The Librarian

TANYA

EVEN AS A CHILD I imagined human life as a something similar to the cycle of the year and divided it up into months. January was white, swaddled infancy, February was early childhood, with its slow, half-frozen time, March and April were filled with school, and May was provisionally the time for college studies. At the age of twenty-seven I suddenly realized with bitter surprise that the June of my life was already approaching its end…

The people I always felt the greatest pity for were the “August women”. I pitied their fading heat, all their ripeness that was still so toothsome, that holiday-resort aura rapidly approaching its end. The tickets have already been bought for the train; in a day or two it will be time to fold up the sunshade, get dressed and leave the sunny beach of vigorous maturity to travel into September and the fifties, with a direct line from there into pension-book October and on into the endless winter, into the shroud and the grave of December, which accepts everyone “from eighty upward” into its geriatric group…

Tanya Miroshnikova was a typical “August woman”. That Tuesday I saw her as someone quite different, not in her crude disguise as a “dacha lady”, and not kitted out for combat. She had put on a peach-coloured dress—yellow and orange, warm August colours. A slim, well-proportioned woman with wonderful eyes—blue in the sunlight, green at sunset, and grey in gloomy weather. Tanya’s loose hair suited her very well—chestnut, with the glint of a wave in motion; if she gathered it into a ponytail, it brought out something touchingly monkey-like in her face. How old was she? Forty, probably. On her bulging, childish forehead three parallel wrinkles had appeared, almost deep enough to be fate lines. The large white pellets of her false pearls looked touching on her withering neck.

Tanya was a teacher; she taught physical education in a school. She had graduated from a teacher-training college. Tanya’s sporting career had only advanced as far as a first-level qualification in fencing, but this highly useful skill came in very handy for the Shironin reading room. Fifteen years earlier Tanya had had a botched abortion, after which she never fell pregnant again. Doctors and medicine didn’t help, and one day her husband left her. Tanya had been introduced to the reading room by a friend of her deceased mother. At that point Tanya was on the verge of suicide, and the tender-hearted woman spotted that just in time and gave Tanya the gift of a new life and a large family.

I’m sure my rapid acclimatization to the new place owed much to Tanya Miroshnikova’s wonderful female charm. She was an easy person to be with—always smiling, she made it easy to like her, and she knew how to listen. She always praised me and supported me, and simply loved me just the way I am: impressionable, nervous, far from the most courageous of men, with only the title: “librarian”…

I remember that on the Tuesday we spent together Tanya and I agreed to find a substitute for the chicken. We settled on fried potatoes and tinned fish. Tanya groused for a while, and then made me draw up a list of what I didn’t eat for the future—she was terribly upset when she saw that cabbage soup and jellied meat were both out of favour.

Marat Andreyevich left to go to work, and Tanya and I spent the whole morning sitting in the kitchen. She questioned me eagerly about my past. Unlike Timofei Stepanovich, she was absolutely delighted that I had studied to be a theatrical director. I told her about my old successes in the CJI, and she immediately started assuring me that she had seen me on the television, but I denied it. At the end Tanya exclaimed enthusiastically, “Alexei, you’re a creative individual!”

I suggested that she read the Book and she responded enthusiastically, although at first, out of politeness, she said that her job was to guard me, not to read the Book.

She withdrew into the bedroom. But I wandered aimlessly round the apartment, browsed through a novel by Pikul, starting from the middle, and then dozed. When I woke up, I looked through my uncle’s gramophone records and then picked up the phone. I tried calling home and got through on the third attempt, catching my mum in. I was already relatively calm, and my voice didn’t betray my anxiety. I told her as nonchalantly as I could that I would try to solve the problem of selling the apartment in the next two months—it couldn’t be done any quicker than that. Mum immediately started worrying if I had enough money and I assured her that life in the deep provinces was very cheap, that in general I liked the town and I had met some very warm-hearted people in the housing office who had promised to help me find a buyer. I lied, and my mum, entirely satisfied, asked me to keep my father and her informed about developments.

The moment I put down the receiver, Tanya came out of the bedroom. I was embarrassed, because I wasn’t sure if she had overheard my conversation, although of course it hadn’t touched on the interests of the reading room. But on taking a closer look at Tanya, I realized that she wasn’t concerned about trifles like that. Her pink, flushed face was set in an expression of radiant, tender rapture, directed inward. I observed this luminous, incomprehensible condition without moving, afraid to disturb it with a superfluous movement or word.

Tanya came close to me. The pupils of her slightly narrowed eyes were drifting in a disquieting sensuality, as if she had been exhausted by hours of lovemaking that was not corporeal, but fundamentally different in nature. Her mouth was half open and she was breathing in short sighs, swallowing them, so that her throat and her lips produced slightly sticky sounds, like a kiss separating. She spoke with a faint, provocative hoarseness in her voice: “Everything’s fine, Alexei…”

That night, when I reached out for my uncle’s porn magazines, to browse through them before I fell asleep, I realized that I could manage perfectly well with just that memory of Tanya.

And two weeks later, during her fourth watch, she told me at breakfast with stupefying directness: “Alexei, don’t take this the wrong way. You’re a young man, you need a woman, and there’s nothing shameful about that. It’s hard for you to be locked up like this. If you like, I… I promise you there wouldn’t be any problems with me. You’d feel better. It’s physiological, so it’s hard to fight it, and stupid to try. This probably all sounds vulgar… It’s just so that you can feel more comfortable. Just for the time being. When things calm down, you can date anyone you like. If I’ve shocked you or offended you, I’m sorry. I know I’m not exactly right for you—my age… and maybe you have a girl in Ukraine…”

I thanked her, embarrassed—“Thank you, Tanya…”—and prudently avoided accepting this offer.

The point was that literally only a few days earlier I had heard something similar from the youngest Vozglyakova sister, with the simple difference that she had acted quite directly and unequivocally. After informing me that before reading the Book she was always intensely agitated and began sweating, Veronika locked herself in the bathroom and emerged from it naked. Looking at her, I was prepared to change my disdainful attitude to voluptuous figures. The vision before me had the firm curves of a plaster Girl with an Oar in a Soviet park.

Glowing white and covered in sunny little drops, Veronika first bewailed my enforced solitude and assured me that she was willing to do everything she could for what she touchingly called my “male comfort”. As she spoke, Veronika dried herself with a bath towel, doing it with a quite inexpressible, artless prudery.

I cast an alarmed glance at the small, round apple-breasts, at the strong broad belly, at the wet curly cluster below Veronika’s mighty hips, but caution defeated temptation. I was sure that this was simply an attempt to bind me to the reading room with a woman.

I rather demurely changed the subject to my Uncle Maxim. This device worked, and Veronika immediately turned more serious and got dressed. Then she read the Book, and lost all interest in conversation.

The next morning Veronika Vozglyakova was relieved by Marat Andreyevich, and just before she left she whispered to me at the door that the offer to cater to my male “comfort” was still in force.