Calligraphy Lesson (5 page)

But quite a few years have passed and you're still alone, Evgeny Alexandrovich.

How can I explain it, Nastasya Filippovna? One day I had to stay late at work. I was writing up a report. I think it was about some young man who'd killed the mother of his buddy, who was in the army at the time. They tracked the youth down the same day, and he didn't deny it but kept insisting she'd gotten him drunk and lured him on. A photograph was attached to the case materials—a naked body on the floor, fat and misshapen. There are pictures like that in nearly every file. It's nothing unusual. By the time I left, it was dark outside, a cold autumn evening, and I started home. Where else could I go? When Kolya still lived at home, I'd always tried to get back as early as I could to feed him, check
his homework, play a game. We would cut out little paper men, draw faces on them, and invent all kinds of stories. Kolya had an amazing imagination. He would come up with great yarns and he was always rescuing everyone. Kolya would talk about himself nonstop: about the other kids, his teachers, his grades, all his friendships and arguments. But now I had to force myself to go home to an empty house. So that day, knowing I faced another endless, pointless evening, I took the longest possible route home, then made another detour, and walked like that for an hour, maybe two—aimlessly, I thought—and suddenly found myself outside your house. There was no one outside and the streetlights were dark. I opened the gate and walked in. It was dark in the garden. The only light came from the windows. I got very close. The undrawn curtain revealed nearly half the room. No one was there. Suddenly you walked in and looked out the window, straight at me. That scared me and made me want to hide behind a tree, but I froze, transfixed. You were standing so close you couldn't have not seen me, but you didn't even flinch. You turned to one side, then the other, ran your palms over your hips, looking at your reflection, fixed your hair, turned away, and walked through the room and around the table. You were talking to yourself. I couldn't hear through the double window. I could just see your lips moving. Suddenly your husband loomed up. He'd been lying on the sofa the whole time, and now he stood up, in his robe, disheveled, with mussed hair and a tired, sleepy face. He must have taken a nap right after work. He put his arms around you, lay his head on your shoulder, and shut his eyes. Then the children were brought in, to say goodnight probably, because they were wearing their nightshirts and were all pink under the lampshade. You made a cross over your daughter and son and kissed them on the forehead. The little girl kept holding out a book to you, probably trying to talk you into reading to her before bed. First you shook your head
and your face was stern, but your little girl begged you so, so you smiled and sat down next to her in the armchair. Your child wiggled for a long time getting comfortable and then fell still with her little mouth open, on a flight of fancy to a land of trolls, or naughty ducks, or enchanted frogs, places you and I can never be. Meanwhile your spouse started a game of blind man's buff with your son, put a coin in his eye to look like a monocle, and paddling with his arms, chased the little boy around the room. The child was in such ecstasy that his cries, shrieks, and laughter splashed out the window and scattered over the stiff, chilly garden. You tried to calm them both down a few times and spoke sternly, probably about how the children shouldn't get so worked up before bedtime, or words to that effect, but even you couldn't help laughing and gave first one and then the other a playful smack with your little book. The coin popped out and your husband got down on his hands and knees to reach under the chair for it, whereupon the boy jumped on his neck and the girl on her papa's back. You were all laughing hard. Finally, the children were taken off to bed. Your spouse lit up and sat down with the newspaper under a lamp in a corner of the sofa. You settled in beside him with a fat book. Then you got up, brought a pillow over, plumped it up at the other end of the sofa, and lay down, wrapping your legs in a big warm throw. You read like that for a long time, with your legs draped across his knees. Once you looked into the corner together—up. It was the clock chiming. Occasionally he would read you something out loud, some funny item. He would laugh and shake his head while he read, but you would just smile faintly, not even looking up, you were so engrossed in your book. Then he folded the paper, yawned, said something to you, you just nodded, and he went out. You kept reading, first sitting with your legs curled underneath you, then lying on your back. From time to time you would take a pin out of your hair and scratch your head. I didn't
notice how cold it was, that I was chilled through, but I just couldn't leave. I kept standing there watching you. At one point you stood up and took a box of candy from the sideboard, balanced it on your knees, and ate piece after piece, wadding each wrapper up in a ball and flicking it away. Suddenly, from upstairs, came a child's cry. You jumped up, dropped your book on the table, and rushed out of the room looking frightened. No one was there for a long time. Then your husband appeared for a moment and the light went out. But I kept standing there. I was afraid to leave.

