Tatyana Tolstaya - White Walls - Collected Stories

The burning candles stood, chest-high in translucent apple light, a promise of goodness and peace, the pink-yellow flame nodded its head, champagne fizzed, Faina sang to guitar accompaniment, Dostoevsky’s picture on the wall averted its eyes; then they told fortunes, opening Pushkin at random. Peters got: “Adele, love my reed.” They laughed at him and asked him to introduce them to Adele; they forgot about it, talking on their own, and he sat quietly in the corner, crunching on cake, figuring out how he would see Faina home. As the party broke up, he ran after her to the coat room, held her fur coat in outstretched arms, watched her change shoes, putting her foot in colored stocking into the cozy fur-lined boot, wrapping a white scarf around her head, and hoisting her bag on her shoulder— everything excited him. She slammed the door, and he saw only her—she waved a mitten, jumped into the trolley, and vanished in the white blizzard. But even that was like a promise.

Triumphant bells rang in his ears, and his eye saw what had previously been invisible. All roads led to Faina, all winds trumpeted her glory, shouted out her dark name, whirled over the steep slate roofs, over towers and spires, snaked in snowy strands and threw themselves at her feet, and the whole city, all the islands and the water and embankments, statues and gardens, bridges and fences, wrought-iron roses and horses, everything blended into a circle, weaving a rattling winter wreath for his beloved.

He could never manage to be alone with her and he sought her out on the street, but she always whizzed past him like the wind, a ball, a snowball thrown by a strong arm. And her friend who looked in at the library in the evenings was horrible, impossible, like a toothache—an outgoing journalist, all creaking leather, long-legged, long-haired, full of international jokes about a Russian, a German, and a Pole measuring the fatness of their women and the Russian winning. The journalist wrote an article in the paper, where he lied and said that “it is always very crowded at the stands with books on beet raising” and that “visitors call librarian Faina A. the pilot of the sea of books.”

Faina laughed, happy to be in the newspaper, Peters suffered in silence. He kept mustering his strength to at last take her by the hand, lead her to his house, and after a session of passion discuss their future life together.

Toward the end of winter on a damp, tubercular evening Peters was drying his hands in the men’s room under the hot blast of air and eavesdropping on Faina talking on the telephone in the corridor. The dryer shuddered and shut up, and in the ensuing silence the beloved voice laughed: “No, we have nothing but women on our staff. Who?… Him?… That’s not a man; he’s a wimp. An endocrinological sissy.”

Adele, love my reed. Inside, Peters felt as if he had been run over by a trolley. He looked around at the pathetic yellowed tile, the old mirror, swollen from inside with silver sores, the faucet leaking rust—life had selected the right place for the final humiliation. He wound the scarf around his throat carefully, so as not to catch cold in his glands, wended his way home, felt for his slippers, went to the window, out of which he planned to fall, and pulled the blind. The window was thoroughly taped for the winter and he didn’t want to waste his work. Then he turned on the oven, placed his head on the rack with cold bread crumbs, and waited. Who would eat rice porridge in his memory? Then Peters remembered that there hadn’t been any gas all day, they were doing repairs, grew furious, with trembling finger dialed the dispatcher and screamed horribly and incoherently about the outrageous service, got into his grandfather’s chair, and sat there till morning.

In the morning, large snowflakes fell slowly. Peters looked at the snow, at the chastened sky, at the new snow banks, and quietly rejoiced that he would have no more youth.

But a new spring came, through the connecting courtyards, the snows died, a cloying smell of decay came from the soil, blue ripples ran over puddles, and Leningrad’s cherry trees once again showered white on the matchbox sailboats and newspaper ships—and did it matter at all where you start a new voyage, in a ditch or an ocean, when spring calls and the wind is the same everywhere? And marvelous were the new galoshes Peters bought—their insides laid with the flesh of flowering fuchsia, the taut rubber shining like patent leather, promising to mark his earthly paths with a chain of waffle ovals no matter where he went in search of happiness. And without hurrying, hands behind his back, he strolled along the stone streets, peering deeply into yellow archways, sniffing the air of canals and rivers; and the evening and Saturday women gave him long looks that boded no good, thinking: here’s a sickie, we don’t need him.

But he didn’t need them, either; but Valentina caught his eyes, small and sinfully young—she was buying spring postcards on the sunny embankment, and the fortunate wind, gust-ing, built, changed, and rebuilt hairdos on her black, short-cropped head. Peters dogged Valentina’s steps, afraid to come too close, afraid of failure. Athletic young men ran up to the beauty, grabbed her, laughing, and she went off with them, bouncing, and Peters saw violets—dark, purple—bought and presented, heard them call her by name—it tore away and flew with the wind, the laughing people turned the corner, and Peters was left with nothing—dumpy, white, unloved. And what could he have said to her—to her, so young, so be-vileted? Come up on his flabby legs and offer his flabby hand: “Peter-s…” (“What a strange name…” “My grandmother…” “Why did your grandmother…” “A little German…” “You know German?” “No, but Grandmother…”)

Ah, if only he had learned German then! Oh then, probably… Then, of course… Such a difficult language, it hisses, clicks, and moves around in the mouth, O Tannenbaum, probably no one even knows it…. But Peters will go and learn it and astonish the beauty….

Looking over his shoulder for the police, he posted notices on street lamps: “German Lessons Wanted.” They hung all through the summer, fading, moving their pseudopods. Peters visited his native lampposts, touching up the letters washed away by rain, gluing the torn corners, and in late fall he was called, and it was like a miracle—from the sea of humanity two floated up, responding to his quiet, faint call, slanted purple on white. Hey, did you call? I did, I did! He rejected the persistent and deep-voiced one, who dissolved once more into oblivion, while he thoroughly questioned the tinny lady, Elizaveta Frantsevna from Vasiliyevsky Island: how to get there, where exactly, and how much, and was there a dog, for he was afraid of dogs.

Everything was settled, Elizaveta Frantsevna expected him in the evening, and Peters went to his favorite corner to wait for Valentina—he had been watching and he knew she would come by as usual, waving her gym bag, at twenty to four, and would hop into the big red building, and would work out on the beam amid others like her, swift and young. She would pass, not suspecting that Peters existed, that he had a great plan, that life was marvelous. He decided that the best way would be to buy a bouquet, a big yellow bouquet, and silently, that was important, silently but with a bow hand it to Valentina on the familiar corner. “What’s this? Ah!”—and so on.

The wind was blowing, swirling, and it was pouring when he came out on the embankment. Through the veil of rain the red barrier of the damp fortress showed murkily, its lead spire murkily raised its index finger. It had been pouring since last night, and they had laid in a generous supply of water up there. The Swedes, when they left these rotten shores, forgot to take away the sky, and now they probably gloated on their neat little peninsula—they had clear, blue frost, black firs and white rabbits, while Peters was coughing here amid the granite and mildew.