Sonechka

Zurich

LIDIA SAT out a full three working days on that bench with her German textbook open in front of her. Her decision to use her holiday leave in this manner now proved justified. Toward the end of the third day a suntanned, slightly overweight man radiating a barely perceptible aura emerged from the exhibition hall and sat down beside her. The aura was not actually proceeding directly from him but from the sheen of his gray-blue jacket. He gave off the fragrance of invigorating pine forests. His shoes were of a gray more often found in women’s shoes and had patterns of holes punched in them. Lidia took in his entire appearance, down to the holes, in her first tenacious glance. She even noticed the slightly prominent rachitic brow and the red vein in his left eye before returning to her textbook, which she now held with the cover turned slightly in his direction.

The man opened his mouth like a fish and promptly swallowed the bait. “Oh, die deutsche Sprache!”

After that, he smiled. A thin but confident stream of conversation began to flow. The gentleman informed her that he was a Swiss businessman from Zurich, represented a company manufacturing paint, had a house on the outskirts, and loved animals. Lidia for her part told him about herself. It was a tale she had thought out long ago, learned by heart, and rehearsed. She was a pedagogue. She worked with children. She went to a German class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, just out of interest.

“I very much like the orderliness of German. Everything has its right place, especially the verbs.”

The Swiss businessman melted. Oh, he also studied foreign languages, and also considered German to be the most logical.

The plainclothes KGB agents were overloaded beyond all reason. This was an international exhibition so the entire Moscow demimonde had converged upon it; those bigbosomed harbingers of spring, the women pioneering international trade, were bringing their fresh goods packaged in pink silk knickers with bad elastic. Lidia had nothing to worry about. It would never have occurred to anyone that she too was here on a manhunt.

She truly had nothing in common with the girls who flocked here, being past thirty and with no pretensions to pulchritude. Quite the reverse, indeed, since her lower lip was pulled forward like a spade and her nose drooped slightly. If she had consorted in the circles of European royalty her lip would have been considered Hapsburgian, but since she was born in the hamlet of Saloslovo her childhood nickname was Liddy-goose. Her two most conspicuous assets, other than the German language, were her luxuriant blond hair, tied up in a layered bun, and her unusually slender waist, constricted by a crude lacquered belt to the point where she appeared to have been half sawed through.

The conversation was proceeding unhurriedly and all in the right direction, but a time came when the Swiss businessman glanced at his Swiss watch and Lidia was afraid he was just going to stand up and leave, bidding her Auf Wiedersehen. He didn’t. On the contrary, he invited her to come and see his stand and have a cup of coffee.

Lidia smiled demurely, flashing the two gold teeth in the depths of her thin-lipped mouth, put the textbook away, and for a moment was in a quandary. She had a pair of white nylon gloves in her handbag, and the edging on them exactly matched that on her blouse. Should she put them on? Gloves were smart, but might she be overdoing it? Unable to make her mind up, in the end she just pulled them out and clutched them in her hand.

“My guest.” The Swiss nodded to the security guard, and Lidia, toying with her gloves, followed him in.

He took her to the little room at the back of his stand. Lidia was ecstatic. She found it such tremendous fun to look at samples of the house paint in which the overweight Swiss businessman traded.

“How lovely!” she exclaimed, and no one could have doubted her sincerity. Although she had many merits, including a certain forthrightness, sincerity was not one of them. More than that, she was really rather devious. That summed her up: forthright, but just a bit devious. As far as implementing her life strategy was concerned, on this occasion she had had every intention of being devious, of deceiving, even of duping. None of this was proving necessary, however. She really very much fancied the gentleman.

Just don’t lower your guard, don’t lower your guard, Lidia instructed herself.

He invited her to sit down, sat down himself, slightly hunched, in a splendid red plastic armchair, and smiled vaguely. Why could he have invited this unknown woman into the hall, who hardly seemed a prospective customer and was not pretty?

“You need a massage. You have osteochondrosis!” Lidia announced decisively and, without giving him time to gather his wits, sank her fingers into his neck and began working her small powerful hands over his fat withers. He froze in horror. His eyes bulged and he gasped for air.

Lidia was catastrophically short of German vocabulary. She did not know the word for relax, but she recognized that in no way could she allow herself to lose the initiative or remain silent. She must say something, so talk she did. First she repeated what her textbook had to say about the history of Moscow, then the biography of Pushkin. In passing, she removed his shimmering jacket, praising the material. He tried to protest but soon succumbed to her onslaught and, did in the end, relax.

“I have a diploma in massage: sports massage, therapeutic massage; I have even studied Chinese massage,” she declared, and she was evidently not lying; her movements were assured and vigorous.

In Switzerland he had had occasion to be massaged, and it did not come cheap. As regards her diagnosis, she was perfectly right: He did have osteochondrosis.

She plied him with her small fingers for fifteen minutes or so and very pleasant it was too, only the door was ajar and he was a little anxious that other people might see them. Nobody intruded, however, and when she had finished, giving him an agreeable pounding through his shirt, there was nothing for it but to thank her. She was an extremely strange lady but very nice, he decided.

It was time for the coffee. He rotated his warm neck and decided that besides coffee he should offer her some chocolate. He had a supply both of bars of chocolate and of chocolates in boxes for regaling good customers.

The main thing is not to lose the initiative, Lidia thought, focusing, and while he was making the coffee she was wording an invitation in her head.

“I will be glad to invite you to my home for dinner. I have a diploma in cooking,” Lidia announced. “European cuisine, cuisine of the peoples of the USSR, dietary cooking. I have a permit to work as a chef in a restaurant.”

This hit the bull’s-eye. The Swiss businessman had long been thinking about starting his own restaurant but had been prevented by his circumstances.

“Are you then a masseuse or a cook?” he asked, entirely genuinely.

“Both. Although at the present time I am teaching the history of our city,” she said, with modest pride. “I am a pedagogue.”

This was all perfectly true. Lidia was in her second year of conducting a local history class at her neighborhood Pioneers’ Club. The pay was wretched, but the job left plenty of time for her many other interests, and she earned money by sewing and knitting and simply by selling odds and ends. What did money matter anyway? It was the root of all evil. Lidia had lived to do whatever she found interesting since she was a child, and her main interest in life was studying.

“Oh, I shall be very happy to come to have dinner with you!” The Swiss beamed and brought out a larger box of chocolates than the one he had been going to produce. He found Lidia very interesting.

LIDIA MADE a start with the curtains. As soon as she got home she took them all down and put them in the washbasin. She enjoyed doing laundry more than any other housework. She found it a calming occupation, and if something unpleasant happened, or if she was just in a bad mood, she would go and do some washing. Right now, however, she was in a very positive, competitive mood, as if she were about to take an important exam. Something told her that, like all her other exams—and she had taken hundreds of them—she would pass this very important one too. Just as long as her Swiss businessman turned up.

Even before she got back home, Lidia recognized that she had made a mistake with the arrangements. She should have promised to collect him; otherwise all sorts of things could go wrong. He might forget, or he might have business to attend to, a visit to the Bolshoy or the restaurant at the Hotel Nationale. What else did foreigners do in Moscow? Oh, well, yes, the Tretyakov Art Gallery.

