Mark Girshin
from The Seaweed Mattress

to my parents, Anna and Daniil

At first it had been my aunt’s room, and it had two things in it, an armchair and a stove. The tile stove, white to the ceiling, reflected the light from the window in such abundance that an air-soaked sun fluttered down the walls, maybe not as bright as outside, having lost its original July fury, but utterly alive, moving over the wallpaper when the wind rustled the wild grape leaves in our window.
    I nearly wrote that the armchair was leather, without thinking. But my aunt, like my mother, a druggist at the pharmacy who had gone to register at the labor exchange as unemployed, could not have bought a leather armchair from the apartment’s former mistress, who had “shared” it after the revolution. Oilcloth is another matter. For payment, say, some of what she owed this month, something more the next, and so forth. Why the armchair exactly? I think because an armchair signifies comfort, especially by a stove in winter. A hot tile stove and next to it a black oilcloth armchair, dingy, seeming to swallow the light, not very big, low-slung, perfect for that small room. There must have been something else in my aunt’s room, but for me, no sooner had I raced through the door, if someone had left it open, than I saw only two things there: the stove pulling down a mass of light and that armchair. That was all. I remember the armchair very well. Underneath, it had almost imperceptible casters for rolling it across the floor, but by then they had stopped turning, so stiff were they from all the varnish stuck inside, and its plump upholstery was tacked on by deeply sunk nails that had shreds of oilcloth on their heads.
    A copper nameplate hung on the door of our communal apartment, from its old inhabitants up until the war: “The Shchedroviches.” Spelled with the old orthography. The door to another apartment with another name, “The Bokls,” shared the landing.

    The balcony was in another room, across the hall from my aunt’s, and that’s where our family lived. The balcony was semicircular, with a paunchy, concave grille, and it hung over acacia branches you could see the street through in patches. Above the balcony was a mass of blue air that coalesced into cool shadow under the cornice but was white higher up, above the roof, where nothing protected the blue air from the sun. An impression of soaring: you could stand just like that, on the balcony, in that air, or drift like the birds flying by.
    But touching the balcony’s rust-scratchy enclosure suddenly destroys my sense of oneness with my environment, my dissolution in it, instantly erecting a distressing boundary. The child sobs inconsolably. Everyone thinks his tears are from the rust sticking to him, poking into the skin of his sweaty palm, wounding it. No one knows he has had his ability to be an object, light, a bird, taken away—an illusion given him by the balcony.
    Mama and someone else, maybe my aunt or a guest, bend over me in the room and shake the rust from my hand, and everyone is oddly young. The noise from the street rushes through the open balcony door and the scent of acacia floats in. The sun falls slantwise in a hot stream, and in it everything is bright: my hands, the chestnut-colored parquet, the brightly shining air. There is such a lot of air, and a draft lifts the curtain. Something colorful, overflowing, a froth of spring.

    I am eating cream of wheat from a mug.     A gray enamel mug. The cream of wheat is gray, too. The sugar sprinkled on the hot cereal dissolves into sweet white puddles on its surface.
    I collect this liquid with my spoon, trying not to bring up any cereal. In my field of vision, too, are our housemaid Dusya’s bare feet, black between the toes.
    Obviously I am on the floor and she has brought me the cereal.
    Mama hires Dusya when she is lucky and finds temporary work. Dusya lives in our apartment, on the mezzanine over the kitchen. I haven’t been there yet. It’s very far away.

    The colorful shop window lights the green iron column that holds up the streetcar cables. Empty cabs drive by slowly; a driver wearing a canvas apron with a metal badge dozes sideways in his box. The streetcar rings merrily. Above me the faces of passersby keep changing, and the walls of a building with yellow windows retreat upward into the dark sky.
    I am here for the first time, and it’s another world. The child’s obstinacy annoys the grown-ups; he won’t leave. What can there be of interest on this sidewalk?
    But there are white seashells visible in it and brown beach pebbles; it’s brown from sea sand.
    I try to pry one of the shells out of the sidewalk. It’s lying almost on the surface. But something is holding it tight.
    Mama jerks me away and leads me through the nearest passage into an unfamiliar courtyard to wash my hands under the building’s tap.

