The Big Green Tent (28 page)

“Olga, that one there, the thin one with the dark eyes, is the famous Sinko. We listened to recordings of his songs at Bozhenov's, remember?”

“Yes, of course I do. Wonderful songs.”

“He has a guitar with him, so he's going to sing.”

“Shura, put down the pie and go get the herring. Did you forget it?” Lisa admonished the plump one, her voice raised again. The sharp end of Lisa's nose wriggled like that of a small creature, and Olga realized that her name was a reference to
lisá
, meaning “fox” in Russian, rather than a nickname for Elizabeth. Her pointy little nose was so mobile and alert, it seemed to have a life of its own. The plump one ran into the house, her behind jiggling. Lisa shook her head and smiled a condescending smile, as if berating a dull and inept assistant. The young girl in white went up to Lisa and told her something, but Lisa dismissed it with a wave of her hand:

“Your job is to help. You didn't bring the aspic!”

And the younger one also trotted back to the house at a rapid clip.

At last, King Arthur peeled himself from the chaise longue and went to sit at the head of the table. He sat in his armchair with the patched armrests. A girl with an expressive eastern countenance, large eyes, lips, and nostrils, her hair cut short, and wearing white jeans and a white T-shirt, sat down next to Artur on a bentwood chair. He put his arm around her.

“What a stylish bride!” Olga whispered to Ilya.

“No, that's Lenka Vavilon. She has nothing to do with Artur at all. She's Ossetian; she graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages. She knows all the languages of the Caucasus. And Persian, too. I've never laid eyes on the King's bride myself.”

At that very moment, Lisa went up to the stylish young woman and yanked the chair out from under her.

“Lenka, that chair's not for you.”

Lenka remained unruffled.

“Lisa, don't order me around.”

“Well, you get out of that chair, it's for the bride!” Lisa shouted at her raucously. Lenka turned the chair with its back to the table, and then got up to sit in Artur's lap.

He didn't seem to mind.

“Shura, let's get started! Come to the table!” Lisa screeched. The door flew open, and Shura appeared with a dish towel in her hands.

“I'm coming, I'm coming!” On the way, she wiped her hands off with the dish towel, then fanned herself with it, saying quietly to Lisa (though Olga managed to catch what she said): “Lisa, tell Masha to sit down. You know she won't, unless you tell her to.”

Masha came out balancing a large oval platter of herring on the outspread fingers of each hand.

Shura, going up to the bentwood chair, turned it around toward the table again, hung the dish towel over the back, and sat down heavily. This was the bride. In the meantime, Lenka Vavilon had vanished from Artur's lap as though she had never been there at all. Shura's hair was a hopeless mess. Early in the morning she had rushed out to the hairdresser's, where they had whipped her hair into a tower of curls. This made Lisa furious. She harangued her sister, then ordered her to wash her hair at once, getting rid of both curls and hairspray. Shura used an entire bottle of her sister's foreign-made shampoo. Now her hair was cleaner than it had ever been before; but it was so limp and flyaway that no amount of pinning and clipping could contain it. Shura kept reaching up to fiddle with her plain reddish locks, revealing dark stains under the armpits of her white dress. Her face was as flushed as if she had just emerged from a steam bath. It was clear she had been laboring in front of the stove all day.

Now Lisa's voice, with a metallic edge, rang through the air again:

“Well, come on, pour us a glass! Fill up the glasses, Artur! Why are you such a deadbeat? Get up, bridegroom! Who's going to make a toast? Sergei Borisovich, you're the head honcho here!”

A short, small-boned man in glasses, who looked about fifty, with an unhappy, self-contained air, refused outright.

“Lisa, you dragged us all into this farce; you see it through to the end.”

“Who is that?” Olga said, startled by the exchange.

“Chernopyatov. A lot depends on him. He's a strong, uncompromising man. He was sent to the labor camps when he was only fourteen. He was still in school. I'll tell you more about him later.”

Lisa waved her hand indignantly.

“Fine! It's my wedding, after all. My own husband is marrying my own sister.”

