Fourteen Weeks of Silence

1. The silence has returned to Mitya Zhukovsky's brain. It starts as a bad day, a long night – the old man from the upstairs apartment is banging on the thinly-carpeted floor for quiet and Irena is angry, throwing things. There is a tiny explosion, painless, in the side of his head, and the briefest flickering of red from just beyond the curve of his vision, and suddenly he can’t hear. He sits at the kitchen table and watches Irena scream, dash her mother's ceramic icons against the metal sink; her fingers are in his face, stiff and accusatory. He doesn’t hear a thing. In the curious numbness which follows, hollow and even as a winter morning - 3am when the snow's still falling - Irena flings his books from the table. They go flying to meet the wall - the only time Milton's words will ever soar, he thinks - and just like that the pressure is back and the explosion implodes, the red blanches to white and he is right back where he started. He stands up abruptly, snatching at an elbow, catches fingernails and hair and hits Irena. He hears the slap. Solid and clean as ice. She falls back hard against the kitchen counter. It is the only time Irena will ever soar. He holds the side of his head and watches the bruise bloom on her cheek. "Say something," he rasps. Her lips are locked behind her fingers, stifling tears. "Say something."He stares at her, wild-eyed. He needs to know that he can hear. She won’t, but he knows that he’s still alive when she wanders to the other end of the kitchen and, crying audibly, begins to pick at pieces of broken china.

2. The second time it happens: Moscow. Late December. Vitaly has dragged all three of them to a political rally and they stand about in the square getting jostled and spat upon by the armed guards who hold the crowd back from the thoroughfare. Sascha looks down, smearing away a string of snot with two fingers of his leather glove and glances up again, wide-set blue eyes betrayed and disgusted. "Fucking freezing," he says. ‘Why the fuck are we out here when it's so fucking freezing?" Mitya doesn’t know, and says so. Vitaly is waving a cigarette at them, trying to talk over Sascha's incessant swearing. And then the star explodes in Mitya's left temple and he stands there with his hands dredging the pockets of his overcoat, with no one to tell. He hears nothing. Kiril holds his face in his hands and says nothing: tears freeze on his emotionless cheeks and slip into the hollow between sealed lips.

3. Mitya Zhukovsky lives with Irena Kaminsky. They love each other, but they hurt each other constantly. She wants to be married. Once, he buys her a ring, but ends up throwing it in the river before he makes it back to the apartment. He is glad that he is unable to hear her cheerful, incessant chatter all that everlasting long night. But he nods and shrugs at all the right moments, and she isn't angry the next morning, so he imagines she hasn't noticed. Secretly, he is glad that he threw away the ring.

4. On Sunday night, everyone comes over and gets drunk with their boots up on Irena’s sofa. The table holds five glasses and a cheap bottle of harsh Ukrainian vodka which Irena doles out with great ceremony. She can drink like a sailor. So can Sascha. He keeps sliding his arm around Irena and trying to kiss her neck while she squirms and pretends not to enjoy the attention. Mitya does not react. Men and women flirting is simply an arrangement found in the natural order of societies, even sexless communist ones. Vitaly is hunched over the table in earnest, black Balkan eyes roving. He is trying to impress upon them the incredible gravity of last week’s military rally in Red Square: “…not the ideology,” he keeps saying, “it’s not the ideology that matters, it’s the cult of personality.”

            “How so?” asks Mitya, massaging the knuckles which hold his glass. He can feel the tendons clicking each time they pop. One, two, three, click, one, two, three, click. For as often as Irena has held his hands, caressed them, studied them, pulled at them, she has never found this tiny click beneath the joint. He likes that. Her failure to discover it has made it a secret, and Mitya enjoys secrets. Sometimes he feels that his entire life has been nothing but a search for a truly secret hiding place.

            Sascha is giggling. “Why do you listen to him?” he asks Mitya, head lolling towards Vitaly. “Shut the hell up, Vitaly, before you get us all arrested. For all I know, everyone in this room is a rat.”

            Vitaly, the high-minded and political Yugoslav, mutters an insult.

            Sascha stands up with an alcoholic lurch. “Fucking Ustashe son of a bitch –“ he starts, raising a fist, but Irena pulls him back down to the couch.

            Mitya can feel the dreadful silence coming on as the scene unfolds. He tries to get away from them, declaring that he’s had too much to drink and wants to lie down, but Kiril makes him stay with a hand on his arm. Kiril never speaks, which is why Mitya likes him. Confined once more to the sofa, Mitya keeps drinking to avoid getting into a conversation. He is not relaxed. His eyes flit nervously from one corner of the room to the other, sensing the oncoming red: he focuses every modicum of his energy towards detecting and deflecting that tell-tale haze. A few times, he begins to see it and then realizes that it’s nothing but a strained hallucination. As the evening progresses, he begins to feel warm and irritable. He wants to tell Irena to stop being such a whore, but the vodka refuses to let the sentence past his lips. He falls into deafness clinging to every one of Vitaly’s words like a man falling downhill. Political words, convoluted beyond Vitaly’s tortured southern accent; the last thing he feels before that great, terrible hush washes over him is pity for Vitaly, whose insights are wasted on such friends.

