Tatyana Tolstaya - White Walls - Collected Stories

His grandmother gave Peters slapdash German lessons. They played the very old game, Black Peter, drawing cards from each other’s hand and matching up pairs—goose and gander, rooster and hen, dogs with haughty faces. Only the cat, Black Peter, had no pair, he was always alone—grim and withdrawn—and whoever got stuck with Black Peter at the end of the game lost and just sat there like a fool.

They also had color postcards with captions: Wiesbaden, Karlsruhe; there were transparent inserts without feathers but with a window: if you look into the window, you see someone distant, tiny, on horseback. They also sang “O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum!” All that was German lessons.

When Peters turned six, his grandmother took him to a New Year’s party. The children had been checked out: not infectious. Peters walked as fast as he could in the snow, his grandmother barely kept up. His throat was snugly wrapped in a white scarf, his eyes shone in the dark like a cat’s. He was in a hurry to make friends. The marvelous life was beginning. The big hot apartment smelled of pine, toys and stars sparkled, other people’s mothers bustled with pies and soft pretzels, quick, agile children squealed and raced around. Peters stopped in the middle of the room and waited for them to make friends. “Catch us, tubby!” they shouted. Peters ran blindly and then stopped. They smashed into him, he fell and stood up, like a weighted doll. Hard adult hands moved him toward the wall. He stood there until tea was served.

At tea all the children behaved badly except Peters. He ate his portion, wiped his mouth, and awaited events, but there were no events. Only one girl, as black as a beetle, asked him if he had any warts and showed him hers.

Peters immediately fell in love with the girl with the warts and dogged her every step. He asked her to sit on the couch with him and that no one else come near her. But he couldn’t wiggle his ears or roll his tongue into a tube, which she requested, and she quickly grew bored and abandoned him. Then he didn’t know what to do. Then he wanted to spin in place and shout loudly, and he spun and shouted, and then his grandmother was dragging him home through blue snow hanks saying indignantly that she simply didn’t recognize him, that he was all sweaty and that they would no longer visit children. And in fact, they were never there again.

Until he was fifteen, Peters held his grandmother’s hand when they walked on the street. First she supported him and then vice versa. At home they played dominoes and solitaire. Peters used a jigsaw. He wasn’t a good student. Before dying, his grandmother got Peters into a library school and willed him to protect his throat and wash his hands thoroughly.

The day she was buried the ice broke on the Neva River.

In the library where Peters worked, the women were not attractive. And he liked attractive women. But what could he offer such a woman, if he ever met one? A pink belly and tiny eyes? If only he were a brilliant conversationalist, if only he knew German well; but no, all he remembered from his childhood was Karlsruhe. But in his imagination he has an affair with a gorgeous woman. While she does this and that, he reads Schiller out loud to her. In the original. Or Holderlin. She doesn’t understand a word, naturally, nor could she, but that’s not important; what’s important is how he reads—with inspiration, with a musical ripple in his voice… Holding the book close to his nearsighted eyes… No, no, of course he’ll get contact lenses. Though they say they pinch. So, here he is reading. “Drop the book,” she says. Kisses, tears, and the dawn, the dawn… And the contacts pinch. He’ll blink and squint and poke his fingers in his eyes…. She’ll wait a bit and then say, “Just peel those damned bits of glass off, good lord!” And get up and slam the door.

No. This is better. A sweet, quiet blonde. Her head on his shoulder. He is reading Holderlin out loud. Maybe Schiller. Dark forests, mermaids… He’s reading and reading, his mouth is dried out. She’ll yawn and say, “Good lord, how long am I supposed to listen to this stuff?”

No, that wouldn’t do, either.

What if he left out the German? Without the German, it could go something like this: a knockout woman, like a leopard. And he’s like a tiger. Have to have ostrich feathers, a lithe silhouette on the couch…. (Have it slipcovered.) The silhouette, then. The cushions fall to the floor. And the dawn, the dawn… Maybe I’ll even marry her. Why not? Peters looked at his reflection in the mirror, the fat nose, the eyes rolling with passion, the soft flat feet. And so what? He looked a bit like a polar bear, women ought to like that and be pleasantly frightened. Peters blew at himself in the mirror to cool off. But neither friendships nor affairs happened.

Peters tried going to dances, stumbling about, panting, and stepping on young ladies’ feet: he would approach a group of laughing and chatting people, clasp his hands behind his back, tilt his head to one side, and listen to the conversation. It was getting dark, August was blowing cool air from the stiff bushes, sprinkling the red dust of the last rays over the black foliage and the park’s paths; lights went on in the stalls and kiosks selling wine and meat, and Peters went past severely holding on to his wallet, but unable to resist the wave of hunger that engulfed him, bought a half dozen pastries, went off to the side, and in the gathered darkness hurriedly consumed them from the glinting metal plate. When he came out of the darkness, blinking, licking his lips, with white cream on his chin, and mustered his courage, he approached people and introduced himself— blindly, headlong, seeing nothing out of fear, clicking the heels of his flat feet—and women recoiled and men intended to punch him, but took a closer look and changed their minds.

No one wanted to play with him.

At home Peters beat egg yolks and sugar for his throat, washed and dried the glass, then set his slippers neatly on the bedside rug, got into bed, stretching his arms out on top of the covers, and lay motionless, staring into the twilit, pulsating ceiling until sleep came for him.

Sleep came, invited him into its loopholes and corridors, made dates on secret stairways, locked the doors and rebuilt familiar houses, frightening him with trunks and women and bubonic plagues and black diamonds, quickly led him along dark passages, and pushed him into a stuffy room where a man sat at a table twiddling his thumbs, shaggy and laughing mockingly, knowledgeable in many nasty things.

Peters thrashed in his sheets, begged forgiveness, and forgiven this time, once again plunged to the bottom until morning, confused in the reflections of the crooked mirrors of the magic theater.

When a new person appeared in the library, dark and perfumed, in a berry-colored dress, Peters grew agitated. He went to the barber and had his colorless hair cut, then swept his apartment an extra time, and switched the chest of drawers and armchair around. Not that he expected Faina to come over right away; but just in case, Peters had to be ready.

At work there was a New Year’s party, and Peters bustled about, cutting out snowflakes the size of saucers and pasting them on the library windows, hanging pink crepe paper, getting tangled in foil icicles, the small Christmas tree lights were reflected in his rolling eyes, it smelled of pine and garlic, and dry snow came through the open window. He thought: if she has, say, a fiance, I could come over to him, quietly take him by the hand and ask in a regular, man-to-man way: leave Faina, leave her for me, what’s it to you, you can find someone else for yourself, you know how to do it. But I don’t, my mother ran off with a scoundrel, my father’s floating in the sky with blue women, Grandmother ate Grandfather with the rice porridge, ate my childhood, my only childhood, and girls with warts don’t want to sit on the couch with me. Come on, give me something, huh?