Happiness is Possible (14 page)

Let us admit it: Lev Naumovich was delinquent in
les affaires d'amour
. But what else could he have done? He was an interesting man who looked like Pushkin, with an extensive education, so he attracted the attention of the museum's female employees, among whom, believe me, it is always possible to find one or two decent lookers. Moreover, the events described here took place in the summer, and even if there are three sets of Olympic Games going on, summer in a memorial estate museum is the season of
affaires d'amour
and
adultère
. In summer all the even slightly interesting male employees and non-hideous female employees who are not involved in guided tours, stroll through the wooded memorial park together, read poetry to each other and hearken to the call of the flesh. Then comes autumn and the
adultère
either fades away of its own accord or advances to the stage of a substantial affair. But if Galina was concerned that her Lebed was ripe for an extra-marital affair, her fears were absolutely groundless: he had never been known to make life complicated for himself.

However, the male friendship between Lev Naumovich and myself was of a different nature. It did not fade away when autumn came but was renewed each time I visited Vaskovo and called round to see him. According to the season I visited him with my bottle of Agdam or Alabashly either in the flat, which smelled ineradicably of the stoker Matveev, or in the old hut, which now served Lebed as a
dacha
. Lev Naumovich and I discussed literature and the humanities and Galina, when she was not cursing and swearing, fed us rather tastily: she could cook well using simple ingredients. Later on, when I married Toma and became a Muscovite, Lebed started paying me visits. It was convenient for him to spend the night at our place after a day spent in the library or chasing round editors' offices.

By the way, all his beavering away in libraries and chasing round editors' offices was not entirely futile. Of course, the decade that elapsed between the Olympics and the collapse of the USSR was one of profound stagnation for society, but in his career as a scholar it was the most fruitful, resulting in the publication of four scholarly literary articles and one monograph devoted to Pochechuev. Nowadays nobody ever mentions that decade, those rotten eighties, except to abuse them, but I cannot subscribe to the general attitude, if only because Tamara and I spent those years in loving harmony. At bottom, however, everybody was dissatisfied with the existing state of things at that time. For instance, Toma and I wanted to have a child, but we couldn't, while Lev Naumovich still couldn't get himself officially registered in Moscow. He was also depressed by the lack of any changes ‘concerning Galina's health'.

Well, Tamara and I did not see our hopes fulfilled, but Lebed successfully invoked changes of his own. They came crashing down on him immediately after the breakup of the empire, which Lev Naumovich, as a genuine Kropotkinite, initially welcomed fervently. As a theoretician, however, he should have foreseen that a great collapse would bring lesser collapses in its wake and the ructions would inevitably reach the Pochechuev museum, which they did. The former Party
nomenklatura
director was replaced and, naturally, the new one inflicted on the employees proved to be an embezzling villain. The first thing he did was to sack Galina Lebed as senior curator so that she would not hinder his plundering of the museum's holdings and assets. This dismissal, plus the reform of the currency, brought about serious changes concerning her health. Galina passed away in late 1992, after suffering a severe epileptic fit.

I wouldn't say that Lev Naumovich started moping after Galina's death, he simply fell apart. He wasn't able to feed himself tastily and cheaply, let alone clout himself round the ear for his most recent moral lapse. Moral delinquency and inadequate nutrition gradually became the norm with him; his life and his very personality were on the verge of total disintegration. Even his liberal views were shaken.

‘Russia,' he told me one day, ‘needs a new Pinochet.' Then he paused and added: ‘But screw Russia anyway'.

This casual addition evidently expressed profound disenchantment on his part. I guessed that Lebed was directing his cumulative resentment for the failure of his own life against the country as a whole: his resentment for all those long years of wandering from to place, for the poverty, for the manuscripts rejected by publishers, for the years spent with a deranged wife: basically for his entire life, with its unrealised potential in human, philological and, perhaps, even sexual terms. And I also twigged that Lebed was ready to change his official place of residence again.

I was not mistaken. The next time he came, Lev Naumovich brought with him a three-volume edition of the poet Kirsanov and a lady's gold watch.

‘I cleaned out my library,' he said, taking out the three volumes. ‘Anyway, this is a present for you.'

‘And the watch?' I asked.

