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Read Russia 2nd pass:Layout 1 5/2/12 1:03 AM Page 23
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a former life and a pre-former life. Some of the entries were half-erased,
barely even showing through, best read against the light, like watermarks;
others seemed fresh, literally made yesterday, and it was strange to see Sergei
Alexandrovich’s cramped, looping writing—his hand, as they used to say—
when there was no longer any way that that hand could scoop a spoonful of
soup out of the plate or stroke Elizaveta Nikolaevna’s dry hair. Methodically,
deciphering everything on each small page (some pages fell out, looking like
pieces of thin suede leather with frayed, frilly edges or meticulously dressed
mouse skins) the little widow dialled the unfamiliar numbers on the heavy
black telephone. In most cases she turned out to be calling people who no
longer existed. The book contained the contact details of more than three
hundred deceased individuals, but a few isolated living ones turned up as if
by accident. A couple of times, like music on the radio, she heard women’s
voices that used to ask her to call Sergei Alexandrovich to the phone—at
which Sergei Alexandrovich would get terribly embarrassed and wipe his
sweaty hand on his trousers with an odd penguin-flipper movement. These
voices doused the widow in thick benevolence, but they were absolutely useless
to Elizaveta Nikolaevna. She was looking for men who could give her
support.
And they were found. The letter “K” manifested a kind man who immediately
came round and immediately made a zealous effort to help—with his
square chin and turbulent, grayish peasant curls, he looked very much like
his late father, the director of one of those Something-or-Other-of-October
factories, whom Elizaveta Nikolaevna actually remembered from the old
days. This K gave Elizaveta Nikolaevna the first job of her life. They brought
her a laptop and she quite quickly learned to type, which turned out to be like
knitting: stitch by stitch, row by row. The informational bulletins that the
widow put together for K, making timid excursions into the Internet, were
splendidly obtuse—they were the papers that rambled and rustled around
the floor, like light toy boats all fluffy with dust. Another gentleman, from the
letter “T,” stoop-shouldered, with wistful, transparent eyes that always
squinted slightly inwards at the tip of his nose, also came and sat in an armchair
for a while, wrapped in a spacious kidskin trench coat, following the
ponderous flight of a dying autumn fly with a cool gaze—afterwards she
started receiving very decent sums of money from him, plus backbreakingly
heavy bags of groceries. There were another two or three who also helped
her.
Ertel’s home number was entered on one of the book’s final pages—it