In the time it took to wash the curtains, Lidia thought out the entire program. She could not possibly get by without help from Emilia Karlovna. There were a number of things she needed to borrow from her for the meal. No need to go overboard on the zakuski to start with. She should buy caviar, of course, and perhaps half a pound of smoked sturgeon, but basically what this called for was a real Russian meal: fish soup, piroshkis, perhaps kurnik chicken pie. Beef Stroganoff might be good, but you didn’t want to make things too complicated; just get the right balance. And what should she wear? That really was a primary consideration. She mustn’t overlook the main point of the exercise.

Lidia toiled unstintingly for two days. She found time to fit in everything. She went to the Prague Hotel’s food hall and the Central Market and to Emilia for the silverware. Emilia raised an eyebrow as if to say, I’m sure I don’t know what this can be for, but she did not turn Lidia down. She took two silver table settings from the dresser, two pie servers, two dessert forks, and a two-tier fruit stand with a pike on top. Lidia knew how to present it properly: You arranged the grapes on top, one bunch, and draped them down like a little curtain. On the lower tier, of course, you put two peaches, a pear, and five or six plums. And no apples. In winter of course you would have Antonov apples, but then not in a stand. You would have them steeped with pickled cabbage and cranberries. She also asked to borrow the enameled caviar dish—that should really impress him.

How did Lidia know all this, all these subtleties about how to set a table, how to launder, to blue and starch, and how to fold a man’s shirt, how to safeguard linen from moths over the winter, how to crush a pill for a child and put it in cranberry mousse, and all the rest? Partly it came from Emilia, who had taught her all sorts of things, partly from courses she had taken, and the rest she had conjured out of thin air using her imagination. Lidia might not be pretty, but she was formidably intelligent, something she had known for a long time. Of all the people of her acquaintance, only Emilia was cleverer. As for the others, she had sometimes thought she had met a really clever woman, but she subsequently turned out to be no cleverer than Lidia. Lidia recognized she had made a few blunders in her dealings with the male sex, both with Kolya and with Gennady, but that was a long time ago. Now she had seen the light and realized that all her life she had been looking in the wrong direction. As they say, better late than never.

Martin was half an hour late already, and Lidia, in her immaculate apartment, wearing a dazzlingly white blouse, standing beside the laid table, kept rushing from the door to the window and cursing herself for a fool. What a stupid thing to do! She should have known this would happen. The smart thing would have been to go to Sokolniki, find him at the exhibition, and drag him here.

Hover as Lidia might by the window, she failed to spot her visitor coming because he didn’t approach the apartment from the lane. The twit had walked off in the wrong direction from the Bauman metro station and tramped this way and that for forty minutes in the heat, until two schoolgirls brought him to his destination.

He rang the doorbell and came bearing flowers. Roses, and not just three, five, or seven as a Russian might have, but twelve. He stood in the doorway all wet, the sweat dripping from his forehead, his mouth open, out of breath. His heart’s not up to much, Lidia immediately thought with alarm. Hers was a practiced eye, and she had also taken courses in medicine. At that time you couldn’t go on to massage courses unless you’d been through medical college, and she was desperate to learn massage.

“Ich warte Ihnen so lang,” Lidia said.

He started apologizing, but his eyes were all over the place. A good start.

“Do you allow me,” he said, “to remove my jacket?”

The jacket was still gray, but a different one, without the sheen. He removed it. Lidia took it for him, and it was as smooth as silk. Perhaps it was silk. Switzerland is an extremely rich country. Emilia had told her long ago, “They have more banks than we have bars.” Martin’s light-blue shirt was dark blue under the arms and on the back. He really had been sweating, poor lamb, and she didn’t even have a bathroom of her own. This was a decidedly proletarian apartment building. She could think herself lucky she had at least her own separate toilet.

Then Lidia had a moment of inspiration. “Sit down here a moment.” He sat in the armchair she indicated and looked at her table as if it were a museum exhibit. His mouth gaped slightly, evidently a habit of his.

Lidia meanwhile darted to the kitchen and half filled a bowl with water. She brought it through, holding it out, and set it on the floor directly in front of him. Then she sat nimbly down. “Allow me . . . excuse me. . . .” She took off his gray shoes and his socks, which were also gray.

The Swiss businessman’s eyes were out on stalks and he flapped his lips. “Was? Was?”

“It’s what we do in Russia,” Lidia said. “If you’re too hot, a cold footbath is extremely good for you. And a cold compress on the forehead. With my medical training I know all about these things.”

Her German might not have been too elegant, but he understood and nodded his bald head. “Ja, ja.”

What feet he had, what dainty little feet, what little toes. Did he have them pedicured? When she thought back to Kolya’s hooves, the fermenting muck in his toenails, which it was impossible to get out. . . . “It’s the boots,” he would say. That smell came from the boots, and washing or not washing his feet wouldn’t make the slightest difference. Whether he wore tarpaulin boots or chrome leather, any guy in boots, you could bet, would have smelly feet, said Kolya.

The moment Lidia saw his little toes she saw her future. This was her moment of destiny.

Lidia had a subtle smile. Smiling made her drooping nose touch her lip. This did not improve her looks, but she was clever enough to know that, and when she smiled she would lower her head and turn a little to one side. “We live in the East,” she said, “and this is what we do in Russia.”

He said something in reply which seemed to register approval, but the language was too complicated and she couldn’t understand the words. Never mind, she would learn all those words, no problem. There was the dictionary lying on the shelf. It was no big deal.

She placed one foot on a towel, dried it, tugged the toes to straighten them, then the second foot. His shoes were soft and smooth. What did they make them from? You could wear leather like that anywhere on your body. His face expressed surprise and bewilderment. She had shocked him. Good!

The napkin was encircled in a silver napkin ring, the fork had a German monogram. “Oh! Gothic script: CR.”

“Yes. Christine Runge, my grandmother from Riga.” (Christine Runge was actually Emilia Karlovna’s grandmother. What difference did it make?) The Swiss raised his eyebrow. She really was a most interesting woman.

“Bon appetit! Do have some hors d’oeuvres” (in faultless German). Lidia had learned all these little mealtime expressions by heart the first year she went to work as Emilia’s maid. Emilia was looking after five children at that time, in a kind of private nursery. She remembered them perfectly. Little Jewish children, all of them, as sweet as could be: two sisters, Masha and Anya, and Shurik, Grisha, and Milochka. They were brought in the morning with their little covered dishes, all of them for nine o’clock, but Milochka was brought at half-past nine by her great-grandfather, who was as old as the moss on a tree stump. Emilia took them out to the square for a walk and back for half past eleven. Lidia removed their coats, washed their hands, and took them into the room. There was half an hour until lunch. While Lidia warmed up the food they had brought, they played German bingo and spoke only German. “Ich habe Nummer einundzwanzig.” They spoke German at lunch too: “Geben Sie mir, bitte”; “Danke . . . Entschuldigung. . . . Das hat mir geschmeckt.”

After that Lidia washed the dishes while the children had a rest hour: the three girls were put in the big bed together; Shurik on the couch; Grisha on the two-seater settee. Whether they actually slept was neither here nor there, but they mustn’t say a word. It was the rest hour. That was the rule. Then they all got up, washed, and had tea. There was cake at teatime, which Emilia provided. Lidia could make that cake with her eyes shut: two egg yolks mixed with half a cup of sugar, add four ounces of chocolate-flavored butter. . . .

