Uncertain Weights and Measures Read online

  I heard Sasha laughing, again, and looked through a glittering Christmas display in the direction of the counter. Sasha and Michel had been watching me.

  Sasha and I left for the dacha the next day. He called his mother from the station in Moscow to say we were coming. She said something to him that he disagreed with but when he got off the phone he said that everything was fine. The train rolled slowly out of the station and picked up speed as we neared the edge of the city, the scene out our window changing from cement walls to the final clusters of buildings to snow-dusted trees and trees and trees. Sometimes we’d cross a river and get a view of the landscape as whole — an endless, snow-covered forest interrupted only by the occasional red-roofed dacha — and just as quickly we’d be swallowed back into the darkness of the forest. Before too long, we couldn’t see much at all because the sun had set and the moon had yet to rise. Inside, the train was crammed full of people escaping the city for the holidays.

  I’d only met Sasha’s mother once, and it was three years previous, the summer after we were married. Both of us were working by then, but we were as poor as ever.

  According to him, on that day, she had come in from her dacha in the countryside, leaving behind an exquisitely clear river and a cloudless sky, with the single purpose of meeting me. From the minute we met — Sasha and I had come from his studio, she had just gotten a lift from the station — I knew that this wasn’t true.

  She had chosen a restaurant on Nikitskaya. From the street, I looked up at the balcony and its patrons. Nikitskaya still had lime trees, and some of their leaves rubbed up against the balcony railing, so I wondered if the air up there smelled of citrus. The evening light calmed my nerves.

  Sasha, she said, clasping his face, kissing him. She was tall and thin and wore her pale hair piled in a bun atop her head. When she looked at me, her eyes were so light, like wisteria, that I wanted to look away. She limply put her hands on my arms and kissed my cheeks without actually touching my skin, as if she were French, but she wasn’t. Her translucent skin made her look fragile, but I don’t think she was.

  We’ll sit inside, she said, because I can’t stand another minute in the streets. I trailed up the steps behind the two of them. Mrs. Pavlovna’s arm hung on Sasha’s back like a bird’s outstretched wing.

  We took a table in a quiet corner of the restaurant. Sasha and I sat with our backs to the wall, on one side, Mrs. Pavlovna on the other. Sasha’s hand found its way to my thigh. The more she stared at him, the younger she looked. The same was true for him. Sasha pulled his hand away, crossed his arms on the table and leaned toward her.

  How are you, Mama? he said softly.

  Oh, fine, she said, looking at me momentarily before looking back at him. The same.

  Do you need help? asked Sasha.

  She pulled her napkin out of her glass, shook it loose, and laid it neatly on her lap.

  Of course not, she said. We manage.

  I wasn’t sure who the “we” referred to. Remarrying would have been out of the question.

  The waiter came by to fill our glasses and paused until Mrs. Pavlovna waved him away.

  Natasha sends her regards. She’s absolutely desperate for you to visit. You really should come soon, she said, looking at me again, as if forcing herself to remember I was there. Both of you.

  The waiter returned with warm wet towels so that we could wipe the city from our hands. She ordered for us.

  The high ceilings, the neatly buttoned waiters, and the polite hum all said the place was fucking expensive. If I thought about it that way, as fucking expensive, as another fucking example of fucking byt bullshit, I could tell myself that I didn’t belong.

  Mrs. Pavlovna’s face tensed each time the terrace door opened, as if the city itself galled her.

  I fought the urge to change my order.

  The truth was that my father had frequented restaurants like these, and so, as a result, had I. One way I’d come to understand the differences between my mother and father had come to me on Osorgin’s wall. Freud’s concept of the narcissism of minor differences wherein the darkest forms of hatred emerge between groups who are not diametrically opposed — my parents were both left-leaning intellectuals — but between groups whose differences are as small as a splinter in one’s toe, and as painful.

  And how is your art? said Mrs. Pavlovna.

  Pointless, said Sasha, with a kind of laugh.

  He’d never said anything like that to me, so I turned to face him.

  Mrs. Pavlovna looked at me, as if I might understand, but I didn’t.

  What a preposterous thing to say, she said.

  Your posters are everywhere, I said. How can you say they’re useless?

  Oh, but those aren’t art, said Sasha. She’s talking about my paintings. I knew he made this distinction, but it surprised me all the same to see how little value he placed in the posters which were, even then, displayed all over the city.

  His paintings are very beautiful, such dark expressionism, she said, explaining him to me.

  I bit my lip, refusing to compete with her over him.

  Sasha placed his napkin on his lap. I followed suit.

  But what are these posters? she asked him.

  I do colouring, he explained, for some of the artist-engineer types. Colouring in their thick black images of trucks and galoshes and trains and cigarettes and cosmetics.

  Oh, said his mother. Well, that is useful, isn’t it? she asked. But it wasn’t a question. She brushed her hand across her cheek as if wiping away a crumb, though really she was trying to erase the confusion that had clouded her face with the mention of the artist-engineers. They were a type for Sasha and me because they were ubiquitous: men and women whose careers had begun in the arts but had transformed into something more practical, not engineers exactly — their designs could hardly be trusted to withstand a person’s shifting weight nor the pressure of wind and snow — but another post-revolutionary class with which we were familiar and which told people like Mrs. Pavlovna that the world was no longer theirs.