5. Grigory Poletkin is a friend of Mitya's dead father. He has spent the last 37 years in forced labor in Siberia. He is a coward, which he can't help, but when his fellow inmates discovered that he was reporting to the prison guards in return for better rations, they beat him within an inch of his life. He has the crooked nose and the toothless smile to prove it. It is on Irena's name day that he shows up at Mitya's apartment, and Irena, drunk and sunburnt from a day in the park, goes to bed to let Mitya deal with this new development.

            Mitya pours out two glasses of vodka. From the sofa, Grigory is rambling. He has gone quite mad with despair and hunger in prison. “On the train back to Moscow, a woman kept dropping her groceries,” he whispers conspiratorially. “Can you imagine that? If only she had dropped something out the window. Hah – what a sight that would have been! Cabbages rolling down the tracks, bags of flour bursting like grenades on impact. Exploding, right? Everybody covered in flour. Mothers combing the white out of their children’s hair to save it for the bread…”

            Mitya settles in the chair opposite him. “Do you have some place to stay?” he asks.

            Grigory nods vigorously, empty mouth twisted into the blackened shell of a smile. “My granddaughter just got married. Fine fellow, fine fellow, but a little stuffy; Party member, big aspirations. They live down on Zhukov Proyezd; you know where Krupin’s watch shop used to be? It’s an office building now – vultures - but they’re just around the corner and they say I can have the little bedroom in the back all to myself as long as I don’t cause any trouble and promise to get out of the apartment a few times a week. That’s my girl, worried about my health and fresh air. Just like her grandmother.”

            “How is your wife?”

            “Oh, dead, long dead. But when she was alive, she would send me these little packages in the camp… only a few of them ever got through censorship, but she made sure to send me cigarettes and once even a tiny envelope of sugar.”

            “Nadezhda was a sweet woman.”

            “Sweet! By God, yes. You know she wanted to come with me when I got arrested? Come live in Vorkuta with me and tolerate all that coal dust in her hair and in her kitchen. Get to see me through the wire every once in a while. I wouldn’t let her, you know. I wrote to her, forbidding it. Called her all sorts of terrible names, just to keep her away. Called her a whore. The mother of my children, a whore! But that’s no sort of place for a lady, right? And wouldn’t you know it; she kept sending me letters anyway.” Grigory scratches feebly at the labyrinth of tattoos on his right arm: scrawny bone and blue lines, ink mixed from soot and urine. Gulag tattoos. Mitya remembers little of his father but the crucifix between his shoulder blades, and the tiny skulls that counted up the men he’d killed. Grigory’s tattoos are less flattering. A cat to symbolize his profession [Grigory was arrested for stealing machine parts, though he must have exaggerated this tale a bit to earn a tattoo for thievery]; naked women; Stalin’s face, expertly drawn and fading with time; a dagger dripping blood at this throat – in heavy black scrawl beneath it is the prison slang for “informant”. Half of the word scarred, burnt beyond recognition; Grigory once took a hot poker to his own throat in an attempt to blot out the crime, but the pain was too much for him. He tells this to Mitya in the cold dark, and knocks back the last fifth of vodka. Every time he swallows, his Adam’s apple bobs the dagger up and down.

            It is only when telling of the torture that Grigory begins to cry. Mitya stands up, taking the bottle from him. The hairless, toothless wraith on his sofa covers his face with his hands. Mitya pulls him close and holds his skull gently. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “You’re free now. You never have to go back again.”

            Grigory shudders.

            Mitya continues haphazardly, “But you could if you wanted to. For some outlandish reason, if you ever wanted to go back and visit the town, you would be able to. Because you’re completely free. They’re not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do now. Never again. From now on, you’ll have your own bed with real sheets; you’ll have sugar with your tea… maybe even a grandson in the not-too-distant future. You’ve made it. You’ve earned it.”

            “I’ve earned it,” Grigory says, letting out a huge trembling sigh and grinding his knuckles against his eyes.

            Mitya makes him spend the night – “It’s a long way down to Zhukov Proyezd this time of night; in the morning, Irena will make you a nice breakfast, would you like that?” – but by the time Grigory stops crying and starts thanking him, he’s gone deaf again and retreats  to the bedroom before the old man can start telling him about the coal mines.

