Chapter 7
Her life came to a kind of standstill, or hung like a computer program. Nina was possessed by a strange apathy, almost paralysis, unable to collect her thoughts, let alone decide anything.
And yet, it was time for her to make decisions. She was twenty six. Five years had passed since her graduation from the university. After a good start, her career made a weird pirouette and landed her in a disreputable bank which she had every reason to leave as soon as possible. She had carried out her mission – saved her father’s company – and was now free to make any plans. The problem was, she did not feel like making any.
Meanwhile, changes were brewing in the bank’s industrial credit department where Nina was still working, so this page of her biography was about to turn anyway. Ignatiy Savelievich was admitted to hospital, and although he returned to work afterwards, it was clear that his working days were counted. Kirill was about to leave the department, too, but for a different reason: he was expected to become a vice-director. Once again, the young manager was full of plans which embraced the entire bank now. “We’ll change everything here, everything! Just give me time, you’ll not recognize the bank!” he would exclaim sharing his enthusiasm with Nina.
“Who’s going to be department head?” Nina asked him once without much interest and received the answer, “I hope, you are.” Kirill wanted her to take over his place. He admitted that he did not yet have the authority to decide the matter on his own. “But I’ll convince them, trust me!” he assured her. “Listen, you and I together, we’ll be moving mountains!” He could not imagine that Nina might refuse.
Formally, that would be a big step forward in her career, a great opportunity. However, Nina was not after any career in that bank. She did not believe that Kirill and a few other enthusiasts were able to cure the inherent flaws of that establishment which had begun as a ‘laundry’ for the money from plundering public budgets and God knows what other shady affairs. “A leopard can’t change its spots,” recalled Nina the English proverb. (She had made a little progress in English through reading a few pages from some English detective story every night before sleep.) In her native language, a similar proverb sounded even more expressive, if somewhat cruder, ‘A black dog can’t be washed white.” Nina could not forget the terror that she had experienced facing the thugs in her father’s company, and she had no intention of devoting her life to washing black dogs. She had to leave, that much was clear. Still, she procrastinated.
By that time, she knew thoroughly all the operations performed in the department and was doing her work almost automatically, without giving it a thought. She had some free time again and could resume her old pastimes – reading, tennis.
A couple of times, Nina went to the theater in the company of her father and Lydia Grigorievna. Either for want of habit, or because the shows were not good, theater struck her as a primitive and affected kind of art. To her rational mind, the dramatic turns of the plays seemed labored, and she never got emotionally involved in the action, unable to take her mind off the actors’ crude make-up, their unnatural postures and voices, and their stomping on the planks of the scene.
Meanwhile, Lydia Grigorievna was in raptures. Nina learned from her that those shows were the biggest hits of the season. “The city is talking of nothing else!” exclaimed the woman. Not wishing to be impolite, Nina praised what she saw and cast sidelong glances at her father trying to understand what he found in all that.
Yevgeniy Borisovich was in high spirits – his life was getting back on track and the two women who were dear to him seemed to be getting on finally. Nina did not question him about his company’s affairs, and he hardly ever mentioned them of his own accord, but when he did, it was in the tone of newly acquired confidence and pride in the business that he had built. Only Nina, who knew all his intonations, was not deceived by that facade of confidence – behind it, she detected his deeply embedded fear and emotional fatigue.
Her father’s optimism was not matched by his appearance, either – he looked unhealthy and older than his age, having grown overweight and short-winded over the past few years. “You must take care of yourself,” Nina pleaded with him. “Go to the swimming-pool. You used to like swimming, didn’t you?” Her father promised absently. Lydia Grigorievna, who was not into sports, believed in herbs – she had a whole program of decoction treatment worked out for Yevgeniy Borisovich. “But, Ninochka, this stuff should be taken at least five times a day, dead on time. Who’s going to see to it when he’s at work?” complained the woman.
Nina and her father scheduled a day for visiting their dacha. However, in the morning of the scheduled day, Nina received an alarmed phone call from Lydia Grigorievna. “Papa has high blood pressure. Ninochka, please, put off your trip.” Nina spoke to her father. At first, Yevgeniy Borisovich refused to change plans. “What kind of invalid are you making of me? I’m as strong as a bull!” he protested. Then he suddenly slackened off, gave in to persuasion and stayed at home.
