Zhenya lifted her grandmother from her chair.
“Let’s go, Babulya, everything’s ready.”
Elena Georgievna obediently stood up. Her back was straight, her legs thin and long, slightly bent by old age . . . Zhenya held her by her fragile shoulders and led her off. Granny walked well, but her torn house slippers with their unglued sole got in the way. Three pairs, if not more, of new ones were in Toma’s room. Oh, how grudging . . .
They went inside the bathroom. Granny pointed to the latch with her finger. Zhenya locked it. Slowly Granny undressed. She seemed to want Zhenya to help her, but resisted at the same time. She fought with the button of her robe. She had forgotten how to undo buttons. She was straining to remember. She couldn’t.
Zhenya helped her to undress.
Damn, what was Toma thinking of when she invented those idiotic elastic bands under her knees. Why couldn’t she put diapers on her, or at least put a diaper underneath her?
They undressed.
“Okay, now raise your leg. The right one. Hold on to me.”
Zhenya’s stomach was in the way. A lot in the way.
“Now the other . . .” Elena Georgievna lifted her long legs easily. Her foot was awful. The nails were covered with yellowish-gray fungus. Her bunion stuck out. How could someone who had worn only house slippers for more than twenty years have developed a bunion? Elena Georgievna stood knee-deep in water and could not figure out how to sit down. Her figure . . . Her bone structure was highly symmetrical. Her waist small, her sides angled. Her breasts were small and not at all droopy, and her nipples were fresh. Her stomach was flat, her navel hidden inside a horizontal fold. Another fold hid a scar beneath her navel. Her body was hairless, white, and completely wrinkled, like crushed cigarette paper. Her face was white too. The only hairs growing were under her chin. Zhenya used to tweeze them, but now she just cut them with scissors. There wasn’t enough time. There was too little time. She had no idea how she was going to manage when the baby was born . . . Probably, she’d have to take Granny to her place on Profsoiuznaya, as soon as Dad moved to his new apartment. In Dad’s old apartment with the two connected rooms there was room for all of them. But Toma might object . . .
“Sit down, sweetie, sit down.” Zhenya pressed her grandmother lightly on her back. Granny cautiously sat down. Zhenya directed the stream from the shower over her. Granny moaned with pleasure. Now what would happen was what had brought Zhenya here weekly for the last ten years. Ever since her grandfather had died and she had moved to her father’s.
“Thank you, my child,” Elena Georgievna said. Toma was certain that Elena Georgievna had forgotten how to talk. That wasn’t so. She knew how to talk. But only here, in the latched bathroom, when Zhenya sat her in the warm water. There was an inexplicable closeness between them. Zhenya had been raised by her grandfather. Granny had always been silently present and observed her tenderly. For as long as Zhenya could remember, her grandmother had been sick. And they had always loved each other, if love without words or actions, purely in the air and hinging on nothing else, could exist at all. Zhenya stroked her head.
“Feel good?”
“Bliss . . . Lord, what bliss . . . In Siberia we all used to go to the bathhouse together—Pavel Alekseevich, Tanechka, Vasilisa . . . With birch branches . . . There was so much snow . . . Do you remember, child?”
“Who does she take me for?” Zhenya thought. But essentially that did not make any difference. Once a week Elena Georgievna would utter several words. For but a few minutes her link with the here and now would be restored.
“Why did you move into the pantry?” Zhenya asked.
“Into the pantry? What difference does it make . . . Let it be.” Then confidentially: “Why didn’t you bring Tanechka with you?” She shuddered and seemed confused.
Zhenya suffered most at those times when she sensed that her granny was confused and bewildered. Zhenya soaped her sponge and ran it along the jagged vertebrae of her spine. How should she answer? Sometimes it seemed to Zhenya that her grandmother took her for her deceased daughter. That, probably, was what it was, because in her moments of confused speech the name Tanya would slip out addressed to her . . . But it also happened that Granny would call her “Mama . . .”
“Is the water okay? It hasn’t cooled down, has it?”
“Very good . . . Thank you, child.” She thought and added in a whisper: “Today some man shouted at me.”
“Mikhail Fedorovich? Mikhail Fedorovich shouted at you?”
“No, child, he would never allow himself to do that. Someone else was shouting.”
Zhenya pulled her head back slightly and placed her hand on her forehead.
“We’re going to wash your hair. Squeeze your eyes tight so no soap gets in.”
Elena Georgievna obediently closed her eyes.
While Zhenya washed her hair, she gathered water in the cup of her hands and poured it on her shoulders and chased it with her fingers: she was playing, just the way children play, except without the rubber ducks and the little boats . . .
Then she said unexpectedly: “Don’t be angry with Tomochka. She’s an orphan.”
Zhenya had already rinsed her hair and now pulled a plait of hair upward and stuck in a hairpin so that it would not get in the way.
“And who am I? And you? We’re all orphans. I don’t understand why she in particular needs to be felt sorry for.”
“My head is one big hole. It’s difficult,” Elena Georgievna complained.
“Mine too,” Zhenya admitted. “Yesterday I turned the whole house upside down and spent three hours looking for my documents. I couldn’t remember where I’d put them. Stand up, please. I’m going to rinse you with the shower, and then we’re done . . .”
Zhenya helped Elena Georgievna get out of the tub, wiped her dry with a bath towel that was disintegrating from age, coated her legs and her intimate creases with baby cream against diaper rash that threatened with time to turn into bedsores, dressed her in a clean nightshirt and a clean robe. She wrapped the towel into a turban, and wiping down the steamed mirror, she told her grandmother to take a look at herself.
“See how beautiful you are.”
Elena Georgievna shook her head and laughed. There in the mirror she saw a completely different picture . . .
2
THE NEXT SUNDAY ZHENYA WAS NOT ABLE TO COME: THAT evening, her husband had taken her to the maternity hospital. During the same Sunday after-dinner hours when Zhenya normally would be combing and drying Elena’s gray and no longer wavy hair, her cervix dilated and the fetus began to be pushed out: the baby’s head crowned. They—Zhenya and the baby—still constituted a single whole. The rise and fall of their muscle spasms were coordinated, but the moment was already approaching when the baby would begin to undertake its first independent movements . . .
When she could no longer stand the pain, Zhenya screamed, and the pain receded, then rolled in again. “If Granddad were alive, he would probably do something so that it wasn’t so painful . . .” she thought in those moments when she was capable of thought. This was heavy collaborative work—for her, the child, and the midwife, whose face she completely forgot. What did remain in her memory, however, was her commanding and tender voice: “breathe deeper . . . put your hands on your chest . . . count to ten . . . don’t tense up . . . now shout . . . shout . . . good . . .”
It was the most imperfect of all natural mechanisms of giving birth—human childbirth. No other animal suffered as much. The pain, the duration, and sometimes the danger for the health of the mother were signs of human beings’ special status in this world. The two-legged, straight-backed, forward-looking, freehanded, and sole creature in the world conscious of the connection between conception and childbirth, between corporeal love and that other variety, known only to human beings. The price of walking straight up, some thought. Recompense for original sin, claimed others.