Marina Stepnova

The Women of Lazarus

Translated from the Russian by Lisa Hayden

World Editions

breda 2015

Published in Great Britain in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Marina Stepnova, 2011

English translation copyright © Lisa Hayden, 2015

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © Ritratto di ragazza (Portrait of a young woman), Amedeo Modigliani, 1916

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as Zhenshiny Lazarya in Russia in 2011 by AST Publishers, Moscow

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-020-2

Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation (Russia)

The publication of the book was negotiated through Banke, Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency (www.bgs-agency.com)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Chapter One: Barbariska

In 1985, Lidochka turned five and her whole life went down the tubes. They never, ever met again, Lidochka and her life, which is exactly why all the smooth, slightly salty, damp details of their last happy summer together settled in their memories so firmly that their heads buzzed.

The Black Sea (it’s black because it never washes its hands, right?). A resort’s guest house that looked like spilled matchboxes. A beach strewn with softened little cardboard cups from fruit and berry ice cream (ice cream where the price is a dream, Papa liked to say). Huge, scorching-hot bodies. The morning walk to the chosen spot and all those tiny polite steps to avoid snagging a heel or towel on someone else’s luxuriating, vacationing flesh. Lidochka would quickly lose her patience and then all Mama had to do was get distracted for a second—by a neighbor at a cafeteria table or a roaming seller of forbidden cotton candy—and Lidochka would break free of her tight visual leash and rush off toward the sea with a piercing squeal, her fat, round heels haphazardly pounding the sand.

Alarmed vacationers raised themselves up a little, as if they were sea lions, shaking large, barley-like grains of morning sand out of damp crevices and synthetic creases, smiling in response to the parents’ apologetic ritual lamentations, It’s fine, let the child have some fun! Just look at that, galloped off, what a fidget! You’ve got to understand, it’s her first time at the sea… And where might you be from? From Ensk. Oh, you’ve come a long way. We’re from Krivorozhe, got this holiday trip from the factory, that right, Manya? Manya nodded cheerfully with a kind mouth generously loaded with gold ore. She shifted all their junk into a heap so it was easier for Lidochka’s papa to spread out a towel. You vacationing at Sunnyside? Yes, we are. Mama quickly extricated herself from a sundress crackling with artificial silk’s static electricity and weak stitches. And we’re at Red Banner. Nice to meet you.

The long-term friendship ready to spark—complete with greeting cards on major holidays and reciprocal cross-country visits—was hindered by intense heat and Lidochka, who was golden-brown, ear-splitting, smooth, and glistening in a small surf for all Soviets. Mama just couldn’t tear herself away from Lidochka, not for the sweating watermelon that made a sugary crack under the peaceful Krivorozhe proletarian’s predatory pen knife, not for the ongoing beach game of fool, And what do we have as trump here? No, hearts were last time!, not for the ever-intricate monologues from enticing, unfamiliar lives, And then Petrovich, that’s my brother, he says, So you take the kids, Lariska, and move in with me, there’s enough room. And the government really did just give him a room, twelve square meters, you could hold a wedding there, you could ride a motor scooter in there! But Mama just smiled absentmindedly, even as fate’s tentative dotted line for some Petrovich nobody knew threatened to transform itself into a solid line of full-fledged human happiness.

At any other time she would have been delighted to try on someone else’s unachievable fate, if only to convince herself how cleanly and cleverly her own had been cut out. But the thread of the story slipped away hopelessly as soon as it took on a new plot turn filled with communal poverty and babies begotten in sin—meager Soviet life somehow always provoked unprecedented, downright Byronic passions—because Lidochka jumped away from a tickly wave, laughing. The horizon, dimly visible and quivering from the surging heat, was blinding and Mama squinted, frightened when she didn’t see her daughter’s familiar sun hat among peeling shoulders, titanic rear ends, and exultant shrieks. There she is, thank God. Lidochka waved in reply and, without taking off her red and blue inflatable beach ring, crouched down to mold an appetizing cake of a house with termite towers that she pressed out of her hot little fist.

Lidochka’s white sun hat cast a lively perforated shadow on her tanned cheeks but the shadows of her eyelashes were even longer and more transparent, oh and your daughter is so sweet, knock on wood, not to jinx anything, and Mama graciously accepted the praise like a special gift, not just feeling but secretly knowing with an exultant, bubbling certainty that Lidochka was singular, not just ‘so sweet.’ Inimitable. The most wonderful child on earth with the most wonderful and flawlessly fortunate fate. Mama looked at her little daughter with a quiet stunned smile and then at her own stomach—young, tight, and not at all disfigured from her early pregnancy—not believing herself that at one time Lidochka, now as wide-eyed as a puppy, with silky, warm shoulder blades and weightless adult curls on her dark, chubby neck, had fit inside there, all of her, and hadn’t even existed before.

Then Mama’s thoughts reached the limits of the comprehensible and began spinning dangerously, like a truck hanging over a precipice: the hacking wail of an agonized motor, two wheels vainly spinning bald tires in thickening air, the other two tires spewing little clumps of gravel that seemed to explode from pressure. With just one second before the fall (one second, one second) a translucent little plastic devil toy jumps in front of her eyes, Vovka made it out of IV tubes, owes me three rubles, the pain in the ass, now it definitely won’t get paid back, so there it is, you know, that’s how it is, that’s how people die, there’s what I’ll never be able to tell anyone… But why does non-existence before birth scare me more than the emptiness after death? Why isn’t it scarier to die, Oh-dear-Lord-have-mer-cy-and-save-me?

‘You look a little pale, Ninusha,’ Papa said, worried. He kissed Mama on the shoulder. The skin under his lips and tongue was hot and dry, as if lightly starched. ‘Have you been in the sun too long?’

Mama smiled guiltily. The dark thoughts let go of her and her soul lightly crossed itself and steered onto the main road: it was saved, soaked in sweat from horror and exhausted, but still feeling a little despondent not to have learned what was over there on the other side, just beyond that final second, after which there’s only a tumbling flight that races with soundless metal wreckage and then the crack of straining muscles, and… and… and… Mama felt lost trying to imagine the impossible and rubbed her forehead on her husband’s merciful arm, a strong arm with large freckles and familiar, dear reddish fluff. Yes, it’s hot, sweetie. I’m dizzy.

Lidochka, still just a little creature at five years old, sensed an unsettling little draft of otherworldly air and ran right to her mother. She was hot and agile, wearing remarkable imported day-of-the-week panties. Each day a new color, each day a silly new appliqué. Monday: pink panties with a strawberry. Tuesday: light blue with a bristling bunny. Wednesday: yellow with a gap-toothed sunflower. Ma, what’s wrong? Mama’s delicate lips touched her daughter’s eyelids, one little eye, then the other, everything’s fine, Barbariska, you’re not going to get sunburned on me are you? Nah, and Lidochka, now calm, slipped out of Mamochka’s affectionate arms and tore off for the sea again, and their new beach friends grinned affably. Lida, Lidochka, Little Lozenge, Barbariska—little family nicknames that were the cooing patter of parental passion. No one would ever be so intense again. No one, ever.

‘Don’t sneak off, you little partisan,’ Papa said. He gathered Lidochka up in his arms, agilely flipping her over, which made her laugh uncontrollably: the sea and sky had smoothly changed places; biting fishes, sea horses, and little ships on the horizon were just about to fall into the clouds; everything was swimming, slipping away; deafening seagulls hung on invisible threads; and Lidochka herself hovered between sea and sky.

And this was happiness: beloved, hot hands that would never let you go or drop you even if the whole world turned upside down. She grasped that later. Much later.

‘You sit with Auntie Manya and Uncle Kolya for a bit,’ Papa said, setting Lidochka on the sand. The sea was on the bottom again and the sky was on the top. Like usual. ‘Will you sit for a bit? Mamochka and I are going to swim out and back, she’s boiling hot already.’

‘Go on, go on, don’t you worry,’ Auntie Manya said in her rich honking voice, ‘I got my own two on their feet and the third granddaughter’s on the way—I won’t take my eyes off your little charmer. You go swim as long as you like.’

‘We won’t be long,’ Mama promised, sounding guilty and pressing Lidochka with her soft, burning-hot cheek. ‘Do what Auntie Manya tells you. I love you very, very much.’

Lidochka nodded inattentively as Auntie Manya energetically dug around in her purse, like a plotter—it was clear she was preparing to extract something very, very interesting. Uncle Kolya looked intrigued, too: his life with his wife had obviously been filled with young, exciting surprises thus far. ‘Ta-da!’ Auntie Manya said with circus-like intonation as she presented Lidochka with a huge, warm peach, softly fuzzy and overflowing with tigery-pink color. A cool wave pawed at Mama’s stomach and goose bumps instantly dashed along her back and shoulders. Lidochka sniffed the tickly peach and squinted. Shall we see who’s fastest to the buoys, Nina? Mama jerked her head and smiled trustingly. Eat, hon, Auntie Manya affectionately instructed Lidochka. Uncle Kolya had already knocked a boiled egg (procured from the same purse) on his knee and malformed ‘oxheart’ tomatoes had appeared one after another on a newspaper as if by magic, along with sausage, slices of bread expropriated from the cafeteria, and grapes from the market that were golden through and through. Auntie Manya bragged that she’d haggled them down to eighty kopecks, then, with identically nonthinking tenderness, she stroked first Lidochka’s sun-warmed little head, then the close-cropped, degenerate back of her proletarian husband’s, oh, Marusya, you’re good as gold, what a wife, I’m jealous of my own self, swear to you…

Lidochka ate almost half the peach, taking deep breaths and moaning a little with pleasure, the sticky juice dripping down her chin and chubby, tanned stomach. No, no, don’t smear it all over, hon, I’ll wash you off in the water later, you’ll be all nice and clean, just like a little apple, And where does your mommy work? Whoa, and does your daddy draw plans, too? And how many rooms do you have? Hear that, Kolya? I told you, didn’t I, how engineers get three-room apartments right away up north but then you thought, why the hell does Genka need technical school, he should go straight to work at a factory? And that’s how he and his family’s going to croak, in that dorm. So do your mommy and daddy make a lot of money? Don’t know? Just eat, hon, eat, may God give you health and your mommy and daddy, too…

The shriek came up suddenly, as one terrifying note—AAAAAAAA! Lidochka choked and dropped the peach, immediately coating the most delectable pulp with large-grain sand: there’d be no washing it, only throwing it away, too bad really, but the shriek got closer and closer, working itself to such inordinate heights that the picture of the beach—which looked like it had been drawn on thick, translucent glass—instantly dimmed and transformed into a web of frightened cracks. Vacationers slowly got up from their towels and chaise longues like sleepwalkers; some had already run to the shore, jostling the rest aside.

AAAAAAA! HELP! HELP!

Auntie Manya crossed herself, scared, Lord Jesus, Kolya, take a look, see what happened, just don’t you howl, hon, someone’s head obviously got baked, let’s us go have a look, too. Lidochka kept turning to look at the fallen peach, which was hopelessly ruined. She wasn’t even thinking of howling. Quite the opposite. This was all terribly interesting.

Papa was kneeling at the very edge of the beach: his arm was being pulled as if he were a little boy by a tall, wet guy, one of the brigade of muscle-bound lifesaving Atlases who usually hung around for whole days at a time in wooden watchtowers, stuffing themselves with ice cream and flirting with female vacationers, but mostly, of course, bored silly.

‘You all right, comrade?’ the guy asked Papa, sympathetically leaning in so that his rear end, in blazing swim trunks, jutted out behind him.

One of the curious in the crowd answered in a reproachful deep bass, ‘What do you mean, “all right”? Can’t you see, a man’s drowned!’

