Tatyana Tolstaya - White Walls - Collected Stories

Where was I?

Aunt Rita. Strange traveling companions Aunt Rita had chosen for herself. If, of course, it was her.

No, it wasn’t her. No. Aunt Rita was young, she had a different hairdo: a roll of bangs on her forehead, fair, wispy hair. She would whirl in front of the mirror, trying on a sash and singing. What else? Why, nothing else. She just sang.

She must have been planning to get married.

And she disappeared, and Denisov’s mother ordered him never to ask about her again. To forget. Denisov obeyed and forgot. Her perfume flacon, all that remained of her, a glass one with an atomizer and a dark blue silk tassel, he traded in the courtyard for a penknife and his mother hit him and cried that night—he heard her. Thirty-five years had passed. Why torment him?…

What does the siege have to do with it, I’d like to know. The siege was already long past by then. That’s what comes of reading all sorts of things at bedtime…

I wonder who those people are. The old man looks like the farmer-fisherman type. How did he get in there?… And the fat guy—what, is he dead too? Oh, how he must have hated dying, his kind are afraid of dying. What squealing there must have been. And his children probably shouted, Papa, Papa!… Why did he die?

But comrades, why visit me? What do I have to do with it? What did I do, murder someone? These aren’t my dreams, I don’t have anything to do with it, it’s not my fault. Go away, comrades. Please, go away.

Lord, how sick I make myself!

Better to think about Lora. A pretty woman. And one good thing about her—although she shows all signs of really loving Denisov, she doesn’t pester him, doesn’t demand uninterrupted attention, hasn’t set her sights on changing his way of life, but entertains herself, goes to the theater, to underground art openings, to saunas, while Denisov, thinking arduously, wastes away on his sofa and searches for the path to immortality. What problems could she be having with her father? He’s a good, quiet papa, just what the doctor ordered, he keeps himself busy. He sits in his study, doesn’t meddle in anything, nibbles on chocolates, writes articles that he puts by for winter: “The master of the woodlands loves a tasty treat of dry, fleshy multicarpels and dry indehiscents…. But as soon as the north wind blows, as soon as foul weather begins to sport and play, the Bruin’s overall metabolism slows abruptly, the tone of the gastrointestinal tract lowers, and we observe a corresponding growth of the lipid layer. But the minus range doesn’t frighten our friend Mikhailo Ivanych: a first-rate scalp and a splendid epidermis…” Oh, to crawl into a cave like a bear, to burrow into the snow, close your eyes tight, grow deaf, depart into sleep, pass through the dead city along the fortress wall from gate to gate, along the paved streets, counting the windows, losing count: this one’s dark, that one’s dark, and this one too, and that one will never light up—and there are only owls, and the moon, and dust grown cold, and the squeak of a door on rusty hinges… but where have they all gone? Aunt Rita, now there’s a nice little house, tiny windows, a staircase to the second floor, flowers on the windowsill, an apron and a broom, a candle, a sash, and a round mirror, why don’t you live here? Why don’t you look out the window in the morning? The old man in the blue shirt is sitting on a bench, resting from his long life, the freckled fat man is bringing greens from the marketplace, he’ll smile and wave; here the knife grinder sharpens scissors, and over there they’re beating rugs… And there’s Lora’s papa riding a bicycle, turning the pedals, dogs are following him, they get in the way of the wheels.

Lora! I’m sick, my thoughts oppress me. Lora, come on over, say something. Lora? Hello!

