Tatyana Tolstaya - White Walls - Collected Stories

That washroom, smelling of soap and rotting boards, had been the bedroom of the pharmacist Janson. Intending to live a modest, happy, and long life there, he had lovingly pasted to its walls all the newspapers he’d kept from childhood—page after page, with nothing thrown out, nothing wasted—and, over that, his first layer of wallpaper. Meticulous and clean as he must have been, a Russified Swede, he had built himself a cozy little sleeping nest, a private corner, behind a thick door with a heavy bolt, and under the floor his own clean chickens. The little room next door, with a balcony and windows facing the sunset and the black Karelian spruce, had been his dining-living room: there he could drink a cup of coffee with chicory, sitting in a hard Lutheran armchair; there he could think about the past and the future, about how he had survived up to now, how he was going to grow medicinal herbs, and how when the first snow fell he would take a walk in his lightweight black felt boots, leaving tracks.

We tore off all the paper, everything down to the naked boards. The excitement of cleaning seized all four generations of our family, and we sandpapered and rubbed. We worked hard, careless of fingernails and scrapers. The local store, which for thirty years had got by in a complete stupor, never offering anything but rubber boots in the wrong size and hard candies called “pillows with jam,” came to life in the new era and crammed the shelves with Johnson & Johnson products. What could one Janson do against two Johnsons and all the other foreigners? From abroad, there were quick-acting cleaners and spot removers—aerosols to erase memory, acids to eliminate the past. We scraped everything off: the white roses on a lilac background, the bloody dogs, the puffs of frosty breath lining up to view the revolutionary son of a public-school inspector, and the rows of tomorrow’s cripples and casualties, trustingly buying round tins of the charlatan “Mustachin Cream” a week before their mutilation or death, counting on love and happiness, as had the pharmacist Janson, who bought six pairs of felt boots for future legs, now unneeded.

We scraped the boards bare, down to the faint rings on the planed wood. We let the walls dry out. Then we took a large brush, dipped it in guaranteed, sticky, synthetic glue, and, following the instructions, slathered it the right way— with no bubbles—on the back of the Versailles wallpaper. Then we pressed hard with an old cloth and rubbed the fresh wallpaper onto the fresh wall, which still smelled like the Johnsons. The glue took, and the wallpaper stuck in a passionate kiss without air.

All in all, it was a good summer near Petersburg, dry and hot. Everything dried quickly. The next morning, our wallpaper looked as if it had always hung there: no dark spots, not a blotch. It wasn’t so difficult after all—this tearing off and gluing on. Of course, the effect wasn’t exactly palatial, and, to be honest, it wasn’t the least bit European. Not that there wasn’t a certain artistic quality to it, but, frankly—why beat around the bush?—it was a sorry sight. The room looked like a flowery barn. A doghouse. A shelter for Pushkin’s wretched Finn, born blind. Things never seem the same on the walls as they do in small pieces, do they?

Now, we could always buy more wallpaper, plain white wallpaper with no pattern—these days you can find everything, after all—and then it would look great. Then our misguided decoration would be hidden under even, white, aristocratically indifferent, democratically neutral, benign layers of Buddhist simplicity. Plain white is straightforward and elegant. At home in the city, everyone’s switching to it, and eventually I’ll switch, too. White wallpaper. Or, better yet, just a paintbrush or a roller, water-based paint or plaster, and presto!—all clean. Nothing superfluous. Just welcoming white walls.

