And one evening, when Fedya was watching television and Rimma was sitting with her head on the table listening to the old man coughing on the other side of the wall, in burst Pipka, all fire and flame, rosy-cheeked, looking younger, as sometimes happens with insane people, and smiling, her blazing mouth full of sparkling white teeth. “Thirty-six!” she shouted from the threshold and banged her fist on the top of the doorway. “Thirty-six what?” said Rimma, lifting her head from the table. “Thirty-six teeth!” said Pipka. And she told the story of how she got a job as a cabin boy on a steamer bound for Japan, and since the steamer was already overstaffed she had to sleep in a cauldron with the meat and rice, and the captain had rendered her honor but the captain’s assistant had rent it; and a rich Japanese man fell in love with her on the way and wanted to arrange their marriage by telegraph without delay, but they couldn’t find the right Japanese characters and the deal fell apart; and then—while they were washing the meat-and-rice cauldron in some port or other—she was kidnapped by a pirate junk and sold to a rich plantation owner, and she spent a year working on Malaysian hemp plantations, where she was bought by a rich Englishman for an Olympics memorial ruble, which, as everyone knows, is highly prized among Malaysian numismatists. The Englishman carried her off to misty Albion; first, he lost her in the thick mist, but then he found her, and to celebrate he footed the bill for the most expensive and fashionable set of thirty-six teeth, which only a real moneybags could afford. He gave her smoked pony for the road and now she, Pipka, was finally going to Perlovka to get her things. “Open your mouth,” said Rimma with hatred. And in Svetlana’s readily opened mouth she counted, fighting vertigo, all thirty-six— how they fit in there was beyond comprehension, but they were indeed teeth. “I can chew steel wire now. If you want, I’ll bite off a bit of the cornice,” the monster started to say, and Fedya was watching with great interest, but Rimma began waving her hands: that’s all, that’s it, it’s late, we want to sleep, and she thrust taxi money on her, and pushed her toward the door, and threw her the volume of Simenon. For heaven’s sake, take it, read a little tonight, only just leave! And Pipka left, clutching the walls to no avail, and no one ever saw her again. “Fedya, shall we take a trip to the South?” Rimma asked. “Absolutely,” Fedya answered readily, as he had done many times over the years. That’s all right, then. That means we will go after all. To the South! And she listened to the voice that still faintly whispered something about the future, about happiness, about long, sound sleep in a white bedroom, but the words were already difficult to make out. “Hey, look—it’s Petyunya!” said Fedya in surprise. On the television screen, under palm trees, small and sullen, with a microphone in his hands, stood Petyunya, and he was cursing some kind of cocoa plantations, and the black people passing by turned around to look at him, and his huge tie erupted like a pustular African sunrise, but there wasn’t a whole lot of happiness to be seen on his face either.
Now Rimma knew that they’d all been tricked, but by whom and when, she couldn’t remember. She sorted through it all day by day, searching for a mistake, but didn’t find any. Everything was somehow covered with dust. Occasionally— strange to say—she felt like talking it over with Pipka, but Pipka didn’t come around anymore.
It was summer again, the heat had arrived, and through the thick dust the voice from the future once again whispered something. Rimma’s children were grown, one had married and the other was in the army, the apartment was empty, and she had trouble sleeping at night—the old man coughed incessantly on the other side of the wall. Rimma no longer wanted to turn the old man’s room into a bedroom, and she didn’t have the white peignoir anymore—moths from the junk in the hall had eaten it, without even looking at what they ate. Arriving at work, Rimma complained to big Lucy and little Lucy that moths were now devouring even German things; little Lucy gasped, holding her palms to her cheeks, and big Lucy grew angry and glum. “If you want to outfit yourselves, girls,” said the experienced Kira, breaking away from her telephonic machinations, “I can take you to a place. I have a friend. Her daughter just got back from Bahrain. You can pay later. It’s good stuff. Vera Esafovna got seven hundred rubles’ worth on Saturday. They lived well over there in Bahrain. Swam in a pool, they want to go again.” “Why don’t we?” said big Lucy. “Oh, I have so many debts,” whispered the little one.
