Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m going to put them back in their box.”

“Maybe you should leave them. They seem like fun.”

“We have enough clutter as it is, I think,” she said in a level voice.

The baby, now full, cooed happily. She looked over at him, and her heart, which had been momentarily unsettled, came to rest in its rightful place.

The nursery was a cheerful room; she had painted it herself. The walls were lime green on one side and emerald green on the other, the ceiling light blue, and the windowpanes and baseboards azure. All across the green of the walls she had drawn yellow flowers with neat round petals, while the ceiling was peppered with plastic stars that glowed in the dark. When her parents had walked into the nursery for the first time, her mother had been volubly enchanted, but her father had seemed not to notice it at all—the only thing in the room he had noticed was Genie himself.

He sat in the armchair in the corner now, small and sullen, like a ruffled bird in winter. “Isn’t it time for the boy to wake up?” he asked again.

He always called Genie “the boy,” whereas her mother called him Zhenechka.

She glanced at the crib, then at the minute hand of the smiling moon on the wall.

“No,” she said, “not yet.”

He pursed his lips and resumed gazing outside with a vague frown, and immediately she felt guilty; next time he asked, she would have to wake Genie up. In his presence her father’s face became like a stained-glass window with the sun shining through. At all other times, though, a new sour look lodged itself in his eyes, in the deep crease between his eyebrows, in the lines tugging his mouth down into his beard. Whenever she glanced up at him from folding shirts or tidying toys, a sweaty hand took hold of her heart and dragged it sideways.

“So what’s beyond this street?” he asked.

“Another street just like this one,” she replied.

“And beyond that?”

“Two more streets like this, and then a highway. There is a grocery store on the other side of the highway, but it takes a while to cross with a stroller.”

“You must get a car,” he said, sounding displeased. “It’s impossible here without a car. You should learn how to drive. You never leave the house. The boy is pale.”

She started to explain about taking him out on the veranda for his daily allotment of fresh air, and about not having needed a car before they had moved here, and Paul working on weekends and never having the time to teach her, and, in any case, her not wanting to practice with a child in the backseat; but halfway through her apologetic mumbling, her father made a short, annoyed sound deep in his throat, and she fell silent. He resumed looking out the window, his face closed off. All at once she wanted to abandon the trivial, fussing tasks and the insignificant small talk on which she was squandering what little was left of their time together—she wanted to sit at his feet instead, prop her chin on his knee, stare up at him, and ask him things, the way she had done when she was a little girl. Back then she had tried to pry the mysteries of the universe out of him—“Why is the sky so black?” and “Does it hurt your shadow when you step on it?” and “Why does this song always make Mama cry?”

She had just as many questions now, though the questions had changed in nature.

Mama tells me your treatments are going well, are helping you—is that true? How much longer do you really have—how much longer do we have together? Is there enough time for me to prove myself to you? Whenever I see the way you look at Genie, I thaw inside, but I am also hurt: it’s like I have done my part and no longer matter as much. Are you disappointed in me, are you hoping that he will turn out to be more like you? Do you need someone to be like you, to preserve some echo of your life? The meaning of life as you explained it to me that one time, at the dacha, under the stars—do you still hold that to be true, and do you fear that you have not done enough, that after all the decades of unsparing work, your life has not succeeded on its own, not fully, so you want the reassurance of seeing a piece of yourself carried forth by future generations?

Are you afraid of dying?

Do you believe in the afterlife?

Do you believe in God?

Listen, Papa: I love you. I will give you more, so much more, than a grandchild. I will keep your memory alive to the outermost limits of my soul. I will write a long poem about you when I’m finally good enough as a poet to write it. That should count for something, should it not? I love you.

She went on folding Genie’s tiny shirts in silence, and her father went on sitting in the armchair, staring out the window with a deepened frown, and in another few minutes Genie woke up from his afternoon nap. He always woke up happy and alert, often rolling some recently learned word around in his mouth—“cup,” “fish”—like a delicious treat, tasting its novel sound with a surprised, pleased look on his small pink face (not pale, not pale at all, she took good care of him). Now, within seconds of opening his eyes, he bounced up, held on to the crib’s railing, and rattled it, eager to get out, eager for whatever wondrous adventures his grandfather had prepared for him that day.

Genie was blond and blue-eyed, and looked nothing like his grandfather—or, for that matter, nothing like her either.

“Today,” her father announced, beaming, as he groped for his cane, “I will teach you to hunt mushrooms. Repeat after me: grib . Try again. Grib. Now, real mushrooms grow in a forest, of course, I will take you there when you are a bit older and come to visit me at our dacha in Russia. For now, these buttons will have to do. The white ones are the best, belye griby , we call them, and the red ones—”

She wanted to intercede: the buttons did not seem safe, Genie was not yet two, he put things in his mouth, he could choke; but she looked at her father and stayed silent, just watched them hawk-eyed for the next ten minutes, while they traipsed all over the rug, Genie wobbling a little, her father’s cane tapping as he limped up and down, both crowing with excitement when they stumbled upon yet another button; and every time, her father admonished the boy to clean the stem thoroughly of leaves and dirt before they gently lowered the button into their imaginary basket.

In the suburban American room with the painted grass, painted sky, painted flowers, she remembered the smells and the sounds of the Russian woods she had walked with her father two decades before. Once, they had brought home a baby owlet, and another time had come upon a small dead fox curled up in a snowy hollow by a fallen oak. There had been that misty autumn morning, barely past sunrise, when a moose had rushed at them out of a thicket; it had been so close she could see the moist, agitated flaring of its nostrils. A quote she had read somewhere came to her mind: “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a homesickness or a lovesickness”—or something like it. And would it also be true, she wondered, that the bigger the lump—say, if you happen to have both sicknesses at once—the better the poem?

Her mother appeared in the hallway, seemingly shrunk in Paul’s kitchen apron.

“Zhenechka should have a snack now,” she said, but she too paused to watch them play. Genie had just spotted a button that had rolled all the way under his crib, and was gurgling, then screaming, with laughter. Her father began to laugh too, until it looked as if he was crying.

“The main regret I have in life,” her mother spoke from the doorway, “is that your father and I didn’t have another child. A child growing up alone doesn’t learn to think about others as much, and if you stay in your head all the time, talking to imaginary friends and not noticing other people, it’s harder for you to be happy in life later on.”