"Is Grigory at Home?"

March 9, 2020

On Monday Grisha came with an idea.

Ideas came to Grisha rarely, and each time it could be seen from afar: he came down the stairs not as usual but more slowly, and his face was concentrated, as though he were carrying in his head a saucepan filled to the brim and was afraid of spilling it. In this state he came into the shop, hung his jacket on the nail and, without taking up the bucket, said into the curtain:

"Master. What if it's me after all?"

"What's you?" asked Kesha, though he understood at once what he meant.

"Well, him. In the coat. What if he's looking for me after all?" Grisha spoke quickly, hurrying to tip it all out before he forgot. "He asked, 'Is Grigory at home.' And here I am. I'm Grigory. And him saying 'another' — well, maybe he mixed me up with somebody. Maybe he thought I was older. Or shorter. Or… well, I don't know. But really it's me. Maybe he's got some business for me."

"What business could he have with you?"

Grisha thought.

"An inheritance," he said.

Behind the curtain Kesha closed his eyes.

"Well, why not?" Grisha seemed offended. "It happens. I read about it on the internet. A man like that comes, in a coat, and says: your second cousin's grandad in America has died and left you a million. And you never even knew you had a grandad in America. And these coins," — he nodded at the table — "maybe they're… a deposit."

"Grisha," said Kesha. "Wash the floor."

"I'm washing it," said Grisha. But, filling the bucket, he was still muttering to himself: "Well, it happens…"

---

Kesha did not explain anything to him. And what was there to explain? That the man in the coat had come not for Grisha but for Grandpa? Grisha would ask: which grandpa? Yours? But he's dead. And Kesha would say: yes, he's dead. And Grisha would ask: then why did he come? And Kesha would not know what to answer.

He did not know. He only felt, and what he felt was no good for explanations.

All day he worked — five clients, as was proper — and between clients went to the window and looked at the tower. There was nobody by the tower. Only a crow — perhaps the same one as yesterday, perhaps another — sat on the cornice and also, it seemed to Kesha, looked down at the shop window.

One of the five had the twenty-second flooded with a blot. A young lad, a taxi driver, "Purse." Kesha wrote him "Caution" — added it to the same parchment in small writing at the bottom: "On the twenty-second don't go out on your shift. Stay at home. Don't answer if someone calls you by name." The taxi driver read it, snorted, stuffed the parchment in his pocket and drove off in his car — Kesha heard him rev the engine upstairs by the entrance.

Six. Six with a blot.

Our weather in March behaves like a capricious daughter-in-law who first agrees to everything and then suddenly, for no reason at all, slams the door: for a week the roofs drip, last year's rubbish crawls out from under the snow in the yards, cats yowl on the sheds, old women take off their felt boots and put on galoshes — and suddenly in a single night everything is buried so deep that in the morning Uncle Pasha the yardman comes out with his shovel, looks at the drifts, says something that can't be written in a book, and goes back home. On the radio on such days they announce that "conditions on the region's roads are difficult," but we put it more simply: "again."

By evening the snow was pouring down. Not March snow — wet and lazy — but real winter snow, thick and heavy, as though winter, already almost gone, had suddenly come back for something it had forgotten. It fell and fell, and by six o'clock Krivaya had disappeared under white, and the cars up above were skidding and roaring, and the streetlights stood in the snow as in milk.

Grisha, getting ready to go home, looked at his phone and said:

"The marshrutkas aren't running."

"At all?"

"It says a lorry's gone into the ditch on the Northern bypass, they've closed everything. Till morning."

"A taxi?"

"Eight silvers to ours." Grisha scratched his ear in embarrassment. "That's like 'The Main Day.'"

Kesha was silent for a moment.

"And your mum?"

"Mum's on shift," said Grisha. "She's an orderly at the regional hospital. On nights today. It's all the same to her where I am." He thought. "Well, not all the same, of course. But she's not at home."

Kesha understood where this was going and did not like it. Grisha sometimes spent the night in the shop — three times, maybe four, in six months: when he stayed late cleaning, when the marshrutkas had stopped running, when his mother was on shift. He would put up the camp bed by the wall, behind the client's table, cover himself with his jacket and sleep like a log till morning, and in the morning, at the crack of dawn, get up and wash the floor. Kesha did not object: Grisha did not get in the way — he slept quietly, didn't snore, didn't touch anything, and in the morning the shop greeted the master with a floor so clean you could almost see your reflection in it, and smelled of household soap and the tea that Grisha managed to brew by seven.

But today Kesha did not want it. He did not know why himself. Perhaps because Grisha was Grigory. Perhaps because all day a man who asked for Grigory had stood by the tower. Perhaps because of Grandpa's rule, which these last days kept turning over in his head: "Whoever sleeps under one roof with you — don't read them."

But to throw Grisha out into a blizzard, into the night, onto a closed bypass — that Kesha could not do.

"Put up the camp bed," he said.

---

A night in the shop was almost a festive occasion for Grisha, like a camping trip with an overnight stay, which, as later emerged, he had dreamed of all through his childhood and had never once been taken on, because they took on camping trips the boys who could put up a tent, and Grisha could only wash floors. He unfolded the camp bed with the solemnity with which some people lay out a game of patience, wedged bits of cardboard under the legs so it wouldn't creak, and spread his jacket on it as carefully as if it were not a jacket but a hotel sheet.

