Snow in May: Stories (27 page)

“In Makin’s cramped room, stuffed with books and old recordings, Galochka went on, the world was bigger and more interesting even than going to the Black Sea for vacation, with a two-day stopover in Moscow. He told her about growing up in St. Petersburg, listening to Mayakovsky recite his poetry in the parlor of his parents’ house. His verses struck Makin’s soul like whips. On her part, Galochka told Makin about her childhood in the suburbs of Moscow. Her great-grandfather had been a royal beekeeper.

“She loved him, she said, and was certain that he loved her. She didn’t know why he hadn’t made a move all these years. Maybe the age difference. Makin was in his mid-fifties by then, but she, too, had been on the edge of spinsterhood for some time. Should she ask him to marry her or should she continue waiting?”

Sonya scooted to the edge of her taboret, listening now in horror.

“Poor Galochka. She was a pleasant woman, femininely plump, big blue eyes, wavy black hair. Half a head taller than Comrade Makin, by the way. To me, she looked like a kindergarten teacher, someone who should be surrounded by children, not numbers. Her personnel file said ‘never married’; I didn’t pry. She’d always struck me as a bit ‘not of this world,’ as they say, but she was a hardworking accountant. That’s what mattered to me most.

“So, Galochka and Makin.
Da,
I couldn’t dream of this in my sleep. How could she not have known of his disease? How could she not see it? Granted, sometimes I felt that if I didn’t know, I myself wouldn’t be able to tell from just looking at him. But it is what a person chooses to do behind closed doors, seen only by his conscience, that defines his true character. I even wondered if he had played some kind of trick on her.

“‘Galochka,’ I said to her, ‘I have to tell you something that, to be honest, I thought you knew.’ She was blinking at me with those big blue eyes. ‘Vadim Andreevich has been observed to, how to say, not fall in love with women. It is not your fault.’

“She smiled. ‘Maybe he hasn’t met the right one yet? For a special person like him it must be difficult.’

“‘With any woman,’ I said. How could I explain something I didn’t myself fully understand?

“Galochka looked at me askance. I felt scrambled inside. I just couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud. I was afraid, perhaps irrationally, that once I let the wild animal out of the cage, everything would fall into chaos. Our harmony at work. Our friendly, productive
kollektiv
. Of course, many knew, but it was all underwater. It wasn’t an issue. At the same time, I realized that no matter what I said, it wouldn’t change the truth.”

“‘His compass is broken,’ I blurted out. ‘Instead of women … it’s the other way around. He likes men. It’s a disease.’

“Galochka didn’t fall into hysterics like I’d expected. She didn’t even look very disappointed or betrayed. She asked me to please keep her confession in confidence. As you see, I’m only breaking my promise more than thirty years later.

“A few weeks after our conversation, Galochka came to my office again. She was pale and had even lost several kilos.

“‘Mikhail Pavlovich, I decided,’ she said dramatically, like the wife of a convicted Decembrist. Have you studied the Decembrist uprising at school yet, Sonya, when many wives had followed their husbands to exile in Siberia? ‘I’ve thought hard,’ Galochka said, ‘I understand that with Makin I wouldn’t get the kind of love women expect in a marriage. Besides, many husbands, normal husbands, beat their wives—’

“Here I lost my temper a bit. If my workers let their arms loose, I could call a disciplinary meeting and strip them of northern coefficient pay. She wasn’t talking about my workers, she said. Her heart was telling her that she had to be Makin’s companion, to love and serve him selflessly. Her life would be full, and they both would be happy. This was love between souls, bypassing the body, she said.

“I dismissed her. Told her that she’d been reading too much Turgenev.

“‘A person always knows when someone loves him,’ Galochka insisted. ‘I will take care of him, and if one day he is able to return my love like a husband, to my joy there will be no end. If not, it won’t change my feelings for him.’”

Sonya held her breath. The story was beginning to sound like one of Baba Olya’s favorite soap operas—full of amnesia, misunderstanding, and love for the wrong people.

“‘Enough with the decorative language,’ I said to her strictly.” Deda Misha shook his finger. “To be honest, I thought she must be a little abnormal. Unwed and childless at thirty-five, living in her dream world of books and piano. Lost in her head. Of course, such marriages weren’t unheard of. On the contrary, they were viewed positively, as a documented effort to change, to start a new life.

