Life Stories Page 9

  "Damn," he stopped himself. "You talk nonsense, as usual. You have always been a crazy kid. Remember how the girls at school thought you were nuts. But things turned out just as Erasmus of Rotterdam once said: He who is not taken seriously almost always wins.' In the end, it was you, crazy eyes, who triumphed over those girls, the young philistines. But even back then, while they appeared to disdain you, some of them were secretly in love with you."

  Meanwhile, the bus arrived at the crematorium. The women were showering compliments on Valentina, whom he had called Aunt Valya since he had been a child. She was around 80 years old, but was full of life and vigor—her hair dyed blonde. A year ago, she had still been working at the same plant where she had started as a young girl after getting out of college.

  The crematorium-columbarium was quiet. The crematorium looked like a somewhat awkward hangar built of concrete and glass. It could have been used to fix or park airplanes. But the columbarium had been planted with lines of short arborvitae, juniper bushes and blue firs, which would eventually grow tall and create an even more pleasant environment for the dead, emit even tarter smells, and cast even deeper, bluer shadows. As he stared out the window of the bus, he knew that it had its boulevards and avenues, and that on one of them an urn with the remains of his father, a man with an angry face, had been installed into a stone slab. When the old woman was cremated, an urn with her remains, mixed with the ashes of her blanket and clothes, would be placed next to the remains of the man she loved.

  "What the hell did she love him for?" he thought bitterly. They were bad for each other precisely because he had even less vitality than she. He had his talents, he had an ear for music and could play the guitar and the piano like a virtuoso—not just a few chords, but seriously. Yet, neither of them spurred the other to conquer the world. They gave birth to him, but they never thought he would turn out to be a conqueror. Basically, they couldn't understand him, didn't believe in him and were deeply offended and dumfounded when, in 1989, his books began to be published in Russia for the first time and he was welcomed back like a big man. Journalists took an interest in him and, in the apartment his mother had just been carried from, the telephone never stopped ringing. Back then, his mother remarked to him darkly: "Your father is such a good man. Why is it that no one takes an interest in us?" A tear rolled down her cheek. He was no longer as principled as he had been when he was an unknown—he had already been spoiled by fame, so he hastened to reassure his mother with a meaningless phrase: "This is the kind of work that I do." But he thought in amazement: "They treat me like a stranger. They envy me. Yet, I'm their son. How come they don't feel that my victory is their victory, too?" It was then that he understood for the first time that everyone competes with one another, fathers compete with their children and women compete with men. Even his beautiful wife, the most beautiful wife on earth, began to compete with him like a guy. That's how things always were. He thought of her interview published in a mass-circulation paper more than a month ago, in which she got all puffed up and declared: "I'm the main breadwinner in the family." To say nothing of the grotesque exaggeration of her achievements (he had supported the family while she was pregnant and then breast-fed the baby, and after that he gave her money every day, whenever she asked, because that year she barely worked a few weeks, even though her work as actress-performer did pay better than his, a creator's), he was shocked by this division of the family into two, with her being the breadwinner and him supposedly contributing very little. And she would drag all this out into a yellow newspaper? Had she changed as a result of some crisis of consciousness? She was about to turn 34. But she had begun to turn strange a year earlier, at 33. It was then that she went to Goa for the first time, in order to "restore herself," as she had put it.

  The bus stopped and they exited. It was raining. The bus with the old woman's casket drove off to unload the casket at the back entrance, at the door reserved for the dead and the staff. Before leaving, the driver had said that they would soon see the old woman and would be able to pay their respects.

  "Go over there," the driver pointed to the main entrance and the rather ugly industrial doors. The passengers of the bus of the dead, they headed for the doors. Along the way, in an open space in front of the crematorium paved with slabs, they were joined by the passengers of the Chevrolet. One of the women, the one with swollen feet, was leaning on a stick. His bodyguards helped her to the industrial doors of the crematorium, just as they had helped her down the steps of the bus.

