Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

It must be very late, for the street is quiet, and the ceiling, undisturbed by the flares of passing headlights, lies indistinct in a pool of shadow. On nights when I cannot sleep I stare at it for what seems like hours, populating it with the geometry of imaginary constellations, with meandering trajectories of grotesque creatures born in the deeper pockets of darkness and fleshed out by dribbles of streetlamp illumination. But I am too thirsty to imagine anything at present, and the voices continue to crisscross one another in the kitchen, until my throat feels so dry it is painful to swallow. After another minute I hunt down my slippers, nudge open my door, and walk into the corridor.

The kitchen is flooded with light. I see the men’s backs—my father’s, Orlov’s, Borodinsky’s, two or three others’; they are crowded around Orlov, looking over his shoulder as he speaks. I am about to march over the threshold, making straight for the teakettle, when Orlov’s weighty tone, with none of his usual clowning, makes me pause. He has begun to declaim a poem, as he often does at my parents’ gatherings, but it is not one of his own humorous ditties with glib little rhymes—this poem has a measure so solemn, so stark, that after a moment’s listening I feel with absolute certainty: These words are not meant for my ears. No one has noticed me yet, so I take a stealthy step back, slip into the unlit bathroom, push my father’s robe out of the way, and stand straining my hearing, one eye glued to the crack in the door, my heart beating wildly as if I am in the presence of something vastly more important than myself.

The kitchen is now so hushed that I can hear Orlov’s voice with clarity, as I would if he were whispering in my ear, though he is reading quietly, under his breath—he seems almost embarrassed to be saying the words aloud.

He shuffles the pages. “And this,” he says.

His voice trails off, and then everyone else is silent too. From the corner into which I am wedged, I cannot catch a glimpse of anyone’s face—I see only the indistinct bobbing of gray and brown jackets, a patch on the elbow of my father’s old sweater, a flash of light on a typescript page in Orlov’s hand, and, on the wall behind them, directly in my field of vision, our old cuckoo clock, my late grandmother’s long-ago present. It is almost two in the morning. I will be in trouble if I am discovered.

Borodinsky speaks, so loudly that I start.

“This will never be published,” he announces, “and no wonder.”

“Oh, I don’t know about ‘never,’” says Orlov.

“Not in your lifetime, at any rate,” insists Borodinsky.

“I fear I must disagree,” my father says. An argument commences, or perhaps only a discussion; my father’s friends often sound belligerent and cheerful at the same time, and I am not always able to tell the difference between the two. Soon they are shouting—about the times changing or not changing, the new Party leader, some underground art show someone attended in someone’s basement, some newspaper article someone is waving about. My father attempts to stride back and forth as he talks, but our kitchen is too small for striding, and he is forced to stand with the others in an agitated clump, all of them crammed together, interrupting one another now, arms jerking, shoulders shrugging. I find it hard to listen. I feel that the words read by Orlov only minutes before have left an emptiness behind them, a dark, chilled hush as after the passage of something powerful, something immense—like the profound stillness after the tolling of a deep bell, like the blackness pooling behind your eyelids after you have gazed straight at the sun—and it needs to be acknowledged by everyone, yet is ignored. It occurs to me that they sound somehow relieved, as though glad to have dispelled the kitchen silence with such boisterous promptness, glad to be debating matters that must be important but seem oddly trivial to me.

I am again aware of my thirst. I wait, my face pressed into my father’s robe; it has preserved faint memories of his tobacco. At two o’clock, darkness yawns in the lacquered façade of our kitchen clock and the cuckoo stumbles out to take two stiff bows, one left, one right; it lost its voice years ago, but I can hear the wooden creaking of its aged joints. Through the crack in the door hinges I see my father’s elbow grow busy as he resumes topping off the guests’ glasses; then they abandon the kitchen and stomp, still arguing, into the corridor. I watch six or seven pairs of well-worn shoes stampede past me, hoping that no one decides to barge into the bathroom. A moment later the study door swings open, Orlov’s wife laughs shrilly, a heedless saxophone trill leaps into the breach, the door closes.

I tiptoe out.

The brightly lit kitchen is deserted, and there, on the table, among the jumble of my mother’s gold-trimmed floral cups, on top of my father’s newspapers, lies a forgotten sheaf of typescript pages. My heart painful in my chest, as if my rib cage has suddenly grown too tight for it, I push the cups and the newspapers aside, gather up the pages, and sit down. The type is blurry, in places almost illegible; this must be the fifth, if not the sixth, carbon copy, and the letters seem precarious and thus doubly precious, as though in imminent danger of dissolving under my very eyes into blots of thinning ink on the brittle surface of rice paper.

“Anna Akhmatova, Requiem ,” is written at the top, and, just below:

I read.

A chair creaks, a cough sounds. Blearily, I look up.

A man is sitting across from me at the table.

“I’ve been watching you for the past ten minutes,” he says. “You have quite the ability to tune things out. This too may be of use to you—if, that is, you tune out the right things.”

The dazzling, terrifying, cleansing revelation of the poems releases me slowly.

I frown at the man before me. He is not someone I recognize, though I know my parents’ friends well. His face is handsome—the word “chiseled,” at which I snickered a year or two ago, during my brief Dumas obsession, makes gratifying sense at last—but he is not young, the age of my parents if not older, and the slight hints of heaviness in his jowls, of droopiness in his eyelids, of thinness in the blond hair that he wears too long, make his beauty seem disturbingly marred, unnatural somehow. Like a statue of a god with his nose lopped off, I think—or perhaps with his chin grown double, the marble gone weak and flaccid. All at once I realize I am staring, and I feel flustered.

“You were not here earlier,” I mumble.

“No, I just dropped in for a moment,” he replies, smiling. It is not a warm smile. “So, reading banned poetry in the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning, are we? You’re a poet yourself, are you not?”

“No,” I say curtly. He is studying me, his light eyes piercing. I am not in the habit of being rude to adults. I look down at the pages before me. “That is… I suppose I rhyme things once in a while. When I can’t sleep. Nothing like this.”

“Well, no, of course not,” he agrees, leaning back in his chair. “This kind of thing—it comes much later, and not to everyone.”