‘The watch is Galina's,' he replied. ‘A memento, you might say. I'll let you have it cheap. I haven't got time to faff around with it now, and you'll be able to sell it for a good price or trade it for food.'

‘What food?' I asked in surprise. ‘And why do you say you haven't got time?'

‘For food . . .' he explained, ‘. . . I mean when there'll be nothing left here to eat. And I don't have time because I'm getting out of here.'

That made everything clear. I didn't buy the watch, of course, but Lebed wasn't really upset about that. I think he sold it later to the same Azerbaijanis who bought his, that is, Matveev's flat from him.

Just before he left, Lev Naumovich came to see me with a bottle – for the last time. He wanted to talk, to explain himself, to sum up, I suppose, his more than fifty years of life in Russia.

‘The most important thing,' he told me after the third or fourth shot of vodka, ‘the most important thing I've learned in my life is that in this country nobody needs me. I wasn't needed in Soviet times and I'm needed even less now – even the girls have stopped valuing culture in a man.'

When he grew agitated, Lev Naumovich looked especially like Pushkin, but an old Pushkin with a Jewish nose. I listened to him, secretly bemoaning the fact that every shot only added to his vehemence.

‘But after all,' he exclaimed, ‘there are other states in the world, there are! States that take respect for every single human individual as the cornerstone of their values . . . no! – for them it's more than that, it's the very centre of the universe!'

I tried to protest, muttering that all this was obscurantist nonsense and even from the scientific point of view the universe couldn't revolve round a single human individual.

But I was inebriated, and therefore unconvincing.

A few days later Lebed departed, travelling light.

He abandoned our perverse country with the sincere desire to start a new life. However, his desire was not to be granted in full; life abroad was different, all right, but in certain respects it was still like the old life. The most annoying problem that Lebed encountered there was the same old one of an official place of residence. Those countries that took the individual human being as the cornerstone of their values were not yearning desperately to offer Lev Naumovich a place by that stone in the corner. Before he could settle into it, he had to live for a while in a certain small southern state where the cornerstone of values was not so much the individual as the absence of a foreskin on the individual's penis. And although Lebed met this requirement of the state, the state failed to meet his requirements. How and why he explained later in rather vague terms. Supposedly Lev Naumovich couldn't get along with the rabbinate in the small town where he was given accommodation. I think the real reason was actually that the small town didn't feel any great need for Russian-speaking philologists and the local girls didn't feel any great need for men of culture . . .

I start a new line here, although I don't know why, since the whole of Lev Naumovich's life in emigration could be fitted into a single paragraph. The only job that a Russian-speaking philologist could find in a small town in a small southern state was as a floor polisher in the local supermarket. He spent seven and a half years in this capacity, without the slightest chance of saving up enough money to make the move to a country where there was no rabbinate and his individual personality would find itself at the centre of the universe. But then, we must assume that he would not have made any better career for himself there. Lev Naumovich would have remained in that small town, a floor-polisher to this very day, gradually forgetting the Russian language, birch trees and all his subtle philological wisdom, but . . . if you recall, I have already announced a happy ending to his story.

Good tidings, though tinged with sadness, reached him from his homeland. During the years that Lebed had spent far away from Russia, none of the terrible things he had prophesied had come to pass there, that is, here. The food supply had improved and the new ruler of the state was almost a new Pinochet. The birth rate in the country had increased, especially in the capital, although, unfortunately, without any assistance from Tamara and me. The death rate had declined but not yet, alas, been reduced to zero: old people still contrived to die one way or another, freeing up accommodation and bringing their younger relatives joy through tears. One day in the city of Moscow an old lady passed away in the course of this natural process. I did not know this old lady and, of course, no one informed me of her demise. But Lev Naumovich Lebed was informed, because the old lady's first name and patronymic were Faina Naumovna, her maiden name was Lebed and she was, in fact, Lebed's sister. Lev Naumovich had told me almost nothing about her; all I do know is that they were at loggerheads over some disagreement for years. I suspect that he simply resented her right to reside in Moscow, which she had acquired, like me, via a felicitous marriage. Be that as it may, when she departed for the next world, Faina Naumovna settled accounts with her younger brother by leaving him her Moscow flat.