“Oh, caviar!”

“Yes, please take some. We have Astrakhan and Caspian caviar. This is Astrakhan. I prefer it. It is not black but gray, and the grains are smaller. It’s very creamy. Please, please. Take some butter. It’s Vologda butter. Try it. Can you taste the nutty flavor? It’s the best butter in Russia. I know Swiss dairy products are very good, but this Russian butter is also excellent. Perfekt. Sehr perfekt. Kalach is a special kind of Russian bread roll. Ein russische Brötchen. A little glass of vodka? Just a little one. Good health! Prosit!”

He took just a little of everything, tested it on his tongue, pressed it against his gums, his expression tentative, exactly like Emilia. Perhaps he was a Lett as well? He nodded his head, moving his arm to one side.

“Eels.” The first word in any German dictionary: Aal. “They live in the Baltic Sea. You don’t have eels in Switzerland, do you?

“Tomato stuffed with sheep’s cheese. It’s a Bulgarian recipe. I learned it from a course about cuisine of the peoples of the world. What is a popular Swiss dish? Fondue? Lasagne?”

“No, that is in French Switzerland. We live in the German part. In my region people like potato pudding. I’ll have to look that up in the dictionary.” An exceptional woman. Such beautiful hair. If you let it down it would be truly magnificent. It would probably come below her waist.

And the way he ate his food! Slowly, precisely, the napkin on his knees, no clattering about with his knife and fork, as if he had been taught by Emilia herself. Eating not in order to satisfy hunger but purely in the service of beauty, the way people play the piano or dance. Russians can’t eat like that to save their lives. Actually, Lidia can because she has been taught by Emilia.

She took the dishes with the hors d’oeuvres out to the kitchen. On the way she turned toward the hall stand and sniffed his jacket. She breathed in, and her loins caught fire.

While she was out in the kitchen, ladling fish soup out of the pan and into the soup tureen, Martin was trying to find the answer to a riddle. It didn’t add up for him, this unheard-of hospitality. He had never tried caviar in his life; he had never dreamed he would. The table settings were fit for a czar. They wouldn’t be out of place in a museum. In spite of all that, the apartment was beggarly, a slum. What a mysterious woman! And his feet? How she had washed his feet for him! One could expect a lot from her. He had been going to see a certain Polish woman for eight years before he got married to Elise. He paid her two hundred francs, and she had never given him so much as a bottle of mineral water. He had to take everything there himself: water, coffee, cake. Not for nothing do they talk about the mystery of the Russian soul.

He subsequently turned out not to be all that young. Despite being fresh-looking and plump, he was already about forty-eight. His face, though, was very smooth, quite without wrinkles, his suntan was even, and it was only the top of his head that was bald. For the rest, he was a very, very nice man. Over there in Switzerland everyone was like that—clean, respectable, nice—but Lidia only discovered this later.

At the moment she knew just one thing: You didn’t meet people like Martin in Moscow; if she searched for a hundred years she would not get anyone like him here. Perhaps actresses or singers had such husbands, but she personally had never seen any, either in Emilia’s house or at the clinic, in the teacher training institute or at the University of Marxism-Leninism. Nowhere.

The fish course. You weren’t going to impress someone from Switzerland with meat. Sterlet soup with fish tartlets, but not too much. Kabachok, a light vegetable marrow dish. Béchamel sauce.

With a partner like this Lidia, a man could open a restaurant tomorrow. Not in the center of Zurich, of course, but in some agreeable location like Zollikon or Kilchberg. Lidia, a pleasant name, an elegant name. And an elegant figure. Her waist . . . Undoubtedly there is a charm in smaller women. Elise with her size, her girth, could never look elegant. He frowned.

Lidia was alert: “Don’t you like vegetables?”

“Very much. Especially potatoes. Do you know, I grew up in the countryside, and it was during the war. Don’t imagine that because Switzerland didn’t take part in the war we lived very well. We had a hard life during the war. We ate potatoes and milk. It is a healthy diet, but for peasants. Simple, and there wasn’t much of it. Your cooking is fantastic. Have you never worked in a restaurant? You could be a chef.”

“No, I cook only for friends. I very much enjoy having friends round for a meal. . . . Here, have some of this, it’s called nemchura. In Russia people visit each other very often, cook for each other, bake pirog, it’s a bit like sponge cake, but it doesn’t have to be sweet.”

“Do you have many friends?”

“Not very many. I like only the very best quality, so I don’t have very many friends.”

“Oh, yes. Quality is very important. That is the basis of everything, quality. The firm I represent has been in existence for sixty years because it manufactures paint of very high quality.”

The firm belonged to Elise, and that was the cause of all his troubles. If only the firm had belonged to someone else, or to no one, or was just private. Indeed, if it had belonged to him. . . . But he was so firmly in the embrace of his paint-and-varnish wife that he sometimes woke up from a terrifying dream in which he was stuck in paint and couldn’t get his feet out of it. He would try, he would tug desperately, only to see that his feet were those of a fly.

“May I?” Her cool arm touched his forearm as she collected his plate. “Coffee? Tea?”

He had intended even before leaving to find himself a Russian prostitute in Moscow. Alas, such institutions as he had found, for example, in Amsterdam, where he had once enjoyed the services of a very interesting Chinese girl, simply did not exist here, and he hadn’t the courage to pick up a woman in the street, although there were plenty of them wandering around the exhibition, and not a few around the Hotel Moskva, where he was staying. All of them somehow seemed too young and raised the suspicion that if you went with them you might land yourself in a scandal. He had been briefed about that before he left Zurich. Lidia, however, was plainly a respectable woman, with caviar and table silver. When, nevertheless, her bare arm touched his bare forearm, he guessed that just ma ybe. . . . The thought was enough to arouse him. He asked where the toilet was, and Lidia showed him through. Everything was spotless but desperately poor. But then, what about the caviar? He had to wait some time before he was able to urinate. He fancied this woman. That much stuck out a mile.

The washbasin was the sink in the kitchen. He went there. Lidia was standing with her back to him, and her long neck, bending over the cooktop making the coffee. Two little ringlets of hair twisted on her neck. Her legs were a delight, with slender ankles and calves firm as a ballerina’s. On high heels. He waited while she turned off the gas and took off the coffee, then put his left hand on her waist and with the right drew her to him. She lowered her face onto his shoulder, and he realized he was going to get lucky and even more, because he had his way with Elise but just any old how, while here there was such inspiration.

He labored over Lidia until late in the evening. He achieved his output target for a month ahead. He had never felt himself to be a giant in sex, but that night he discovered something of the giant in himself because of this woman with the slender waist, this extraordinary woman of mystery, with gray caviar but no bathroom or even a shower, with silver place settings and unshaven armpits. And so educated, too. On all the walls there were framed diplomas, at the very least eight of them, and she had a grandmother whose initials were CR in Gothic script, yet she did not even have a telephone.

Yes, yes, of course, Swiss women were just cows, Poles were greedy, Chinese were venal; but this Russian Lidia was a miracle. She really was a mysterious Russian soul. Where had he got that from? Who had said that? It might have been their great writer Leo Tolstoy, or perhaps it was his schoolmaster in Niederdorf.

