He saw Isolde at the market and followed her. A peek from the side at her face blue with cold, at her transparent grapelike eyes, and he knew: she would be the one to bring him out of the tight pencil case called the universe. She wore a shabby fur coat with a belt and a thin knit hat—those caps were offered by the dozens by the stocky, heavy women who blocked the entrances to the market; women who like suicides are banned within the gates, turned away from proper stalls, and whose shadows, hard in the frost, wander in crowds along the blue fence, holding in their outstretched hands piles of wooly pancakes—raspberry, green, canary, rustling in the wind—while the early November flakes fall, fall, blowing and whistling, hurrying to wrap the city in winter.
And Vassily Mikhailovich, his heart contracting with hope, watched the meek Isolde, chilled to the bone, to an icy crunch, wander through the black crowd and drop inside the gates and run her finger along the long, empty counters, looking to see if there was anything tasty left.
The northern blizzards had blown away the hothouse sellers of capricious summer produce, those sweet marvels created on high by warm air from pink and white flowers. But the last faithful servants of the soil stood firm, frozen to the wooden tables, grimly offering their cold underground catch: for in the face of annual death nature gets scared, turns around, and grows head down, giving birth in the final moments to coarse, harsh, clumsy creatures—the black dome of radish, the monstrous white nerve of horseradish, the secret potato cities.
And the disappointed Isolde wandered on, along the light blue fence, past the galoshes and plywood crates, past the tattered magazines and wire brooms, past the drunkard offering white porcelain plugs, past the guy indifferently fanning out colored photographs; past and past, sad and shivering, and a pushy woman was already spinning right before her blue face, and praising, and scratching a bright woolen wheel, tugging at it with a big-toothed metal brush.
Vassily Mikhailovich took Isolde by the arm and offered her some wine, and his words glistened with winy sparkle. He led her to a restaurant and the crowd parted for them, and the coat check took her raiments as if they were the magical swan feathers of a fairy bather who had come from the heavens to a small forest lake. The columns emitted a soft marble aroma, and roses floated in the dim lighting. Vassily Mikhailovich was almost young, and Isolde was like a wild silvery bird, one of a kind.
Yevgeniya Ivanovna sensed Isolde’s shadow, and she dug pits, put up barbed wire, and forged chains to keep Vassily Mikhailovich from leaving. Lying next to Yevgeniya Ivanovna with his heart pounding, he saw with his inner eye the cool calm of fresh snow glowing on the midnight streets. The untouched whiteness stretched, stretched, smoothly turned the corner: and on the corner, a Venetian window filled with pink light; and within it, Isolde lay awake listening to the unclear blizzard melody in the city, to the dark winter cellos. And Vassily Mikhailovich, gasping in the dark, mentally sent his soul to Isolde, knowing that it would reach her along the sparkling arc that connected them across the city, invisible to the uninitiated:
Vassily Mikhailovich chewed through the chain and ran away from Yevgeniya Ivanovna; he and Isolde sat holding hands, and he flung open wide the doors to his soul’s treasures. He was as generous as Ali Babà, and she was astonished and trembled. Isolde did not ask for anything: not a crystal toilette, not the queen of Sheba’s colored sash; she would be happy to sit forever at his side, burning like a wedding candle, burning without extinguishing with a steady quiet flame.
Soon Vassily Mikhailovich had told her everything he had to tell. Now it was Isolde’s turn: she had to wrap her weak blue arms around him and step with him into a new dimension, so that lightning, with a flash, would shatter the ordinary world like an eggshell. But nothing of the kind happened. Isolde just trembled and trembled, and Vassily Mikhailovich was bored. “Well, Lyalya?” he would say with a yawn.
He paced the room in his socks, scratched his head, smoked by the window, and stuck the butts in the flower pots, packed his razor in his suitcase: he planned to go back to Yevgeniya Ivanovna. The clock ticked, Isolde cried, not understanding, promising to die, there was slush beneath the window. Why make a scene? Why didn’t she grind some meat and make patties instead? I said I was leaving, that meant I was leaving. What was unclear about that?
