LITMIR.BIZ

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wife …’ she joked with that old phrase, culled from a sixties movie. Even now, they understood each other better than anyone else, but life was turning out in such a way that they saw each other only at weekends. It was always Nina who visited him, either at the settlement, or at the dacha if the weather was ok.

      Today, an old friend they hadn’t seen for some time dropped in at the dacha. Yet as the conversation gained momentum, Nina had suddenly got up to rush back to Moscow. Aleksei walked her to the car, and then stood for some time watching the car rumble off down the lane. Finally, he vanished from her sight in the rear-view mirror – along with the little cluster of houses; along with the neat rows of American maples, their branches hung with propeller seeds that looked like dragonflies’ wings; along with the bridge across the black, icy still flowing river. And after that came the slipway on to the main road.

      There was a time when Nina had really loved that road. On each side spread vast, open fields, and the river was sporadically visible on the right, its banks picked out by pale bundles of ginger grass, by the thin, drooping black branches of weeping birches, and by stunted willows from which withies protruded like scribbles smeared in pencil in a child’s sketchbook. Alongside the road marched groves of purplish, glaucous-leaved trees, mixed with the odd cloud of dark green spruce.

Nina was driving fast, mechanically sliding past the naked winter trees in the raking rays of the equally unconscious setting sun, as the groves darkened and thickened, merging with the damp, descending dusk. The twilight spaces flooded with a dank silence and the first flurries of snow slanted across the fields. Good, Nina thought, wanting precisely the soft, longed for calm whiteness of nature at rest, a natural refuge for the pain of her unseen mental torpor. The aching depths of that autumn soil, she hoped, would soon be buried – sweetly, thoughtlessly, benumbed – and there would be no more need to live, to labour, to give birth throughout the long, fierce, icy winter, while above in the pure, white snow-swept fields, shivering spikes of wormwood¹¹ would turn dark-gold in the setting sun.

      How sad it is, how thick the mist …

      Wrapping her head with a towel, Nina suddenly caught herself humming an old romance – the one her husband had started today on the guitar. It was at that moment she’d suddenly remembered she had to get to Moscow. He, bless him, didn’t get offended or act surprised, but put aside the battered instrument, a veteran of many hiking trips, and went with her to the car. Now the words from that romance appeared on her lips by themselves and she, just as suddenly as she’d wanted to escape from the chatter in the dacha, wanted to banish the now oppressive silence by singing aloud, with the backing of the karaoke machine she had bought on impulse. Nina switched on the electronic orchestra, picked up the microphone and, sensing the beat, started to sing.

      And the past seems a dream …

      Nina sang, and the snow flew outside the window, and the orchestra boom-boomed on and on with its relentless rhythm. The mechanical pop tempo was a little too fast for Nina, so she couldn’t sing with the proper expression. It is the accompanist who must listen to the singer sympathetically. But sadly a karaoke machine has no sympathy. Still, you don’t have to talk to it. You don’t have to share the unconscious impulses of the all-enduring heart. You can, without offending anyone, simply fling the microphone on the armchair and walk to the window to gaze at the snow again from behind the curtain.

      That snow was tirelessly covering Moscow, and in the suburbs everything was maybe already white, whitening the darknesses and the endless nooks and open spaces in which no soul could find an earthly answer to their prayers or relief for that unbearable, for Nina, poignancy; nor was there any consolation in the candle guttering weakly in front of the Cypriot icon of she who, as Nina was told, in the very death of her son found comfort and example, and her own immortality.

      Snow flew, flew and fell – in big fluffy flakes now. The pavements began to turn white and even the ugliest trees near the block were transformed by slipping on snow-white furs for a while. Snow clung to their branches, lodged in their forks in moist threads, and sat like white dough on their gleaming, naked twigs. But whenever too much snow piled up, it collapsed with a thump to the pavement beneath, and it was becoming clear that the snow wouldn’t stay until morning, that it would melt in the never-ending repetition of wet weather, as if it was trying with all its being not to remember how icy, how invigorating, how ringing and crisp it once knew how to be.

      There was a place on the way back from Klyaz’ma, a mixed grove where one November we picked mushrooms in the first snows. That day, remember, was also foggy, but the sky was still bright above. The road was smeared with such terrible sludge that the old car with its bald summer tyres shot into the ditch. Fortunately, we were driving slowly – so got away with just a little fright. Aleksei set off back to the dachas on foot to get help, while we, not wanting to hang around on the road, walked deep into the winter grove with Lenechka.

Soft, clinging snow was lying on the pine needles and yellow leaf-fall, thickening the arms of the spruces and forming fringes along the branches of birches and aspens. It was Lenechka who spotted a cluster of small snowy mounds in a shallow dip, and scattering away the snow revealed huge, creamy milk mushrooms¹² – real milk mushrooms, freshly fringed, beaded on their silvery undersides with white dew drops of their secret juices.

      Lenechka skipped back to the car for a penknife and they, lost in awe, cut half a dozen mature mushrooms, and were struck by the rich aroma which brought the soul alive with its sense of warm summer rain and dew-soaked forests plants. It emanated not only from the exposed milky caps, but rolled in waves from their leafy nests that were laced with the whitish threads of their hidden mycelium. Life itself, continuing against the odds, smiled on them in that white grove, where it seemed, every living thing was held forever in suspense.

Lenechka would have already been twenty-two. He died four years back, appallingly and stupidly – not in Chechnya, but during a student winter hike in Kolsky.¹³ He broke his leg and froze to death in the tent, while the rest went vainly to get help.

      After that, Nina couldn’t look at snow for a long time. She’d even had to find a job in Cyprus to escape it. But she couldn’t settle in the Mediterranean and had eventually returned to Russia and learned to face the snow again. Now it flew and beat the window and smothered, smothered everything, and her heart, Nina felt, was humbled in waiting for the coming white, pure, infinite spaces of eternal winter, so light and perfect that her soul would feel neither warmth nor cold but reflect only the light of the skies that still glows even in the total Russian darkness.

      The electronic orchestra, mechanical and predictable as the duties of existence, went on boom-boom, boom-boom, officiously leading Nina back to the banalities of life, but she wouldn’t turn it off. She suddenly regretted that she’d let the idea fill her head that she must come home so early, because nothing now seemed to save her from mortal vanity, not even calling her husband’s name, nor screaming, nor howling aloud to the God of the Just for Justice – and all that was left to her was to swallow her usual strong sleeping pills and slump at once into a deep sleep.

      But before that she must still dry her hair – and kill another two hours, or else she would wake before it was light. And she’d have to while away the hours in silence, because those snooty neighbours wouldn’t tolerate music late.

⁷A diminutive name for the road running east from Moscow to Vladimir, made famous in a great painting by Isaac Levitan from 1892 (now hanging in Moscow’s Tretyakovsky Gallery), which shows the lonely, open road stretching into the distance.

⁸The Church of the Intercession on the Nerl is one of Russia’s most treasured architectural monuments, a perfectly square twelth-century church in white

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