The Big Green Tent (27 page)

“Yep. It bears the inscription of the owner—none other than Berdyaev. Of course, it needs to be verified.”

“You need an expert—I can show it to Sasha Gorelik,” Ilya said.

“No, I'm not letting it out of my sight. You can bring him here. I'll stand him a bottle.”

“He'll stand you one. He might even buy the book.”

“There's no way I'm selling this.”

Olga took a peek over Ilya's shoulder. She saw the name Nikolai Berdyaev, written in lilac ink.

The name seemed familiar; she had heard the name mentioned among Ilya's friends. She didn't dare ask, though, so as not to compromise the aura of sophistication she was cultivating. Besides, it was already obvious that Ilya, who had no formal university training whatsoever, knew much more about literature than she did. And she would soon be graduating. Judging by the books that packed the room, this retired sailor was a well-educated man. Her surmise was confirmed when he pulled out a palm-sized volume of Dickens from behind the divan.

“Here is a truly remarkable writer, Ilya. Oh, the rubbish they made us read as children!” He laughed, waving his hand dismissively. “Actually, I read almost nothing as a child. In the entire city of Izyum, I don't think there was a single English book. It's a Cossack settlement. They put boys on horses before they can walk. They can wave their sabers around, but they don't even know the alphabet.”

Although she had promised herself to keep quiet, Olga couldn't resist asking: “So you know how to use a saber?”

“No, my child, I've hated all that Cossack derring-do since I was small. I ran away from home when I was thirteen. I entered the Nakhimov Naval Academy. I was a romantic. An idiot, in other words. I had no idea what the military was all about.”

“My child”—that was patronizing, of course; but Artur's tone was completely friendly and open. He looked directly into her eyes, not past her.

Soon they got ready to leave. Ilya put a packet of books, neatly wrapped in newspapers and tied with twine, in his nearly empty backpack. He gave King Arthur a small pile of bills in return. Then they hurried to the station. It was nearly ten o'clock, and the electric commuter trains came less frequently. Along the way, Olga asked Ilya about Artur, and he replied briefly. “Yes, he's a former naval officer who survived some sort of blast. He was discharged, with a detour through a psych ward, receives a small pension, works as an assistant at the paper collection center.

“At first he didn't know a lot about book collecting, but over the years he learned the tricks of the trade. He developed a feel for it. And it would have been hard not to—people bring in books by the bagful. It's amazing what turns up among the old newspapers and the scribbled-over textbooks—an original edition of Karamzin, or Khlebnikov. A Rudolf Steiner. You can't find those at the antiquarian booksellers—turn-of-the-century editions.

“You don't know him? It's not my kind of thing, but you need to know who he is. Artur has taken up yoga recently. He found a volume of Vivekananda at the collection center. He practices meditation.”

“I also want … Vivekananda.” Olga wanted everything: all the books, all the conversation, and music, and theater and film, and Berdyaev, and the Indian Vivekananda, and she wanted to read Dickens in English right away. And, as in childhood, when she wanted to hurry to join the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol Youth Group so she could be in the vanguard, she now wanted to be accepted by Ilya's amorphous group of acquaintances—King Arthur, and the others whom she didn't know yet, but about whom she had heard. They were the ones who had been standing outside the courthouse when her professor was on trial, and being part of their company was far more appealing to her than serving on the Komsomol committee of the philology department.

Ilya gave Olga both Berdyaev and Vivekananda, as well as Orwell, who truly astonished her. After her expulsion from the university, Olga now had plenty of free time. She lolled around in her room for days at a time while Faina took care of Kostya, feeding him, taking him out for walks, and putting him down for naps. Toward evening, when her mother came home from work, Olga would go out to meet Ilya. They had several favorite meeting places: by the monument to Ivan Fedorov, the printing pioneer; by the Kitai-Gorod wall; at an antiquarian bookseller's; in the old apothecary's on Pushkin Square. When the weather got warmer, they started meeting at the Aptekarsky Garden, a small botanical garden founded by Peter the Great.

Half a year passed before Ilya invited Olga to Tarasovka again, this time for a wedding. Olga was surprised. Who would want to marry such an eccentric man?

