The woman stirred the spoon in her tea listlessly, and the little point of light bouncing off the surface of the tea blinked on her little red nose and in her blue eye. The blue eye especially was lit up in a very poetic way-it flashed like some living precious jewel.
It was a genuine double recognition: two souls met and didn’t know it.
Five minutes later, Grisha was up the stairs and sitting across from this old woman, this widow. His landlady, her cousin, had gone off to the college where she taught. This old woman never did get around to drinking any of her tea or lifting her gaze. Grisha fell in love with her with all his broken heart, married her, and came to Moscow to meet her melancholy, pale, blond and curly-haired son.
When he shook hands with this son, this Alyosha, a tear rolled from the third, unseen eye below Grisha’s neck-a bitter, tiny tear from the dead father. Alyosha avoided the draft in the end: his father had died, as Grisha’s new wife explained it, and so the son became the lone provider for a pensioner (his mother), and by law such a person is exempt from army service. At the draft board that day they kept yelling and insisting that he should start serving now, they’d release him later (they needed to fill a quota, apparently, and without him they’d be one short). So the mother had to run around and gather the necessary papers while Alyosha was hiding-the police would come to the apartment at night looking for him-and meanwhile the funeral had to be arranged! Grisha listened to all these tales and wept every time, no matter how often he heard them.
But Alyosha never accepted this new father. He was shocked by the speed with which his mother had experienced a change of heart. It seemed like a betrayal-she still wore the same slippers she wore while his father lived, and now she’d flung herself into another marriage. Alyosha refused to go to America with them. But his mother, looking younger than herself by twenty years, blossoming, golden-haired, blue-eyed, in love, flew off with her new husband to the place where her first husband’s soul now lived-and no one ever did explain it to either of them.
The New Robinson Crusoes
A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century
SO MY PARENTS DECIDED THEY WOULD OUTSMART EVERYONE. When it began they piled me and a load of canned food into a truck and took us to the country, the far-off and forgotten country, somewhere beyond the Mur River. We’d bought a cabin there for cheap a few years before, and mostly it just stood there. We’d go at the end of June to pick wild strawberries (for my health), and then once more in August in time for stray apples and plums and black cranberries in the abandoned orchards, and for raspberries and mushrooms in the woods. The cabin was falling apart when we bought it, and we never fixed anything. Then one fine day late in the spring, after the mud had hardened a little, my father arranged things with a man with a truck, and off we went with our groceries, just like the new Robinson Crusoes, with all kinds of yard tools and a rifle and a bloodhound called Red-who could, theoretically, hunt rabbits.
Now my father began his feverish activity. Over in the garden he plowed the earth-plowing the neighbors’ earth in the process, so that he pulled out our fence posts and planted them in the next yard. We dug up the vegetable patch, planted three sacks of potatoes, groomed the apple trees. My father went into the woods and brought back some turf for the winter. And suddenly too we had a wheelbarrow. In general my father was very active in the storerooms of our neighbors’ boarded-up houses, picking up whatever might come in handy: nails, old boards, shingles, pieces of tin, buckets, benches, door handles, windowpanes, and all sorts of useful old things, like well buckets, yarn spinners, grandfather clocks, and then not-so-useful old things, like old iron teakettles, iron oven parts, stove tops, and so on.
Three old women were the village’s sole inhabitants: Baba Anisya; Marfutka, who had reverted to semi-savagery; and the red-headed Tanya, the only one with a family: her kids would come around and bring things, and take other things away-which is to say they’d bring canned food from the city, cheese, butter, and cookies, and take away pickled cucumbers, cabbage, potatoes. Tanya had a rich basement pantry and a good, enclosed front yard, and one of her grand-children, a permanently ailing boy named Valera, often stayed with her. His ears were always hurting, or else he was covered with eczema. Tanya herself was a nurse by training, which training she received in a labor camp in Kolyma, where she’d been sent at the age of seventeen for stealing a suckling pig at her collective farm. She was popular, and she kept her stove warm-the shepherdess Vera would come from the next village over and call out (I could hear her in the distance), “Tanya, put the tea on! Tanya, put the tea on!” Baba Anisya, the only human being in the village-Marfutka didn’t count, and Tanya was a criminal-said that Tanya used to be the head of the health clinic here, practically the most important person around. Anisya worked for her for five years, for doing which she lost her pension because it meant she didn’t complete the full twenty-five years at the collective farm, and then five years sweeping up at the clinic don’t count, especially with a boss like Tanya. My mom made a trip once with Anisya to the regional Party headquarters in Priozersk, but the headquarters had been boarded up long ago, everything was boarded up, and my mother walked the twenty-five kilometers home with a frightened Baba Anisya, who immediately began digging in her garden with renewed vigor, and chopping wood, and carrying firewood and twigs into her house-she was fending off a hungry death, which is what she’d face if she did nothing, like Marfutka, who was eighty-five and no longer lit her stove, and even the few potatoes she’d managed to drag into her house had frozen during the winter. They simply lay there in a wet, rotten pile. Marfutka had nibbled out of that pile all winter and now refused to part with these riches, her only ones, when one time my mother sent me over with a shovel to clean them out. Marfutka refused to open the door, looking out through the window that was draped in rags and seeing that I was carrying a garden spade. Either she ate the potatoes raw, despite her lack of teeth, or she made a fire for them when no one was looking-it was impossible to tell. She had no firewood. In the spring Marfutka, wrapped in layers of greasy shawls, rags, and blankets, showed up at Anisya’s warm home and sat there like a mummy, not breathing a word. Anisya didn’t even try to talk to her, and Marfutka just sat there. I looked once at her face, which is to say what was visible of her face under the rags, and saw that it was small and dark, and that her eyes were like wet holes.
Marfutka survived another winter but no longer went into the yard-she’d decided, apparently, to die of hunger. Anisya said simply that, last year, Marfutka still had some life left in her, but this year she’s done for, her feet don’t look straight ahead but at each other, the wrong way. One day my mother took me along, and we planted half a bucket of potatoes in Marfutka’s yard, but Marfutka just looked at us and worried, it was clear, that we were taking over her plot, though she didn’t have the energy to walk over to us. My mother just went over to her and handed her some potatoes, but Marfutka, thinking her plot was being bought from her for half a bucket of potatoes, grew very frightened, and refused.