CHAPTER EIGHT

Through images of that autumn and the premature onset of winter, there showed a haphazardly primed canvas onto which the autumn and winter were superimposed in a slapdash manner. Almost every event was a brutal reminder of the simple underlying reason: if an image, that is, something unquestionably visible, lives according to its own flourishing laws, with chiaroscuro, curves and creases at the lips, then so does a canvas also according to its own, with the inevitable creeping decay of the linen hessian, and nothing can be done about it.

The incident with the phone book became the beginning of pure misery and would be a reminder of itself for a long time, like a chronic ankle sprain distorting one’s gait. Even though nothing much happened, really. There was a new sofa purchased in lieu of the one perished at the rubbish heap. There was, sitting on the sofa immersed in the telephone book, a taciturn beauty, whom Sidelnikov did not recognise as yesterday’s Lora. It cannot be said that she was all that absorbed in the book; yet she was leafing through it with great attention, sometimes revisiting the pages she had already gone through, but this did not prevent her from picking blindly some cornflakes from a bowl and nibbling on them with the air of a preoccupied little squirrel. She was wearing a light-blue smock no longer than a man’s shirt. Her bare right leg was hidden underneath her and the left one, just as bare, was set free as an independent being, all of it, from her almost childlike toes to the chamois hollow in the groin.

This inane reading went on for so long that Sidelnikov started to feel physically the diminishing of time. Meanwhile, he managed inadvertently to repair the switch in the hall, to have a sit-down on the sofa next to her, to breathe savagely down her neck, to give a stroke to her leg - the liberated one, and at the same time to ascertain her inevitable transition from letter “r” to letter “s”: Savelyev, Savitskaya, Savkin, God, how many more of them!

He sat down opposite Lora mirroring her pose and unfolded a fresh issue of “The Literary Gazette”. He held it in front of himself upside down for several minutes, then warily asked her if anything had happened. The answer from the sofa was a vague shrug of the shoulder.

He tried to read the editorial, for a long time staring with exasperation at the word MSILAER in its heading but, having succumbed to the unbearable angst, discarded the paper. As he asked her the question, he knew in advance that there would be no answer.

‘What happened?’

He was offered some cornflakes to nibble.

He went out of the room and for an infinitely long time was roaming the dark corridor to the kitchen and back and then froze at the door jamb, staring at her fixedly. She had just leafed back through about thirty pages and then continued her perusal. He felt like throwing himself to her precious knees begging forgiveness for all his non-existent sins but was stopped by the feeling that he had witnessed a scene like this somewhere before.

‘Maybe I’d better leave?’ Sidelnikov asked in whisper, squeamish of his own voice and hoping that she would not hear. But she did hear and shrugged her shoulder again, this time in an absolutely clear way.

And now he was not just driven but dragged away, into the December gloom. He was kicking himself out, down five steps at a time, through the snowdrifts, and the empty sleeve of his half-pulled on coat was slapping him on the back. When he turned his head he saw that there was no light in all the windows on the third floor.

The following day, he woke up a minute before the telephone call. The morning was no different from the night before: there was the same indigo darkness in the window, and the same feeling of an irreparable loss. Normally it would have been his mother, calling to check whether he had started with his homework. In fact, he managed to do most of his homework during the breaks at school.

The receiver felt glacial. An unknown male voice asked irritably,

‘Is a Rosa Sidelnikov related to you?’

‘Yes,’ said Sidelnikov hoarsely.

‘Well then, come and collect her. There’s no point operating on her. She’ll have to rest at home. We have no beds left.’

‘Where is she?’ Sidelnikov yelled.

‘Where? Hello! She’s in the Chkalov hospital, the surgery ward.’

His mother phoned straight afterwards.

‘Why was the phone engaged?’

He told her of the phone call. When he finished, his mother asked:

‘Have you got a lot of homework to do?’

‘A lot,’ Sidelnikov said and put the phone down.

He ran to the Chkalov hospital through the deserted “Park of Culture and Leisure” where all the trees had frozen with their eyes closed. MSILAER, a horrid word of an incomprehensible origin was gaping in his mind. It was only when he reached the porch of the hospital building that this slippery monster turned back to front to become more comprehensible, though no less loathsome.

In the doctor’s room, a weary fellow in a white hat that made him look like a chef probed Sidelnikov all over with his condoling eyes, endured Sidelnikov’s breathlessly uttered questions, and with an all too obvious geniality assured him, ‘Not to worry, it’s just the age thing. How old is she?’ He gave an encouraging wink: ‘A dear old bat, isn’t she.’ ‘Bat yourself,’ Sidelnikov thought aloud, slamming the door.