  Once they entered, they found themselves in a kind of vestibule or foyer, bare and unadorned except for signs such as, "Wait Here to Be Invited to the Hall of Last Respects," "You Will Be Called" and several others written in the same stern spirit of discipline and order.

  They stood there like parentheses around a subordinate clause, on one side the colonel, the connected man and the old woman's son and on the other his bodyguards and the women. The woman with swollen feet said that she liked cremation and wished to be cremated herself. She even had money set aside for it. Her relatives would be close by and would come to visit her and it would not cost much. Aunt Valya was also leaning toward cremation. They spoke in an everyday tone of voice and even smiled when they felt it was appropriate. The youngest woman, the nurse who had found his mother dead, had left them for a while and had driven away with the driver. She had the death certificate. Now she returned, saying that, in the old lady's apartment, somewhere in a drawer, they would need to find documents confirming that the niche at the columbarium had been purchased for two. Otherwise the old woman's remains would not be placed together with the remains of her husband, and her photograph would not appear next to the photograph of the angry old man.

  "We'll have to find it," she said to the old woman's son.

  A short compact man with closely cropped hair wearing a black suit now came out and invited them to the Hall of Last Respects. The old woman's son found the Hall impressive. It was a semi-dark, slightly damp room with a tall ceiling and proportions large enough to ensure that a handful of mourners felt orphaned and insignificant. The casket stood on a platform by the far wall. The old woman lay in it. She once had been his mother. The funeral director ushered them to the side of the casket. He went to the other side and climbed the dais, which was draped with pine branches, wreaths and ribbons. The funeral director made a speech, which was as competent and appropriate as it was standard.

  The speech explained that such and such person (he used the old woman's name and patronymic) was being taken from us, or rather was leaving us and going to the next world, and that we mourned her departure. Still, the semidarkness, the skillfully cast light and the impressive size of the room imbued his speech and the simple ritual with a larger meaning.

  When he finished, the funeral director asked whether anyone wanted to say anything. Nobody expressed such a wish and so the funeral director said:

  "Then, let us go up and say goodbye. Please pay your last respects to the deceased."

  The old woman's son was the first to approach the body, which he did as though it was a routine task for him to pay his last respects to the dead. He was light on his feet, dressed in a black coat and a black sweater, gray-haired, looking like the devil only knows what kind of polar explorer or Captain Nemo. He came up to the casket, leaned over and kissed the scarf on the old woman's forehead.

  He whispered: "So you have died, Mom. Rest in peace. Forgive me for being a bad son." The old woman lay with an otherworldly, inhuman face, like a chunk of mined ore or a broken mammoth bone in the snow. He walked away and was followed by Aunt Valya wearing a scarf on her dyed head, who said goodbye to her girlfriend. The old woman's son didn't hear what she had said to her.

  "The farewells are over," said the funeral director. He picked up the casket top and covered the old woman, his mother. Funeral music sounded. Just as skillfully as the driver an hour ago, the funeral director drove confident nails into the casket. Boom. Boom. Now he drove them in all the w
ay to their heads.

  The casket suddenly began to ride upward from the platform, heading toward an opening in the wall curtained off by red velour drapes. The casket stumbled momentarily at line of the drapes, and then crushed them, disappearing with a second or third nudge into a space where it could no longer be seen by the mourners. Behind it, the drapes returned to their original position. The music stopped.

  "The ceremony is over," said the funeral director.

  They headed for the exit, the limping old lady with her bad feet, Aunt Valya, the other women, his bodyguards and the passengers from the Chevrolet. Once outside, in the rain, he thought that at least this problem, the one that had oppressed him for several years, turning into a nagging pain every New Year's, had now been resolved by Nature. "No person, no problem,"1 he thought bitterly. "My mother, who oppressed me by her very being, is gone. But another mother, my son's, lingers on," he admitted to himself.