The evening passed quietly. Grisha put up the camp bed, went upstairs to the all-night kiosk for pelmeni, boiled them on Kesha's hotplate in the back room and brought Kesha a plate behind the curtain — with sour cream, the way Kesha liked it. He himself ate at the client's table, on the stool, and when he had eaten sat a long time looking out of the window at the snow.

"Master," he said through the curtain, "why did they call you Kesha?"

Kesha raised his head from his book.

"I don't know. My father wanted it, probably. Or my mother. I don't remember them."

"Ah," said Grisha. "My mum named me. I asked — why Grisha. She says — no reason. She just felt like it." He was silent for a moment. "Only she says it sort of strangely. Like it wasn't for no reason."

"Strangely how?"

"Well," Grisha searched for words, "you know how people say it when they don't want to say. 'No reason.' And looks away. And then straight off: 'Go on, Grisha, take the rubbish out.'" He shrugged. "So I don't ask any more."

Kesha looked at the curtain, behind which Grisha sat, and said nothing.

"Well, good night, master," said Grisha.

"Good night."

Grisha lay down. The camp bed creaked under him and fell silent. Five minutes later — Kesha could hear — his breathing became even and deep, like that of a man who has fallen asleep at once and soundly, without dreams.

Kesha did not go to bed. He sat at the desk under the green lamp with a book he was not reading. Outside the snow fell and fell. The tin on the tower did not bang — the snow must have buried it. Even the dripping behind the wall, in the neighbouring cellar, could hardly be heard today — as though everything there had frozen too.

There was a silence such as Kesha did not remember. Dense, woolly, like the snow outside.

At about one in the morning he put out the lamp and went into the back room. He lay down on the bed without undressing — these last nights he had somehow stopped undressing — and lay looking into the darkness.

Grandpa's trunk stood at the head of the bed. Kesha had put back into it everything he had taken out — the clothes, the pipe, the photograph — except the notebook. The notebook lay on the shelf above the bed, and Kesha felt it there in the dark, the way you feel someone's gaze.

He did not remember falling asleep. He must have fallen asleep, though, because later — he woke up.

---

About people who talk in their sleep we have a whole science, which old women pass on to their granddaughters together with the recipe for jellied meat. You mustn't wake someone talking in their sleep — the soul, they say, won't have time to get back; you mustn't answer them — it won't be them who talks to you; and if you want to know who they're dreaming of, you have to take them by the little finger of the left hand and ask in a whisper — then they'll tell the truth. Granny Tosya from Oktyabrskaya swore she had found out about her husband's mistress that way, but by then she had had no husband for ten years or so, so there was no need to believe her. Kesha did not know this science and learned of it much later; that night he simply lay and listened.

He woke because someone was talking.

The voice came from the shop, from beyond the back-room door, from behind the green curtain. Quiet, mumbling, sleepy. Kesha lay without moving and listened.

It was Grisha. Grisha was talking in his sleep.

Kesha had heard people talk in their sleep before: in the hospital where he lay with pneumonia, the man in the next bed called all night for someone, some Lyuda. It was indistinct and plaintive, and Kesha had lain awake half the night. Grisha mumbled the same way — indistinctly, in scraps — and at first Kesha could not make out a single word. Then he began to catch individual ones: "…mum…", "…but I'm telling you…", "…don't…"

Then Grisha fell silent. Kesha had already decided that was all — and then the voice began again.

Only now it was a different voice.

No — the voice was Grisha's own, breaking, boyish. But it did not speak the same way. Not the way Grisha speaks — hurriedly, stumbling, with his "well" and "like." It spoke slowly. Drawlingly. Sing-song. With long vowels, with a soft "h" for "g" that Grisha had never had — the way old men speak somewhere far to the south, in the villages.

And Kesha made out the words. Every one of them.

"Sleep, little grandson," said Grisha's voice in the dark. "Hands under your cheek. Shchob nikhto ne pidhliadiv — so nobody peeks."

Kesha stopped breathing.

He knew those words. He had heard them every evening — every evening of his childhood, until he was about ten, when he began to consider himself too grown-up to be put to bed. Grandpa would sit on the edge of the bed, big, warm, smelling of tobacco, lay his enormous palm on Kesha's head and say: "Sleep, little grandson. Hands under your cheek. Shchob nikhto ne pidhliadiv." And Kesha, falling asleep, would put his palms under his cheek, hide them — so that nobody would peek.

Nobody else knew it. Nobody. Grandpa said it only to him, only at night, only in that room — and Kesha had never, not once in his life, told anyone. There was no one to tell.

And Grisha — Grisha, who was born four years before Grandpa's death and had never set eyes on him — Grisha had just said it. In Grandpa's words. With Grandpa's accent. In Grandpa's slow, drawling voice, through which, as through clouded glass, his own boyish one showed.

The shop went quiet.

Kesha lay in the dark and could not move. His heart was pounding so hard that it seemed it could be heard in the neighbouring cellar. He lay and waited — for another word, another sound — and there was nothing. Only the even, deep breathing of a sleeping person behind the curtain.

And then Kesha — without thinking, without understanding what he was doing — slowly, as in childhood, put both palms under his cheek.

And lay like that till morning.