The Big Green Tent Read online

  No one got under the skin of the mutyuks and murygs like Mikha, but with all of his orphanage experience, he easily weathered the schoolyard brawls. He never complained, but shook himself off, snatched up his hat, and took to his heels while the hoots and catcalls of his enemies rained down on him. Ilya played the clown with aplomb, and was often able to confuse his enemies with wisecracks or with sudden comic moves. Sanya proved to be the most sensitive and vulnerable among them. Still, it was his excessive sensitivity that served as his defense in the end.

  Once, when Sanya was washing his hands in the school bathroom—a cross between a parliament and a den of thieves—Mutyukin was overcome with loathing for Sanya’s unassuming pastime and suggested that he wash his mug, while he was at it. Sanya, partly from a desire to keep the peace, but also partly out of cowardice, did as he was told. Then Mutyukin grabbed a filthy rag for cleaning the floor and wiped it across Sanya’s dripping face. By this time, they were surrounded by onlookers who were in the mood for some excitement. But they were disappointed. Sanya went pale, began to shake, then fainted, collapsing onto the tiled floor. The paltry enemy was, of course, vanquished, but the victory felt hollow. He lay on the floor in a contorted pose, his head lolling back. Murygin jabbed his side with the toe of his boot, just to make sure that he was really out cold. He called out to him with no malice whatsoever,

  “Hey, Sanya, what’re you doing down there?”

  Mutyukin stared wild-eyed at the lifeless Sanya. Sanya didn’t open his eyes, despite the insistent pokes and jabs. Just then, Mikha came in. He glanced at the mute scene, then rushed off to fetch the school nurse. A pinch of smelling salts revived Sanya, and the gym teacher carried him to the infirmary. The nurse measured his blood pressure.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  He answered that he felt fine, though he couldn’t quite recall what had happened to him. When he did remember the dirty rag rubbing against his face, he almost retched. He asked for some soap and washed his face thoroughly. The nurse wanted to call his parents. It took some effort for Sanya to persuade her not to. Mama was at work, anyway, and he wanted to guard his grandmother from the unpleasantness. Ilya was enlisted to accompany his shell-shocked friend home, and the nurse wrote a note for both of them, dismissing them from class.

  From that day on, counterintuitive though it might seem, Sanya rose in stature. True, they did start calling him Epileptic Gnome, but they stopped tormenting him: What if he had another fainting fit?

  On December 31 school let out for the winter break. Eleven days of bliss. Mikha always remembered these days, each of them a revelation, and each different from all the others. On New Year’s he received a wonderful present. After secret negotiations with her son, who solemnly promised her that his direct descendants would never claim their rights to that particular family heirloom, and he himself didn’t mind in the least, Aunt Genya gave Mikha a pair of ice skates.

  They were an American make, long outmoded, a hybrid between the standard Snegurkas and Hagues, with double blades and serrated front tips. The blades had been affixed to a pair of beat-up boots that had once been red, with huge star-shaped rivets. On the metal plate connecting the blade to the shoe, the word Einstein could be made out, followed by a series of incomprehensible numbers and letters. The boots had been thoroughly battered and broken in by their previous owner, but the blades gleamed like new.

  Aunt Genya treated the skates like the family jewels, the way other families cherish their grandmother’s diamonds.

  And diamonds did figure into the story of these skates in a tangential way. In the year 1919, Lenin himself had dispatched Genya’s older brother Samuel to the United States on a mission to organize the American Communist Party. For the rest of his life, Samuel had prided himself on his mission and regaled his relatives and close friends, of whom there were hundreds, with the details of the journey—until he was arrested in 1937. He was sentenced to “ten years of imprisonment without the right of correspondence,” and disappeared forever; but his remarkable story became the stuff of family legend.

  In July 1919, Samuel traveled from Moscow through northern Europe by a roundabout route, finally arriving in New York Harbor on a Dutch trading vessel in the guise of a seaman. He clattered down the gangplank in boots that had been fashioned by the Kremlin cobbler, with an exceedingly costly diamond secreted in the heel. He carried out his mission: at the behest of the Comintern, he organized the first underground congress of the Communist Party. Upon completion of his task several months later, Samuel returned and reported directly to Comrade Lenin.

