“There it is, my little monastic cell! God grant I die here.”
No matter how hard Elena attempted to persuade her to live in the main room, together with Tanechka, Vasilisa refused.
By standards of the time they were rich beyond measure. Only Pavel Alekseevich’s generosity was equal to their wealth, thanks to which there was never any spare cash in the house. Twice a month, on payday, after their late dinner, Pavel Alekseevich would announce: “Lenochka, the list!”
Elena would bring him the list of those to whom they sent monetary aid. Since before the war Pavel Alekseevich had sent money to his cousin’s daughter, a half-aunt, an old surgical nurse with whom he had begun his career, and his friend from university, Ilya Goldberg, who since 1932 had been either in a camp, or in exile, or in some provincial hole.
Before Pavel Alekseevich’s marriage there had been no list as such: he just remembered and sent the money. But now, when his wife compiled the list, adding to her husband’s her own distant relations, her girlfriend from school stranded in Tashkent, and several of Vasilisa’s old lady friends, Pavel Alekseevich even acquired a certain respect for his big salary. Since the circle of people was rather extensive and could change from month to month, Pavel Alekseevich would look at the list and sometimes inquire about a name.
“Musya? Who’s that?” Hearing out the explanation, he would nod.
Then Elena would announce the grand total, after which Vasilisa would scurry into his office and solemnly bring out the old leather briefcase. Pavel Alekseevich opened the briefcase and divvied up the banknotes. The next morning Vasilisa wrapped each amount separately in newspaper, then, for some reason, wrapped all the newspaper bundles into an old towel, then, one hand clutching her change purse and the other Elena’s arm, she went to the post office, and only there, at the window, handed the money over to Elena, who sent off the money orders.
Vasilisa moved her lips. Elena thought that she was counting the money. Vasilisa was saying her favorite prayers. She had few words of her own, and she was accustomed to conversing with her God in fragments of the psalms and prayer formulas. When she experienced an urge to add something from herself, she invoked the Immaculate Virgin as “darling, dear, please do this and that, so that everything will be all right . . .”
Vasilisa’s world was simple: on high sat the Lord God, the Holy Mother of God with all the angels, all the saints, and mother superior among them; then came Pavel Alekseevich; and then they, the family, and everyone else—evil people to one side, good people to the other. In her eyes Pavel Alekseevich was almost a saint: at that hospital of his he helped everyone, good and evil, just like the Lord God. Even mortal sinners who had taken the lives of others. That Pavel Alekseevich’s chief concern was to legalize that sin had not yet occurred to her.
7
AFTER TURNING FIVE TANECHKA SPROUTED AND LOST her baby fat: her face acquired angles, and moist blue shadows appeared under her eyes. Her cough would go away, then come back again. They called Isaac Veniaminovich Ketsler, a friend and classmate of Pavel Alekseevich’s late father. He was more than eighty; he had worked at the former St. Vladimir’s children’s hospital since 1904, and after retiring he continued to make the daily trip to his clinic, where he was allowed to keep his office.
Isaac Veniaminovich was renowned for his divine ears. They even looked unusual, enlarged with age, flabby and dry, like an elephant’s. A fountain of gray hairs spurted out of his ear canals, while his elongated lobes hung in long wrinkled folds. For all this, Isaac Veniaminovich was hard of hearing until he put his short black tube in his ear and placed the wide end against a child’s back. His hearing improved especially if he pressed his old ears directly against the ticklish tiny patient’s squirming body.
“We have a primary infection right here,” Isaac Veniaminovich said, pointing a finger just below Tanya’s clavicle.
“In the upper right lobe. You need to go the Institute of Pediatrics and have Dr. Khotimsky do an X-ray for you . . . On the Solyanka, Solyanka Street . . .”
Pavel Alekseevich nodded. He knew the place welclass="underline" an old structure near the Ustinsky Bridge built at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a foundling house for abandoned infants, the children of wayward village girls, maids, and seamstresses to Moscow’s Babylon who had not managed to keep their transgressions from becoming newborns . . .
Pavel Alekseevich looked at his daughter, undressed to the waist, with his special vision, focusing it several inches just below the surface of her milk-white skin, but he sensed nothing except his own restless concern.
“Unfortunately, it’s a widespread phenomenon,” Isaac Veniaminovich mumbled, walking his fingers around Tanya’s ear and down her neck, stopping below her chin and then entering the depths of her armpits.
“She is lymphatic, lymphatic. Likely, her thyroid is slightly enlarged as well. How is her appetite? Bad, naturally. How could it be good? And vomiting? Does she vomit frequently? Heraus? From the stomach?”
“Very frequently.” Elena nodded.
“A spoonful too much and she starts to vomit. We never try to talk her into eating more.”
“As I thought,” the old man responded with satisfaction. “She’s spasmatic.” He put an ear to her stomach. “Does your tummy hurt? Here?” He poked his finger at a certain spot. “It aches right here, does it?”
“Yes, yes,” Tanechka was delighted. “Right there.”
“That’s what it is,” Pavel Alekseevich brightened to himself. “The old man’s ears are clairvoyant. Not his eyes, not his fingers . . .”
Strain as he might, he could not see anything this time. The picture he had grown accustomed to seeing—of a person from the inside, the mysterious landscape of organs, the turns of rivers, foggy caves, hollows, and the labyrinth of the intestine—would not open up before him . . .
Not turning off his discouraged vision, he looked at Isaac Veniaminovich. The crimson light of a cancerous tumor enveloped his stomach. The locus was in the pylorus, and a cluster of metastases crept along the mediastinum. Pavel Alekseevich closed his eyes . . .
Tanya got an X-ray. They found something. Blood tests confirmed the diagnosis. The old pediatrician’s recommendations turned out to be amazingly old school. The child was prescribed Switzerland, within means, naturally—that is, suburban Moscow Switzerland. Many hours outside, sleep in the fresh air—much to Vasilisa’s horror, for as a simple person who had grown up in a village, she did not believe in fresh air. And, of course, good nutrition and cod-liver oil. In a word, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, although Isaac Veniaminovich had never heard of it. And no medicines like that newfangled PAS: why strain the liver or overload the kidneys?
Pavel Alekseevich nodded, and nodded, and then asked pointedly whether the old pediatrician wanted to have his own stomach examined.
“My dear colleague, at my age all natural processes have slowed down to the point that I have a good chance of dying of pneumonia or heart failure.”
“He knows everything. He’s right,” Pavel Alekseevich agreed in his heart.
THEY RENTED A BIG WINTRIFIED DACHA NEAR ZVENIgorod that belonged to a career admiral banished for the minor infraction of grand larceny to an honorable exile as chief military attaché at the embassy in Canada. That same autumn the Academy of Sciences was distributing dachas, and Pavel Alekseevich was invited to submit an application. For some reason he refused. He could not have explained to himself why, but he had an inkling: they were offering him an awful lot these days. Would it later cost him the skin off his back? He did not even tell Elena about the offer of a dacha.