  Our meals arrived: three identical plates of roasted goose sliced up on a bed of sour apples with a side of golubtsy. I picked up the cold towel and put it on the waiter’s tray.

  Divine! said Mrs. Pavlovna, clapping her hands together like a child.

  We ate in silence for some minutes, all in the same manner. We caught a small piece of the tender meat and one single slice of sour apple on our forks, and then slid it into our well-bred mouths, our lips unchapped, our palates attentive to the apt pairing of sweet and sour on our tongues. I hadn’t eaten food so rich in years. If Sasha found it hard to digest, it didn’t show.

  After tea and petit fours, Sasha said he couldn’t walk me home because he wanted to take his mother to her lodgings.

  My stomach started to hurt when I watched them walk away, her arm linked in his. Without thinking why, I turned up the street, toward Rima’s. I wanted to smoke a cigarette and talk. I knew Yuri would be out because he was always out, working or running a meeting, whatever. He’d been a member of the Party since before the Party existed.

  I lay down on the floor as soon as I was inside her apartment.

  The night was hot and humid; nothing moved. On the table beside the balcony, the fabric covering the phonograph had been pulled aside.

  What were you listening to? I asked.

  Rima’s arms draped over the balcony railing, moving only when she brought the cigarette to her mouth for a long, slow drag.

  Irving, she sang, exhaling slowly.

  From my position on the floor, I admired her.

  What’s she like?

  Rich, I said.

  That’s still possible?

  Come on.

  Where does she live?

  Near Sokol’niki.

  So, she hasn’t been through collectivization yet. Lishensty class, said Rima, which was apt.

  Sasha’s mother still had all her money, but she’d lost the right to vot
e. She could vote with her dollars, I thought, and I could vote with my vote. Eventually, her dollars would run out.

  In the ceiling of Rima’s apartment, a small crack had appeared in the upper right corner. It had gotten so hot and humid that, lying there looking up, I could almost believe that I was at the bottom of a pool and the strange play of light and that crooked line were happening where water met air.

  The pure thing, I said.

  Didn’t you already know that? she asked from far away.

  I suppose.

  I saw Rima reposition her body so that she was still leaning against the railing, but facing me at the same time, looking down at me at the bottom of the pool.

  Was she awful?

  I took a deep breath and imagined myself surfacing, She was like a weary little doll. She barely looked at me, didn’t ask a single question about me.

  I rolled over and pulled myself up so that I could step out into the night air, where there might be some semblance of a breeze. I leaned onto the railing like Rima, taking a few drags of her cigarette, then threw it down into the courtyard. The bright ember split apart on landing, then dulled.

  I wonder if Sasha’s father ever hit her, I said.

  Did he hit Sasha? asked Rima, looking at me.

  I don’t know, I said.

  A man Sasha knew was waiting for us at the station to transport us to the family home. Sasha raced ahead of me when he saw him, and then remembered me and came back to carry our suitcase, hurrying me along. We got into the back of a car, which made so much noise it was impossible to talk, but Sasha was talking anyway, yelling excitedly back and forth with the man as he caught Sasha up on the lives of people he no longer saw.

  The moon had appeared on the horizon and was almost full, so its light spread ominously across expansive white fields, which were periodically delineated from other fields by a lonely line of trees. As a child, I had visited country homes before, but it had been years since I had left the city. The vastness of the landscape terrified me a little, making me feel exposed and spied upon rather than safely anonymous, which was how I felt in the city. I couldn’t decide if it was just me or if it was true that it was colder in the country than in the city. I looked at Sasha then and saw that he was happy out here, more peaceful somehow.

  Everyone in Sasha’s family, except his mother, had left for Europe. His father, Pyotr, was long gone — a blessing for everyone — and his siblings, an older brother and sister, were in Berlin and Paris, both with ideas of returning that would never be realized. Only the mother remained. Sasha had been raised by his grandmother and a nanny, Natasha, who was an Old Believer. Even after the children had grown, Natasha had stayed on. The two women seemed to cohabit without speaking. Natasha was younger than his mother by a decade or so, and stronger, too. If the house was warm it was because Natasha had stoked the stove; they ate if Natasha cooked. It was Natasha who greeted us at the door.

  Come in, come in, she said. She stepped aside to let us pass, then closed the door quickly, saying, No point heating the whole country.

  Natasha was round and robust, her cheeks flushed as if her body contained its own source of heat. Looking around, I could see that although the house had once been beautiful, it was starting to fall apart.

  We put down our bags and walked down the hall to the sitting room where Sasha’s mother was waiting, hands crossed on her lap.

  Her eyes softened when she saw Sasha. She didn’t look at me. I wondered if she regretted the decision, or fact, of not having raised him. Sasha walked in and pulled her up to hug him.

  I stood, for a moment at the edge of the room, awaiting some sign that I was wanted. Only Natasha noticed my discomfort.