He saw Rosa in the corridor. She was walking slowly, pressing her side to the wall and looking around uncertainly, like an orphan. At that moment, when she believed that nobody was watching her, she wore an expression as if there was nothing more reliable left in her life than the green wall and the enormous penitentiary gown without buttons that she held together across her stomach.

‘Have you come for me? Are you going to take me away from here?’

‘Yes, I have, yes I am,’ Sidelnikov was repeating, trying to lift the tin-like rigid collar of her gown in order to cover her collarbones and the long thin neck.

‘I’ll just try and go to the loo. Sorry.’

When they came outside, she said:

‘I’m so glad that it is you… I thought I’d never be outside again.’

He was leading her home, as if she were a little girl, just as she had in the other time led him home from the kindergarten.

Tatyana, dishevelled and barefoot, opened the door for them.

‘Is that it? ‘Ave they patched you up? ‘Ow are you feelin’? They turned the water on yesterday. So I washed both meself and them floors! I’m on the third shift tonight.’

‘And I’m on the second,’ said Sidelnikov, for no reason at all.

In the kitchen, Lisa was feeding her baby boy, pushing a fat breast between his cheeks.

Rosa’s room was unlocked. In the room, the Baronkin brothers were lying on the floor thrashing each other in the game of “Chapayev’s draughts” which involved flicking each other’s pieces from the board. From their flicks, Sidelnikov’s plastic draughts were scattering from the board in all directions. In a few years’ time, one of the brothers, Yuri, who experimented with self-incendiary arson and making shanks, would go to prison convicted for hooliganism to do his first, though not his last, stretch. Tolya, the other one, was wounded near Kandahar and would come home from a military hospital with non-healing boils on his legs but candidly proud of the round figure of Afghan soldiers he had personally killed. When a new, uncommonly modest expression “base contingent of Soviet troops” emerged in the official news, Sidelnikov every time imagined the “base contingent” personified by Tolya Baronkin.

Rosa politely shooed the brothers out and locked the door. She asked Sidelnikov to look away at the window because she needed to change. The sun was not bright but the snow-covered yard was almost blinding, reflecting the whole sky and sending a giant spot of reflected light into the room. On the pounded down patch between the snowdrifts, the red-haired Lydia was strolling to and fro clad in a chequered overcoat bought in “Detsky Mir”, a children’s department store. She was swinging a string bag with an empty milk bottle inside. Behind everything, one could discern a certain poignant truth, a transparent logic of losses whose count had already started. All of it bore the name of the withdrawing Lora, while the very novelty of lovelorn misfortune would not allow him to accept it completely.

Sidelnikov forgot that he had to stand by the window because Rosa had asked him. Turning round, he hurt his eyes with the sight that he was not supposed to see. He looked away the same second but his eye lens - or retina? – what is the tool used by this tearful and ruthless photographer? - had done its work. From that moment Sidelnikov could see the image even with his eyes closed, even in the next century.

Bent over as she sat on the edge of her chair, Rosa was taking off a cotton stocking. Instead of the tall silver pitchers, there were two long folds with wormholes of nipples drooping down to the hollow of her belly between the jutting out angles of the iliac crest. Beneath her remarkably smooth skin an ultimate earthly blackness was showing through all over.

...

‘If she wants to, she could move in with us,’ Sidelnikov’s mother told him, ‘at least, she won’t be on her own.’ That day, he swiped a half-litre jar of sugared lemons from the fridge at home. He took it to Rosa. She ate the lemons with obvious voracity, straight from the jar, fishing out the slippery crumpled segments with a tablespoon, one after another.

‘Why don’t you move in with us. At least you won’t be on your own. And mother says the same…’

She stopped chewing and quickly swallowed. Then she announced in her usual cold voice:

‘I’ve got a place to live.’

He tried to persuade her twice but she would not even listen. Pressing her was useless. Her unbending self-sufficiency permitted Sidelnikov to think that things might still get better. In any case, he did not believe in the hopelessness of her condition. It was he who could be in a bad way, it was he who was bent by his precious grief – but Rosa had to stay a permanent value. The only thing that changed from the very beginning of her illness was that she forbade visits to Innokenty, who in all these years had not vanished from the horizon.

More than once Sidelnikov would recall how, when coming to see Rosa during her last February, March or July, he was always in a hurry to leave because he badly needed to smoke and he was not supposed to do so in her presence.