“I decided that Galochka needed to spend some time away from Makin, while I determined the feasibility of their union. My head began to work,
tik tik tik
. I surveyed my, so to speak, vast empire: there were gold mines all over Kolyma, and to each mine was attached a village, a camp, and an electrostation.

“‘I have a great idea, Galina Fyodorovna!’ I told her. ‘I can send you on a monthlong assignment to audit our accounting at the electrostations up north, and while you’re gone, I’ll talk to Makin. Don’t send him letters or call. Let me sort this out and let him think.’

“Galochka liked my plan very much. She left my office with her beatific smile. But I had a heavy heart.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to happen. On one hand, I hoped she would come to her senses and give up on Makin so he could live out his days in peace. I even considered keeping her up north indefinitely.” Deda Misha smiled sadly. “Time cures everything, except, I guess, Makin’s disease. On the other hand, this could be his only chance to rejoin Soviet society as a full member.

“The following month, Galochka began her work above the Arctic Circle, and I looked for the right time to talk to Makin. I turned over and over in my head how I would present to him such a marriage proposal. I still hoped that he might get himself fully rehabilitated as a man. For that, Galochka wouldn’t have been my first choice.… I lost hours of sleep thinking over this.

“Makin was not easy to catch in those days. Gumenyuk finally got the central arts committee to approve a solo tour outside his exile zone. Not Moscow or Leningrad, but Makin was moving inland, reconquering his former territories. He was rehearing all the time. He had ordered a new tuxedo at the local atelier, which, by the way, was stolen from his room the night before he left on tour.”

“How could someone do that?”

“Jealousy. Black-heartedness, small-heartedness. Makin returned home from the theater late, and I, let’s not forget, had my own family to take care of. Galochka wrote to me every week asking about the progress of our scheme. We petroleum engineers know that we’re always one mistake away from an explosion. I extended Galochka’s assignment for another month.

“I decided to talk to Makin after he returned. I meant to stop by and wish him good luck, but there was an accident at the port.”

“What happened?” Sonya said.

“An oil tanker was cleaning its pipes and flushed so much water—”

“No, Deda, with Makin. What happened with Makin?”

“What happened with Makin, what happened with Makin!” Deda Misha looked gratified. “It was equally shocking and predictable. His first stop was Sverdlovsk—now Yekaterinburg—a town east of the Urals. After a sold-out concert, he was caught red-handed at his old crime. In his hotel room, with a young man.” Deda Misha ran his hand through his white mane. “Makin, so naive. The KGB had been watching his every move. He was returned to his old camp, and my decision was made for me: there would be no wedding.”

“That is horrible. He should have been more careful. He should have known!”

“Yes. A tragedy for the country, to lose such a talented singer twice. He squandered the chance most other prisoners and former prisoners, millions and millions of them, never got—a second chance at life. To me, only one thing that could explain his behavior—madness. Perhaps he and Galochka weren’t so different in the end.

“After this, a wave of gossip and paranoia rolled through Magadan. Those who had advocated for the relaunch of Makin’s career got very nervous. People still remembered the years of repression, Stalin, Yezhov. Kazakov, the radio director, destroyed all the recordings of Makin’s new songs. My own fears subsided a bit when Baba Mila was appointed official witness while the KGB inventoried Makin’s property in his room, but you never knew whom they might play against whom.”

“And you never saw him again?”

“I did. Once. A year after his second arrest. I was looking for the supervisor at a construction site for one of my depot workers’ houses and instead found Makin. He sat at a desk in the corner of the room—well, you could hardly call it a room at that point, it was just a concrete box.”

“Dedushka! What was he doing there?”

“He was the timekeeper. His job was to record the hours of the other inmates who worked toward shortening their sentences. My first impulse was to pretend not to recognize him, to save our dignities. He looked up at me and smiled like at an old friend. I smiled in return. Genuine smiles are contagious, Sonya. I instantly forgot everything.

“‘Vadim Andreevich, I’ll try to do something to get you out sooner,’ I said. ‘Did you know how much Galochka loves you? She wants to marry you and take care of you as if you were her own child. We will restore you as the director of our musical ensemble at the Workers’ Club. You will be rehabilitated.’ I didn’t have the power to do what I was promising. In fact, my rambling probably sounded crazy and foolish, too. I tell you, Sonya, he had a witching influence over me, just as he did over millions of Soviet people. One nod from him, and his welfare would’ve taken over my life again.