‘It’s his woman’s drowned,’ someone corrected the bass voice. Papa finally tore his arm away from the lifeguard, groaned softly and dully, and then fell facedown, like a toy accidentally jostled from a familiar place by an elbow.

The lifeguard straightened up and looked around, bewildered, but a shouting woman doctor, as white and brisk as a motorboat, had already broken through the ring of vacationers. A motorboat that was just as white and brisk—but real—was already spinning around the buoys, cutting anxious circles as the other lifeguards dove off the boat into the smooth waves with a noiseless splash, their distant young voices pealing as they shouted back and forth.

‘Look at that, his wife drowned but he’s in one piece,’ said someone in the naked, sweaty, babbling crowd. He was invisible and indistinguishable; maybe he was reproachful, maybe envious. Papa got right up as if he’d heard those words: he was all covered with heavy brown sand, just like Lidochka’s unfinished peach.

Then he suddenly lifted his head to the sky and threatened someone above with his fists in a gesture of such ancient and frightful power that it wasn’t even human. A mischievous little wave decided to lick at his pink, somehow childlike heels but then got scared and threw itself back into the sea, returning to its own. Papa’s naked, wet eyes surveyed the vacationers.

‘No,’ he said, completely calm. ‘None of that’s true. It’s time for us to eat lunch. We’ll go have lunch now. Where’s my daughter?’

Lidochka pulled her little hand, all sticky with peach juice, out of Auntie Manya’s fist and rushed away, hotly and unsteadily, sinking into something hot and unsteady. Her head was bursting inside with frequent little explosions, as if tiny fuses were burning out, one after another, unable to withstand the voltage. Until everything that had to be erased had been erased.

(It wasn’t until thirty years later, watching a leisurely BBC documentary about a family of orangutans, that Lidochka mentally paused when a male who’d barely recaptured his young from an alligator jumped on shore, hoarsely began howling like a human, and then lifted his mutilated dead baby toward the sky, maybe punishing, maybe reproaching, maybe trying to understand. Lidochka winced and then her head clouded with an oily murkiness, as if she were looking at the world through glasses—but they were someone else’s glasses, with someone else’s dioptres, hurriedly grabbed with greasy fingers from someone else’s desk. They didn’t help. Not at all.

(And then the male cautiously placed his young on the ground and all the orangutans took turns sniffing the motionless, mutilated little body as if they were saying goodbye. They filed away, awkward and stooped by evolution, instantly and happily forgetting everything because forgetting means living for them. ‘Awfully sad, isn’t it?’ said Luzhbin, blinking a lot. Like all deliberately harsh people, he readily shed tears about trivial things. Lidochka nodded in agreement. She’d been broken of crying from pity back in school, when she was nine. ‘Want a peach?’ Luzhbin stretched, flustered, for the fruit bowl, and damn if he wasn’t sniffling like a girl. No, Lidochka said, Sorry. I’m allergic to peaches.)

Children are constructed sturdily, very sturdily. No matter how the grown-up Lidochka tried to remember the summer of eighty-five—after July 24, rather than before—all she could get were vivid, painful flashes. A white and light blue flowered coverlet on the bed in the room. Papa lying the whole day on the next bed, face to the wall; the unprotected pink skin on the back of his head showing through reddish fluff. On the airplane—Lidochka was flying on a plane for the first time in her life!—a very nice pretty lady in tight-fitting dark blue brought around a tray of ‘Takeoff’ hard candies that were surprisingly itty-bitty, only half the usual size. Lidochka took one and quietly said thank you, like Mama’d taught her. Have another, the stewardess said. Very human, sympathetic wrinkles made their way through both her cordial professional grin and her ‘Ballet’ foundation makeup so thick you could spread it on a sandwich. Thank you, Lidochka whispered again, taking another. It was interesting to be on a plane but it was stuffy and smelled like pine air freshener and the ghost of someone’s long-ago vomit. Papa cried the whole six hours they flew to Ensk. Without stopping. Six whole hours.

Who took on all the unbearable tasks, who gathered the documents and procured the coffin, who helped transport it across the whole country? Who? Lidochka never found out. They didn’t bring her to the funeral so she stayed at home, sedately playing with her dolls under the watch of a taciturn neighbor equipped with knitting needles. The dolls made soup and went visiting, and East German Lelya with the squeaky golden hair even married a rabbit. Lelya was almost as tall as Lidochka herself and Mama had even altered one of Lidochka’s dresses for her: it was white, for special days, and had a horrible burn on the chest from a careless iron. Mama had hidden the burn under a big bow, dooming the white-silked Lelya to eternal matrimonial aspirations. What do you do for work, Lelya? Me? I’m a bride!

When the doorbell rang, Lidochka was pondering who to appoint to be Lelya and the rabbit’s child: a bug-eyed puppy or a plastic Hurvinek figurine whose little arms moved. The neighbor lady attempted to extract herself from her chair in four maneuvers—remove glasses, set down glasses, drop yarn ball, rub small of back—but Lidochka was already dashing to the front door, jumping for joy, it’s Mamochka, Mamochka came, I just know it! The neighbor lady finally broke free from the captivity of her furniture and furtively crossed herself. Outside the door stood an unfamiliar woman wearing a dress of an improbable and troublingly nocturnal color. She was very pretty, very, forget the stewardess. She was almost as pretty as Mama, but her lips were way too red. The woman came in after moving Lidochka to the side without looking, as if she were a small and not particularly valuable object.

‘But where’s Mama?’ Lidochka asked, stretching her mouth so she could began howling as artfully as possible.

‘She died,’ the woman very calmly said. The neighbor crossed herself again.

‘But what about Papa?’ Lidochka didn’t know what ‘died’ was but she’d called off the howling, just in case.

The woman’s lips trembled a tiny bit, as if she’d intended to kiss the air but reconsidered.

‘Your papa will be back soon,’ she said, finally looking at Lidochka.

The woman’s eyes turned out to be blue-gray, translucent, and smooth, with some kind of complex graphite tint in their very depths. But Mama’s eyes had been tawny. Tawny and cheery, like a tawny, cheery dog. Later—for the rest of her life—Lidochka was most afraid, more than anything in the world, she’d forget that.

‘And who, may I ask, are you?’ The neighbor lady finally came out of her fog after gazing mistrustfully at the double strand of pearls around the mysterious guest’s neck: the individual pearls were large and completely identical, and they went together with the wonderful modesty of very expensive, very simple things.

Probably artificial, the neighbor lady reassured herself: she was a professional market researcher and inspired envier, now on a much-deserved pension. Her hope was unfounded: the pearls were genuine pink-gray saltwater pearls patiently cultivated in a tender, living, oystery darkness. Just about everything of Galina Petrovna Lindt’s was genuine: only the very best and most expensive. With the exception of her own life, but nobody knew that, thank God.

‘Who am I?’ Galina Petrovna raised her eyebrows sympathetically, as if the neighbor lady were insane and didn’t know the reigning personage whose portrait hung in every home’s holy corner, wrinkly from the incense of admiring love and an ever-boiling samovar. ‘Who am I? Are you serious?’

The neighbor lady instantly shrank and retreated back into her pathetic life, into her crowded one-room apartment with angular village-themed patterns stenciled on whitewashed walls.

‘Let’s go,’ Galina Petrovna said. She nudged Lidochka toward a door nobody had thought to close. And Lidochka obediently stepped over the threshold of her own life.

Lidochka figured out, though not immediately, that her grandmother had inherited her.

Her grandmother’s name was Galina Petrovna and she was to be addressed in formal terms. Lidochka tried a variation—‘Grandma Galya’—for a while but it was rejected. In the first place, it sounded far too provincial and, in the second, someone might think you had a hundred grandmothers and didn’t know which one you were talking to. This was true: Lidochka didn’t have a hundred grandmothers or grandfathers, either, for that matter. She did, however, have a grandmother and grandfather who lived in Mama and Papa’s bedroom. Mama sometimes took them off the wall and affectionately ran a finger across a black-and-white man in a high-collared military jacket and a curly-haired woman who’d placed a light, round hand that even looked happy on her husband’s captain shoulderboards. The woman had dimples on her cheeks and a long strand of beads, and the man had a moustache like a frowning little brush. And these, Barbariska, are my mother and father, said Mamochka, your grandmother and grandfather. Where are they, Lidochka asked: she knew the answer in advance, like in a fairytale, and was as happy as any child to know in advance, once and for all, the natural order of things. Far, far away from here, in a wonderful and fantastic land, her mother said sadly, meaning maybe heaven or maybe the Far East Military District and a snow-covered bridge. A truck dove off that bridge when its not-so-bright driver, a soldier with big ears, dozed off at the wheel, populating his intricate final dreams with a platoon chilled to the bone in the back and a captain who’d hitched a ride at the edge of the city of Bikin and gotten into the truck’s cab with his wife, who even in death clutched to her chest a table lamp and bright, sunny lampshade they’d purchased at the commissary.

But why don’t Grandma and Grandpa come visit us? Lidochka impatiently tugged on Mamochka’s arm as if she sensed it was wrong to think too much about the ice breaking under wheels or the black water, silent from the cold, that rushed up to meet the truck. But why, tell me. Why? Because it’s very far away, Barbariska. Will we go see them? Absolutely, Mamochka promised, all serious. First Papa and I, then you. But it won’t be for a long, long time. In a thousand million years? Lidochka even went breathless from such a grand figure. Even longer, Mamochka promised and stepped off an ottoman that looked like a plush strawberry on thick little legs. Here, let’s go cook up some donuts, how about that? Lidochka squealed triumphantly, already feeling the promise of a fresh jar of jam and playing with flour; her grandmother and grandfather went back to the wall. They didn’t honestly look much like a grandmother and grandfather.

But Galina Petrovna, well… Galina Petrovna wasn’t like anyone else at all!

In the first place, she lived all alone in a huge apartment that looked like the picture of the castle in the big crackly book of Charles Perrault stories.

In the second place, running, jumping, and screaming weren’t allowed. Meaning those things were no longer allowed at all, particularly in the apartment.

In the third place, a special woman came over every morning: Maryvanna put on an apron and tidied up all the rooms with the soulless, taciturn dispatch of a genuine machine. Mama had always been mad or singing when she tidied up. Maryvanna cooked meals, too, something new and fresh every day, and then she put yesterday’s lunch or supper leftovers into special little containers for carrying food and took them away with her. She didn’t speak with Lidochka, it was as if she didn’t exist.

‘Why does Maryvanna need the food?’ Lidochka asked Galina Petrovna. She couldn’t hold back, though she knew all too well what happened to curious Varvara, whose nose was torn off for putting it where it didn’t belong. Mamochka and Papa hadn’t allowed her to bother grownups she didn’t know by asking questions. But if there weren’t other adults, people she knew, that meant she was probably allowed to ask.

‘What food?’ Galina Petrovna tore herself away from the television, absentminded from her surprise. ‘Oh, that food. I don’t know, she probably takes it for her grandchildren.’

Lidochka quietly pondered for a minute. ‘Is Maryvanna our grandmother, too?’

Galina Petrovna finally surfaced from her movie, Bracelet-2. About some foolish horse. Nobody knew how to make movies these days. ‘What makes you think Maryvanna is our grandmother? And don’t pick at the chair. You’ll ruin it.’

Lidochka obediently stopped stroking the velvety upholstery. Maryvanna came every day, cooked, cleaned, made the beds, and did laundry. She took care of Lidochka and Galina Petrovna just like a grandmother’s supposed to. Furthermore, as had just been revealed, she brought Lidochka and Galina Petrovna’s leftover food to her grandchildren. Therefore, Galina Petrovna and Lidochka were also Maryvanna’s grandchildren and they were, moreover, her very favorites. Lidochka didn’t see a single hole in the logical chain of her reasoning. Everything was correct. Wasn’t it?