Cautiously, so as not to disturb us, like a barely perceptible shadow tiptoeing in wool socks over the new linoleum, with felt boots under his arm and a bouquet of valerian stars in his hands, with corks and vials stuffed in his bulging pockets, with the mustachioed and shaven cripples of all times in his frightened memory, Mikhail Avgustovich Janson takes his final leave. A Swede, a Lutheran, a petit bourgeois, a pharmacist, a hardworking gardener, a frugal and meticulous man, faceless, with no distinguishing marks—Mikhail Avgustovich, the heirless husband of a small wife, an inhabitant of small rooms, a discreet preserver of the forbidden past, a witness to the history we scraped off the bare walls of his former shack. Mikhail Avgustovich, about whom I know nothing and now will never know anything—other than the fact that he buried a strange iron object in the garden, hid some useless rags in the attic, covered the impermissible and unrecoverable under wallpaper in the bedroom. With my own hands, I tore the last traces of Mikhail Avgustovich from the walls that he had held on to for half a century, and, no longer needed by anyone in this new, bleached, laundered, and disinfected world, he faded, probably forever, into the grass and the leaves, into the chlorophyll, into the roots of the weeds, into the mute, unnamed, and blissful kingdom of pharmacopoeia.

A HOT DAY in May in Ravenna, the small Italian city where Dante is buried. Once upon a time—right at the start of the fifth century A.D.—the Emperor Honorius transferred the capital of the Western Roman Empire to this city. Once there was a port here, but the sea receded long ago, and in its place are swamps, roses, dust, and vineyards. Ravenna is famous for its mosaics; hordes of tourists move from one church to another, craning their necks to glimpse the dim luster of tiny multicolored smalti high up under the dusky vaults. Something can be made out there, but not very well. One of the glossy postcards will give you a better view, though awfully bright, flat, and cheap-looking.

I’m suffocating, hot, and dusty. I’m depressed. My father died, and I loved him so much! Once, long, long ago, almost forty years back, he passed through Ravenna and sent me a postcard showing one of the famous mosaics. On the reverse side—in pencil for some reason, he must have been in a hurry—he wrote: “Sweetheart! I have never seen anything so sublime (see the other side) in my life! Makes you want to cry! Oh, if only you were here! Your Father!”

Each sentence ends with a silly exclamation mark—he was young, he was cheerful, maybe he’d had a glass of wine. I can see him with his felt hat cocked in the manner of the late fifties, a cigarette between white teeth—which were still his own then—beads of sweat on his forehead. Tall, slim, handsome: his eyes shine happily behind the glass circles of his spectacles… The postcard—which he dropped in a mailbox, lightheartedly entrusting it to two unreliable postal services, the Italian and the Russian—shows heaven. The Lord sits in the midst of a blindingly green paradise of eternal spring, white sheep grazing all around. The two unreliable postal services, Russian and Italian, crumpled the corners of the postcard, but it was all right, the message was received and everything could be seen.

If heaven exists, then my father is there. Where else would he be? But the only thing is, he died—he died and doesn’t write me postcards with exclamation marks anymore, he no longer sends tidings from all points of the globe: I’m here, I love you. Do you love me? Do you share my pleasure and joy? Do you see the beauty that I see? Greetings! Here’s a postcard! Here’s a cheap, glossy photograph—I was here! It’s wonderful! Oh, if only you could be here, too!

He traveled all over the world, and he liked the world.

Now, as much as I can, I follow his footsteps. I go to the same towns, try to see them with his eyes, try to imagine him young, turning that corner, climbing those steps, leaning on the railing of the embankment with a cigarette in his teeth. This time I’m in Ravenna, a dusty, stuffy, exhausting place like all tourist sites where crowds fill narrow streets. It’s a dead, trivial, hot town, with no place to sit down. The tomb of Dante, exiled from his native Florence. The tomb of Theodorich. The mausoleum of Galla Placidia, sister of Flavius Honorius, the very same one who made Ravenna the capital of the Western Empire. Fifteen centuries passed. Everything changed. Everything grew dusty, the mosaics crumbled. What had once been important—is unimportant; what once excited—has vanished in the sands. The sea itself receded, and where merry green waves once splashed, there are now wastelands, dust, silence, hot vineyards. Forty years ago—a whole lifetime ago—my father strolled and laughed here; his myopic eyes squinted; he sat at a street table, drank red wine, and tore off bites of pizza with his own strong teeth. The dark blue night fell. And on the edge of a table, in pencil, he scribbled a few hurried words to me scattering exclamation marks all over, expressing his delight and love for the world.