6. Five weeks after he hit Irena, Mitya is hit in turn by a petty thief who wants his pocket change. It is not the blow which gives him a minor concussion and ruptures an eardrum, but the twice-repeated slamming of his skull on the concrete. Russian thieves don’t take chances. Irena hides his books and translation projects from him for a whole week, forcing him to stare at the bedroom ceiling and puzzle over ways to hide his delight. Now he has an excuse as to why he doesn’t hear a vase shatter, or respond to a question shouted from another room. It is the calmest week of his life. He lays on their wide, double bed like a man newly-freed and spends all day examining the lazy paths of hairline cracks which run down the south wall. Until he gets a call about a death in the family.

7.  He dreams about his gang of female cousins: awkward, nervous Vera and her foul-mouthed sister Raisa; little Dina wobbling around on chubby legs; Katerina, the pianist, who had big dreams and thin fingers; mischievous Natasha with the narrow nose and coral-colored birthmark on her collarbone. He has always been helplessly in love with Natasha. A memory: on the back porch of their grandfather's run-down dacha, the girls kicked at pieces of autumn leaves and Natasha taught them a love spell. "You write the name of the man you love along your cigarette, see? And by the time you finish smoking it, he'll be yours forever." They all did it then and there, though delicate little Katerina threw up in the bushes afterwards. He can still picture her flushed, cheerful face, water and vomit caught in blonde tendrils of hair as she held back another cough. He doesn’t know who or what Natasha had wished for, but he supposes it wasn't to burn alive in an electrical fire in an overcrowded slum in Zaryadye. "Pre-cremated," giggles Vera at the funeral. And, laughing, bursts in tears he can’t hear. He reflects that a funeral mass is a horrible and grotesque affair when the choir makes no sound.

            Irena assumes that he is heartbroken – which he is, but for the wrong reasons – and tries to be the model sympathizer. She even wears black for a whole week, which is wholly unlike her. His head still hurts from the mugging. When the pressure comes back to his brain a few days later, there are many questions and only one possible answer. No, he does not want to drop by his uncle’s apartment to have coffee and mourn with the others. No, he does not want to stop by Raisa’s and tell her the news; it’s not his fault that no one’s been able to get ahold of her. No, he says to Sascha on phone, I don’t want you to come over. He even says no when Kiril breaks his personal vow of silence to offer to take over his translation projects for the next few days. “Just until you’re back on your feet,” says Kiril. “Death is hard, but God knows it touches us all.”

8. Irena is especially considerate for the entirety of the following week. She doesn’t know what to do with grief. She grew up in a state orphanage; her idea of the loss of relatives is confined to falling out of contact with her old bunkmates. She pauses frequently throughout the day to hug him. She instigates sex. She makes his favorite dinners and keeps records playing day and night to distract him. She has heard this cure for anguish from one of the women at work, who read it in magazine. He has heard Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” twenty-seven times since Monday. When the deafness comes, as it always does, he sits in front of the record-player and watches the rotations, trying to follow along with the orchestra in his mind. It is a game of chance for him to wait until sound pulls back in and informs him whether he is ahead of or behind the Kirov Orchestra.

9. Vitaly’s real name is Vjeko, but he was given a Russian nickname on his very first day in Comrade Stalin’s conscript army and since then it’s stuck. After the war, he studied political science in Leningrad. He is not a party member, and has to deliver weekly bribes to the local militia in order to remain off the persons-of-interest list. One day he calls Mitya Zhukovsky to ask about the latter’s recent lapses in health, but what he really wants to know is whether or not he’s free to come over – “…bring Irena if you want…” - and talk politics. Mitya mentions curtly that the radio is on too loud for him to make out what Vitaly is saying, and passes the phone off to Irena. He has been doing this more and more often. Vitaly does not hear the radio at all, and means to ask Irena about it, but forgets by the time invitations are extended, accepted and elaborated upon.

             Vitaly is a man of both thought and action. He spends a lot of time writing essays and reading leaflets. If any of them could benefit from Grigory’s gulag fables, it would be Vitaly. He needs something to tempt him towards restraint. Mitya has taken it upon himself to be that something. He plays devil’s advocate to all of Vitaly’s Plato-inspired sociopolitical theories. Every now and then, he walks around the room to make sure that the windows are closed and check the outside landing. Sascha laughs at them. Kiril smokes in quiet earnest, unable to commit, unable to leave. Kiril was tried for anti-social tendencies last year, but walked away from it because his wife’s uncle is a party member of high standing. KGB don’t let you go twice. Kiril frequently has pressing appointments that keep him from Vitaly’s political dinner parties.