“Quick, quick, girls, we’ll take a taxi,” said Kira, hurrying them. “We can make it during lunch break.” And, feeling like schoolgirls cutting class, they piled into a cab, inundating one another with the smells of perfume and lit cigarettes, and whirled off down hot summer side streets strewn with sunny linden-tree husks and patches of warm shadow; a southerly wind was blowing, and through the gasoline fumes it carried the exultation and brilliance of the far-off South: the blazing blue heavens, the mirrorlike shimmer of vast seas, wild happiness, wild freedom, the madness of hopes coming true—
Hopes for what? God only knows! And in the apartment they entered, holding their breath in anticipation of a happy consumer adventure, there was also a warm wind fluttering and billowing the white tulle on the windows and doors, which were opened wide onto a spacious balcony—everything here was spacious, large, free. Rimma felt a little envious of this apartment. A powerful woman—the mistress of the goods for sale—swiftly threw open the secret room. The goods were rumpled, heaped up in television boxes on an ever-rising double bed, and reflected in the mirror of a massive wardrobe. “Dig in,” ordered Kira, standing in the doorway. Trembling, the women buried their hands in boxes crammed with silky, velvety, see-through, gold-embroidered stuff; they pulled things out, yanking, getting tangled in ribbons and ruffles; their hands fished things out while their eyes already groped for something else, an alluring bow or frill; inside Rimma a vein twitched rapidly, her ears burned, and her mouth was dry. It was all like a dream. And, as happens in the cruel scenario of dreams, a certain crack in the harmony soon emerged and began to grow, a secret defect, which threatened to resound in catastrophe. These things —what is this anyway?—weren’t right, they weren’t what they seemed at first. The eye began to distinguish the cheapness of these gaudy, fake gauze skirts hardly fit for a corps de ballet, the pretentiousness of those violet turkey-wattle jabots, and the un-fashionable lines of those thick velvet jackets; these were throw-aways; we were invited to the leftovers of someone else’s feast; others have already rummaged here, have already trampled the ground; someone’s greedy hands have already defiled the magical boxes, snatched up and carried off those very things, the real ones that made the heart beat and that particular vein twitch. Rimma fell on other boxes, groped about the disheveled double bed, but neither there, nor there… And the things that she grabbed in despair from the piles and held up to herself, anxiously looking in the mirror, were laughably small, short, or ridiculous. Life had gone and the voice of the future was singing for others. The woman, the owner of the goods, sat like Buddha and watched, astute and scornful. “What about this?” Rimma pointed at the clothes hanging on coat hangers along the walls, fluttering in the warm breeze. “Sold. That’s sold too.” “Is there anything—in my size?” “Go on, give her something,” Kira, who was propped up against the wall, said to the woman. Thinking for a moment, the woman pulled out something gray from behind her back, and Rimma, hurriedly undressing, revealing all the secrets of her cheap undergarments to her girlfriends, slithered into the appropriate openings. Adjusting and tugging, she inspected her mercilessly bright reflection. The warm breeze still played about in the sunny room, indifferent to the commerce being conducted. She didn’t exactly understand what she had put on; she gazed miserably at the little black hairs on her white legs, which looked as if they’d gotten soggy or been stored in dark trunks all winter, at her neck, its goosey flesh stretched out in fright, at her flattened hair, her stomach, her wrinkles, the dark circles under her eyes. The dress smelled of other people—others had already tried it on. “Very good. It’s you. Take it,” pressured Kira, who was the woman’s secret confederate. The woman watched, silent and disdainful. “How much?” “Two hundred.” Rimma choked, trying to tear off the poisoned clothing. “It’s awfully stylish, Rimmochka,” said little Lucy guiltily. And to consummate the humiliation, the wind blew open the door to the next room, revealing a heavenly vision: the woman’s young, divinely sculpted daughter, suntanned to a nut-colored glow—the one who had come back from Bahrain, who darted out of swimming pools filled with clear blue water—a flash of white garments, blue eyes; the woman got up and shut the door. This sight was not for mortal eyes.