Galina Petrovna shrugged her shoulders, annoyed. ‘Your head is so stuffed with silliness! Maria Ivanovna is my housekeeper. Why don’t you go read or draw? You can read, can’t you?’

Lidochka got down from the chair, offended. She could read. She’d been reading for ages. And even by herself, by the way.

Something else was strange: Lidochka’d never had any idea that Galina Petrovna so much as existed. It was incomprehensible. Because either you have a grandmother—even if she’s only a wall grandmother—or you don’t have a grandmother. Of course she could demand an explanation from Papa but for some reason Papa wasn’t coming back even though Galina Petrovna’d promised he’d come soon. Lidochka vaguely remembered Papa had been at Galina Petrovna’s the first night she’d spent there. She’d been put to bed on a leather couch that felt alive and all elephant-like to the touch. Papa had knelt by the couch, softly whimpering like a puppy and wobbling a little. Even through thick layers of sleep, Lidochka could sense his homey, warm scent, a wonderful mix of tobacco and a cologne Mama said made him smell like bay leaves in soup; sometimes she even called him Little Bay.

‘Little Bay,’ Lidochka muttered, turning over. The pillow was unfamiliar and too soft. Mamochka said sleeping on a soft pillow was bad for you. Papa went silent, scared. ‘Sleep, little girl, sleep, little bunny,’ he whispered, trying with unseen, blind hands to find Lidochka amidst the couch’s many outgrowths. ‘Just look, nobody unbraided your hair for the night, your grandmother hasn’t figured that out but don’t be mad at her, she’ll learn, you’ll see…’

Lidochka tried to lift her heavy eyelids but nothing worked. But where’s Mama? she asked in an unsatisfied voice, shaggy from sleep. Get Mama… Papa was quiet, as if he were gathering strength, and then he buried his huge burning face in Lidochka and she could feel his teeth jumping and knocking through the thin fabric of her pajamas.

‘Knock off the hysterics, Boris,’ Galina Petrovna ordered, appearing out of nowhere in the doorway. A ghostly white nightgown, a robe with firm silk dragons woven right in. ‘You’re acting like a girl.’

The side of Lidochka’s pajamas was soaked through with tears when Papa lifted his head.

‘You always hated her,’ Papa said quietly. ‘Always.’

Galina Petrovna shrugged her shoulders and disappeared and then Papa disappeared, too, melting into the slow night air after Lidochka turned over, no longer strong enough to resist the gentle pressure of sleep that drifted in from all sides…

Papa was nowhere to be found in the morning and Lidochka paced around the unfamiliar apartment for a long time, slapping her heels on the floor until she wandered upon Galina Petrovna standing at a window in a halo of hot tobacco. Mama had never smoked. Papa did, but Mama didn’t.

‘Where’s Papa?’ Lidochka asked sullenly.

Galina Petrovna turned. The cigarette in her fingers was astoundingly long.

‘He left,’ she said.

‘What about Mama?’

‘Mama died.’

Lidochka silently tried on this impossible fate. ‘I want to go home,’ she said.

‘This is your home now.’

That wasn’t true and both Lidochka and Galina Petrovna knew it perfectly well. But they had no choice, so Lidochka and Galina Petrovna began living together.

Galina Petrovna got started by bringing Lidochka to the doctor. In a long white car with a flowing name: ‘Volga.’ Galina Petrovna even got behind the wheel herself, which was surprising, too, because in Lidochka’s former life only nice, sweet men with huge calloused hands drove cars. Taxi drivers. Mamochka always raised indignant eyebrows at their fingernails, demonstrating to Lidochka what happens if you don’t wash your hands before eating: drivers’ fingernails were black, cracking, and covered with grimy uncultured layers. Buses, however, essentially drove along on their own, but on buses you could stick your nose into the stuffy sheepskin tails of someone’s fur coat or touch the bright crisp hem of a stranger’s dress-up skirt. Lidochka loved buses.

Galina Petrovna settled Lidochka, all fresh and dressed-up like a doll, on the front seat, tightly strapping her in with the safety belt as if she were tying up a holiday bouquet with a ribbon. ‘Don’t squirm,’ she commanded, and then the street came at them like a happy puppy, all light and smooth, with long shadows and blindingly sunny-green squares. Lidochka almost immediately felt queasy because the utility poles quickly changed into tree trunks, and then the tree trunks changed into sunny, mirror-like windows: the effect was like running your hand over a piano keyboard. Beyond that, the Volga had a strong, sweet stench of gasoline and Galina Petrovna’s perfume, which was as thick and unbearable as currant preserves that explode in the heat and rudely ooze from the jar. It was Dior’s Poison, an aroma that hadn’t yet become legendary. It was still a novelty, released in 1985 and incredible even in Paris, the very same year that—just now—the Volga flowed along the Ensk streets with Lidochka strapped into her seat, swinging her little legs, and trying to touch the car’s rattling floor with a sandal. Futilely. Utility pole, tree trunk, window, turn. Tree trunk, window, turn, utility pole.

Galina Petrovna spent three hundred rubles—three hundred!—for Poison, which was more, a lot more, than the monthly salary of many citizens of the huge Soviet Union. But the more money you spend, the more money you’ll have, that was a very simple and very understandable rule. Besides, who determines the cost of an ounce of happiness? Or what monetary units can quantify the sound of the glassine wrap as it broke and then slipped off a green box that looked like it might even be malachite? And the purplish-blue vial as round and smooth as a young female breast. The transparent prism of its tight cap. Galina Petrovna drew the vial’s cool, damp neck along her own hot, pulsing neck. Orange tree honey, raspberry, ambergris, opoponax, and coriander. The Ferula Opoponax plant is mortally wounded to yield its resin. The tears and blood of that herb smell of a spicy poison, the purest. I don’t think anyone else in Sovietdom has this perfume yet, purred the faithful Norochka, secret supplier of the Ensk elite, a small rat in the big black market and diplomatic routes. She thrust Galina Petrovna’s three hundred rubles into the half-opened pink maw of a show-offy purse as if it were a bra, using a petty thief’s quick and efficient motion, a motion that didn’t fit with either her imported outfit, intricately designed down to the last dart and yoke, or her drawn-out, offhand air of a wealthy lady who’s seen it all.

The car bounced over a treacherously gaping manhole cover and Lidochka barely managed to swallow a gigantic wooly gob of impending vomit. ‘It smells,’ she complained, looking straight ahead. She complained without much hope, just because. Galina Petrovna bent over, extending a strong hand (the reek of Poison and gasoline became tangible, as if Lidochka had been dunked in inky black, sweet snot) and then the rapid outside air agilely shoved its cool, tensed paw through the window glass like a tomcat, painlessly batting at Lidochka’s lips and round, sweaty forehead. It was already a little easier to breathe. But now a dreadful rumbling roar had joined the dangerous monotony of the rhythm of utility pole, tree trunk, window, turn. All the city’s noises rushed past, hurriedly pushing one another aside as they tried to elbow their way through the open window: they got stuck instead and, of course, began wailing on just one completely unbearable, raging note.

Lidochka looked sideways at Galina Petrovna to distract herself a little but Galina Petrovna was caught up in endless, very mechanical motions. That made matters worse: Galina Petrovna’s strong knees moved quickly under a skirt the color of delicate, fresh-baked milk, as if she were kneading something stubborn, resistant, and evil with the unseen soles of her feet. Her right hand (with a large, ripe ruby cabochon on one finger) kept lowering onto a handle that stuck right out of the floor. The handle twitched with a predatory crunch as if some sort of important but invisible bone was breaking, the car roared sorrowfully in response, and Galina Petrovna’s hand returned to the wheel to complete its flowing, turning motion: it all resembled some strange mechanical dance that was unbearable for both the audience and the dancer. The motion Galina Petrovna made with her head was particularly torturous: she looked into three mirrors in turn—above, left, right—and a sculpted honey-brown curl above her forehead jerked each time, falling out of the overall, set rhythm for a hundredth of a second.

At some point her complex rhythmic pattern arrived at the same resonance as the unceasing flashes outside the window and the smell in the car intensified, becoming almost festive, choral, and ear-splittingly loud. Lidochka already knew it was too late of course but she still tried to free her arms from the seatbelt or at least squint. ‘Don’t squirm, I told you,’ ordered Galina Petrovna, angry as she squealed the brakes and then—oopsy!—Lidochka vomited.

Her dress (light blue and new, with a satin waistband and a finely ruffled flounce on the hems) hardly suffered, but a sobbing Lidochka washed out her own little white socks with tiny little pompoms in the clinic bathroom under Galina Petrovna’s supervision. Good God, what is with this child! Rinse them better. Now squeeze them out properly. Don’t hold your hands like that. Not like that! Galina Petrovna grabbed the defiled socks from Lidochka’s hands and quickly—squeeze, squeeze—wrung them out over the sink. The cabochon on her finger caught the faucet’s spiral trickle and, now liberated, filled the whole bathroom with a damp, crimson blaze. Smooth pink patches of light galloped over tiled walls and disappeared. Rinse out your mouth, ordered Galina Petrovna, and Lidochka obediently rolled a cool ball of chlorine-scented water around her mouth. And set it free. She picked a strand of bitter, sticky drool off her chin. She wasn’t nauseous anymore, other than a little turning in her stomach, but that was more from shame. Galina Petrovna rolled the laundered socks into a tight, damp little ball and quickly tossed them in her purse. Let’s go, she ordered. And they went.

The lady doctor looked like a round white meringue cookie glued together from two light, crunchy, sugary halves. And who is this doll that’s come to see me, she said, stretching her words with the sweet, meringue-like voice of an experienced pediatrician and crouching in front of Lidochka. Lidochka backed up a bit just in case, expecting something awful like a tongue depressor or a syringe: she obviously couldn’t expect anything good from a person with a voice like that. But the lady doctor’s smooth fingers palpated nimbly and painlessly, and now say aaaah, what a smart little girl, lift up those arms, good, now let’s have a listen to you. The disc of a stethoscope so icy it was almost even hot, then the hurried pattering of anxious, tickly goose bumps. Lidochka drew together her shoulder blades, now covered with goose bumps, and giggled. Don’t breathe, ordered the lady doctor, serious. Now breathe. Lidochka giggled again and Galina Petrovna, annoyed, threatened her with a finger.

‘A perfectly healthy little girl,’ the sugary lady doctor finally said, helping Lidochka on with her dress. ‘And what a cutie, she’s like a copy of you, Galina Petrovna. Do you have any specific concerns? Maybe Lida isn’t eating well? Or sleeping? That would be completely understandable after all that stress. And how are you feeling?’ The lady doctor delicately lowered her voice as if she were inviting Galina Petrovna for a spin in an intoxicating verbal waltz. Like many other doctors for the institutional elite, she spent the greater part of her days stupefied from producing an insufferable, well-paid elation for the benefit of high-ranking patients, and only gossip kept her sane.

Galina Petrovna angrily jerked her shoulder. She didn’t intend to gossip, particularly about herself.

‘I’m absolutely fine,’ she said, cutting off the lady doctor. ‘Relax. But examine the child properly. Maybe she has worms?’

‘Oh, come now, Galina Petrovna, what worms?’ The lady doctor even seemed a little offended for Lidochka, who was still sitting right on the chair, swinging her little sandals. There was a telltale spot from the washed-out vomit on the flounce of her blue dress and her left heel smarted a bit. ‘The little girl is perfectly healthy, thank God. Of course we can do tests if you want but…’

A wooden-faced older nurse came out from behind a screen as if the word ‘tests’ had called her to life.

‘Olga Valeryevna, write up a referral. Fecal worm and egg. Lidia Borisovna Lindt. Lidochka, your papa’s Borya, isn’t that right?’ Lidochka didn’t even have a chance to nod before Galina Petrovna stood, took her by the hand, and left the office without saying goodbye.