Nina went to the countryside alone, by suburban train. She had no business at all at the dacha. “It’s just a good way to unbend your mind a bit,” she said to herself following her habit to rationalize everything.
She had not been to the dacha for a few years, and at first, she had difficulty recognizing the dear plank cottage, now almost hidden from view by a thicket of two-meter tall weeds.
“Nina, is that you?” a neighbor hailed her from over the fence. “I’ve been wondering whether it’s you or not. Why, it’s been ages! And where’s your father?” The neighbor had known her since she had been a little girl, and they had been friends at one time, but he had grown old since and looked a stranger now.
Nina opened the cottage and walked about the dark rooms which smelled of a junk shed rather than a human dwelling. She came out into the yard. Everything here was overgrown with giant burdocks. They hid completely the vegetable garden which her mother had once cultivated. Mama was a creative soul and while everyone around grew potatoes, she would try planting something fancy like melons or grapes. Nina’s father built her a hot-house following all the rules of the building science, but in the hot-house either, mama was never able to grow anything. Mama laughed at herself and ventured something else the next year.
At the far end of the plot the black trunks of three apple-trees could be seen. Two of them had long been killed by frost, but to Nina’s surprise, the third one had a few small apples on its branches. She plucked a couple and tasted them. The apples were sour-sweet and astringent – Nina liked them that way.
Among the apple-trees stood a swing. The poles had gone lopsided, the iron bar was rusty, but the seat fastened to a pair of rods was there. Nina cleared the seat of a layer of dead leaves, sat on it and tried to swing. There was an awful screech, but the swing got into motion.
How many times the little girl Nina had swung here – so that her thin legs shot up to the sky! … Now it was a young woman, not a little girl, on the swing. Far from shooting up, she barely moved to and fro, drawing burrows in the carpet of fallen leaves with the tips of her shoes. However, as if by some magic, the swing carried her back to her childhood which had been full of bruises, colds, and little sorrows – but which, as Nina understood now, had been a happy time. The main thing, her mama had been alive then, and she and papa had both been young…
“Mama, mama, where are you?” Nina called in her mind. As she stirred her childhood memories now, she realized that the life of her family had not always been serene. When she first went to school, her father got into some trouble in his syndicate and was suspended from his job. Nina did not understand anything at that time, of course – she only remembered long, worried talks her parents were having and those words, “Papa’s been suspended.” He was reinstated afterwards, and he never discussed any of it with Nina, but mama would sometimes mention that episode as she tried to convince Nina’s father to be more flexible rather than pushing his way through. “Do you want to get suspended again?” she would say.
Things had not always been serene between the two of them, either. There was a time when her father left his wife for another women, and Nina lived with her mama and grandmother who had specially come from Tashkent to help them out. Nina knew her very little as they had hardly ever seen each other before. Then Nina’s father returned to his family, and Nina’s grandmother went back to Tashkent where she had other granddaughters and grandsons. Afterwards, Nina’s parents never referred to that time in Nina’s presence. As a remembrance of Nina’s grandmother, a small carpet of Uzbek craftsmanship was left behind in their home.
It was a life, with all the complications of a life, but Nina’s mama managed almost invariably to turn that life into a feast. Only the feast did not last – mama seemed to have given away to other people all her store of life and joy so that she was unable to live on herself.
A gold medalist of her school and a brilliant student of the financial university, Nina looked slightly down on her mother who had never had any deep mind or logic. Only much later, when she had gone through her first disappointments and dramas, Nina started to realize that her not-very-deep mother had possessed her own knowledge and understanding of things – which she, Nina, did not have and probably would never acquire.
Nina had not forgotten the promises that she had given to her mother in the hospital ward. She kept at least one of them. She had not left her father – she had supported him as best she could – and she was not going to leave him in the future, especially now that she knew how vulnerable he was.
Feeling chilled, she got down from the swing and walked off, but after she had made a few steps, she heard a terrible crack and crash behind her. The swing collapsed – all of it, together with the rotten poles.
Nina was not superstitious or easily scared but that incident left her with a sad feeling, as if yet another thread – be it an illusory one – that had connected her to her past had broken, exposing her solitude and confusion in the face of life. “Mama, mama, where are you?”
One day Nina went to a university friend’s party. The friend and her husband had just moved to a new apartment and a large bunch from their former student group gathered for a house-warming. It was the first time Nina found herself at such a get-together. She was looking into the faces around her with a strange feeling – they were both startlingly familiar and already noticeably different, changed.
