Calligraphy Lesson (8 page)

The day after classes ended, I stopped by the university vivarium, but they said Alexei Pavlovich wasn't there. I walked past the glass cases where white mice swarmed in trays. When I pulled one out by the tail, a whole cluster latched on. Their red eyes burned like cranberries. Frogs were laid up in huge, smelly jars, and the moment you opened a lid, one would fly out and land smack down on the brick floor.

A fish supper at home. They called for me. I locked myself in my room.

Daughter, up and at 'em. The surgeon's sturgeon's tired of waiting.

Eat without me, I'll eat later.

Zhenya, stop it.

I can't eat out there. He smacks his lips. Then he'll take a toothpick out of his pocket and dig around.

Why are you being like this?

Like what?

Enough, let's go.

Mika took the fish bones out for Roman, laid them on the rim, and the dish turned into a staring eye with off-white lashes.

You said: no letters. My naïve Alexei Pavlovich. You forgot about cartes postales. Not in vain did a bald professor at the Vienna Military Academy once drop the first postcard into a mailbox, paying for it with two Kreuzers and his entire soul. Ever since, the departed professor, taking on cardboard flesh, has languished around the world and found no rest. I found a whole pack of them neatly held by a rubber band in Vera Lvovna's writing desk. When you were away, you sent cards home daily with the sights and views, and—unintimidated by the censors—called your spouse your little mouse, your little bun, even your little fanny. Moreover, you always drew yourself in a picture: a stick man in a hat either roaming spectrally down the Samara embankment, or standing like a poet's shadow on the bluff of the Piatigorsk gap, or scrambling up the Admiralty spire like a gorilla. How, you might well ask yourself, can one resist such temptation, having fooled you and the postal department, of writing a postcard, an open letter, addressed at this late hour to all sleeping humanity? Here, please accept, from a place where this night cannot reach me, an unpretentious card with a glossy country landscape, gilt edging on the sunset clouds, a card scratched by swifts, splashed by a drop of a blossoming pond fragrant with lilac and iodine—it's my father, lost in conversation, whose bandaged finger keeps missing the point. Do you recognize our clumsy house, saturated with damp, permeated by mosquito buzzing, the sunny porch where a wet footprint vanishes instantly, the peeling barrel where the little bleakfish I'd caught were hidden away until October? When the barrel was emptied for the winter, the fish flopped all over the ground, sticking to the fallen leaves. And here, under the vaults of hundred-year-old lilacs, a windy June supper. Your wife is twirling the binoculars and laughing crazily, aiming them first at the moon, which has surfaced like a jellyfish, then at the deck chairs flapping in the wind, then directly at her plate. A pimply lass who
arouses herself at night with her finger is eating the icing roses off the cake. I don't think that was me, but you know better. You're across from me. There's a whole beard in the rusty lilac inflorescences that drop on the table. You wink and mumble, “These are dead moths;” you scoop them up in your glass with a spoon and lick it off. My father—a cheap drunk—is shouting now, “I told them so. Here you are!” he shouted and brandished his empty glass. “Please be so kind as to join us! I'll cut their umbilicus. Congratulations on coming into the Divine light!” But they're shouting, they're not satisfied! They think, the Divine light is over there, while over here is the very Kingdom of Darkness.

Of course, my unclad little people, there's been a misunderstanding, you were misled, I explained to them, but there's nothing you can do. It's too late. Live as best you can! Here, my brothers, each has his own share of agony, his own path of suffering is marked out, and there's no avoiding it. Each must drink to the dregs! They strain and howl, as if to say, Why? We are innocently condemned! they say. And I tell them, Hush! You're all like this at first. But later? You don't honor your father and mother, you create idols, you commit adultery, you covet your neighbor's ass! So suffer and don't squawk! But again they holler! And wail!

When I came in, Alexei Pavlovich was wiping the dirt off the jars, disturbing the dissected popeyed creatures' peace.

Zhenya? Why are you here? Someone could stop by at any time.

Look at that, Alyosha,
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you're afraid of me. I can tell. I was at your house yesterday. I went to see Vera Lvovna specifically because I knew you weren't home. I went to convince myself that she doesn't have long left. There'll be no need to hide, and this humiliation will end. We'll live
openly, together, afraid of no one, and I'll give you a wonderful baby, scrumptious, chubby-cheeked, blowing bubbles from satisfaction when we tell him the bogeyman's coming to get him. My father will deliver the baby. He'll hold my hand and say, “Push, mama, push!” And everything will turn out well. I'll recover, I'll crunch a cucumber, and pale, tormented, and beautiful, I'll look down at you from my window, as you stand on the sidewalk under an umbrella, chilled to the bone, happy.