  The whole of his modest travel allowance was spent on presents, minus twelve dollars spent on food. For his wife he brought home a red woolen dress with berries embroidered on the collar and shoulders, and red shoes three sizes too small. The skates were the third, and most expensive, American present in his luggage. He had bought them too big (with growing room) for his son, who died soon after.

  He should have bought them for himself. As a boy, Samuel dreamed of gliding out into the middle of the skating rink with his body bent over the slick ice, racing past all those who turned up their noses at him—past the fine ladies in their muffs, the gymnasium students, the highborn young boys and girls, Marusya Galperin most likely among them. The skates had been buried in a chest for safekeeping, awaiting a new heir. But Samuel didn’t have any more children, and the skates, which had lain for ten years untouched, were passed down to the son of his younger sister Genya.

  Now, twenty years later, they changed hands—or rather feet—again, inherited by another relative of the heroic Samuel.

  Thus, the first day of Mikha’s vacation culminated in this unexpected gift, and far surpassed any happiness he could ever have imagined. And there was nothing that even hinted of the misfortune to follow.

  * * *

  On New Year’s Eve, Aunt Genya’s large family gathered around the table. The neighbors who shared their communal apartment had consented to having the festive dinner set up in the common kitchen, rather than in the 150-square-foot room that Genya occupied, together with her unmarried and endocrinologically challenged daughter, Minna, and, for some time already, Mikha. Aunt Genya prepared a sumptuous feast: both chicken and fish. That night, after the memorable repast, Mikha wrote a poem expressing his abiding impressions of the day.

  The skates are the finest thing

  That ever I have seen in life,

  Finer than sun and water,

  Finer than fire.

  Fine is the man

  who is on those skates.

  On the table, bedecked as at a ball,

  Countless were the dishes,

  And one can only wish

  One’s kin great victories in years to come.

  At first he had “victuals” instead of “dishes,” but thought better of it—it sounded a bit crude.

  All week Mikha got up when it was still dark outside and went down to the courtyard, to the improvised skating rink. He skated by himself until the first kids appeared, after sleeping their fill, since they were on school break. He still wasn’t very sure on his feet when he was wearing the skates, and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to fend off the other kids if they tried to jump him.

  The skates were, of course, the most important event of that vacation. The second most important was Anna Alexandrovna, Sanya’s grandmother. She took the boys to museums.

  Mikha had a dual nature: he had a thirst for knowledge, a natural curiosity and excitement that was both scientific and unscientific; but he was also possessed of an inchoate creative fire. He was captivated by Anna Alexandrovna. He was not the only one to fall under her spell, however. The museum outings made a strong impression even on Ilya, who seemed to have more of a technological bent than an artistic one. Sanya, the proud owner of this remarkable grandmother, sauntered casually from room to room, occasionally sharing his thoughts—not with his friends, but with his grandmother. It was clear that in museums, no less than in mus
ic school, he was in his element.

  Mikha fell in love with Anna Alexandrovna. He would never stop loving her until the day she died. She saw in him a budding man of that stamp she had always preferred. The youth was a redhead, a poet, and during that particular week he even limped a bit, having overtaxed himself on his new skates—exactly like the nearly great poet whom Anna Alexandrovna had secretly loved as a thirteen-year-old girl. This paragon of a man, already full-grown in that distant era, who had the aura of a freedom fighter and would-be martyr, and enjoyed adulation at the beginning of the twentieth century, didn’t deign to notice the lovestruck young lady, but left a lasting impression on some Freudian underside of her psyche. All her life she would love these intense, emotional redheads.

  She smiled when she looked at Mikha—a boy of the same breed, but separated by time … and it was pleasant for her to catch his rapturous gaze.

