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Read Russia 2nd pass:Layout 1 5/2/12 1:03 AM Page 25
B a s i l e u s / 25
tractor driver as a ticket to life. He had advanced on his own, in total indifference
to his numerous kin, who had extorted backbreaking tribute from
him when he was still sitting on a student’s bench in a lecture hall in Moscow,
owing to their own inability to pay for medical treatment, funerals and other
catastrophes of indigence, which arose suddenly and more than once every
year. The gentleman with the wistful eyes hated helpless people. He had
torn large chunks out of his own perfectly normal human heart to help them,
but failed to make anyone happy. His own joy at his generous gifts was always
disappointed and desecrated by the abject state into which his feckless, goodfor-nothing
relatives immediately relapsed the moment the effect of the
money ceased. The warning given to the enamored Ertel possibly included
a fatal dose of a supremely bitter truth of life.
Ertel himself could sense in Elizaveta Nikolaevna a strange, formless
void with nothing in it at all. When she smiled hazily, suddenly allowing him
a glimpse of that void, it left him, a grown man and scion of the nobility, feeling
small and weak, as if he was facing an elemental force, some natural phenomenon
incommensurably more powerful than a human being. Ertel’s very
sinews, which seemed made out of twisted metal, literally slackened. She
was so touching, this little girl-woman–old woman, with her trembling hands
scratched by Basileus, her ancient pretzels in a salad bowl from a Kuznetsov
dinner service, her dull-golden braid that had sprouted again during her widowhood,
that gathered up the hair crookedly from the back of her head and
looked like a tenaciously clinging lizard . . . To give her a gift was a supremely
sweet temptation, a Christmas party. The joy frothed up in Ertel like champagne
when he made the agitated ride up to her apartment in the barred
cage of the old lift, fingering in his pocket the thick little envelope that he
always left discreetly on the sideboard, beside the ornate china clock the size
of a lapdog. The result was always that he was poisoned by the festivity’s toxic
products of decomposition. Ertel felt intuitively that the good deeds which
Elizaveta Nikolaevna provoked and nudged men into performing did not
actually become part of that genuine substrate of good, any addition to
which, anywhere in the world, was beneficial to the whole of humanity. Nothing
was actually added to it from all these sudden impulses of tender feeling.
This was exhausting him, it was sucking him dry. There was no higher
rationale to any of it, and he could only wonder at how much of everything
a single human life, hanging by a thread, was capable of consuming.
Elizaveta Nikolaevna, however, must have been a genius of helplessness,
and this inspired brilliance of hers rendered her irresistibly seductive. Not in