I laid a brush to the middle of the wall closest to the kitchen and when I pulled it away there remained the image of a naked, round-faced woman, angelic in her demeanor, her torso almost entirely obscured by tomatoes, green pepper plants, vines, and a tottering stack of books. At the woman’s shoulder, incompetently foreshortened so that it appeared to be resting on it, was balanced a small, uneven wooden house, our dacha. I suffered a number of comments about being either so sentimental or so guilty that I would paint my own wife.
I don’t make any claims for the painting’s artistic merit, but I liked it anyway, for its lushness, for its appetizing, perfectly round tomatoes, and for my wife. The painting was indeed sentimentaclass="underline" the one or two square meters that it occupied was a map of idealization. I’m told it remains on the café wall to this day.
My wife Lydia was from the country, a small town in central Russia, and never seemed to forgive the circumstances (admission to the philology department of Moscow State University) that had brought her to Moscow. She hated the motor traffic, she hated the noise, and most of all she hated the food, the dearth of fresh vegetables and fruit even in summer and their tinned replacements all year round, the factory chickens, the pale, tasteless cellulose-stuffed bread and the fatty, rancid meat. She called it food for slaves. She had hardly less disdain for the union food packages, containing otherwise impossible-to-get delicacies, that I brought home from Yeliseyev’s Gastronom. Shortly after we married she established a garden on our fifth-floor balcony. The balcony was almost always in shade and hardly anything grew there save her resentment. I could watch her from a window in my study as she crouched at the root of a sickly vine, tapping the soil, muttering incantations. Then she would shake her head, give the root a parting touch, and go back to her book.
Lydia’s passion for reading, her wanton surrender to an author, was the sexiest thing about her. Embracing a book, she was completely vulnerable to the author’s advances. She would accept any indignity, swallow any lie, and remain constant in the face of the author’s infidelities and depravities. Regardless of the wattage of the light above her head, she gave the text the firm grip of her attention. She was always missing her metro station, even when she read standing, wedged between the other passengers. Sometimes the text was my own. In the hours when I knew she was reading my work, I lived a kind of distracted half-life, as I imagined the play of my words against her retinae.
One evening earlier that summer, like a gladiator approaching the tribune with booty, I had swaggered into our flat and announced that we had been given the right to rent a small union dacha in Peredelkino, the writers’ settlement just outside Moscow. I had expected to be tattooed with kisses, but Lydia was too surprised to even congratulate me. As she stood in the kitchen, tears welling in her eyes, I realized that I hadn’t fully gauged the weight of despair that she had accumulated living here in the city.
Even though the hour was late and the juices of a roast were bubbling in the oven, she demanded that we inspect the property right away. By elektrichka from the Kiev Station the village was a half hour’s journey. In that time she hardly spoke, as if fearing to break the spell. The house was located about two kilometers from the train stop, a distance we covered nearly on a run. We arrived during the prolonged twilight, the shadows long and diffuse, the birds childishly atwitter about their late bedtimes.
The dacha was small, but it was a dacha nonetheless, a wooden, two-room house sitting on a small plot of land and encroached by vines and juniper bushes. The overgrowth made it impossible to see our neighbors, even though they were less than twenty meters away on either side of us. An outdoor dinner party unwound somewhere and a woman’s laugh was close enough to promise that I might someday know it intimately. Our dacha possessed neither indoor plumbing nor telephone, but it had a stove and was comfortably laid out and clean. From the porch I watched Lydia till some soil with her foot, testing it.
“No chickens,” I declared.
She turned and gazed at me as if I were mad, the mad tsar issuing an ukase to his tenth-of-an-hectare kingdom.
“I’m sorry, but it just won’t do,” I said. “This is a writers’ settlement.”
She scowled. “You’ve never had a real egg, that’s your problem.”
We moved in the following day and at once set to work clearing the refuse, broken bottles, and abandoned building materials that were scattered in the underbrush. After marking out a rectangle at the side of the house, Lydia laid down a thick layer of fresh topsoil that had been procured at great expense from a truck driver who worked in a nearby kolkhoz. It was already too late in the year to plant anything but lettuce, dill, parsley, and sorrel.
I hardly accomplished any literary work the remainder of that month. Moving into the dacha, as modest as it was, occupied the sum of our energies and imaginations. The first morning I woke in the straw-filled dacha bed, I lay for hours looking up through the square of sky unevenly partitioned by the trunk of a birch tree and believed that I loved the birch as much as I loved life itself. This was not the manifestation of anything as simple as a love of nature. The allocation of this dacha was an enormous professional success, as much as the publication of my first book.
On a pleasant summer weekend, when things were good, Lydia and I would stroll hand in hand down the lanes, blowing cigarette smoke over the hedges of the residences of our greatest writers. On wide Serafimovicha, Korney Chukovsky lived in a yellow-and-brown house with a veranda on which he read his verse and Whitman’s to the neighborhood children. A few blocks away, Zinaida Nikolayevna, Pasternak’s widow, was living out her last days in their round, wooden dacha. From the street, one could see into Pasternak’s upstairs study and, through the line of unshuttered windows, the woods behind the house. Zinaida Nikolayevna’s immediate neighbors were, on one side, Mayakovsky’s former lover Lily Brik and, on the other, Pasternak’s friend and persecutor, Konstantin Fedin.
Each dacha was like a book, in that it represented an author. But there were many more variations among Soviet dachas than there were among Soviet books. Some were located on large grounds and were cottages of more than one story, others were rusticated gingerbread shacks, some were constructed on an individual plan, and many more were built according to a standard design—and each variation spoke of the inhabitants’ literary success, productivity, social standing, and political reliability.
Most dachas were owned outright, not rented, by writers who claimed achievements greater than my two novels. I would be reminded of this every month when I paid Litfond, the union’s social welfare agency, for the vouchers that I would then give to another clerk in the same office—a pointless, time-consuming task that satisfied somebody somewhere that the capitalist practice of “renting” had been subverted. The vouchers were not inexpensive, but Lydia took on some lucrative translation work and I augmented my schedule of well-paid “creative trips” that brought literary programs to provincial audiences.
Lydia had immediately declared her intention to spend every remaining week of the summer in Peredelkino, and that was fine with me. Accompanied by dozens of other husbands, I took the train out every Friday evening, bringing my manuscript and two or three books or “thick” journals for Lydia. The husbands would return on Monday morning, looking forward to hot showers in our newly roomy flats and the capital’s parties and romantic intrigues.