Toma did not belong to the ranks of Tanya’s admirers: interstellar distances lay between them . . .
8
ELENA HAD CHOSEN A MODEST, VERY MODEST, PROFESsion. But she never regretted the choice. She liked everything about her work: the special illuminated desk, the drafting board, and the various sorts of paper with which she worked: cloudy, icelike tracing paper, fragile vellum, and slippery gray-blue blueprint paper. She liked both the smell of ink and the scrape of pencils. Even insignificant but necessary and skill-intensive tasks like sharpening pencils . . .
All these basic things she had come to understand while still an apprentice. Then, having worked a year or two, she fell in love with the more essential, very calming aspect of the draftsman’s wonderful trade: in displaying itself, every object turned about in three views, which was entirely sufficient for it to be described in its totality, leaving no secrets and no hidden spaces inside. Everything as it was . . .
At times it seemed to Elena that all phenomena, like all objects, could be described from three vantages: front, side, and top. Not just a part in a tank motor, but the wind, and stomach pain, and any uttered word.
Her teacher had been her first husband, Anton Ivanovich Flotov, a great master—of the art, one might say—of technical drawing. They met in an obscure, insignificant place where Elena was a student and he an instructor of drafting. He appeared old, well-kempt, and dull, although he was only twenty-nine. She had just turned seventeen and had recently escaped the Moscow region agricultural commune—an amazing and extremely strange place—where she had spent her childhood. This community was Tolstoyan and directed by her father, Georgy Ivanovich Miakotin.
This girl who had grown up in special, entirely unique circumstances—taught to read with Tolstoy’s children’s books, milking cows while still a child, working (not playing at working) in the fields and in the communal kitchen, silent witness to dinner-table discussions of Vivekananda and Karl Marx and of folk and folk-liberation songs sung in monophonic style—felt lonely in Moscow, surrounded by an alien and dangerous world. Her grandmother Evgenia Fedorovna was the only person Elena was not afraid of.
More than love, what united Elena with Anton Ivanovich, her future husband, was an underlying sense of irrational guilt for “standing apart” from, “not blending in” with, the merry and amicable company of innocent people. Both of them sensed their social inadequacy but made no attempt to disguise it with political activism, breast-beating, or damning their unfortunate parents. They belonged to another, meek breed of human beings who preferred to retreat unobtrusively to life’s sidelines, into the bushes, under a stone, into the shadows, not to be noticed.
Anton Ivanovich descended from a family of architects and builders—some of whom had emigrated, some of whom had been exterminated—and the entirety of his inheritance was his profession as a draftsman. Because of the revolution he did not manage to receive the German engineering training given to boys in their family. He was a first-class draftsman, worked at a large plant as a technical designer, and conducted courses in draftsmanship at the plant’s school for workers.
Cautious and attentive, Anton Ivanovich studied Elena for a year before approaching her, then met with her on Sundays for another year, and married her only in the third year of their acquaintance—not out of ardent love, but with serious intent and after careful consideration, as with everything he did.
Elena’s parents did not attend the wedding: her father was busy planting and would not allow her mother to go. Georgy Ivanovich invited his daughter and son-in-law to join them in Altai. Things at the commune were not bad, and while there was a lot of friction with the authorities, the members of the commune could not have imagined that in a year or so they would all be arrested, put in prisons and camps, and sent to places where you couldn’t break the soil with a pickax.
Anton and Elena led a peaceful, quiet existence in Elena’s grandmother’s apartment. Their salaries sufficed for a modest life, and Elena had never known any other. In any case, after her childhood in the commune, life in Moscow seemed free and easy. The most interesting part of it was, perhaps, mechanical drawing.
Elena’s bosses praised her as a diligent and capable young woman. It was written in her papers that she was from a commune—which looked good only because of a misunderstanding: the fact that it was a Tolstoyan commune was not mentioned; for this reason it was even suggested to Elena that she continue her studies at the plant’s workers’ school, but she had no desire to do so. She was happy just to sit at her drawing table, and even Anton Ivanovich was surprised by her eagerness to work.
Once she dreamed that Anton Ivanovich had spoken some ordinary phrase to her and that she could see the phrase not in the usual way, frontally, but from the side, in profile: like a thin fish face, wavy and drawn-out towards the top in a pointed triangle. What a pity, though, that on waking she could not remember the phrase. But the dream itself remained and did not fade. Afterward she surmised that every phrase must have its own geometry and that one need only concentrate in order to see it.
There is something draftable to words, she reflected. There is “construable space” in everything that exists; it’s simply impossible to express.
She tried to talk to Anton Ivanovich about this, but he just shook his head.
“What fantasies you have, Elena . . .”
These dreams, however, occasionally recurred. They were perfectly senseless, containing nothing that could be retold, yet afterward she was always left with the vaguely pleasant sense of something new.
And now, when so many years had passed and Anton Ivanovich was no longer on this earth and Elena had even hidden away his photographs—so that her growing daughter would not accidentally discover that Pavel Alekseevich was not her natural father but her stepfather—every time she would sit down at her work table, she would open the antique German case of drawing instruments, a Flotov heirloom, and let out a sigh for the deceased Anton Ivanovich. She never forgot her guilt before him. And from time to time she still had those mechanical drawing dreams—why, what did they mean . . . ?
PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH DID NOT LIKE ELENA’S JOB: WHAT was the point of tiresome hours sitting at the design office? He was perplexed. Elena would defend herself.
“It’s a good job. It makes sense to me.”
“What’s so good about it?” Pavel Alekseevich asked with sincere surprise.
“I can’t explain it to you. It’s beautiful.”
“Whatever,” Pavel Alekseevich granted craftily. “It’s just very, very mindless,” he teased.
“Oh, Pasha, what are you saying?” Elena took offense. “There’s nothing mindless about it. Sometimes it’s even very complex.”
Pavel Alekseevich awaited this moment when her usually meek expression would change. She shook her head lightly, the fluffy curls at her temples that always resisted being pulled back into a bun fluttered, and her lips tightened into wrinkles at their corners.
“I mean that it’s all so mechanical, no mystery.” He raised a forefinger in front of her. “There is more mystery in a single human finger than in all of your drawings.”
She gathered his finger in her hand.
“Perhaps there’s mystery in your finger, but not in anyone else’s. Perhaps there isn’t any mystery in a drawing, but there is truth. The most indispensable truth. Maybe not the entire truth, just a part. One-tenth, or one one-thousandth. I know that everything has other content, not just the draftable . . . I can’t explain,” she said and put down his hand.