Tatyana Tolstaya - White Walls - Collected Stories

Panya stole from family. But Pavel Antonovich stole from strangers. Panya confessed. Pavel Antonovich suffered from slander. The scales of justice are balanced. And what did you do? You came, you ate, you judged? In anti-plague goggles and rubber boots, with an enormous syringe, Pavel Antonovich approached the camel. I am your death, I’ll eat you up! Mice get sick, and so do rabbits. Everyone gets sick. Everyone. No need to brag.

Lenochka did not wish to hear about Sergei’s hat anymore. As if there were nothing else to talk about. And really… Children, don’t shout! I don’t understand who she is. Why she married me. If she doesn’t care about anything… She’s waterlogged…. Not a person, but soap suds. Seryozha, you’re shouting so loudly. Just like Pavel Antonovich. Hush, hush. In her condition, Lenochka needs peace.

Lenochka, don’t be mad at me. All right, all right, Seryozha. Drive a nail there—to hang up the diapers. Why don’t you sleep in the study, won’t little Antosha let you get any sleep? The shadow of leaves falls on the tiny face, the lace-trimmed sheet; the infant sleeps, his wrinkled fists raised, his brow furrowed—struggling to understand something. The fishies are asleep in the pond. The birdies are asleep in the trees. Who’s breathing outside in the garden? We don’t care, my love.

Sweet dreams, sonny, you’re not to blame for anything at all. The plague corpses in the cemetery are covered with lime, the poppies on the steppe bring sweet dreams, the camels are locked up in the zoos, warm leaves rustle and whisper over your head. What about? What do you care?

A PERSON lived—a person died. Only the name remains—Sonya. “Remember, Sonya used to say…” “A dress like Sonya’s…” “You keep blowing your nose all the time, like Sonya…” Then even the people who used to say that died, and there was only a trace of her voice in my head, incorporeal, seeming to come from the black jaws of the telephone receiver. Or all of a sudden there is a view of a sunny room, like a bright photograph come to life—laughter around a set table, like those hyacinths in a glass vase on the tablecloth, wreathed too with curly pink smiles. Look quickly, before it goes out. Who is that? Is the one you need among them? But the bright room trembles and fades and now the backs of the seated people are translucent like gauze, and with frightening speed, their laugh-ter falls to pieces, recedes in the distance—catch it if you can.

No, wait, let me look at you. Sit as you were and call out your names in order. But it is futile to try grasping recollections with clumsy corporeal hands. The merry laughing figure turns into a large, crudely painted rag doll and will fall off its chair if it’s not propped up; on its meaningless forehead are drips of glue from the moplike wig; the blue glassy eyes are joined inside the empty skull by a metal arc with a lead ball for counterweight. Just look at that, the old hag! When you think she pretended to be alive and loved. But the laughing company has flown up and away, and contrary to the iron laws of space and time is chattering away in some inaccessible corner of the world, incorruptible unto eternity, festively immortal, and might even appear again at some turn in the road—at the most inappropriate moment, and of course without warning.

Well, if that’s the way you are, so be it. Chasing you is like catching butterflies waving a shovel. But I would like to learn more about Sonya.

One thing is clear—Sonya was an utter fool. No one has ever disputed that quality of hers, and now there is no one to do it anyway. Invited out to dinner for the first time, in the distant, yellowish-smoke-shrouded year of 1930, she sat like a dummy at the end of a long, starched table, in front of a napkin cone folded into a house, as was then customary. The bouillon pond cooled. The idle spoon lay before her. The dignity of all the kings of England froze Sonya’s equine features.

“And you, Sonya,” they said to her (they must have addressed her more formally, using her patronymic, hopelessly lost now), “and you, Sonya, why aren’t you eating?”

“Waiting for the pepper,” she replied severely with her icy upper lip.

Actually, after some time had passed and Sonya’s irreplaceability in the kitchen for pre-party preparations and her sewing skills and her willingness to take other people’s children for walks and even babysit if the whole noisy group was heading for some unpostponable festivity became evident—with the passage of time, the crystal of Sonya’s stupidity sparkled with other facets, exquisite in its unpredictability. A sensitive instrument, Sonya’s soul apparently captured the tonality of the mood of the society that had sheltered her yesterday, but, gawking, she failed to attune herself to today’s mood. So, if Sonya gaily shouted out, “Bottoms up!” at a wake, it was clear she was still at somebody’s birthday party; while at weddings, Sonya’s toasts gave off the gloom of yesterday’s funeral meats.

“I saw you yesterday at the concert with a beautiful lady; I wonder, who was she?” Sonya would ask a bewildered husband as she leaned across his stiffened wife. At moments like that, the mocker Lev Adolfovich would purse his lips, arch his eyebrows, and shake his head, his shallow glasses glinting. “If a person is dead, that’s for a long time; if he’s stupid, that’s forever.” Well, that’s just what happened, time merely confirmed his words.

Lev Adolfovich’s sister, Ada, a sharp, thin woman of serpentine elegance who was once discomfited by Sonya’s idiocy, dreamed of punishing her. Just a little, of course, so they could have a laugh and give the little fool some amusement. And they whispered in a corner—Lev and Ada—plotting something witty.

So, Sonya sewed—And how did she dress? Most unbecomingly, friends, most unbecomingly. Something blue, striped, so unflattering. Just imagine: a head like a Przewalski’s horse (Lev Adolfovich noted that), under her jaw the huge dangling bow of her blouse sticking out from her suit’s stiff lapels, and the sleeves were always too long. Sunken chest, legs so fat they looked as if they came from a different person’s set, enormous feet. She wore down her shoes on one side. Well, her chest and legs, that’s not clothing—Yes it is, my dear, it counts as clothing too. You have to take features like that into account, some things you just can’t wear at all—She had a brooch, an enamel dove. She wore it on the lapel of her jacket, never parted with it. And when she changed into another dress, she always pinned on that dove.

Sonya was a good cook. She whipped up marvelous cakes. And then that, you know, offal, innards—kidneys, udders, brains—it’s so easy to ruin them, but she made them wonder-fully. So those dishes were always assigned to her. It was delicious and an excuse for jokes. Lev Adolfovich, pursing his lips, would call across the table: “Sonechka, your udders simply astonish me today!” And she would nod happily in reply. And Ada would say in a sweet voice, “I, for one, am enraptured by your sheep’s brains.” “They’re veal,” Sonya would reply, not understanding, smiling. And everyone enjoyed it; wasn’t it just too much?

She liked children, that was clear, and you could go on vacation, even to Kislovodsk, and leave the children and the apartment in her care—why don’t you live at our place for a while, Sonya, all right?—and find everything in perfect order upon your return: the furniture dusted, the children rosy-cheeked and fed, and they played outside every day and even went on field trips to the museum where Sonya worked as some sort of curator; those museum curators lead a boring life, they’re all old maids. The children would become attached to her and be sad when she had to be transferred to another family. But you can’t be egoists and hog Sonya; others might need her, too. In general, they managed, setting up a sensible queuing system.