So by the time the cook, exposed at last, once again found himself amid the whortleberry copses and cumulous clouds of the homeland, he had managed to complicate the international situation so thoroughly, to inflate the prices on natural resources so enormously, and to introduce such bedlam into the art market, that it’s unlikely to be corrected by the end of the current millennium. The oil boom was also his doing, said the cook on visiting Aunt Zina at the May and November holidays. Hed already gone to pieces by this time, was unshaven and dressed in a quilted jacket; Aunt Zina spread a newspaper on the kitchen floor so that the cook wouldn’t drip while he drank a few shots of vodka; “I’m not asking you for money for the suit,” said the cook, “I understand you’re a widow, I only ask respect for my services, because the oil boom—that was my doing; and I never tasted that guava in my life, and there’s no cause to go dumping it all on me, only honor and respect, I don’t need any suits, and if I’ve got a real head on my shoulders then you should appreciate it, and not attack me—in another government I would have been oh so useful, they’d have asked me to be president and everything. They’d have said: Mikhail Ivanych, be our president, and you’ll be honored and respected, and the suit, a piece of junk, is totally unnecessary, to hell with your suits… Here’s where I had them all,” said the cook, showing his fist, “this is where they all were, and if need be I’ll have them in the same place again: all those kings and presidents and general-admirals and all sorts of shahs. If you want to know the truth, I already had Norodom Sihanouk on a hook, I’d call him on a direct line: So, Norodom, how’s it going, you still hanging in there?” “I’m still hanging in, Mikhail Ivanych!”
“Well, then, you just keep on hanging…” “What is it, what can I do for you, Mikhail Ivanych?” “Nothing, I say to him, just checking… Keep on hanging, just don’t let go…” Or else the emperor of Japan would call me on the direct line: Here I am, Mikhail Ivanych, he’d say, I sat down to eat raw fish, but it’s no fun without you, why don’t you fly over and keep us company; yeah, sure, as if I hadn’t ever eaten that fish of yours; no, he says, hee-hee-hee, you haven’t eaten this kind, only I eat this kind… but everybody keeps on talking about this guava business,” swore the cook, as Aunt Zina pushed him toward the door. “Don’t you touch me! You, there, don’t grab my sleeve!” And snatching a ruble or sometimes even three, he would tumble noisily into the elevator, where he vomited the grated carrot and beet stars of a recently eaten salad.
Having done the appropriate amount of crying and mourning, Aunt Zina had long since calmed down, and, seeing as people are weak and vain, found satisfaction in calling herself a social consultant on the capture of the wild mid-Russian man. She emphasized proudly that he was a close relative, and her neighbors envied her and even tried to arrange intrigues to deny her relationship, but, of course, they were put to shame. “How proud Zhenya would be if he’d lived to see this,” Aunt Zina repeated, her eyes shining like a young woman’s.
Every year in the fall, regardless of the weather, I drop by to fetch her; she straightens the lace scarf on her head, takes my arm, and we walk—in no hurry, a step at a time, to visit Pushkin, to place flowers at his feet. “If they’d just made a little more effort—he would have been born,” whispers Aunt Zina with love. She gazes up at his lowered, blind, greenish face, soiled to the ears by the doves of peace, gazes into his sorrowful chin, forever frozen to his unwarming, metallic foulard blanketed with Moscow’s snows, as if expecting that he, hearing her through the cold and gloom of his new, commendatore-like countenance, would raise his head, reach his hand out from his bosom, and bless everyone: bless those near and far, crawling and flying, deceased and unborn, tender and scaly, bivalve and molluscan; bless those who sing in the groves and curl up under the bark of trees, who buzz amid the flowers and crowd in a column of light; bless those who vanished amid the feasts, in the sea of life, and in the dismal abysses of the earth.
“And the Slavs’ proud grandson now grown wild…” Aunt Zina triumphantly whispers. “How does the rest of the poem go?”
“I don’t remember,” I say. “Let’s leave, Aunt Zina, before the police chase us off.”
And it’s true, I don’t remember another word.
