AN OUT-OF-TUNE PIANO, AN ACCORDION
When air becomes denser to the touch, when celandine’s wet yellowness appears above pockmarked musty needles on the forest floor, when trash between the naked, sucked-bare pine tree trunks forms a white shimmer like giant flowers of a cosmic-sized apricot tree, then you can rest assured—the wandering ghost camp is already here, close by, in our forests.
It’s your choice whether to believe in it, you can make your cute skeptical grimace: puffed lower lip like a moist cherry, an obstinate horizontal fold between the eyebrows, wrinkles on your little nose with its semi-transparent wing-like nostrils; now you’ll shake the morning dew off of them, spread them out sleepily—and take off into the air, into the light-blue broth of the sky, swimming next to Boeings and globs of sour cream.
The night exhales the first mosquito swarms, opens its jaws full of warm muck. A coarse crone with a jelly-like body, nearly blind and hopelessly slow-witted—just think what its drunken grin and cloudless joy are worth.
Flowers fall off pear trees with a dry rustle; self-satisfied caterpillars lazily munch on arugula leaves, and irises—these crystal ritual daggers—fold like origami, Japanese boats and lanterns, and shine from the inside with a meager cold light.
Then you won’t be mistaken: the wandering ghost camp has arrived. An indistinct melody spreads above the trees, multiplied by echo—like a tune from a victrola or an old cassette player that constantly chews up tape. Girlish laughter resounds together with teenage shouts and giggles, with piercing playful cries. An insincere feminine voice declaims something solemnly into a microphone; you can distinguish lines of poetry, rehashed jokes, and mechanical reading off a page, but you can’t make out the words. Every evening up until late at night, when the cooperative dacha settlements die down, hold their breath, and their dwellers sidle up to one another in pitch-black darkness, their expansive bodies sun baked to a meaty shade of pink, the sounds of eerie amateur performance seep through the double panes. From the forest thickets a menacing stench and an otherworldly smoke come swirling, flashing with fuzzy shimmering lights that circle around the tree branches.
You can never tell precisely where they are now—at Krasna Poliana, near Poroskoten, or in the Babka Valley [1]—their manifestations are omnipresent yet so uncertain, their music resounds, it seems, from tree trunk hollows and badger burrows, they spy on us from behind currant bushes, they rustle in the grass around the cesspit, their elongated greenish faces reflect in the glass walls of hothouses like in stagnant water.
Everything quiets down only at dawn, when the contours of trees slowly become clearer, birds shake their wings and clear their throats, and the air gets saturated with nanodroplets of moisture, invisible beads of a necklace—they refresh and make things easier. The shroud of stupor and fear falls off, the gaze becomes clearer.
Viola sits on a cold wet terrace, her head thrown back, her mouth wide open. Her red eyes stare unblinkingly at one spot. She is exhausted, drained, finished. Her large soft body has spread in the armchair like melting butter. Her wet dress sticks to her, its contact with skin unpleasant. Renat comes closer, dragging his left leg, and covers her with a yak-down blanket brought from the Himalayas.
Renat is eighty. His left leg does not obey him; he has a glass left eye. It shines mutely, its pupil directed at you no matter where you go, wherever you retreat—the way icons, especially old ones, worn, damaged by woodworm and dry rot, look at mortal sinners. Renat’s right eye, squinted and sly, darts about and peeks under the lining: what’s hiding there? Renat’s teeth are crooked and dark (he refuses to get dentures as a matter of principle, saying that nowadays bodies already do not decompose); his wide grin is open and scary at the same time; his face is a puzzle made of hundreds of wrinkles; his hoarse ingratiating voice that of an old beast, once strong, and now simply warming itself in a sunny spot.
Renat always knew how to enjoy life. The start package of his life included starched white shirts with wide cuffs and gold cufflinks, fragrant cigars, recliners, fancy building materials acquired through connections, the smiles of flight attendants, banquets in hotel restaurants, and also apartments, dachas, antiques, laundered linens, offices with lacquered furniture, cars with the latest sound systems, yachts, Cuban women, snorkeling, gravlax, getting to see the doctor without waiting in line, special deals, precious jewels, massages, yachts again, they really eat this stinky cheese, it costs how much? I’ll be damned! . . .