Then, late in the night, they fed once more on caviar with butter and kalach, and drank champagne, entirely respectable champagne. If she was a schoolteacher, how could she afford champagne? And tomorrow—today, already—he had to leave and he could not even give her a decent present. Everything suggested she was from a very good family, perhaps even from the aristocracy. Such an interesting appearance in every particular, you could tell she was a person with good taste. And she could cook, as well! This was not Switzerland. In Russia there had been a lot of aristocrats; they had counts and princes and barons. But then again, perhaps she was a KGB secret agent under instructions to investigate him. His testicles contracted at the thought. No, that was impossible.

Lidia fearlessly went to see him off at Sheremetievo. Everything there was very impressive and had a strong odor of foreignness. They exchanged addresses, of course, but that was vapor, the stuff of dreams, without substance. The only substantial thing was that Lidia had been happy as never before in her life. She was already aware that the last seconds of her happiness were ticking away, and she would never again in her life see this Martin, who was so unusual. Such men simply did not exist. Even his sweat did not smell. It was as if he were an angel.

In the plane, Martin immediately fell asleep and slept all the way to Zurich. Lidia, however, from the moment she got onto the bus taking her back to the airport reception center in Moscow, cried all the way home, even in the metro and as she was walking through the side streets to her apartment.

Back home, Lidia got washed. She really was not one for weeping. She finished what little remained of the caviar. She washed and cleaned; she took Emilia’s china and silver, wrapped each piece separately, and placed screws of newspaper between the items to make sure they wouldn’t get chipped or damaged. She put everything in a bag so that tomorrow it would be ready for her to take to Emilia before going on to school.

AS SOON as Martin left, she was inundated with work. She got two new customers for massage; the director of the Pioneers’ Club wanted her to knit a dress in mohair. All summer she had sat yawning in the after-school tuition office, but now that the holidays were ending the children started preparing themselves and came in every day. Her main preoccupations, however, were the German language and postcards. Lidia had decided first to enroll in a new course and second to start collecting postcards with reproductions of Russian paintings or views of the Russian countryside.

She mailed them every day. She would write a few sentences on the postcard along the lines of

This depicts one of the most beautiful views of our North Russian countryside. I wish you happiness, good health, and success in your work.

Lidia

Or,

A painting by the famous Russian artist Vasily Surikov, The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy. It depicts a historical event when the young Czar Peter the First foiled a plot by his sister Sophia. I wish you happiness, health, and success in your work.

Lidia

She would put the postcard in an envelope and affix a pretty commemorative stamp. It was both civilized and not importunate, just a reminder that she existed.

The postcards were being sent not to his home address but to a post office box number. By some caprice of the postal service, Lidia’s postcards took just two weeks to reach their addressee, while she received the first letter from him almost two months after it was sent. Although she was sure she would get it, she felt it was a miracle when it arrived. More exactly, she was sure a miracle would happen and that she would get a letter from Martik. Martik was what she had called him to herself from the first day she met him.

Lidia remembered, as if she had seen it in a film, every detail of the day—the morning—when she removed from her letterbox an envelope as white as a fainting fit, with a stamp depicting somewhere in the mountains and the address finely written in black ink. She pulled off her leather glove and, with her bare hand, extracted the envelope. Even though she had allowed just enough time to get to work, she went back up to her apartment, took off her coat and overshoes, and sat down at the table to read the letter. The first thing to come out of the envelope, however, was a photograph of Martik wearing white shorts, which came down to his knees, and a white vest, standing beside a fence with a tennis racquet in his hands. Her heart fairly stopped beating.

And what a letter there was inside! What a letter: the greeting precisely in the middle—Meine liebe Lidia!—the margins as if invisibly delimited, every sentence beginning on a new line. Oddly, however, although everything was written very clearly she couldn’t make out a single word. None of the letters seemed to have been formed normally. In the end she wrapped it in paper, slipped it into a paper bag, and rushed off to work, because that morning they had a local history excursion for sixth-graders to the Red October candy factory.

In the evening, Emilia Karlovna first spent a while turning the letter over in her hands, studying it from every angle, and viewing Lidia with a new interest. It would not be too much to say that she had brought this girl up with her own hands. She had rented a dacha in the Moscow Region around 1958. Her husband, Ivan, was still alive, so yes, it was 1958. The landlady’s niece, an orphan called Liddy from somewhere in Belorussia, was serving in the guesthouse. She was a quiet girl, cowed and with no abilities whatsoever, or so it had seemed to Emilia Karlovna at first. On the last day, just before leaving, she nevertheless decided to take her with her. She suggested it to the landlady. What was she called? She couldn’t remember. . . . No, she was called Nastya, and she was perfectly happy to let the girl go. Liddy wasn’t yet sixteen and was already in Moscow by the time she received her internal passport; Ivan Savelievich was a retired colonel and able to arrange it through his personnel department. He registered her address as a factory hostel, but in fact she lived with them, next to the kitchen.

Now, as Emilia held the letter, she looked at Lidia with new respect. Well done! Well done, girl! From completely dire circumstances, out of nothing at all, she had really done very well. She had got herself an education and an apartment of her own. She had even managed to make something rather aristocratic out of her unprepossessing appearance. She had style, there was no denying it. The fact of the matter was that, in relative terms, her own daughter, Laura, had not done half as well.

Emilia Karlovna wanted to tell Lidia that she used to go to Zurich before the war with her grandmother and had been taken to Geneva and Paris, but the habit of never telling anyone anything about herself proved too strong. Since 1945, when she had met Ivan Savelievich, she had understood that the main thing in modern life was to keep quiet. Ivan really had completely fallen for her but even to him, a captain in the NKVD, Emilia said nothing whatever about herself. She was merely a girl from a poor Latvian family, her father a skilled worker. Oh, in Latvia we always had great respect for professionals; he was an instrument maker and first class at his job. Ivan, himself from the working class, was impressed by that. That her father had been assassinated by partisans while serving the Germans as commander of a Latvian Sonderkommando, energetically implementing the Judenfrei program, was something she omitted to mention.

Liddy was also good at keeping her mouth shut. She knew things she didn’t talk about. She too had skeletons in her cupboard. Her father had been arrested after Belorussia was liberated by the Red Army and shot in 1944 for sins of some description that he had committed against Soviet power. It wasn’t entirely clear whether Lidia had forgotten or had never known anything about it. He left eleven children and a burned-out hut. Of the eleven, only three survived, and they did not want to keep in contact. They dispersed and disappeared. She had heard that her elder brother was in the army and that her sister lived somewhere like Nalchik or Pyatigorsk. Everything in the past had been forgotten for all time, both for Emilia and for Lidia.

Emilia, however, had been almost beautiful, tall, with bubble breasts, a fringe of dyed hair over her forehead, and a backside like a pear. Like two pears, in fact. Ivan Savelievich was billeted in her apartment until he was allotted his own place by the state. When he did get it, he moved in together with Emilia. He took in Emilia’s daughter, Laura, too, and later gave her his surname.

Every paper that documented the past—photographs, certificates of any description, diplomas, letters—burned to ashes in conflagrations large and small, accidental or deliberate. Only the silver and the good china survived from the old times; Ivan Savelievich had no objection to them. He adapted rapidly. It is not so difficult to make the transition from using an aluminum bowl to using a silver one. The reverse transition would have been considerably more problematical, but he didn’t have to endure that. Emilia humored him to the day he died, not because of any great love for him but because she was a respectable woman. She taught Lidia to do the same. Things didn’t work out quite so well with Laura.

