Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“I see you are awake now, Mrs. Caldwell,” said Rose, entering the library with the duster and vigorously setting about the books. Clouds of ancient gray pollen rose into the air; no one had touched most of these volumes in years, if not decades.

She found herself sneezing, her eyes filled with tears.

“Sorry, sorry,” said the maid. “So much dust.”

She did not want anyone to be in the house when she watched it. If she watched it at all—and she was not sure she would—she would be alone. She waited until Paul departed on another of his business trips, and Rose had finished with the afternoon chores. She ate a light supper—an apple, a handful of blueberries, she was never hungry these days—then walked through the rooms, picking up a misplaced magazine here, a teacup there; but the endless drift of books, clothes, phones, keys had ceased since the last of her children had moved away, and the house had lost its daily mutability—everything tended to stay in its place now, unchanged and unchanging for weeks on end. It was not yet eight o’clock when she found nothing but time stretching before her like an open sea—inviting, deadly. Even then, she was not sure she would watch it. She pretended not to think about it for a while, but no matter what she occupied herself with—perusing a cookbook in search of next Sunday’s dinner, watering plants—she was always aware of the movie in its sealed case lying on the table at the foot of the staircase, waiting, waiting.

Giving up at last, she descended to the basement, scooped the movie off the table, and, tearing the plastic wrapping as she walked, proceeded to the home theater. The movie cover showed an imposing glass-walled office high up in a skyscraper, and, propped on a leather armchair behind the desk, the top half of a human-size matryoshka with the photograph of the famous actress playing the lead role pasted over the doll’s rouged, round-eyed face. The doll’s lower half lay tipped on its side on the plush carpet, and three or four smaller dolls had spilled out of it—the next-largest bearing the heavily made-up, obscene face of a young stripper, the smallest one that of a serious dark-eyed girl of about five. Quotations in square red letters, all the R’s backward to signify the Russianness of the proceedings, promised “HEAЯT-STOPPING EXCITEMENT!” and stated underneath, in less prominent print, “Original screenplay by the award-winning author of—”

She parted the curtains that separated the movie room from the rest of the basement, maneuvered through the rows of built-in chairs. When she had first seen the house, thirty-two years ago now, she had been struck dumb by the cup holders in the armrests and the golden tassels on the decadent velvet of the curtains. Now everything appeared vaguely dated, and musty, and neglected. Paul and the children had watched numerous movies here, eating the inevitable popcorn, making shadow puppets with their hands in the beam of the projector during the credits; but now the children were gone, Paul was busy, and she herself could recall suffering through only half a dozen films in all her time in the house. She had no affinity for sitting in the dark, invisible and passive, following the peregrinations of someone else’s life—it felt to her like a small foretaste of death.

Except this time, it would not be someone else’s life: it would be her own.

For when she finally switched off the lights and settled into one of the rigid-backed chairs to watch the movie, she saw the view of the eternal construction site from the window of her Moscow apartment, and a caricature of her bearded, pipe-smoking father, who spoke in somber truisms, and a mother who collected porcelain cups and came across as superficial and insensitive, and a dacha neighbor for whom the heroine decorously pined while reading Turgenev. She stared at the screen in disbelief, her hands gripping the armrests. The actors sported laughable accents, the teenage heroine cavorted under onion domes and birch trees—and yet it was, undeniably, her childhood, her youth, at least up to a point. For after a particularly ham-fisted, cringe-worthy scene in the country, in which the heroine mused about her impending adulthood, the story veered off: the girl went on a moonlit walk with the dacha boy, and there followed her first kiss in the shade of an old oak tree and a subsequent anguished romance in the streets of Moscow, which scarred her deeply and made her swear off marriage and children, and move to America. With that, the exposition sequence over, the dreamlike sepia tone gave way to harsher colors that signified the present day and place, and the movie proper began. She found herself watching a thriller she could not follow, its fast-paced, intricate plot involving a corrupt American politician, and the Russian mafia, and the heroine, now a courageous New York lawyer, doing something brave yet sexy with a briefcase full of incriminating documents, and a manly colleague who resembled the dacha boy just enough to justify the lengthy backstory—

She stopped the movie, backtracked, watched the beginning again. Her heart felt crammed into her chest, its every beat a painful scrape against her rib cage. When the heroine burst out of her door and ran across the dirt road, hurrying to her first assignation with the dacha neighbor, she screamed and flung the remote control hard against the wall. It broke apart with a dry plastic crack, and the screen went black.

She sat unmoving in the dark, her temples damp, her mind full of poison.

Bitch, you bitch. How could you do that to me? You think you can steal from people like that, gut them, betray them, as long as you claim to do so in the name of art? But you are no artist—just a cliché-ridden hack, driven by nothing but the urge to escape from the emptiness of your own life. Because your life is empty, and you are alone, you have no husband and no children and no proper home—you have nothing, you are nothing, nothing, nothing, do you hear me…

The fury wound tighter and tighter in her chest, until something within it seemed to give way, to sag sidewise. Suddenly frightened, she pressed her clammy fingers to her forehead and took a shallow, labored breath, and another. All at once the darkness of the room was stifling her, threatening her somehow; she wanted to turn on the lights, but she felt queasy, and oddly exhausted, and the image of herself stumbling through the black void, bumping into unseen corners and edges, made her press hard into the back of her chair and close her eyes against the darkness, and for one moment give all her attention to the sweating, melting, skipping, somersaulting thing that her heart seemed to be doing against her will, of its own volition. Perhaps, she thought, I really ought to stand up and get hold of the telephone, call an ambulance or something; and the thought sent a stab of terror through her, which radiated like pain from her chest and deposited the telephone neatly in her hand. Yet when she dialed, it was not the ambulance, it was Olga’s number instead; and though she had long forgotten the number, if indeed she had ever known it, her fingers, flying over the buttons, magically summoned the right combination to life—and though the number could have changed, and though Olga was never at home, if indeed she had ever existed, she answered on the first ring.