The Big Green Tent (19 page)

Since his retirement, Afanasy Mikhailovich had quietly reveled in his uncomplicated existence. He was not as emotionally high-strung as his wife, and he was somewhat reluctant to expurgate his daughter from his life; he simply set her aside. Unlike Antonina Naumovna, he refused to let his suffering get the better of him.

Evidently, Olga herself sensed her father's weakness. He was the first one in whom she confided about her changing circumstances, not her mother. But this was a calculated move.

In the middle of February, Olga moved to the dacha. She arrived on the bus like an ordinary person. On a weekday; not in the morning, nor in the evening—but after midday. They had just delivered her father a meal from a nearby military sanatorium where he had a voucher: a three-course meal and a delicious sweet roll from their own bakery. Afanasy Mikhailovich was just busying himself with the lunch pails when Olga showed up. He was glad to see her—it had been a long time, and the memory of the family quarrel was fading. She was cheerful, just like her old self. She shared her father's meal without balking, and even joined him in a preprandial drink. After their lunch she put her feet up on the leather armchair with the aluminum tag on the neck rest. There were still vestiges of the government-issue furniture that the general had purchased for mere kopecks when he bought the dacha, and Olga chose this monstrosity, so familiar to her from childhood, over her father's refurbished antiques, made entirely of wood, and devoid of softness and coziness, all of them from the same antiques store where he had found her bed.

“Daddy,” Olga said, calling him by her childhood name for him, “I want to live at the dacha with you. I could bring Kostya, too. What do you think?”

Afansy Mikhailovich felt a surge of happiness. He didn't even suspect that there might be a catch.

“Sure, live here as long as you like, why bother to ask? But what about work? It will be hard to get around without a car…”

Traveling back and forth to the city was complicated: to Nakhabino by bus, which didn't run on schedule, but according to whim, and from Nakhabino by commuter train to Rizhskaya Station.

“It's no problem for me,” Olga said, laughing. “I don't work, I study.”

Afanasy brightened: his wife hadn't told him that Olga had gone back to school. But his joy was short-lived. Olga was not studying in the university, she was taking evening courses in Spanish, for some reason. She didn't have classes every day. And she didn't intend to reenroll at the university.

Afanasy Mikhailovich was weighing all of this in his mind, trying to understand why his daughter had suddenly taken a notion to make this change, and wondering how his wife would react to it, and whether he should have discussed the matter with her first, before agreeing to it. But Olga cut through the confusion abruptly.

“My friend might come here to live, too.”

The old general choked with indignation: she had divorced without asking them, and now she had taken a lover, whom she wanted to bring home with her, and she was asking for her father's blessing! But, after a moment of silence, he relented.

“Go ahead, live with whoever you want. Why should I care?”

He frowned, consumed the last of his government-issue meat patty, and went to carry out his postprandial ritual—a nap.

Several days later, an old Pobeda drove into the general's huge property. Out of it tumbled Kostya in a sheepskin coat, a puppy that seemed to be dressed in an identical fur coat, Olga, with a pile of books in her arms, and a tall, shaggy-looking man with a pair of skis.

The windows of Afanasy Mikhailovich's workshop, where he was engrossed in his wood, were on another side of the house, and he didn't see them arrive on the porch, jostling one another, falling down in the snow, and dropping mittens and books along the way.

When he went to answer the doorbell, he saw what appeared to him to be a whole crowd, after the seclusion of his dacha life. Kostya was shrieking, the dog was barking, Olga was laughing artificially, and over all of this mayhem loomed a tall, gangly man—whom the general instantly recognized to be the root of all the evil.

This evil root was Ilya Bryansky. He extended a bony, lean hand. He smelled of cheap tobacco, some familiar chemical reagent, and veiled hostility. Olga also smelled different—audacious and alien. Only his grandson, Kostya, and the mutt of a puppy seemed like his own. But Afanasy Mikhailovich didn't indulge in analyzing his feelings. He kissed his daughter and grandson and went back upstairs to the second floor, to take up his handiwork again. The smell of varnish, carpenter's glue, and sawdust soothed him more effectively than valerian. He took the finest grade of sandpaper and began to rub the side of a chair, removing the offensive layer of varnish, and his hand delighted in the curvy smoothness of the scroll that supported the armrest.

