20
IN LENINGRAD LIFE SEEMED TO TANYA TO BE MORE PEDIgreed, with interesting roots, and somehow better accoutered in all respects—the streets, and things, and people had more substance to them, was that it? The past peeked out from under every bush, and you had to be a complete numbskull, like dear Tolya Aleksandrov, to put a hot frying pan on a wood mosaic table and never once in twenty years wonder to whom the table had belonged before. It had belonged to Zinaida Gippius, who had lived in precisely this room, having moved in as a young girl with her young husband. The city was a marvel of perpetual history, but the scars of the frying pan were also visible everywhere, which occasionally invoked a certain melancholy. There was no time, however, for melancholy: their little child did not allow it. Morning and daytime life were filled with things to be done, their bohemian, artistic life ensuing in the evening. They hired Aunt Shura, who for not very much money agreed to babysit Zhenya in the evenings and sometimes through the night. Tanya and Sergei dashed to friends’ or to the cafés—no small number of which had cropped up in those days—drinking, smoking, and dancing. From time to time Sergei would perform. Their trio had not only not broken up, but, just the opposite, was becoming more and more well known in the world of the city’s younger generation, but—it goes without saying—that fame was of the half-underground, private variety.
During her second Petersburg winter Tanya began to experience a wearying drowsiness and sluggishness, which she battled unsuccessfully, sleeping with little Zhenya up to twelve hours a day between December and February. But when winter’s gloom began to recede a bit, she set herself into calculated motion, and already in February managed to lease a rather decently equipped workshop. There she planned to begin making strange jewelry from wire and cheap Siberian stones that a geologist friend brought from the Urals.
Tanya’s daughter was blessed with a marvelous disposition, amused herself, never got bored, and it was enough to put a toy, a spoon, or a piece of string in her hands for her to spend hours of total delight investigating it, gnawing at it with her fresh tooth, sticking it in her pocket, spinning it, and deriving from it masses of interest. Sergei came to love the little girl in the most natural of ways, just as Pavel Alekseevich had once come to love Tanya, so that few of their friends knew that the little girl was hardly Sergei’s daughter or Tanya—his wife. The couple did not bother with the issue of matrimony. Technically, neither of them was officially free: Sergei was married to Poluektova, and Tanya was married to Goldberg. The only problem that could possibly arise was that Tanya lacked a residence permit, which was required to get a job or to have access to health care. But Tanya had no intention of getting an office job and was completely healthy. Were anything to happen to her little daughter, she would immediately jump on a train and the next morning place the sick child in the best hands on earth . . . But nothing of the sort happened, not even a cold.
Tanya rose early, like a working woman, fed Zhenya, dressed her in her little fur coat, hat, and the stuffing underneath that one was supposed to put on children in those days before down snowsuits and hygroscopic diapers had been invented, and, with the heavy bundle loaded into her carriage, traveled—no matter what the weather—from the south mainland bank of the Neva to the checkered Petrogradsky district, where she had managed to lease a studio on the west bank of the Nevka, right next to the house of the artist Mikhail Matiushin, of whom, at the time, she knew absolutely nothing, although she quickly sensed the bizarre springs of avant-gardism that poked through the local decaying bogs.
The route from home to the workshop took at least an hour, which made for a good walk, after which Zhenya slept for an hour in her carriage, which had become a tight fit. Tanya constructed large, deliberately crude jewelry pieces with black jet and smoky quartz, which she intended to make fashionable on the Neva’s left bank among her pretentious contemporaries, lovers of Petersburg jazz. Since childhood she had been aware of a special quality she had: when she put something on, all of her classmates immediately imitated her . . . For that reason, the first thing she needed to do now was to drape herself with as much of her own handmade beauty as possible, hang out, and wait for customers.
At lunchtime Sergei would arrive, having taken care of his morning responsibilities—walking the dogs and communing with his saxophone. He brought food from a takeout store and kefir for little Zhenka. Although she was more than a year old, she loved baby food and obviously preferred liquids to solids. Tanya set the teakettle on the electric hot plate, and Sergei steeped tea. Opinion was that he did that better than anyone else. They ate student-style. Like a true Petersburger he referred to white bread as buns and was careful not to waste food: the blockade had left its mark, although he, a sickly little boy, had been evacuated that year over the ice . . .
Afterward he either left to hang out with the guys, to practice, or just shoot the breeze and drink, or they spent the rest of the day together until evening. When he stayed, he would lie down on the filthy couch and play with Zhenya.
Their dinners together concluded with after-dinner games, considered harmful from the point of view of digestion. He would hoist the little girl dancing in his arms into the air, trying to catch the rhythm of her movements and tooting intermittently with his lips, while Tanya pounded out her own working beat with her mallet—metal against metal. Sergei delighted in how rhythmically conceptualized their existence was—filled through and through with musical meaning, while they themselves formed a kind of cool trio with a bass line, a lead, and a sub-lead, just as in a jazz ensemble, and even their acoustic space was divided into distinct niches, like the three melodic voices in New Orleans Dixieland . . .
“We’re having a terrific jam session,” Sergei said to Tanya, who, beating out another cascade of blows, objected.
“No, we have a marvelous family music box.”
“Are you kidding? Music boxes make dead music . . .”
“You’re right, you’re right,” Tanya agreed instantly.
They did not reflect on their happiness, just as the blissful pair in the never-ending Summer Garden had not a care for their daily bread, their health, or their bank accounts. Even the question of where to live did not faze them: they were living for free in a pricey bourgeois apartment in exchange for services rendered to their hostess, also for free—feeding and walking the two stupid, handsome borzois. This was work, but Sergei was used to it, knew where to buy bones, what kind of meat to add, and who to get vitamins from. Two enormous pots never left the stove top, and there were times when Tanya and Sergei served themselves from the dogs’ pots, adding salt to taste.
Of course, this improbable idyll was not without problems. For example, the climate. It was cold. Or, for example, where to buy a bottle of vodka at night? From a taxi driver? Go all the way out to the airport? And there was the political order, which was disagreeable and at times downright dangerous. On the other hand, politics was everywhere, and where there was no politics there were either mountain precipices or wild beasts and venomous snakes. And other inconveniences . . .