After receiving this happy and sad news, Lebed repatriated himself so rapidly that he almost arrived in time for his sister's funeral. Somehow the idea of selling his newly acquired flat and finally departing to take up permanent residence in those countries where the individual human being is truly valued never even entered his head. Now he's back again working as a senior researcher at the Pochechuev memorial estate museum, although he only attends two days a week, because it's a long haul from Moscow to Vaskovo. Lev Naumovich drinks a little vodka, inveighs against Russian centralism and now and then expounds the teachings of Kropotkin. He doesn't reminisce about his life in foreign parts, but occasionally he subjects the work of the museum floor polisher to severe criticism.

As for his ‘whoring' – that, of course, is a thing of the past: too many years have gone by.

Everybody has places that hold special memories for them. Places where they spent their childhood or where they met their love or where they simply used to live and were happy, without even realising it. It's good to visit these places sometimes: to go there, stand there for a while and think; to sigh a bit, as if contemplating the grave of someone dear to you. Only sometimes it seems as if there is nowhere for us to go to, because these places no longer exist anywhere except in our memory. There are no ruins or ashes left behind; everything has been wiped off the face of the earth or, even worse, built over and transformed into something quite different by that indefatigable property developer, time. Of course, it's possible to journey back into the past simply in the mind, after all, no one has taken away our memory, it still belongs to us. Although who can say . . .

Blank spots . . . More and more often these days I find them not only on the outer surface of my cranium, but inside it too. I occasionally feel I would like to sigh sweetly and recall something special, something good from my life – but I just can't. It has been blanked out and built over with later texts, many of them composed by me. Perhaps the reader may sigh over them, but I can't manage it any more.

For instance, here is one text, already quite dilapidated at this stage, constructed by me on the site where a memory should live. It starts . . . no, I don't remember where it starts. Somewhere in Moscow, in the vicinity of my college. I can't say precisely, because in those young years I had what my comrades used to call ‘the wine weakness'. Not in the sense that I was especially devoted to wine, we were all devoted to it, but in the sense that I got drunk quickly. I got drunk very quickly at our student binges and afterwards I had only the haziest memory of the route we had staggered along, the young men we had fought, the girls we had kissed and all the other heroic feats we had performed. The next morning, when I woke up in the student hostel, I found out about everything from the stories that my comrades told – those were my first experiences of blanks in my memory.

I didn't always wake up in the hostel though. A post-binge awakening could find me in the entrance of some unfamiliar building or on a park bench or at a bus stop or in the monkey cage at a militia station – anywhere at all, basically. The only thing that all such awakenings had in common was the first thought that arose before I even opened my eyes: ‘Better not wake up'. This is a fundamentally pessimistic, even downright depressive thought, but it is precisely this thought or, rather, the phrase that represents it, with which I am obliged to open my text.

So: ‘Better not wake up . . .' I thought before I even opened my eyes. At that moment I couldn't remember my own name or where I was, but I knew for certain that I was drunk again. It wasn't the first time this had happened to me: in some mysterious fashion this realisation arose in my consciousness at the very moment of awakening. But on this occasion I had the feeling that the fateful news had reached me from the outside.

‘He's drunk, Tomka, why are you wasting time on him?' I heard an angry voice say somewhere above me.

Another, more compassionate voice, protested:

‘Wait . . . We can't just leave him like this.'

It was as if my two angels, the dark and the bright, were deciding my destiny.

The dark angel said:

‘Well, please yourself. I'll be off then.'

But the bright angel stayed with me.

I felt a wet cloth on my face, probably a handkerchief. The angel was either washing me or trying to bring me round – in either case it felt good. Without parting my eyelids, I reached out with a grateful hand and found a bare knee.

‘Hey-hey, no funny business!' said the angel.

And then I realised it wasn't the first time I had heard that voice. Awareness was gradually returning. By the time I made the decisive effort to open my eyes, I already had a pretty good idea of whose face I would see. But when it happened, when I finally unglued my eyelids, I recognised that face and didn't recognise it at the same time. Yes, I remembered those little cheeks, little lips . . . Somewhere, it must have been at Felix's party, I had already tried to press my lips to those little lips (and heard that ‘hey-hey'). Little lips, cheeks and nose: I remembered all of those, but I didn't recognise the eyes. Because now they were the eyes of an angel and they glowed with the light of compassion.

‘Ah, you've come round at last! I've wasted my entire bottle of water on you.'

