All her neighbours were, as a rule, drinkers. Some drank more. Some drank less. Some drank because they were young and foolish. Some of the older ones were so fossilized into the habit that they drank like fish. Her nearest neighbour was, in this sense, just reaching maturity. Through the working days, he imbibed moderately, but on Saturday he got roaring drunk, fighting with the girl he’d just picked up; and Elizaveta Osipovna, consumed by a black and viperous fit of anger, locked herself in her room and convulsed at each clatter as furniture was thrown over in the flat next door. It was lucky, then, that she had no children with her, as she did much of the time, since the neighbours would often hand their offspring to her to look after while they had a break from boozing at home, and a break from playing the songs of the highly fashionable (in those long-gone times) Joe Dassin.6
That summer, it was especially hard to get away from Joe Dassin. Sweet and catchy tunes spilled out into the warm summer air, if not from one window then another. ‘Si tu n’existais pas, dis-moi, pourquoi j’existerai?’ the handsome foreign singer was convincing some girl, and if only Elizaveta knew French she’d have recognized the haunting lyrics: ‘If you didn’t exist, then why should I?’
But Elizaveta Osipovna didn’t understand French. She knew a little Azerbaijani, because she was from Baku. But all her family lived in that faraway place by the Caspian Sea. In Moscow she had no-one, no-one at all, apart from her neighbours, who were entirely convinced she was a native of Moscow because of her incorrigible love of theatre and her stubborn intelligence. They were truly astounded when her sister and nephew arrived from Baku to arrange her funeral.
In the past, before her retirement, she went to the theatre regularly, and never missed a key premiere, although she always bought the cheapest seats. Her pension wouldn’t stretch even to the cheap seats, so whenever she could she got a free season ticket to the lectures in Bakhrushin theatre museum, and was always up on the latest theatre news. In the past, too, Elizaveta Osipovna had visited Baku almost every year. This summer, though, it was getting hard for her to even walk to the shops.
So she relied on her TV, small and black and white. She’d saved her pension for quite a few years to get it. Then finally she had enough. With the help of another neighbour, a giddy young father from across the stairwell who, thanks to her child-minding, had plenty of time on his hands, she went to the shop, selected the very cheapest set and brought it home in a cab, worrying all the way that it might get broken and stop working. But the TV did work, and Elizaveta Osipovna, who suffered senile insomnia, watched and listened to every programme right up to the anthem of the Soviet Union that closed broadcasting for the day. In the past, before the TV, she had read a lot, but now her eyes were letting her down. ‘I’m so afraid I’ll go blind,’ Elizaveta Osipovna would say, weeping bitterly. But that was when she was in hospital.
Before she was taken into hospital, on a quiet night when the lips of the ever-present Joe Dassin were momentarily stilled on the insistence of Soviet regulations, then a single nightingale, or even a pair, that swooped into the yard between the blocks from the Streshnevsky ponds might just be heard. In between the clanging and rumbling of the goods trains, Elizaveta Osipovna, holding her breath, listened intently to their leaping song. Sometimes, when it was hard to stay lying down, she went to the window and tried to guess in which of the yard’s trees the nightingales were hidden.
One might imagine that hearing the silvery warbling of the nightingale, singing out through the sudden silence of the dark yard and ascending to the stars, might bring to Elizaveta Osipovna some sweet, or even sad, memories, but did not – and even if it did, we, her ex-neighbours, will never know. If you do let free the dreamy capriciousness of the imagination, then much more plausible in this ordinary world would be her sudden wish to have the strength to walk in the morning across the railway and along the white, beaten path to the Streshnekovsky ponds and sit on a bench to watch the flashing ripples in the water, the soft to and fro of the reeds, the ever-shifting reflections of the pines. And maybe she’d catch the watery scent of overblown bird-cherry blossom, strewn across the pond in blankets of white stars.
After all, do any of us, here and now, realize what a joy it is simply to be conscious of our own existence and, while there is still time, feel alive – realize not what life was, but what it is, before, ahead of time and carelessly, we bid it goodbye?
To really feel, experience, see, hear and comprehend – without some exaggerated sixth sense and redundant imagination – how the living branch of the tree near to you shades the grass; how gently and sympathetically the warm summer breeze touches your hair, while at the same time rippling the sparkling water and waving the reeds; how the pine trees on the far bank stand straight and while they are alive, stretch up through the air towards the heavens, up to the clouds that are tenderly spun by the same soft wind of life. All that is in the world is perceived together in such a moment, like the summer’s warmth, and appears as it truly is – a miraculously bright, gratefully received yet undeserved blessing.
How warm, how fresh and light, how easy to forget debts and guilt and all the confusing details in the vision – which, thank God, the eyes can still see – and see with all the simple clarity of the children playing in the sandpit and on the grass who will remember all their lives some chance view of an ant busily climbing a straw of grass, or a crimson and black fire beetle, or a gleaming, brassy water-beetle flashing amber on the pond – where, the adults say, also live the scary tritons with those bright red spots on their white bellies. Ah!
Elizaveta Osipovna died that summer in the regional hospital. So now there was no-one to leave the children with. The young neighbour who helped her buy the TV visited her in the hospital only once, and found her sitting on the bed, wearing a grey hospital robe, which slipped off her yellow shoulder to reveal a pitifully thin clavicle. When she saw him, she started to cry, and said she was so scared of going blind. There was a phone call later, informing him that she’d died.
Elizaveta Osipovna’s relatives from Baku arrived for the funeral, and the young neighbour went with them to the crematorium, and as the coffin glided slowly between the open furnace doors, a taped voice solemnly sang Massenet’s ‘Elegy’ ‘O-o-o, where are they, the light days, the tender nights of spring? …’ And on the way home, the neighbour couldn’t help humming that haunting melody, again and again out loud and in his head, until the moment he walked into the yard and it was overwhelmed by Joe Dassin:
Si tu n’existais pas, dis-moi, pourquoi j’existerai …
Yet, extraordinarily, as he walks through the yard, enters the porch and goes up in the lift back to normality, he has no idea that for all his life he will remember that music, and every time he moves on, or changes his life in any way, that music will awaken in him an inevitable, unquenchable longing, a perpetual reminder of the involuntary betrayals that lodge guiltily in his core. He might have forgotten it entirely – for was there really any fault – but what is anyone left with if you take away their last treasure, their secret and very personal guilt?
Only shame is then left, but with shame it is completely impossible to live, dear neighbours.
1Poem by Lydia Grigorieva.
2The hero of The Tale of The Dead Princess, Pushkin’s telling of the Snow White fairy story. The princess, who is protected by seven knights, is tricked into eating a poisoned apple and falls into a deathlike trance, only to be awakened, finally, by the brave young Prince Yelisei.
3With its sumptuous palace and magnificent formal gardens, Kuskovo is sometimes called the Russian Versailles, created in the eighteenth century by Pyotr Sheremetyev, the wealthy son of one of Peter the Great’s key