    A white marble staircase in the front hall, the final flight from the first floor landing to the street.     I am walking down, placing both feet on each step. Next to me the wall is patterns and flowers of bright colors, from which the corbels that hold up the railings poke. These corbels are not plain. A twisted metal stalk, a tulip cup covered with a thick layer of dust; in it white cigarette butts.
    It must have just been winter because with the coming of warmth my impression of the staircase is different. Especially the coolness from the white marble steps, which still seemed to breathe snow, a coolness felt by my bare feet, finally free of winter stockings, then the humid draft roaming through the booming lobby from the tall, wide open Venetian windows, filling my soul with happy anticipation. I’m bristling to get downstairs as quickly as possible, to the yard, which is still shut off from the morning sun by the wing walls stretching upward. The filler rocks are damp with dew, the stone used to pave the courtyard is dark. When the sun dries it out, it will be gray and yellow.
    The courtyard wasn’t paved solid with this stone, one stone abutting another, like the paths on Cathedral Square or in the Municipal Garden near Deribasovskaya Street, just on the edges and the walkways and only so that your feet didn’t get stuck in the bad weather and to prevent mud. In the summer, grass grew between those rocks; the yard was green, and tall weeds sprouted near the solid walls and in the secluded corners, so tall that they cast a drab scabrous color on our heads. Next to the north wing’s walls, where no sun fell, swamp-colored moss grew right under the window of little Ilya.
    I remember his olive face and burning eyes. Usually he sat on the windowsill. We played under his window. He was older, about ten. I think he looked down on our games. The words “engineer” and “details” suddenly flash into my mind. Those words came from him. Heaped on the windowsill were metal strips of various configurations with holes for bolts, wheels, axles, and angle bars—his parents brought them so he wouldn’t be bored.
    When he got tired of us he would go back to building something with them. A lift crane. A truck. “Engineer” was a popular amusement in those days.
    Then Ilya disappeared. But his window, where the sun never shone, reminded me of him for a long time afterward. Of his illness.
    There was always a spectacle to witness from the front staircase in the spring, in April. In April we had verbokhlyost. I’ll explain what that means. Though it’s not hard to guess. At Easter, vendors brought pussy willows to the markets and streets. Children lashed each other about the legs with them. Everyone was stockingless by then, wearing short pants with shoulder straps, short dresses, anklets, which people in Odessa called karpetki, and sandals. The lashings hurt a lot and left red stripes, sometimes even dried droplets of blood if the attacker broke the skin dragging the pussy willow across. It was exciting. Chase, hit, flee. When you struck someone you had to shout, “Verbokhlyost!” It was a kind of apology; that was the custom, they said. It barely hurt. We raced around the yard and through the courtyard entrance to the street, our hearts pounding.

    Laundry began with laundry soap. Big gray or brown pieces of laundry soap with grains of what looked like salt on the surface. And a sharp smell that made your eyes water. That smell excites me.
    The soap is lying on the bundle of dirty linen made ready for Yegorovna the laundress. She’s supposed to take it downstairs, to the laundry room.
    I linger near the bundle and wait for Yegorovna. I eye the soap. Something’s written on it in raised letters. Yegorovna comes and carries off the linen bundle.
    Soon Mama sends me to take the bluing to Yegorovna in the building’s laundry room. A wet cement floor and warm drops falling from the ceiling. A red fire dances under the big copper vat in which the linens are being boiled. And in this steam, big bony Yegorovna, leaning over the washtub. Hair stuck to her face. Looking like Baba Yaga from the fairy tale.
    “Set it here!” Yegorovna barks.
    I don’t recognize her voice, which is always so welcoming. I’m afraid. I throw down the bundle of bluing and run away.