Even now, weathered and worn by life, lacking one eye, crooked, wrinkled, and dented, Renat hasn’t lost his luster. He’s like an old Steinway with a cracked frame. A 1954 Rolls Royce Phantom with a broken headlight and clumsy body and doors that don’t close tightly—still, its interior preserves the scent of Queen Elizabeth: lavender, clary sage, vetiver, lemon mint, and patchouli; the luxurious leather-clad seats creak heavily like balding gentlemen coughing at the opera after an intermission.
His first wife was the same age as he. They lived quietly together for thirty years, producing a couple of kids along the way, up until Renat met Viola. She was forty then, and she still remained striking and attractive: curvaceous, blond, and languid; ripe, juicy, and soft like a plum (you bite through the deep purple, almost black, skin and the purplish inside reveals itself moistly). Renat, understanding everything well (I am sixty, she’s forty, I have two kids and six grandkids, real estate and savings; she has alcoholism, infertility, a room at a boarding house, and messy personal life)—in fact, precisely because he understood everything so well—opened his embrace to her with luminous calm. He so loved watching her expose her face to the wind when riding in his yacht, try to eat correctly an oyster on a half shell, pretend to be a society lady, chasing champagne with strawberries. Her buttery voice and mannered way of talking moved him the way a child’s babble can move you. She laughed loudly like a boor, opening widely her mouth covered in bright lipstick and throwing her head backwards—and he, choosing a strategic seat beside her, magnanimously squinted his one eye, smiled quietly to himself and mumbled something, paying no attention to the confusion and disapproval around them.
He, the kindly sixty-year-old daddy, showed her the world. At the dacha that Renat succeeded wrestling from his first wife, they made an alpine garden to which they kept on adding stones brought from various corners of the world. It was surrounded by plaster gnomes—once so bright and cheerful, with the bright red cheeks and noses of drunks (which is the reason they had conquered Viola’s heart), but decades of rain, snow, and piercing wind had bleached them and worn them out; paint peeled off of them, and the noses of a few of them were missing.
In the spring, Viola, dressed in tight pink britches and a revealing blouse, crawled on all fours across their sizable garden with a jar of paint and a brush, refreshing the collection of plaster beasts and fairytale characters. Their well-tended lawn spread like a silk rug. The decorative bushes stood all covered with flowers.
As soon as she married Renat, Viola tried to become a good housekeeper. She studied reference books for home gardeners, bought seedlings, and planted several varieties of tomatoes: Aurora, Hussar, Turandot, and Calif. She tended them thoroughly, selflessly: that year Viola felt especially sharply her hopeless unrealized maternal instinct. The tomatoes reciprocated: their elastic stems bent under the weight of plump red fruit.
And then she cried, loudly, uncontrollably, choked on tears, howled and yelled over sixty buckets full of sweet vegetables.
“What shall I do with them, Renat dear?” she screamed in an unrecognizable voice. “To whom can I give them? We won’t be able to eat so much. I won’t go to the farmers’ market! I won’t give them to strangers! To no one! They’ll rot!”
The next day, shortly past noon, Viola was barely able to open her swollen, hurting eyelids. She had a piercing headache, her throat was burning, her neck hurt from the bottle of Greek brandy.
When she was finally able to focus her gaze, she saw Renat in front of her. He was holding in his arms a kitten, black, with a triangular white patch on the chest. This was Methodius.
Oh Renat, how much did this sly old fox of a man love them, his kids. His short fingers dug into the edge of the table, so that the tips hurt—this is how much he craved to stay just a little bit longer here, next to them. Squinting his eye, he caressed with his gaze this corpulent woman in a bright skimpy low-necked dress, her shapeless forearms covered in freckles, her puffy hands ending in sharp claws painted with sparkly enamel, her swollen face covered by the purplish-black mesh of blood vessels, her misshapen nose, tiny bleached eyes that twenty years ago were still so blue, so full of surprise—and now hidden behind butterfly-shaped glasses. Methodius, as always, spread himself over her knees, his pink neutered belly up in the air, and purred like a freshly started engine. This was like the purr of the granulators, agglomerators, and shredders made by Berlingtong, the Japanese company whose sales rep Renat was (just one capsulator sale—and a trip to Sri Lanka is guaranteed!).
“He is so smart, so smart, you have no idea, gentlemen!” Viola clapped her hands like a giant newborn. “He goes number one in the bidet, and opens doors with his little hands, like this, grabbing the latch, just imagine!” Viola tried to show with gestures how Methodius opened doors. “Our little son, I cried so much when he came back home all injured.”