But Lora doesn’t have the strength to come all the way out to Orekhovo-Borisovo, Lora’s terribly tired today, I’m sorry, Denisov, Lora went to see Ruzanna, something’s wrong with Ruzanna’s leg, it’s a real nightmare. She showed the doctor, but the doctor doesn’t have a clue—as usual—but there’s a woman named Viktoria Kirillovna, she took one look and immediately said: You’ve been jinxed, Ruzannochka. And when they put the hex on you, it always affects the legs. And you could probably find out who put this spell on you, Viktoria said, but that is a secondary question because there are thousands of witches in Moscow, and right now the main thing is to try and lift the spell. First off you have to fumigate the apartment with onion stalks, all the corners. So we went and fumigated, and then Viktoria Kirillovna checked out all the potted plants and said: These are all right, you can keep them, but this one—what, are you crazy, keeping this in the house? Throw it out immediately. Ruzanna said that she knows who’s out to get her, it’s the women at work. She bought herself a third fur coat, went to work, and right away she felt the atmosphere tense up. It’s just plain envy, and it’s not even clear why they have such base feelings; after all, like Ruzanna says, it’s not like she bought the fur coat for herself, she really bought it for others, to raise the aesthetic level of the landscape. Ruzanna herself can’t see anything from inside the coat anyway, but it makes things more interesting for everyone on the outside, there’s more variety for the soul. And for free too. I mean, it’s almost like an art show, like the Mona Lisa or Glazunov; for that they push and shove and wait in humongous lines for five hours and have to pay their own hard-earned rubles to boot. But here Ruzanna spends her own money and presto—art delivered to your door. And then they’re unhappy about it. It’s just crass ignorance. And Viktoria Kirillovna agreed: That’s right, it’s crass ignorance, and instructed Ruzanna to lie on the bed with her head to the east. Ruzanna showed her a photo of the dacha that she and Armen have on the Black Sea so that Viktoria could tell her whether everything was all right there, and Viktoria looked at it carefully and said: No, not everything. The house is heavy. A very heavy house. And Ruzanna got upset, because so much money’s been put into that dacha, would they really have to redo everything? But Viktoria reassured her; she said shed find some time and visit the dacha with her husband—he possesses amazing abilities too—she’d stay there awhile and see what could be done to help. She asked Ruzanna whether the beach and the market were nearby, because they are sources of negative energy. It turned out that they’re very close, so Ruzanna got even more upset and asked Viktoria to help right away. She begged her to fly to the Caucasus immediately and do everything possible to screen out these sources. So Viktoria—she’s really got a heart of gold—is taking a photograph of Ruzanna’s leg with her so she can work on healing her down south.

And Viktoria told Lora that her energy core had become completely unfocused, her spinal cord was polluted, and her yin was constantly sparking, which could mean serious trouble. It’s because we live near the TV tower and Papa’s and my fields are incredibly warped. And as for Papa’s case—I’m having some problems with Papa—Viktoria said it’s beyond her capabilities, but there’s an absolutely amazing guru visiting Moscow now, with some unpronounceable name, Pafnuty Epaminondovich, or something like that; he cures people who believe in him, with his spittle. A wonderful, totally uneducated old fellow with a beard to his knees and piercing, piercing eyes. He doesn’t believe in blood circulation and has already convinced a lot of people that it doesn’t exist—even a woman doctor from the departmental clinic, a big fan of his, is completely convinced that he’s basically right. Pafnuty teaches that there’s no such thing as blood circulation, only the appearance of it, but juices, on the other hand, do exist, that’s certain. If a person’s juices have stagnated—he gets sick; if they’ve coagulated—he’ll be disabled; but if they’ve gone to hell and completely dried up, then it’s curtains for the poor guy. Pafnuty won’t treat everybody, only those who believe in his teachings. And he demands humility, you have to fall at his feet and beg—“Grandfather, help me, poor, wretched worm that I am”—and if you do it just right, then he spits in your mouth and they say you feel better instantly, it’s as if you’ve seen the light and your soul has been uplifted. The healing takes two weeks, and you can’t smoke or drink tea, or even take a drop of milk, God forbid—you can only drink unboiled water through your nose. Well, the academicians are furious, of course. You see, all their scientific work is shot, and their graduate students are beginning to look elsewhere, but they can’t touch him because he cured some bigwig. They say that firm from Switzerland came—what’s it called, Sandoz or something—anyway, they took his saliva to analyze —those guys won’t do anything without chemistry, they’ve got no spirituality, it’s just awful—so, well, the results are top secret, but supposedly they found levomycitin, tetracycline, and some sort of psi factor in the old man’s saliva. And back in Basel they’re building two factories for the production of this factor, and that journalist Postrelov, you know, the famous one, he’s writing a very polemical article about how we shouldn’t stand for bureaucratic red tape and the squandering of our national saliva, or else we’ll end up having to buy back our own resources for foreign currency. Yes, I’m sure of this, and just yesterday I was in that shop called Natasha, waiting in line for Peruvian tops—not bad, only the collars were pretty crude— and I started talking to a woman who knows this Pafnuty and can arrange a meeting with him while he’s still in Moscow, or else he’ll leave and go back to his Bodaibo in the Far East again. Are you listening to me?… Hello!