Requiems

The God Poseidon

ONE TIME WHILE VACATIONING BY THE SEA I RAN INTO MY friend Nina, a single mother in middle age. Nina invited me to her house, and there I saw strange things. The entrance, for example, had cathedral ceilings and a marble stairwell. Then the apartment itself-dominated by dark wood and vermilion tapestries, its floor covered with a plush gray carpet. It looked magnificent, like something you’d see photographed in the magazine L’Art de Decoration, and the bath especially was impressive, the floor carpeted in gray, with mirrors and a light blue china wash basin-it was simply a dream! I could hardly believe my eyes. Meanwhile, Nina, who had kept her look of eternal suffering and passivity, led me into the bedroom with its three open doors, a little dark but still very elegant, with a surprising number of unmade beds. “Did you get married? ” I asked Nina, but she just walked out one of the doors with a look of concern, like a busy housewife but somehow not touching anything. The bedroom was glorious-like in a hotel-with enormous closets, twelve feet long, filled with gowns. How did all these riches fall on poor Nina, who’d never even had decent underwear, who had one ancient coat for every season and three dresses, all told? She got married-but here? This wild place where no one lives, where people just wait in the seaside emptiness for summer, when they can let their rooms to strangers? But how could she rent this house with its stairwells, corridors, arches… and what’s more, I happened to open a wrong door and found myself in a white-marble courtyard, where a teacher was leading schoolkids on a field trip.

All right, so she got married, but it turned out she’d also traded her small one-room apartment in Moscow, where she’d been getting by with her teenage son, for this glorious apartment, with all the furniture and even bedsheets! Which is to say, the owners didn’t touch anything-they just left-except in fact they hadn’t left at all, which is why Nina looked so glum, I think. The extra beds in the room were for the landlady and her son, a quiet young fisherman with puffy cheeks. The landlady still bustled around the house, and in fact we sat down to dinner under her patronage. She behaved exactly as if she were a quiet and docile mother-in-law and Nina her honored daughter, for whom she bent and toiled in the house, all the while maintaining her position as the head of the household and not allowing Nina close to anything, in fact.

It turned out the woman had exchanged apartments with Nina, and Nina had left her job at the newspaper and moved here, planning to write about this new place, about the sea, which she’d always loved-she’d always had a weakness for anything to do with it-but in the meantime she was just moping around this new place, which the owner hadn’t yet left. Formally everything was in order-Nina had all the papers, and she and her son owned the house and lived there-but the old landlady had stayed there all winter, with her son, and they hadn’t mentioned leaving. Nina had always been a disorganized person who let things go; thus her leave from the newspaper to go “freelance” and the apparent total unraveling of her life. Nina accepted things here as she found them. She ate, drank, walked out to the sea; her son attended the local school, which was quite good; and they didn’t need any money, since every day the young fisherman would bring the fruits of the sea home to them.

“Who is he?” I asked, and Nina, without any hesitation, answered that he was the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, that he could live and breathe underwater, that he brought home literally everything from there, that he walked sometimes on the floor of the ocean to other countries, and brought home shells and jewels, and everything else for the house and the family.

Meanwhile Poseidon’s old wife, who had for some reason taken poor Nina under her wing, sat at the head of the table, underneath the tall window, and kept feeding and feeding us, and as I ate I kept thinking of that gorgeous hotel-like bedroom with its four beds and their sheets as white as sea foam-and I was thinking Nina was right: you should let things take their course, not fight the current, just lay down your oars and you will breathe underwater, and the god of the sea will take you in and set you up in a lovely apartment. Because, returning home to Moscow, I learned that Nina hadn’t moved anywhere, in fact, but had drowned with her teenage son in a well-known ferry accident not far from the spot where I had just been, not suspecting anything.

My Love

GIVEN TIME HIS DREAMS MIGHT HAVE COME TRUE, AND HE might have found himself with the woman he loved, but the road was too long and it brought him nowhere. All he had with him that barren time was a page from a magazine, with a photograph of the woman he loved, and in fact only a few people from work knew it was her. It was just a pair of legs, that was all, a little chubby at that, bare, in heels; she herself had immediately recognized it-by her purse, and the hem of her dress. How was she to know that just her lower half was being photographed?-the photographer had rushed out into the street and taken a few quick snapshots, but they published only the hem and the legs. He-this man-kept the photograph tacked up over his desk at home, and his wife never brought it up with him, though she was a strict woman and ran the entire household, including her mother, and her children, and even her distant relatives and students. On the other hand, she was also a kind, generous, hospitable woman-she just didn’t give any slack to the children, and also her meek mother lived with them, lay on the cot, read aloud to her little grandkids while she still could, and enjoyed the warmth, peace, the television, and then afterward she spent a long time dying, also meekly, barely alive now, and went without much fuss in the end.

As for him, having buried his mother-in-law, he began waiting patiently for his wife to die as well. For some reason he knew that she would go first and set him free, and he began to prepare for this event very actively: he was healthy and athletic, went running in the mornings, even toyed with weights, kept a strict diet, and in the meantime managed to work like a bull, was promoted to the head of his department, traveled abroad-and waited. His chosen one, the pretty plump little blonde, every man’s dream (she looked like Marilyn Monroe), worked in the same place as he did and sometimes came along on business trips-and that’s when their real lives would begin. Restaurants, hotels, strolling and shopping, tours and talks. How lonely he felt on those nights when he had to descend from heaven back into his hell, into the warm, poor nest where his graceless, cramped home life slowly bubbled, where his children got sick, went crazy, ran around like maniacs, not allowing him to concentrate, so he had to quiet them down, and sometimes this meant strapping them with his belt, after which he felt even more insulted and humiliated. His wife screamed at the kids too-she had no time for anything, she could barely turn around in that apartment, in which, as in any decent household, they also had a dog and a cat, and the cat would howl all through the night when she was in heat, and the little dog would bark every time the elevator reached their floor. The nights were the worst: he would lie in his bed and fall into cheerless dreaming of the warmth, calm, and beauty that emanated from his forbidden friend on their trips abroad. When they weren’t together, she too was hounded by life: her husband and her mother-in-law literally hung on her neck, her mother-in-law forcing her to scrub the apartment every Saturday, to the point where she was scrubbing the tiles in the bath with ammonium! Her husband would get drunk and forbid her to go to office parties, birthdays, or to anything else, always made trouble before her business trips, suspected her of everything-together he and the mother-in-law were crushing her like Scylla and Charybdis, and what is more they fought each other, the husband and his mother. The mother-in-law was always demanding to know of the pretty blonde why her husband drank so much and ate so little-even that was her fault! The girl would complain about it at work, but only obliquely; she was discreet and never threw it all up in his face the way his wife would. Sometimes you find a woman like that, the lonely husband would think as he tossed in his bed, while on the other side of the wall his children cried and whimpered in their sleep, and his wife snored heavily because of her heart problem, growing older and more loving with each day. Now here was something the mind could never grasp: how she, a dried-up old woman past forty, so loved and took such care of him! It seemed as though she could never quite believe that this elegant man, with his handsomely graying whiskers, could be her husband; in fact she was too shy to accompany him anywhere. She tailored her uniformly plain dresses herself, long and baggy, the better to hide her girth and the runs in her panty hose-there was never enough money to buy new ones. This was known as “dressing modestly and tastefully” by the many guests and relatives who came crowding in during all the holidays, devouring her pies, cakes, and salads-they were all her guests, not his, her classmates, her colleagues, her relatives-they remembered her young, pretty, with cute dimples and a long thick braid, and they didn’t even notice that she was already someone else, that she had dimmed.