Methodius, the impertinent tomcat, went everywhere his heart desired. Neither someone else’s territory, nor unhappy owners, nor guard dogs could stop him. He entered other people’s kitchens and sipped broth right from the stove; he munched on parsley and scallions on vegetable beds, leaving stinky piles instead.
That morning Renat found him by the fence. Methodius was lying on his belly spread-eagled, his hind paws unnaturally twisted. His left eye was closed and a dark streak came down from it. The cat was maimed, badly wounded. Renat let out a sob, got on his knees in front of the cat—the way he did when pulling the heads off dandelions—and carefully pressed his forehead against the tiny skull.
“You are a strong boy, you won’t get away from us,” whispered Renat.
Methodius thought the same. He recovered, regained his health— yet he did not get a glass eye of his own.
“Only a human could have done this,” said Viola, gesticulating wildly. “Neither an animal nor a car could have damaged him so much. I don’t know where such cruelty comes from, gentlemen. But this must be a local, one of ours . . .”
Viola waited for the oppressive silence to thicken, scratching Methodius behind the ear. And then she continued coquettishly,
“The boy has been with us for eight years now. This is the second man in my life. He won’t let anyone offend me, my knight in shining armor,” with her bright-clawed hand she lifted the cat’s head, puckered her lips, and kissed the cat on the nose with a loud smack. Her voice is sweet, candied, with flies swimming in it. “Just like Renatie, isn’t it right, my kitten? Do you remember, honey, how I almost got kidnapped in Istanbul? Just in the middle of the day, at the market, in a crowd of people. Renatie was walking slightly ahead of me, I was a step behind him, having stopped to admire a lovely, unbelievable coral necklace— and suddenly some man, short, below average height, grabbed me by the arm and pulled. He seemed so small but held me so tightly I couldn’t pull myself free. He pushed me down some stairs, to some basement, opened the door—and then Renatie turned around, saw me and was next to me, my friends, was right next to me—and that man disappeared into thin air . . . Right, Renatie? I will never ever get away from you.”
Renatie was losing strength. With each passing day he felt that he was melting more and more into thin air, becoming semitransparent, like smoke from burnt grass. Sitting in a cool room, he listened to Viola outdoors continuing to imitate society life, greeting people cheerfully, her voice all sugar and honey, as always,
“I am just so happy to see you! Have you been well? Perhaps you could drop by our place for a glass of wine?”
Fortunately, no one dropped by. Viola bawled next to him, sobbing like a little girl, and he first tried to calm her down, stroking her head and promising never to die, and then, finally, barked at her and chased her away, for she did not calm down and only continued to wail in a thin voice of a little bird in a large, worn-out body.
Feeling offended, neglected, Viola for half the night darted back and forth through dark rooms, threw pillows and dishes, smoked on the sofa, drank from the bottle. And then, having grabbed in her palm an uneven quadrangle of broken mirror, she thickly put on lipstick, wiped the running mascara off her cheeks and quickly, in a determined fashion, left the house, shuffled over the gravel path, and disappeared into the forest, among the creaking melancholy pine trees that gently swayed like pendulums.
Soon the dispersed little blue lights started gathering around her. Viola passed by a gazebo filled with immobile hushed shadows. The path, paved with stones, led somewhere through the prickly thickets of sweetbrier. From someplace nearby came the musty, smothering scent of blossoming bird cherry; Viola’s head was spinning.
Nobody sat on the benches under the unlit streetlamps; plaster children with lidless, never-closing eyes rose on the pedestals. The clearing in front of the building was likewise empty—but from somewhere, God knows where, resounded the familiar indistinct melody: too-too-too-tah-too-too, an out-of-tune piano and an accordion.
Viola stopped in front of a broken fountain, its basin full of dry leaves, and picked at a piece of whitewash with her nail. The wide-open entry doors beckoned with their gaping orifice.
Empty hallways covered with smashed bricks breathed stuffy moisture. In the rooms, through the cracks in the floor and the walls, plants broke through, little twisted pines, ferns, lichens in puddles of stinky brownish water. Iron beds with nets, bent, sagging like a tired udder. Decomposed sheets, saturated with the stink of decay.
