Sonechka

The Orlov-Sokolovs

AT FIRST glance they didn’t make much impression. Both seemed rather small, they weren’t particularly striking in appearance, and were so taken up with each other they had no time for the rest of the world. Second glance, however, showed them to be kingpins, and after that it was impossible to go back and remember the impression they had made at first glance. Nobody in the faculty could remember a time when they were not an item. They had met while taking the entrance exam, despite being in different groups. After sitting the exam, even before the enrollment lists went up, at a time when the other school-leavers were totaling up points and half points, the two of them hightailed it to his dacha. They returned precisely on July 21 and went straight to the dreaded bulletin board, which had everybody, with only three exceptions, trembling with fear. One of the exceptions was Tonya Kolosova, an uninspired swot and, as they subsequently learned, the dean’s niece. They, Andrey Orlov and Tanya Sokolova, were the other two.

Their surnames derived from the Russian words for eagle and falcon and suited them marvelously. They were soon so inseparably associated that before long people were calling them the Orlov-Sokolovs.

During those five days at the dacha, where they crawled out of bed only long enough to slip down to the village store for wine and suchlike basics, they ascertained that their differences could be counted on the fingers of two hands. Tanya liked classical music; Andrey liked jazz. He liked Mayakovsky’s poetry, which she couldn’t stand. They laughed over their final difference: he had a sweet tooth, while her favorite treat was a pickled gherkin.

On all other counts they discovered total coincidence. Both were mixed-race, Jewish on the mother’s side. Both mothers were doctors, which they also found a laugh. Admittedly, Tanya’s mother was a single parent and had brought her up in fairly straitened circumstances, while Andrey’s family had had no worries along those lines. Even this was compensated for by the fact that, in place of Tanya’s absent father, Andrey had a present stepfather he didn’t get on with. The family’s prosperity and the good things that his mother showered down upon Andrey in what, for those times, was great abundance, were accordingly an affront to his precocious masculine pride. From the age of fifteen the professor’s son was out earning illegal pocket money on Gorky Street, trading in ladies’ metal bracelet wristwatches and American jeans, which at that time were just beginning their triumphal progress from Brest-Litovsk to Vladivostok.

At this point in Andrey’s confession, Tanya chortled. “The conflict between Labor and Capital!” Her own business had been in an adjacent market segment. While Andrey was hawking jeans, she had been running up button-down shirts, complete with the all-important brand labels, calculating that young people who aspired to wear jeans would sooner or later face the dilemma of where to buy the requisite shirt, which had to have not two but four buttonholes on the collar and a loop at the back.

Tanya made her shirts in three standard sizes. If she worked from morning till evening without a break, which usually meant on a Sunday, she could finish four shirts. Four times five rubles makes twenty, so by the time she was fifteen she did not need to ask her mother for money. The concept of self-service had just arrived, and she followed the trend.

How about sports? Oh, yes, they were both into sport. Andrey had been a boxer and Tanya a gymnast, and they both gave up when the decision had to be made on whether to become a professional. Andrey achieved first category, became a candidate master of sport, and joined the Moscow junior team as a flyweight. Tanya dropped out slightly earlier, on the verge of first category. She was satisfied with that.

At the start of the fourth day, or night, of their life together, they confessed to each other that they had always preferred well-built partners, both of them being fairly diminutive, especially when compared with their fellow sportsmen and sportswomen.

“Are you saying you don’t fancy me?” Tanya snorted.

“Absolutely. I’ve always liked terrible Amazons.”

“Well, you aren’t my type either. Too skinny.” Tanya laughed. They were showing off their sometimes rather alarming directness.

To listen to them, you might have imagined they had both been through fire and water. In fact, although they did have some experience, it was very circumscribed: indeed, barely sketched. They had, however, had enough to recognize the rarity of their sense of identity, which was more what might have been expected between twins: all the sighs and gasps, the soaring and tumbling down, their movements while half asleep or just as they were waking. They would wake in the night and head for the fridge, even assailed by the pangs of hunger at precisely the same moment. And they clung to each other and fused with each other like two drops of mercury, or even better than that, because complete union would have killed the wonderful difference of the potentials that produced those crackling discharges, the blinding flashes of lightning, the moment of death when the world stands still in a void of bliss.