She gestured toward her sister dismissively, as if brushing her aside. Shura stood up, and Lisa jumped up onto her chair. Her getup was like something from another world. She had on a white silk blouse, on top of which was a black lace bra; short shorts peeked out from under her shirttails. She stood on the chair unsteadily; the chair legs wobbled, sinking into the soft, uneven ground. Her spiked heels only made matters worse. Strands of unruly hair blew around in the breeze. Artur, watching the orator attentively, prepared to catch her if she lost her balance. On the other side of her, Shura shuffled around in place, arms outspread, watching the precariousness of the situation in alarm. Still, Shura hadn't foreseen just how precarious the situation was—suddenly it dawned on her that Lisa was totally smashed.

“Hey, where's the champagne? Pass me a glass!”

Someone gallantly thrust a glass into her hand. She raised it into the air and shouted:

“It's bitter!”
*

Artur grabbed her. She clung to his neck and began kissing him: on his bald head, on his cheek, on his nose—until she came to his mouth, when she fastened her lips to those of the imperturbable King.

“I am giving my beloved husband away in marriage! To my dear sister! Hey, Masha! Hey, where's my niece? Come over here, Masha! I've found a daddy for you!”

Masha was standing next to her mother; the expression on her face was no laughing matter.

No one knew what would happen next, but it was clear there was trouble afoot.

Olga was riveted by the scene and didn't notice that Ilya was gone. He reappeared a few minutes later laden with shish kebab skewers. He was accompanied by one of the grill tenders.

Lisa grabbed a skewer and thrust it at the King.

“Shura! Look at me, goddammit! The first piece always goes to him! Masha, you too! I'll tear your eyes out if I have to!”

But there was no need to tear out Shura's eyes—they were already filled with tears, and she wanted to die of shame. She stood rooted to the spot. Ilya passed out skewers, and the shish kebab distracted the attention of the guests from the main wedding ritual—the bittersweet kissing.

“Ilya, she's just a rogue, she thrives on chaos!” Olga fumed, when Ilya brought her the shish kebab.

“Of course she's a rogue! A brilliant rogue. She's the one who got the King out of prison and into the loony bin, then got him discharged. She paid some, turned tricks for others. She became a lawyer. No, it's true! She graduated from law school, taking evening courses. You can't imagine what all she's done. I knew her first, before I met the King. She was a girl from the Far East, her father was a hunter. She went out hunting in the taiga with him when she was just a little tyke. And she can hold her liquor; she keeps up with the best of them. She's an iron lady, except when she's got the hots for someone. That's her only weakness. And the King is impotent, which she herself will announce shortly.”

And that was just what happened. There was a lull in the drama while the guests were amicably partaking of the grilled meat. It ended when Lisa, having polished off her shish kebab, started brandishing her skewer.

“Friends, I take my leave of you! That's it—I'm going to the land of the Finns. I've fucking had it with all of you!” She wriggled her nose and tittered. “But I adore you. Remember that I'm coming back to check up on you! You can't hide from me! The KGB is amateur hour next to me! I'm a one-woman secret agent bureau! Don't you dare insult the King! Or Shura, either. She may be just a dairy cow, but she's a good person. Good Doctor Ouchithurts will heal the masses; she'll feed one and all. She's a nurse. If you need a shot, whether it's in the ass or in your arm, you can count on her. But don't put the moves on her, she hates that. Her hormones are on strike. Whereas mine are raging! They make the perfect pair: one more impotent than the other!”

Going limp, she clung to the King's neck again, then set up an urgent, primal peasant's wail, singing:

“Oy, sweet lord of my soul, you poor little thing! Poor impotent King! Well, why are you all smirking and grinning? He's better than any one of you! If he could get it up, his worth would be beyond compare!”

The King patiently indulged his ex-wife in her wailing. He was completely impassive in the face of her public indictment, which would so devastate any ordinary man. He towered over the rest of them in height, and nobility, and dignity—even in the privilege of impotence among all the sexually obsessed and tormented lovers, the beloved, and the forlorn and unloved, men and women.

He's a king among men
, thought Olga.

Shura and Masha hid away in shame in the house, in the kitchen. Shura howled, and her daughter comforted her:

“Mom, stop—you know what Auntie's like! She'll go away, and everything will go back to normal again.”