‘Well, now, she is foul,’ the nurse said to the closed door with unexpected fury. ‘Worms. As if she’d dragged a kitten home from the dump.’

The puked-in Volga, all hot from the sun but carefully cleaned inside, was waiting for them by the guard booth, where Galina Petrovna had left it. The guard had gone all-out for them; he was a fat, cheery man charged with protecting the elite clinic from rank-and-file fellow citizens with ulcers and sinusitis that were of no interest to anyone. Oof, you sure got carsick, you little bug, the nice man said to Lidochka, sympathizing and slipping a Barbariska candy into her slack hand. The candy had practically lost its original confectionary appearance after a long stay in his uniform pants. Though she was stunned and dispirited about the mysterious word ‘worms’ and seeing the Volga again, Lidochka obediently mumbled a thank you she extracted from Mamochka’s eternally stuffed pedagogical storage bins.

‘LazarIosich’s little granddaughter?’ the guard asked brightly, attempting to pat the hot crown of Lidochka’s head before Galina Petrovna nimbly pulled Lidochka out from under his affectionate hand, thrusting the earned three-note into it instead so he’d shut his mouth and not get too familiar.

One car door slammed, then the other, and Lidochka again found herself in the unbearable interior of an automobile with a familiar stench, a sharp blend of the scents of hot plastic, chlorine, and fresh vomit.

‘And who is that, LazarIosich?’ she asked, trying to breathe with her mouth and not move, so as not to disturb the live vomit gob that was again establishing itself inside her.

Galina Petrovna lifted her brow a tiny bit and looked at Lidochka with unexpected respect, as if she were looking at a very adult and very brave person.

‘Lazar Iosifovich Lindt was an academician,’ she said, slowly, incomprehensibly, and a little sing-songy, though of course that wasn’t an explanation for a five-year-old child or even much of an explanation in general: it was more like a spell that killed a memory, or maybe a prayer that exorcised demons. Lidochka opened her mouth a little, not understanding. ‘He’s your grandfather.’

Chapter Two: Marusya

He turned up in Moscow out of nowhere, as if God had brought him to life right at the doorstep of the Second Moscow State University on a November morning in 1918 that crunched with frost. Your obliging imagination has probably already fanned out gloomy daguerreotypes that have darkened over time: cold, hunger, ruin, unbridled cannibalism, horror, fratricide, and typhus.

Things weren’t actually that bad in Moscow, though. The city had been declared the capital again as of March 1918 and though it wasn’t quite clear which country’s capital it was, at least the government’s hasty move from Petrograd guaranteed crows weren’t feasting on corpses in the streets. The public that crowded the Komissarzhevskaya Theater for Aristophanes’s Lysistrata was by no means bloated from hunger, the Zamoskvoretsky Sports Club’s soccer team won the city championship, and the Petrovka tennis courts were ruled by Vsevolod Verbitsky, an actor at the Moscow Academic Art Theater, a real sweetheart, and the dandy who’d taken first place in revolutionary Moscow’s first tennis championship that very same year, 1918. Pleasantly squeaky leather jackets for both genders were coming into style thanks to Sverdlov’s light hand, anything could be obtained through a private sale, and brunettes with high cheekbones teased with their eyes and their knees just as in former, peaceful times that might have even been rather dull. Intermittent food supplies, the proximity of the Germans, and crowds of soldiers in various degrees of drunkenness didn’t seem like undeniable forerunners of the apocalypse: they were more likely the unavoidable costs of a great turning point, things as closely and vexingly linked as mosquitoes and a marvelous evening at the dacha, marriage and being in love, or Shrovetide and greasy heartburn cozily curled up behind the breastbone.

Plenty of guileless human garbage and wreckage of individual fates ended up in Moscow, too: the newly minted revolution had uprooted nothing less than entire social classes and nations. There were, in particular, many Jews—now that’s who Soviet power certainly gave everything to, in the beginning, in the heat of the moment. Crazed, awkward, and restless without their usual Pale of Settlement, they made their way to the capital, perhaps to experience some of their own impossible Jewish happiness or to personally assure themselves that, yes, of course, their suffering was over. This time for sure. The wiliest and sharpest had already fit in, adapted, and acclimated, as if from habit: some were in trade, some in rapidly devaluing money, some in positions never seen before, taking things slowly, a little at a time. Treading softly, as the zoological anti-Semite who was also a great Russian writer used to say.

For some, though, there wasn’t the slightest reason to adapt since they themselves, the best sons of the Jewish people, participated in and inspired the Russian rebellion. Its futile participants and relentless inspirations, it must be said. It was they, by the way, who became the very first victims of the demons that were set loose a few vivid and faltering years later when the gigantic imperial pig grunted, rose from its century-old puddle, and took to chomping indifferently on its own piglets, not making much distinction between kosher and not-so-kosher. But oh, what a holy and frenzied army they were in the early Soviet years, those youthful commissars, those ancient sons of Abraham! Incorruptible, fanatical, ruthless, and wonderful in their idiotic heroism, it was they who brought the Russian Revolution its distinct Jewish flavor, a flavor that decades later caused Jews themselves to spit furiously, some with venom, others with the realest of blood. Which one, as academician Lindt said, depended on which side you came down on.

Lindt himself, however, didn’t belong to either the merchant or commissar class and, truth be told, he generally found very little use or benefit in his Jewishness. He considered Jews a timid and peaceable little nation with an extremely unfortunate historical fate. And, well, think about it: small-scale trade for centuries and being made to feel small, living with your bags packed, shivering and huddling at night, knowing that no matter how you try, you could be kicked to the curb with all your worldly possessions at the very first sign of trouble. Just like that, so you don’t get under foot and reek of your garlic.

‘You know, Lazar,’ Chaldonov said, wrinkling his brow, ‘the Jewish anti-Semite is even more repulsive than the slutty nun.’ Chaldonov was one of the fathers and founders of contemporary hydro- and aerodynamics, an academician, a beaming pillar of Soviet science, and such a fundamentally genuine Russian that he didn’t need any passport to prove it. Just a glance at his doughy nose, colorless brows, and the general contour of his simple-hearted, log-like physiognomy was like an instant high-speed screening of the entire simple history of Russian tillers of the soil, along with all that history’s whooping, whistling, forced labor, and equally forced, almost compulsory, merriment.

‘Come now, Sergey Alexandrovich, what kind of anti-Semite am I?’ Lindt said, grinning and displaying big, crafty teeth. ‘I’m just speaking up for the truth. How can anyone call a people great and chosen if it’s hopelessly fucked up everything on earth including its own Temple, and then nourished itself for thousands of year on just tear-stained memories? They haven’t even managed to create a decent cultural legacy!’

‘For heaven’s sake, Lazar, but what about the Bible?’ Chaldonov asked, frightened. He’d been around since 1869 but even toward 1934 he still hadn’t forgotten the pedagogical persuasiveness of a deacon who used his strong fists and gift for enlightenment to ram theology and love for God into a dense-headed village congregation. ‘How about the Bible?’

‘What Bible, Sergey Alexandrovich, I beg you!’ Lindt was openly laughing now. ‘Just about everybody wrote it, you might as well cite the Upanishads and the Torah as examples, too! I’m talking about cultural legacy, not religious ravings. Where is your Jews’ great literature? Where are the paintings? And the architecture?’

Chaldonov mentally crossed himself and just as mentally muttered to himself, Give us this day our daily bread—dear, familiar, and calming words that meant almost nothing but nourished the spirit’s most calloused sorrows and wounds like holy oil. Generations of Lindt ancestors prayed in unison with Chaldonov, praying unseen, unheard, and in another language but to the very same God. They were quiet wanderers, desperate eternal Jews who truly hadn’t created either labyrinthine palaces or large-scale canvases or fat-assed sculptures, nothing anyone would be sorry to abandon if exiled. But it was that prayerful striving, both unending and bitter, that had seeped so far into all of world culture that melancholy Jewish eyes or equally melancholy Jewish noses stuck out of every corner. They—meaning, oh, good Lord, you, yes, of course you—are the divine First Cause and spiritual origin for everything rational and civilized. Can you swallow that, Lazar?

Lindt shrugged: he hadn’t swallowed anyone’s unpleasantries, particularly religious ones, ever in his whole life.

Sometimes Chaldonov thought the Creator had just been in a rush to cram the essence of Lindt’s genius into the first available earthly body, as if He himself lacked the power to hold that essence in His hands. Rather like a charred, burning-hot baked potato with bursting sugary sides: you start off just honestly trying to toss it from hand to hand, trying to cool it, but then you drop it in grass you can’t see at night anyway, and to hell with it, it’s so hot you couldn’t handle it, but at least it didn’t fall in a cow patty, thanks for the small things.

Lindt’s body was so humiliatingly small, frail, and sinewy when it randomly turned up at the Second Moscow State University in November 1918 that the freezing young soldier with the big ears who guarded the entrance initially took Lindt for a street urchin: the rags he wore were absolutely outstanding, as if they’d come from the Imperial Maly Theater. It dawned on the Red Army man that Lindt would go around begging, so he ordered him, almost affectionately, ‘Go on, get out of here, you dirty little Jew boy, there’s nothing to fucking snatch up here. It’s just scholarlyish gentlemen. They don’t got anything to feed on, either.’

‘I’m here to see Chaldonov, Sergey Alexandrovich,’ the dirty little Jew boy politely said, like an adult. And then he firmly requested, ‘Announce me, please.’

The secretary of the Physics and Mathematics Department (which had natural, mathematics, and chemistry-pharmaceutical divisions) brought Lindt to Chaldonov. In reality, however, the department and the secretary didn’t quite exist because the department as a whole—with all its divisions—still belonged to the future, though the secretary chronically remained in his cozy past as a university privatdozent so as not to lose his mind, since in the past there’d been a reliable salary as well as spiritual and moral pursuits appropriate to his title. Lindt, however, wasn’t aware of the circumstances and didn’t sense anything remotely wild or Hoffmannesque about the situation: he generally kept a distance from hysterical and esoteric whims or empty reflection on the futility of everything. In that respect he wasn’t Russian and he wasn’t, of course, from the intelligentsia. He was simply a genius firmly standing on earth, a genius, moreover, in the most biological sense of the word: a classic brain pathology. Honestly. It was probably some sort of rare mutation. It’s not my fault things worked out that way.

Sergey Alexandrovich Chaldonov groaned with dissatisfaction when he heard scratching sounds, much like a stray dog, outside the door, sounds that usually preceded a downcast appearance from the department secretary.

Sergey Alexandrovich Chaldonov was pressed for time.

Chaldonov had been pressed for time for almost thirteen years now, since about 1905, when he (a brilliant mathematician, by the way) agreed to direct the Higher Women’s Courses, bringing only trouble upon himself. All hell broke loose: firewood, trustees, expansion, papers, female students gripped by hormonal turmoil: Get married, you fools, get married right away! Now, however, all that fuss felt like a pleasant, postprandial nap to Chaldonov. Being the director of the Higher Women’s Courses is one thing under the Tsar-Father but just you try, my dear sir, to turn those very same Women’s Courses into a second Moscow State University in a month, especially under a new revolutionary government that’s inexperienced and doesn’t know itself what it wants but makes demands anyway, heaps of them. Assisted by a Nagant revolver.

The secretary thrust his bald head into the office after delicately scratching at the door with his claws. Chaldonov despondently set aside protocol No.77/113 of the session of the Board of the People’s Commissariat on Education. The protocol ordered ‘reorganizing the Higher Women’s Courses into II Moscow State University, making it a mixed educational institution but not considering it a newly established higher educational institution.’

