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Read Russia 2nd pass:Layout 1 5/2/12 1:03 AM Page 21
B a s i l e u s / 21
her with sweets they had saved especially, sometimes badly frayed in their
male pockets and smelling of tobacco. A female writer and multiple Stalin
Prize winner, who was incised all over with fine wrinkles and covered in age
spots that looked like blotches of washed-out blood, maintained a tenacious
friendship with her. And then, in a space of three years, they all died, including
her husband.
At all times, but especially in years of universal struggle for survival,
inactive creatures like Elizaveta Nikolaevna arouse the indignation of their
vulnerable fellow-citizens, who are obliged to trade at markets or kowtow to
a capricious boss while doing his work as well as their own for a barely decent
salary. But if Elizaveta Nikolaevna was protected by anything, it could only
be the mercy of God. She seemed to be entirely a product of God’s arbitrary
will and that was why there was so much that was inexplicable about her. She
was awkward—she often broke things, walked into a room at the wrong
moment, said the wrong thing. But her ineptitudes suddenly triggered very
long sequences of cause and effect—in the way that a single movement of a
finger knocks over a single domino, setting an entire ribbon of dominos flowing,
which releases a lever that sets water pouring and a heavy little ball
rolling along a groove. When they associated with Elizaveta Nikolaevna the
worthy old men vaguely sensed that they were located at the center of a toy
designed with incredible accuracy and precision, something like a phantom
child’s railway set, and the sweetly humming little ball that was launched at
the very end might just turn out to be a bomb. But it was not they who were
the targets of the existence of this little woman who looked out at the world
through such intensely blue eyes that everything around must have been
tinted blue for her. And that was why one fine moment an invisible hand
cleared the stage of everything superfluous.
Left completely alone, Elizaveta Nikolaevna fed herself for a while on
the reserves of canned foods that she found in the house—the solid fat had
a back-taste of candle wax. She tried eating fermented jam and even blocks
of jelly that had been lying around in the cupboards under the ceiling. She
had absolutely no understanding of money (when inflation distended the
rows of noughts she genuinely thought that everyone had got rich), and so
she sold the neighbors her Chopard watch, covered in quarter-carat diamonds
like cross-stitching, and an old ruby brooch in the form of a dragonfly
for what she thought was a large sum, but actually for mere pennies. She
lived as if there was a war on, swapping things for food, and it was only by
sheer good fortune that the silver-tongued realtors eager for Stalin-era real