CHAPTER ELEVEN

Later on, during the months before his leaving, Sidelnikov struggled to remember Rosa, to recall what she looked like and what she had been saying. To his consternation and shame, he could not recall anything. For some reason, other things would surface, like his washing the floor when nobody asked him to. It was just that visiting her he noticed the fluffy coat of dust under his feet and with the words, ‘I’ll be right back,’ he went to the bathroom to get the mop and the bucket. It was not that he had some sort of a strong housekeeping reflex – more likely, he lacked it altogether, but the untidiness of the flat seemed to harbour an implicit threat. Yet is it worth remembering the way Rosa half-rises from her couch in embarrassment, as if caught red-handed, and he, care embodied, is crawling backwards on all fours spreading the dirt on the floor?

In the same nameless haze, there dispersed his final exams – the last school tribulation, the corn pollen scent of that July, the stuffiness of the second-class carriage and the enrolment competition at the philology department of Srednovsk University. Mother gave him ten green three-rouble notes and a squashed half-a-metre long jam roll. The roll got stale very soon, but for more than a fortnight it sustained the university applicant Sidelnikov at breakfast and supper. On the twenty-first of August, he left at the Dean’s office a signed form that bound him to return on the first of September in order to go to a collective farm for onion picking. He hastily packed his bag that was lighter now, thanks to the disappearance of the jam roll, and after sixteen hours of merciless jolting, this time in a third-class carriage, he returned home.

As a present for his mother, he brought a foreign detective novel purchased from a drunkard at the railway station. For Rosa, he brought the large magnifying glass she had been in need of for a long time. She would never get to use it because two days later, at eight o’clock in the morning, her neighbour Tatyana would come into her room to find her lying prone on the floor.

It is from this day, when Sidelnikov was told on the phone the words “she’s dead” and he ran to Rosa across the whole of the town, ignoring the stitch in his side and not allowing himself even a momentary wait for a tram, as if something could still depend on a extra minute and on his crazy haste – well, it is from this day that one could date the beginning of a new stage in their relationship that was ever unbreakable: a relationship before – between the living, and later – between the living and the dead.

On the corner of Lenin Prospect and Oil Workers Street, he slowed down, suddenly realising that he was not ready. That is, even if he did to some extent comprehend what he’d heard on the phone, for him it did not signify Rosa’s disappearance. It felt as if to her changeless room, already cramped, was added a bulky and untidy thing called “death” which one had to get accustomed to. But he was not ready to see Rosa dead.

The room was empty. Only her slippers were left, placed neatly by the couch. Tatyana entered without knocking, her stride wide and imperious. A sniffling Olga followed her.

‘You tell your mum I’ll take care of the funeral. We’ll see Rosa Valentinovna off properly. And I’ll do the food, too…’

Tatyana opened Rosa’s wardrobe (something Sidelnikov never, ever would have allowed himself to do) and upon rummaging in there for some time, got out a brown winter headscarf and covered the wall mirror with it.

‘Well, y’know, she left ‘er room to us, so…’ The neighbour fell silent, waited a little either for objections or for gratitude and went out.

‘She felt a bit better yesterday,’ Olga said. ‘Last night, she sat in the kitchen with us and had some food. And this morning we came into her room and there she was… face down on the floor.’

‘But where is Rosa?’ Sidelnikov asked quietly, as if just now they had been talking about somebody else.

‘They took her to the morgue.’

Olga started crying.

He needed to smoke. But it was only after he pulled the window frame open, having conquered the tight latch, and took a cigarette out of the pack, that he realised with a start that he could now smoke inside because Rosa was no more.

...

A pauper’s coffin covered with red sateen was placed on two stools in the middle of the yard. Rosa in a thin headscarf was lying in it, her face light and wet for some reason, as if she had just washed her face and had no time to dry it. Next to Sidelnikov his father, who flew in on the previous day, was shifting from foot to foot. Sidelnikov’s mother did not come to the funeral. The women neighbours were whispering and sighing. A little way off, two unfamiliar old men dressed in dark suits were standing in silence. Innokenty, his head hanging and almost completely bald, was languishing nearby. All of a sudden, one of the old women let out a wail, a very sonorous and musical one, but nobody joined in and she became quiet all at once.

