12.
Raya
Valentin thought that Raya was an incredible woman.
Her family was everything his family was not. Grandmothers and grandfathers from all different branches of the family tree kept appearing, either in person or on portraits hung on walls.
In this open and overpopulated house, Raya chirped like God’s little bird.
The house echoed with laughter and music. The radio boomed and piles of newspapers and magazines lay under armchairs or right in the middle of rooms.
Valentin, like all other visitors, was welcomed as part of the house. In this house, children, both the family’s and other people’s, played hide-and-seek and blind man’s bluff, they knocked over half-empty tea cups and threw stray newspapers in crumpled balls. Beautiful little pictures surprised one in unexpected corners. But the chaos was not at all filthy or shabby; it was the receptacle for the peculiar life of this incomprehensible and wonderful house, which attracted Valentin like a magnet.
Raya was not so much the child of her parents as an offspring of the house and the life in it. To win Raya meant to be accepted by the house. Whether Valentin and Raya were in love, whether they slept together—such things passed unquestioned in the general state of absent-mindedness. No one, neither the children, nor the adults, were interested in such details.
From the very beginning, Valentin realized that being part of the family came first, and being with Raya came second. Perhaps that was why he didn’t take any precautions—it was the desire to leave a trace, to win a place for himself in the group picture. Gradually he began to feel anxious, realizing that he was after something which was only important to him, but not anyone else. Not to Raya, and not to the rest of them.
Little by little, the foreboding that it was all doomed overpowered him. He could no longer fight it. And no one around him seemed to notice anything. The sisters, the cousins and the little brothers, the grandfathers and the aunts, the parents and their parents, no one seemed to suspect for even a moment that Valentin, once having formed a part of this harmony, could ever break away from it.
Valentin was nearing a steep ledge. He felt neglected. Raya could not understand why he felt this way. But he blundered on, trying to step outside the family circle. A game of blind man’s bluff of a different nature. He adored Raya for her inimitable ease: she did not have to try to be this way or that way, she did not need to make decisions and stick to them, she did not need directions. But he also hated her for it and wanted to destroy that in her.
The rupture came when she got pregnant. Everyone felt betrayed. The endless joyride was over. Valentin knew that, in this household, everyone loved everyone else and did what was best for them. The best for Raya was to preserve her childhood; the best for the pregnant Raya was to marry Valentin, but leaving the house was out of the question. Valentin had slept with her, but she was a child of the clan, her baby would be a child of the clan, and so Valentin was invited to become the same.
He closed his eyes and tried to picture it. After a brief silence, the Ferris wheel turns again for another ride. One more sweet little baby crawls on the floor, vomits over the rich thick carpet, and everyone laughs. Raya’s older brother hugs the baby as if it were his own, her younger brother plays with him as if it were his baby brother, her father throws a bemused look, not sure whether the tiny creature is his grandson, or some kind of great grand-nephew, or even—why not—his own son. At this point in his imaginative reconstruction, the water in Valentin’s body reached boiling.
After that, Valentin could not hold back from acting stupidly. He knew he was destroying everything, and this time it was not because he wanted something else. Raya cried at his wickedness. And she became increasingly miserable, because she could not understand where it was all coming from. He himself could barely understand what he was doing, yet he felt that it was his turn to act. He was obsessed by the idea that part of Raya belonged to him and he wouldn’t share that part with anyone. Within the communal Garden of Eden of her family, his behavior appeared disgusting. So be it, then—he was disgusting.
He lay down impossible conditions and made demands he knew Raya could not satisfy. For instance, he wanted them to live separately, just the two of them. There were strong arguments against it—they could not support themselves. They were still in school. They were too young. But why couldn’t they get jobs and be like a normal family? Raya did not understand the meaning of “normal family.” She imagined work as some kind of hobby that had nothing to do with earning money. And she imagined herself as a molecule of some precious substance whose chemical formula was her family’s secret.
Then Valentin disappeared. He disappeared from their life together, from the life of his baby, and from his own life, which had only just begun to acquire a life-like shape.
Or, to be more precise, he tried to disappear, going back to the house he had always inhabited—the house of his mother.
13.
Maria’s Baby
It was then that he discovered that his mother was also expecting a baby. And that a new protagonist, named Boris, had appeared on the scene.
Boris had already moved into his mother’s house. At first Valentin was resentful. His father was God knows where, behaving like a madman, and here was this new person with his glasses, only a couple of years older than himself, who barely even spoke a word. His mother and Margarita were not very generous in their explanations, either—Boris was a molecular biologist of international reputation, a genius in his domain, a vagabond wiseacre who had, however, ended up here with his two enormous black suitcases. Whatever Valentin had hoped for in his attempt to disappear, there was no empty wilderness to be found here. There was a new storyline just beginning to emerge.
Although it seemed somehow absurd, Valentin told his mother, more or less, about Raya and her baby. Maria immediately said that they were welcome to come here, the three of them, or the two of them, whatever they decided. Curiously, though, she did not say a word about the possibility of his coming to stay here alone. Valentin wondered for a while if this was supposed to mean anything, then let it be, deciding that the whole thing was too complicated. Yet he felt like a ship stuck on a reef. In escaping one all-devouring organism, he had landed in the hands of another.
On the other hand, given that Maria almost never left the house: how had she and Boris gotten to know each other?
The subject of marriage was breached only after Maria met Boris’s parents.
The old man and the old woman in their little house were like characters from a fairy tale.
When Boris brought Maria to meet them, they could hardly see her face beyond her enormous belly. She could not bend much, so she simply sat on the floor at their feet in order to kiss their hands. Her hair spread around her like a cloak.
Boris had never seen Maria’s eyes so clear. They were usually murky, like fog, but now they had a gray opal-like shimmer that was new to him. The expression in her eyes was also new to him. Maria looked at the old man and the old woman as if she had just recognized in them her long lost parents.
Boris left them and walked up the path to the chapel. It was the first time he had returned there since his christening. Since he had pushed the big door with his fingers and had seen, sitting inside the chapel, a tiny woman with eyes like fog.
This time there was no one inside. He walked in and sat on the floor opposite the door, which slowly closed before him. He sat down exactly on the spot where he had seen her. The moment his back touched the wall, he suddenly felt that he was her. That he was she, and she was that woman, and he was the baby she was carrying and she was his parents in their little house down the hill. There was a soft hum in the chapel that made him drowsy. He sat there for a while, or maybe it was just a minute. Sitting was timeless. He recalled the gaze of the