Alexandra Ernestovna’s signal is five rings, third button from the top. There’s a breeze on the landing: the dusty stairwell windows are open, ornamented with easygoing lotuses—the flowers of oblivion.
“Who?… She died.”
What do you mean… just a minute… why?… I just… I just went there and came back. Are you serious?…
The hot white air attacks you as you come out of the passageway crypt, trying to get you in the eyes. Wait… The garbage probably hasn’t been picked up, right? The spirals of earthly existence end around the corner on a patch of asphalt, in rubbish bins. Where did you think? Beyond the clouds, maybe? There they are, the spirals—springs sticking out from the rotting couch. They dumped everything here. The oval portrait of sweet Shura—the glass broken, the eyes scratched out. Old woman’s rubbish—stockings… The hat with the four seasons. Do you need chipped cherries? No? Why not? A pitcher with a broken-off spout. The velvet album was stolen. Naturally. It’ll be good for polishing shoes. You’re all so stupid, I’m not crying. Why should I? The garbage steamed in the hot sun and melted in a black banana ooze. The packet of letters trampled into slush. “Sweet Shura, when will you?” “Sweet Shura, just say the word.” And one letter, drier, swirls, a yellow lined butterfly under the dusty poplar, not knowing where to settle.
What can I do with all this? Turn around and leave. It’s hot. The wind chases the dust around. And Alexandra Ernestovna, sweet Shura, as real as a mirage, crowned with wooden fruit and cardboard flowers, floats smiling along the vibrating crossing, around the corner, southward to the unimaginably distant shimmering south, to the lost platform, floats, melts, and dissolves in the hot midday sun.
ON THE GOLDEN PORCH
FOR MY SISTER SMURA
IN THE beginning was the garden. Childhood was a garden. Without end or limit, without borders and fences, in noises and rustling, golden in the sun, pale green in the shade, a thousand layers thick—from heather to the crowns of the pines: to the south, the well with toads, to the north, white roses and mushrooms, to the west, the mosquitoed raspberry patch, to the east, the huckleberry patch, wasps, the cliff, the lake, the bridges. They say that early in the morning they saw a completely naked man at the lake. Honest. Don’t tell Mother. Do you know who it was?—It can’t be.—Honest, it was. He thought he was alone. We were in the bushes.—What did you see?—Everything.
Now, that was luck. That happens once every hundred years. Because the only available naked man—in the anatomy textbook—isn’t real. Having torn off his skin for the occasion, brazen, meaty, and red, he shows off his clavicular-sternum-nipple muscles (all dirty words!) to the students of the eighth grade. When we’re promoted (in a hundred years) to the eighth grade, he’ll show us all that too.
The old woman, Anna Ilyinichna, feeds her tabby cat, Memeka, with red meat like that. Memeka was born after the war and she has no respect for food. Digging her four paws into the pine tree trunk, high above the ground, Memeka is frozen in immobile despair.
“Memeka, meat, meat!”
The old woman shakes the dish of steaks, lifts it higher for the cat to see better.
“Just look at that meat!”
The cat and the old woman regard each other drearily. “Take it away,” thinks Memeka.
“Meat, Memeka.”
In the suffocating undergrowths of Persian red lilac, the cat mauls sparrows. We found a sparrow like that. Someone had scalped its toy head. A naked fragile skull like a gooseberry. A martyred sparrow face. We made it a cap of lace scraps, made it a white shroud, and buried it in a chocolate box. Life is eternal. Only birds die.
Four carefree dachas stood without fences—go wherever you want. The fifth was a privately owned house. The black log framework spread sideways from beneath the damp overhang of maples and larches and growing brighter, multiplying its windows, thinning out into sun porches, pushing aside nasturtiums, jostling lilacs, avoiding hundred-year-old firs, it ran out laughing onto the southern side and sopped above the smooth strawberry-dahlia slope down-down-down where warm air trembles and the sun breaks up on the open glass lids of magical boxes filled with cucumber babies inside rosettes of orange flowers.
By the house (and what was inside?), having flung open all the windows of the July-pierced veranda, Veronika Vikentievna, a huge white beauty, weighs strawberries: for jam and for sale to neighbors. Luxurious, golden, applelike beauty! White hens cluck at her heavy feet, turkey-cocks stick their indecent faces out of the burdock, a red-and-green rooster cocks his head and looks at us: what do you want, girls? “We’d like some strawberries.” The beautiful merchant’s wife’s fingers in berry blood. Burdock, scales, basket.
Tsaritsa! The greediest woman in the world:
Once she came out of the dark shed with red hands like that, smiling. “I killed a calf…”
Aargh! Let’s get out of here, run, it’s horrible—an icy horror —shed, damp, death….
And Uncle Pasha is the husband of this scary woman. Uncle Pasha is small, meek, henpecked. An old man: he’s fifty. He works as an accountant in Leningrad; he gets up at five in the morning and runs over hill and dale to make the commuter train. Seven kilometers at a run, ninety minutes on the train, ten minutes on the trolley, then put on black cuff protectors and sit down on a hard yellow chair. Oilcloth-covered doors, a smoky half-basement, weak light, safes, overhead costs—that’s Uncle Pasha’s job. And when the cheerful light blue day has rushed past, its noise done, Uncle Pasha climbs out of the basement and runs back: the postwar clatter of trolleys, the smoky rush-hour station, coal smells, fences, beggars, baskets; the wind chases crumpled paper along the emptied platform. Wearing sandals in summer and patched felt boots in winter, Uncle Pasha hurries to his Garden, his Paradise, where evening peace comes from the lake, to the House where the huge, golden-haired Tsaritsa lies waiting on a bed with four glass legs. But we didn’t see the glass legs until later. Veronika Vikentievna had been feuding a long time with Mother.
The thing was that one summer she sold Mother an egg. There was an ironclad condition: the egg had to be boiled and eaten immediately. But lighthearted Mother gave the egg to the dacha’s owner. The crime was revealed. The consequences could have been monstrous: the landlady could have let her hen sit on the egg, and in its chicken ignorance it could have incubated a copy of the unique breed of chicken that ran in Veronika Vikentievna’s yard. It’s a good thing nothing happened. The egg was eaten. But Veronika Vikentievna could not forgive Mother’s treachery. She stopped selling us strawberries and milk, and Uncle Pasha smiled guiltily as he ran past. The neighbors shut themselves in; they reinforced the wire fence on metal posts, sprinkled broken glass in strategic points, stretched barbed wire, and got a scary yellow dog. Of course, that wasn’t enough.