Everything about this sheet of paper categorically disgusted him: its yellowish color, its roughness, and its plebeian, official tone, unbearable for a descendent of peasants (‘allocate for financial support of the courses in the form of an advance of 1/12 of the estimate given by them’). Most terrible of all was a list of those on the board, people absolutely unknown to Chaldonov. D.N. Artemyev, V.I. Kalinin, M.N. Pokrovsky, V.M. Pozner, and D.B. Kalinin were at least somewhat bearable. But the name Lengnik, which immediately smacked of both a toothache and Swift’s unpronounceable Houyhnhnms, caused Sergey Alexandrovich nothing short of physical suffering. Fortunately, a considerate guardian angel had saved the chronically sleep-deprived Chaldonov by removing the completely intolerable details: Lengnik’s first name and patronymic (Fridrikh Vilgelmovich) and his Party nicknames (Kurz and Kol). Without that assistance, the future academician and laureate would have been lying on the parquet of his unheated director’s office with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. What are you waiting for? Pavel Nikolayevich? Come in. What is it? Yet another order from on high?

‘No, Sergey Alexandrovich, no orders. Someone’s come to see you,’ the secretary said, remaining between the corridor (his back side) and Chaldonov’s office (his head). In some sense, this was his usual position between past and future, too.

‘Well, who the hell is it?’ As a human being, of course Chaldonov couldn’t help but sympathize with a secretary who hung between two worlds, but he couldn’t contain himself because one must work at work, after all, my dear gentleman! Indeed! Work! No matter what!

The secretary lingered, unable to decide quite how to classify the raggedy adolescent who carried himself with the wonderfully cheery calm of a person born rich and free, despite his obvious stench and lack of washing.

‘Tell Sergey Alexandrovich that I have questions about the dynamics of nonholonomic systems,’ Lindt said quietly. His down-at-the-heel shoes stood out so much it was best not to even think about his feet.

‘Ehhh,’ the secretary said, definitively deciding the fate of Soviet science because the bored Lindt entered Chaldonov’s huge office unannounced after agilely pushing aside the privatdozent’s rear end, which had been blocking his path to a bright future.

It was more like a conspiracy than anything else. Or perhaps some children’s game where the rules are made up and changed on the go, so the only thing you remember is a feeling of fanciful happiness that’s only accessible in an early childhood that doesn’t even realize yet that it’s childhood.

Lindt and Chaldonov sat at the conference table and deftly tossed a small notebook back and forth to one other. Lindt had extracted the notebook—so greasy it was nearly edible—from under the heap of rags he was wearing. On its empty pages Chaldonov quickly wrote some letters, figures, and words incomprehensible to the normal human, then Lindt accepted the pass and wrote his own figures above those letters. Both players sometimes even quacked from an almost physical pleasure, as if they’d actually gone at it playing volleyball, heh-hehing, tensing their resonant, healthy, ideal muscles, and sending each other a ball that was just as resonant, healthy, and ideal.

Then Lindt finally got stuck for a few minutes on some sort of unheard-of formula that looked more like an intricate insect bristling with a dozen grasping pedipalps and chelicerae. Chaldonov tapped on the table with a short, impatient drumming.

‘So?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lindt admitted. He covered the formula with his hand as if he were afraid it would creep out through his fingers, which were all swollen from the cold, and hide with a quiet, dry rustle in the unearthly air of a darkening world.

‘What did I tell you, colleague?’ Chaldonov happily said, summarizing as he and Lindt suddenly began laughing from joy as if it weren’t November 1918, crunching with icy mud, but June of peaceful, sunny 1903, and it wasn’t a little notebook lying in front of them but an unswaddled, satisfied, pink-bottomed baby twisting its chubby little legs, and the two of them had just saved the baby from inevitable misfortune. Perhaps even from death.

‘Will you take me on as a student, Sergey Alexandrovich?’ Lindt quietly asked. Somehow it suddenly became clear that the blotches and streaks on his gaunt, boyish face weren’t from dirt, weren’t from hunger, and weren’t even from thousand-kilometer tiredness because, you know, he’d had to walk most of the distance… It was the twilight of his fate, the shadow of a large gift, a very large and frightfully distant gift under whose shelter Lindt had already had to live eighteen years of his vast and solemn life, and would need to live a minimum of sixty-three more.

‘Student?’ Chaldonov repeated in a threatening tone. ‘Fuck that! He wants to study, just take a look at this goose! You’re going to work with me, work! That’s what we’re going to do!’

Chaldonov laboriously got up from his desk, opened his office door, and brayed out into the depths, into the distance, into an indefinite personal future, ‘Pavel Nikolayevich, Pavel Nikolayevich, register our new co-worker right now! What’s your name, colleague?’ Chaldonov said, catching himself and turning to the wondrous foundling.

Lazar. Lazar Iosifovich Lindt.

Chaldonov nodded—maybe memorizing, maybe saluting—and went off himself in search of the lost privatdozent, without waiting for a response from the future. When Chaldonov returned an hour later, laden with cards, certificates, and questionnaires, Lazar Iosifovich Lindt was sound asleep after dropping his lousy, uncombed head right on his open notebook. Floating on his face—at last!—were not the shadows of demonic wings but the quick ripples of short and seemingly completely childlike dreams.

That evening, Chaldonov brought Lindt home to Ostozhenka Street and his huge professorial apartment, all dusky and creaking, with the appetizing smell of books in nice bindings and sedate home-cooked dinners with four courses for five guests. When Chaldonov hesitated with his thoughts for a moment at the door, Lindt quickly touched him gently on the sleeve.

‘Are you sure this is all right, Sergey Alexandrovich? I do have somewhere to spend the night.’

‘What do you mean? Stop with the silly ceremony, colleague,’ Chaldonov growled, taken aback as he tugged the doorbell. What the hell, does he read minds or something? With abilities like those and considering the electromagnetic nature of radiation… Oh and Marusya will give me the what- for, Lord-help-us-and-have-mercy. The what-for, that much is more than certain.

The front door swung open—without the clarifying questions or bolt clanging that were completely forgivable in the city where the Great October Socialist Revolution had just taken place—and a woman appeared on the threshold along with a light so bright and dense that Lazar Lindt squinted for a second. The light was too alive and too strong for him to write it off to the mundane kerosene lamp that Maria Nikitichna Chaldonova (known familiarly as Marusya) held in her hands. Even much, much later, whole years after, Lindt associated Chaldonov’s wife and their whole family with that particular light.

Maria Nikitichna had the gentle and unusually lively face of a coarse and somewhat common type that went out of fashion in the second decade of the twentieth century and now lives exclusively on pre-Revolutionary photocards. There was no doubt she’d been pretty in her youth, also in a way that’s already forgotten, back when a sedate allure went along with female beauty and a girl from a good family was most certainly supposed to cry profusely at trifling matters, have skin as fresh as cool milk, and spend whole days in bed during menstruation, lying about in skirts specially made for the purpose. All those gentle requirements and conventions receded into the background in Chaldonov’s wife, subdued by the light she seemed to radiate all by herself, as if it were even against her will. Lindt searched his whole life for similar glistening reflections in the faces of many women, a great many. But he never did grasp that a woman just does not exist on her own. She is a body and a reflected light. But there, you took my light and left. And all my light left me. A quote. The year nineteen hundred thirty-eight. Georgy Ivanov. Nabokov would have confirmed that an attentive reader would know where to place the quotation marks.

‘Marusya, take a look at who I found,’ Chaldonov said, cheerfully and a bit afraid, as if he were a little boy and Lindt was a shivering, flea-bitten puppy that was already tremendously beloved, and the only person deciding if he could stay to live in the house—or if they were going back to the dump together—was Mama, who probably still hadn’t forgotten yesterday’s behavioral demerit. Maria Nikitichna looked questioningly at her husband.

‘This is Lazar Iosifovich Lindt, my new colleague,’ Chaldonov said, attempting to introduce his guest. The scheme to bring the foundling home felt less and less successful with each passing second. Like all well-bred people, Marusya possessed a temperament that generally stayed nicely under control but was also capable of exploding with remarkable speed. Chaldonov knew this perfectly well: he couldn’t possibly have known it better. When Lindt attempted to politely bow, the stairs, door, and lamp immediately began softly, quickly spinning around a dizzying axis. He wanted so very much to eat. Marusya was silent for another long second.

‘Lice?’ she asked Lindt, businesslike, as if she were asking his price at the market. Lindt nodded as if doomed. He had nothing, really, but his little notebook and his lice. ‘Then be patient while I clean you up. We won’t eat until after that, all right?’

An hour or so later they were already sitting in the dining room at a dinner table set according to rules that were becoming relics of the old regime even as they ate. Napkins crackled, silverware jingled heavily, and Lindt’s head, shaved bare and emitting exultant flashes of light, protruded from the roomy collar of one of Chaldonov’s shirts as if it were poking through a hole in the ice. (Chaldonov had sacrificed an excellent razor from the Aron Biber Manufacturing and Industrial Trading House in Warsaw, a pre-Revolutionary luxury, just perfect for your impenetrable thickets, colleague.) Real carrot tea with real saccharine glistened in Kuznetsov china cups and Marusya Nikitichna put a third potato (with melted butter!) on their guest’s plate and affectionately persuaded him, eat, Lesik, it’s scary to look at you, you’re like some sort of head on legs, nothing more.

‘And what a head, Marusya, what a head!’ Chaldonov said, satisfied and boasting as he raised his knife and fork to the heavens. ‘This young man is a genius, trust me. And you know I don’t throw around words like that!’

‘He might be a genius, but he’s still very underfed,’ Marusya laughed.

Lindt squinted: he was flustered, sated, and trying with all his might not to doze off. He’d already heard ‘genius’ more than once. But nobody had ever called him Lesik, either before or after. Ever.

He courageously refused a fourth potato, I’ll return the favor as soon as I have some rationing cards, Maria Nikitichna. The Chaldonovs’ protesting hands waved him off immediately. This was, of course, his winning ticket. Undeserved and unexpected. As if he’d been walking along the street, picked up a little gold key, and released a trapped fate. Lindt himself knew things didn’t happen that way. But then there you go: his eyes dreamily close and everything quivers and blurs in the wet radiance of simple human happiness.

Maria Nikitichna stood to clear the dishes from the table and Chaldonov jumped right up to help her though of course he couldn’t have been more tired but still he said, good Lord, Marusya, sit down, I’ll do it myself, I’ll do it. And because he looked at his wife with hungry adoration and because she smoothed an unattractive whitish curl over his forehead in passing, it was obvious that even thirty years of marriage might be something God needed, especially if you believe He really does exist. Lindt swallowed a bitter lump that had arisen out of nowhere. I’ll have a life like this, too, he swore to himself. Just like this, no different. Love just like this, a Marusya just like this, a family just like this.

Maria Nikitichna Chaldonova was the biggest success of Chaldonov’s life and the fact that they both knew this perfectly well lent the whole tenor of their family life that essential flavor of marvelous adventure without which a marriage quickly turns into a horribly dull and barely digestible dish, something like fried potatoes rewarmed thrice. Marusya was smarter, stronger, and morally loftier than Chaldonov, but the most important thing was that she was of a completely different and better human stock. Her whole family was marvelous: it was an old priestly family with roots extending to such an early Christian, apostolic age that it was immediately obvious why their home was so pleasant for adults, children, cats, a canary in its cage, and all the holy fools, stray, destitute, and itinerant folk without whom it’s impossible to imagine either Russian life or service to a Russian God.

Marusya’s family, however, had its own special relationship with God. Even their surname was wonderful, delicious, seminarian, and completely of God: Pitovranov. Even now, at age forty-nine, Chaldonov remembered the serious look on young Marusya’s face when she explained to him, a twenty-year-old blockhead, that the Pitovranov name honored the prophet Elijah, who was fed by the ravens, the ‘vran’ in their name. Do you understand? Chaldonov nodded his tangled pale hair but understood only the dimples on Marusya’s cheek and the gray polka dots on her smart, fitted cotton print dress, which was unbearably shameful to even think about, even if there was no way not to think about it.