Nina was not especially close with anyone in that set, but she enjoyed plunging in the atmosphere of common jokes, recollections and rumors. They gossiped about those of their mates who had got married or divorced, gone abroad or come back. Life was raising or sinking people, spinning them and tossing them about – as a rule, giving them something very different from what they had hoped for in their student years.
Nina was respected here as the most able student in the group and one who had landed the best job among them all after graduation. When she told them that she had left her prestigious investment company for a doubtful bank, they were surprised at first but then nodded and clicked their tongues appreciatively, showing that they understood what kind of dealings she was engaged in now. Trying to dissuade them, Nina told the exact truth – that she was stuck with boring accounting and had committed forgery only once. That caused a burst of laughter.
They went out onto the balcony to have a smoke. The non-smoking Nina went out with the crowd and found herself side by side with Aliska, a famous femme fatale of their year who had managed to get married twice while they were still in university. Aliska had a bit too much of everything – legs too long, breasts too large, clothes too fashionable, make-up too thick. However, all that put together looked quite bewitching. “And what about you? Why do you have to be such a scare-crow?” Aliska asked Nina, enveloping her in clouds of cigarette smoke. “Nobody has worn such skirts for five years at least. And where did you unearth that blouse? At a flea-market?”
Nina was embarrassed. She took little interest in clothes, which she herself considered as proof of her lack of femininity.
“You’ve become quite a cutie, though, Shuvalova,” Aliska acknowledged suddenly. “If you only got dressed up a bit…”
The methodical Nina fished out a notebook and asked Aliska to enlighten her about fashions. By the time Aliska finished her second cigarette, Nina had made up a whole list – designs, trade-marks, shops.
After the party, they all walked to the underground station as a noisy, intoxicated crowd. For one night, they had been carried back five years, to the time when they had an illusion of community, almost kinship. But the party was over and they had to return to the real world. Looking at the excited, laughing faces of her mates, Nina thought, “I wish I knew what they really have on their mind. Do they know how to live? Me, I don’t know…” But questions like that were not discussed at parties – everyone had to decide them on their own.
Aliska’s instructions were not lost – Nina spent the whole of the next week fitting herself out according to her list. By Saturday, a fair sum of money had moved from Nina’s card to the accounts of fashionable shops, but Nina was almost totally equipped.
She only lacked a hat. Nina had never in her life worn hats, always doing with berets or knitted caps, but the Italian coat of a famous brand that she had bought required a hat. “Don’t buy it just anywhere, or you’ll spoil everything,” Aliska warned her. “Hats can only be bought in…” – and she named a couple of boutiques.
In the shop, Nina spent a long time browsing, unable to pick anything suitable. There were lots of hats, but all of them too pompous or flashy – simply not her. The shop assistant got exhausted trying to figure out what Nina wanted. “You see, none of this is my style,” Nina tried to explain. “I’m a serious-minded kind of person – actually, an accountant.” The assistant took it for a joke and smiled wanly.
Then Nina saw her hat. Placed apart from the others on the shelf, it was quite small, and at first glance, quite plain. However, when given a closer look, the hat attracted and excited – there was something about it that made one think of Paris, French Riviera, posh automobiles, elegant men, and beautiful, dangerous women. “Ah, that one, I forgot about it,” said the assistant. “It’s the latest lot, a trial model. Trend of next season.”
Nina put on the hat and stood before the mirror. In it, she saw a young lady, impeccable from head to toe, who seemed to have just stepped down from a magazine cover. Involuntarily, she straightened up her back and raised her chin.
The shop assistant who was serving her gazed at her open-mouthed. The other assistants went out from behind their counters, surrounded Nina, and stared silently. That silence spoke louder than any words.
Without taking off her new acquisition, Nina paid up and went out into the street. It was a fair autumn day. For once in a long while, Nina had absolutely nothing to do, and she decided to take a walk. Actually, she had a motive for doing so: she wanted to check what effect her new image had on people around her.
And it did have effect. Nina was walking along a boulevard, stepping languidly on yellow leaves with high boots from the best firm, keeping an absent look on her face but feeling almost physically the glances of passers-by on her – intrigued glances of men and envious, spiteful glances of women.