  Thus, without being aware of it himself, Mikha’s love was requited. That winter he became a frequent guest at the Steklovs’ home. Countless books, even books in foreign languages, nestled in every nook and cranny of the living room, with its three windows and another half window bisected by a partition wall, under lofty ceilings with ornate plaster moldings, also bisected. An upright piano, ever battle-ready, guarded its music in its depths. From time to time, unusual but intoxicating smells wafted through the room—real coffee, floor polish, perfume.

  This must have been what it was like in my parents’ home, Mikha thought. He didn’t remember his parents. His mother had perished during the bombardment of the last train headed east from Kiev on September 18, 1941, when the Germans were already approaching the Podol district. His father died at the front, never knowing that his wife was dead and his son had survived.

  In reality, the home of Mikha’s parents hadn’t been anything like Sanya Steklov’s. He was already twenty years old when he saw photographs of his parents for the first time. By some miracle, the photographs had been preserved after the war. He was very disappointed to see that his parents were poor, unattractive people—his mother, with a forced smile on her small dark lips and an extravagant, brazen bust; and his father, squat and corpulent, with an air of exaggerated self-importance. The photographs afforded glimpses of dull, everyday life, a setting that was not at all like the diminutive portion of the smaller reception hall of the former Apraksin-Trubetskoy mansion occupied by Sanya’s family.

  On January 9, as the winter break was drawing to a close, they celebrated Sanya’s birthday. Before that it was Christmas, but only grown-ups had been invited to that event. It would be several years before the younger generation would be allowed to take part in the January 7* festivities. Still, there were always sweets left over from Christmas on Sanya’s birthday—candied apples, cherries, even orange rinds that Anna Alexandrovna prepared like no one else in the world. But that wasn’t all: they would fold up the room divider, move the dining table closer to the door, and, between the two large windows, set up a towering Christmas tree decorated with ornaments from a box that had been stashed away all year in a storage loft.

  Sanya’s birthday party was always a thrilling event. Even girls came. This time there were two of Sanya’s friends from music school, Liza and Sonya. There was also Tamara, the granddaughter of his grandmother’s friend, with her friend Olga; but they were still small, little first-graders, and they didn’t inspire any interest in the boys. His grandmother’s friend was somewhat lackluster, too. Liza’s grandfather, Vasily Innokentievich, though, was marvelous, with his military uniform and mustache. An enigmatic cloud of odors clung to him: cologne water, medicine, and war. Half-joking, he addressed his granddaughter with the formal “you,” while casually calling Anna Alexandrovna “Nuta” and addressing her with “thou.” Vasily Innokentievich was Anna Alexandrovna’s cousin, and Liza was thus some sort of distant cousin to Sanya. They even used those pre-Revolutionary terms, the French cousin and cousine, which also seemed to have been pulled out of the box in the storage loft.

  Anna Alexandrovna called the girls “young ladies” and the boys “young men,” and Mikha, discomfited by all these high-society forms of address, was completely at a loss until Ilya winked at him, as if to say, Take it easy, they won’t bite!

  Anna Alexandrovna had planned an extraordinary evening. First there was a puppet show, on a real puppet stage, starring Petrushka, Vanka, and fat Rosa. They tussled and fought and exchanged insults, all in a foreign language.

  Then they played word games. The little girls, Tamara and Olga, refusing to be outdone by the grown-ups, showed a quickness of mind beyond their years. Anna Alexandrovna invited the children to take pride of place at the large oval table, while the grown-ups retreated to a corner to drink tea. Vasily Innokentievich sat in an armchair and smoked shag tobacco cigarettes. After the puppet show, Anna Alexandrovna picked out a fat hand-rolled cigarette from the silver case on the side table in front of Vasily Innokentievich and tried to smoke it, but immediately broke into a fit of coughing.

  “Vasily, these are awfully strong!”

  “That’s why I don’t offer them to anyone, Nuta.”

  “Ugh!” Anna Alexandrovna expelled the reeking smoke. “Where do you get them?”

  “I buy the tobacco, and Liza rolls them for me.”

