She looked at him with an uncomprehending eye.
“Say it just like that: ‘He’s gone off on a binge.’”
Vasilisa was clueless, but fulfilled her assignment to the letter.
The impromptu tactic was ingenious. Pavel Alekseevich was not the only one who affected illness that day. But he was the only one who got away with it. He did not go to his clinic for two weeks and did not appear at the Academy for four months, not until he had established his reputation as a habitual binge drinker.
Whereas before he had drunk readily only at dissertation defense parties, family celebrations, or funeral banquets, now he began to drink on yet another occasion: every time passions started to run high and he was required to issue assurances, or sign something, or make a public address. He would conscientiously drink himself under the table, and Elena, who had figured out the real cause of his sudden alcoholism, would call the Presidium herself and in a sweet little voice inform them that Pavel Alekseevich could not attend because he had another one of his attacks, you understand . . .
At particularly vile times Pavel Alekseevich stayed at home, drank a glass of vodka in the morning, played with Tanya, taught Vasilisa how to make meat dumplings, or just slouched around the apartment, where he constantly found the little notes his wife Elena wrote to herself. Touching little notes that began with one and the same words, “don’t forget . . . ,” followed by: “buy apples,” “take linen to the laundry,” “take your purse to the repair shop . . .” What was funny was that there were so many of these notes, all of them with one and the same list: apples, laundry, repair shop . . .
He knew that Elena was not good at household chores, and her efforts not to forget anything, to get everything done on time, touched Pavel Alekseevich. His wife’s virtues delighted him and her shortcomings endeared her to him. That’s what’s called marriage. Their marriage was happy both night and day, and their mutual understanding seemed especially full because, being reserved and silent by nature as well as by upbringing, neither of them required the kinds of verbal confirmations that get worn out so quickly by people who like to talk.
Pavel Alekseevich’s drinking binges, despite their initially diplomatic character, were hardly staged. But Elena, although worried about the health of her not-so-young husband, made no attempt to put an end to them. Women’s intuition, not reason, as always, guided her. She knew nothing about the nature of alcoholism, especially Russian alcoholism, when the soul, finding no other outlet, finds easy and available consolation without lies or shame.
When binges occurred, Elena sometimes took vacation time, and she and Pavel Alekseevich would head out to the dacha. One of these short holidays occurred in the autumn, two others in the winter. There were no better days in her life than these drunken holidays when he cast off all of his numerous cares and belonged entirely to her. It was the fever of youth that they had both missed, the uncomplicated revelations of seeming bottomlessness, where everything climaxed—about this Pavel Alekseevich longed to forget, and sometimes he managed to—with a few milligrams of a secret and measured dose of a mysterious substance inside the tunica albuginea . . . And when he no longer had the strength to extend his arm for a glass of water, everything at the bottom went cold: all of it was in vain, in vain, for there remained that insurmountable boundary they were unable to cross together . . . The only medicine was to try again and again . . .
By his third binge Elena knew that the ensuing period of sobriety would be an ordeal for her. She both feared and deep in her heart awaited the morning when Pavel Alekseevich, having drunk his first liberating glass, would say to her:
“Get your things, dear, we’re going to the countryside . . .”
AT THE ACADEMY IN THE MEANTIME THEY HAD STOPPED bothering him. The reputation of a drunkard was a peculiar sort of reprieve. No single other vice elicits nearly as much compassion in our country as alcoholism. Everybody drinks: tsars, archbishops, academicians, even trained parrots . . .
10
IN THE THIRD WEEK OF MAY A PREMATURE HEAT WAVE set in, making everyone a little bit sick. A few more days remained until the end of classes, but the curriculum had been covered in its entirety, and grades, both quarterly and final, had been given. It was already known who the honor students were and who would have to repeat a grade. The girls and the teachers at the school languished from the emptiness of time and its sluggishness.
Galina Ivanovna, an elderly schoolteacher, a worn-out nag with a flabby croup, came to class in a new summer dress, dirty beige with broken black lines that lost each other, then found each other, and emitted little sprouts.
Galina Ivanovna had worked with this group of girls for four years and had taught them everything she knew: writing, arithmetic, and drawing. Over these same years the girls had memorized both of her woolen winter dresses—one gray, the other burgundy—as well as her dark-blue suit covered with a layer of gray cat fur.
Since their first class that day the future fifth graders had been heatedly debating the teacher’s new acquisition: the belt was a bit plain, without a buckle, and it had Japanese sleeves. Most of the girls were eleven-year-olds, the age when they were most unalike in terms of development, when some of them had already developed curves and growths of curly hair in the hidden regions of their bodies, while others were still thin, sexless children with gnawed nails and scratched knees. But the teacher’s new dress intrigued both the former and the latter.
It intrigued Galina Ivanovna herself no less. She had sewn this dress not simply because her old one had worn out, but also because today, after classes were over, there would be a festive tea party to mark her fortieth anniversary as a teacher. During the class change Galina Ivanovna had even gone to the lavatory to look at herself in the mirror and straighten her collar. She had already achieved the rank of honored teacher, and now deep in her heart she dreamed that she would be given a real award—a medal or ribbon.
She devoted the fourth period to extracurricular reading. At first the girls read aloud in turn, every one of them poorly. Those who did not trip over their words rattled them out so senselessly that it was impossible to catch the contents. When she tired of correcting them, Galina Ivanovna took the book and began reading herself. Her voice, a bit high for such a large and stout person, was slightly nasal, but expressive. She read the part about freezing Kashtanka suffering on the shelterless street with particular depth and feeling.
Only a few minutes remained until the end of the lesson, and the most impatient were already silently collecting their satchels. The sun scorched at full capacity through the windows, and the girls to a one sweated in their woolen dresses that stuck to their wet armpits.
“A freezing dog gets no sympathy in this heat,” Tanya thought to herself, and at that same moment heard first one, then another, sniffle of someone crying into her sleeve.
Galina Ivanovna stopped reading. The entire class turned to look back at the far corner of the last row where for the last four years Toma Polosukhina had sat, insensible and indifferent to everything. She was crying over the bitter fate of frozen, lost Kashtanka.
Desks slammed shut, and the girls jumped from their seats.
“Class is not over yet,” Galina Ivanovna reminded them and, smiling professionally from the corners of her faded mouth, she said to Toma, “Why are you so upset, Toma? Didn’t you finish reading to the end?” She tried to calm the girl. “Everything will turn out all right at the end.”
“No it won’t, no it won’t!” Toma sniffled, tearing her cheek from the sticky school desk and wiping her nose with her apron.
She was one of the smallest, one of the least developed girls, plain and ordinary, like a sparrow or longspur . . .