Sergei was bitter. Tanya—all the more. It even seemed to her that the moment had arrived for her to get involved and direct the situation a bit. In the winter Sergei had been invited to play with Dixieland. Why not play with someone else? Garik wasn’t the only show in town . . . She called her father and asked whether he was still burning with desire to take Zhenya for the summer. If so, the two of them would come and live for a while in Moscow so that she got used to everyone . . .
In the middle of May Pavel Alekseevich met Tanya and Zhenya at the Leningrad train station. He neatly finished off all of his duties at work by the end of the month. Now he wanted only one thing: to stay at their dacha with his granddaughter, feed her porridge in the morning, take her for walks, try to figure out her incoherent words and first thoughts. The women in his family were all falling apart: Elena got up from her armchair only unwillingly, Vasilisa had become decrepit, and her vision, despite the successful operation, was very weak. Toma helped him as much as she could, but her evening studies took a lot of her time, and Pavel Alekseevich could only quietly wonder why precisely Toma, with her very average abilities, banged her head so zealously against the sciences, while Tanya sat in a half-basement, molding something with her skilled hands, while her wonderfully organized head went completely unused.
His granddaughter, whom he had visited in March, had not forgotten him and stretched out her little hand and turned her check for him to kiss. He kissed her creamy skin and was filled with hot air, like an aerostat . . .
Tanya spent a week living at home. She did a deep cleaning of the place, digging out all the corners. She washed the windows. She was very tender with Vasilisa and took her to the public bathhouse: Vasilisa recognized no other form of bathing, but she was afraid to go on her own after she had slipped on the bathhouse’s stone floor. Toma rarely agreed to accompany her. In addition, Vasilisa did not recognize bathing on any day except Saturday, while Toma usually had her own plans for Saturdays. The bathhouse was not far away, on Seleznevskaya Street, and Vasilisa always brought her own basin, loofah—wherever did she get them?—smelly tar soap, and fresh change of underwear. For the first time in her life Vasilisa accepted Tanya’s help. First Tanya helped her peel off her thick coat, which was somewhat binding in the sleeves, then bent down and removed her all-weather felt boots. Nowadays she dressed year-round for the winter, just like a real old woman from the village. Vasilisa had stopped wearing shoes several years ago . . . Vasilisa grimaced and said in self-deprecation: “Well, miss, I’ve lived to see the day . . .”
Then Vasilisa herself quickly unbuttoned her flannel house robe and removed her gray patched underwear. Her nakedness was as abject as her clothing. A gray, wrinkled body, knotty long legs with inky veins and a red rash of tiny vessels, and a withered, spiderlike rib cage with a big crucifix that hung down almost to her navel. Looking at Vasilisa was discomfiting, but her vision was so poor that she did not sense Tanya’s gaze, and for all her innate prudishness Vasilisa at the bathhouse took off her inhibitions along with her clothes. Tanya noticed hanging between her legs a rosy-gray fist-sized little sack that was relatively disgusting to look at . . .
“Vasya, what’s that hanging between your legs?”
Vasilisa bent over slightly, squatted a bit, and with an awkward movement stuck the hanging little sack back inside.
“It’s my child parts, Tanechka. It ripped off. In 1930, when we were pulling a cart . . . It’s nothin’, nothin’ . . . It doesn’t get sick . . .”
Tanya sat her down on the bench, put the basin with hot water under her legs, took a bathhouse basin full of water, and started to wash her with the loofah. Vasilisa moaned a bit, and groaned, emitting various degrees of pleasure . . .
Awful, just awful . . . She worked for us all her life, carried bags, washed windows, ironed laundry with a two-ton iron . . . Reinserted her prolapsed uterus and climbed up the stepladder . . . In the house of the country’s leading gynecologist . . . Should I tell Dad? Awful, just awful . . . Standing in her rubber shower flip-flops on the slippery bathhouse floor as she scrubbed the old woman’s boney back, Tanya mumbled: “Lord, what am I supposed to do with you all? Vasenka, am I supposed to move back home . . . Why are you all grown so old . . .”
The place was noisy with voices and flowing water, and Vasilisa did not hear her.
“Enough. We’ve had our good time. Now we have to get back home,” Tanya said to herself. And she despaired at the horrible prospect of life in their old house between aging Vasilisa and her out-of-her-mind mother, with her daughter, and with Seryozha . . . The most intolerable thing was the smell of stale urine, both human and feline, of soured food, dust, grime, and dying—even after the most painstaking cleaning . . . Poor Dad, how does he bear it all? Then she remembered his chilly office and the ever-present empty bottle between the desk’s two columns of drawers . . . What if she were to have Toma quit her job and take care of the house? Then she realized immediately that she should be ashamed at the thought.
When Tanya brought steam-mellowed Vasilisa back home and sat her down next to the teakettle, her mind was made up: she was going to the dacha right now to prepare it for the summer season and make a deal with some local woman to help out with the housework, then move them all out there and leave them there till fall. In the fall, after she returned to town, she would move to Moscow. With Sergei . . . The last point was still up for question . . . But, ultimately, they could rent a room . . . And people played jazz everywhere!
21
TOMA DID NOT LIKE CHILDREN. SHE DID NOT LIKE childhood—her own or anyone else’s—or anything connected with having children. One doesn’t need Freud to understand her profound repulsion for everything in that sphere of life where sexual attraction resides—be it innocent petting in some corner or the wretched panting that accompanies coitus, to which she had been witness since childhood. Her mother’s festering bed—where the mystery of love occurred and where it claimed the life of the janitor whose name had long ago been forgotten by the people in the courtyard—and her undignified death were the stuff of Toma’s nightmares. Whenever Toma fell ill and her temperature climbed, it seemed to her that she lay in the family lair. She would open her eyes, and there would be Elena Georgievna alongside her clean starched bed, crocheting with a large hook something gray or beige; seeing that Toma had woken, she would give her warm tea with lemon and wipe her wet brow . . . Pavel Alekseevich would drop in in the evening with some surprise: once he brought her a transparent glass rabbit the size of a real mouse. Later she lost the rabbit at the dacha, or one of their dacha neighbors had stolen it, and there was much grief. Another time Pavel Alekseevich brought her a little box with scissors, tweezers, and a sharp thing she didn’t know what to do with. He brought Toma the present and kissed Elena Georgievna on the head as she sat alongside the bed. To Toma it was absolutely apparent that although they were husband and wife, there could be none of the wretched muck from which her poor momma had died between these two clean, fine-smelling, and beautifully dressed people. They even slept in different rooms.
A lot of what Toma saw in the Kukotsky household she interpreted in the most fantastic ways, but in this case she was not mistaken: no such muck took place between husband and wife, in fact not since the moment she had entered their home . . .
As for the manicure set, it has survived to this day and not lost its significance: when the girls were ill, he brought little presents every evening, and these daily treats reconciled them with their illness. When Tanya was ill, Pavel Alekseevich brought two presents, for both girls, the sick one and the healthy one. But if Toma was ill, he brought nothing for Tanya . . .