Tatyana Tolstaya - White Walls - Collected Stories

She had been married: it was as if she’d done an interminable, boring stretch on a transcontinental train and emerged—tired, dispirited, and yawning uncontrollably—into the starless night of a strange city, where the only kindred soul was her suitcase.

Then she lived the life of a recluse for a while: she took up washing and polishing the floors in her spotless little Moscow apartment, developed an interest in patterns and sewing, and once again grew bored. An affair with the dermatologist Arkady Borisovich, who had two families not counting Nina, smoldered sluggishly along. After work she would drop by his office to see him. There was nothing the least bit romantic about it; the cleaning lady would be emptying out the trash cans and slopping a wet mop across the linoleum while Arkady Borisovich washed his hands over and over, scrubbing them with a brush, suspiciously inspecting his pink nails and examining himself in the mirror with disgust. He would stand there, pink, well fed, and stiff, egg-shaped, and take no notice of Nina, though she was already in her coat on her way out the door. Then he would stick out his triangular tongue and twist it this way and that—he was afraid of infection. A fine Prince Charming! What sort of passion could she find with Arkady Borisovich? None, of course.

Yet she’d certainly earned the right to happiness, she was entitled to a place in the line where it was being handed out: her face was white and pretty and her eyebrows broad, her smooth black hair grew low from her temples and was gathered at the back in a bun. And her eyes were black, so that out in public men took her for a Moldavian Gypsy, and once, in the metro, in the passageway to the Kirovskaya station, a fellow had even pestered her, claiming that he was a sculptor and she must come along with him immediately, supposedly to sit for the head of a houri—right away, his clay was drying out. Of course she didn’t go with him; she had a natural mistrust of people in the creative professions, since she had already been through the sorry experience of going for a cup of coffee with an alleged film director and barely escaping in one piece—the fellow had a large apartment with Chinese vases and a slanted garret ceiling in an old building.

But time was marching on, and at the thought that out of the approximately 125 million men in the USSR fate in all its generosity had managed to dribble out only Arkady Borisovich for her, Nina sometimes got upset. She could have found someone else, but the other men who came her way weren’t right either. After all, her soul was growing richer as the years passed, she experienced and understood her own being with ever greater subtlety, and on autumn evenings she felt more and more self-pity: there was no one to whom she could give herself—she, so slim and black-browed.

Occasionally Nina would visit some married girlfriend and, having stopped off to buy chocolates at the nearest candy shop for someone else’s big-eared child, would drink tea and talk for a long time, eyeing herself all the while in the dark glass of the kitchen door, where her reflection was even more enigmatic, and more alluring in comparison with her friend’s spreading silhouette. Justice demanded that someone sing her praises. Having finally heard her friend out—what had been bought, what had been burnt, what ailments the big-eared child had survived—and having examined someone else’s standard-issue husband (a receding hairline, sweatpants stretched at the knees —no, she didn’t need one like that), she left feeling dismayed. She carried her elegant self out the door, onto the landing, and down the staircase into the refreshing night: these weren’t the right sort of people, she should never have come, in vain had she given of herself and left her perfumed trace in the drab kitchen, she had pointlessly treated someone else’s child to exquisite bittersweet chocolate—the child just gobbled it down with no appreciation; oh, well, let the little beast break out in an allergic rash from head to toe.

She yawned.

And then came the epidemic of Japanese flu. All the doctors were pulled out of the district clinics for house calls, and Arkady Borisovich went, too, putting on a gauze face mask and rubber gloves to keep the virus from getting a hold on him, but he couldn’t protect himself and came down with it, and his patients were assigned to Nina. And there, as it turned out, was where fate lay in wait for her—in the person of Grisha, stretched out completely unconscious on a bench in a custodian’s lodge, under knit blankets, his beard sticking up. That was where it all happened. The near-corpse quickly abducted Nina’s weary heart: the mournful shadows on his porcelain brow, the darkness around his sunken eyes, and the tender beard, wispy as a springtime forest—all this made for a magical scene. Invisible violins played a wedding waltz, and the trap sprang shut. Well, everybody knows how it usually happens.

A sickeningly beautiful woman with tragically undisciplined hair was wringing her hands over the dying man. (Later on, to be sure, it turned out that she was no one special, just Agniya, a school friend of Grisha’s, an unsuccessful actress who sang a little to a guitar, nothing to worry about, that wasn’t where the threat lay.) Yes, yes, she said, she was the one who’d called the doctor—you must save him! She had just, you know, dropped in by chance, after all he doesn’t lock his door, and he’d never call for help himself, not Grisha—custodian, poet, genius, saint! Nina unglued her gaze from the demonically handsome custodian and proceeded to look the place over: a large room, beer bottles under the table, dusty molding on the ceiling, the bluish light of snowdrifts from the windows, an abandoned fireplace stuffed with rags and rubbish.

“He’s a poet, a poet—he works as a custodian so he can have the apartment,” mumbled Agniya.

Nina kicked Agniya out, lifted her bag from her shoulder, and hung it on a nail, carefully took her heart from Grishunya’s hands and nailed it to the bedstead. Grishunya muttered deliriously, in rhyme. Arkady Borisovich melted away like sugar in hot tea. The thorny path lay ahead.

On recovering the use of his eyes and ears, Grishunya learned that the joyous Nina meant to stay with him to the bitter end. At first he was a bit taken aback, and suggested deferring this unexpected happiness, or—if that wasn’t possible— hastening his meeting with that end; later, though, softhearted fellow that he was, he became more complaisant, and asked only that he not be parted from his friends. Nina compromised for the time being, while he regained his strength. This, of course, was a mistake; he was soon back on his feet, and he resumed his senseless socializing with the entire, endless horde. There were a few young people of indeterminate profession; an old man with a guitar; teenage poets; actors who turned out to be chauffeurs, and chauffeurs who turned out to be actors; a demobilized ballerina who was always crying, “Hey, I’ll call our gang over, too”; ladies in diamonds; unlicensed jewelers; unattached girls with spiritual aspirations in their eyes; philosophers with unfinished dissertations; a deacon from Novorossisk who always brought a suitcase full of salted fish; and a Tungus from eastern Siberia, who’d got stuck in Moscow—he was afraid the capital’s cuisine would spoil his digestion and so would ingest only some kind of fat, which he ate out of a jar with his fingers.

All of them—some one evening, some the next—crammed into the custodian’s lodge; the little three-story outbuilding creaked, the upstairs neighbors came in, people strummed guitars, sang, read poems of their own and others, but mainly listened to those of their host. They all considered Grishunya a genius; a collection of his verse had been on the verge of publication for years, but a certain pernicious Makushkin, on whom everything depended, was blocking it—Makushkin, who had sworn that only over his dead body… They cursed Makushkin, extolled Grishunya, the women asked him to read more, more. Flushed, self-conscious, Grisha read on—thick, significant poems that recalled expensive, custom-made cakes covered with ornamental inscriptions and triumphant meringue towers, poems slathered with sticky linguistic icing, poems containing abrupt, nutlike crunches of clustered sounds and excruciating, indigestible caramel confections of rhyme. “Eh-eh-eh,” said the Tungus, shaking his head; apparently he didn’t understand a word of Russian. “What’s wrong? Doesn’t he like it?” murmured the other guests. “No, no—I’m told that’s the way they express praise,” said Agniya, fluffing her hair nervously, afraid that the Tungus would jinx her. The guests couldn’t take their eyes off Agniya, and invited her to continue the evening with them elsewhere.