They didn’t know how lucky they were. They had everything they could wish for: two small athletic bodies charged with power and lightning-fast reactions, quick rigorous brains, and the self-confidence of the winner who has never suffered so much as a scratch. How deeply all this was ingrained in them! They had retired from their sports just as they were approaching the limit of their capabilities, just a step ahead of the inevitable defeat. They were readying themselves to joust on the new field of their scientific careers, in the country’s best educational institution and in one of its most demanding faculties. The world, it seemed, was their oyster and had agreed in advance to spill its pearls at their feet.

The first-year course was heavy going and overloaded with general subjects, an enormous number of lectures, and sessions in the laboratory. They passed all the exams in their first semester with top marks, confirmed their elite status, and had their grants increased.

By now, nobody in their year was indifferent to them. Some they irritated, some they attracted, but everybody they intrigued. They even had their own uniquely individual style of dressing.

During the winter vacation, Tanya had her first abortion, carried out professionally, expertly, and with much more effective anesthesia than was usual at the time. It was the first negative experience they had shared, but they emerged from it without evident damage and became if anything even closer to each other. No thoughts about the baby entered their highly organized minds. It had been an absurdity—indeed, a sickness—of which one needed to be cured as promptly as possible. Andrey’s mother, Alla Semyonovna, a good and unpretentious woman who had played an active part in the medical undertaking, had greater qualms about it than the young people. She and her second husband had no children, and Alla was more aware than most of the amazing powers and capricious fragility of this feminine equipment, with its microscopic gaps in the tiniest of tubes. Their pink-napped epithelium would at one moment avidly accept and at another implacably reject the one and only cell from which both her Andrey had been formed, and she herself, and from which some day the baby would be formed who was to be her grandson.

Alla Semyonovna liked Tanya, although she was alarmed by her strength of mind, by her independent manner, and also by the benign indifference she showed toward Alla herself and toward her famous husband. Boris Ivanovich was almost an academician, yet it seemed to be a matter of complete indifference to Tanya what he and Alla thought about her.

“They really do have such a lot in common, the two of them,” Alla confided to her husband. “They are a perfect couple, Boris, a perfect couple.”

Boris, raising his sexless white face from the newspaper, agreed, slightly deforming his wife’s thought in the process. “Well, yes, two boots make a pair.”

He had never brought himself to love Alla’s son and in truth had not tried all that hard. Himself the son of a poor peasant, the eighth child in the family, he found all this Jewish doting over children fairly wearying.

As for Tanya’s mother, Galina Yefimovna, she too knew all about the abortion, but in her eyes her daughter could do no wrong. She never attempted to instruct Tanya and couldn’t imagine where her strong character and remarkable giftedness could have come from. Only from Sokolov, she supposed, although she had never noticed any such virtues in him before he abandoned her, long ago.

Galina was privately upset for a couple of months. Stealing occasional hangdog glances at her daughter, she could not understand how Tanya, not yet nineteen, could be so bold, so unabashed. When Galina hinted to her that it might perhaps be a good idea to formalize her relations with Andrey, she gave a curt shrug and said, “Why should we want to do that?”

Their vacation was spoiled, of course. Instead of the planned ski trip they spent a week at the dacha, opening their embraces to each other very carefully indeed. Their negative experience had no moral stigma attached to it for them, but it did entail a number of inconveniences that they would prefer to avoid in future.

The course recommenced, and it was far from easy. They had studied together during the first semester, either in the library or at Andrey’s home, and although both of them scored straight top grades, Andrey did nevertheless prove to have the better mind. He solved problems more elegantly, more interestingly, with greater mental agility. His superiority rankled with Tanya more than once, particularly when he expressed surprise at her slowness and sluggishness. Tanya would be a bit offended, and then there would be a reconciliation, but she took to studying without him, in her communal flat with her mother by her side and to the quiet murmur of a music program on the radio.

They both achieved a grade of excellent in the spring exams also, and by now their fame had spread beyond the other first-year students. The professors too were seeing them as rising stars. The only thing that could blight the prospect of a brilliant future was that both neglected the obligatory “social activism.” What was worse, they were not discreetly neglectful, in what could have been seen as a passive manner, but overtly and indiscreetly. Here too they were in complete agreement; the Soviet state was beyond redemption and Soviet society was degenerate.