The melody sometimes quieted down, then again crackled at full volume, its tempo quickening. Somewhere a window frame creaked nervously—although at times it seemed to Viola this was a ball hitting the floor further up. In one of the rooms, it seemed that somebody wheezed or coughed in the corner. Viola started gazing into that direction till her eyes hurt, but the darkness only grew thicker and stuck back together, safely hiding everything behind itself.
Viola decided to follow the tune. She wandered for a long time, passed though the same gap in the wall several times, until she finally found herself in a large hall with rotted parquet floor, holes gaping in it here and there.
The accordion stood on a sports bench by the wall bars. Viola looked at the immobile instrument and continued to hear a melody. At the piano, with her back to the guest, sat a little stooping woman with curly hair. Her dark, shapeless clothes blended with the surrounding darkness, and only two pale arms, like empty sleeves of a white blouse, continued darting back and forth above the keyboard.
Viola closed her eyes and made the first step. Her body was light, weightless; she no longer felt her weight, forgot her clumsiness and exhaustion. It was as if there was no floor beneath her feet, it seemed to Viola she was swimming through the air, thick and tender, which carefully enveloped her, caressing her skin. The woman began spinning on an axis, a pleasant hum appeared in her head—no effort, but she spins like a top, and this makes her feel so cheerful, so joyful and light, that Viola couldn’t hold herself and burst into clear, loud laughter, delighting in its echoing all around.
Nearby, someone readily joined in her cheer. However, the laughter of those others was muffled, like a rustling. As if from all directions at once, plastic bags crept towards the woman in a bright dress who, forgetting herself, spun under the ceiling, her legs not touching the floor.
Sensing a dull pain near her neck, Viola opened her eyes. This boy, tall, abnormally thin, with an elongated face, with heavy lids weighing over his eyes, looked somehow familiar to her. He embraced her and led her into a dance, peering intently into her face. His bloodless lips were curled in a whining grimace. The boy held Viola tightly with his strong bony hands, so tightly that it was impossible to break out, there was no strength left even to breathe—much more tightly than the short Turk who once grabbed her elbow—and the spinning grew so fast that a vortex appeared around Viola, an icy whirlwind it was impossible to resist.
And when Viola’s pulse started beating so fast that in a moment it surely would fail—right at that moment resounded a mad, piercing, wild scream, and somebody small and fierce jumped at Viola’s partner and, twitching wildly, clawed and bit at the alien void of the gaping hole, up until the melody cut off, yelping with a torn string, and the accordion several times twitched convulsively, drooping halfway.
Renat woke in the middle of the night in an empty bed and, groaning heavily, got up on his feet. Viola was nowhere to be found. He passed one room after the other, the heart was beating anxiously, air came through the alveoli like through a dirty filter, the leg hurt as if white-hot knives had sliced it. But his baby was nowhere to be found—neither in the garden, nor on the path behind the fence. And Renat, the old diseased predator, dragged his hurting body into the pitch-dark space of the forest.
He gazed, feeling the path in front of him with a stick, passing the palm of his hand over the pine tree trunks. He looked up—the black treetops formed extravagant Baroque ornaments against the sky.
Viola sat on a pile of dry leaves, staring at the space in front of her. Next to her, Methodius lay, bloodied and exhausted, in an unnatural pose. From his throat came muffled wheezes.
“What’s with you, children, what’s with you again?” Renat dropped on his knees in front of them, sinking into the pine needles covering the forest floor. “Let’s go home.”
. . . Viola, the large white butterfly of a woman, sips sherry on the terrace. An opened tome of Pérez-Reverte [2] chills on the table nearby. Viola thinks: septic amber brings Sept-ember, and this, kids, is a no brainer. Viola, oh butterfly-brained woman. God, when will You let her go! When will You come to this Earth—it seems You did rise from the dead, right? Viola looks for miracles at the bottom of a greenish bottle. Her exhausted hips tremble, like a sandwich with toothpicks assembled; it seems, it was too much of a gamble: Viola, the lady bramble, Viola, an ear of grain . . .
“. . . And we’ll never ever leave each other,” said Renat, covering Viola with a blanket. The cat was lying nearby; its pink belly calmly rose and fell with breathing. “It’ll be time soon, kids.”
Notes
[1] Krasna Poliana, Poroskoten and Babka Valley are all places in Ukraine located west of Kyiv.
[2] Spanish novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte (b. 1951) is best known for his popular novels about the seventeenth-century Spanish soldier Captain Alatriste.