  They piled into the same bus and the same driver drove them, now recklessly, back to New Houses. The old woman's son thought that at least he had accomplished his task. He could now go back to Moscow, but the moral duty to the women—the nurses and the neighbors who took such an important part in the funeral (in fact, who had arranged everything)—had to be fulfilled. A banquet awaited them, the most pleasant part of the ceremony of death, the pagan rite of sating the mourners and filling them with alcohol.

  Actually, his mother was the oldest and the most enduring character in his life, a life rich in people and adventures. And the fact that she had finally physically departed this life changed nothing in an already established order. In reality, he had long since erased both his father and his mother from among the living. Even though he wrote to them from prison, replying to their letters, it was only a formality. It was in prison that he summed up his attitude to family when he wrote his treatise, Monster with Tearful Eyes. In the years that passed since then, he had no reason to alter his views. When he came out of the labor camp, responding to pressure from a lawyer friend—who had traditional values—and taking along a couple of bodyguards, he drove in the man's car to see his parents. At the border, at the Goptivka checkpoint, Ukrainian border guards scurried nervously to and fro when they recognized the famous goatee and eyeglasses. In the end, he discovered that he had been banned from entering Ukraine long ago, that there had been two decrees by the Security Council of Ukraine on this subject, one dated November 1999 and the other March 2003. By March 2003, he was already in jail—awaiting sentencing—so that the rationale for the Security Council of Ukraine's decree, whatever it was, was either false or absurd. But whom could he complain to? No one. His passport was stamped with a statement that he was banned from entering Ukraine until July 25, 2008, and there was nothing to be done except turn around. "You should thank us that we didn't arrest you for 72 hours. After all, you were trying to cross the border," a Ukrainian officer told him by way of a farewell. "Thanks," he replied.

  By then, his father had already taken to his bed. He simply got bored with life. He was not ill, he just chose to stay in bed and let his wife take care of him. Life became difficult for her. When they neared Belgorod, riding in the lawyer's Lexus, the lawyer—a traditionalist—said that he would leave the old woman's son at a hotel and drive and bring the old woman to Belgorod. Meanwhile, his father would spend half a day in the care of the bodyguards. He was so kind, that lawyer. Had it not been for his idea, the old woman's son would have driven back to Moscow with a clean conscience. A cruel man, he could never understand this kind of sentimentality. No one had ever taken pity on him, neither the women he loved, nor the authorities, nor his enemies and rivals, of course. Hadn't they made an honest attempt to cross the border? What else could he have done?

  The lawyer brought his mother over. She turned out to be a crooked, stooped old woman with a walking stick. She was very happy to see him, cried a little at various moments and described to him the physiological details of his father's condition—how she had hurt her back lifting him and how he would wet his bed if she didn't get there in time. He listened to all these horrors and considered going back to Moscow as soon as possible, where a friend had lent him a huge, bourgeois apartment, where he stayed with a 21-year-old girl who had welcomed him back from prison. The lawyer took his mother back and in the evening he and the lawyer sat at an outdoor restaurant, since it was July, and about them walked young girls smelling of young flesh. Less than a month had passed since he had emerged from the camp. Life was a holiday for him. He ate a kebab, chased shots of vodka with beer the way he liked it, used foul language and felt happy. For no reason at all, just because he had spent two and a half years behind bars.

  They went up to the apartment on the top floor. Tables had been set up in the large room and food was ready to be served. Two women and two bodyguards had stayed behind. "Back so soon?" those who had stayed behind asked. "We didn't expect you back so soon. Some things aren't ready yet."

