Thus was the true face of Olga Khristoforovna revealed, and without a second thought she ran off on her special pension, in order to resolutely write her battle memoirs, for in her time she had galloped with a cavalry squadron, had known Commander Shchors, and even been awarded an engraved sword, which still hung across the raspberry-colored wall rug with blue zigzags that had been given to her by a Dagestan delegation, and under which, on the narrow bed, covered with an army blanket, her unclaimed spinsterhood languished at night.
By the way, I’d like to note—for the sake of fairness and the bigger picture—that though Antonina Sergeevna acted faintheartedly, sloughing off her guilt in the affair of the boiled citizens of R. (and who wouldn’t have acted faintheartedly?), all in all she remained on top of the situation: she thoroughly understood and appreciated Olga Khristoforovna’s role and her contribution to our successes, to our lofty today, as she liked to say; and although she certainly could have, she didn’t cross Olga Khristoforovna off the Timur Scout’s list of old people, but every October sent her two transitional age adolescents with an axe to chop firewood for the winter. In turn, Olga Khristoforovna tactfully refrained from pointing out that her building had long since switched to central heating and that she didn’t need firewood; she didn’t shoo away the adolescents, but gave them tea with quince jam and showed them how to handle a sword, without a thought to sparing the white geraniums on her windowsill; as a gesture of friendship she even sent them to get cigarettes—she was an inveterate smoker—at a nearby kiosk, which the adolescents then chopped open with the axe around New Year, carrying off four kilos of hard candies and two packs each of cheap macaroni for Mama and Grandma. At the trial they referred to Prudhomme, who taught that all property is theft, and likewise manifested a good knowledge of Bakunin’s works; leaving for the camp, they promised upon their return to apply to the philosophy department, and waved their prison handkerchiefs at a sobbing Olga Khristoforovna.
As a matter of fact, Antonina Sergeevna was a great gal, even though she wasn’t one of us; she had steel teeth, a head of curls, and the nape of her neck was shaved high. “Girls!” she would say to us. “You don’t know how to work, oh, go jump in a creek, the lot of you, what am I going to do with you?” Her jacket was official and inflexible: under it in a rose blouse resided her warm, unembraceable, already rather elderly expanses; she wore a wooden brooch at her throat, and her lipstick was bright, Parisian, and poisonous—we all had a taste of it ourselves when Antonina Sergeevna would suddenly jump up from behind the bountiful table (“the tomatoes! set out the tomatoes!”) and press our heads to her stomach with emotion, kissing us with unabated strength.
Antonina Sergeevna took our motley crew in stride, said that she was very, very, very glad we had come—there was much ado, a lot of work, and we, of course, would help her. R. was preparing for a holiday: they were expecting guests from the Greater Tulumbass tribe, which was a collective sister region of the whole R. region. A three-day friendship festival was planned and the authorities were beside themselves. The undertaking was ambitious: to create all the necessary conditions for the Tulumbasses to feel at home. Plywood mountains and ravines were urgently erected, the string factory wove lianas, and in order to be stained black, a color closer to the heart of the sister region, the pigs were forced to wade twice across the Unka River, which had been noted in a chronicle of the eleventh century (“And the Prince came on the Unka River. And it was wide and terrifying”), but had since lost its strategic significance.
Pushing aside the plates, Antonina Sergeevna immediately laid papers out on the table, and waving away the clothes moths, acquainted us with the heart of the leadership’s arguments. She herself proposed a thorough, comprehensive plan: an international scramble up a smooth pole; a sauna for the chief; a visit to the embroidery factory with gifts of dust ruffles and embroidered towels; a sight-seeing excursion around the city to include the ruins of the nunnery, the house where legend had it another house had stood, and the bakery that was being built; the placing of earth at a friendship tree; the signing of joint protests against international tensions here and there; and tea in the foyer of the House of Culture. Vasily Paramonovich made a counterproposaclass="underline" a meeting with Party activists; an excursion to the acid guild of a chemical factory; a concert of the voluntary militia choir; the presentation of memorial envelopes; the signing of a proposal to name one of the Tulumbasses an honorary member of the cosmonaut detachment; and a picnic on the banks of the Unka with campfires and fishing. For the dust ruffles he proposed substituting the Urdu language edition of South Seas explorer and ethnographer Miklukho-Maklai’s collected works, which had appeared recently in local stores in unlimited quantities. Akhmed Khasianovich reproached his colleagues with a lack of imagination: all this had been done, he said, when they received the delegation of Vaka-Vaka Indians. Fresh ideas were needed: a mass swim across the river, a parachute jump, or on the contrary, an excursion down into the local limestone caves, but a friendly two-week trek across the desert or the tundra would be best of all; however they’d have to agree on the route immediately and set up stands with lemonade and sour-cream buns along the way. The best gift of all would be a copy of the famous painting The Poet Musa Jalil in the Moabit Prison, since it had everything one could want in a painting: ethnicity, folk elements, protest, and optimism, expressed in the rays of light pouring through the barred window. Antonina Sergeevna objected that, as far as she could recall, there weren’t any windows in the painting, and even if she were mistaken, the prison is depicted from the inside, which could be depressing, and wouldn’t the painting Life Is Everywhere, in which the prison is seen from the outside, be better? The sweet faces of children peer out of the windows in that one, which inspires warm feelings even in unprepared viewers. Vasily Paramonovich, who was not strong on art, said in a conciliatory fashion that the safest thing would be the poster “With Every Year—Our Step Grows Wider,” there are several hundred rolls in the warehouse, we could give a copy to each of the Tulumbasses. They had decided on the poster, but now Antonina Sergeevna wanted to know our opinion, as people more in touch with the capital.
Antonina Sergeevna has to be given credit: Judy’s past, present, and future, her looks, name, bad pronunciation, and clothes, which in their abundance and quality reminded one of the increased production at the Three Mountain Manufacturing plant at the end of the year, utterly failed to rattle her: Spiridonov knew where he was taking us. Judy was Judy, the Tulumbasses were Tulumbasses, five guests or twenty-five guests—it was all the same to Antonina Sergeevna, a woman who thought in categories and documents.
Twilight was already upon us and distant islands awoke in Spiridonov: the ocean seethed, Trinidad and Tobago stirred, a little wind played in the tops of the palms, a coconut fell, the blind coral threw out a new prickly arrow, and seashells opened their gates in the warm murk of the lagoon; and in the smoky dream of a pearl oyster what must have been Paris floated by— in a gray rain, in grape cluster of lights, quivering, Paris floated by like a sweet intimation of existence beyond the grave. Violins squealed like the brakes of heavenly chariots.
“Keep it down, Kuzma,” remarked Antonina Sergeevna, raising her head from the papers and unseeingly glancing over the top of her glasses. “So then, Vasily Paramonovich wants to call in the blimps—he has good connections—and stretch a holiday banner between them—a few sickles, golden ears of wheat as symbols of peaceful labor—the sketch has already been approved by the censors. In this regard, a question for you Moscow comrades: do we need a little slogan or two for the ears, what do you think?”