He scooped her into his arms and shoved his hands under her jacket.
“We’ll talk all about it, of course we will, little one.”
The car moved off.
“No, no. I’m not going anywhere. I came out to say I wouldn’t go with you.”
“But we’ve already gone,” Butonov laughed.
This time Alik was offended. “What an appalling way to behave! Can’t you see that?” he berated her late that night when she returned. “Someone goes out for ten minutes and comes back five hours later! What am I supposed to think? That you’ve been run over? Been killed?”
“Please forgive me, for God’s sake. You’re absolutely right, it’s a terrible way to behave.” Masha felt profoundly guilty. And profoundly happy.
Next, Butonov disappeared for a month, and Masha tried with all her might just to accept his disappearance “as fact,” but it was a fact that burned right through her. She ate almost nothing, drank sweet tea, and conducted an interminable inner monologue with her absent lover. Her insomnia was becoming ever more acute.
Alik was alarmed: it was obvious she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He started giving Masha tranquilizers and increased the dose of sedatives. Masha refused to take psychotropic drugs.
“I’m not a lunatic, Alik, I’m an idiot, and you can’t treat that.”
Alik didn’t insist. He saw this as just one more reason why they needed to emigrate as soon as possible.
Nike came to see her twice. Masha talked only about Butonov. Nike cursed him, felt very penitent, and swore the last time she had seen him was in December before he went to Sweden. She also said that he was empty-headed and that the only good thing to come out of the whole saga was that Masha had written so much splendid poetry. Masha obediently read her poems and wondered whether Nike could be trying to deceive her now and whether it was Nike who had been with Butonov when she was ringing at the door.
Alik was doing the rounds of all manner of bureaucratic institutions, assembling a whole mountain of documents. He was in a hurry not only for Masha’s sake: he wanted to get to Boston to carry on with his work, the lack of which was making him feel ill too. They were not emigrating in a straightforward manner: first they would travel to Vienna under the provision for Jews, and then go on to America. It was possible that between Vienna and America they would have a spell in Rome. That depended on the speed with which documents were dealt with by, at that stage, foreign bureaucrats.
To all these complexities there was suddenly added a rebellion by Debora Lvovna. “I’m not emigrating anywhere. I have a sick sister, the only person close to me in the world, and I’ll never leave her.” There then followed the canonical text of a Yiddish mama: “I’ve devoted my whole life to you, you thankless boy, and now . . . that damned Israeclass="underline" it’s because of them we’ve had troubles all our lives. That damned America, may it come to a bad end.”
In the face of such arguments Alik held his peace and took his mother by the shoulders: “Mother of mine! Can you play tennis? Can you ice-skate? Is there anything in the world you can’t do? Could there maybe be something you don’t know? Some little detail? Be quiet, I beg you. Nobody is going to abandon you. We are going together, and we will support your Fira from America. I will earn a lot of money there.”
Debora Lvovna was quiet for a moment, but then worked herself up into even more of a lather: “What do I need your money for! To hell with your money! Your father and I always despised money. You will ruin the child with your money!”
Alik clutched his head and went out of the room.
When all the documents had been collected, Debora Lvovna categorically refused to go but did give permission for them to emigrate. The exit permits were finally issued, only for Butonov to announce himself again. It happened one morning. Masha got Little Alik ready, took him over to Alexandra, and went to Rastorguevo to say goodbye.
It was a good leave-taking. Masha told Butonov this was the last time he would see her, that she would soon be leaving forever, and she wanted to take every last detail with her in memory. Butonov was agitated: “Forever? Well, of course, you’re right, Masha, quite right. Life here is crap compared to the West, I’ve seen that. But forever . . .”
Masha walked through the house memorizing it all, because she wanted to retain the house in her memory too. Then the two of them went up to the attic. It was as dusty and cluttered as ever. Butonov tripped over the knocked-out seat of a bentwood chair, and picked it up: “Look.”
The center of the seat was pierced through with knife throws, and marks from near misses were all around it. He hung the seat up on a nail.
“This was the main thing I did as a boy.”
He took out a knife, went off to the far end of the attic, and threw it. The blade stuck in the wall right through the middle of the punched-out circle.
Masha pulled the knife out of the wall and went over to Butonov. He thought she wanted to throw it at the target too, but she only weighed it in her hand and gave it back to him.
“Now I know everything about you.”
After that trip Masha began quietly preparing to emigrate. She took all her papers out of the writing-desk drawers and decided what to keep and what to throw away.
The customs officials did not allow manuscripts to be taken out of the country, but Alik knew someone in the embassy, and he promised to send Masha’s papers out through the diplomatic bag. She sat on the floor surrounded by them, rereading every page, pondering each one, and feeling sad. She could suddenly see that everything she had written was only a draft for what she wanted to write, now or some time in the future.
“I’ll compile a collection and call it Insomnia.”
The poems came out to her like wild animals coming out of the forest, complete but invariably with a defect of some kind, a limp in the foreleg, a limp in the first verse.
There is clairvoyance in the nighttime,
all detail hidden by the dark;
of stripes on walls it’s only white ones
that on the paper show their mark.
The baggage that I bear at nighttime,
the cares and trivia fall away:
the brilliant genius of nighttime
by far outshines the light of day.
I have come to love insomnia,
the crystal vistas of the deep:
their gift, a delicate deposit,
dispels all likelihood of sleep.
Masha grew very thin, becoming even more fragile, and the daytime world, which seemed to her so dull in comparison with the world of night, became more fragile too. An angel appeared. At first she could not actually see him but sensed his presence, and sometimes turned around quickly because she thought she might glimpse him that way. When he came to her in a dream, his features were clearer, and the part of the dream in which he appeared was like a color sequence inserted in a black and white film.
He looked slightly different each time and could assume human form: one time he appeared to her in the form of a teacher dressed in white like a fencing instructor, and started teaching her to fly. They were standing on the slope of a living, softly breathing hill, which was also taking an ill-defined part in the lesson.
The teacher indicated a region of the spine to her, below the level of the shoulders and deeper, where a small organ or muscle was located, and Masha knew that she would fly just as soon as she learned the gentle, precise movement which controlled this organ. She concentrated, and it was as if she had pressed a button: her body began very slowly to break free from the mountain, and the mountain gently helped her with the movement. Masha flew clumsily and slowly, but it was already entirely clear to her what she had to do to control the speed and direction of her flight—to wherever she wanted to go and for as long as she wanted to fly.