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Read Russia 2nd pass:Layout 1 5/2/12 1:03 AM Page 41
B a s i l e u s / 41
allowing a waiter with his hair slicked sideways across his head from ear to
ear to clear away the almost untouched plates. “Charity should be kept at
the level of bookkeeping and within the limits of policy. That’s the only way
to conceal the fact that there’s nothing we can do. And, basically, nothing
we really want to do . . .” he added indifferently, gazing into the hall, where
several very famous faces were chewing, strangely plebianized by the act of
feeding, and, as always, there were many free tables.
That ruined evening left a heavy residue in Ertel’s heart. K’s grimace in
anticipation of pain appeared before his eyes again and again, as well as his
bald patch with the skin stretched tautly over it, as if the brain beneath had
been tied in a knot. He could understand now that for all their power, the
movers and shakers of this world—or many of them, at least—were weak in
the face of their own human feelings, and that was why they replaced those
feelings with copies that could be circulated safely. Pavel Ivanovich himself
had appreciated the convenience afforded by these certificates when he
found to his own surprise that he had switched to using them himself.
One day he had suddenly admitted to himself that he no longer loved his
wife. This stirred up a storm of such acute pity for Anna that he didn’t take
his hands off her for a week. He kissed the dry parting of her hair, where the
gray roots glinted silver, and at night he couldn’t wait for her to come out of
the bathroom, looking like a magic lantern in her semitransparent nightdress,
and turn out the light. With his newly heightened vision he saw spots of mustard
where once there had been laughing freckles and noted that for a long
time the crude copper of those still large, heavy curls had been dye. He formulated
the wrenching feeling that he experienced like this: gray hair and
wrinkles are the same thing for a woman as scars for a man—the marks left
by life, worthy of respectful love and admiration. He was prepared to accept
this new Anna he had suddenly seen because only he knew how much sublime
patience and heroism life—life with him—had required from her.
Disastrously, Anna started avoiding him and crying quietly in secret: it
was impossible to bear this muffled howling from a woman who had never
cried before and the vivacious manner in which she turned her red, dry eyes
away from her grief to her bewildered husband. Finally she asked, as if she
was committing some shameful act, if Osip Borisovich had phoned (a doctor
of that name, a fat man with dove-gray hair and the manners of a big boss,
monitored the Ertels’ health under the terms of their family policy) and told
him in secret that Anna had been diagnosed with cancer. That put an end to