Sanya Steklov didn’t approve of Ilya’s pursuit of lucre, but Ilya just shrugged it off.
“Do you know how much large-format photo paper costs? And developer? Where am I supposed to get it?”
And Sanya would fall silent. His money came from Mama and Grandmother, and he suspected that this wasn’t the most honorable way to come by it.
The old camera turned Ilya into a photographer. Soon he realized that he needed his own darkroom. Amateur photographers usually set up their darkrooms in the bathroom, where there was running water for rinsing film and photo paper. But their communal apartment had no bathroom—just a sort of pantry or broom closet, where three families kept their washtubs of various sizes as well as necessities. The closet shared a wall with the WC, which did have running water, so Ilya started devising a plan to rig some pipes to feed water into the closet and then drain it out again. He didn’t consider the neighbors, who had equal rights to the closet.
In their apartment, along with Ilya and his mother, lived a harmless old lady named Olga Matveevna, and a widow by the name of Granya Loshkareva, who had three children. Ilya’s mother often took the younger two to the preschool where she worked, and she helped Granya in other ways, too.
In short, when Maria Federovna talked the matter over with her neighbors, they didn’t object. They dragged their unwieldy washtubs out of the closet—and the rest was up to Ilya. He was just in time to write a letter to his father requesting his help in setting up shop. His father was deeply touched, and wired him 150 rubles. A two-line message accompanied the telegram: “I’ll come down for the May holidays, and we’ll do everything together.” That was his last letter—he didn’t live till May.
Although he couldn’t hook up the water to the closet for another year and a half, Ilya now had his own private nook where he spent a great deal of time. He salvaged a bookcase he found in the trash and used it for storing all his equipment.
Fifth grade seemed endless. It was the thirteenth year of their lives. The boys had slowly filled up with testosterone. The early bloomers had grown hair in secluded places and pimples on their faces. They itched and ached all over, more fights and arguments broke out, and they yearned to touch themselves to relieve the vague longings of the flesh.
Mikha exhausted himself skating. As a result of his secret early-morning training sessions, he became a good skater. He also became a passionate reader. Even before that he would read anything he could get his hands on, but now Anna Alexandrovna was supplying him with wonderful books: Dickens, Jack London, and many others.
At ten o’clock sharp, Aunt Genya would emit a single, high-decibel snort, after which she snored gently and steadily till morning. Minna turned in still earlier, and fell asleep quickly, after a bit of restless stirring about. Then Mikha slipped down to the kitchen to read to his heart’s content by the light of the communal lamp. He never got caught. He would sit there scratching at his pimples, reading a young-adult book that had nothing whatever to do with the aggravations of his body.
Sanya lagged behind his friends, not just in height, but in other ways, too: smooth face, clean collar—he was a gentle fellow. But he was also in the process of maturing. He announced to his mother and grandmother that he no longer intended to continue his physical therapy. It was obvious that his hand wasn’t going to heal and that he would never become a pianist. His mother and grandmother were both musicians of the homespun variety. In their youth they had dreamed of becoming professionals, only to be forced to abandon their musical training because of the entirely unmusical times, when blaring horns, thundering timpani, and marches and battle hymns were disguised as street songs.
The two solitary women had pinned all their hopes on Sanya. He had promise as a pianist, and everything was going beautifully—he had an excellent teacher, his future was shaping up. After the accident with the knife, however, Sanya had dropped out of music school. Anna Alexandrovna and Sanya’s mother, Nadezhda Borisovna, prepared themselves for a serious talk about his future. Anna Alexandrovna said that with his musical talent, it would be a waste to cut all his ties to music completely. Of course, he would never be a professional performer, but what could prevent him from playing at home? There was a certain charm in being an amateur. Sanya stubbornly resisted at first, then gave in after two weeks. He began taking private lessons with his grandmother’s friend Evgenia Danilovna.
Sanya played on their beloved Karelian-birch upright piano with his futureless, maimed hands. He would go weak at the knees for Chopin’s waltzes the way his peers did when girls from the neighborhood would brush against them in the mad chaos of a street game. He read, played, and sometimes did what normal boys his age did only as a form of punishment: he took long walks with his grandmother.
Evgenia Danilovna continued to give him lessons for about two years, but then the lessons faltered. This was partly due to Liza: her progress was so great, and his so minor, that he began shirking.
Anna Alexandrovna was a teacher of Russian, but with special qualifications—she taught Russian to foreigners.
And what foreigners they were! Her students were young men from Communist China who had come to study at the military academy. This was Anna Alexandrovna’s eighth or ninth job since finishing high school, and everything about it suited her. She liked how she was treated by the administrators. The short hours, her salary, and the various bonuses and benefits, including the excellent military sanatorium where she was allowed to stay for free once a year, were all very much to her liking.
Nadezhda Borisovna was an X-ray technician. It was an unusual profession, harmful to her health, but she got short hours and free milk to boost her strength.
Even though the small family was relatively well-off, their life was not without problems. There was too much secret dissatisfaction pent up in both mother and daughter. They were single, having both lost bona fide husbands, and husbands-to-be. No one raised the tactless question of where their men were. Those who needed to know, knew, and everyone else left them alone.
Mikha spent a lot of time at the Steklovs’. During his visits he watched Sanya fingering the keys, and saw how they responded to his touch. He imagined mysterious negotiations transpiring between the boy and the instrument, and tried to intuit their secret meaning, but was unable to get to the bottom of it.
He sat in the corner, leafing through the pages of his book, awaiting Anna Alexandrovna’s return. She would place a plain cookie and a cup of milky tea in front of him, then sit down beside him—with a self-rolled cigarette that she didn’t so much smoke as hold poised between her beautiful, arched fingers. Sometimes Sanya would get up from the piano and sit down with them on the edge of the chair, but his presence ruffled them. Mikha was fast outgrowing Dickens, and Anna Alexandrovna, without a second thought, urged Pushkin on him.
“But I’ve already read him,” Mikha said, resisting.
“This is like the Gospels—you read it your whole life.”
“Then give me the Gospels, Anna Alexandrovna, I’ve never read them.”
Anna Alexandrovna laughed, shaking her head. “Your relatives will kill me. But, to be honest, you can’t understand European literature without them. Not to mention Russian literature. Sanya, dear, bring us the Gospels. In Russian.”
“Nuta,” he said, baiting his grandmother, “I think you’re just a corrupter of youth.”
But he brought over the book in its black binding.
They decided that Mikha could read the Gospels, but he was not to remove the book from their house or breathe a word about it to anyone. Mikha had never known such abundance—he had a home with his own folding cot, Aunt Genya with her soup, the buxom, feeble-minded Minna constantly nudging him, now with her ample hips, now her ample bosom, his friends Sanya and Ilya, Anna Alexandrovna, skates, books …