    In the building at the corner of our street and Cathedral Square, an iron staircase with openwork steps led to the mezzanine and a walled-up door. Which is why no one used the staircase.
    Vasya the street kid lived under that staircase.
    On our way to the boulevard for a walk we go past the staircase. My parents give me a heavy copper coin and tell me to take it to Vasya.
    I proceed hesitantly. Vasya’s face looks strange to me: dark brown with white stripes of eyelids. Like a mask. I throw down the money and run to my parents.
    The thick brown color must have been the dust and dirt caked on his skin. The real color of his face must have been the greenish hungry pale color of his eyelids.
    Near the opera theater, not far from the boulevard, there is an enormous rust-colored kettle. My father picks me up to show me its black insides. It’s tar, and during the day they boil it there to asphalt the sidewalk. The kettle still hasn’t cooled, and it’s hot standing next to it.
    We walk on. I hear that little Vasya sleeps in a kettle like this in winter, so as not to freeze to death.
    I see nothing tragic in this. I want to sleep there, too.

    Aunt Dora and her husband Yevgeny Isaevich are visiting us. They have come from somewhere and brought their daughter Faina.
    She’s lying in the middle of the ottoman wrapped in pink. I examine her from afar. She can’t talk yet, and I’m not allowed to touch her.
    In the evening we go for a stroll. We stop in at the pharmacy. Behind the counter, which reflects the electric light, is a plump, white-faced woman with blue eyes and blond hair. She is our relative, too. They have a lively conversation with her and joke.
    We leave the pharmacy. I hear their ecstatic voices: “Catherine the Great!”
    But Catherine the Great is standing on the square wearing an iron mantle. We always walk by her on our way to the boulevard. She is black and the woman in the pharmacy doesn’t look anything like her. It’s some kind of mistake.

    Under me is a horse’s broad dusty croup and far below is the ground. They have put me in the carter’s seat while the carter and Papa carry our things out in the courtyard and stack them on the horse-drawn skid to go to the dacha.
    The dacha is a big, lonely, three-story house on Zhivakhovaya Hill. Mama has rented a room here; the employment exchange has sent her to work in a pharmacy outside of town for the summer.
    Growing near the pharmacy are the violet “tobacco” flowers, which have rainbow water droplets after watering and a pungent scent at sunset.
    In the steppe near the lake there is an abandoned locomotive. The grass has grown up in such profusion that you can’t see the rails in it at all, just the rusty wheels’ top halves.
    The dacha is also the Lake Kuyalnitskoye streetcar station. We go from here to meet Mama after work. Papa picks me up in his arms and runs for the approaching streetcar, to hop up on the step and take a seat before the streetcar reaches the stop.
    No sooner are we in the empty streetcar than it drives into a scary, shouting crowd, and passengers red from the beach tumble on in bunches. They rush to take window seats on the shady side, where we’re already sitting.
    I watch with interest as they take flying leaps and plop down on the benches.

    The figure of a warrior in armor and helmet and holding a halberd greets me and Mama in the Red Army House vestibule. We walk past that warrior to the kindergarten. Everything there is bright and everything smells new: the wallpaper, the blocks, the furniture. It’s obvious the kindergarten only just opened. My memory of it even retains the poster: “Let Vrangel have it!” with a Red Army bayonet pointing at the fleeing admiral’s back.
    Now I understand what this was about. The 51st Perekop Division, Vrangel’s vanquishers, had been stationed in Odessa. At home they said this was Papa’s division.
    During our walk with our teacher, a new impression: a crazy woman. She has a gaunt face and hanks of gray hair. She is walking very quickly down the sidewalk and talking to someone nonstop. As she passes us, she throws a rag on the side of the road, then picks it up. Maybe she thought she was leaving it for her daughter to play with.
    Once our eyes met, and I turned away immediately; her eyes flung such madness.

    Mama and I are riding somewhere in a cab. On the narrow dacha lane, our droshky encounters what was at the time a rare truck. Neither the driver nor our cabbie wants to back up to clear the way. They get down, face each other, and start shouting.
    The horse has it the worst. It keeps jerking its head because the hot radiator is thrust in its face and is emitting a stream of steam.