  There was the usual fuss that precedes a banquet. Where is the bread? Where are the soup plates? What shall we dump the potatoes into? Common womenfolk hold men in far greater respect than educated women. He reached this uncomplicated conclusion when they placed him, the colonel and the gray-haired, connected man at the head of the table and served them vodka and food while scurrying about arranging the table and, whenever they needed it, exploiting younger men—his bodyguards. He had not been in the company of common people for so long that he kept making new discoveries, one after the other. It turned out that they had a well-defined sense of hierarchy. They had promptly arranged themselves into a small tribe, recognizing the authority of those who had more experience, knowledge and skill. In his own small family there was no such natural hierarchy, he thought bitterly. Nor was it now possible to re-establish such a hierarchy. Since last fall, the monster-werewolf who had taken residence in a beautiful actress would reach for her cell phone whenever tempers flared even slightly and would emit an ugly cry: "I'm calling the cops." She had just acted the role of a businesswoman who put her husband behind bars because he allegedly raped her, which was why she sounded so convincing. Unwilling to tempt fate, he would call his bodyguards and leave.

  How had it started? ("Pass the pickles, please." "Excellent pickles!") How had she managed to turn into a werewolf? "I should spend some time thinking it over," he promised himself and stood up. They wanted him to say something about the deceased and were clinking their forks against the shot glasses.

  He began by admitting that he had been a bad son, that he had left his parents early in life and lived abroad for a long time and that, after 15 years of separation, he came back to find his parents aged. He said that his parents didn't believe in his abilities, but nonetheless they helped him in those distant years when, as an adolescent, he set off to conquer Moscow. They used to send him 25 rubles every month, addressed to "General Delivery" at the Central Post Office on Kirova—now Myasnitskaya—Street. He added something else and then said again that he was a bad son to the deceased. They drank. He sat down again.

  Aunt Valya, whose turn it was to speak after him, because she had known his mother for fifty years if not longer, began by defending him. It wasn't good for the son of the deceased to speak like that about himself. His mother understood that he had a different destiny, and others around her understood it, too. Nobody expected him to spend his entire life by his mother's side. Even when he was a child, they saw that he was a different kind of man, a man unlike them.

  The different kind of man, in the mean time, attempted to figure out what there was in him that he got from his parents. Nothing, it turned out. Even when he lived with them, he hadn't been raised by them, but by books about travels and adventure, then by special books about history and by books of poetry. Now his character consisted of several distinct strains. One was the working habits and opinions of a hard-working writer. Up early, work at the writing desk, physical exercise, walks, one meal per day. Ascetic habits, of course. Then, when he became a Soldier, tho
se ascetic habits stood him in good stead. His soldiering years and the time he spent at war honed his character. Decisiveness, courage, ability to make do and enjoyment of life were traits they built or uncovered in him. When he became the head of a radical party, a revolutionary and a leader, he had to get used to surveillance and eavesdropping, to prosecutors and judges. When he did time, prison became part of him forever. If you do time, you can never again be completely free of prison. It follows you for the rest of your life. In short, it was a very complicated character that sat at the head of the table next to the colonel. An insatiable sex fiend, too, but that was something few people knew, he thought, sneering, even though many suspected it.

  He brilliantly if obscenely proved it before the evening was over. He declared to his mother's nurse his desire to sleep with her, grabbed her breasts and asked if he could pull out her tit. His bodyguards looked the other way in embarrassment. Old Nadya, a former neighbor, stared at the scene without blinking an eye.

  He had taken a notice of that nurse the last time he came. He saw her briefly in the corridor (they were about to leave by then), and he got the sense of her feminine tidiness, and goodwill toward him, and a certain nervous excitement when he was near her.

  Yet, he didn't carry his shameful conduct to the end. His infallible iron health kept him from getting completely drunk. He controlled himself and made sure that the nurse and her girlfriend got home, ordering his bodyguards to walk out with them and put them in a taxi. He gave the key to his bodyguards and lay down in the small room on a broken down old bed. His father had died there four years ago. His mother had died yesterday, in the large room. This room smelled of dust, old things and, faintly, of mothballs, the usual smell of the old. His father's guitar hung on the side of the armoire that bulged with old things. The bottom peg that held the strings in place had long since come unglued because of the heat, and the strings reared up like the depiction of a wave in a Japanese print. He thought that now he was indeed all alone in the world. There had been a time when that was what he dreamed of. But now he didn't like it much.