  But that wasn’t the end of the evening. After the puppet show an array of desserts was spread out for them, a presentation Mikha would remember to the end of his days—everything from the homemade punch to the pale yellow napkin rings, carved from bone, cinching the folds of starched linen.

  Ilya and Mikha exchanged glances. This was a moment when Sanya appeared aloof and inaccessible to them. The two of them felt set apart, like lowly interlopers. A three-way friendship, like all triangles, is a complex matter. Obstacles and temptations arise—jealousy, envy, sometimes even treachery, albeit trivial or pardonable. Can treachery be justified by unendurable, boundless love? The three of them would be granted an epoch quintessentially suited to posing this question, and a whole lifetime—shorter for one, longer for the others—in which to find out.

  That evening, not only the rather inhibited Mikha, but also the expansive Ilya, felt somewhat abashed by the grandeur of the surroundings. Sanya, preoccupied by Liza, with her long, narrow face, and her hair set free from its blue ribbon, nevertheless sensed this. He called Mikha over and the two of them whispered together for a long time, then summoned Anna Alexandrovna. A little later, it was announced that there would be a game of charades. Then Sanya turned an ungainly little chair upside down, and it suddenly became a stepladder. He climbed up to the top step so that he was even taller than Mikha, who stood one step lower, and together they raucously declaimed the following lines, all the while pushing and shoving each other, tugging at each other’s ears, snorting and mooing and making a general racket.

  Two names that start the same—

  A talk between two lords of the meadow.

  The second part of one’s like foul disgust: “Yuck!”

  The other’s like the vulgar sound

  Released after a meal of slops: “Ugh!”

  The two names end the same—

  A German preposition.

  Add them together, you have two creatures

  Misnamed, perhaps, Homo sapiens.

  The guests laughed heartily, but no one could guess the answer. There was only one person among them who was capable of solving this linguistic riddle: Ilya. And he didn’t let them down. Waiting until the guests admitted defeat, he answered, not without pride, “I know! The beasts are called Mutyukin and Murygin!”

  In all honesty they should have chosen another charade, because no one had ever heard of any Murygin or Mutyukin; but no one took them to task for it. Everyone had had a good time, and that was what mattered.

  But something in the boys’ relationship to one another had shifted: Mikha, who had taken part in the charade, was raised to Sanya’s level, and Ilya surpassed them both—he was, after all, the one to solve the riddle, and
thus support the integrity of the game. It would have fallen through if no one at all had known the answer. Good show, Ilya!

  The boys slung their arms around each other’s shoulders in triumph, and Vasily Innokentievich photographed the three of them together. This was their first group portrait.

  Vasily Innokentievich’s camera was a war trophy—a fine one, Ilya noticed. He also noticed that his epaulets were those of a colonel, and decorated with serpents. He had been an army doctor.

  On January 10, Anna Alexandrovna took the boys to a piano concert at Tchaikovsky Hall, to listen to Mozart. Ilya was fairly bored, and even took a little snooze, but Mikha felt a sense of elation. The music was so thrilling, and he was so deeply moved, that he wasn’t even able to write a poem about it afterward. Sanya was upset, and nearly broke down in tears. Anna Alexandrovna knew why: Sanya wanted to be able to play Mozart that way, too.

  On the eleventh they went back to school. That very first day, the three of them, along with another boy, Igor Chetverikov, got into a school-yard brawl with the other boys. It all began with an innocent snowball fight, and it ended in a rout: Mikha had been punched in the face and his glasses were broken; Ilya had a busted lip. It was humiliating that the fight had been two against four. Sanya, as usual, had hung back—not so much out of cowardice as from fastidiousness and tact. Murygin and Mutyukin aroused as much disgust in him as the infamous rag they had wiped his face with. This time, the bullies ignored Sanya completely. Red-haired Mikha, who had aimed a rock-hard snowball at the bull’s eye of Murygin’s nose and was right on the mark, was far more interesting to them. Ilya was over by the fence, spitting blood, Chetverikov was wondering whether it was time to hightail it, and Mikha was leaning with his back against a wall, fists at the ready. Mikha’s fists were massive, almost like a grown-up’s.