In the meantime, life was not quite real, it was life in anticipation, lived out of a suitcase, slipshod, lightweight—a pile of junk in the hallway, midnight guests: Petyunya in his sky-blue tie, the childless Elya and Aiyosha, and others; Pipka’s nocturnal visits and her outrageous conversations. How hideous Pipka was with those black detoothed stumps—yet lots of people liked her, and often at the end of a festive evening one of the men couldn’t be accounted for: Pipka had whisked him away while no one was looking—always in a taxi—to her place in Perlovka. That was where she holed up, renting a cheap little wooden shack with a front yard. At one time Rimma even worried about Fedya—he was flighty and Pipka was crazy and capable of anything. If not for those rotten stumps in her hurried mouth, it might have been worth thinking about not allowing her into the family home. Especially since Fedya often said mysteriously, “If Svetlanka would just keep her mouth shut, you could actually talk to her!” And she was forever trembling, half dressed, or dressed topsy-turvy: crusty stiff children’s boots on bare feet in the middle of winter, her hands all chapped.
No one knew where Pipka went, just as no one knew where she actually came from—she had simply shown up and that was that. Her stories were outrageous and confused: It seems she’d wanted to go to drama school and had even been accepted, but in a market she met some pickled-garlic merchants and was gagged and taken off to Baku in a white Volga with no license plates. There they supposedly ravished her, knocked out half her teeth, and abandoned her, naked, on the seashore in a pool of oil. The next morning, she claimed, she was found by a wild mountain man in transit through Baku; he carried her off to his hut high in the mountains and held her there all summer, feeding her melon from a knife through the cracks in his shack, and in the fall he traded her to a visiting ethnographer for a watch with no hands. Still completely naked, she and the ethnographer, who called her Svetka-Pipetka, which is where she got her nickname, holed up in an abandoned watchtower, dating back to Shamil’s time, that was covered with rotten Persian rugs—the ethnographer studied their patterns with a magnifying glass. At night eagles defecated on them. “Shoo, shoo, damn you!” Pipka would act it out, racing around the room with an indignant expression, frightening the children. When winter came, the ethnographer left to go higher into the mountains, and at the first snowfall Svetlana descended into a valley where the people calculated time by the lunar calendar and shot at schoolmarms through the school window, publicly marking the number of casualties with notches on a post in the center of the bazaar. There were more than eight hundred notches; the Regional Department of Public Education couldn’t manage—several pedagogical institutes worked exclusively for this valley. There Svetlana had an affair with the local store manager. But she quickly dumped him, finding him insufficiently manly: instead of sleeping as a Caucasian horseman should, on his back in a
papakha fur cap with a sword at his side, fiercely displaying his wide, muscular shoulders, the local store manager would curl up, snuffle, and whimper in his sleep, shuffling his legs; he explained in his own defense that he dreamed of gunfire. Toward spring Pipka reached Moscow on foot, sleeping in haystacks and avoiding the high roads; several times she was bitten by dogs. For some reason she went through the Ural Mountains. But then geography gave her even more trouble than her private life; she called the Urals the Caucasus, and placed Baku on the Black Sea. Maybe there really was some kind of truth in her nightmarish stories, who knows. Rimma was used to them and hardly listened; she thought her own thoughts, surrendering to her own unhurried daydreams. Almost nobody listened to Pipka anyway—after all, was she really human? Only occasionally some newcomer, enthralled by Pipkas nonsense, by the disgorged fountain of tales, would exclaim in joyous amazement, “Boy, does she ever lay it on! A thousand and one nights!” That was the type Pipka usually carried off to her semifantastic Perlovka, if it actually existed: was it really possible to believe that Svetlana was employed by the owners to dig troughs around the dahlias and that she ate fish-bone meal along with the chickens? As always, during a simple gathering of friends, amid the noise and chatter and clatter of forks, a dreamy somnolence overtook Rimma, marvelous dream-visions real as life appeared, pink and blue mists, white sails; the roar of the ocean could be heard, far off, beckoning, like the steady roar that issued from the giant shell gracing the sideboard. Rimma loved to close her eyes and put the shell to her ear—from those monstrous, salmon-colored jaws you could hear the call of a faraway country, so far away that a place could no longer be found for it on the globe, and it smoothly ascended, this country, and setded in the sky with all of its lakes, parrots, and crashing coastal breakers. And Rimma also glided in the sky amid pink, feathery clouds—everything promised by life will come to pass. No need to stir, no need to hurry, everything will come all by itself. To slip silently down dark channels… to listen to the approaching roar of the ocean… Rimma would open her eyes and, smiling, look at her guests through the tobacco smoke and dreams—at lazy, satisfied Fedya, at David Danilich swinging his legs—and slowly return to earth. And it will start with something insignificant… it will start bit by bit…. She felt the ground with her legs, which were weakened by the flight. Oh, the apartment would have to be first, of course. The old man’s room would be the bedroom. Baby-blue curtains. No, white ones. White, silky, fluffy, gathered ones. And a white bed. Sunday morning. In a white peignoir, her hair flowing (time to let her hair grow out, but the peignoir had already been secretly bought, she couldn’t resist)… Rimma would stroll through the apartment to the kitchen…. The aroma of coffee… To new acquaintances she would say, “And in this room, where the bedroom is now, an old man used to live…. So sweet… He wasn’t a bother. And after his death we took it over…. It’s a shame—such a wonderful old man!” Rimma would rock back and forth on her chair, smiling at the still-living old man: “You smoke a lot, David Danilich. You should take care of yourself.” The old man only coughed and waved her away, as if to say, Never mind. I’m not long for this place. Why bother?