Leibe looks at the clock but the hands are frozen, motionless, on its face.
He takes his professorial dress uniform from the back of his chair and realizes it’s his father’s old robe. So where’s the dress uniform? The one with dense fabric of deep blue and a row of buttons, each with a stern two-headed eagle spreading its wings? The same one with the narrow snow-white enamel insignia shining on the chest, the badge of a Kazan University professor? The same one Grunya blows the dust motes from every morning? That’s right, she took it out for cleaning.
Volf Karlovich takes a step toward the door. The smooth handle falls complacently into his palm. He tugs at it for a long time, as if he’s amiably shaking the door’s brass hand, then he pulls down sharply and strides into the black abyss that’s opened up in the hallway.
Grunya is assiduously rubbing the side of a pot with a soapy rag and the white suds bubble in the thick kerosene soot, blackening. After Stepan’s arrival, a desire has awakened in her to scour the kitchen utensils to an unbearable, mirror-like cleanliness, so in her powerful hands the professor’s basins and skillets have begun sparkling with a hitherto unprecedented gleam that hurts the eye.
Her back senses the neighboring women’s unfriendly gazes nestling between her shoulder blades. Let them look, the wretches. They dislike her so much in the communal apartment because she conducts herself as if she were the apartment’s proprietress. But why shouldn’t she? She is the proprietress. Every wall here, every floorboard, every baseboard, every flourish on the white carved wooden doors knows her hands, which have swept, cleaned, washed, and polished them hundreds of times.
When more residents were assigned housing in the professor’s apartment back in 1921, she’d staunchly held the line, carefully selected the most valuable items, and moved them into her own room (lunch and tea services, silver cutlery, heavy candleholders, velvet drapes – what, was she supposed to leave them for these half-literate bumpkins?). She occupied the best table in the kitchen and the largest cabinet in the hallway, in addition to an upper storage cabinet, too. And then one dark autumn evening she took a dully gleaming silver ink set as huge as a pillow, as hefty as a rock, and bearing the personalized inscription “To V.K. Leibe, professor of medical sciences, with the deepest respect of G.F. Dormidontov, rector, Imperial Kazan University,” to the building manager, with no regrets since it was obvious to any fool that you had to be friendly with building managers.
And she began waiting.
By this time, the professor was already shattered by the changes that had taken place in the country. He’d had a rough time during the war between the Bolsheviks and the Czechs fighting for the White Army, he’d fallen out of favor with the new rectors at the university (they changed fairly often during the first years of the Civil War), and his practice at the clinic had been closed. Then one morning Volf Karlovich didn’t leave his room. Nobody noticed his absence. Only Grunya – when bringing a cup of the herbal slop that the professor had become accustomed to drinking for breakfast in the mornings instead of his usual coffee – quietly gasped when she looked into joyful blue eyes unclouded by further earthly sorrows. At first she was scared. Then she realized what had happened – there it was, she’d waited it out. She would be the apartment’s proprietress.
She tolerated the residents, as if they were bedbugs. She simply didn’t know how to poison them. Stepan, who had come into her life a couple of months ago, knew. He decided to begin with the easiest: the professor.
Grunya didn’t question his plans for long. She was already sick to death of taking care of the half-crazed former proprietor. And she was desperate to be Stepan’s little pussycat, lamb, or bunny, and occasionally (forgive me, O Lord, I do sin, I repent…) even his little vixen.
And so the letter was written and dropped in the postbox. Grunya sweated profusely, like a horse, during Stepan’s dictation, tracing out long and tricky words whose meanings she didn’t understand: was bourgeois written with ou or oo? Was German written with e or i? Did spy end in y or i? Is there one r or two in counterrevolution? Is it one word or two? If Stepan is right, they will arrive soon to free up the professorial office with its trio of lovely windows looking out on an ancient park, floors smelling of wax, and heavy walnut furniture. Free it up for Grunya, who’s already been awaiting her turn for happiness for ten long years. And even then – what was it Stepan said that morning? – they weren’t going to spend the rest of their lives huddled in the two little rooms.
Grunya rinses the pot in a basin. It’s suddenly become very quiet in the kitchen. The other women don’t usually converse in her presence; they only exchange glances. But now the silence behind Grunya’s back is thick and unusually heavy. Someone’s soup gurgles, as if it’s choking from agony.
Grunya turns around.
Professor Leibe is standing in the communal kitchen.
A little neighbor girl, who’s always getting underfoot on her ailing tricycle, thrums the bell from fear – ding! – and asks, in the quiet, “Mama, who’s that?”
The women have gone stilclass="underline" one with a ladle, another with an iron, yet another with a rag in her hands. Wide eyes stare at Leibe. But he’s looking only at Grunya.
“Where’s my professorial dress uniform?” he asks in a voice high-pitched with agitation.
Her hand squeezes the rag and soapsuds trickle between her fingers, dripping resonantly into the basin.
“Where’s my professorial uniform? I’m asking you, Grunya.”
“Let’s go have a look in your room, professor,” she says in a voice that suddenly sounds strained. “Let’s go to your room.”
“I’ve already looked there,” Leibe persists. “Give me my uniform at once. I’m late.”
The neighbor women’s eyes, huge from curiosity, probe the professor’s frail figure and shift their gaze to Grunya, then back.
Can it really be that he forgot for ten years, until now? Right now, when they should arrive any day? So Grunya will not be drinking coffee from the professor’s cups, after all – oh no, she will not. And will Stepan want her like this, with one teeny little room in a communal anthill? Grunya’s fat fingers, covered with white suds bursting in the air, turn cold.
“So are you going to give me my uniform?”
In the crosshairs of the neighbors’ attentive eyes, she climbs on a stool and pulls a huge plywood suitcase from the overhead storage cabinet. She rummages around in it and removes from the bottom a wrinkled uniform that’s lace-like from moth holes and white from dust in places.
Leibe laughs joyously and puts it on, stroking it affectionately. The stitching on the sleeve crackles, coming undone and baring zigzags of threads. A blackened button tears off and bounces along the floor, jingling into a corner somewhere.
“I just knew you’d taken it to be cleaned,” the professor says, smiling with satisfaction as he straightens the worn insignia on his chest and turns around.
“Where are you going?” The presentiment of catastrophe dumbfounds Grunya.
“To the university, for a lecture,” he says. He shrugs his shoulders with surprise and leaves, his backless slippers thudding.
“He could have put on shoes,” says one of the neighbor women, finally regaining the ability to speak. “He’ll catch cold.”
Fortunately, Volf Karlovich doesn’t have the chance to catch cold. They take him exactly one minute later, right there, outside the building, as half the apartment’s residents stare out the windows at their strange neighbor’s entrance into the world. He’s just beginning to run down the steps – his feet flying on their own, lightly, as if he were a young man – when other feet, wearing polished black boots, are already running up those very same steps to greet him.