“I don’t know,” she said.
“Who else can I ask?”
“I don’t know. There are a lot of tenants here.”
I didn’t intend to give up. Once inside the building I figured out how things were numbered and what the abbreviations in the addresses meant; they represented the doorways, floors, building wings, and then individual apartments. At last, when I’d figured out the note, I knocked on a door. After a long pause, I heard a woman’s voice: “Who is it?”
“I’m looking for Valerija Mihajlovna Ščukina.”
“She doesn’t live here.”
The voice came from just behind the planks of the door; I knew that the woman was observing me through the peephole.
“Maybe you know where I could find her?”
“You’re a foreigner?”
“Yes. A foreigner.”
I heard the woman unlocking the door. She stuck out her head.
“Let me have a look at it.”
I gave her the address. “Do you know any of these three people?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“We’ve only been living here for three years. Ask over there, down at the end of the hall. Last door on the right. Ivanovna. Varja Ivanovna Strahovska. She might know.”
Then she handed me the piece of paper back; I heard her locking the door.
I knocked slowly, cautiously. No one responded. At some point it dawned on me that no one was behind the door, and I pushed down on the handle. The room measured about five meters square. A lightbulb without any kind of shade hung down from the ceiling. In the corner was a massive stove, like the ones in factory canteens. I understood then that this was the communal kitchen for the whole wing of the building. Feeling like I’d stumbled onto a secret hiding place, I exited quickly and closed the door behind me. But my inspection had apparently not gone unnoticed.
“What are you doing here? Who are you?”
The woman was enveloped by a large knit shawl; she wore her hair done up in a big bun. On her feet were stiff army boots.
“Excuse me,” I said, handing her the paper with the addresses as if it were an official form. “They told me that Varja Ivanovna lived here. Strahovska.”
“You’re a relative of hers?”
“You could say that.”
“A foreigner?”
“A foreigner.”
“Varja Ivanovna is very ill. Her heart. Wait here.”
She knocked on the door right across from the community kitchen; she disappeared for a minute and then reappeared.
“She says she has no relatives abroad. Or anywhere else.”
“I’m a friend of Marija Nikolajevna Aleksinka. Tell her that. She’ll know.”
The woman went back into the room without knocking again. This time she was gone longer. At last she emerged.
“Go in for just a bit. I take care of this building. You should have called ahead. Go on in.”
The room resembled a cell. Bare walls. A bed against the wall, and next to it a stool. A glass of water and a little bottle of prescription medication on the stool. A pale gaunt woman lay with her head on a thin pillow, covered up to her chin with a singed army blanket.
“I am Varja Ivanovna Strahovska. I heard who you are. You were asking about Natalija Viktorovna Karajeva. She died two years ago, in this same bed. She was a friend of Marija Jermolajevna, who died four years ago. No, it was five. I knew Marija Nikolajevna Aleksinka too. And her children. They died in a fire. I’m glad to hear that she’s still alive. Her sister, Valerija Mihajlovna Ščukina, was the first one to die, about eight years ago. Well, now I’m dying in turn. I’ve told you everything I know, so please leave me in peace. I don’t feel up to remembering anymore, or talking either. I’m preparing to die. Meetings in this world mean nothing to me now.”
“Forgive me, but I’d like to be able to tell Marija Nikolajevna a bit more about her sister. And all the others.”
“What is there to tell you? There are lives that it turns out weren’t worth living. We lived as if we were dead. Farewell.”
She closed her eyes, a sign that she was ending our conversation. At that point the door opened. “So, you found her alive after all,” said the woman with the bun in her hair. “Now go, before I call the cops.”
For months following my return from the tour, I put off visiting my old landlord and landlady. But one day, walking past the Zvezda cinema, I looked them up. First I walked into Nikolaj Aleksinski’s room. He was reading Berdyaev. I shared my impressions from the tour and told him about the visit to the Novodevichy Cemetery and the Lenin Mausoleum. He served me kirsch.
Then Marija Nikolajevna appeared in the doorway.
“Pardon me,” she said. “I don’t want to disturb your carousing. I just wanted to check in with our traveler. Is he still unlucky at love?”
“We’re talking about Moscow,” I said. “And Leningrad.”
“Ahhh,” came the reply. “But then what can you see in two weeks? Nothing.”
“I saw Dostoyevsky’s grave,” I countered. “And Blok’s.”
“You see?” Marija Nikolajevna said, appealing to the old man with her hands. “I told you he would forget to look for my sister. He did nothing in Russia but drink vodka with the actresses. He’s a bohemian.”
“I couldn’t get away from the group. That’s not easy to do in Russia.” (Then I translated it into our sign language.)
“I knew it,” she said, leaving the room.
“No matter,” Nikolaj Aleksinski commented. “It’s better for you to have gone drinking with the actresses than to have roamed about Moscow. It really is better this way. For her not to find out.”
I realized it was obvious to him that I had carried out my assignment.
“Let’s have another glass,” he said. “Then I have to put the bottle away. Marija Nikolajevna is very sick.”
Postscript
In this piece, under the influence of Truman Capote, I attempted to approximate, in my own way, the genre of the “nonfictional story,” in which the role of imagination is reduced to a minimum and the facts are everything. In my story “Jurij Golec” I didn’t succeed in carrying out this intention: when a story’s characters, even ones of secondary importance, are specific people who are still alive, the writer is sometimes compelled to make costly adjustments and concessions with regard to amour-propre, something that is as understandable as it is human.
THE POET
At dawn a notice had appeared near the power plant, on a wooden post.
It was autumn, the end of a wet and dreary October. The wind plucked the foliage from the poplars, in gusts. Leaves blew up and all around, like leaflets tossed from an airplane, and then descended to the ground.
The sign was hung on the pole with the rusty thumbtacks that someone had prized with his or her fingers from the death notice of one Slavoljub (Bate) Rapajić (1872–1945), a disabled pensioner, hanging below. The culprit did however show some respect for the dead: the new sheet of paper, no bigger than that on which the necrology had been printed, was only attached by means of two of the available thumbtacks; this meant that the death notice too was still hanging on the pole, fastened at both ends and still able to withstand the wind.
The paper-stock was yellow, of wartime quality, and in the course of one night or one morning it had browned considerably, to the color of withered leaves; as if, in this environment of autumnal fading, surrounded and grazed by the poplar leaves, the paper had obeyed the laws of mimicry. Its tiny Cyrillic letters — very blue and quite pale — had already begun to wash out in the rain; in all honesty, however, the typewriter ribbon that had been used to type up this text hadn’t been in the best condition to begin with.