Devoted people are the first to be betrayed. You can rely on people like this. They will always be there for you. But I can vouch that just over twenty years ago, one summer’s day, around Moscow’s Sokol metro station not a living soul had this sort of idle thought in their head. In one green quadrangle stood substantial apartment blocks which had only one, but I must say significant, drawback, which was the constant traffic on the nearby circular railway. Every night, heavy-goods trains without any apparent end seemed to slow down then pull away again right next to the apartments with a fearful fusillade of metallic clangs from the truck couplings. The residents, though, long ceased to pay any attention – can people get used to anything? In fact, this place wasn’t especially quiet even during the day.
On one side, the eight-story apartment block overlooked the Volokokamsky Highway, and on the other, the side on which Elizaveta Osipovna lived, the 23 tram regularly clattered by. For three kopeks you could ride the tram to Koptevsky market, where moustached Azerbaijanis royally traded scarlet persimmons, richly coloured apples and grapes as pale as teardrops – where did they get such ripe fruits in June? Piled high on their stalls, too, were lush bunches of coriander and sweet brown Georgian churchkhela4 – jumbled, for some reason with wonderful pickles, huge, waxy marinated garlic, and delicious crimson-stained Gurian cabbage bound in sheaf-like bundles with salty green ramson.
Of course, there were also many other Moscow treats, especially rich, butterlike soured cream, the purest most trickling cottage cheese, village butter in golden millstones, freshly drawn meat ruddy and steaming, juicy vigourous radish, giant dense onions, plump washed carrots and lush green celery and parsley.
Yet Elizaveta Osipovna had long ceased going to the market. A butchers, a dairy, a baker and a fish shop were conveniently at hand, next to the tram stop. The greengrocer’s was a disappointment with last year’s spongey potatoes and straggly damp carrots covered with the soil that was smeared all over the floor. The soil was often dry and the smell of the dust filled the shop. Not far away, though, near the beer dispensers and a recently opened rumochnaya,5 there were almost always old women selling herbs such as dill and parsley much cheaper than in the market.
True, the bunches the old women sold were sparse, but, lonely as a finger, Elizaveta Osipovna didn’t need much. She was terrified of anything not fresh, so every single day she went to the local shops to top up. She’d buy 50 g of butter, a couple of slices of doktorskaya smoked sausage or, on pension day, a few slices of ham, a morsel of soured grain, and a sliver of cheese – just a smattering of each. Strangely, her fear of stale food harmonized perfectly with her pension of 56 soviet roubles. She learned how to eke out that sum over the entire month, yet at the same time, out of the kindness of her heart and the natural diplomacy essential in communal flats, she managed to give a rouble to the local wino to tide him through to the next pay day. Well, one couldn’t dare refuse.
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 –
