Tatyana Tolstaya - White Walls - Collected Stories

To retell a life you need an entire life. We’ll skip it. Later, perhaps, sometime or another.

I’m really thinking about the whale: how he dove into the cold Norwegian waters suspecting nothing, not a thought for the red-bearded northern fishermen; how he wasn’t on his guard when he rose up to the gray surface of the sea, to the unextinguished yellow sunsets in the overflow of the northern waters, fair-haired girls, pines, stones, Grieg sonatas, to that sea sung by fashionable writers in the modern’s minor key. He didn’t need those baleens, those horny formations on his palate, those so-called whiskers or bones intended as an instrument for filtering plankton; the northern girls found a better use for them. A slender waist; luxuriant hair; a difficult love; a long life; children dragged by the hand across seas and continents. And then the end of war, then the victor’s roar, and the Allies sent us tins of good stewed pork; we ate it and spat the bones, teeth, and whiskers into the empty containers. But it’s the bottle-nosed whales that have the teeth, while ours, our very own, personal, gray, right, rorqual, our poor Yorick, didn’t even eat fish, he didn’t wrong any fishermen, he lived a radiant, short life—no, no, a long, long life, it continues even now and will continue as long as someone’s uncertain, pensive fingers keep fishing out and tossing back, fishing out and tossing back into the tin on the shaking windowsill these hushed, stunning skull shards of time. Clench a fragment of Yorick in your fist—milky and chill—and the heart grows younger, pounds faster, and strains; the suitor wants to snatch the young lady, and water spouts like a fountain to all ends of the sea, and the world circulates, whirling, spinning, wanting to fall; it stands on three whales, and splits away from them into the head-spinning abyss of time.

In 1948, Mikhail Avgustovich Janson, a pharmacist of Swedish descent, built a dacha near Leningrad to rent out to city folk for the summers. For himself, he added a little greenhouse and two small rooms over a chicken coop. He planned to live a long, happy life there, eating fresh eggs and cucumbers and selling valerian tincture made from plants that he lovingly grew with his own hands. By June, he was ready for an onslaught of tenants with trunks, children, and an unruly dog. The Lord had something else in mind, however. Janson died, and my family, the tenants, later bought the dacha from his widow.

All this was years ago. I never saw Janson, and I don’t remember his widow. If you spread out our photographs in a fan of seasons and years, you could watch the Genghis Khan—like horde of my brothers and sisters multiplying madly; you could see how our dog grew old and decrepit, how Janson’s cozy homestead fell apart and was overgrown with goosefoot. Where there once were chickens, you’d find seven pairs of skis and a pile of skates, and on the former site of the greenhouse you could discover my sisters and me lying in the grass, our arms flung wide, tanning our young bodies in the white satin brassieres of the Khrushchev era and flowery underpants that didn’t match anything.

In 1968, my brothers and sisters and I climbed up to the attic. We found some hay that Janson had cut years before Stalin’s death and an enormous trunk filled with tiny corks, with which Janson had intended to stopper his vials of valerian. There was another trunk as well, cinched with metal straps and dry to the touch; in it six pairs of huge lightweight felt boots of a sombre color had been perfectly preserved. Under the boots, in a careful pile, lay several dark dresses for a small, birdlike woman; and under the dresses, already disintegrating into molecules, was some grayish-yellow lace—you could pulverize it with your finger and scatter it on the bottom of the trunk, where time had already ground and scattered a dusty layer of some unrecognizable thing that had once belonged to someone.

In 1980, to plant strawberries, we dug up the tall weeds in the corner of the garden where, according to the old-timers, the pharmacist’s Eden had once blossomed and borne fruit. At a certain depth, we unearthed a large iron object that scared us silly. The same old-timers assured us that it wasn’t a bomb, because no bombs had fallen here during the war, but, still frightened, we reburied it, packing down the earth on top of it.

When we replaced the stove, we found nothing of Jan-son’s. Nothing again when we replaced the stovepipes. When the kitchen collapsed into the cellar and the washbasin into the chicken coop we had great hopes, but all in vain. When we patched up a huge hole the proletariat had left between the perfectly new pipe and the perfectly new stove, we found some trousers and were overjoyed, but they turned out to be our own trousers, lost so long ago that we didn’t recognize them right away.

Janson had dispersed, disintegrated, vanished into the earth. His world had long since been buried under the trash of our four generations. And shockingly new children had already grown up, children who didn’t remember the plaque trumpeting “M. A. Janson,” which had been stolen by an admirer of nonferrous metals, children who hadn’t spent hours throwing tiny corks at one another, who had never discovered the white umbrellas of stray valerian plants in the overgrowth of stinging nettles.

Two summers ago, the summer of 1997, we mistakenly calculated that our dacha was half a century old, and, in honor of the event, bought rolls of white wallpaper with green garlands. Well, we decided, in that shed where the sink is falling off the wall, where jars of dried-up linseed oil and boxes of rusty nails lie forgotten on the shelf, we will create a little Versailles. First, we’ll scrape off the old green-and-white checkered wallpaper and then we’ll glue our pompadour onto the bare wood. If we’re going to do a real European-style renovation, then let’s do it right.

But under the green and white checks there was white wallpaper with dark-blue speckles; under the speckles, a grayish spring motif with weeping-birch blossoms; under that, lilac wallpaper with embossed white roses; under the lilac, brownish-red wallpaper densely decorated with maple leaves; under the maples appeared newspapers—Oryol and Belgorod liberated and a celebratory fireworks display; under the fireworks, “the people demand the death penalty for the bloody Zinoviev-Bukharinite dogs”; and, under the dogs, a photograph of mourners in line at Lenin’s funeral. Under Lenin, in a group portrait taken in Galicia, there were dashing officers, belted and thickly mustachioed, who gazed directly and anxiously at us as if they had never been plastered over with starch glue. And then, under that fraternal grave, under graves, graves, and more graves, on the very bottom, next to the wood, with a last hurrah, came “MUSTACHIN CREAM” (what else!) and “AMERICAN HIGH SOCIETY USES ONLY KOKIO LILY-OF-THE-VALLEY TEA. DUBININ TEA WAREHOUSE, MOSCOW, 51 PETROVKA STREET” and “WHY AM I SO YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL? FREE BOOKLET BY IONACHIVARA MASAKADO” and “WHEN YOU BUY CIGARETTE PAPERS, DON’T SAY, ‘GIVE ME A BOX OF GOOD PAPERS,’ SAY, ‘GIVE ME KATYKA PAPERS.’ ONLY THEN CAN YOU BE SURE THAT YOU HAVE CIGARETTE PAPERS THAT DON’T TEAR, DON’T WRINKLE, ARE THIN AND HYGIENIC. YES, ONLY KATYKA PAPERS WILL DO.”

Having started to rip and crumple, we kept on ripping and crumpling layers of time, as brittle as old glued newspapers; we tore newspapers that were as brittle as layers of time; having started to tear, we couldn’t stop; from under the old paper, from under the bubbles and buckles, fell a fine wood dust, the residue deposited by the timber worms, the mice, and the bark beetles, after the weevil and its family had joyously feasted on dry starch, leaving behind a micron-size cushion of air between the strata of history, between the tectonic plates of someone else’s misfortunes.