The letter was clearly from a respectable man, there was no doubt about that. He thanked Lidia for her exceptionally generous hospitality, confessed that he had never before had the pleasure of meeting such a cultured woman, hinted also at her incomparable feminine charms, and went on to inform her that he had not immediately opened her eyes to his married status because at first it had seemed entirely irrelevant and afterward he had been afraid of upsetting her. He had never imagined that after returning to Switzerland he would think about her all the time. She was so much in his thoughts that his relationship with his wife had completely fallen apart, and now he was thinking about his future. There were some important decisions he needed to make, but this was very difficult. His head was going round in circles.

After Emilia had read the letter out, Lidia was also able to decipher his writing. He had an odd way of writing r, n, and k. I looked like t. Once you got used to that, however, it was perfectly readable. In conclusion, Lidia played her trump: the photograph. Emilia examined it closely before reaching her verdict. “Lidia, you must take this very seriously. You will have to work hard without any great hope of success. These matters are far from straightforward.”

What a fool my Laura is, Emilia Karlovna thought tetchily. In spite of all her advantages, the best she can manage is that wretched Jew, Yevgeny. She told Lidia to write the reply in Russian, and she would translate it in order to make the best impression.

Lidia spent three days writing it, and the letter that resulted took Emilia aback; it was more than passable, it was positively elegant.

Even more did it take Martin’s wife aback. She was looking in a drawer in her husband’s desk for a copy of a missing receipt when she found a stack of twelve picture postcards and the very same elegant letter, from which it appeared that Martin had got himself a woman in Russia. This was something Elise had already begun to suspect for a number of reasons. An enormous domestic row erupted over what had taken place. Martin might perhaps have got over his amorous adventure. It might of its own accord have taken its place as one of the episodes of his (on the whole, rather modest) sexual biography, with Lidia being relegated to a place in a series that began with the Pole, continued with his one-night stand with the Chinese girl, and concluded with his one-night stand with a Russian—her. Elise, however, escalated the row by unworthily accusing Martin of being useless in every respect and impugning his masculine prowess when, as he now knew for a fact, all he needed to be capable of great things was for a lady to be bowled over by him and to plunge his overworked feet into a bowl of cooling water. Succumbing to an unfamiliar masculine assertiveness, which felt as if he had it on hire, he told Elise with quiet dignity that, yes, he had fallen in love with a Russian woman. He had been prepared to suppress his feelings but if she, Elise, now wished for a divorce, he, Martin, had no objection.

Pulling out from her revolting crocodile-skin handbag the edge of a stack of postcards with their incriminating Russian views and the envelope with Lidia’s elegant letter, Elise raised a meaningful eyebrow and made vague mention of a lawyer. Even without a lawyer, Martin had little doubt that the twelve years he had been toiling in paints and varnishes would simply be stolen from him. The fact that he had built up the business and paid off the debts that hung over the company after Elise bought out her brother would count not a franc to his credit. All his labors would have been in vain. Perhaps he would get only a part of the money for the house, and even then it was unclear what use Elise might make of the letter. That same evening Martin wrote Lidia an unplanned letter, informing her that he would come to Russia for Christmas, and a second letter to a lawyer requesting an appointment.

The divorce proceedings and the division of their property took more than a year, but the outcome was more advantageous for Martin than could have been foreseen. He was not the joint owner of the company, but neither had Elise paid him a salary. She was now obliged to pay compensation, and very substantial compensation at that, for his labors over the past twelve years.

In the two and a half years that preceded the solemnization of his new marriage, Martin saw Lidia for a total of six days, divided between two trips. He confirmed his belief that she was indeed a living treasure, providing top quality massage, care, food, and sex.

He and Lidia agreed to restrict their meetings for the greater good of their future together. Martin saved money furiously. After the divorce, Elise unexpectedly invited him to continue working for her as an employee. Martin thought it over carefully and agreed. He was now earning a very fair salary. If you took the compensation and added to it as much again, after his new marriage it would be possible to open a small restaurant.

Lidia for her part also prepared purposefully for her new life. With a mysterious smile, she handed in her notice and abruptly switched her allegiance from the cultural sphere to public catering. She got herself taken on in the restaurant of the Central Hotel as an assistant chef. The hotel served Russian food but, as Lidia soon found out, on a very primitive level. What was it, after all, that foreigners ordered? Pancakes and caviar, borscht, vodka. Nothing too ambitious. Perhaps such primitiveness was all that was needed? At the same time, Lidia was able to check out the finer points of the production process. After three months there was no point in staying on at the Central; everything there was to know she had already learned. A new goal suggested itself: to earn as much money as she could for her dowry, so that she could arrive in Zurich in style, not as a downtrodden waif but as a grand Russian lady.

She needed to buy an Astrakhan fur coat like Emilia’s, gray, and a diamond ring, and a pair of earrings. She also wanted to buy gold and red Khokhloma tableware for her future restaurant. She liked the idea. The only problem was how to get it out of the country. She stopped sending Martik views of the north of Russia and instead sent him a collection of postcards depicting Khokhloma ducks and spoons. He approved.

A fairy tale is soon told, however, and the day came for Lidia to pack into two suitcases all her best clothes, which she wouldn’t be ashamed to wear in Switzerland. (In fact, she was wrong. The only clothes she would wear afterward were what Martik bought her. All her own clothes ended up being used for rags.) She bought a train ticket to save money. Lidia departed from the Belorussky Station, on her way to the legendary city of Zurich, where the cellars are full of gold and where Lenin once lived, sitting in the Odeon Café on the bank of the River Limmat, eating Apfelstrudel and dropping sweet crumbs onto his volume of Marx. Zurich. The very name made you want to salivate.

In the compartment Lidia sat very straight, mechanically rubbing the end of her nose with her finger, with her head, weighed down by its heavy bun, thrown backward. When she opened her mouth wide to take a bite of something, her lipstick would leave a mark on the tip of her nose and she periodically took measures to put things right. Through the window the scenery of her Russian homeland flashed by, and Lidia, who for the last two and a half years had dreamed only of the moment when this train would move out, was suddenly overwhelmed and started thinking nostalgic thoughts about Russian birch trees, although for the moment all that stretched beyond the window was scrub and suburban garbage dumps. She thought she might be feeling homesick, although why should she feel homesick when this was all there was to Russia, a million Kolyas in tarpaulin boots, a million old women like Aunt Nastya, who had never once inquired how her niece was getting on in the city, or even whether she was alive or dead. The one person she felt close to was Emilia Karlovna. Only she understood Lidia. Of course she did. Selbstverständig.

Two elderly commercially active Polish women with whom she was sharing the compartment asked her a question in mid-Slavonic, but Lidia was in such a turmoil that, to her own surprise, she answered them, very confidently, “Entschuldigen bitte. Ich verstehe nicht.” The Poles immediately recognized their mistake in taking her for a Russian, when it was obvious she was a German. Her suit of jersey material was of bourgeois quality, and she had rings on her fingers.