YORICK
ON THE windowsill of my childhood stood a dust-colored round tin with black letters printed on it: “Dorset. Stewed Pork.” The tin served as a communal grave for all single buttons. Every now and then, a button would fall off a cuff, roll under the bed—and that was it. Grope as you might or run the broom under the bed, it was gone forever. Then the contents of “Dorset” would be shaken out on the table and picked over with one finger, like grains of buckwheat, in search of a pair, but of course nothing matching could ever be found. After a bit of hesitation, the other button would be snipped off—what can you do?—the orphan would be thrown into the pile, and a half-dozen new buttons wrapped in muddy, tea-colored waxed paper would be purchased at the variety store.
The tram ran outside the window, the glass rattled, the windowsill shook, and the minute population of “Dorset” jangled faintly, as though living its own cantankerous life. In addition to buttons, there were some old-timers in the tin: for instance, a set of needles from the foot-pedal Singer sewing machine that no one had used in so long that it gradually began to dissolve into the air of the room, thinning down into its own shadow before it finally vanished, though it had been a real beauty—black, with a ravishingly slender waist, a clear-cut gold sphinx printed on its shoulder, a gold wheel, a black rawhide drive belt, and a dangerous steel-toothed crevasse that plunged down into mysterious depths, where, shuddering, the shuttle went back and forth and did who knows what. Or there might be a crumbling scrap of paper in the tin, on which hooks and loops sat like black insects; as the paper died, the hooks fell to the bottom of the grave with a gentle clink. Or some metallic thingamabob resembling a dentist’s instrument; no one knew what it was, because there were no dentists in our family. We’d fish out this cold, sharp object with two fingers: “Papa, what is this?” Papa would put on the spectacles that sat on his forehead, take it carefully, and inspect it. “Hard to say… It’s… something.”
The corpses of tiny objects, shells of sunken islands. One that constantly surfaced, fell to the bottom, and then surfaced again was a dull-white, bony blade, good for nothing. Of course, like everything else, no one ever threw it away. Then one time someone said, “That’s whalebone, a whale whisker.”
Whalebone! Whale whiskers! Instantly, monster whale-fishes came to mind, smooth black mountains in the gray, silvery-slow ocean sea. In the middle of the whale—a fountain like the ones at Petrodvorets, foamy water spouting on both sides. On the monster’s face—small, attentive eyes and a long, fluffy mustache, totally Maupassant. But the encyclopedic dictionary writes, “Teeth are found only in so-called ‘toothed-W.’ (dolphins, narwhals, sperm W, and bottle-nosed W), which feed mostly on fish; the whiskered, or baleen W. (gray W, right W., rorquals), has horny formations on the roof of the mouth, plates mistakenly called ‘bones’ or ‘whiskers,’ which serve to filter plankton.” Not true, that is, they’re not only for filtering. As late as 1914, a seamstress sewing a stylish dress for Grandmother reproached my absent-minded, happy-go-lucky ancestor, “Nowadays, Natalya Vasilevna, one can’t circulate in society without a busk”; Grandmother was shamed and agreed to a straight busk. The seamstress grabbed a handful of “bones” that came from the mouth of a gray W, or perhaps it was a right W, or maybe even a rorqual, and sewed them into Grand-mothers corset, and Grandmother circulated with great success, wearing under her bust, or at her waist, slivers of the seas, small pieces of those tender, pinkish-gray palates, and she passed through suites of rooms, slim and petite, a decadent Aphrodite with a heavy knot of dark-gold hair, rustling her silks, fragrant with French perfumes and fashionable Norwegian mists; heads turned to watch her, hearts pounded. She loved, rashly and dangerously, and married; then the war began, then the revolution, and she gave birth to Papa—on a day when a machine gun strafed through the fog—and she was anxious and barricaded the frosted window of the bathroom; she fled south, and ate grapes, and then the machine gun began blazing again, and again she fled, on the last steamship out of grapevined, bohemian Odessa, making her way to Marseilles, then to Paris. And she was hungry, poor, and humbled; now she herself sewed for the rich, crawled on her knees around their skirts, her mouth pursed to hold pins; she pinned hems and linings and despaired, and again she fled south (this time the South of France), imagining that she could not only eat grapes but make wine herself—you only have to stomp on them with your feet, it’s called vendange—and then everyone would get rich again and everything would be like it used to be, absent-minded, lighthearted, carefree. But again she came to ruin most shamefully, ridiculously, and in August, 1923, she returned to Petrograd, her hair bobbed, wearing a new, stylishly short skirt and a mushroom-shaped cap, holding a much grown, frightened Papa by the hand. By that time, you could circulate in society without a busk, under different conditions. A lot of things circulated then.