished maple, and it never creaked.
20
My half was connected to their room by two large, nearly- ceiling-high arches which I constantly tried to fill with various combinations of bookshelves and suitcases, in order to separate myself from my parents, in order to obtain a degree of privacy. One can speak only about degrees, because the height and the width of those two arches, plus the Moorish configuration of their upper edge, ruled out any notion of complete success. Unless, of course, one could fill them up with bricks or cover them with wooden boards. But that was against the law for this would result in our having two rooms instead of the one and a half that the borough housing order stated we were entitled to. Short of the fairly frequent inspections of our building's super, the neighbors, no matter how nice the terms we were on with them, would report us to the appropriate authorities in no time.
One had to design a palliative, and that was what I was busy at from the age of fifteen on. I went through all sorts of mind-boggling arrangements, and at one time even contemplated building-in a twelve-foot-high aquarium, which would have in the middle of it a door connecting my half with the room. Needless to say, that architectural feat was beyond my ken. The solution, then, was more and more bookshelves on my side, more and thicker layers of drapery on my parents'. Needless to say, they liked neither the solution nor the nature of the problem itself.
Girls and friends, however, grew in quantity more slowly than did the books; besides, the latter were there to stay. We had two armoires with full-length mirrors built into their doors and otherwise undistinguished. But they were rather tall, and they did half the job. Around and above them I built the shelves, leaving a narrow opening, through which my parents could squeeze into my half, and vice versa. My father resented the arrangement, particularly since at the farthest end of my half he had built himself a darkroom where he was doing his developing and printing, i.e., where the large part of our livelihood came from.
There was a door in that end of my half. When my father wasn't working in his darkroom, I would use that door for getting in and out. "So that I won't disturb you," I told my parents, but actually it was in order to avoid their scrutiny and the necessity of introducing my guests to them, or the other way around. To obfuscate the nature of those visits, I kept an electric gramophone, and my parents gradually grew to hate J. S. Bach.
Still later, when books and the need for privacy increased dramatically, I partitioned my half further by repositioning those armoires in such a way that they separated my bed and my desk from the darkroom. Between them, I squeezed a third one that was idling in the corridor. I tore its back wall out, leaving its door intact. The result was that a guest would have to enter my Lebensraum through two doors and one curtain. The first door was the one that led into the corridor; then you'd find yourself standing in my father's darkroom and removing a curtain; the next thing was to open the door of the former armoire. Atop the armoires, I piled all the suitcases we had. They were many; still, they failed to reach the ceiling. The net effect was that of a barricade; behind it, though, the gamin felt safe, and a Marianne could bare more than just her breast.
2 I
The dim view my mother and father took of these transformations brightened somewhat when they began to hear from behind the partition the clatter of my typewriter. The drapery muffied it considerably but not fully. The typewriter, with its Russian typeface, was also part of my father's China catch, little though he expected it to be put to use by his son. I had it on my desk, tucked into the niche created by the bricked-up former door once connecting our room and a half with the rest of the enfilade. That's when that extra foot came in handy! Since my neighbors had their piano on the opposite side of this door, I fortified my side against their daughter's "Chopsticks" with a walled bookcase that, resting on my desk, fit the niche perfectly.
Two mirrored armoires and the passage behveen them on one side; the tall draped window with the windowsill just two feet above my rather spacious brown cushionless couch on the other; the arch, filled up to its Moorish rim with bookshelves behind; the niche-filling bookcase and my desk with the Royal Underwood in front of my nose—that was my LebeiiSraum. My mother would clean it, my father would cross it on his way back and forth to his darlcroom; occasionally he or she would come for refuge in my worn- out but deep armchair after yet another verbal skirmish. Other than that, these ten square meters were mine, and they were the best ten square meters I've ever known. If space has a mind of its own and generates its own distribution, there is a chance some of these square meters, too, may remember me fondly. Now especially, under a different foot.
2 2
I am prepared to believe that it is more difficult for Russians to accept the severance of ties than for anyone else. \Ve are, after all, a very settled people, even more so than other Continentals (Germans or French), who move around a lot more, if only because they have cars and no borders to speak of. For us, an apartment is for life, the to^ is for life, the country is for life. The notions of permanence are therefore stronger; the sense of loss as well. Yet a nation that has lost in half a century nearly sixty million souls to its carnivorous state (which includes the twenty million killed in the war) surely was capable of upgrading its sense of stability. If only because those losses were incurred for the sake of the status quo.