    There’s a bookstore at the corner of Deribasovskaya Street, in the Passage Building.     Mama takes me there to buy a primer, Native Speech. It has lots of color illustrations. The capital letters are in color, too. The broad pages smell of fresh printers’ ink. I press them to my face to breathe my fill. And I go home with Mama like that, stumbling, stopping, the open primer in both hands.
    “Never hold a book that close,” Mama admonishes. “You’ll ruin your eyes.”
    But I don’t want to read the primer, only breathe in its smell. Mama just doesn’t understand!
    Mama needs to get to her shift at the pharmacy in time. She takes away my primer so I’ll walk faster.

    Now a few more minutes.     It’s a gray winter’s day. I’m playing on the floor next to the warm stove. Warm not just from the tiles. There’s also a Grets—an oil stove with two wicks—going on the floor. Through its mica window I can see the red-black flame silently flickering on the wide wicks.
    Mama has been baking bread in the Grets’s firebox.
    She puts a plate with a freshly sliced heel of steaming bread on the floor in front of me. I look at the gray porous heel and don’t feel the least bit hungry. The red window in the Grets reminds me of a picture from my book of fairy tales.
    Outside the tall window, in the murky air, fluffy snow twirls, and from time to time even swirls up.

    One day I had a toothache. For the first time in my life. It was incredibly awful. I couldn’t stop crying and wailing. Everyone around me, people and objects, disappeared, swallowed up by the pain.
    Lipovetsky, the husband of Mama’s friend, was a dentist. Mama took me to see him. Fortunately, the doctor was home.
    He put me in the chair and did something to my tooth. And the pain passed very quickly.
    I was immediately distracted by my surroundings. Dr. Lipovetsky had a round head, blue shaven cheeks and chin, and thick red lips. He had a boy’s haircut, with a forelock. A thick dark forelock with threads of gray on his puffy white brow. Mama’s friend resembled him: stout and dark with red lips.
    I remember feeling uncomfortable; Mama was probably offering them money and the Lipovetskys were refusing. There was something humiliating about Mama’s friend leading us out of the room toward the door past the large dining room table covered with a tablecloth, with identical chairs in canvas slipcovers. “Don’t be silly, Anyuta.”
    As we were going home, a sign fell on us. A strong wind had ripped it from the wall of a building, over a store.
    Fortunately, the sign was tin and relatively light, and the air current dropped it on us flatwise. Still, we fell on the sidewalk and I scraped my arm. A cheerful accident.

    When I fell ill, Mama went to get Dr. Tumarkin. He lived across the street.
    The doctor was broad and wore a roomy suit with bulging pockets from which at the beginning of the examination he extracted a stethoscope and at the end a piece of hard candy. The candy smelled of mint, and to this day that smell reminds me of my heatsuffused head, pain in my eyes and throat, a stuffy nose, and a cough.
    But one day Tumarkin returned a teaspoon to Mama that he had used to examine my throat, lifted the shirt over my chest, where I had several pink papulae, and said, “It’s scarlet fever, Madam.”
    I was taken to Kherson hospital.
    It was summer. The large window that ran the full length of the wall in the ward was green from the overgrown bushes. Once I saw Papa in that window. He had brought me cherries in a paper bag.
    A boy in our ward was visited by his divorced papa and mama, who argued right there at the window if they happened to arrive at the same time. And we listened.
    But the big event was rounds.
    A crowd of people wearing white coats came into the ward led by the chief physician, Sokolsky. They went from bed to bed to see the patients. Here and there they lingered, and each one, beginning with Sokolsky, listened to the patient and then a discussion followed in hushed voices. After which stethoscopes were frequently taken out again and a new discussion began. Or else Sokolsky would run a finger over the flaking skin, a sign of recovery, give the patient a wink, and the crowd would flood away from the bed, their coats rustling.
    The chief physician liked children. We sang a song: “...and our Sokolsky is a kind doctor.” It was passed on from those who were recovering to the new admissions.
    But even those recuperating were forbidden to get out of bed, to prevent any heart complications. The doctors and nurses were always afraid of heart complications, but despite this, when there were no adults there, we ran around the ward, feeling the coolness of the tile floor on our bare feet.