10. Irena is sobbing in the bedroom while Mitya makes tea like a man on his way to an execution. He has no idea what’s going on. The silence hit while he was walking back from the library, and hasn’t yet receded. These days, he only get an hour or two of sanity every morning before breakfast; the rest of the time, he nods, grins, shrugs and pretends to be human, but the veneer is wearing thin. He sips at his tea – too hot – and wonders if he should consult a doctor. He decides against it. He’s afraid they’ll put him away. He can feel the walls of the dreadful quiet like a second skin. Pushing out his elbows, he can feel it stretch. The now-perpetual lack of pressure at his temple makes him wonder if his blood’s still flowing. He is constantly touching his wrist, his neck, his chest. The pulse is reassuring, but it’s beginning to make him look as though he has a tic.

            He doesn’t know why Irena is crying. She said something with great intensity this morning at breakfast, looking distressed. He mouthed the words, “No, I guess not,” on a gamble and went to the library and when he came home, she was crying on the bed.

11. Irena is pregnant. This is the news he finally understands when the noise returns one week later. Irena hasn’t been speaking to him or touching him; she looks through him as though he isn’t there and no longer comes home at night. It takes a furious phone call from the friend she’s staying with to jumpstart the vein in his temple and restore the spectrum of sound to his brain. From the friend’s savage ranting, Mitya manages to piece together the week he lost to the silence. The question Irena had asked him at breakfast was, “Do you want this baby?”

            He does, desperately. He doesn’t know how to recant his error. It takes five solid days of phone calls – some he can hear and some he can’t - unannounced visits – none of which he can hear – and desperate letters to convince Irena that he hadn’t heard her right that morning, begging her to come home. Eventually she does, but she still doesn’t look at him. In her rounded posture and nervous gestures, she holds a secret. Mitya has always liked secrets, but only his own. Irena’s secrets scare him. At night, he pulls her close and lets her fall asleep with her head on his chest. Once, near midnight, he decides to tell her about the silence, but when he wakes her up, she mumbles, “Just a bad dream,” and falls back to sleep at once.

12. On March 23, Vitaly Nikolic is condemned and shot to death for conspiracy to commit sedition. The big question on everyone’s mind is: who informed on him? Mitya doesn’t know, and says so. Kiril has heard from his wife’s high-ranking uncle that Mitya Zhukovsky’s name is now on the persons-of-interest-list. “They’ll have you by tonight, if not sooner,” says Kiril, “Go stay with your sister in Kiev, yeah? Just for a few days. I’ll try to get this sorted out. We need to find Sascha.”

            Sascha is nowhere to be found, but Mitya eventually discovers him in his own apartment, in bed with Irena. Mitya stares for a moment before turning on his heel and walking into the next room, tearing apart the end table in search of his revolver. He breaks a drawer trying to get it unstuck, flinging aside identification papers and old letters in search of the bullets. When he finds them, he leaves, though every nerve in his trembling body is yearning to go back and put a little cylinder of lead in the back of both of their heads. Irena chases him downstairs in her robe, shouting, “Don’t you dare walk away from me!” but entreaties have no effect whatsoever on a man who no longer hears through the madness. The sound slides back for a sliver of a moment he steps out onto the street, and the last thing he hears is Irena hollering at him from the doorway, “The baby’s his, you know.” He walks away from her through the thickly falling snow which mutes the world in cruel irony. All he has ever wanted in his life is a truly secret hiding place. Nowhere is quite as secret as a dead man’s apartment. So he goes to Vitaly’s.

13. At the table in Vitaly’s depressingly clean kitchen, Mitya drinks and thinks of the assaulted little table he left in his apartment. It seems unfair to him that such a lovely piece of furniture should have undergone such abuse for the sake of bullets. He removes them from his coat pocket and sets them on the table, next to the bottle. Five bullets. At least he’ll be able to take some militia with him when they come for him tonight. He picks up one of the bullets and begins tapping it against his glass, insistently; he can feel the vibrations, but he can’t hear the ringing. That terrible hush, the horrifying still. This has too long been a disease in his brain. He hates it and fears it, but what he fears most of all is the knowledge that he won’t be able to hear the door being kicked in when the police come for him.

             He finds a knife in Vitaly’s kitchen drawer and carves IRENA down the length of a bullet, so that when he puts it through his brain, she’ll still be the last thing on his mind. It is, he thinks, the masculine equivalent of Natasha’s love spell.

            He has never contemplated suicide before. He’s not sure how to go about it, but it seems only right to put the gun to the left temple and destroy the silence before anything else. Maybe he’ll actually hear the explosion if it’s inside his head. He does not hear the men come in, but he sees their shadows on the wall and feels the vibrations shake up through the floor as they round the corner.

14. The second-from-last thing to go through his mind is sudden, overwhelming relief. The last thing is Irena’s bullet. He imagines that he hears the explosion as he pulls the trigger.