Oh, Martik, Martik! He was the reward for all she had gone through, especially after two changes of train. He met her at the station in Zurich in a hirsute dark-green overcoat and an equally hairy hat with a narrow brim, cocked up at the back and with a brightly colored little feather to the side. He looked so sweet and even smelled of eau de cologne. He didn’t grab her suitcases as a Russian man would have, but signaled for a porter, kissed Lidia, and walked off arm in arm with her. All around was a foreign world the like of which had never been shown in Soviet films. There had been a film about Rome, for example, which Lidia well remembered. It was very dirty there, with rubbish dumps and ruins. They weren’t that far ahead of us, and they ate cheap food, just like in Russia—the same macaroni—and even thought it was worth filming. She could see now why the Soviet authorities didn’t show the real world abroad. There had been good reason for Lidia’s two-year stint at the University of Marxism-Leninism, where they filled everyone’s heads with nonsense.

Her first year in Zurich was the happiest. They were still just a bit too short of capital to rent suitable premises for their restaurant, so they lived on a shoestring, renting the tiniest studio rather than an apartment. But how high the rent was! Lidia had not been expecting everything to be so expensive in wealthy Switzerland. She was very capable and well able to adapt, but they were hard pressed to get by. Martin checked all the outgoing money himself. He was a trained accountant. Lidia wanted to get a job straight away. He wouldn’t let her at first, but later he did. She translated all her diplomas into German and was taken on as a manicurist. Martin was amazed at how quickly she got established. By the end of the year they had signed a contract to rent a marvelous building for a restaurant. There had been some kind of canteen there before, which was good, because when people are used to getting fed in a particular place, they keep coming back from force of habit.

Martin invited his country cousin to come and work for them. She was a very simple woman, almost rustic, but she dressed like a town dweller. Although only just. Lidia was beginning to understand a few things, perhaps even more than Emilia Karlovna: which shops were for the less well-off, which were for those who are a bit more prosperous. Martin was already very knowledgeable about this because his rich ex-wife, Elise, had taught him. By now Lidia knew that not all foreign goods were equal, but there were, of course, still some things she didn’t understand in detail. Why, for example, the English Shop was even more expensive than Swiss shops, even though there was not the slightest discernible difference in quality. She was aware that French items were very pretty but risky; the quality was not up to much. That was even more true of Italian goods.

Before the restaurant’s opening, Martin advertised it, sent invitations to his acquaintances, and hung up posters all over the district announcing, The Russian House Restaurant invites you to a Russian meal. They hired one Russian waiter, a slightly odd man, displaced and not entirely Russian. Nevertheless, he pronounced the word borscht very satisfactorily. A second, a local lad, they hired for one night only.

The restaurant’s first evening was a great success. It was the last happy day of Lidia’s life. The next morning it was all over. Martin did not wake at six, which was when they usually got up; he just slept on and on. At first Lidia did not want to wake him. He must be tired, let him rest. At ten she did try to wake him but was unable to. He lay on his side, and one arm was twisted awkwardly. Lidia touched it. It was cold. He was breathing, at least, but he did not wake up and he was very heavy. The doctor was called and Martin was immediately taken to the hospital. He’d had a stroke. It was the end. She immediately calculated that her happy life had lasted one year and twenty-one days, from her arrival until his stroke. Now she faced a nightmare.

One thing at least was good. All the hospitals in Switzerland were on the level of the Kremlin Clinic in Moscow. The nurses did everything themselves: changed diapers and fed their patients. You didn’t even have to pay to have someone on duty during the night. When Ivan Savelievich was in hospital with cancer, the three of them, she, Emilia, and Laura, had been run off their feet. Lidia recognized how lucky she had been in coming to Switzerland. At first they fed him intravenously; then the nurses began feeding him normally.

For three months there was little change. You couldn’t even really tell whether or not he recognized Lidia. One time it seemed as if he did, the next it seemed that he didn’t. He couldn’t walk, but they moved him to a chair. Lidia would visit him in the mornings. She had to change buses, and it took three and a half hours. Meanwhile, she had a restaurant to run; she had food to buy and cook. When was it to be done? She enrolled at a driving school. They had a car but Lidia didn’t have a driving license. What a fool! She cursed herself. How much unnecessary knowledge had she accumulated over the years, while she hadn’t even got round to learning to drive. The lessons extended over three months and lasted for four hours, three times a week. It was a sentence of hard labor, not a life. She managed five hours’ sleep if she was lucky, but when she was out of luck she didn’t even manage three. She was sorry for Martik, but she didn’t even really have time for that. He was like a little baby. The down on the back of his head was pressed flat, and as soon as Lidia got him home she slicked it back into place and started giving him an hour’s massage every day. The doctors said he would never recover, but the left leg, which had been affected, began gradually to grow stronger. After three months he could stand. He held on to the back of a chair and stood by himself.

Business in the restaurant, meanwhile, was going well. Lidia did not give up on it. She had to simplify things, of course, introducing something akin to set menus. But life in Switzerland proved, oh, so hard. You had to pay for everything— electricity, water, gasoline, garbage removal—and the taxes were something else. She had to start taking courses again. Nobody would tell you anything unless you paid them. At first Lidia had greatly liked the Swiss for their good manners and cleanliness, but they were very canny. Back in Russia she had always thought of herself as clever, but here everyone turned out to be just as clever, working everything out in advance.

The Swiss took to her Russian restaurant precisely because they soon calculated that for the money they paid they were being very well fed. If Lidia had not been on her own she would have enlarged the premises after a year. There was a summer terrace she could have adapted. Indeed, she would not have been afraid to rent a larger building, if only Martik had been a human being rather than a chronic invalid.

She had no time to grieve or think about anything, however, because there was just so much to get through. In the morning she had to wash Martik, give him his massage, put him on the bedpan, and then feed him. Every two days she went to Frau Temke’s farm for vegetables, and every two days to the butcher’s. Fish was delivered to her door, but for groceries she went to the wholesalers. That was only once in two weeks. All the cooking she did herself. Of course, everything was carefully planned. She had to buy an industrial refrigerator. She froze a lot, although she would never have admitted it to anyone; the Swiss looked down on frozen food. She prepared the pancake filling for the blini once a week and froze that; not the fish, of course, because it would have spoiled the flavor. To be perfectly honest, the Swiss didn’t really know all that much about cooking. They appreciated the fact that she gave them large helpings.

Lidia was terrified the whole year that she would not make ends meet, but at year’s end it turned out that she had made them meet very nicely and even had a bit to spare. She banked the profit under her own name. At that moment she understood the meaning of life for the Swiss. If Martik had been well, she might not have come to the realization through the haze of marital bliss, but since that was now at an end, Lidia came to the realization that in Switzerland happiness was expressed in numbers. The greater the number, the greater the happiness. It was not nakedly a matter of money. There were subtleties. You needed people to appreciate your success, to be made aware that you were smart and had talent by barely perceptible pointers. She painted the fence twice a year. She planted new flowers on the terrace. She hung English curtains. For those with eyes to see, she wore Bally shoes and a Loden coat. There was no Emilia Karlovna here, but she would have noticed.