Oh, you naughty boy! Have you no shame? Gray hair, and you behave like a little boy. It's true, my husband is always reading things out loud from the newspapers. For instance, recently there was one story about three men convicted of raping a girl, a teenager. Not only that, but imagine, they were all reputable men and had families and children. In short, you never would have thought something like that about them. Understandably, they were angry and indignant, and they hired the best lawyers. They brought charges against someone, saying it was all a frame-up. The girl was the daughter of their mutual acquaintances, though, and her parents believed everything she said and were furious at the base and vile things their good friends had done. During the inquiry and trial the girl told stories of such degenerate acts committed against her that no one ever doubted the veracity of her testimony. Such horrors simply could not have entered a child's mind. In short, they were convicted, but their lawyers kept active, another inquiry was scheduled, and the upshot was that the three were innocent, that the girl was sick, that she had an erotically based psychological deviance and had dreamed this all up and believed her own fantasies. The convicted men were released, of course. One can only imagine the joy in their unfortunate families. And they placed the girl in a special clinic to teach this horrible girl not to defame honest people. After all was said and done, though, they found details in her
initial statements that simply could not have been invented: an unusual birthmark in a most intimate place and something else like that. Other testimony and evidence were found as well. Finally, one of them confessed and all three were imprisoned again, this time for good. But meanwhile, what was most interesting was they didn't release the girl, because she really was abnormal and attacked everyone, men and women alike. In short, a fine lot all. But you just don't know my husband really. He's a marvelous man and I love him very much. This is a man worthy of every respect. He loves me and our children very much. He's always coming up with surprises, For instance, he writes either me or himself letters and mails them, and then we open them together and he watches me—after all, he only does it to bring me pleasure—and I go into ecstasies over his silly scribbles, to make him feel good. I rushed headlong into marriage. This very young fool fell head over heels in love with a grown man just because he visited our house occasionally and never said a word. Now I realize my primitive curiosity fed my fantasy—so that I couldn't go on living without this clam. Later, after the wedding, I had an epiphany. It was like I'd regained my senses. I was horrified at what I'd done, but our son showed up so I resigned myself. This man is a marvelous husband, and I understand intellectually that I should be grateful to him, but it's unbearable. The strange, crazy ways he has of eating disgust me. He always has his second course first and then his soup. He likes to crumble bread into his milk because his mama made him a mush like that when he was little, and he shovels that mess, that awful, swelling swill, into both cheeks. I'm always finding his socks in the most incredible places, and when he loses something, it's my fault. He can go weeks without a bath and his dirty hair smells awful, but before leaving for work he spends fifteen minutes putting on cologne, to mask the smell. When he thrusts himself on me, especially at night, I try to imagine it's someone else instead of
him. Don't get the wrong idea. I have no thought of cheating on him; I would despise myself afterward. If I fell in love with someone else, I would fight the feeling in any case. Self-respect is more important than pleasure. I have children and a home and I can't imagine a different life for myself, although in my mind I'm cheating on him constantly—disgusting, horrible, filthy thoughts, and I try to drive them out, but I can't. And that's even worse than cheating on him for real. Sometimes I scare myself. And that goes not just for my husband but for the thoughts that overwhelm me in general. It's become impossible. When I was nursing our first child, I was so tired, I was in a state of such nervous agitation over his endless illnesses and my chronic lack of sleep, I was so tormented by his screaming and crying, that one day I had a nervous breakdown, a moment of insanity. In the middle of the night the boy started screaming again and I jumped up, exhausted, and suddenly such hatred bubbled up inside me, such rage, such fury, that I was ready to kill him. I actually snatched the child from his crib—I remember I was suddenly struck by the idea of throwing him off the balcony. This horrified me so that things suddenly felt crazy after all, I was a second away from the irrevocable. After that night, my milk dried up. Listen to me, because it would never occur to a mother to kill her own child!

