Just like Dostoyevsky Read online

  “You have to ask an Irishman if he’d like a cup of tea?” He smiled at his own joke and promptly sat down at the table. Becky padded quietly into the room and leaned up against the dishwasher.

  “Where’re you from?” Sylvia asked.

  “Glendalough. In the Wicklow Mountains of eastern Ireland. Beautiful country. Not much steady work, though, for someone like myself. Saint Kevin founded a monastery in Glendalough in the 6th century.”

  “I’m not familiar with Saint Kevin,” she said with a faint smile.

  “Ah!” He caught the subtle humor. “No, I should be surprised if you were.”

  She brought him his tea which he sweetened with sugar. “Never married?” The question was gratuitous. She already knew the answer.

  “Never had the misfortune.” He continued to drink his tea in silence, the face dusted with grayish film - cement or sand - the curly brown hair drifting out from under the shaggy cap. “Not being much of a talker,... it’s a bit of an affliction with me,” he said. “Don’t know what to say when I’m around people such as yourself.” He sipped at the tea, draining the last of it from the mug. “All I can do is mend walls.”

  “If people could mend walls as easily as they make mindless chatter, there’d be no need for people such as you.”

  “Never thought of it that way,” he said rising to his feet. His legs were thin and slightly bowed.

  “One question before you go,” Sylvia said. “The section of wall you repaired looks fine, just as it did before the accident. But now the undamaged portion somehow looks different.”

  “While I rebuilt the wall, your daughter tooled the joints,” he replied, “from one end to the other. That’s why it looks spanking new.” He was at the door now. “Like I said, I ain’t much good with people, but I do a passable job with mortar and stone.”

  When he was gone, Becky added, “He showed me how to use the pointing tool.” Sylvia remembered the useless-looking, piece of scrap metal. “Scrape the broken mortar and stone dust from the old bricks. How to wet down the crumbling cement and reform the joints.” There was more than a hint of reproach in her voice. “He’s not some stupid, working-class clod, if that’s what you think.”

  “I never, for one minute suggested - ”

  “And he never snuck a peek at my boobs or bare legs. Not once!”

  Sylvia opted to stay at her interpreter’s flat outside Moscow rather than a Western-style hotel. Tuesday the electricity was off and she was forced to carry her grocery bags up four flights of darkened stairs to the cramped apartment where they lit candles and waited for the lights to be restored. No one seemed to care. Since ‘perestroika’, municipal services and living conditions had deteriorated.

  “Much divorce in Russia. I’ve been married three times, my present husband twice,” Marina said. “One can’t be happy when life is so hard.” She lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and held the glowing weed in front of Sylvia’s face. “In Russia we understand what tar and nicotine does to your throat and lungs; we know vodka pickles your brain, rots the liver.” She sucked on the tobacco and blew a thick column of smoke out her nose. “We are not stupid, only weary of life.”

  Later that night, neighbors in the upstairs apartment began to fight. The husband was drunk; the wife hysterical. The muffled sounds of young children crying filtered through the thin walls. The screaming and recriminations rose to a crescendo and just as abruptly subsided in an eerie stillness. “When these things happen,” Marina muttered, sitting in the darkness waiting for the electricity to be restored, “we have an expression. We say ‘Just like Dostoyevsky!’. Do you understand?”

  “Yes I understand,” Sylvia said.

  In the morning, she was lecturing at Moscow University. She would covered the first hundred pages of Crime and Punishment, focusing on the murder of the pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna; Raskolinikov’s chance meeting in the tavern with the drunken buffoon, Marmeladov; the letter from his mother describing Mr. Svidrgailov’s botched attempt to seduce the younger sister, Dounia; and the dream sequence predating the murders. With Dostoyevsky as a starting point, subsequent, guest speakers would proceed to the other, pre-modern, Slavic writers.

  Sylvia wanted to review her notes. But without adequate light or heat - the furnace had shut down when the electricity was lost - nothing could be accomplished. “Spakonay nochee (good night).” She went into the other room, put on her nightgown and lay down on the cold, sagging mattress.

  In late August, Sylvia arrived home one day to find the kitchen floor under an inch of water, an ominous, hiss coming from the cabinet under the sink. Kneeling down, she opened the cabinet and was struck full force by a blast of cold water. The blow knocked her almost to the middle of the room where she lay dazed in the cool wetness. Water was pouring from the joint where the shut-off valve ran up into the sink. She edged closer and tried to turn the valve but the spray was too intense and drove her back. Her right eye was throbbing, the vision fractured into multiple images.

  Sylvia struggled to her feet but promptly fell down again whacking her head on a chair. Retreating to the den, she dialed the plumber and reached an answering machine.

  Mason and general handyman. No job too small…

  “Do handymen fix leaky pipes?” she mused. Placing the heel of her hand over the right eye, Sylvia dialed the number on the torn scrap of paper. The phone rang a half dozen times before she heard the familiar Irish accent. “It’s Sylvia Mandelstam.” She was crying now, making no effort to hide her distress. “A pipe broke. The kitchen’s flooded. My eye hurts. Can you help me?”

  “Where’s the leak?”

  “Under the sink.”

  “Go down in the basement. Shut the main water supply.”

  “I can’t do it,” she sobbed. “The water hit me full force in the eye. I may need a doctor.”

  “If you could dial my telephone number, you can shut the water. Right is tight. Left is loose.”

  “Right is tight. Left is -”

  “Counterclockwise. Just turn the water off then go check the pipe. I’ll stay on the line.”

  Crying, gagging, stumbling and tripping over her soggy nylons, she groped her way into the basement and fumbled with the shut off valve. “Right is tight, right is tight, right is ...” The last quarter turn was when she heard the flow choke and gradually shut down. Total silence. The water was off.