Lidia sacked Martik’s rustic cousin. She just got under her feet and, although she was a true-born Swiss, knew nothing. In her place she hired other assistants: a Yugoslav girl who had a good head on her shoulders and was also married to a Swiss, and another helper, a crippled, very ugly woman who was, however, brisk and businesslike. Lidia even entrusted her with some of the more straightforward jobs at the stove. She too later turned out to be not a real Swiss but of Jewish origin. One more waiter was Italian. Everybody knows that Italians are born waiters, courteous, smiling, and full of jokes, but inclined to pilfer. Nobody pilfered from Lidia. She ran a tight ship. A business reputation is no small matter; you can’t buy it for money. It is like a seed of grain. You sow it in a pot, water and fertilize it, and it grows. One year, a second, a third. And then the same all over again.

Martik grew thinner and more debilitated and turned into an old man. Lidia, on the other hand, who in Russia had been close to being regarded as ugly, was here considered an interesting lady. Sometimes she was even taken for a Frenchwoman. She taught her husband to walk again. Now he could hobble around the house with a stick and walk in their garden. Lidia bought him a pedigreed dog, a gray toy poodle, and called it Milok. Milok cost next to nothing for vaccinations and vet’s fees, but here too Lidia had picked a winner. The Swiss loved animals. Families would come to the restaurant to dine; the children would play with Milok and later ask their parents to take them to play with the Russian dog again. These were good customers. The children called Martik “the doggy’s grandad.”

When Lidia had got the management of the Russian restaurant and looking after her invalid husband completely sorted out and running smoothly, for old times’ sake she again enrolled in a course. For two years she studied French and, of course, succeeded in mastering it. She thought about English. She would have liked to learn to ski, but it was out of the question to leave the restaurant, Martik, and Milok for several days, even though now she was no longer standing at the stove. She had two chefs whom she herself had trained to do everything. Twice a week she went to a swimming pool, and occasionally to a women’s club where she met other businesswomen. She met them once, she met them twice, and decided that what was lacking in her personal life was recognition. These women too wore Bally shoes, mink coats, and Orient watches. Lidia was irritated that for them it was only what they expected. She wanted to tell them they were all foolish domesticated hens while she, Lidia, was a soaring eagle. They had been born in Switzerland on a lump of butter, while she was born in a peasant hut with an earthen floor and a thatched roof. Until she was fifteen she had worn felt boots in winter and gone barefoot in summer and had acquired her first underclothes in Moscow when, by a stroke of luck, she was taken to work as a maid for a good mistress. Before that, like any other Belorussian peasant girl, she had not even worn a pair of drawers. A feeling of dissatisfaction developed, and an old, suppressed, and unformed dream, like the beginnings of an illness, began to grow and take form and acquire definite contours. Lidia started keeping a list in her business diary, in the last section reserved for personal matters in which the businesswomen entered the details of their meetings with lovers, gynecologists, or plastic surgeons. What she listed, however, was how much she needed to buy for a trip back to Moscow. In Moscow there lived the only person in the world who could properly recognize the magnitude of her achievement.

AS WITH all her other enterprises, Lidia first thought everything through thoroughly. She had kept up no links with Moscow at all. When Emilia Karlovna was bidding her farewell, she had wished her every success but asked her not to write letters or to telephone. At that time the first unpleasantnesses had begun for Laura because her husband, Yevgeny, had signed some protest, was shooting his mouth off left and right, and had brought the predictable disagreeable consequences down on the whole family. Laura listened to his every word spellbound. She seemed not to have a brain of her own and ignored her mother’s advice. Emilia Karlovna hated Soviet power but hid her feelings in the depths of her soul, which the state had long since abolished by decree. At the same time, she vehemently despised that idiot Yevgeny who was squawking like an imprudent parrot. Lidia’s friends from the Pioneers’ Club and the other places where she had studied or worked were not even worth the cost of a postage stamp. The only friend she trusted was her old neighbor, Varya, and at first Lidia maintained a tenuous link, but after Martik’s misfortune she stopped writing to her. What was the point?

Now Lidia wrote to Varya and asked her to call Emilia and find out how she was doing. Varya did so, and informed her that they were living as they always had, still in the same place.

Lidia bought herself a good travel bag. Until then she had been on no travels and had no luggage. She began buying the presents for Emilia that she had listed. She decided to dress her anew from head to toe in clothes of the highest quality. She should be completely outfitted, like a new baby. Lidia now spent her spare time shopping. After Christmas, when the January sales began, she completed her campaign of purchases on which she had spent more than six months. The bag received into its checked interior top-quality items worth a total of all but three thousand Swiss francs: lingerie, panty hose, sandals, shoes, boots, a jersey suit and a silk suit, a jacket, a hat and scarf, a handbag, and a pair of gloves. And all of it matched, because Lidia had taste. She had learned it from Emilia.

Inside the handbag nestled an Orient gold watch, in a case that was a work of Swiss art in its own right.

Lidia then bought herself a three-day individual tour to Moscow, capital of the Soviet Motherland, with accommodation in the Hotel Moskva.

More than ten years had passed since she had first seen Martik off to Zurich, after the memorable and life-changing dinner when his feet were washed and he was fed gray caviar. Sheremetievo had not changed. Liddy-goose had not turned into a beautiful swan, but of her former self nothing remained. She was Frau Gropius, a citizen of Switzerland, wearing an apparently modest raincoat with a soft lining of kangaroo fur. A porter walked behind, carrying her small suitcase and travel bag, and she was met by an Intourist translator, a minor KGB lieutenant with a standard-issue smile bearing a sheet of paper with Lidia’s surname on it. A taxi took them to Manège Square. Lidia felt sick with excitement on the way. The interpreter spoke to her in bad German, and Lidia did not reveal her knowledge of Russian. Why should she? In the second-floor restaurant she ordered Stolichnyi salad and galantine but, after trying it, put the fork down. She felt sick.

The next day she was taken on a tour of the city, shown the Borodino Panorama and Moscow State University on the Lenin Hills. She lunched in the restaurant of the Central Hotel with its Russian cuisine. The maître d’hotel was the same person but, of course, didn’t recognize her. In the evening she was taken to Swan Lake at the Bolshoy Ballet. She sat in the third row of the orchestra wearing a purple silk suit and a diamond brooch shaped like an arrow. She had Americans sitting next to her. One of the women was wearing curlers under a nylon cap. They were going on to a restaurant after the theater, and evidently she needed to have her curls in order for the meal. The ballet was admirable. She and Martik had not gone to the theater in Zurich very often. In Moscow she used to manage to get tickets quite regularly, even for the Taganka and Malaya Bronnaya theaters.

The next day, a Sunday, she told the interpreter she had a headache and didn’t want to go on the excursions. The girl offered to send a doctor but Lidia declined, although she really did have a headache and was feeling sick again. At two in the afternoon she took her travel bag and left the hotel. It was a five-minute taxi ride. Emilia lived nearby on Mayakovsky Square. She got out at a gray brick building on Second Tverskaya Yamskaya Street. The oddly positioned cornerwise building had been constructed for the country’s most important ministry after the war. Shortly before his retirement Ivan Savelievich had been allocated a two-room apartment here. She went up to the fourth floor, remembering how—it must have been thirty years ago—she had entered this palatial mansion for the first time. It was connected to the gas mains; it had electricity, a hot-water heater, a bathroom, and a toilet. It was the first time she had seen these things.

The bell hadn’t changed, a white button on a black wooden circle. She pressed it, and its ring hadn’t changed either. The door was opened, without anyone asking who it was, by Laura.