“Olga, you don't know what you're saying! Before he married Lisa, women were lining up for the privilege to become his wife. They dreamed of the honor of laundering his trousers! A famous actress flew all the way from Vladivostok to Moscow twice a month, just to get screwed by him. She arrives, and he says: ‘Sorry, I'm not on furlough today.' And he goes off with the barmaid. When Lisa appeared on the scene, all that ended. He became a faithful husband. He never so much as glanced at another woman. Then Lisa began whoring around, too,” Ilya said, and laughed.

Olga always admired how freely and simply he spoke about things that she couldn't even have named before she met him. Olga couldn't say the word
shit
out loud—it stuck in her throat; but coming from him, even the most unmentionable vulgarities sounded natural and amusing.

“Who's he marrying?” Olga said.

“It's a curious story, as you might imagine. He's marrying Lisa's elder sister. It's something Lisa cooked up herself. You'll see.”

King Arthur's wedding took place in mid-July. The summer was still fresh. It was the first sunny day after a month of steady rain. On the eve of the wedding, Maria Fedorovna, Ilya's mother, went to visit her sister in Kirzhach. That evening, Olga went to see Ilya at home. For the first time they were able to spend a night together alone, without hurry, interruption, or the furtive awkwardness Olga always felt in the strangers' beds that Ilya took her to from time to time.

In the morning they felt calm and spent, emptied out, and this rapturous vacancy lent them a sense of weightlessness, both physical and emotional. They were both aware of the unprecedented nature of what had happened to them: through bodily self-expression, extreme and urgent, bordering on the edge of possibility, through the feat of the sexual act, they had traversed a generally prescribed boundary—as though making a discovery where they had least expected to find it. Beyond the supreme pleasure of sex, another, inexpressible kind of bliss opened up to them—the dissolution of the individual self, of the “I,” into an ineffable, hitherto unknown freedom of soaring flight.

“It's so wonderful, it's even frightening,” Olga whispered when they were already sitting in the commuter train.

“No, it's not frightening. We were shown what they call seventh heaven. I feel I need to perform an act of gratitude.”

“What kind?” Olga said. “What kind of act could it be?”

“Well, I don't know. Maybe we should get married? Then I can fuck you like an honest man.” And he laughed out loud, as though he had said something quite witty.

Olga felt seared by the expletive, but for some reason her body responded with immediate assent. She blushed—
I've completely lost my mind
—and said awkwardly:

“No. I think we need to have a baby after all of this.”

Ilya stopped laughing abruptly. His experience with fatherhood was terrible, and he had no wish to repeat it.

“No, that's going too far. No way, never. Remember that.”

Something collapsed inside her: what a roller coaster ride! What was this? Cruelty? Stupidity? How could he say such a thing? But he was neither cruel, nor stupid: he realized immediately that he had offended her. He took her arm above the elbow and squeezed it.

“You don't understand. Only freaks of nature are born to me. I'm a freak myself. You can't bear any child of mine.”

Olga grabbed hold of his hand. Her hurt was transformed into poignant sympathy; he had hinted to her before that his child was not entirely healthy. Now she understood that he had not been talking about an ordinary childhood illness; he was talking about an unmitigated catastrophe. They both fell silent, and stared out the window. The leafy green verdure beyond the window, so fresh, and washed clean by the long rains, seemed to call for silence. After this confession, their intimacy grew even more profound than they could have imagined possible.

Tables had been shoved together and placed along the path leading up to the house. The grounds around the house were so overgrown with burdock, raspberry, and nettles that there was no other place to set them up. There were about forty guests, and not everyone had arrived yet. At the back of the property wood was burning in a makeshift outdoor grill. Smoke was rising into the air, and it smelled of wet grass and jasmine. Two young men were fussing happily around the grill.

