—
I ENDED UP WALKING back to the hotel alone. It was past eight. The sky was overcast but still full of light. I found myself wandering along the near-empty streets around Bolshaya Nikitskaya. I let my eyes gaze upward at the old mansions, inhabited long ago by writers and their characters—old nobility and the newly rich—and now occupied mostly by embassies and branches of cultural institutions. Some of these estates had been slicked up since my day, with elegant new doors and smart plaques. Others were in advanced stages of disrepair, the pastels of their stucco paint scabbed and freckled with age. A tiered spire of one of Stalin’s Seven Sisters peeked out over the tops of the sand-colored apartment towers, but I was at a loss to say which sister it was. I wanted to get Kablukov’s image out of my mind—the stretched and faded tattoos, the gray hair sprouting from his narrow shoulders, the smile oiling his face. What did it matter to me? It wasn’t my money. But my sense of disgust and restlessness only multiplied as I walked. Along these quiet streets I thought I could walk myself back into sanity, but instead I felt a loneliness settle in my heart. The Sanduny Baths had made me recall my father—the last day I would ever spend with him. I’d gone with him at the request of my mother, who was preparing for some kind of event or trip we were all to be taking in the next couple of days. She had sewn me a pair of knee pants and had made me walk around in them that morning in our room, while she adjusted the suspender straps with her needle. The knee pants were supposed to make me look like “a real English boy.” I did not understand what that was or why I needed to look like one. I had been warned not to say anything about this to anyone in our communal apartment. For the sake of this “trip,” my mother had spoken only English to me for several weeks. We practiced words, her finger on my lips so that nobody would hear. The arrangements were all shrouded in vagueness and innuendo. Their mysterious logic dictated that I learn to pronounce words like a British citizen, and to this end my father’s friend Uncle Seldon had come over one night to instruct me in proper English elocution. I was told to sit up and forward when I spoke, to keep my tongue where it could almost touch my front teeth and imagine that I was speaking through the crack in a door. At some point, Seldon gave me a hard candy to put on the bottom of my tongue and hold there while I said things like “We surely shall see the sun shine soon.” It was a kind of game, but one I knew not to talk about. Going to the baths with Papa was part of the game. We were getting ourselves fresh and clean in preparation for the adventure.
It was while I walked up Nikitsky Boulevard that I remembered it. I could hear Papa’s voice come back to me, welling up from the bottom of my mind.
“Maybe best not to tell your mother about the fainting,” he said as we strolled home.
I told him I wouldn’t. I was too embarrassed anyway.
“We don’t want her to get any more nervous than she is.”
“All right.”
The sky had become clotted with thunderclouds. Drops of rain were starting to fall on our noses and fingers. We hurried home as the horizon grew dark and the trolley lines over our heads swayed in the sharp bursts of wind.
It was a squalling downpour by the time my father, carrying me on his back, got to our building. The big black and white tiles in our lobby were wet and smeared with footprints. The lift, as always, was broken. We took the stairs.
Old Baba Ksenia, who was nobody’s grandma, was in the hallway when we walked in. “Wipe your feet! You’re tracking in mud.”
Papa, as always, was clownishly deferential to her, dramatically wiping his shoes on the floor mat and inquiring about her health. Irritated by his compliance, she grunted and waddled back to her room. We paused briefly in the common kitchen, where Papa pulled a dry cloth from the clothesline and toweled me off. Through the double-paned windows, I watched the storm clouds. The glass of the outer pane was attacked by wind. Water slid down in a trembling pearl-gray wall behind the glass jars of conserves between the panes. I felt clutched by a fear I couldn’t explain. Or was this fear only something added to my memory later on?
There were others in the kitchen: the apartment’s drunk, Tolik, and the heavyset woman who worked as a cook at a popular café in town. She was accusing him of replacing her new tangerines with rotten ones.
“They rotted. What’s it got to do with me?” he said.
“Some people consider it their duty to steal something.”
Mama was in our room, stitching flowers onto a hat.
“Where have you been?”
“Got stuck in the rain.”
She shook her head and glanced nervously out the window. “What if the whole thing’s canceled? Then what will we do?”
“No, it’ll clear up by tomorrow,” Papa reassured her. He got me changed into my flannel pajamas. The clouds in the sky formed a witches’ brew.
“Why are his cheeks so red?” My mother tested my forehead. “Is he sick?”
“He’s fine,” Papa said, and gave me a wink to ensure I’d keep our secret.
“Maybe we better call it off….”
I could feel her panic. It boomed and rumbled through me like the thunder outside.
Papa came over to her. “You worry for nothing.” But even he did not sound convinced.
“I don’t want to go,” I said.
They both stared at me.
“Do you want me to read from Treasure Island?” my father said.
I shook my head.
“Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not.”
“There’s nothing to be frightened of, I’ll show you.” He got up and opened our curtains all the way. “The storm is still far away. Do you know how I know that? Sit up, I’ll tell you.”
He went to his writing table for a sheet of paper and a pen. “Here. Lightning travels faster than thunder, and why is that?”
“Because light travels faster than sound.”
“Smart boy. But do you know how fast sound travels? About one-third of a kilometer every second! I’ll teach you a trick. Count the number of seconds between the lightning and the next thunderbolt.” He found his Voltan gold-plated watch and gave it to me. “Are you ready? When I say ‘count,’ you start counting. Okay. Count.”
I held the cold, heavy watch in my palms. Its second hand seemed to tick slowly.
“What have you got?”
“Twelve.”
“All right, now let’s divide that by three. What do we get now?”
He drew three rows of four dots on the paper. Finally, I held up four fingers.