“Makin spared me that responsibility. ‘Mikhail Pavlovich, please, don’t worry about me. This time, I’ll look out for myself,’ he said with his gypsy smile. It was pride and shame speaking. Gypsies are a proud people. There was nothing more I could do. We soon acquired new upstairs neighbors—”

“Wait. Do you think he knew that it was you who sent Galochka away?”

Deda Misha looked surprised. “I don’t know, I didn’t tell him. It was beside the point. Makin hadn’t changed at all, Galochka or no Galochka.

“I remember our new upstairs neighbors well because your father became best friends with the son, also named Tolya. That Tolya’s father was a police detective and his mother taught phys-culture at Baba Mila’s school. Details, details. I’m glad to have such a greedy memory, to remember every day with my family and Baba Mila.

“Baba Mila and I moved back to Ukraine in the midseventies, after your father graduated from college. Just before leaving, I saw Makin on our local TV. It was the studio where they filmed all the concerts in Magadan, the one with the black-and-white four-leaf clover floor. ‘
All’s ever, the same old guitar,
’ he sang with his usual earnestness and accompanied himself on the piano. His perennial rubber cat perched on top of the piano. He was in that same familiar pose, turned toward the audience, emphasizing the words with his torso and hands. That same unmistakable timbre, though his voice was weaker now. Vocal cords are just muscles, and they get old whether you are a star or not a star. He seemed to be really enjoying himself. He sang the songs he’d written about Magadan: ‘Snow Waltz’ something, ‘The Streets of Magadan.’ I didn’t like them as much as his old classic songs.

“Then, one of the listeners asked him about his early years as a singer, when he was worshipped by the whole USSR. Makin must’ve been almost seventy then, bald and chubby but still sprightly. He was finally free to leave Magadan. I don’t remember much of the interview except that he said—in a friendly tone and smiling, that I remember—that he didn’t regret anything.
Vot tak
 … The end.”

“The end? But what happened to Galochka?”

“Galochka? She returned to Magadan a few months after Makin’s arrest and continued to work in our accounting department. Then she resigned and left for the continent. Some said she’d had a mental breakdown and went to a sanatorium on the Black Sea. I don’t know for sure. I’ve never liked to get involved with the gossip. So you stayed till the end of the concert, eh?”

Sonya nodded. She was reeling from the story.

“Did they announce that he would finally receive the title of People’s Artist of Russia?”

“I don’t think so.” She combed her mind. Could she have slept through it? The concert seemed like it had happened a century ago.

“I don’t think Makin was ever officially rehabilitated. A pity, a pity, but what can you do.”

“You don’t have any connections anymore, to help him?”

He smiled. “No, Sonechka.”

They sat in silence. Deda Misha stared into the empty teacup as if divining the tea leaves. Sonya rose and picked up the empty bowl and her cup.

“Leave it, Sonechka. I’ll clean up,” he said. “Go to bed.”

She stood in front of the frosted window. “Deda,” she whispered.

He grunted tiredly.

“Is it sometimes better to keep the animal locked up?”

“
Kak
? What animal?”

“The wild animal. Like with you, when you told Galochka about Makin. Sometimes, maybe it’s better to keep it in the cage?”

“What are you talking about? The wild animal was just me saying … it’s just a metaphor.”

“I know it’s a metaphor!” Sonya cried out. “I’m not totally dumb. I know it’s a metaphor. I didn’t open the stupid cage.”

“Shhh!”

A hot wave of shame rose up through her chest and pushed on the top of her throat. “I didn’t tell Papa about Oleg, not even when he moved in with us and ate the food Papa sent. I didn’t want Papa to come back from America. I didn’t stop them.”

Deda Misha was silent for a long time. “Don’t worry too much about that, Sonya. Your father knew. Magadan is a small town. He allowed it.” His glance had a harsh, unfamiliar edge.

She grieved for her mother and her father—and for Makin.

“We didn’t think that in the end she would be stupid enough to leave. Our side of the family doesn’t give up easily, though.”