‘Give me a drink,' I croaked in reply.

I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around to get my bearings.

‘Where are we?'

She giggled.

‘In Moscow.'

Suddenly I was swamped by the noise of the city, as if someone had jacked it up to full volume. Leading the acoustic assault with its screeching and howling was a trolleybus, followed by a tumultuous herd of invisible cars, roaring and snarling in every possible register. Birds' wings started clapping, music started playing, invisible crowds of people started babbling and scraping their feet. We were in Moscow.

When I pushed myself up off the grass it left dirty stains of rubber soot on my hands: the earth under it was warm and trembling. I didn't get up, it was the city that raised me to my feet and embraced me, supporting me with an arm round my shoulders. The city and I breathed into each other's faces: stale vodka fumes for stale engine fumes.

Toma – I'd already remembered what my angel was called – allowed me to finish her mineral water. Then she dusted off my clothes and restored the parting on my head with her own little comb. We could probably have said goodbye then, but I wanted to clarify one final question: Where had she come from? She hadn't been sent down from heaven to help me, surely. Or if she had, then let her say so . . .

‘Have you forgotten? We were all taking a walk together!'

So that was it! We were all taking a walk together. And then Felix had said: ‘Let's put him down here – he can sleep it off, he might get picked up by the cops in the metro'. Then everybody left, but she had stayed.

But that still wasn't the answer to my question.

‘Do you want to know why I stayed?' Toma asked. ‘I don't know how to put it . . . Why don't we walk for a bit? If you're in a fit state, of course.'

I didn't know if I was in a fit state to walk for a bit, but no one knows that until he takes the first step. She took hold of my arm and I took a step. Then another one, and another; from one boulevard to the next; my legs became steadier, my speech became more rational . . . we walked round Moscow, round the inner boulevard ring, and a miracle of healing took place within me as we did so. It's good to be young! Only in youth are the body and the soul capable of such rapid metamorphoses. Was it really me who had been sprawled out on the grass, bleating pitifully, only an hour ago? And now here I was, washed with mineral water, my hair combed and parted, strolling arm in arm with a girl, and she found me interesting company.

I would not stay sober for long though. As we continued our walk, I pursued the obligatory exchange of highly significant nonsense with my companion, thrilling to every accidental touch between us, and felt myself succumbing to a different kind of intoxication, one with which, I confess, I was not very familiar. In those years I didn't suffer from ‘the girl weakness'. Not that I was immune to girls, but casual kisses and other contacts with the opposite sex didn't trigger any kind of addiction. All the more surprising, therefore, that before we parted that evening I was already absolutely convinced that I was in love. In love with this Toma.

In and of itself, my discovery might appear insignificant. Lots of young men fall in love with girls after strolling through Moscow with them in the evening. The next morning or, at most, a week later, all that remains of these strolls is the narrative. That's the usual scenario, but my stroll didn't conclude so smoothly. I fell for Toma suddenly, almost without any reason, head over heels as they say. Some specialists explain this phenomenon by the action of a certain mysterious chemistry. I am inclined to agree, because you certainly can't call it psychology. Without reflecting any further on the matter, I confronted Toma with the full force of the primaeval feeling that had erupted within me; I gave her no chance to gather her wits and didn't even allow her to spend any time as ‘my girl'. It all happened in the space of a few short weeks, from washing me with a handkerchief to signing on the dotted line at the register office.

Only the other day she had been Tomka from group three in our year and now she was my wife. Those little lips and little cheeks were all mine now; and I belonged entirely to her, complete with all my male virtues and accoutrements. Nature had endowed us with the necessary physical and mental prerequisites to begin a life together and as for all the rest, we were counting on getting that from our parents. By ‘all the rest' I mean, of course, accommodation and the means of subsistence.

It was precisely when it came to the parents that Toma and I encountered our first difficulties.

Imagine the scene: I've brought my young wife to Vaskovo, to introduce her to my old folks.

‘Oh, good Lord!' my mum exclaims, throwing her hands up in the air. ‘She's so thin!'

‘But then I don't eat much,' Toma tries to joke, blushing.

‘Never mind,' my mum says reassuringly, ‘we'll feed you up with milk. Look what a lovely little goat we have.'