“Who are you looking for?”

“You. Emilia Karlovna. It’s me, Lidia. Laura, do you not recognize me?”

“Lidia! Lidochka! You’ve been sent by heaven!” Laura exclaimed in delight.

In those years foreigners were immensely useful. You sent out letters and documents with them, since anything sent by post was read by the KGB. Lidia, however, didn’t take kindly to her reception. Here I’ve arrived from Zurich carrying a bag, so now I’m dear sweet Lidochka. She never had any time for me before. There was nothing in the bag for Laura.

Then Lidia breathed in the familiar air of the old apartment. She took off her shoes and couldn’t believe she still recognized all the footwear in the shoe stand, the brown indoors slippers for visitors, two pairs for children, bygones of the professional past.

“Do you still have children coming here?” Lidia asked, with a smile.

Laura shrugged. “How could we now?”

Lidia went through to the main room where the private nursery school used to assemble. There was the long table with its six chairs, and the piano on which Emilia Karlovna would play a polka or a waltz, not too exuberantly, while the children danced, and the side table by the big sofa covered with a hand-woven rug. In the bay window, with its back to the door, stood a wheelchair, not collapsible, institutional, its iron framework painted white, and above the back of it rose a head of luxuriant piebald hair à la Pompadour. Laura walked to the window, turned the wheelchair round, and wheeled Emilia Karlovna out for public inspection.

She looked just like Martik, as if she were his sister or his mother or grandmother: the magnificently snow-white puffy skin, the little chin from behind which a second chin, flowing and almost transparent, emerged like a ruff, the pale blue eyes in round folds of soft skin, and the apologetic smile sliding down to one side. The only difference was that Martik’s nose was short with pronounced nostrils, while Emilia’s was long and hooked and pointed at the end.

“Mama, look who has come! Lidia has come! Do you remember Lidia?”

Emilia Karlovna was clutching a deck of cards in her right hand, and it wasn’t clear whether she was running through them or simply feeling them. Lidia had completely forgotten that more than anything else in the world her old mistress loved playing solitaire. For heaven’s sake, I should have bought some cards. How could I not have thought of that? was her first thought.

“Emilia Karlovna, it’s me, Lidia. Do you recognize me?”

Emilia Karlovna smiled Martik’s tactful smile, and a round bead of saliva gathered in the corner of her mouth.

“How long ago?” Lidia asked.

“Almost a year,” Laura replied quietly. “It’s a nightmare. We submitted applications for all of us to emigrate, but we can’t think how she’s going to travel. When I saw you I immediately thought, There’s someone who can help us. We are flying via Vienna. That’s not far from you. Who knows how long we shall have to wait there. If you could meet us, or even take out a letter with you for the Jewish Agency to meet us there with a wheelchair. I am sure permission to emigrate is coming any day. There are signs. My husband is completely against going to America. Only Israel is acceptable. I would have preferred America myself. . . .”

Lidia said nothing, taking in the situation. Laura chattered on without a break, twisting and cracking her fingers.

“Mama, Mama.” Laura recollected the purpose of Lidia’s visit periodically and shook Emilia Karlovna’s shoulder. “Look who’s come, Mama. Lidia. Do you recognize Lidia? You see, Lidochka, we would have applied long ago, but Mama refused to go to Israel. She wouldn’t hear of it, but it was only Israel that Yevgeny wanted. Many of our friends actually prefer America. Perhaps you don’t know it, but for all her good points Mama is a bit of an anti-Semite. She absolutely dug her heels in over Israel: no way. After she was ill, though, we applied anyway. It’s all the same to her now, isn’t it? But when are you going back, Lidochka?”

Laura went out to put on the kettle and Lidia sat down beside Emilia and took her hand.

“Emilia Karlovna, I’m so glad to see you. You are still very beautiful. Are you feeling all right? My Martik, you know, had a stroke too. Seven years ago, but now he is a lot better. He is walking. He used to be sitting in a wheelchair all the time too, but now he can walk and I have bought him a little dog.”

Emilia Karlovna seemed to be listening and to understand. Laura came back with the tea tray. The sugar bowl, the milk jug, the pink teacups; everything was just the same. Even the cakes were the same: two egg yolks mixed with half a cup of sugar, four ounces of chocolate-flavored butter. . . . Laura had learned how to make them. She hadn’t been able to do that before. Emilia moved her fingers and opened her mouth. She said something that sounded like “U-at.”

“Right away, Mama.” Laura pressed a piece of cake into the agitated right hand.

Emilia shoved it in her mouth and chewed it contentedly.

“There, you see how it is. All she wants to do all day is eat and eat. She gets cross if I don’t let her, but then she has stomach problems. For the past year she hasn’t gone once without an enema.”

Lidia opened her handbag and took out a bar of chocolate she had been keeping for the maid in the hotel. After a moment’s further reflection she took out a small vial of Chanel No. 5. It was her own perfume but she had only just started it.

“Here is a little present for you, Laura.”

Emilia Karlovna ate the cakes one after another, completely heedless of the proprieties of swallowing food that for years she had sought to inculcate in her charges. She rammed the cake far into her mouth, pushing it with her broken nails. Crumbs fell on her dirty collar and the worn front of her old blouse. Lidia’s head was splitting and she felt really sick. She had yet to learn that this was a first sign of high blood pressure.

“I must go, Laura. I’ll call you tomorrow morning. See you again before I fly out.”

“Do stay a bit longer. Yevgeny will be back soon,” Laura urged her, but Lidia was desperate to get out, spend her last night at the hotel, and leave once and for all just as soon as she could.

She pulled on her shoes, put on her mantlelike coat with its Australian animal lining discreetly concealed from public view, and with an effort lifted the checked bag.

“I have somewhere else I have to go. Some friends have asked me to take this for them.”

As a good businesswoman she had all the receipts, just in case, in a separate envelope in the top drawer of the writing desk at home. She could take it all back. It’s a good policy to buy items in expensive shops where you can take them back or exchange them if need be, especially if they already know you quite well.

She asked the interpreter to order the taxi a bit earlier than was really necessary. The poor woman was struck dumb when Lidia instructed the driver in perfect Russian, “On the way to Sheremetievo I need to stop off at Spartak Street. I’ll show you the turning.”

They drove there. The house stood where it always had, a regal four-story ship among the single-story timber huts, but for all that unambiguously a slum. She smiled, imagining to herself Martik’s reaction when he had first entered her sad squalid little apartment. She thought for a moment of going up to the third floor, ringing the doorbell, and asking to see what her old residence looked like now. Then she thought better of it.

She told the driver to take her on to Sheremetievo. She checked in her suitcase and the bag, having forgotten her promise to call Laura.

All the way back in the plane, Lidia was dying of impatience. She couldn’t wait to get back home and kiss Martik on the sagging corner of his mouth. He was a lot better, a lot better than Emilia. He could at least walk. He was better at smiling. He smiled more convincingly and had a certain number of words he could say entirely meaningfully. In any case, how had her business been getting on without her for the past three days?

She still had the headache and couldn’t shake off the nausea. Lidia whispered, almost to herself, but nevertheless just audibly, “Zurich . . . Zurich . . .” and dozed off with the thought that she really had done better than any of them.