Yevgeniya Ivanovna was so glad she baked a carrot pie, washed her hair, polished the floors. He celebrated his fortieth birthday first at home, then in a restaurant. They packed the uneaten fish and jellied meat in plastic bags, and there was enough for lunch the next day. He got good presents: a radio, a clock with a wooden eagle, and a camera. Yevgeniya Ivanovna had been dreaming of being photographed at the beach in the surf. Isolde did not control herself and sort of ruined the party. She sent some stuff wrapped in paper and an unsigned poem, in her childish handwriting:
She was no longer alive.
And now he was sixty, and the wind blew up his sleeves, into his heart, and his legs refused to go. Nothing, nothing was happening, nothing lay ahead, and really there was nothing behind, either. For sixty years he’d been waiting for them to come and call him and show him the mystery of mysteries, for red dawn to blaze over half the world, for a staircase of rays to rise from earth to heaven and archangels with trombones and saxophones or whatever they used to blare their unearthly voices to welcome the chosen one. But why were they taking so long? He’d been waiting his whole life.
He hastened his step. While they shaved Yevgeniya Ivanovna’s neck, boiled her head, and bent her hair with metal hooks, he could reach the market and have some warm beer. It was cold, his fur coat was cheap, a fur coat in name only—fake leather lined with fake fur—which Yevgeniya Ivanovna bought from a speculator. “She skins crocodiles for herself, though,” thought Vassily Mikhailovich. They had gone to the speculator—for crocodile shoes, the fur coat, and other trifles—in the evening, searching a long time for the right house. It was dark on the landing, they felt around, having no matches. Vassily Mikhailovich swore softly. To his amazement he felt a peephole at knee level on one of the doors.
“That’s the right place, then,” his wife whispered.
“What does she do, crawl around on all fours?”
“She’s a dwarf, a circus midget.”
With bated breath he felt the nearness of a miracle: beyond the vinyl-covered door, perhaps the one and only door in the world, gaped the passageway into another universe, breathed living darkness, and a tiny, translucent elf soared among the stars, trembling on dragonfly wings, tinkling like a bell.
The dwarf turned out to be old, mad, mean, and didn’t let them touch any of the things. Vassily Mikhailovich surreptitiously looked at the bed with the stepladder, the children’s chairs, the photographs hung low, just above the floor, testimony to the faded charms of the lilliputian. There, in the pictures, standing on the back of a dolled-up horse, in ballet togs, in glass circus diamonds, happy, tiny, the young speculator waved through the glass, through time, through a lifetime. And here, pulling enormous adult clothing out of the closet with tiny wrinkled hands, the evil troll ran back and forth, the guardian of underground gold, and the Gulliver shadow cast by the low-hanging lamp also ran back and forth. Yevgeniya Ivanovna bought the fur coat, and the crocodile shoes, and a winking Japanese wallet, and a scarf with Lurex threads, and an arctic fox skin for a hat from the horrible child, and while they made their way down the dark stairs, supporting each other, she explained to Vassily Mikhailovich that you clean arctic fox with farina grains heated in a dry skillet, and that the skin side of the fur should be kept away from water, and that she now had to buy a half meter of plain ribbon. Vassily Mikhailovich, trying not to remember any of this, thought about what the dwarf had been like in her youth, and whether dwarfs can marry, and that if they were to jail her for speculation, the prison cell would seem so big and frightening to her, every rat would be like a horse, and then he imagined that the young speculator was imprisoned in a gloomy barred castle with nothing but owls and bats: she wrung her doll-like hands, it was dark, and he was creeping toward the castle with a rope ladder over his shoulder through the evil grounds; only the moon ran behind the black branches like a silver apple, and the dwarf clutched the bars of her window and squeezed through, transparent as a lollipop in the moonlight, and he climbed up, tearing his fingers on the mossy medieval stones, and the guards were asleep leaning on their halberds, and a raven steed pawed the ground below ready to gallop around the sawdust arena, on the red carpet, around and around the circle.