Tatyana Tolstaya - White Walls - Collected Stories

Nothing happened. Vassily Mikhailovich was not visited by a six-winged seraph or any other feathery creature with offers of supernatural services; nothing burst open, there was no voice from the heavens, no one tempted him, carried him aloft, or hurled him down. The three-dimensionality of existence, whose finale was ever approaching, suffocated Vassily Mikhailovich; he tried to get off the tracks, drill a hole in the sky, leave through a drawing of a door. Once, dropping off sheets at the laundry, Vassily Mikhailovich stared into the blossoming clover of cotton expanses, and noticed that the seven-digit notation sewn onto the northeast resembled a telephone number; he secretly called, and was graciously welcomed, and began a boring joyless affair with a woman named Klara. Klara’s house was just like Vassily Mikhailovich’s, with the same clean kitchen, although the windows faced north, and the same cot, and as he got into Klara’s starched bed Vassily Mikhailovich saw yet another telephone number in the corner of the pillow case; he doubted that his fate awaited him there, but, bored by Klara, he called and found the woman Svetlana with her nine-year-old son; in Svetlanas linen closet, clean folded linen lay with pieces of good soap in between the layers.

Yevgeniya Ivanovna sensed that something was up, looked for clues, rummaged in his pockets, unfolded scraps of paper, unaware that she was sleeping in the pages of a large telephone book with Klara’s telephone number, or that Klara dreamed in Svetlanas telephone numbers, or that Svetlana reposed, as it turned out, in the number of the accounting department of the social security office.

Vassily Mikhailovich’s women never did learn of one another’s existence; but of course, Vassily Mikhailovich did not pester them with information about himself. And where would he have gotten a surname, a job, an address, or say, a zip code —he, the phantom of blanket covers and pillow cases, born of the whims of chance of the laundry office?

Vassily Mikhailovich stopped the experiment, not because of the social security office; it was just that he realized that the attempt to escape the system of coordinates was a failure. It wasn’t a new, unheard-of road with breathtaking possibilities that opened before him, not a secret path into the beyond, no; he had simply felt around in the dark and grabbed the usual wheel of fate and if he went around it hand over hand, along the curve, along the circle, he would eventually end up with himself, from the other side.

For, after all, somewhere in the bustling crowd, in the thick tangle of back streets, a nameless old woman was tossing a sack of worn linen marked with a seven-digit cryptogram into a small wooden window: you were enciphered in it, Vassily Mikhailovich. In all fairness, you belong to the old woman. She has every right to you—what if she makes her demand? You don’t want that? Vassily Mikhailovich— no, no, no —didn’t want a strange old woman, he was afraid of her stockings, and her feet, and her yeasty smell, and the creak of bedsprings under her white elderly body, and he was sure she’d have a tea mushroom growing in a three-liter jar—a slippery eyeless silent creature, living years very quietly on the windowsill without splashing even once.

But the one who holds the thread of fate in his hands, who determines meetings, who sends algebraic travelers from Point A to Point B, who fills pools from two pipes, had already marked with a red X the intersections where he was to meet Isolde. Now, of course, it was quite some time since she had passed away.

He saw Isolde at the market and followed her. A peek from the side at her face blue with cold, at her transparent grapelike eyes, and he knew: she would be the one to bring him out of the tight pencil case called the universe. She wore a shabby fur coat with a belt and a thin knit hat—those caps were offered by the dozens by the stocky, heavy women who blocked the entrances to the market; women who like suicides are banned within the gates, turned away from proper stalls, and whose shadows, hard in the frost, wander in crowds along the blue fence, holding in their outstretched hands piles of wooly pancakes—raspberry, green, canary, rustling in the wind—while the early November flakes fall, fall, blowing and whistling, hurrying to wrap the city in winter.

And Vassily Mikhailovich, his heart contracting with hope, watched the meek Isolde, chilled to the bone, to an icy crunch, wander through the black crowd and drop inside the gates and run her finger along the long, empty counters, looking to see if there was anything tasty left.

The northern blizzards had blown away the hothouse sellers of capricious summer produce, those sweet marvels created on high by warm air from pink and white flowers. But the last faithful servants of the soil stood firm, frozen to the wooden tables, grimly offering their cold underground catch: for in the face of annual death nature gets scared, turns around, and grows head down, giving birth in the final moments to coarse, harsh, clumsy creatures—the black dome of radish, the monstrous white nerve of horseradish, the secret potato cities.

And the disappointed Isolde wandered on, along the light blue fence, past the galoshes and plywood crates, past the tattered magazines and wire brooms, past the drunkard offering white porcelain plugs, past the guy indifferently fanning out colored photographs; past and past, sad and shivering, and a pushy woman was already spinning right before her blue face, and praising, and scratching a bright woolen wheel, tugging at it with a big-toothed metal brush.

Vassily Mikhailovich took Isolde by the arm and offered her some wine, and his words glistened with winy sparkle. He led her to a restaurant and the crowd parted for them, and the coat check took her raiments as if they were the magical swan feathers of a fairy bather who had come from the heavens to a small forest lake. The columns emitted a soft marble aroma, and roses floated in the dim lighting. Vassily Mikhailovich was almost young, and Isolde was like a wild silvery bird, one of a kind.

Yevgeniya Ivanovna sensed Isolde’s shadow, and she dug pits, put up barbed wire, and forged chains to keep Vassily Mikhailovich from leaving. Lying next to Yevgeniya Ivanovna with his heart pounding, he saw with his inner eye the cool calm of fresh snow glowing on the midnight streets. The untouched whiteness stretched, stretched, smoothly turned the corner: and on the corner, a Venetian window filled with pink light; and within it, Isolde lay awake listening to the unclear blizzard melody in the city, to the dark winter cellos. And Vassily Mikhailovich, gasping in the dark, mentally sent his soul to Isolde, knowing that it would reach her along the sparkling arc that connected them across the city, invisible to the uninitiated:

Vassily Mikhailovich chewed through the chain and ran away from Yevgeniya Ivanovna; he and Isolde sat holding hands, and he flung open wide the doors to his soul’s treasures. He was as generous as Ali Babà, and she was astonished and trembled. Isolde did not ask for anything: not a crystal toilette, not the queen of Sheba’s colored sash; she would be happy to sit forever at his side, burning like a wedding candle, burning without extinguishing with a steady quiet flame.

Soon Vassily Mikhailovich had told her everything he had to tell. Now it was Isolde’s turn: she had to wrap her weak blue arms around him and step with him into a new dimension, so that lightning, with a flash, would shatter the ordinary world like an eggshell. But nothing of the kind happened. Isolde just trembled and trembled, and Vassily Mikhailovich was bored. “Well, Lyalya?” he would say with a yawn.