    When they let me out of the hospital, I spent a lot of time at home by the window. I still wasn’t allowed to go out. And in that time I studied our courtyard very well.
    To one side of my window a wing wall rose upward. In the morning the plaster was covered in dark spots of damp. If you looked closely, they started resembling the shapes of people and animals.
    By noon, when the sun had dried out the wing, the wall was uniformly yellow, leaving nothing of interest. The only thing that livened it up was the wild grapevine, with its green leaves and inky black berries, that climbed roofward to a height of several stories. The grapevine clung to the naked wall by its sturdy tendrils, which it sank into the cracks in the plaster.
    By noon, when the sun had dried out the wing, the wall was uniformly yellow, leaving nothing of interest. The only thing that livened it up was the wild grapevine, with its green leaves and inky black berries, that climbed roofward to a height of several stories. The grapevine clung to the naked wall by its sturdy tendrils, which it sank into the cracks in the plaster.
    The grapevine stretched up over the walls of all three of the courtyard’s wings, solidly entwining the balconies, even from above, so they looked like large green nests.
    Such was the balcony in the apartment below ours, where I had gone before my scarlet fever to play with the little girl, Nelya. In the noonday heat, shadow reigned here, there was the smell of sun-warmed greenery, and the cement floor stayed cool. Lyodik, a boy from our courtyard, used to go there with me.
    When I came back from the hospital, I found out that Lyodik had come down with scarlet fever, too, and now he was in the hospital. The days passed, and with them the news got worse and worse: heart complications; he’s better, no, worse; they’re giving him an oxygen bag to breathe. And finally, the last news: Lyodik had died.
    Such a terrible disease was scarlet fever in those days.
    Everyone sighed, bewildered that this could have happened. Lyodik had been so healthy, with ruddy cheeks, the object of envy for all the mamas on our courtyard.
    In those days, from my window I saw Lyodik’s mama walk through the courtyard to the street with a black veil lowered over her forehead from her hat; this unusual attire was explained by the fact that she was an actress. The residents rushed to greet her out of respect for her grief.
    But then everything went back to normal, and one of the neighbors was already shouting to her by the courtyard faucet. But I felt awkward when I met Lyodik’s mama in the courtyard.

    After demobilization, my father took me out of the Red Army House kindergarten and gave me to a German Froebelian. Her name was Amalia Frantsevna.
    I remember her broad, bony face, delicate mouth, deep-set eyes, and long blouse with bugle beads. Also her large umbrella, black, with a mother-of-pearl handle.
    In her garret the small square window began at the floor. The ceiling came all the way down to it. The window seemed like a way out, but a folding wooden grate barred access. Below window level you could see the roof of the next building.
    It was with her that I drank coffee for the first time. The Froebelian’s little room was permeated by its smell. And you had to finish the last of your soup by tilting the plate away from, not toward yourself. (It might spill on your lap!) These two things I learned thanks to Amalia Frantsevna.
    For our walk, she takes us to Cathedral Square. Here we are on noisy narrow Sadovaya Street with its streetcar, each of us children has a lunch basket on a strap across his shoulder, and we’re holding one another’s hands tightly so we won’t get lost in the crowd of pedestrians. Amalia Frantsevna is in the middle.
    But we can’t make any progress like that, in a rank, taking up nearly the whole sidewalk; we keep getting bumped into by the heavy baskets of the housewives and their maids returning from NEP’s still abundant New Bazaar, and we bunch up helplessly around our dear Froebelian.
    At last we arrive at the square and Amalia Frantsevna, relieves herself of the net bags containing our balls, our jackets, and so on and hangs them on the back of the bench; she takes up the entire bench. We are allowed to play near the bench and collect chestnuts. We are allowed to move a few steps away to look at the massive monument to Vorontsov but not to swing the heavy, decorative chains at the monument’s base or to climb the slippery granite pedestal. This is where we eat the lunch we brought along, usually a butter sandwich and a cutlet or omelets and fruit salad in a jar. To do this we have to climb on to the bench and sit without swinging our legs or talking. “Ruhe!” Amalia Frantsevna claps her dry hands.
    After lunch she reads us funny stories featuring the rascals Max and Moritz or The Adventures of Baron von Munchhausen. The reading is frequently interrupted so that we can look at the illustrations. The large, well-read book passes from lap to lap.
    When quiet time comes, we return to the garret. And there, on her maidenly bed with the painted iron bedstead, and on her trunk, Amalia Frantseva puts us down for a nap. Crosswise. After which follows the already mentioned zuppe, and if it isn’t raining, back to Cathedral Square, where our parents pick us up.
    The garret doors opened out onto a long wooden gallery with many other doors, beside each of which was a small table or stool, or even a chair with a primus stove or a Grets, a pail or kettle of water for heating, and a mug for washing. Clotheslines were attached to the column propping up the gallery overhang. And on the walls hung zinc washtubs, all kinds of domestic things, old and of no value, for instance, a cap with a broken visor so the cardboard showed through. There was even a poster, obviously nailed up by the house manager: a green military biplane with trusses between the fragile wings and a threatening fist instead of a propeller. On the fist was a hammer and sickle.
    The gallery seethes with adults and children. Voices, shouts, the hum of primuses, a husky gramophone playing somewhere. It smells of dust from the old wood and kerosene, and through the railing, way down, you can see the courtyard. The railings are hot from the sun. A boy I don’t know is coming toward me carrying a bow and arrow, my longtime dream. I immediately ask him if I can hold it.
    But right then Amalia Frantsevna’s stern voice rings out, and I hurry to her. I’m sorry I didn’t get to hold the bow and arrow, but I don’t dare disobey.

