Dedicated to Alla
And again she woke up in the middle of the night, as she woke up every night now, as if someone habitually and maliciously poked her awake: think, think, try to understand! She couldn’t. Her being was capable of nothing but self-torture. But the thing that woke her demanded persistently: try to understand, there must be a meaning, there must be culprits, the closest ones are always guilty, it’s impossible to live on, you must die yourself. She just needed to find out: what was she guilty of? And another thing, secret and shameful: did it all really end like this? “What a fool, how can I think of death when I have a daughter.”
However, she thought easily of death, as something unpleasant but inevitable that had to be endured, like, for instance, having to go to the clinic for an operation. Thoughts of death were much lighter than memory. Memory brought pain, but these thoughts brought nothing but fleeting pensiveness. Here it begins: he used to come home slightly tipsy after pay day at the museum—a long time ago—usually from “Sevan,” next to the museum, or else Fyodor would drag him over to his place, they would stay up late there, and he would always immediately lie down, without delaying for a minute, and fall asleep instantly. But he would always wake up at night, around three or four, just as she did now. He would disrupt her sleep, shuffling to the kitchen for water or some kind of drink from the refrigerator, and she would get angry, cursing him in her sleep. In those minutes when he woke her, she hated him: “What an egoist you are!”
And he, at times, would conceal his drinking, acting resourcefully and slyly; he was a very skillful actor, and she wouldn’t notice the smell or the reddened eyes, believing his words: “Tired as a dog.” She would pity him, quickly make the bed, he would flop under the blanket and start snoring, but at night he inevitably gave himself away by waking up long before morning. Something similar is happening to her now. Her alcohol was memory and pain; she concealed it during the day, no one should notice—not at work, nor at home, neither Irinka, nor her mother-in-law, certainly not her mother-in-law, because if she noticed, the pain would intensify, and all her energy during the day was spent on hiding, but it wasn’t enough for the night hours.
And sometimes he would wake up at night without any drinking—just because, for no known reason. This was just a sheer whim. He wasn’t old, after all. Insomnia happens to old people. And she would become irritated, because she was a light sleeper and woke up as soon as he started sighing, tossing, and especially looking at the clock—he would take the clock from the lid of the bedding drawer to bring it close to his eyes, and the metal buckle would always clink against the drawer. There were many arguments because of that clinking. She was very angry. It was so stupid. He would try, the poor thing, to handle the clock silently, but for some reason, it never worked out: he would inevitably touch the drawer with something, even the tip of the small metal clasp—and a clinking sound would ring out, very clear in the night silence. She would jump, because she had already woken up earlier (as soon as he started sighing) and, freezing, with a constricted heart, waited for the clinking.
The mother-in-law continued to live with her in the same apartment. Where else was she to go?
This woman firmly believed that the wife was to blame for the death of her son, who died last November at the age of forty-two from a heart attack. Living together was difficult; they would have liked to move apart and separate forever, but they were held back by this: the old woman was lonely, and separating from her granddaughter, sixteen-year-old Irinka, would doom her to die among strangers (her sister and niece didn’t exactly invite her to live with them, and Aleksandra Prokofievna wouldn’t have agreed to live with them anyway), and besides, Olga Vasilievna had to consider her daughter, who loved her grandmother and would be completely unsupervised without her. All this was tied up in such a stone, inseparable knot that there seemed to be no way out: wake up in the middle of the night and rack your brains in despair, and then during the day, leave the house, run away, disappear. She now rushed into business trips as often as she could. She understood that it was wrong, that it was a weakness, that Irinka needed her much more now than before—and she needed Irinka, and during her trips, she was tormented by longing for her daughter, hurrying to return. Every evening, she would talk on the phone for five rubles, but upon returning, she would discover that her daughter was living perfectly well without her, engrossed in her own affairs, and this somewhat calmed her, though it also added to the pain, and she was again tempted to leave, to escape, knowing beforehand that there would be no salvation. Ah, how she would pity, how she would value the old woman if she lived somewhere far away! But in these small rooms, in this corridor, where the years they lived stood tightly, cheek-by-jowl, openly and without embarrassment, like worn house shoes in the wooden box under the coat rack that Sergey had built, here, in this closeness and thickness, there was no room for pity. The mother-in-law might say: “I remember you didn’t used to buy those pretzels. Where did you get them, on Kirovskaya Street?” One sentence instantly destroyed all the pity that had accumulated little by little. It meant: his pretzels were not indulged, but now, for herself, she started buying them. And such trifles, such insignificant, laughably stupid things wounded her like a strike with iron. Because in reality—it was malice, torture.