What are you talking about! At work I deal with stories you could never even imagine, but you know I've gotten used to it and I do my job. One man, for instance, quarreled with his wife and slaughtered her and their two children with the bread knife. The older was four and the younger was an infant. Then he came to his senses and started to slit his own veins, and while he was bleeding, he set fire to the apartment and jumped out the window. Another forced his daughter to sleep with him, and that very night she killed him with an ax. A third beat his brother to death with a log because they couldn't figure out how to divide up the
house they'd inherited. A fourth tortured twins, neighbor children, raped them, poked out their eyes, and left them to die in an abandoned cellar—and then went through the worry with their parents, acted outraged, and took part in the searches, until they happened to expose him. You wake up, have breakfast, get ready for work, and you already know what's going to happen. One man choked his own mother with a stocking and carried the body to the outhouse piece by piece, and I said to him: “Please sign here!” And so it goes, day after day, year after year. If it's not Peter, it's Nikolai; if it's not the doting father, it's the loving son. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, a hundred years from now. The words, even those are the same: I didn't see it. I wasn't there. It wasn't me. Nor is the charge ever very original: “consumed by an unquenchable thirst for gain,” “blinded by envy, tormented by his awareness of being a nobody,” “the scum, having lost all humanity, to satisfy a moment's fancy,” “after foully taking advantage of the helplessness of his father, who was crippled by paralysis,” “who for twenty years cleverly and perfidiously concealed his criminal essence under a mask of decency.” And the defense babbles on the same way: “made desperate by the hopelessness and pointlessness of his pitiful existence;” “having no other way to defend his profaned honor;” “being a victim of a prison education—since if you're born in prison all you've seen around you since childhood is rapists and murderers;” “Yes, blood was spilled, and the instrument of murder is before you, but look at the remorse this unfortunate man has shown! Instead of convicting him, share the grief of a man who murdered his own son!”; “My God, even you must have been thoroughly oiled and felt a wild, half-bestial, half-childish desire to take revenge on someone for your good-for-nothing, betrayed life, for all the agonies and injustices, for everything you've suffered at the hands of people near and far, God, and your own self. Haven't you?” They do things even they can't imagine, and I tell them, Write, now, to
keep from losing your mind, write a final word not in some lapidary cursive but, say, an elegant, bubbly Rondo, in blurred letters that repeat, but the verdict is in a littera fractura with flourishes, or Gothic logjams, or Batard, or Coulé, or whatever strikes your fancy, one page like this, another like that. Even if you only write one word, to say nothing of a page, make it harmony itself, so that its regularity and beauty offset that whole crazy world, that whole caveman mindset. Why just today they convicted someone who had poisoned her husband, a drunkard and a brawler, someone the long-suffering household members may have needed to be freed from long ago because their children are cretins, monsters. She tried to hang herself in her cell, but they cut her down and at the hearing she said, “Do whatever you want. You're nobody to me because I'm still going to kill myself. I'm not going to live, and the Highest Court will vindicate me, because I'm fed up with living.” That's what she said. But our presiding judge said, “But you see, dear, that's us. We are the Highest Court, and whether you are or aren't fed up is not for you to decide!” But she kept up her muttering: “I'm fed up with this life of yours.” That's what I wrote: fed up.
What that one word costs! Just try it! The primitive
H
may not merit special mention. Its crossbar is written on a slant in a single stroke. You place the tip of your pen at the beginning, then bend your fingers right away, and the pen itself pulls you down, but the main thing here is the pressure. God forbid you press too hard or lift too much because the line isn't supposed to breathe! The flamelike shape—because it does resemble a tongue of flame—bends first to the left, then the right. It gets fatter in the middle and dwindles to nil at the ends. On the third beat the stick has a curve at the bottom. The first five sections of the line are drawn straight, but on the sixth the pressure eases up and the line, rounding, drifts off to the right, ending at the invisible line that confines each letter to its allotted
space, its cell, you might say. Below, where the stick curves, between the imagined field of the cell and the tip of the line it contains, you get an empty corner. After the curve the fine line goes up—not straight up but in an arc—bending slightly to the right so as not to lose contact with the page and break through to the
ë
, a cunning ninny, unprepossessing to look at, but demanding caution and deft treatment in order to achieve the desired end. After the clumsy, snub-nosed
H
, the
e
requires a light, graceful line that begins with an eyelash stroke and a bend to the right, cuts across the middle evenly on an incline, flies back after the bend, nearly grazing the ceiling of its chamber, and as it falls back in its noose rushes into the half-oval with pressure on the left side; moreover the bend of the capillary outline is hidden in the half-oval but is not left behind. After a break the pen heads all the way to the upper corner of the next cell. The merest tremble or thickening could instantly destroy the illusion of this free soaring, which takes a drastic gain in altitude to become a
. The secret essence of this spindleleg lies by no means in the spaces that run through it from top to bottom but in the concluding, unremarkable, but danger-laden sign-off loop beyond which the
m
is already twitching impatiently. Here it's important not to be too hasty in imprinting the tightening loop but to wait for the loop to turn almost into a period. Then you can rush headlong into three holes in a row, returning happily once again to the
e
,
p
, and
n
, which is hardly a letter, just a
on a stick. But onward, onward, to the very end and the