A small truck with its backboard lowered crept up in reverse. The driver and his mate deftly slid the coffin into the truck between the narrow seats and called out, ‘C’mon up, somebody!’ Sidelnikov got onto the truck, close to Rosa. His father got onto the truck too and sat down in the far corner. All the others went to the bus with a “Reserved” sign. The moment both vehicles slowly set off, there was a desperate shriek, ‘Wait!’ Somewhere from aside, from behind the house, the redhead Lydia darted out carrying a glass jar, from which a flower was sticking out, obviously just plucked from a street flowerbed. Nobody really was in any hurry but Lydia, spilling the water, was racing as if she were trying to catch the last train for refugees. Overtaking the truck, she changed over to a ceremonial pace and was marching in this fashion, like some guard of honour, at the head of the procession carrying the jar with the flower in front of herself, until the driver taxied onto dusty Magadanskaya street where the funereal speed was no longer appropriate.

It took them almost forty minutes to reach the cemetery. It was outside the town in the steppe. All this time, Rosa was looking at Sidelnikov kindly and serenely with her eyes closed. Even when the truck was jolting horribly on pits and bumps, and the coffin was bounding up to the height of sideboards and Sidelnikov had to lean forward and press down with both hands on her forearms and thin knees covered with a tatty sheet, Rosa still remained calm. He could not take his eyes off her wide dark eyelids and her youthful lips, looking as if they were about to smile.

It was hot and windy. The steppe was swaying, worn out by the heat. From the distance, the cemetery resembled a deserted gypsy camp. When they were almost there, the truck stalled. In the otherwise perfect silence, the driver swore, shielded by the raised bonnet. Everybody was silently waiting and Rosa, too, was waiting quietly. She seemed more alive and warm than Sidelnikov’s father, whose apathetic grief could be confused with the expression of utter discontent…

They reached the cemetery at long last. Among the wind-polished gravestones and the meagre dry grass, Sidelnikov was struck by the crudeness of the clay hole where they were about to leave Rosa.

Here, two self-important gravediggers were in charge, shouting orders.

‘Come up now!.. Say your goodbyes!.. Untie her hands… And feet, too… Turn down the sheet. That’s it, shut the lid now... Now heave… Get out of the way, you old fogey…’

Filling up the grave, they took a break for a cigarette. Sidelnikov grabbed a spade and began to throw earth into the hole. Standing aside from everybody else, Innokenty was choking with silent tears.

Once the little pyramid-shaped structure with an iron star on top took its place on the unsteady hillock on the grave, everybody stood there a little longer and then walked back to the bus with the sense of a job properly done.

The women neighbours were exchanging words in relieved voices. The old men still remained prim. ‘Whoever might they be?’ Sidelnikov thought. ‘Admirers, like Innokenty, or former colleagues? Wherever did she work? What was she, as a matter of fact?’ And with the whole of his body, he made a movement to go back, like somebody who had forgotten to ask some important question of the person, from whom he had just parted in haste, or like someone who had left the house without the key… He turned back and froze, confronted by the new grave.

Afterwards, together with the men, he washed his hands, smarting from the spade, in the taut jet of water from the pump. He was smoking somebody else’s cigarette and catching the hostile stares of his father who was already seated in the bus. His father had never before seen him so grown-up and smoking…

At the table with the funeral meal in Rosa’s room, Tatyana was ladling noodle soup into bowls and saying to those who returned from the cemetery, ‘Do come in, sit yourselves down.’ And likewise, she said to Sidelnikov and his father, ‘Do come in!’