‘And the Lord said,’ Marusya continued, importantly, ‘“Get you from here, and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, that is near the Jordan, and you shall drink of the brook; and I have commanded the ravens to feed you.” Ravens, vran, like in our name. How could you not remember?’

‘I remember very well,’ Chaldonov sharply said, far sharper than usual, feeling like some damned village idiot. For some reason the thought that he was supposed to graduate from the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University in about a year with an applied mathematics specialty only intensified the torturously sharp pain of the sweaty shirt under his arms and the general physical awkwardness he experienced from the very presence of this girl, the top of whose head barely reached the button loop on his lapel.

‘Then go on, if you remember!’ Marusya demanded but Chaldonov’s only response was to mutely and beseechingly spread his hands. He knew he’d failed the most important exam of his life, shamefully, pitifully, and for forever, with no right to take it again.

‘But Papa said you’re a person with an outstanding mind,’ said Marusya, disenchanted. She continued the quotation simply, as if it were verse, without even the slightest bit of a churchly lilt. ‘“So Elijah went and did as the Lord told him: he went and dwelt by the brook Cherith. And the ravens brought him food in the morning and in the evening,” for God can do miraculous things to take care of those who serve Him faithfully and depend on Him.’

Chaldonov nodded again and submissively followed Marusya into the next room, where the large Pitovranov family had already settled in at the dinner table, banging chairs and happily squabbling with one another: Alyoshka’s sneaking in by the pies again, Pa, tell him, will you, once and for all, the insatiable Mammon! Pitovranov Senior, a theology professor at the Moscow Theological Academy, merely derisively fluffed his well-groomed, fully secular, cologned beard in response. Contrary to all notions of the fustiness of an ecclesiastical education, Pitovranov—adorer of his wife and progeny, man about town, wit, and thinker—knew nine languages (five of which were, however, hopelessly dead), had defended a brilliant dissertation about pagan cults (about which he fiercely argued with his eternal enemy-and-colleague Vvedensky), and yet still contrived to remain, sincerely and artlessly, a religious believer. On the other hand, how could one not believe when God himself—rustic, cozy, and the only Lord possible, hopelessly anthropomorphic with solid peasant heels and a curly beard resembling a curly cloud that completely took the place of His sofa, chair, and the foundation of the world—lived and breathed each day and each hour in the clinking cutlery, crying babies, creaking floorboards, and every note of every voice in the Pitovranov home.

The family was huge, noisy, and friendly, but it was obvious to even a chance guest that this friendship wasn’t based on some empty, chance blood kinship but on a completely conscious, intelligent human amity, meaning each newly born Pitovranov and each stray cat or dinner guest had to attempt to win the love and amity of all the others. Once becoming part of this peaceful, many-voiced symphony of great human happiness, however, each received in return more than enough wondrous bodily coziness and warmth to last an entire lifetime on earth and even beyond the grave.

It was the senior Pitovranov, a greedy and fastidious hunter and collector of human souls, who brought Chaldonov into their home. Pitovranov had promptly pegged the lanky student—who admittedly looked rather awkward and plebeian—not as a future academician and not as a luminary of fundamental science but rather as a person of that high, uncommon moral standard that Count Lev Tolstoy so long and furiously sought in people. Tolstoy himself, as was God’s will, completely lacked that unnamed delicate organ, that unique vestibular apparatus of the soul that infallibly permits even a small child or a dog to distinguish good from bad, kindness from evil, and sin from upright intention or deed. It was the first time Pitovranov senior had seen with his own eyes such convincing and original proof of the Tertullian axioms—that every soul is by nature a Christian—and this despite Chaldonov’s religious journey having likely never progressed further than the creeds, or even Our Father. Unlike many theologians, though, Pitovranov, a thinker, was fully capable of distinguishing the church from God and so after two long discussions with the bright student, he invited him for dinner at his own home, Pyatnitskaya Street, number 46. We will welcome you, my dear Sergey Alexandrovich, and I won’t accede to any objections. You’ll meet my progeny and members of my household and have something home-cooked as well. The food’s always delicious at my house, that’s a strictly observed rule, and you’re probably sick and tired of taking your meals in taverns anyway.

And Chaldonov, who was generally agonizingly shy about everything on earth except his own mathematics, not only agreed, but actually arrived, all dressed up, pomaded, clumsy with excitement, and bearing candied cherries from the fashionable Einem confectionary company. The show-offy little silk-covered box for those cherries was emptied that very evening and moved in with the Pitovranov girls, where it became a refuge for buttons, silk ribbons, bugle beads, and other little things, odds and ends that were extraneous but eternally dear to any little girl’s heart.

The Pitovranovs had six children but Chaldonov never seemed to remember them all by name because it was Marusya he saw right away, as soon as he walked into their crowded entryway: she was holding a huge, fluffy smoke-colored angora cat by the scruff. ‘Don’t take off your galoshes,’ Marusya angrily ordered Chaldonov. ‘Sarah Bernhardt, this mangy girl, decided to make a mess again!’

Marusya shook the accused cat, who squinted her insolent blue eyes and did what she could to feign the atoning sinner. Her show wasn’t, in all honesty, very convincing, and Marusya shook the limp cat again as a warning.

‘But,’ mumbled Chaldonov, lost, blushing, and unsure where to put the candy. ‘But how can I, well, come in, wearing galoshes? I can’t do that, can I?’

‘That’s true,’ Marusya said. ‘Mama would probably be upset. Take off your galoshes. I ought to put Sarah outside, let her get some air. You must be Chaldonov, right? Sergey Alexandrovich?’

She offered a hand that clutched the cat in a fist and Chaldonov responded by awkwardly holding out the box of candy.

‘Yes, indeed, miss,’ he mumbled, cursing himself for the high-flown vocabulary from who knew where. Yes, indeed, miss! Like a lackey, like a steward! Oh, God, the shame! I’m done for, most completely done for!

‘And I’m Marusya, meaning Maria Nikitichna, of course.’ Marusya smiled easily and joyfully. There was a small, deep-brown beauty mark above her upper lip.

The cat used all the confusion as an opportunity to plop heavily on the floor like a ball of dough and cautiously slip away.

‘And there you have it, I let her go again,’ Marusya said, distressed. ‘Now she’ll probably tear up the gardenias, too. Let’s go, don’t be shy, they’re all tired of waiting. Papa talks about you all the time: we all think he’s completely in love with you.’

That was Marusya’s favorite word: ‘completely.’ She again offered Chaldonov a small, warm hand—now empty—and he cautiously held it in his sweaty fist.

That was on November 28, 1888, and it was on April 9, 1889, Easter Day, that Sergey Alexandrovich, pale to the point of fainting and barely able to string his words together, proposed to Marusya. Holiday hyacinths that even looked tight and damp cast an overpoweringly loud scent through the whole room.

‘Will you, Maria Nikitichna?’ Chaldonov asked. In the event of a refusal he’d firmly decided to shoot himself or, at the very least, throw everything aside and leave for the country, a monastery, or a bender.

When Marusya walked right over to him and looked up into his eyes, her very simple, homey, and slightly apple-like scent immediately displaced the hyacinths and filled the whole world.

‘Well, of course I will!’ she said, happy. ‘Especially since Papa and I have a bet about you, a whole ruble! He said you would most certainly ask for my hand at Easter Week. And I said you wouldn’t be ready earlier than Trinity Sunday, no matter what. Do you have a ruble?’ Chaldonov reeled and caught the edge of a table with his white fingers: this stroke of joy turned out to hold such power that everything took off right before his eyes, floating past, slowly gathering speed, and clickety-clacking over the joints on the rails.

‘Why do you look so pale, anyway? Are you hungry?’

Chaldonov shook his head like an old horse. He still couldn’t speak. He still couldn’t believe it.

‘And what is it, are you really not happy at all?’ said Marusya, still insistent. ‘And you don’t even want to kiss me? We probably can now, you know.’

She raised herself on tiptoes and put her smooth lips in position, just like that, as if she’d already done this a thousand times. Chaldonov closed his worthless eyes just as Grisha, Marusya’s younger brother, burst into the room, furrowing the rugs.

‘Just can’t get enough Easter kisses?’ he asked maliciously. ‘All those locusts in there will finish off the whole piglet without you!’ he said, jerking his head toward a door. The hungry post-Lent Pitovranov family was making a racket behind that door, forcing their way into the dining room.

‘Scat, go on!’ Marusya said, laughing. She took Chaldonov by the arm and they went to the table, gracefully, splendidly, and in step, as if they’d walk and walk and walk their whole life. Grishka, in the grip of early hormones, triumphantly ran ahead of them, shrieking, ‘And they were kissing, I saw it myself! Kissing!’ Everyone had already taken their seats around a festively and thoughtfully decorated dining room table where a suckling pig really did lie on a plate as a centerpiece. It looked small, very child-like, and frightened, squeezing together eyelids swelled like a newborn’s. A bad premonition came over Marusya for a second, but only for one second because this year was a great blessing for the whole planet: the year of the discovery of the Shroud of Turin, a miracle not of human hands and also the source of much heated debate among the Pitovranovs and, well, of course nothing bad could happen in a year like that. Couldn’t and wouldn’t. And also because in late spring Chaldonov graduated from Moscow University with distinction and was kept on at the department to be groomed for a professorship, per order of his teacher, the great Zhukovsky.

He and Marusya married in early summer.

Right after the wedding ceremony the young couple left for a honeymoon voyage along the Volga: this was Marusya’s idea and later turned out, like all her ideas, to be the only possible and favorable option because nobody could have thought up anything better. Amidst all the wedding fuss and then travelling by rail to Nizhny Novgorod, the important thing Chaldonov had feared so much and wanted with such naïveté and agitation was delayed. Only on the very first evening, when he and Marusya were finally alone in their creaky cabin on the steamship, did he feel the full gravity of his undeserved and unbearable happiness. There was a scent of delicate river dampness and long, flowing, lulling shadows floated along the ceiling, and then the whole world around them entered that same flowing, lulling rhythm: the swaying lamp light, the gentle, weak lapping of the Volga’s waves, and Marusya’s responsive movements, which made Chaldonov’s besotted heart alternately stop short and then strain commandingly.

It was the most honeyed of all possible honeymoons, long and unhurried, just like their steamship, the Tsesarevich Nikolay, rebuilt by the Caucasus and Mercury Steamship Line especially for navigating the year 1890. The Tsesarevich hadn’t lost its provincial leisureliness now that it was two-decked and equipped with a brand-new Compound American engine. As was customary, the slow breakfasts on deck under a canvas tent included grayish caviar that was supposed to be spread with a special little ivory spoon on the porous flesh of hot white kalach bread, and there was a never-ending tea party hosted by a small, round-bellied little samovar: Marusya said on the first morning that it looked as important and puffing as a bishop. Chaldonov looked out over the stern at the rapid sunny water with eyes wet from uninvited tears: he saw Marusya’s noticeably puffy lips and the tender, nearly invisible bruise on her young neck, slightly golden from the sun, and squealing seagulls to whom the esteemed public tossed generous pieces of still-warm bread rolls. What did you say, my love? Pardon me, I didn’t hear you. I said you look like a Saint Bernard in the Alps. Just as shaggy and sentimental. But I had no idea I was marrying a crybaby.

Marusya got up from the table, deftly straightened her first truly grown-up lady’s dress (with an uncomfortable bustle she just couldn’t get used to) and went to stroll around the deck after quickly sticking her tongue out at Chaldonov. He watched her through the blurry rainbows still on his lashes: she walked along boards washed to whiteness and she was quick, smiling, and all composed of flowing lines and silken shadows. He feared only one thing, that he would die of happiness without living until the next evening.