No one was sitting down yet, although bowls of various kinds of salads crowded the middle of the long table. Some of the guests had already started drinking, having sought out comfortable, conducive spots—in the ramshackle gazebo, long on the verge of collapse, next to the rain barrels, or on a stump near the outhouse. Loud peremptory cries could be heard coming from the house—Lisa was taking charge of everything. Then she emerged onto the porch: a real beauty, a sex bomb, a starlet—from her slender, shapely legs in spiked heels to the fountain of hair on her head and the oversize, slightly tinted glasses. She smiled, revealing a pair of sharp, fanglike teeth on either side of her mouth. What was she, a vampire? A witch?

“Pannochka!” Olga whispered to Ilya. “It's like she just stepped off the movie screen. She should be playing Pannochka!”

“Maybe,” Ilya said.

Then Olga saw the King. He was sprawled on a chaise longue, either meditating or just sleeping. His eyes were closed, his large, smooth chin pointed up to the sky.

“Your Highness! Come to the table!” Lisa shouted, and the King opened one eye. “Why are you being such a layabout? We can't start without you!”

There was a stirring in the thickets and the undergrowth—the guests, some of them already in their cups, made their way to the table and settled onto the benches. Ilya was one of the first to throw a leg over a bench and sit down. Olga sat beside him. She knew some of the people there, though not all.

But what people they were! All ages—young and middle-aged, two octogenarians, and one very amusing elderly lady. And all of them less than Soviet in their persuasions—to be more precise, they were downright anti-Soviet! Marvelously anti-Soviet! And, of course, her imprisoned professor had been part of this circle.

“Tell me who's who,” Olga whispered.

“Which one in particular do you find interesting?”

“Well, the red-haired one, for example.”

“Ah, that's Vasya Rukhin, a philosopher and theologian. He's extremely erudite. Fascinating conversationalist. He gets drunk quickly, though, and all he can talk about then is the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy.”

The philosopher-theologian was completely sober, and maybe for that reason he seemed rather downcast. He poured some generic alcoholic liquid into a glass, and the woman sitting next to him, whose hand kept straying to the tightly braided bun at the back of her neck, quietly protested. A stooping, almost hunchbacked man with the chiseled features and decorative mustache common among people from the Caucasus Mountains, raising his right arm and gesturing broadly with his left, began slowly declaiming what sounded like verse:

“Alas, the printed word has scruples, but the lyre favors nonsense…”

“That's Damiani. He's a genius. A modern Khlebnikov. He writes palindromes, acrostics, all kinds of formal wordplay. And his poems are brilliant. He's a true genius. He was born too late. If he had lived at the turn of the century, Khlebnikov wouldn't have been able to hold a candle to him. I haven't seen Sasha Kuman yet. They're like bosom enemies. They always go everywhere together. Sasha is also a poet, but of a different stripe. They're always at each other's throat, and poetry is the bone of contention.”

Ilya was no longer waiting for Olga to prompt him with her questions. He waxed loquacious.

“And those two are human rights activists. The fat one is a mathematician, his name is Alik. Theoretical mathematics. His logic is ironclad. I guess he's the only one the KGB is afraid to tussle with. You can't have a conversation with him—he proves every point. No one can keep up with him; his mind is like an automatic weapon. And the one sitting next to him, in the cowboy hat, a born-again Jew—his name is Lazar—is the inventor of machine translation. He's a linguist and a cyberneticist. And next to him, in the blue dress, is his wife, Anna Reps. Also a poet. A fair-to-middling one, I'd say.”

“How did the King come to know all of them?” Olga asked.

“It's a circle of like-minded people. They all live and breathe books. The King is a fine bookbinder. Everyone knows him, and has good relations with him. There are several different groups of people who are connected only through the King. It's a circle,” Ilya said, stressing the word again, as though it summed everything up.

At that moment, Lisa's cry—“Shura! Shura! Where's the pie?”—carried up to the porch. The door opened, and a large, red-faced woman stuffed into a white dress two sizes too small for her appeared in the doorway. In her outstretched hands, she held a baking sheet with a voluminous home-style pie. She had a fresh red burn mark on her forearm. A young girl, with an equally red face, also wearing a white dress, peeked out from behind her shoulder. She was carrying two large buckets. Olga craned her neck to get a better look—the buckets were full of sliced meat. The shish-kebab experts jumped up, grabbed the buckets, and disappeared.