Zhenya, you have no idea what nonsense this is. You have to understand. This is vile, this is just plain vulgar, this is the height of banality—to cheat on a dying wife with a young idiot in love with love!

Yes yes, Alyosha, exactly so. A hymn to vulgarity.
Banalissimo
. Pistils and stamens. Life and death.

Quiet, Zhenya, I'm exhausted. Listen, tomorrow I'm taking Vera Lvovna south, to Yalta. For a month maybe. Or more. We'll see how it goes. You have to understand. Even when I talk to her about the weather, I feel like the worst scoundrel on earth! You know I'd leave her without a second thought, but how can I abandon someone in this situation? You don't understand. Some things are more important than love! Zhenya, my sweet Zhenya, we must part. Temporarily, of course. Vera says to me, “Where are you taking me? Why? What does it matter where I croak? Our friends are here, here Zhenya comes by.” And I don't know what to tell her or how to explain. Well, why don't you say something? Say something quick, before they come in.

Bon voyage!

I was reading to Roman. Me in the armchair under the lamp, him on the couch. When the book was over, we sat in silence. I kept turning the lamp on, then off. What now? I mean, is the light on or is it dark? Not that that matters, Evgenia Dmitrievna, because I still hear you sitting.
I'm a nocturnal animal, you might say, Evgenia Dmitrievna, and we don't need light. One night I'll up and pounce on you. I'll sneak up and pounce.

It's been night for a long time, my kind Alexei Pavlovich, it's past two, and I wanted to sleep, but I can't, and my thoughts are all of you, or rather, of me—actually, they're one and the same. Can you hear the beetles droning in the fogged-up kill jar? Do you remember? You were lying in the spotty birch shade, covered with yesterday's newspaper, and sunspots and crooklegs were running across it. The fidgety daughter of your aging classmate, with whom you set out to assemble a collection for the dacha nature museum she'd just devised, was playing shaman around you, scooping up anything that flew, crawled, or stirred with her swift net. Having caught some pointless creature, the novice insectarian brought it over for identification. A piece of an article had imprinted itself on your wet forehead mirror-image. For a long time you examined the find under your magnifying glass, listened closely, eyes shut, to the droning in your fist, and finally announced, “Congratulations, child! This is the rarest stroke of luck! What a marvelous example of Dungus flyus.” That was enough for this ninny to double up in the grass in fits of cascading girlish laughter. After she caught her breath, she badgered you about your wart: the girls had showed her a house where an old woman lived who bit off warts and licked the wound; she had some kind of special saliva. You were embarrassed and didn't know where to hide your hand. Later, on the cliff, she found a mighty, primordial swing: a very long rope with a stick at the end had been tied to a huge oak. There you were, sitting on a stump and reading a newspaper, though they'd long been expecting you for dinner, while the bundle of mischief swung and swung, and you, tearing yourself away from the letters, watched her rise up on tiptoe and clumsily pull up her foot to finally get one end of the bar under her,
watched her freeze for a second, take a step, in the pose of a boy galloping on a pony, and then pull up her other leg, take a hop, lean way back, and fly off, spinning slowly, into the clouds.

I didn't go to classes and spent all day in bed. Early that morning my father came home from his shift. He was mumbling something, talking to himself, and he clattered his spoon in his glass for a long time. Then he went to bed. Mika got up and started checking on me with a thermometer, or milk, or drops of some kind or other. She tried to talk me into rubbing my legs and chest down with vodka. At last it was quiet: Mika took Roman to the professor's for his lesson, but before leaving she brought me a plate of apples. I snaked the apple peel spirals around my arms like damp bracelets. The boiler man stopped by to check the flue. He was just a minute, but the smell of wet, broken-down boots, cheap cigarettes, and green firewood lingered all day. My father got up. The crackle of fresh newspapers and the hot breath of borscht reached me. Mika and Roman came back from his lesson. Roman started tuning the piano, all the time repeating that the instrument was fine but very much neglected. He banged on the keys until I started pounding on the wall with an ivory knife handle. They quieted down. That evening my father and Mika went somewhere, and Roman paced around the apartment silently, feeling everything as he came to it. Only the old parquet creaked. That night I couldn't get to sleep, but on the other side of the wall they droned on. I was listening hard but could catch only snatches. Then I picked up a big glass flask that had roses in it, removed the flowers, poured the water into the chamber pot, and pressed the flask's bottom to the wall.

What are you trying to prove and to whom? There's no going into your place: you have a corpse peeking out of every nightstand. You're still young, healthy, and strong. No one would dare reproach you for anything.
You were a little boy then and you still are. You dug your heels in and stood counter to life, and you think you can hold out. But you'll be swept away. You've got this idea that Zhenya—it's as if she were her deceased mother and you were living for her. But that's wrong. You know nothing about your daughter. She's not yours anymore, she's her own person. You keep reaching for her to keep from drowning, but you don't have her anymore. Have you told Zhenya about her mother?

