The Big Green Tent: A Novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya & Polly Gannon

Author:Ludmila Ulitskaya & Polly Gannon
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Coming of Age, Jewish, World Literature, Literary, Literary Fiction, Genre Fiction, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 9780374709716
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

THE ANGEL WITH THE OUTSIZE HEAD

“It’s improbable, completely unlikely,” thought Tamara early the next morning, before she had even opened her eyes, reflecting on the evening before. For so many years she had kept her rotten secret about her great and forbidden love to herself, like a jar of preserves, and now it had burst open. She had told all to the person whom she had her whole life considered superfluous, alien, a chance appendage to her existence. For so many years she hadn’t breathed a word about it: not to her mother, so as not to disappoint her; not to Olga, so as not to break the ban; not to Vera Samuilovna Vinberg, her best friend and teacher, so that the secret wouldn’t erupt into someone else’s life and shake the happy equilibrium of another family … And suddenly, out of nowhere, she had gone and told everything to Galya, the wife of a KGB agent. Now it seemed that everything that had come before was no longer relevant.

No, that wasn’t quite true—she had confessed the whole story once before, before she was baptized, to her priest. He had listened patiently, without betraying any emotion, and had then said, smiling:

“That’s all in the past now. A new life begins with baptism; you will become an innocent babe again. This is one of the advantages of being baptized when you are older. It is a conscious choice. You are being offered a new purity, and you must look after it.”

Her new purity faded rather quickly. Her former life didn’t just disappear, and it cast a long shadow over the future. Until he died two years later, even the old Robik, whom Marlen had left behind, continued to sleep on the rug he had occupied every Shabbat eve for many years waiting for his master. The dog kept silent, and Tamara did, too.

But the evening before, the dam had broken and she had told Galya everything. Why? No, no—it was what it was. It had to happen the way it did, and she would have lived her life the same way again. She was sorry for her mother. Raisa Ilinichna had cried. No, not about the Korovin, nor about the Borisov-Musatov—but about the small, almost perfunctory study by Vrubel. It was a large head and a wing, contradicting all known laws of anatomy. Though who had ever been able to observe the anatomy of angels? All the paintings had belonged to her grandmother. They were originally from the Gnesins, and had been given to her over the years. Elena Fabianovna had been her best friend since childhood. Grandmother had devoted her life to this family, and there were still many traces and tokens of the girls’ friendship in the house: teacups, postcards, feathers, books inscribed with loving sentiments in neat, small letters, with flourishes of signatures. But those three paintings were gone. Without a trace. No, no, she had no regrets about them. Far worse were the fevered years of eclipse, the burning passions, of which nothing remained but a feeling of bereavement.

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