By this time the remodeling had engulfed the entire apartment like fire. The place smelled of paint, glue, and roast goose. The table was set up in the former nursery. Toma, on Tanya’s orders, decorated the seven-foot fatsia (referred to by laypeople as fig tree). At the head of the table sat Pavel Alekseevich; next to him Elena, whom Tanya had dressed for the occasion, sat with a childlike, happy face. Vasilisa had donned her carpetlike yellow and crimson headscarf, which made her as self-conscious as if she had come out with bare shoulders. Toma, on the other hand, had put on a dress with a deep plunging neckline, the same one she had sewn for Tanya’s wedding, and had piled her hair so that her little head resembled a big sheep. The guests included the three Goldbergs—the two brothers and Valentina (maiden name Gryzkina), the young stepmother of Tanya’s retired husbands. The basket with the little girl stood at a distance, on Toma’s bed—she was the star that night—and Pavel Alekseevich understood perfectly that were it not for her, Tanya would not have come home or organized this huge, wonderful perturbation.
At a quarter to twelve the doorbell rang, and Tanya ran to open the door, having prepared in advance a snide phrase for their neighbor Roza Samoilovna, who had come by at least fifteen times today and by this time had managed to borrow positively everything there was in the house, from salt and a stool to candles and napkins . . . In the doorway, wearing a light cloth jacket and a huge fur cap, saxophone and sports bag in hand, stood Sergei.
This was the most bizarre family holiday one could imagine. Except for Tanya and Sergei—happy and unconcerned about either the past or the future—each of those present experienced a profound loneliness and a piercing sense of alienation from the others. As if their natural ties to each other had been severed, scrambled, then retied in some perverted way: Pavel Alekseevich’s wife had long ago become his child, while his daughter over the last two weeks had turned out unexpectedly to be the true head of the family; Elena, who sat at a crowded table for the first time in three years, experienced a nauseating form of anxiety caused by all the familiar people who had completely lost their names. Even her daughter Tanya, who more or less resembled her old self, was slightly doubled because the little girl lying in the basket was also Tanechka, but not entirely, only in part, as in a cutaway or cross-section, where the invisible, internal contours of the object usually indicated by lines of dashes were those of the little girl revealed by the cutaway . . . Vasilisa, with her eye resurrected from darkness, saw bright spots of light and the colored contours of bodies against a flat background, and Tomochka’s light-blue spot was the only one that was reassuring. Fluttering about the table like a thin gray bird, placing food on everyone’s plate, and dropping her, Vasilisa, a piece of ferial goose—in total disregard for the Orthodox Christmas fast—Tanya kept disporting herself and touching the young long-haired fellow in black (a member of the clergy?) as she went, all in the presence of her husband and just as Elena had done during the war, while her husband sat and watched, as if he didn’t care, and was this good . . . Filled with disgust by the picture before her, Vasilisa entreated: Lord, have mercy, Lord . . . Establish, O Lord, my unstable heart on the rock of Thy commandments, for Thou only art Holy and Lord . . . The words flew off and fell downward, the pieces of the psalms and prayers that Vasilisa had preserved in her failing memory were forgotten and jumbled, and all that remained was her remorse for her dear ones, all of them living incorrectly, committing sins, and not observing God’s commandments—both temporal and spiritual, no matter where you looked . . . Sins, all our mortal sins . . .
Valentina Goldberg, raised in Old Believer purity in everything, from body, hut, and habits to thoughts and actions, and having deviated from her ancestors not in the slightest degree—despite her total and final estrangement from their unintelligent and outdated religion—observed Tanya mournfully. She had become acquainted with Pavel Alekseevich only after Ilya Iosifovich’s arrest, come to trust him, and to love him, and now she found it impossible to connect the dots between the well-known story of their children’s strange marriage, their indecent family triangle, the appearance of this long-haired musician (obviously, Tanya’s lover), and Tanya herself, whom she was seeing for the first time, having taken a dislike to her in advance, and now on seeing her, for some reason feeling somehow sympathetically disposed toward her . . . although what else should this girl elicit except protest and indignation with the way she carried about, thinking of nothing, and destroying the relationship between the two brothers . . . She was promiscuous, promiscuous . . .
The Goldberg brothers—or husbands—conducted themselves appropriately, but they hardly “didn’t care,” as Vasilisa had surmised. Both of them were pained by the appearance of the pretender. For the first time in the last year they both felt one and the same thing—a condition familiar to them since early childhood, perhaps, one of their first conscious experiences—that of the disappointment and justice of defeat . . . It had already struck twelve, and they were late with the champagne. Tanya had forgotten the bottle in the refrigerator, and by the time she brought it out and Pavel Alekseevich opened it . . . The New Year had already begun, and they drank a toast that all be well, that Ilya Iosifovich be released, and that everyone be happy and healthy, especially the brand-new baby girl . . . They all talked noisily, interrupting each other, clanking their forks against their plates, while only Tanya and Sergei sat silently, looking at each other, well, staring at each other like two icons. Everyone saw that this musician was a perfect match for Tanya, you could see they shared the same nature, lived on the same planet, or whatever . . . What in Tanya was singular and slightly enigmatic was written all over him in full color. The Goldberg brothers had absolutely nothing to do with this and understood that perfectly. Especially when the musician unpacked his saxophone and asked Tanya to accompany him a bit, and she immediately, without mincing, cleared the stack of newspapers off the piano, warned that she had never heard a more out of tune piano, and sat down without protest, and he showed her the left-hand accompaniment on the bass, and she picked it up. Pavel Alekseevich immediately guessed that she had been practicing on and off over the past months . . . Sergei first extracted out of that horn of his some prospective trills, and Tanya harmonized, going right, then left, until they bumped into each other in some indeterminate place, and then Sergei sang long jubilant tidings on his saxophone that ended with such a happy wail that the Goldberg brothers exchanged understanding glances and felt like they were back in the schoolyard in Malakhovo during recess among those hostile rural, small town, and children’s home kids from whom they suffered particularly for not belonging to any of those groups . . . At the first sound of the saxophone Elena dug her fingers into the cuff of her husband’s house jacket: she heard—rather, saw—the music as a set of French curves running from the dark core of the instrument’s metal throat: the principal curve, taut and matte like fresh rubber, first flattened itself, then rolled into a harmonious Archimedean spiral that kept expanding, filling the entire room, and then with a flip of one of its arms whipping out the window . . . The sound itself, it turned out, was the projection of something unknown, unnamed, but produced with obvious effort by the long-haired youth with the familiar face . . .