Tatyana Tolstaya - White Walls - Collected Stories

“How do you stand him, Dima, you’re simply a saint!”

“Don’t be silly, my child, what’s there to get excited about! He’s got it bad enough as is, let him live out his life in peace! For him the time has come to wither; for you, to blossom. You see, even my walking stick is blooming at the sight of you.” Olga Mikhailovna’s head spins; if no one could see her she’d jump up and down and do cartwheels—wow, what a romance! Dmitry Ilich combs back his hair with his fingers, flashes his hawk eyes, and feasts them on Olga Mikhailovna.

It grows dark. Korobeinikov, completely black, shuffles from the village to the sanatorium; a little ball of light bounces about on the roots. Dmitry Ilich has no secrets from Olga Mikhailovna: “By the way, my child, I was only joking,” he says, knocking leaves from a bush with a stick. “It was a practical joke— punish me. That story about the poems—it never happened, and I’ve never seen that Korobeinikov of yours before in my life.”

“What do you mean, Dima?” says Olga Mikhailovna, scared.

“The devil led me astray. Or maybe I was jealous of him. I thought, Who is this Korobeinikov character? But I pulled it off, didn’t I?”

“Ohhhh, Dimochka, you’re so bad,” pouts Olga Mikhailovna. “What are we going to do with you? Come on, let’s go have our tea. My husband is probably sharpening his switchblade by now.”

Over tea they giggle like conspirators. “What’s with you two?” says Olga Mikhailovna’s husband, surprised. So they have to tell about how Dmitry Ilich played a joke on Korobeinikov.

Dmitry Ilich is very amusing about doing penance—he clasps his hands together and begs to be forgiven. He even wants to get down on his knees in front of everyone, only his lame leg gets in his way. “Don’t be ridiculous!” everyone shouts. No, he insists, he’ll get down on his knees! At least on one knee. He’s repented, repented! On one knee, and the other leg cocked like a pistol: how do you prefer the other leg—in front or behind? Everyone laughs: this Dmitry Ilich is so awfully artistic! And though Korobeinikov may be vindicated now, he’s a bore anyway. And somehow they’ve got used to thinking badly of him. Oh, to hell with him! “Heavenly flame!” “Megahertz!” “It hertz until it stoptz!” “Did you hear that?” shouts Olga Mikhailovna’s husband. “It hertz until it stoptz!” Anyway, he always talked such a lot of nonsense, and told such lies—did you notice? And tomorrow he’ll drag himself over here again. He ought to at least be ashamed—he can see how people feel about him; he could just stay put in that sanatorium of his! Spit in his face and he thinks it’s a spring rain!

The next day Olga Mikhailovna feels very uncomfortable. First of all, around her husband, who doesn’t suspect a thing— oh well, that doesn’t matter—and secondly around Korobeinikov. It would be better if he didn’t come. It’s uncomfortable to look someone straight in the eye when we’ve treated him like crap for no reason and we can’t admit it. But, on the other hand, he’s been cleared. And now we don’t have to live with that awful feeling of having invited a bastard into the house. Dima behaved badly, of course. But he’s repented—and all on his own, too, no one twisted his arm. It takes guts to do that, whatever you say. That’s courage.

But Korobeinikov does come, of course. And he tries really hard. Why does he try so hard? It’s all over with! And Olga Mikhailovna puts up with him, soiled as he is, and she’s solicitous, emphatically solicitous, as she pours him tea and feeds him pound cake. “Everything they give you in the sanatorium is probably mush—isn’t it? At least here you can eat like a real person.” Korobeinikov is startled, he looks bewilderedly through his thick glasses. He doesn’t understand—what was all that about, last week? What’s going on now? There’s some kind of tension in the air. And does anyone like this tension? No one does. It’s hard to be with him, Korobeinikov. He’s already turned completely yellow. And it would be nice if he’d realize that, since the conflict is resolved and everything’s cleared up now, it would just be better if he didn’t come here anymore. Because it’s hard to be with him. And when he looks closely into their faces, trying to understand, that’s hard too. And there’s no point staring. As it turns out, it’s nothing to do with him. He’s been acquitted and now he can just leave.

Olga Mikhailovna looks at Korobeinikov with hatred. These nightly visits drive her crazy. And they drive everyone else in the house crazy, too. What—don’t we have the right to live like human beings? Among our own friends? Honestly, it would be better if he died. Yes, well, that’s what’ll probably happen soon. That’s no ulcer he’s got, oh no. It’s not an ulcer; see how lemony-looking he is, and he’s aged right before our very eyes. And another sign that the end is near is that insensitivity and tactlessness, that thickheaded stubbornness—when the sick person doesn’t care about proprieties anymore and just clings to life, to people, to whatever there is. Yes, as an honest person, she freely admits it to herself: she wishes he would die. There you have it. Everyone would rest easier.

The nights are cold: she goes out on the porch, offers Korobeinikov a jacket, knowing that he won’t take it; she waits while he lights the flashlight, steps down from the porch; she listens greedily to his feeble feet shuffling through the fallen leaves. She hopes that she’s right about the symptoms. Soon, very soon. It would be nice if it were before the end of the summer. She stands for a long time and watches the flashlight’s pale fire count the hospital-white birch trunks, watches the corridor of light close in, the darkness thicken, the heavenly flame sweep blindly by, searching out its victim.

AT NIGHT spring blows through Leningrad. River wind, garden wind, and stone wind collide, whirl together in a powerful rush, and race through the empty troughs of the streets, shatter the glass of attic windows with a peal and lift the damp, limp sleeves of laundry drying between rafters; the winds fling themselves flat on the ground, soar up again, and take off, speeding the scents of granite and budding leaves out to the night sea where, on a distant ship under a fleet sea star, a sleepless traveler crossing the night will raise his head, inhale the arriving air, and think: land.

But by early summer the city begins to wear on the soul. In the pale evening you stand at the window above the emptying street and watch the arc lamps come on quietly—one moment they’re dead and silent, and then suddenly, like a sick, technological star, a rosy manganese point lights up, and it swells, spills, grows, and brightens until it shines full strength with a dead, lunar whiteness. Meanwhile, outside of town, the grasses have already quietly risen from the earth, and without a thought for us the trees rustle and the gardens change flowers. Somewhere out there are dusty white roads with tiny violets growing along their shoulders, the swish of summer stillness at the summit of century-old birches.

Somewhere out there our dacha is aging, collapsing on one side. The weight of February snows has crushed the roof, winter storms have toppled the double-horned chimney. The window frames are cracking and weakened diamonds of colored glass fall onto the ground, onto the brittle litter of two years’ flowers, onto the dry muddle of spent stems; they fall with a faint chime no one will hear. There’s no one to weed out the stinging nettle and goosefoot, sweep the pine needles from the rickety porch, no one to open the creaky, unpainted shutters.

There used to be Zhenechka for all this. Even now it seems she might be limping along the garden path, in her hand the first bouquet of dill, raised like a torch. Perhaps she actually is somewhere around here right now, only we can’t see her. But the cemetery is definitely not the right place for her—for anyone else in the world, yes, but not for her. After all, she meant to live forever, until the seas dry up. It never even crossed her mind that she could stop living, and, truth be told, we too were certain of her immortality—as we were of our own, for that matter.