She sat on a bench and crossed her legs. In fact, she never did that – she just did not have the habit – but her new clothes dictated a new behavior. Hardly a minute had passed when she was approached by some clot of a man. At first, the man did not dare to speak, then he sighed and remarked, “Yeah-ah, it’s autumn already.”
Having made that deep remark, he grew bolder and started babbling something about him being on a business trip – only one night in the city and not knowing how to best spend it – while in fact he worked in the gas industry and was a somebody in his company, too, so he could afford it.
“Good heavens, what does he take me for?” Nina thought, outraged. She jumped up from the bench, put on a pair of dark glasses from a famous fashion house, and walked hastily off. “Serves you right,” she said to herself when she had calmed down a bit. “Next time you’ll know better than to sit on boulevard benches luring males.”
She believed that she had never been to that part of the city, but then she recognized the place – it was here that she and Dima, her husband-to-be, went to the movies for the first time. She turned a corner and saw that very movie theater – now it advertised itself as having dolby sound, 3-D, and other improvements. “By the way, why wasn’t Dima at the party?” Nina wondered for the first time. “I’d like to know how he is doing. Poor Dima. I hope everything’s all right with him.”
She paused for a moment before the theater, recalling that show and her hand in Dima’s palm. It seemed to have been ages ago. Good God, how young they had been!
A voice behind her said, “Nina?”
She turned around. It was Dima. He had not changed a bit and looked the same nondescript student guy. His face, hair and figure – everything was the same. Nina even recognized the anorak – the one that he had been wearing as they had been running to the lectures together. The anorak was a bit short, and the bottom flaps of his suit jacket showed from under it. That show of poverty had not been depressing when they had both been penniless students, but now… Nina’s heart was stung by the sight.
Dima was staring at her fixedly, clearly staggered.
“You…” he mumbled at last. “Wow, you’ve become so…”
“So – what?” smiled Nina.
“So chic,” whispered Dima.
“Come off it!” Nina waved it away. “What are you doing here?”
“I… I was just going to the movies.”
Nina felt sorry. She had not expected Dima to become a successful, worldly man, but to see him that way – in a pathetic short anorak, going to the movies by himself…
And then it came home to her. Dima was not going to just any movies – he was going to that movie theater. Their theater. He was still in love with her and lived on memories of her… Dear Dima. A warm wave spread in her breast.
“How are you? How is Tatyana Yurievna?” she asked hurriedly. “Let’s find somewhere to sit down, and you’ll tell me everything.”
“Mother has retired on a pension. She’s out of town now, visiting with her sister in Pushkino,” Dima reported.
“So you are alone?” asked Nina.
“I am,” confirmed Dima.
Nina was gazing at his face with traces of removed pimples, his bluish eyes and locks of colorless hair coming out from under a skiing cap. She saw his despair and anguish. Once he had failed to keep his great luck – he had lost the princess who had come into his hands – and now he saw the queen she had turned into. The queen recognized him mercifully, but the next moment she was going to vanish into her royal spheres, and he was going to remain with his miserable destiny – sitting alone in a dark theater, recalling their holding hands for the first time…
“Let’s go to your place,” said Nina.
Nothing had changed in Dima’s home. Not only Nina recognized the wallpaper, cupboards and small threadbare carpets – even the old copies of magazines stacked neatly on the table seemed the same. And of course, the shabby sofa in their former room was there. Nina sat on the sofa and stroked the surface with her hand. That was where she became a woman.
As on their first, historic date, Dima fussed about preparing tea. This time though, he did not even have any chocolates – only some fossil waffles.
“Dima, drop it,” said Nina. She took him by the hand and forced him to sit by her side.
Dima sat, with his hands on his knees and his head drawn back into his shoulders. Nina realized that he would never dare to make a move.
“Dima, kiss me,” she said, drawing him to herself.
That was good. There was no uneasiness – there was a feeling of comfort and closeness. Also, there was a feeling of something right which there had been in her life at one time and which she had lost since. After all, she had been a wife here, not just anybody. She had had a husband and a mother-in-law – same as all normal wives. She had had problems in her marriage – also, same as everyone. And now she was a chic, but totally lonely woman with vague prospects for the future…
After a somewhat awkward beginning, Dima took her with passion. He had actually grown stronger and seemed bigger. There was no resistance to his ardor in Nina’s body – it accepted him. Even the smell of strawberry soap did not vex her – it seemed appropriate and comfortable. Dima hastened his movements. Nina had, or at least, she thought she had, a pleasant sensation in the bottom of her belly – as she had had once, on a Turkish beach, with a totally strange man. Dima’s love agony was rapidly approaching its climax, but Nina knew that there would be a continuation and was anticipating it…
And then there was a loud sob, or a groan. Nina raised her head. It was impossible, it was a total nightmare, and still it was real – in the door of the room, looking at them open-mouthed, stood Tatyana Yurievna.