  Come to see the tree, she said.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that they would have a tree. I followed Natasha down the corridor to a room with a fireplace and a tree scantily decorated with tinsel and trinkets as old as Sasha. Christmas trees hadn’t officially been forbidden yet, and anyway, everything comes later to the country.

  It’s beautiful, I said.

  Mrs. Pavlovna didn’t think you would like it, but how couldn’t you?

  It’s beautiful, I said again, reminded of Luria’s liars and their tendency to repeat themselves.

  You’ll be sleeping in here, she said, gesturing to a bed in the corner.

  With Sasha?

  Of course.

  Over dinner, Sasha’s mother seemed to warm to me. She’d heard of my father, she said, through a friend who went to the English Gentlemen’s Club.

  I suppose my friend might even have met you, as a girl.

  Maybe, I said, but I only went there once or twice.

  Yes, you would have stayed with your mother.

  Yes, I said, without expanding, in the hopes that she would summon her own image of what those times might have been like for me, and that the image she created would soothe her.

  For the first time, she inquired about my work. And how is your museum? she asked.

  It’s not quite a museum, I said, more of a scientific institute, really.

  Well, said Mrs. Pavlovna, folding her napkin and placing it by her plate, Nikolai spoke highly of your father.

  I saw Sasha smile from across the table, so I knew that at least one barrier had been overcome.

  There was a girl in town, said Sasha as we lay next to each other that night, a strange girl who always had gold dust underneath her index finger. She was one of those people who is born an outcast and stays that way her whole life.

  The fire was still roaring, but we’d covered ourselves with blankets all the same.

  Why was she an outcast? I asked.

  I don’t know, he said, pulling the blankets up under his chin. Her family was poor, but that wasn’t it.

  Where did she get the gold, if she was so poor?

  This was a mystery for a very long time, he said. She never had gold anywhere else. No gold rings or earrings. No necklaces. Nothing except the gold crescent under her fingernail that should have been dirt, but because it was gold it made her into a strange kind of beauty. The first people to notice were the local merchants who saw her hands when she came to their stores to buy flour or sugar.

  Outside, the wind had kicked up.

  Her teachers didn’t notice? I asked.

  She didn’t go to school, he said. Well, she did go to the school, but she didn’t attend classes. She arrived in time for our morning break and we’d find her perched high in the trees, waiting for us. I only saw the gold once, and it was because I caught her hanging from a branch, about to drop to the ground. Mostly she kept her hands in her pockets. Anya Solovyeva.

  Did you talk to her? I asked.

  There must have been a chink in the chimney because sudden gusts of wind outside made the fire spark.

  No, but a friend did, that’s how we found out why she was doing it.

  Doing what? I asked. Where was she getting the gold?

  Eventually, the priests at the local church noticed that the corners of their icons were being chipped away. Devotion icons, the ones that sit at the entrance to the church beside the font, were the most affected, but so, too, were the ones in the sanctuary. Some had only been scraped away at the bottom left corner, but others — those hung at a more accessible height — had had every last flake of gold removed from a part of the image, usually the hands, though sometimes the baby Jesus would have lost his lustre, too. It took a long time for anyone to notice, and even once they did, no one suspected the girl, though the height of the scratchings should have been a clue.

  When was this? Was her family Bolshevik? Is that why they were outcasts?

  Oh, it was too early for that business, said Sasha, though the story’s been changed over the years, I think, and people probably do tell it that way now.

  Her family could have been Communist, I said, sitting up.

  Sure, said Sasha. But they weren’t.

  If she wasn’t rejecting the church, why was she doing it?

/>   It turned out that she was seeking enlightenment.

  I laughed and settled back down under the covers.

  Sasha rolled over to face me and took my hand. He closed all of my fingers to the palm except for the index, which he took into his mouth, wetting it, so that it was cold when he took it out.

  She was ingesting the gold, he said. Ingesting it because a visitor to our town had told her that it would bring her to a vibratory plane, a place that would allow her access to a universal psyche. Or so some said. Others said she wanted access to the streets of heaven, which were paved with gold, and she felt that if she had enough gold in her system, she’d be guaranteed access.

  Would you ever try such a thing? I asked.

  Yellow gold wouldn’t work, he said. She didn’t know that it’s only white gold powder that works.

  You’re joking! I said.

  You’d do it, he said.

  No I wouldn’t.

  Just think of it as a kind of hypnotism, he said.

  Hypnotism is a medical practice, I said.

  So you say, he said.

  When I woke up, Sasha was gone, and I heard voices in the kitchen. I pulled on my wool socks and padded down the hall, past the white room with the framed photographs whose glass caught such a glare from outside that they seemed like windows themselves. I moved quietly, but it wasn’t on purpose that I came almost to the doorway without having been noticed.

  Sasha’s mother was talking about me. I heard her say that she didn’t understand why he’d married such a cold woman, a woman who didn’t want children, who wasn’t a proper wife. She asked him what she had done wrong. Sasha sighed and tut-tutted, saying little. Was this Sasha’s way of rejecting his upbringing, she wondered.