During their long port stops, shrieking, dressed-up country women sold scruffy lilac branches and early wild strawberries. From the deck, Marusya observed the crush on the wooden docks and the many-layered attire of the provincial ladies and happily explained to Chaldonov why the Peredvizhniki artists’ work wasn’t art but simply a pathetic imitation of what’s sinful to imitate. Do you understand? It’s a sin! Just take a look, see that woman over there with the little pies, quite a charmer, isn’t she? Strong as an ox! And those eyes, what eyes! A marvel! Could it really be possible to convey something like that with paint or even words? Marusya was pensive for a second. Could it be played? As a fugue? I think that woman over there is even more grandiose than a fugue! And Marusya, who was musical, like all the Pitovranovs, began quietly humming something thick and titanic that really did resemble the merchant on the dock who held, effortlessly suspended, a huge basket of little pies, new-born, piping hot, and wrapped in rags. The pies were plump, satisfying, and stuffed with offal, onion, and buckwheat kasha, horrible things, Marusya laughed, crouching and sharing a common person’s treat with a heavy-breasted stray mutt that circled and wove around Marusya’s feet in flattery, here you go, take it mommy, treat yourself. Admit it, you have a lot of little puppies, don’t you?

The mutt snapped greedily at the aromatic dough, not forgetting to use her entire hindquarters to signal her most ardent attachment to the newly minted Mrs. Chaldonov. The mutt had seven puppies but a shopkeeper had drowned all of them in a cesspool a couple hours earlier. He wasn’t a mean person or even greedy, he was just rational and sensible, as a true Samaritan should be. He could easily feed the bitch and her litter but he just didn’t need eight dogs, and the mutt had yet to learn this. But for now, well, everything was good for now: the sun, the filling fried up with onions, the affectionate hand in a white glove that scratched behind an ear then the nape of the neck, and each breath blessed the Lord, and He didn’t even seem to be indifferent.

The dog nearly melted with happiness when Marusya ruffled her shoulder one last time. Then Marusya brought her husband for a stroll around Plyos, a lovely little doll-like place resembling a pearl that had escaped into the grass from someone’s pin: the pearl is genuine, even if it might be a little dusty and not perfectly even. People in the market stalls shouted, energetically played the accordion, and shoved fragrant textiles, ring-shaped rolls, and famous local yarn into gaping faces: it was clear to both Chaldonov and Marusya that neither of them had erred and this was just the beginning of a long, wonderful journey where everything would truly be as promised. Awaiting them were a peaceable life, many years together, and love for one another in worldly unity. And they would be granted enough of heaven’s dew, earth’s richness, bread, wine, holy oil, and benefaction to fill their home and share the abundance with the needy. If that’s how it would be, it wouldn’t be scary to die at some point, on the same day. And all those promises came true on, literally, each count. Except one.

After a year of the very happiest married life, Marusya was somehow still able to laugh off questions from kin who wanted to bounce grandchildren on their knees, come what may. A year later she, too, began to worry. Several years—certainly the worst in the Chaldonovs’ life together—were spent in a desperate struggle others didn’t see. Marusya was unusually sensitive and thus especially virtuous, and so found doctors particularly difficult to bear. Go behind the screen and undress, please; confident male hands, torturing instruments, a sweaty fist crumpling a hankie that doesn’t utter a sound, humiliation, horror, humiliating hope, time after time, time after time, the same, always the same, always the same. Each circle of Hell was certainly travelled: trips to the waters and mud baths, university luminaries with diplomas, expensive private doctors, obscure healers who’d ‘performed a real miracle with that Anna Nikeyevna,’ even though that Anna Nikeyevna, the friend of friends of some friends, was by now as completely anonymous and impersonal as a banknote. What distinguished Anna Nikeyevna from a banknote was that Anna Nikeyevna couldn’t buy you even a few grams of happiness. Even the homeopaths, who were quickly becoming fashionable, entered into all this, and only an innate spiritual squeamishness saved Marusya from trips to see wise women, charlatans, and wizards. This wasn’t so much a matter of sin as the promises of shrewd metaphysical hangers-on (many of whom, as it happened, charged so much for a visit that even the most voracious Aesculapian would be ashamed) to change the will of God himself with their hurried incantations, towels cross-stitched on the hems, and broken candles. Deep-down, Marusya felt more than anyone that God’s will was not to grant children to her and Seryozha. There was no point in opposing that will: you might only make a request, as you might request your parents give you a doll from the Simon & Halbig factory for your name day though you always risked receiving yet another little one-kopeck book about a bear or a slap in the face from your father instead of the beautiful poured wax doll in a stylish silk outfit. Marusya wasn’t afraid of slaps in the face, though: she simply wanted to know why she was being denied. And why her?

For Marusya, the trips to doctors (which Chaldonov insisted on) were akin to fetters for holy fools: just another ordeal that brutally tortured the flesh, though there was an equally brutal tempering of the spirit in return. Something else was more important: the icon of the Mother of Jesus called ‘Seeker of the Perished’; the icon of Joachim and Anne, the upright parents of the Virgin; the icon of the upright Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist; the relics of the holy martyr of John the Infant at the Kiev Monastery of the Caves; the miracle-making Tolga icon at the Tolga monastery and, right next to it on a railing, the icon of Our Lady of the Sign, under which one must crawl three times, tearfully praying to the Most Holy Mother of Jesus. Marusya crawled and cried so much that she was taken by the arms and helped out of the cathedral.

There was also the Convent of the Conception and the miracle-working icon of the Gracious, and the relics of Saint Sofia of Suzdal. Marusya’s confessor, Father Vladimir—a withered, sly-bearded, gray old man who seemed to have baptized and given guidance to the entire Pitovranov clan—advised writing to the Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos. After three months of waiting that nobody noticed, Marusya received a little package from the Athos monks containing a small piece of the vine of Saint Simeon the Myrrh-Streaming, which had already borne fruit for a thousand years. The package also contained a small icon of Saint Simeon and three little raisins. The raisins were to be eaten by the infertile spouses—two for the wife, one for the husband—after spending forty days on a strict fast without wine, jam, or olive oil. In practice, this meant bread, water, and raw vegetables. Father Vladimir said Simeon’s vine was the surest of sure methods. Chaldonov didn’t maintain the fast, though, breaking it after a week when he followed the aroma of cabbage soup like a starving dog, only coming to his senses in a tavern amid smelly coach drivers and the shabbiest of folk. When he’d cleaned the bowl in front of him to a shine, the waiter, deftly holding his arm behind his back, was already lugging a tray with boiled beef, tear-inducing horseradish, and salted cucumbers. Burning from shame, Chaldonov gave up on himself and demanded some vodka to go with the beef and intensify the horror of his fall.

Marusya didn’t give in and didn’t retreat, though she was so weak she nearly stopped seeing people, and thus Pitovranov Senior dropped in himself to see the young couple because he missed his daughter. The Chaldonovs were then renting half a house on Povarskaya Street: Sergey Alexandrovich had a good reputation and earned a very, very decent income, if you counted private tutoring. Pitovranov silently looked at Marusya’s face, bony from torment and hunger, and led Chaldonov by the sleeve into another room.

‘Sergey Alexandrovich, I didn’t entrust my daughter to you so she’d go off her head,’ he said quietly but so frightfully that Chaldonov hid his suddenly sweaty hands behind his back like a boy who’d played a nasty trick. He loved his father-in-law and they had become even closer friends after the wedding, all without inhibitions, without obligations. Neither, of course, would have his friendships any other way.

‘I tried to dissuade her, Nikita Spiridonovich, but Father Vladimir gave his blessing for a fast and said only abstinence and a feat of prayer would work.’

Pitovranov senior squeezed his luxuriant beard with his fist and then tugged as if he wanted to tear it out.

‘That old fool Father Vladimir will get it in the face,’ he promised. ‘But you, Seryozha! You’re a mathematician and a learned person, how could you allow these absurd, primitive superstitions into your home?’

Chaldonov fell helplessly silent: hearing something like this from a professor of theology was incredible and even terrifying, but Marusya was even more terrifying: on the outside, her coloring was as cheery and steady as before but she was contorted, all for naught, on the inside.

An anxious Father Vladimir came to see them that same evening—to reason with a spiritual child who had wandered too far—and when Chaldonov treated the old priest to tea and preserves, he unwittingly searched for traces of beatings on a face wrinkled from a lifetime of proffering affection. Despite his churchly learnedness, Pitovranov senior’s fists would be the envy of any merchant. Marusya, however, wouldn’t listen to anyone and continued observing a lonely fast no one needed. Chaldonov knelt and wept as he begged his wife not to destroy herself and not to destroy them both, but he also understood his tears and entreaties were all in vain, all for nothing, and wouldn’t change a thing. Marusya was stubborn, both in her heritage and in her own way, and there was nothing inert, wild, or pained in that stubbornness. She simply wanted to know. Simply wanted to know why and for what reason.

Forty days later, the raisins from Athos were eaten with a prayer, with trembling, and with an improbable and visible hope. All for nothing. The door didn’t open. And no doorman even came out to convey the message that there wouldn’t be an answer. Marusya waited a bit longer and then quietly returned to herself.

To Chaldonov’s timid joy, everything seemed to return to where it had been; the pastors and doctors ceased, as did the unending vigils in front of icons that resulted in nothing but aching kneecaps. The Chaldonovs were sitting at the table on a Sunday: it was summer and morning once again, the white curtains in the dining room billowed and subsided, green and gold outside billowed and subsided, and Marusya’s batiste dress was cool on the outside but fiery-smooth on the inside.

‘This will be embarrassing when Agasha comes in,’ Marusya said, reproaching Chaldonov and affectionately slapping at his forehead with a teaspoon that was also hot and smooth.

‘She won’t come in,’ Chaldonov mumbled, struggling with tiny, smooth little buttons and a silky ribbon. ‘I sent her off for the samovar, she won’t be back for a couple hours.’

Marusya still gently deflected his hands but he could hear and feel her breathing change, and he knew everything would be different in a moment—flavor, heat, aroma—she was surprisingly, unbelievably responsive. One could only dream of a beloved like her, if Chaldonov could, of course, have dared dream of anything like that…

‘Seryozha, wait,’ Marusya said. Her upper lip always swelled instantly from kisses, a special charm of hers that made Chaldonov’s hands shake and head spin even more. ‘I need to go to Kostroma, to the Theodorovsk icon of the Mother of God.’

Chaldonov backed off, dazed and unable to understand how she, so tactful, could ruin everything so suddenly: the morning, the sunny spots outside the window, the translucent dribbles of honey on the table knife, and the taste of her own lips.

‘This will be the last time, Seryozha,’ Marusya said, lightly stroking him on the cheek. ‘The last time. I give you my word, I promise.’

They went to Kostroma together but it ended up feeling like an unhappy shadow of their wonderful honeymoon, despite their all-out attempt to be their usual selves. The miracle-working Theodorovsk icon of the Mother of God, painted by the evangelist Luke himself, resided in the Holy Trinity Ipatievsky Monastery, which was defiantly rich, white-stoned, and reminiscent of a stale crème torte. Chaldonov’s delicate peasant fear of getting in the way or ruining something with his clumsy presence prevented him from going to the Trinity Cathedral, so he stayed outside instead. Marusya—still very thin and humbly wrapped in a simple grayish scarf with dots—glanced at her husband from the threshold as if she were afraid, or couldn’t bring herself to take the final, truly final, step. Her lips moved soundlessly and ceaselessly, and Chaldonov knew Marusya was praying to Anna, the mother of the Mother of God, ‘Give fruit to the womb of those who call to you, releasing them from the darkness of their infertility, through the release from infertility make childless ones fertile, they praise you and eulogize the Son of God, your Grandson, and Creator and God.’ The world is a mind-boggling place if even God has a grandmother and you can complain to that grandmother about an aching heart as well as an aching knee.

