Tatyana Tolstaya - White Walls - Collected Stories

Well, what else can I say about her? Basically, I think that’s it. Who remembers any details now? Fifty years later there’s almost no one left alive. And there were so many truly interesting, really worthwhile people, who left behind concert recordings, books, monographs on art. What fates! You could talk endlessly about any of them. Take Lev Adolfovich, a bastard basically, but a brilliant man and in some ways a pussycat. You could ask Ada Adolfovna, but she’s pushing ninety, I think, and… you understand… Something happened to her during the siege of Leningrad. Related to Sonya, incidentally. No, I don’t remember it very well. Something about a glass, and some letters, a joke of some sort.

How old was Sonya? In 1941—when her tracks break off— she should have been forty. Yes, I think that’s it. From that it’s easy to figure out when she was born and so forth, but what difference could that make if we don’t know who her parents were, what she was like as a child, where she lived, what she did, and who her friends were up to the day when she came into the world out of nebulousness and sat down to wait for the pepper in the sunny, festive dining room?

Of course, we must believe she was a romantic and, in her own way, lofty. After all, those bows of hers, and the enamel dove, and the poetry quotations, always sentimental, that flew from her lips inappositely, as if spat by her long upper lip that revealed her long ivory-colored teeth, and her love of children—and any children at that—all that characterizes her quite unambiguously. A romantic creature. Was she happy? Oh, yes! That’s certain. You can say what you want, but she was happy.

And just think—life is full of such tricks—she owed her happiness completely to Ada Adolfovna, that snake. (Too bad you didn’t know her in her youth. An interesting woman.)

A whole group of them got together—Ada, Lev, and Valerian, Seryozha, I think, and Kotik, and someone else—and worked out this practical joke (since the idea was Ada’s, Lev called it “a plan from Ades”), which turned out to be a great success. This must have been around 1933. Ada was in her prime, though no longer a girl—marvelous figure, dusky face with dark rose cheeks, she was number one at tennis, number one at kayaking, everyone thought she was terrific. Ada was even embarrassed by having so many suitors when Sonya had none. (What a joke! Suitors for Sonya?) And she suggested inventing a mysterious admirer for the poor thing, someone madly in love with her but who had reasons why he couldn’t meet her personally. Excellent idea. The phantom was created instantly, named Nikolai, burdened with a wife and three children, and moved into Ada’s father’s apartment for purposes of correspondence—here protests were voiced: what if Sonya learns, what if she sticks her nose in there?—but the argument was rejected as insubstantial. First of all, Sonya was stupid, that was the point; and secondly, she had a conscience—Nikolai had a family, she wouldn’t try to break it up. There, he wrote quite clearly, Nikolai did: darling, your unforgettable visage is imprinted forever on my wounded heart (“Don’t write ‘wounded,’ she’ll take it literally that he’s an invalid!”), but we are fated never, ever to be near because of my duty to my children… and so on. But my feeling, Nikolai continues—no, sincere feeling is better—will warm my cold members (“What do you mean, Adochka!” “Don’t bother me, you idiots!”) a pathfinding star and all that other moon-june-spoon. A letter like that. Let’s say he saw her at a concert, admired her fine profile (here Valerian fell off the couch laughing), and now wants to start up a lofty correspondence. He found out her address with difficulty. Begs for a photograph. Why can’t he meet for a date, the children won’t be in the way for that? He has a sense of duty. But for some reason they don’t keep him from writing, do they? Well, then he’s paralyzed. From the waist down. Hence the chilled members. Listen, stop fooling around. If necessary, we’ll paralyze him later. Ada sprinkled Chypre cologne on the stationery, Kotik pulled a dried forget-me-not from his childhood herbarium, pink with age, and stuck it in the envelope. Life was fun!

The correspondence was stormy on both sides. Sonya, the fool, went for it right away. She fell in love so hard you couldn’t drag her away. They had to rein in her ardor: Nikolai wrote about one letter a month, braking Sonya and her raging cupid. Nikolai expressed himself in poetry: Valerian had to sweat a bit. There were pearls there, if you understood—Nikolai compared Sonya to a lily, a liana, and a gazelle, and himself simultaneously to a nightingale and an antelope. Ada wrote the prose text and served as general director, stopping her silly friends and their suggestions to Valerian: “Write that she’s a gnu. In the sense of an antelope. My divine gnu, I perish anew without you.”

Ada was in top form: she quivered with Nikolai’s tenderness and revealed the depths of his lonely, stormy spirit, insisted on the necessity of preserving the platonic purity of their relations, and at the same time hinted at the destructive passion, whose time to be displayed for some reason had not yet come. Of course, in the evenings, Nikolai and Sonya had to lift their eyes to the same star at an appointed hour. Couldn’t do without that. If the participants in the epistolary novel were nearby at the appointed minute, they tried to keep Sonya from parting the curtains and sneaking a glance at the starry heights, calling her into the hallway: “Sonya, come here a moment. Sonya, here’s what—” relishing her confusion: the significant instant was approaching, and Nikolai’s gaze was in danger of hanging around in vain in the neighborhood of Sirius or whatever it was called—you generally had to look in the direction of Pulkovo Observatory.

Then the joke got boring: how long could they go on, especially since they could get absolutely nothing out of languid Sonya, no secrets; she didn’t want any bosom buddies and pretended nothing was going on. Just think how secretive she turned out to be, while she burned with unquenchable flames of high feeling in her letters, promising Nikolai eternal fidelity and telling him about every little thing: what she dreamed and what she had heard little birds twittering. She sent wagon loads of dried flowers in envelopes, and for one of Nikolai’s birthdays she sent him her only ornament, taking it off her ugly jacket: the white enamel dove. “Sonya, where’s your dove?” “It flew off,” she said, revealing her ivory equine teeth, and you couldn’t read anything in her eyes. Ada kept planning to kill off Nikolai, who was turning into a pain, but when she got the dove she shuddered and put the murder off for a better time. In the letter that came with the dove, Sonya swore to give her life for Nikolai or follow him, if necessary, to the ends of the earth.

The whole imaginable crop of laughter had been harvested, damned Nikolai was like a ball and chain underfoot, but it would have been inhumane to abandon Sonya alone on the road without her dove, without her love. The years passed: Valerian, Kotik, and, I think, Seryozha dropped out of the game for various reasons, and Ada carried the epistolary weight alone, hostilely baking monthly hot kisses by mail, like a machine. She had even begun to turn a little like Nikolai herself and at times in evening light she fancied she could see a mustache on her tanned pink face as she looked in the mirror. And so two women in two parts of Leningrad, one in hate, the other in love, wrote letters to each other about a person who had never existed.

When the war began, neither had time to evacuate. Ada dug ditches thinking about her son, taken out of the city with his kindergarten. No time for love. She ate everything she could find, boiled her leather shoes, drank hot bouillon made from wallpaper—that had a little paste, at least. December came, everything ended. Ada took her father on a sled to a common grave; and then Lev Adolfovich; fueled the stove with Dickens and with stiff fingers wrote Sonya Nikolai’s farewell letter. She wrote that it was all a lie, that she hated everyone, that Sonya was a stupid old fool and a horse, that none of it had been here and damn you all to hell. Neither Ada nor Nikolai wanted to go on living. She unlocked the doors of her father’s big apartment to make it easier for the funeral brigade to get in and lay down on the couch, piling her father’s and her brother’s coats on top of her.