Mika and my father were silent for a long time, only I could hear the wet stems dripping from the edge of the table onto the floor. The ear I had pressed to the flask's neck was sweating.

When she came to us then she wasn't herself, I could tell right away. I asked, “Why didn't you bring little Zhenya?” And she said, “Leave me alone.” I thought, Well, to hell with you. Living makes me sick even without you. If you don't want to tell me anything, you really don't have to. Then for some reason she stopped by at my neighbor's, a pharmacist. His little boy used to like all kinds of experiments, and his father had made him a laboratory. The lad started showing her his treasures. “If you drink from this test tube,” he said, “you're a goner!” All this became clear later. In the middle of the night I suddenly woke up from a scream. I couldn't figure out what was going on because people don't scream like that. Then it was quiet. My Roman was breathing heavily, but she wasn't there. The bathroom door was locked from the inside. Behind the door there was some movement, shuffling, rustling. Scraping. I shouted to her, but she didn't respond. I wanted to give it a kick to make the latch give way, but then I looked and her fingers were reaching under the door. I shouted, “Your fingers, take back your fingers!” But they kept reaching. Somehow I got across the balcony to the bathroom window, broke the window, and nearly lost my grip, though it was only the second floor. I grabbed her and picked her up. She looked at me with horror in her
eyes, she was trying to say something, but there was a jumble where her mouth should have been.

Evgenia Dmitrievna, thank God I'm blind, not legless, and there is no need to grab me by the arm and push me. I just need to hold onto your elbow. Like this. Let's go. And if you think that this makes me deeply unhappy, then you are mistaken, Evgenia Dmitrievna. I can see that you're unhappy. I can't see, of course, I said that wrong, though that's not something you can see with eyes, rather I can sense it. But you're not unhappy because you can't fly, for instance, or walk through solid objects, walls or earth. Isn't that so? I know you're afraid of me, Evgenia Dmitrievna. I mean, you think you pity me, but in fact you're afraid. Because it's yourself you pity, not me. Thinking about me, you imagine yourself in the dark, eyeless, and naturally for you this is scarier than dying. But the point is that blindness is a seeing person's concept. I live in a world where there is no light or dark, and that means there's nothing awful about it. My God, you should have warned me there was a sidewalk here.

God, prankster and coward, supreme lover, insatiable sperm-hurler, who each time chooses the guard for his fevered treasure on a whim—a bull-boor, swan-sneak—or sometimes you pierce me like sunlight—you're still a silly-billy. Remember how you kept dawdling and mumbling that you were afraid of hurting me? A god-child, even on a stolen bed, on that heavenly sheet, you wanted to be my obedient reflection, my pliant guide, and here you wanted to be my child. Here's Europa, straddling the horned monster, driving him on with her heels, Leda enveloping her flock with rustling wings, Danae grabbing the stiff but timid ray of light with both hands. A god-bungler, you tried to snatch everything on the fly, displaying your obscene zeal, and you became reckless, surfeited, pitiless,
each time collecting your tribute more and more divinely, more and more lustfully. It was both frightening and thrilling to see the squinting, blood-filled bull's eye, to feel the swan feathers tickling my hips and the beak cropping the fragrant grass, and to see the golden rain twisting and turning as it spanked my belly and breast. Do you remember how you came to love the Mount Ida shepherd? The boy didn't suspect a thing, the boy with the rooster, or rather, chicken leg wrapped in a napkin so it was easy to hold; we took the other leg to the hospital. The child sat Turkish-fashion, poking the air with his knees; still wet, not chilled after bathing, he gnawed the leg, sucked the bone, crunched the cartilage, and his sharp little-boy shoulder blades, reflected successively in two mirrors and so seeming like someone else's, kept appearing and disappearing. Could this bird have flown past Ganymede? The naked adolescent jumped up, froze warily, not knowing whether to hide his nakedness from the eagle, still not understanding but already rigid from sensuous horror. The talons grabbed the boy's arm where his pockmarks were, squeezed, pierced them painfully, nearly broke the skin. Ganymede broke away, ran off, and tried to scream, but gasped for air: the mighty black wing fell on him and crushed him. Ganymede tried to beat it off, but his hands were twisted behind his back. Fear and sweetness mingled, the boy was afraid but simultaneously urged on this suppressed squawk, and the sharp bird tongue, wetting his ear, and the royal eagle talon, which had already groped out the road to the sky. Don't listen to me, my thinking pistil, know only that I love all of you, from your gray hair to the two hot hamsters squeezed in my hand.