Masha was indifferent to all this sophisticated riffraff. She had her own plans: to settle down in Moscow, to marry a man with an apartment, and to graduate from college. She was just as ambitious as her aunt, but she had been hewn with an axe, rather than a fine chisel.

The wedding party was gaining momentum. An enormous bottle of Absolut that had been bought in a Beryozka store was put away in minutes. The supply of home brew bought from the neighbors in three-liter jars, however, never ran out. The bitter Bulgarian Gamza, in pretty bottles covered with woven straw, was nearly untouched, though an entire case of cheap port had already been consumed. An Ampex tape recorder, one of the King's trophies from his final voyage, had been set up on a table pushed against the window. Bebop music, powerful and exuberant, poured into the yard. Everything seemed jarring and incongruous, almost a travesty—the American tape recorder, a true rarity, the epitome of a boyhood dream come true; the refined, inspired music of another culture; the awkward, reeling drunken wedding against the background of lush July greenery, in which the single indispensable thing was lacking: mutual love between the man and the woman. Soon the tape recorder, exhausted, emitted a little hiss and then fell silent.

Sinko picked up his guitar then, and everyone gathered around him. He brushed his elongated fingers, with their long, chipped fingernails, over the strings of the guitar, and they seemed to coo like a woman. He touched his fingers to the strings again, and they answered him in kind.

“It's almost like his fingers are talking to the guitar,” Olga marveled.

Ilya put his hand on her shoulder, and she felt happy. They had been sitting at the table for several hours already, and she longed to touch Ilya, to experience the “awareness of the body” that had begun to melt away. She was too shy to be the first to touch his hand or his shoulder. But he touched her, and this was proof that the feeling was still present.

“Have you never heard him live?”

“No, only on recordings.”

“That's completely different. He's a true artist. He sings Galich's songs better than Galich himself.”

*   *   *

Lisa left for Helsinki the same evening. By train. At half past nine Sergei Borisovich Chernopyatov, who had been keeping a close eye on Lisa the whole time, went up to her, put his hand on her shoulder, and said:

“It's time to go, Lisa.”

Lisa seemed to shrink back, but she went into the house with Chernopyatov. Soon they emerged with a suitcase. Sergei Borisovich was taking Lisa to Leningradskaya Station; they had agreed on this beforehand. Everyone streamed out into the road to gather around the car. Sergei Borisovich wore an air of practical efficiency, and looked irritated. He opened the trunk of his old blue Moskvich. At that moment, Lisa began to hum and spin like a top. She clung to the King's neck again, scolding him rather incoherently for past sins, and again reminding him of his impotence. Artur stroked her head with his hairless pink hand, and suddenly began trying to persuade her to stay:

“Forget about that Finn, Lisa. Stay with us, no one is driving you away!”

Lisa suddenly howled in rage and let her ex-husband have it.

“Not driving me away! What about Shura? I've arranged for Shura to live here with you! Where would she go now? She sold her house! She came here with her child in tow! No way, I'm no longer your wife! Enough! Shura's your wife!”

Then she turned to Shura.

“Well, why are you standing there with your eyes bugging out? Get ready! You're coming with me, to see me off! Artur doesn't need you here to scratch his back—there's always Lenka Vavilon. You'll scratch his back, won't you, Lenka? Shura, get a move on! Let's go!”

Chernopyatov stopped Lisa.

“Listen, I'm not driving all the way back here again. How is she going to get to Tarasovka from the station in the middle of the night?”

Lisa took a sizable packet of money out of her purse and waved it around.

“My sister's coming with me to Leningrad. Aren't you, Shura?”

Shura looked haggard and drawn. She hadn't eaten a thing all day—she had only drunk one glass of champagne. Her head ached and her stomach was cramping from hunger.

“Wait a minute, I'll just get my jacket.”

Sergei Borisovich's face darkened. He stood next to the car, its doors agape, then got behind the wheel impatiently. Lisa had sobered up a bit. She shoved Shura, clutching her jacket, into the car. Lisa got in behind her. She rolled down the window, and shouted:

“Hey, people, keep it up! Keep it up! In our village, weddings last at least three days!”