Tatyana Tolstaya - White Walls - Collected Stories

Dum, dum, dum. The sun set. The sun rose. A pigeon with a banded leg landed on the window and looked severely into Zoya’s eyes. There, there you are! Even a pigeon, a lousy, dirty bird gets banded. Scientists in white coats, with honest, educated faces, PhDs, pick him up, the little bird, by the sides— sorry to disturb you, fellow—and the pigeon understands, doesn’t argue, and without further ado offers them his red leather foot—my pleasure, comrades. You’re in the right. Click! And he flies off a different creature, he doesn’t get underfoot and cry, doesn’t recoil heavy-jawed out of the path of trucks, no—now he flies scientifically from cornice to balcony, intellectually consumes the prescribed grains, and remembers firmly that even the gray splotches of his droppings are illuminated henceforth with the unbribable rays of science: the Academy knows, is in control, and—if necessary—will ask.

She stopped talking to Vladimir, sat and stared out the window, thinking for hours about the scientific pigeon. Feeling the engineer’s sorrowful eye upon her, she would concentrate: well? Where are the long-awaited words? Say it! Give up?

“Zoya dear, what’s the matter. I treat you with love, and you treat me like a…” mumbled Mr. Two-Beards.

Her features hardened and sharpened, and no one has said Oh!” in a long time upon meeting her, and she didn’t need that anymore: the blue flame of endless sorrow, burning in her soul, put out all the fires of the world. She didn’t feel like doing anything, and Vladimir vacuumed, beat the rugs, canned eggplant “caviar” for the winter.

Dum, dum, dum beat in Zoya’s head, and the pigeon with the fiery wedding ring rose from the dark, his eyes stern and reproachful. Zoya lay down on the couch straight and flat, covered her head with the blanket, and put her arms along her sides. Unbounded Grief, that’s what the medieval masters from the album on the shelf on the left would have called her wooden sculpture. Unbounded Grief; so there. Oh, they would have sculpted her soul, her pain, all the folds of her blanket the right way, they would have sculpted her and then fixed it up on tippy top of a dizzying, lacy cathedral, at the very top, and the photo would be in close up: “ Zoya. Detail. Early Gothic.” The blue flame heated the woolen cave, there was no air. The engineer was tiptoeing out of the room. “Where are you going?” Zoya shouted like a crane, and the married pigeon grinned. “I was… just going to… wash up…. You rest,” the monster whispered fearfully.

“First he goes to wash up, then to the kitchen, and the front door is right there,” the pigeon whispered in her ear. “And then he’s gone.”

He was right. She tossed a noose around the two-beards’ neck, lay down, jerked, and listened. At that end there was rustling, sighing, shuffling. She had never particularly liked this man. No, let’s be honest, he had always repulsed her. A small, powerful, heavy, quick, hairy, insensitive animal.

It puttered around for a while—whimpering, fussing—until it quieted down in the blissful thick silence of the great ice age.

The world is ended, the world is distorted, the world is closed, and it is closed around Vassily Mikhailovich.

At sixty, fur coats get heavy, stairs grow steep, and your heart is with you day and night. You’ve walked and walked, from hill to hill, past shimmering lakes, past radiant islands, white birds overhead, speckled snakes underfoot, and you’ve arrived here, and this is where you’ve ended up; it’s dark and lonely here, and your collar chokes you and your blood creaks in your veins. This is sixty.

This is it, it’s over. Here no grass grows. The soil is frozen, the earth is narrow and stony, and ahead only one sign glows: exit.

But Vassily Mikhailovich was not willing.

He sat in the hallway of the beauty shop and waited for his wife. Through the open door he could see the crowded room, partitioned with mirrors, where three… three women his own age squirmed in the hands of mighty blond furies. Could he call what was multiplying in the mirrors “ladies”? With growing horror, Vassily Mikhailovich peered at what sat closest to him. A curly-haired siren planted her feet firmly, grabbed itby the head, pulled it back onto a waiting metal sink, and splashed it with boiling water: steam rose; she lathered wildly; more steam, and before Vassily Mikhailovich could cry out she had fallen upon her victim and was choking it with a white terry towel. He looked away. In another chair—my God—long wires were attached to a reddened, albeit very happy head, with protruding diodes, triodes, and resistors…. In the third chair, he realized, was Yevgeniya Ivanovna, and he went over to her. What at home appeared to be her hair was now wrinkled up, revealing her scalp, and a woman in a white coat was dabbing at it with a stick dipped in a liquid. The odor was stifling.

“Take off your coat!” several voices cried.

“Zhenya, I’m going for a walk, just a quick circle,” Vassily Mikhailovich said, waving his arm. He had felt weak in the legs since morning, his heart was thumping and he was thirsty.

In the lobby stiff green sabers grew hilt-down out of large pots, and photographs of bizarre creatures with not-so-nice hints in their eyes stared from the walls under incredible hair— towers, icing, rams’ horns; or, ripples like mashed potatoes in fancy restaurants. And Yevgeniya Ivanovna wanted to be one of them.

A cold wind blew, and small dry flakes fell from the sky. The day was dark, empty, brief; its evening had been born with the dawn. Lights burned brightly and cozily in the small stores. A tiny, glowing, sweet-smelling store, a box of miracles, had grown onto the corner. You couldn’t get in: people were pushing and shoving, reaching over heads with their chits, grabbing little somethings. A fat woman was trapped in the doorway, she clutched the jamb, she was being carried away by the flow.

“Let me out! Let me get out!”

“What’s in there?”

“Lip gloss!”

Vassily Mikhailovich joined the jostling. Woman, woman, do you exist?… What are you?… High up a Siberian tree your hat blinks its eyes in fear; a cow gives birth in suffering so you can have shoes; a lamb is sheared screaming so you can warm yourself with its fleece; a sperm whale is in its death throes; a crocodile weeps; a doomed leopard pants, fleeing. Your pink cheeks come from boxes of flying dust, your smiles from golden containers with strawberry filling, your smooth skin from tubes of grease, your gaze from round transparent jars—He bought Yevgeniya Ivanovna a pair of eyelashes.

…Everything is predestined and you can’t swerve—that’s what bothered Vassily Mikhailovich. You don’t pick wives: they simply appear out of nowhere by your side, and you’re struggling in fine netting, bound hand and foot; hobbled and gagged, you’re taught thousands and thousands of stifling derails of transient life, put on your knees, your wings clipped; and the darkness gathers, and sun and moon still run and run chasing each other along a circle, the circle, the circle.

It was revealed to Vassily Mikhailovich how to clean spoons, and the comparative physiology of meatballs and patties; he knew by heart the grievously brief lifespan of sour cream—one of his responsibilities was destroying it at the first signs of mortal agony—he knew the birthplaces of brooms and whisks, distinguished professionally among grains, had in his head all the prices of glassware, and every autumn wiped windowpanes with ammonium chloride to eradicate the ice cherry orchards that planned to grow by winter.

At times Vassily Mikhailovich imagined that he would finish out this life and begin a new one in a new image. He fussily selected his age, an era, his looks: sometimes he wanted to be born a fiery southern youth; or a medieval alchemist; or the daughter of a millionaire; or a widow’s beloved cat; or a Persian king. Vassily Mikhailovich calculated, compared, deliberated, made conditions, grew ambitious, rejected all suggested possibilities, demanded guarantees, huffed, grew tired, lost his train of thought; and, leaning back in his armchair, stared long and hard in the mirror at himself—the one and only.