The fourth time, it wasn’t Lily who came but her mother. Our affair had come out.
“You almost ruined my daughter’s life,” her mother yelled in a deep, operatic voice. She was fat, almost a perfect square — the kind of woman Lily would probably become in her older years, after having children. “I’d kill you if you didn’t look so miserable. I’d make sure you’re an outcast in this town.”
Suddenly I wanted to laugh, though her threats were far from empty. Lily’s father had a high position in the local Party Committee. In Magadan, where everyone knew everyone’s business, reputation was important.
Lily’s mother went on detailing my lack of morals, of sympathy for a young girl’s heart, of respect for their family and my family, of respect for myself. Lack, lack, lack. But the blade had narrowly swung clear of both Lily’s head and mine, and I wanted to celebrate. My broken leg had saved my career. Moreover, it provided a blameless, romantic exit from my relationship with Lily. I knew all along that she wasn’t the girl I’d marry even if her engagement broke up, and our inevitable separation, if protracted, could have taken a much uglier form.
Tolyan wasn’t so lucky. He was smitten with Anya, an air-headed girl with a lean figure and a voice that went with campfire guitar as smoothly as vodka goes down with salted herring. While Tolyan nursed me at the hospital, Anya let herself be swayed by a former classmate of ours, a certain Seryoga, at the Women’s Day dance.
“You didn’t have to stay at the hospital. You could’ve just gone to the dance,” I said when he told me the news.
“That didn’t occur to me.” Tolyan gave me a shaming look.
“Well, she showed her true nature. Why do you need a girl like that?” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. There’re always more. Seryoga will play with her and dump her soon enough. That’s the way he is,” he said, picking up my metal scratcher. “What’s this for?” He put it in his mouth and chewed, making a disconcerting sound. “Brutal age, rough manners, nyet romantismy,” he concluded with a quote from one of our favorite films.
I spent another month at the hospital. Tolyan and I grew out our hair, mustaches, and beards, which made us look like nineteenth-century Russian merchants. When he visited, we drank tea in character — out of saucers — and flirted with the nurses. After I’d been moved home, friends and girls stopped by to help with groceries and laundry, and to make sure I followed doctor’s orders of three hundred drops of vodka daily. I enjoyed three more guilt-free months of reading. I was a big fan of Thornton Wilder then. While reading The Bridge of San Luis Rey, I wondered, just like Brother Juniper does in the novel, whether there was any logic in who got into accidents or became the victim of various unfortunate events. Of course, breaking a leg was a disaster not on the same scale as dying in the collapse of a bridge. Still, maybe I’d been plunged into this parallel, slower life to learn a lesson. Maybe Lily’s mother was right: it was time to grow up. That meant getting married. Surprisingly, this thought no longer threw me into panic.
But I don’t want to give the impression that I suffered unduly in heavy self-reflection. Apart from a few physical inconveniences, I loved living in my favorite striped mohair robe, away from my job, which didn’t prove to be as exciting as I’d imagined when I went off to the aviation institute in Riga. I was often awake at five in the morning after reading all night to hear the first birdsong of the day. The Eagles’ “Hotel California” had just made its way to the northeast and played from the radio in every open window. Sometimes, when reading or watching soccer on TV, I’d forget about my white underwear boiling in a giant pot. The water and bleach would spill onto the stove and then the floor, and this way the whole kitchen would clean itself in minutes. Life was good.
In July, the doctors removed the cast. Later I’d find out that the fibula had grown back at a slight angle: the soles of my left shoes would now forever develop holes before the right ones even showed signs of wear. I hobbled outside on crutches to exercise my legs. The stream of friends and well-wishers thinned. Everybody had gone on vacation. Tolyan and I played Battleship over the phone, unable to do any of the things that made the cold summer in Magadan bearable. (Tolyan couldn’t, or wouldn’t, find another tennis partner.) Finally, his father helped us obtain two-week passes to a sanatorium on the Black Sea and off we went to seek a cure for our bachelors’ ennui.
It was there that I met my future wife, Marina, who was on vacation with her friend Lenka. I still remember my Marina’s green bikini and the giant sagging straw hat, which was quite ridiculous, but on her seemed utterly stylish. Under the hat she had fantastic bangs. On top of it all, she was that mythical creature — an actual pianist and a piano teacher — whereas Tolyan and I, and everyone we knew then, had quit the fashionable, parent-ordered piano lessons after a year of family-wide suffering. A funny story: when I had first asked her what she did for a living, she said that she worked as an instructor. I, however, heard “on a tractor” and was considerably impressed, for days picturing her astride a tractor in the fields of golden wheat, her cheeks red and eyes shining.
Marina didn’t take me seriously. I fell in love. While I crabbed after her through the toe-wrenching Crimean pebble beach, trying to impress her with my intelligence and wit, Tolyan was stuck with the plain Lenka. When he found out, though, that her father was a high-ranking Party apparatchik in Voronezh, with money and connections, she at once became a lot less plain. I realize now that Lenka was the type of girl whose beauty would have been awakened by a truly great love, which Tolyan could neither give nor inspire.
At the close of two weeks we said good-bye to the girls and spent the following months clogging the phone lines with long-distance calls. As soon as my leg was strong enough to bear the weight of a bride, Tolyan and I decided to visit Marina and Lenka in Ulyanovsk, their and Lenin’s hometown. I arrived in my most fashionable outfit: a blue plaid blazer, plaid shirt, and navy pants I still had from my European days in Riga. I told myself that as soon as I saw Marina again I’d know. And I did. She met me at the airport in a scarlet dress with white polka dots and giant horn-rimmed glasses, her chestnut hair in a thick schoolgirl braid. The now legendary welcome dinner awaited me at her apartment: meatballs that had congealed overnight into one pot-sized meatball mass and had to be cut with a steak knife.
We married the next month. Tolyan married Lenka because if one must have a wife, it might as well be an apparatchik’s daughter, he had reasoned. Perhaps I should have foreseen trouble. But the little sense I possessed at twenty-eight was hopelessly drunk on Marina. I wanted Tolyan to have what I had — the wedding, the young wife. We, after all, had known our brides for the same amount of time: two weeks plus the phone calls. Our chances seemed equal.
The weddings took place on the same day. Back then it was a simple affair: you signed the book at the civil registry office (I remember a big oil portrait of Karl Marx on a whitewashed wall behind the officiant), took pictures next to the war memorials in town, and partied at a restaurant until morning. It was the first time my parents met Marina and I met Marina’s mother, Olga, who was the chief doctor of a polyclinika in Syktyvkar, a city in the north. I remember being a little bit offended that she’d brought an extra pair of wedding rings, in case we’d forgotten to buy ours. She didn’t trust me yet. She’d also brought a family album for me to catch up on my bride’s family tree. They came from the Terek Cossacks, with a wild-card Mongolian babushka somewhere down the line. Marina didn’t know her father; Olga had left him because of his gambling addiction when Marina wasn’t yet two.