Nina went into hysterics. She was roaring with laughter, her whole body shaking, unable to stop. At last, Dima made her drink a few sips of tepid tea. Totally baffled and shriveled, he kept murmuring, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I’m sorry…”
Unconsciously, Nina got dressed and went out into the hall. She did not even look back at Dima who stayed behind in the room. But as she touched the familiar latch on the outer door, she heard, “Nina, wait, please.”
Tatyana Yurievna was calling her from the kitchen.
“Good heavens, is she going to offer me tea again?” Nina thought, appalled.
As Dima, Tatyana Yurievna had changed little, but now she was not herself with extreme agitation.
“Nina, listen,” she spoke, fiddling nervously with a kitchen towel. “I feel awfully guilty towards you. Please forgive me. I shouldn’t have interfered with you and Dmitry – I shouldn’t have kept him by my side. I am an old egoist. But everything’s changed now. I have no more claims. You can live wherever you want – I’ll just step aside. I can even give up this whole apartment for you to settle here. I’ll move in with my sister in Pushkino – she has long invited me.”
Nina’s head was reeling, the hysterical shiver in her body refusing to subside.
“Thank you, Tatyana Yurievna, but please, don’t. It’s not going to work, sorry,” – she said and darted out of that little apartment and of the life of those two people – her former family – never again to return to that page of her past.
That nightmarish incident was what she needed to shake her out of the stupor that had possessed her during the recent months. “That’s it, enough of recollections, enough of drama,” she told herself. “I must live on, build my life.”
Indeed, she was free and full of energy – she felt that she could attain any goal. Her father seemed to be doing all right now, and he was not alone – a good, loving woman was by his side. It was time for Nina to take care of herself.
She drew up a program of two obvious points. First, she had to find a good, promising job which she could devote herself to with enthusiasm. Second, get married and… yes, bear a child. Preferably, a girl, as her mama had wished.
The first point was not much of a problem – she only had to study the vacancy market and make the right choice. Nina knew her own value and was certain that she could find a good job whatever the competition.
It was not as easy with the second point. Here, she had no certitude at all. There were some men looming on the horizon – in the tennis club, and among relatives and acquaintances of her few friends. Some opportunities were probably going to turn up at her new job, too. Nina knew that she no longer was the ugly duckling that she had been in her school years – she had no reason to be shy or retiring now. She only needed to take care of herself in terms of clothes and the like. Also, she had to buy a car and learn how to drive.
Of course, all decent men were married, and those who were divorced were in no hurry to tie themselves up again – they would rather get what they wanted from a woman without giving her anything in return. But those were ordinary difficulties which single women had faced since the beginning of time – Nina was not afraid of them. Her methodical mind suggested that the main thing was to seize every opportunity to associate with worthy men. Unworthy men should be driven away with a stick, but for worthy ones, she should be an interesting, non-burdensome, and useful companion – someone they could talk to about work and about life, or go to bed with if it was mutually agreeable. She should behave like a woman, but without petty coquetry. Rather than posing as a touch-me-not, she should respect herself while respecting and valuing men, too. Then one of those worthy men would finally realize that he wanted to have her around always.
That was the theory, and Nina was prepared to put it into practice with the same persistency as she had used in mastering her profession. The problem was that, even realizing all that, she did not believe in any of it. Picturing her future in which she would be the wife of a worthy man that she was going to win through her strategy, she did not get any response from her inner self. The woman inside her maintained an indifferent silence. That woman had been silent for a long time already, as if waiting for something, and there was no knowing what it was.
Nina set about implementing her program. She had interviews in three firms and actually received one job offer which did not quite suit her, though.
Nina sized up her tennis partners and marked off two of them for showing some symptoms of being divorced. She assumed a friendlier attitude towards them and struck up an acquaintance.
All was going according to plan, everything was possible, but then her own biography went out of her control again. He father’s life, which meant her life, too, was run over by a steamroller named Gradbank.