Something similar to the pretzels—something torturous—happened with the television. Long ago, while Sergey was still alive, they wanted to buy a new, large one instead of the old one with the antediluvian lens, and they were saving money. Olga Vasilievna often became irritated—maybe she shouldn’t have, but, my God, what good is it now—she was irritated unnecessarily, unfairly, unable to overcome herself, because, in all honesty, there were reasons, and these memories are also torture now—because he could spend hours, forgetting everything, watching any kind of sports nonsense. He would flop into the green armchair, leg over leg, a cigarette in his mouth, placing the round ashtray with the fish next to him on the floor—and he was glued there, impossible to summon, impossible to call to. But why everything indiscriminately? Could everything really be equally interesting? “I’m relaxing! Don’t I have the right to rest, after all?” The anger was slightly feigned: everyone was obligated to know that he was monstrously tired from work.
He was indeed tired, and besides, there were troubles. But everyone has troubles. He lacked self-control. And another thing: he concealed, he concealed; much was discovered later. She spoke about her troubles and thereby relieved herself, but he concealed, ashamed of his failures. And then, in front of the television, he complained semi-sincerely, semi-foolishly:
“Gentlemen, my nerve cells need rest. Dogs eat grass, the intelligentsia listens to music, and I watch sports—that is my treatment, my bromine, my Yessentuki water, damn your incomprehension, gentlemen…”
It was ordinary buffoonery, but Aleksandra Prokofievna would honestly rise to her son’s defense. Sometimes, to support him, she would sit next to him in an armchair and watch hockey or volleyball, it didn’t matter what—it mattered even less to her—and she would exchange remarks with her son that almost made Olga Vasilievna burst into laughter. Sometimes he would subtly and delicately—but so that Olga Vasilievna understood—mock Aleksandra Prokofievna in these conversations in front of the TV, but the old woman stubbornly pretended that sports greatly interested her. Ah, yes, forty or thirty years ago, she was an avid hiker! Even recently, she would dress up in ancient khaki trousers, an unthinkable jacket from the era of military communism, throw a small backpack suitable for collecting scrap metal over her shoulder, and go off somewhere alone on the commuter train. Sergey took this calmly. He didn’t allow others to joke about his mother or even smile silently behind her back. It seemed she visited places she had once walked with her husband, Sergey’s father, a professor of mathematics, a passionate hiker, tourist, and photographer. The mother-in-law’s appearance in hiking attire from the time of People’s Commissar Krylenko was tragicomic. Even Olga Vasilievna winced, and Irinka simply suffered: local village women, the guardians of the entranceway, mocked her grandmother. Sergey’s father volunteered for the militia in forty-one and died near Moscow in the autumn. The old woman with her sad eccentricities could be understood, but why was she, Olga Vasilievna, not understood? Why was her grief not seen? No force could compel the mother-in-law, an intelligent woman with a law degree, to recognize Olga Vasilievna’s right to suffer.
“Oh, certainly, buy the television, buy it, don’t overthink it!” she said when Olga Vasilievna foolishly decided to consult her.
Irinka had strongly pleaded for a large television. Olga Vasilievna didn’t care, but then a very good brand of television, which was rare, arrived at the nearest department store, in the next building, where Irinka liked to run for all sorts of nonsense, and a decision had to be made.
“I’m telling you: buy it! Why would you deny yourself the pleasure?”
Olga Vasilievna said she was in no state for pleasures.
“I understand, but on the other hand, you’re not planning to lock yourself away in a monastery.”
“No, I don’t want a monastery, that’s true.”
Olga Vasilievna emphasized this on purpose now, to hurt the old woman—for she, too, intended to inflict pain by speaking of pleasure.
“So don’t torment yourself, take the money; Sergey was saving for this, it was his wish…” A gracious smile was fixed on Aleksandra Prokofievna’s flat, high-cheekboned face, like an old Tatar woman’s, and the mother-in-law’s eyes—small, clear-blue slits, Sergey’s eyes—looked coldly, without mercy.
Exasperated by these jabs, Olga Vasilievna decided not to buy the television to spite the old woman. She yelled at Irinka, who cried. But then, becoming even more exasperated, Olga Vasilievna decided the opposite—and bought it. The mother-in-law had not watched the television once in four months. She said she was protecting her eyes and feared radiation, but it was also a demonstration. Some acquaintances reassured Olga Vasilievna: you’ll settle in, you’ll endure it, you share one sorrow, one girl whom you love. Olga Vasilievna also thought they would somehow adjust, but that was before one incident, when she understood that no, never.
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