    But now Amalia Frantsevna has gone off and disappeared. I’m left to play all day long in the courtyard. It’s noisy and interesting here, and outsiders come often, looking up at the windows and shouting in work-weary voices, “Bot-tles! We buy old things, bottles. We buy old boots and clothes.”
    There is an old man with a sack on his back.
    “Windows! Who needs a window put in? Windows put in with putty.”
    The glazier carries a tall narrow box of windows on his shoulder.
    Or: “Mattresses! We fix mattress springs. We retie springs.”
    And here’s one pushing an old pram on tall wheels. He’s got everything he needs for repairs there.
    One day mama calls to the reupholsterer to come up to our place. He examines our mattress, straps it on, and that short, bow-legged man carries it out into the courtyard without any special effort. There he rests the broad, almost square mattress on four chairs and sets to work.
    First, he tears off the old cover, which the springs have poked through, and spreads it out on the ground. Then he carefully collects the brown seaweed from the mattress and spreads that on the cover. Seaweed was preferred to soft batting. But even in our city by the sea seaweed was hard to come by.
    In the cloud of dust from the mattress you can see the springs and the snatches of worn rope. Once those springs were closely tied and propped up the cover. Now many of them lie on their side. No surprise the mattress is full of pits and no one can sleep on it anymore.
    The work goes on all day. In that time the reupholsterer moves the mattress and chairs from sun to shadow several times.
    By the time the residents are coming home from work, at the end of the day, he has already attached a new cover, pulling nails from his mouth. The mattress, as plump as a stuffed pillow, gleams with its new striped cover fabric. It even smells fresh, like linen just taken off the line.
    It is so tempting to take a running leap onto the mattress and jump on it. But the reupholsterer will not let us, of course. He does, however, allow us to stand very close and watch him finish up his work. We may even rest our heads on the mattress to feel what sleeping on it will be like.
    Papa comes home from work, too, and helps the reupholsterer carry the mattress and chairs back upstairs. The reupholsterer collects his hammer, pliers, and can of nails in his pram and does not forget the old cover and curls of broken springs. And he and his squeaky pram set out from the courtyard. I walk him all the way to the gate. Our reupholsterer!

Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz

This has been an excerpt from “The Seaweed Mattress”; the work continues in Subtropics 9. [Read an interview with Mark Girshin, in English or Russian.]