  In the kitchen, a lake mirrored the fixtures on the ceiling but the deluge was over. “I shut the water,” Sylvia spoke more evenly now. “Except for the lake in my kitchen, everything’s under control.”

  “What’s the matter with your eye?” More than a hint of concern crept into his voice.

  Sylvia blinked several times and gazed about the room. “My eye’s okay.”

  “I’m leaving now,” Danny said and hung up the phone.

  While she was changing into dry clothes, Becky came home. “What happened?”

  “Pipe broke. Danny O’Rourke’s coming over.”

  “How are we going to get all that water up?”

  “Hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

  Twenty minutes later, Danny O’Rourke arrived with plumbing tools and a 10-gallon wet-vac. He vacuumed up the water, then checked under the sink. “Nothing wrong with the shut-off valve,” he said, lugging the wet-vac back out to the truck. “Copper fitting gave way, that’s all.”

  She followed him into the street. “I knew enough to shut the main water supply,” Sylvia blustered. “When the water hit me in the face, I got momentarily, disoriented.” She suddenly grabbed his wrist with both her hands. “That much I did know.”

  “Yes, these things happen.” Danny located a propane tank. “Have Becky open the outside faucets to drain the line.”

  Why drain the line? Wasn’t it sufficient to have the water shut down and pipes dry? It was easier to learn the Cyrillic alphabet than deal with these domestic calamities. “Yes, of course,” she said and immediately felt silly.

  Back in the so
ggy kitchen, Danny lit the gas torch and fanned the flame over the pipe. When it glowed bright orange, he clamped a vise grip on the upper stem and pulled the joint apart. Running a sausage-shaped, metal brush back and forth inside the coupling, he cleaned the copper tubing with cloth-backed, emery paper.

  “What’s that for?” Sylvia asked. He was brushing a clear paste inside the joint and on the polished outer surface of the pipe.

  “Flux,” he replied without bothering to look up. The metal glistened with the wet paste. “It keeps the metal from oxidizing and draws the solder into the joint for a water-tight seal.” He relit the torch, adjusted the flame to a compact, blue wedge and placed it against the metal. A minute passed. Touching a strand of solder to the metal, the silver wire dissolved in a moist blur disappearing into the faucet coupling. When the excess bubbled up over the edge, Danny pulled the strand away, flicking the torch off. “All done. Good as new.”

  “My husband works for a printing firm,” Marina, the interpreter, said. They were walking in the garden of the Monastery of Saint Peter the Great. “The other day a man came into the office and requested a quote on 50,000 copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” She took a draft from an unfiltered cigarette and blew the air out forcefully through her mouth. “My husband says, ‘I don’t print anti-Semitic shit!’, and the man holds up a thick wad of rubles and says, ‘I pay cash for the job.’”

  Sylvia pulled her collar up tight around her throat. April in Moscow felt more like March back home. “And?”

  Marina grimaced. “My husband says, ‘Go to hell!’. The man closes his brief case and says, ‘Better yet, I’ll go down the street to your competitor.’”

  Becky reentered the kitchen and squatted on her haunches next to the sink. She was dressed in a tank top, leather sandals and cut-off jeans. “After what just happened, “ Sylvia mused, “I wouldn’t care if she were naked from the waist up.” She went down into the basement and turned the main water supply back on. The joint held. Danny collected his tools and took them out to the truck.

  “Ask him out.” Becky put her nose in her mother’s face. “If you don’t I will.”

  “Danny O’Rourke’s a perfectly nice man - a saint, maybe - but he will never be your step-father.”

  “Intellectual snob! Hypocrite!”

  Sylvia kissed her daughter on the tip of the nose, deftly stepped around her and went out to the curb. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Thirty should do it.”

  “A plumber would charge twice as much.”

  He was leaning into the cab of the truck, one hand on the steering column. “I’m a mason, not a licensed plumber.” He swung up onto the seat and began rummaging in the glove compartment. Dropping back down to the ground, he handed Sylvia a wrinkled picture postcard. “Glendalough, in the Wicklow Mountains.”

  Sylvia glanced at the card. The ruins of several churches with crumbling steeples lay nestled in a flowery, tree-shrouded valley; a wide lake loomed in the background. “There aren’t any homes visible in the picture.”

  “They’re scattered throughout the countryside. There’s no central village to speak of.” He pushed the shaggy cap back on his head. “When you look at this, perhaps you’ll understand why I’m not so clever with words.”

  Sylvia handed him back the card and stared at the parched, late-summer lawn. “Cleverness with words isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” An anonymous woodpecker in one of the Scotch pines that bordered the property was hammering away at the porous wood. The rhythmic clatter petered out then, after a short lull, the woodpecker resumed his frenetic labor. “My trip to Russia last year was a nightmare.”

  “But I thought -”

  “I know what I said. It was crap.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Becky glanced out the bay window. Her mother had moved away from the pickup truck and was standing near the mended wall, yakking away nonstop. Danny was leaning against a slim hazel tree, his hands plunged in his pockets, eyes bent to earth.

  Becky went upstairs, took a shower and washed her hair. An hour later she went to the window. Her mother had edged a few steps closer to the mason who had removed his hat and was inspecting the brim. “Strange!” Becky muttered.

  When the mason finally drove off, Sylvia wandered back indoors. “Mr. O'Rourke will be joining us for supper Friday night.” Her voice sounded strangely high-pitched, affected.

  “A date!” Becky grinned idiotically.

  “Not a date, per se,” Sylvia hedged. “Just an invite to dinner. Don’t you dare read anything more into it than that!”

  “No, of course not,” Becky said in a voice equally counterfeit.