From downstairs he heard explosive laughter, snorting and guffaws, trailing off into groans and squealing—sounds not at all befitting a quiet, well-mannered household.

How brazen she is—showing up here with her lover and her son in tow, acting like it's nothing
, thought the general.

They began to live in two households, under one roof. Afanasy Mikhailovich, on his military sanatorium provisions, carried on according to his habitual schedule: rising at seven, dinner at eight, bed at eleven. Olga's family lived any which way. They would sometimes throw together some insubstantial meal, but mostly just eat sandwiches. All day long they opened and closed the refrigerator. They got up and went to bed when it pleased them, and not by the clock. They would take walks, drink tea in the middle of the night, sleep till all hours, laugh and bang on the typewriter till dawn. And they worked erratically, too. Sometimes they left for work in the morning, sometimes in the middle of the day. Olga left for her evening courses at four and returned on the last bus. Ilya would pick her up at the bus stop. Sometimes with Kostya. But why take the child out at night, in the bitter cold?

Although, it was true, they never left Kostya alone—they took turns going out. And if they would be gone overnight, they called on Faina Ivanovna. During the past two months, they had asked Afanasy Mikhailovich to look after Kostya only once. He had taken him up to his workshop, and the child had lent him a hand. He was a smart boy.

On Saturdays, Antonina Naumovna arrived in the gray Volga, laden with cake and groceries. She organized the Sunday family dinner. The new fiancé avoided running into her for a long time; when the weekend rolled around, he would make himself scarce. Only at the beginning of April did they finally meet. Antonina's anticipatory hostility was not misplaced: she didn't like him. How could she? Except for his curly head of hair. But otherwise—his face was gaunt, his nose was like a crow's beak, his lips were thick and red, like he was feverish. He cut an absurd figure: narrow shoulders, spindly legs; he looked like he might snap in two at the waist. His trousers were tight, and they bulged out in front, as if they were well-packed. But he was a scrawny little runt! Ugh.

Antonina nodded, pursing her lips.

“Pleased to meet you. I'm Antonina Naumovna.”

“Ilya.”

“And your last name?

“Ilya Isayevich Bryansky,” he said.

Bryansky is just Bryansky, Antonina Naumovna reasoned, bringing her accumulated expertise in categorizing personnel to bear. But Isayevich! Only priests and Jews were named after prophets … and Old Believers. She knew this issue inside and out, having had to defend herself on this count her whole life.

But what did the girl see in him? She had traded Vova, such a decent sort, and a good husband, for this scraggly beanpole. And, what was worse, Kostya couldn't take his eyes off him, and crawled up and down him like he was some sort of human tree.

When they were at the table, the young family started giggling. Antonina Naumovna noticed that Ilya had tossed a little ball of bread onto Kostya's plate, and Kostya sprinkled salt on his, as if by chance. Olga sat there with a dumb grin on her face, screwing up her eyes … Ilya ate two pieces of the cake. He licked the cream off the top, like a cat. And he ate up the rest of Kostya's. And he sucked on his spoon. Disgusting! Afanasy shouldn't have allowed them to move in. Let them fend for themselves; they've had it far too easy in life. And a spiteful dry tear clouded her eye …

Olga's poor parents couldn't imagine what on earth this unprepossessing suitor was up to, why the typewriter keys clattered ceaselessly into the night, and why he always had to rush off, abandoning the peaceful luxuries of the dacha. But Olga knew: she was the one who typed all the anti-Sovietism from the onionskin paper. Granted, Olga was not entrusted with any sizable texts. She had neither the speed nor the skill for that. She opted for the poetry, most often Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. She considered this to be a kind of community service. The thick books were passed on to more dexterous typists, who were paid for the work—either Galya Polukhina, a girlhood friend, or Vera Leonidovna, a professional typist.

