Forty Rooms (3 page)

“So, if this city is so ideal,” I say, “then where are all the people?”

My father thoughtfully chews on his beard, then puts on his reading glasses, and makes a careful inspection of the paintings.

“There are some people here,” he says at last, pointing.

“No, those are statues. Or if they aren’t, they are the size of ants and have no faces, so they don’t count. There is a dot moving here, which looks like a girl my age wearing pajamas, but at this distance I can’t tell for sure—it may just be a smudge.”

“Well,” my father says, “perhaps all the people are inside. They are sitting around drinking wine—moderate quantities of well-diluted wine, mind you—and discussing philosophy or creating masterpieces or whatnot. This is a perfect city, after all, so they are content wherever they are, indoors or outdoors, see?”

I look again; but the evenly spaced windows are dark and dead, and the doorways gape blindly. A while back I discovered a delightful secret—some paintings possess a deeper layer of life below their still surface: if I concentrate, then glance away quickly, I can often catch things moving out of the corner of my eye, women powdering their noses above the stiff lacy collars, cherubs tickling each other, cardinals relaxing their glum faces to yawn or sneeze.

I am certain that there is no hidden life lurking here.

“There aren’t any people,” I say stubbornly. “There aren’t even any cats or dogs. And look, there are no doors anywhere, just these open passageways. People wouldn’t live in houses that have no doors.”

“Ah, but that’s where you are wrong,” he says, smiling. “If you listened to me with more attention, you would see that everyone in the ideal city is kind and honest, and there is no need for locks and chains.” He takes off his glasses, pulls out a folded square of suede always ready in his pocket, and begins to wipe the thick lenses, thoroughly, with deliberation, as he does everything, before putting the glasses back in their velveteen case. “But perhaps you are right and there are no people there,” he adds, no longer smiling. “Perhaps that is really the point. Ideals are all very fine until you start applying them to real life, you see. Just let
people into your perfect city, just wait until they make themselves comfortable, and before you know it, well—”

Vivaldi has just stopped playing, and beyond the crackling of the radio void, I can suddenly hear the ticking of the clock on the desk. My father rubs the bridge of his nose in a gesture I know so well, then glances toward the window; I see an odd, stark look cross his face, a look of not quite anger, not quite grief. In the spare darkness of the early-spring night, the enormous construction site across the road is abbreviated to mere grayish hints of fences and sketchy gallows of cranes in the sky, but I know it is there all the same, as it has been throughout the ten years of my life. The rising edifice itself is only a shapeless bulk blotting out the stars. None of us has any idea what it will be when it is completed. “Temple of the People,” my father used to say when I was four or five and pestered him with endless queries.

My father pulls the curtains closed before turning back to me.

“Never mind,” he says briskly, “I’m not afraid to admit a mistake. Perhaps this was not the most fruitful subject for tonight’s discussion. Since you seem to miss people and dogs so much, how about some Fra Angelico? Here, let me show you.”

Once more he leafs through the Renaissance volume. This time the bookmark is pink, and so, I see, are the predominant colors of these new paintings, in which roses bloom, ladies blush, and saints are ruddy with health, all against a background of pink cliffs, red roofs, and churches aglow with sunrises. I am charmed. My father has already begun to speak when, against our custom, I plunge into his steady stream of dates and names with a breathless, out-of-turn question.

“Papa, are houses in Italy really so pink?”

“I suppose it is possible,” he says. “I’m glad you like these. But to continue, in 1436, Fra Angelico moved to Florence, to the new friary of San Marco, and there—”

And there are tiny yellow flowers in the swaying meadows and tiny blue flowers on the hems of the girls’ dresses, and tiny monsters bare their pointy little teeth in the soft swell of harbors, and bells ring, and birds chirp, and everyone, everyone, has a golden halo. A few chubby monks have clumsily dropped a slab of stone onto a writhing blue imp and now stand around with guilty downcast eyes, debating how best to rescue him. A mother sits encumbered by a fat baby in her lap, and as her gaze follows the flights of some great white birds soaring toward the sun on rainbow-colored wings, her sad face brightens with the desire to leave the baby behind and fly away with them. These paintings are like fairy tales, and while the stories do not all have happy endings—I notice a number of heads freshly detached from their bodies, floating in puddles of what looks like my mother’s strawberry preserves—they make me giddy with the premonition that somewhere, somewhere out there, a place so vivid, so alive, really exists.

“Haven’t you been to Italy?” I interrupt again, too excited to listen.

My father coughs shortly.

“No,” he says.

I tear my eyes away from the book. “You haven’t been to Italy?”

“No.”

“But you’ve been to Greece.”

“No, not to Greece either,” he says.

“To France, then? And England?”

“No.”

“But—to Egypt? China? India?”

Silent now, he shakes his head. I stare past him, at the lacquered spines of the art volumes lined up in their neat alphabetical rows on the shelves, as I struggle to find the right words for the enormity of my disappointment.

“But . . . but you’ve
told
me about all these places. I thought . . . Haven’t you ever wanted to go there?”

“Well now, you see,” he begins, then clears his throat, and again says, “Well, you see,” and falls silent. The telephone rings in the hallway. We listen to the rush of my mother’s slippers slapping toward the sound, the lilt of her muffled voice. In the next moment the door of the study is cracked open.

My mother does not come in.

“Sorry to interrupt, it’s Orlov,” she says from the corridor. She is cupping her hand over the receiver, the cord stretched as far as it will go. “He wants to discuss tomorrow’s seminar, but I’ve told him you’re busy and will call him back in—what shall I say, half an hour?”

“No need, I’ll take it, we are finished,” my father answers, as he closes the book and rises from his armchair. “We must do better on our choice of subject next week. Perhaps Andrei Rublev?” He speaks the last words already past the threshold, picking up the telephone. “Yes, hello?”

Stunned, I look at the clock on his desk. There are still twenty minutes left of the Culture Hour. He has never done this before. All at once I am certain it’s because I interrupted him so much, and I feel chastened.

4. Kitchen

Immortality

I fall asleep to bursts of laughter behind the wall to my right and wake up, hours later, with the laughter, louder and looser, behind the wall to my left; the guests have moved from the study to the kitchen. I lie dozing for a few minutes, half traversing an arched bridge between the misty shores of some dream, half listening to the hubbub of blurred voices. The loudest of them, which I recognize as Orlov’s, appears to be propounding something, while two or three others burble up in the background whenever Orlov pauses for breath. The women, though, are still in the study: when I roll over in bed and press my ear to the wall, I hear a snippet of my mother’s exclamation, a saxophone wail from the record player turned down low.

The men must have gone to the kitchen to refill their glasses.

The dream bridge recedes farther into the fog as I realize I am terribly thirsty; this evening my mother let me stay up with the
guests until well past my bedtime, snacking on pickled mushrooms and cheese with garlic. My thirst makes me more and more awake, until, giving up on sleep altogether, I toss off the blanket, lower my feet to the floor, and wait without turning on the light, hoping that the men will leave the kitchen at last.

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

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

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

“That was when the ones who smiled

Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

And like a useless appendage, Leningrad

Swung from its prisons . . .”

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

“Magdalene thrashed and wept,

The favored disciple turned to stone,

But no one dared to cast a glance

To where his mother in silence stood . . .”

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

Borodinsky speaks, so loudly that I start.

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

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

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

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

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

I tiptoe out.

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

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

No, not under the vault of alien skies,