Chaldonov sighed and sat on a secluded little bench hidden in the very heart of some fluffy shrubbery. The monastery was cared-for, green, and distinguished, a repository of Romanov tradition. Its external flashiness was unfailingly maintained even though everyone had long grown accustomed to regular visits from the tsar’s family. The monastery’s gardens and soldier-like tidiness were enviable. Chaldonov sat, patting his pockets out of habit: he so wanted to smoke that his saliva was bitter, but he couldn’t bring himself to get his cigarettes. There was a scent of sunny, lush, recently watered foliage and rich, satiated black earth, and a bird chattered deafeningly in tangled branches, scolding Chaldonov for disturbing her nest.

Pilgrims scurried around the monastery: wiry black monks agilely rounded them up into their proper places like sheep and smartly dressed laypeople sedately went to prayers, but the majority of those swarming about were unattractive, broken, beaten down by life, and humiliated, people who’d dragged themselves here looking for final refuge and the hopes they no longer harbored, even within. Chaldonov knit his brows, secretly disdaining the wounded birds the Russian Orthodox Church eternally collected around itself. It was painful to think that his Marusya—so lively, wonderful, and genuine through and through—had ended up among the desperate, orphaned, and wretched who crawled toward the entrance of the promised heavenly kingdom. He respected any faith and Marusya’s, too, in particular, though for goodness’ sake, what did the institution of the church have to do with anything? It was a monster as unwieldy as a government, capable of pulverizing even the very best human material to dust.

A monk appeared on the square in front of the Trinity Cathedral as if in answer to Chaldonov’s thoughts. He was not some gold-leafed monk from a Nesterov painting but a genuine warrior of Christ, the Lord’s dog, but with an orthodox appearance. He was tall, broad-shouldered and unbelievably, almost scarily, handsome: otherworldly, inhuman and, of course, with a beauty that wasn’t Godly. And he walked, broadly inflating the black wings of his robes and looking over human heads with furious disdain, as if afraid of being soiled. The crowd parted before the monk, standing back in reverence and crossing themselves, struck dumb by a being of such an otherworldly, singular breed. ‘Oh, he’s so fine,’ said one young hussy, enraptured and ahhing, a fine specimen herself, like a peeled onion. The monk’s face instantly contorted out of hatred, as if a bright, black flame had blazed up inside, but then it tightened again into a disgusted grimace.

Chaldonov began to feel uncomfortable, as if he’d stumbled in some high place and caught his hand on an unsteady railing at the very last minute. God didn’t care one iota about people, that much was clear. He indiscriminately and ineffectively filled vessels extended to him without noticing tears or listening to prayers. Why was this home-grown Lucifer from Kostroma granted so much bodily beauty and power? Why was Marusya kneeling once again in front of yet another icon—in the dark, in fear, and in desperation—and seeing nothing but oily ochre splotches of light on a huge old board? Why had the Lord not found them worthy of seeing the children of their own children? Was that really just?

The bird decided to change tactics after despairing of ever frightening Chaldonov by chirping. She came down from the branches and began hobbling around on the grass, dragging a wing and naively limping first on one foot, then the other, pretending to be injured and vulnerable. She was saving her children.

‘Don’t be afraid, you ninny,’ Chaldonov mumbled, wiping his wet eyes. ‘Marusya’s right, I am a real crybaby and a sniveler. And no, I won’t touch your nestlings.’ The bird stopped and looked at Chaldonov with a round, impenetrable eye: he loved starlings for their intelligence, cheer, and industriousness; they had plenty of starlings in the country. ‘I’m leaving, do you hear? I’m already leaving. How much can a person take, huh? For so long! How much longer do I need to wander? Will this torment go on long? Until death itself, mother! Until death itself…’

He wanted so much for Marusya to come out of the cathedral that of course he missed it when the huge door opened. Then the air around him simply changed, all at once, and it turned out Marusya was already walking through the yard, head bent low, walking very slowly as if yet another cross—instead of a consoling hand—had been lowered on her shoulders inside the cathedral. And it was completely overwhelming this time. That’s it, Chaldonov grasped, that’s it, nothing helped. Not even this last thing. They’ve broken her. Mutilated her. Finished her off. My Marusya. He wanted to shout or even yelp: it was as if someone was tormenting a child or a cat right in front of him and there was absolutely no way to prevent the pointless, long torture of a completely innocent and uncomprehending being. Marusya kept walking and walking as if she were plowing through heavy water in her sleep, and with each step Chaldonov hated God even more. The hatred was swelling up inside him, growing larger and larger within his dark, empty rib cage, first making it impossible to breath, then to believe, and finally, to live.

Marusya walked over and lightly placed a warm palm on her husband’s sleeve.

‘How was it, sweetie? How are you?’ The fidgety Chaldonov kissed Marusya’s temple, straightened her jacket, and tidied her hair for some reason, as if his awkward, petty bother was an attempt to distract God from his own nest. The hatred was gone and there was only fear that an unavoidable fiery pillar might now collapse on Marusya’s head, too. He’d ruined everything again, brought tremendous harm to everyone. A blunderer. A clod. A damned fool. He wanted to look his wife in the eye but was desperately cowardly. She was so strong, his Marusya, but even she could be crushed. Anyone can be crushed, especially if you’re God.

‘Let’s go, Seryozha,’ Marusya quietly said. ‘Let’s finally go home now.’

‘But what about…’ Chaldonov stumbled on his words, not knowing how to finish the question. What about faith? What about children? What will happen now? What’s the next station? The madhouse? Church divorce? A noose hastily attached to a chandelier?

‘Let’s go home, Seryozha,’ Marusya softly repeated. ‘I came to an agreement about everything.’

Chaldonov finally dared look at her face. Marusya’s eyes perfectly matched her scarf—light and speckled—and very calm. They held neither pain nor wrath nor hope. Nothing at all. Complete silence.

She truly had come to an agreement.

Neither she nor God told Chaldonov the terms of the agreement, but they both firmly kept their word. Chaldonov was as happy in his marriage as only a mortal man can be with a mortal woman. There was never another question about children, just as there were no children. This apparently never again worried Marusya at all.

She willingly and even gladly took on tasks for her husband: his rapidly growing career, scholarly work, and university squabbles. Chaldonov was finding his way in the world, confidently and steadily, and his blend of peasant stubbornness with a tremendous gift for mathematics allowed him to combine all sorts of activity that are usually extremely unwilling to combine. Chaldonov simultaneously proved himself an outstanding scholar and a sensible administrator. He was valued, promoted, and invited: in short, everything took its proper, happy course and in the evenings Marusya knelt on a chair that squeaked under her weight and made a clean copy of her husband’s future dissertation, diligently sticking out her tongue and not understanding a single thing. She wrote in a precise hand that leaned strongly to the left, something uncommon that graphologists claim speaks of reason having full control over feeling. ‘…Thus the solution of the corresponding problem regarding the flow of gas may be written with the help of a series in which all members contain certain equalizing coefficients expressed through Gaussian hypergeometric series…’ Chaldonov came up behind Marusya and lightly blew right into the fluffy, ticklish little curls on her neck.

‘Don’t pant on me!’ Marusya said, angry. ‘Can’t you see I’m working? You said yourself you need this soon!’

Chaldonov submissively stepped aside and she ordered, without turning, don’t ravage the sideboard, dinner’s coming soon. Not me, no I wouldn’t do that, Chaldonov vowed, trying to keep the treacherous little door from squeaking.

‘Gaussian hypergeometric series…’ Marusya repeated in a singsong voice. ‘Very beautiful. Though incomprehensible. Does this happen to mean anything?’

Chaldonov mumbled eagerly, attempting to swallow the piece of meat he’d just stolen.

‘Shameless,’ Marusya said, indignant. ‘We’ll be sitting down to eat in an hour and you’re snacking… Veal! And it’s even cold! And you finished it all! You didn’t even leave me one little piece!’

When the round-hipped cook came in to set the table, she found a married couple peaceably eating preserves right out of the jar, moreover Chaldonov was animatedly expounding to Marusya on the basics of gas dynamics, not noticing his young wife was wielding the spoon and unconscionably eating out of turn. ‘On Gas Streams,’ which he presented as a doctoral dissertation to the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University, was brilliantly defended in February 1894, the very same year the Chaldonovs celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary.

Contrary to the logic of happy marriages, Marusya didn’t turn into an enraptured shadow of her own husband. That might have been because Chaldonov understood perfectly that the house his wife kept—which was sometimes as stubborn and capricious as a living being—was also work, something creative that the world needed no less than his scientific investigations or, say, the purring of a cat licking sleepy, sated kittens. Beyond that, Chaldonov sincerely believed there was far more meaning in Marusya’s everyday life than in his own. In the pattern for a new dress laid out on the big table, in arranging personal happiness for the maid (for some reason the Chaldonovs’ servants were particularly susceptible to romantic passions and Marusya gave away girl after weepy girl for marriage), even in how Marusya scratched her delicate neck with a pencil as she thought up tomorrow’s lunch, economizing by using the same piece of beef for a sauté, cabbage soup, and filling for turnovers. All of this had its own astonishing, touching, and immediately understandable logic of small events, the only things that can possibly add up to major happiness. At night the Chaldonovs slept together, embracing, and neither woke up when they both turned onto the other side as soon as someone’s arm went to sleep and become all fiery, needly, and disobedient.

The Pitovranovs—who’d grown even noisier and friendlier during this time—often visited the Chaldonovs. Nieces and nephews were born each year in a frightening, almost geometric progression and they adored Auntie Marusya, who possessed an innate feminine gift for bouncing, swaddling, nourishing with thin porridge, taking to task for a shattered dish (while expertly hiding the shards from other adults), frightening with scary stories, and explaining geography. She did all this in such a way that even the most capricious child didn’t feel for a second that he was being coerced into something he didn’t want to do or couldn’t do himself. Chaldonov was even jealous of the young horde that constantly hung on Marusya’s skirts even though she never fussed over them and could leave a superb, burning imprint on a guilty rear end when necessary.

Her parents once raised the idea of getting an orphan from an almshouse but Marusya just raised her eyebrows in surprise.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘I’ll have a child. I know it. There will be a child. I believe that, do you understand?’

Her mother lost her composure and burst into tears: she’d given birth fourteen times herself, raised six, and the Almighty had taken the other eight so there was someone to romp at the feet of His gleaming throne.

‘What are you talking about, Marusya? Is there some way around it if the Lord doesn’t allow it?’

‘But I’m not getting around anything, Mama,’ Marusya stubbornly repeated. ‘I just know.’

That was in 1899: it was the beginning of a new century and a new era, and Russia drowned each evening in bloody half-crushed sunsets that were written about by everyone able to write, and that alarmed even those who had nothing to worry about. Marusya turned thirty, something that was already discernible: her bosom had softened a little, her cheekbones had sharpened a little, and in the morning she didn’t respond to her husband so gladly, though she knew he loved those moments more than anything, when she was half-asleep, warm, and slightly hazy from a long, blissful non-existence that wasn’t the teensiest bit frightening. Life passed through Marusya and by Marusya, though she still knew God would fulfill the promise He’d made, just as she’d kept the word she gave to Him. And God turned out to be just.

Marusya’s child appeared when she was forty-nine years old.

And it was fine that he turned out to be a frail little Jewish boy with warm and happy—contrary to the nation’s dictates—eyes. It was fine that he was eighteen and brought terribly nasty scabies into the house along with his lice. This was her child. Marusya’s. Her only boy. Her treasure. Her Lesik.

She knew that as soon as she opened the door.