Sidelnikov perched at the corner of the table on a stool brought in from elsewhere. He forced half a glass of vodka down his throat. He realised that he could not touch the soup and consequently was at a loss as to where he could put the full bowl unnoticeably out of sight. Across the table from him, his father was tackling the same problem with his glass – he just wetted his lips for the sake of appearance. Sidelnikov patiently primed himself for the meal taking a long time but before long, everybody simultaneously got up from the table, except Lydia who was asking for a second helping.

Having done with death as it should be done and given it its due, everybody was wandering off to get on with their lives. His father was flying back that night.

Oil Workers Street had by now completely forgotten about the person called Shkiryatov. After walking in silence for two blocks, his father started cheerfully:

‘So you’re a student now!’

‘What? Oh yeah…’ Sidelnikov was distracted and absolutely drunk.

‘Your mum complains that you are rude to her and that you don’t listen to what she’s saying.’

Suddenly, Sidelnikov felt nauseous – he barely managed to dash aside to be sick behind the corner. His father was wincing and looking at his watch.

‘So why can’t you get on with your mum?’

‘She shouldn’t humiliate me,’ coughed out Sidelnikov feeling like a kindergarten snitch. By the tram stop, he suddenly remembered:

‘Could I go to the airport with you?’

‘No need. It’ll be too late for you.’

He dryly parted with his father and went straight back from the tram stop, hoping to sleep over at Rosa’s for the last time. Slightly perplexed, Tatyana let him stay. The room, already tidied up, was pretending that no funeral lunch had taken place in there and that earlier, nobody had been lying there face down on the floor. Everything looked innocent, except that one of the two slippers must have been kicked under the couch in the bustle.

He could not find a bed sheet and put a blanket cover on the mattress on the iron bed. It was getting dark fast and moths began to invade the room through the window. Sidelnikov turned off the light, stripped naked and lay down, covering himself with the worn-out itchy blanket. In the darkness by the window, there immediately appeared something like a blind spot, impenetrably black. He had to half-rise in order for the blackness to take the shape of the mirror covered with the scarf.

Why was it done? He was told that something might stay in the mirror. The soul of a dead person? Or a reflection of death? If there was any reason, however feeble, in this custom, then this was the right time to check it... He came up to the mirror and yanked the scarf off. A tiny powdery body of a butterfly hit him in the face. Somebody naked and dishevelled was looking back at him wildly, his eyes glistening.

By the age of seventeen, Sidelnikov had worked out his own self-made physics, nurtured exclusively by intuition. For instance, according to his crude theory, any object, whether alive or not, should, in order to be seen, emit particles, which were fast and tenacious enough to penetrate the pupil of a spectator or the depth of a mirror. The night before last the mirror, not yet blinded by the scarf, reflected the lonely death on the floor, which meant that it might have absorbed the particles comprising the image of that death.

It did not occur to Sidelnikov to correlate his “physics” in any way with the namesake school subject, since he did not feel any academic confidence in the teacher, a retired major, who used to say when calling a pupil to the blackboard, ‘C’mon now, make it snappy! Nature, it friggin’ ab’ors a vacuum!’

Having adapted to the silence of the room that had lost its mistress and to the nocturnal breathing of August outside the window, Sidelnikov was trying, if not to measure, then at least to feel the dire consequences of Rosa’s departure. But after lengthy and painstaking listening, when it was already about midnight, he started to realise that there was no direness at all. It was only his, Sidelnikov’s, soul that was devastated by what had happened, whereas everything around him was abiding in a peace so complete, it was as if the world was a chalice that stayed intact, without the slightest depletion, or spilling of a drop, and was rather even somehow replenished.

Over the abating chorus of cicadas and murmur of the trees, and over the sleepy sighs of the town – above the whole thing – one could hear the oceanic effort of some colossal lungs that miraculously coincided in rhythm with the even breathing of Sidelnikov curled in a foetal position already almost asleep.

Before he drifted off, he remembered to screw up his eyes very tight in order to make certain that the tiny creatures visible only from the inside of his eyes, under the shut eyelids, still continued their hasty mysterious life.

They did, as if nothing had happened.