Sometimes Ilya delivered the pages to his friend Artur, to be bound, and sometimes he distributed them just as they were. Artur made lovely volumes of poetry covered in chintz. Books of a religious nature were bound appropriately—in leatherette or plain calico. It wasn't easy to pin him down, though. He forgot about what he had agreed to do, and when it was expected to be finished. Ilya made a living from samizdat. Contrary to most of these other heirs of Gutenberg, his intellectual contemporaries, he felt no moral qualms about material compensation. He expected to be well paid for his time and effort, and he invested his earnings in his photography and his expanding archive.

What an abundance of poems there was! What lyrical abundance! Never before nor after had there been such a time in Russia. Verses filled the airless space, and themselves became the air people breathed—albeit “stolen air,” in the words of Mandelstam. The Nobel Prize, it seemed, was not the supreme literary honor. Rather, it was the honor of being printed and read on these dry, rustling pages, crudely typed or handwritten, full of misprints and errors, sometimes barely legible—conferred on Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and, finally, Brodsky.

“Our high-school literature teacher, Victor Yulievich Shengeli, is someone you ought to meet. You'd really like him. He hasn't taught for a long time, though. He works in some museum—trying to escape notice.”

The Soviet authorities persecuted the unemployed, including those whom they themselves banned from official employment. The “parasite” Joseph Brodsky had already been released from exile in the village of Norenskaya, but no one could have anticipated that fifty years hence, a memorial room would be established in the local library in his name, and that a down-at-the-heels woman in her waning years would show people around, calling the tour “Brodsky in Norenskaya.”

Olga became more and more adept at translation. She had studied French at university, and Spanish at night school. She picked up Italian as well, studying it on her own in the commuter train on the way to and from the dacha. She made connections, and was sometimes asked to translate film scripts, a task she was very good at. She did other forms of moonlighting—writing research papers, patents. Her earnings were meager at first, but they grew steadily. These jobs were all “unofficial,” of course—officially she was registered as a research assistant, like Ilya. This was a front used by many people at the time.

After the death of his former father-in-law, Ilya found someone else who would register him as an assistant. For Olga, he found an old professor willing to take her on as a secretary. They both joined some sketchy labor union that seemed tailor-made for people trying to evade the Soviet authorities.

At the dacha, Ilya rigged up a darkroom in the broom closet next to the bathroom. He ran a pipe from the WC into the broom closet, just as he had done back in his school days, and performed his magic there during the nights. Afanasy Mikhailovich didn't notice a thing, since he bathed only on Saturdays. The rest of the week he never so much as glanced at the bathroom or the broom closet.

What happy years they had together! Ilya divorced his first wife. Eventually, without much fuss or bother, he and Olga got married. Olga devoted herself to him heart and soul. Everything he said or did was fascinating and unprecedented: samizdat, photography, travel—he adored the Russian Far North, the Central Asian south, and often set out for the back of beyond. Sometimes he took Olga and Kostya along with him.

Once they took a trip to the region around Vologda—to Belozersk and Ferapontovo. Kostya remembered this long afterward as a magical journey. Everything that happened, every hour of every day, stayed in his memory like a movie he could watch at will—how they went fishing in a rowboat, and slept in a hayloft; and how they climbed the scaffolding surrounding the monastery and he nearly plunged to his death, only Ilya grabbed hold of his jacket just in the nick of time and saved him. And the horribly amusing story of the bee that he ate along with a piece of homemade jam pie, and how Ilya fished the pie right out of his mouth, and then plucked the stinger deftly from his lip.

Olga had other memories: of the vanishing frescoes of the icon painter Dionysius, the crumbling monastery, and the slow, somnolent beauty of the north, which, from that very first sunset, shimmering and pellucid, she recognized as her true home.

It was here, near Vologda, that she finally came to terms with her keen disappointment in her parents' ideals, in the whole edifice of power and authority of the country she was born in, in the country itself, with its cruel and inhuman regulations and customs. Now she was overcome by a new and heart-wrenching love for this austere, impoverished north, where her father had been born. Her heart leapt to her throat when she watched the late-evening sun sink into the big lake, and saw how the crimson sky gradually gave way to silver, and how this silver spread over everything else, in turn—the fields, the water, the air. This greenish-silver hue was also a revelation of this journey, and it was Ilya who first noticed it, and spoke of it.