The goat comes out. Toma shrieks:

‘OhHey, it's chewing my dress!'

My father huffs through the cardboard tube of his
papyrosa
and darts a glance at her from under his eyebrows. Eventually he asks: ‘Are you going to live with us?'

‘Mmmm . . .' I reply.

‘I see,' he mutters.

‘What do you see?' my mum asks anxiously.

My father tries to strike matches – one, two . . .

‘I see everything' he repeats angrily. ‘Now his studies are down the drain and . . . I see the whole thing.'

‘There you go, droning on already . . .' says my mum, glancing round to see if the neighbours can hear.

We leave the next day, after promising to ‘visit more often'. We have been given a hundred-rouble note and a jar of goat's milk to be getting on with. Our mood is uncertain, tending towards bad, especially since Toma has broken a high heel at the station.

Now the action moves back to Moscow, to a flat in a building from the pre-Khrushchev era, with an extravagant superfluity of moulding on the high ceilings. These eighty square metres of useful floor space are occupied by Toma's parents, her younger brother Vityok, a deaf white cat and Toma and her young husband. I am the husband and son-in-law, an unexpected and extravagantly superfluous family member.

In the sitting room the date has been circled with a red felt-tip pen on the calendar with the half-naked half-Japanese girl – that's how Nikolai Stepanovich, Toma's dad, indicates the public holidays. After the official events are over, he invariably celebrates these holidays at the table with his nearest and dearest. Today his nearest and dearest include his wife, Irina Borisovna, his deputy manager for purchasing and supply, a colleague of his from the ministry with his wife, and his two children – Vityok and Toma. The cat has already eaten and is sprawling on the carpet. My plate has been perched right on the farthest corner of the table to make sure that I'll never get married again. The assembled company is drinking, eating and lending an ear to Nikolai Stepanovich's speechifying (everyone apart from the fortunately deaf cat).

Nikolai Stepanovich's orations, packaged in the form of toasts, deal with a standard set of subjects arranged in order of decreasing importance. These subjects are:

1. the international situation;
   
2. the successes achieved by the reinforced concrete goods factory that Nikolai Stepanovich manages;
   
3. the successes (if any) achieved by Vityok and Toma in their studies;
   
4. prais
   e for the hostess and this magnificent spread, with a kiss on the lips for the individual concerned.
   

At this point Irina Borisovna exercises her right of reply and remarks quite correctly that the credit for the grand spread belongs entirely to Nikolai Stepanovich. The thought that she leaves unspoken is that all the fine fare on the festive table has not come from the grocery shop, but through
nomen­klatura
supply channels. The ministerial comrade and his wife nod understandingly. This compulsory programme usually winds up as the main course is being served. When Nikolai Stepanovich is eating, he is not capable of intelligible speech.

After the main course our host requires a break. He spends a few minutes searching for something in his mouth with a fork and seeming rather abstracted. Soon, however, his gaze clears and we come to the next item on the agenda – ‘miscellaneous'. At this point nobody, including Nikolai Stepanovich himself, knows for certain what he will start talking about. He might speak about football or launch into some
nomenklatura
-type reminiscences. Or perhaps he might glance round the assembled company without saying a word and break into his favourite folk song. True, just recently Nikolai Stepanovich hasn't really been in the mood for singing. On its smooth passage round the table, his gaze inevitably stumbles over me and his lyrical mood evaporates.

Never mind, it's time for the next item on the programme. A carnivorous smile is already playing on Nikolai Stepanovich's face.

‘And now,' he declares, ‘I want to drink to my dear son-in-law!'

‘Here we go . . .' I mutter spitefully.

‘Daddy, don't . . .' Toma cheeps imploringly

But no, daddy really wants to do this! He simply has to take his revenge on me for his unsung song. Irina Borisovna suddenly needs something from the kitchen urgently. That snake Vityok is already chortling into his glass in anticipation of a scandalous scene. Nikolai Stepanovich tells the heartfelt story of how in my person their family has acquired a useful new member and how greatly its common budget has been augmented by my student grant. The couple from the ministry shake their heads; I know that their own darling son tried to pull Toma at one time, but without success, even though he is studying to become a diplomat. Daddy's deputy manager for purchasing and supply smirks openly: in this devious rogue's opinion I could hardly be a less valuable acquisition.