It was, however, the society in which they were going to have to live, and they wanted to live their lives at full throttle, doing justice to their egregious abilities. The question was how far they would have to accommodate themselves to the system, and at which point they would draw the line and refuse any further retreat. Both had joined the Young Communist League and supposed, for no very good reason, that this was where the line could be drawn. Theirs were the problems of the 1960s generation, problems that had not appeared from nowhere but seeped down to them from people like Andrey’s stepfather. Boris was a former front-line soldier, an honest but prudent man enthused by atomic energy, which in those years seemed to hold out the prospect of power and prosperity, rather than catastrophe and disgrace. To such people a career in science seemed to promise the least amount of ideological interference in their lives, a hope that had yet to be disappointed. Solzhenitsyn was already being read over hostile radio stations, Samizdat was being passed from hand to hand, and Tanya and Andrey slipped boldly into living the double life typical of the masters and doctors of miscellaneous sciences.

Having done their stint of factory work experience, the two stars rollicked off to vacation in the Baltic states and for a month and a half swam in the cold sea, fell asleep on the distilled white sands beneath stately pines, drank the revolting Riga Balsam, and danced in the dangerous dance palaces of Jurmala. Then it was the turn of Vilnius to receive them and they found Lithuania more agreeable than Latvia, perhaps because they met up there with a lively group from Moscow who were five years or so older than they. Out of sociable card-playing on the beach, friendly relationships developed that were to prove long-lasting. From then until they graduated, every New Year and every birthday was celebrated with this new circle of acquaintances: a young doctor, a beginning writer, a scientist from the faculty of physics and technology who already was what Andrey hoped someday to become, a young actress who was rapidly becoming (but never did quite become) famous, a very bright philosopher who later turned out to be a KGB informer, and a married couple who lodged in their memory as the ideal family.

In the autumn Tanya had another abortion, all very quickly and smoothly done. This time Alla made her disapproval clear but arranged everything for them. Tanya was regarded as part of the family by now, and even Boris Ivanovich, who paid attention to nothing other than his beloved Alla and his meals, took a liking to her; she had a good brain. He went to America for a conference and brought back presents for everyone, including white jeans for Tanya. Amazingly enough, they fitted perfectly. Tanya was very pleased and twirled in front of the mirror, prompting Andrey to grunt and concede jokingly, “That’s the last straw. Now I’m going to have to marry you!”

Tanya stopped wiggling her backside, turned her little head on its long slender neck, and said, perhaps even a little tartly, “No, you aren’t.”

They were into the third year of sharing life together, and there had been no talk of marriage because there was no need for it. They were enjoying all the advantages of matrimony in full measure and had no interest in the drawbacks associated with responsibilities and obligations toward each other.

By now, Andrey was drawing confidently ahead of Tanya. She followed a short distance behind in his wake and had almost reconciled herself to the fact. Grades no longer mattered as much as they had in the earlier years of their course. Everybody had been allocated to different departments and laboratories, and the first publications had begun to appear from the most active students. Those who had committed themselves to a more direct career ladder were already sitting on Communist Party committees, local committees, and trade union committees, taking minutes and voting and allotting tickets to the New Year Party in the Kremlin, or sturgeon, or places on group tours.

The goodies being handed out for free held no allure for Tanya Sokolova and Andrey Orlov. Everything they needed they already had. Indeed, each of them had a scholarly article to their credit—coauthored, of course, in an entirely fair manner by the director of their laboratory. Their closeness, despite the independently written articles, grew even closer because both of them, against all expectation, chose to work in a slightly backwater discipline, crystallography, rather than anything trendy like theoretical or nuclear physics.

Crystallography reposed at the interstices of physics, chemistry, and even mathematics. Tanya busied herself with spectrophotometers, while Andrey worked at night in the Computing Center at an enormous computer, which at that time filled one entire story of the building.

At the end of their fourth year, tickets were bought for a holiday at Golden Sands in Bulgaria, and the two couples, one young and the other old, went off for a holiday together.

They occupied a hotel room next to that of Andrey’s parents without needing to produce any documents other than their passports for travel abroad, which contained no confirmation that they were legally married. When they had holidayed and sunbathed to their hearts’ content in Bulgaria, they returned to Moscow. Tanya underwent what had become her annual autumn abortion and they returned to their studies. Tanya’s mother on this occasion ventured to express her view that Andrey was a complete bastard. Tanya did not take up the subject, only grunting, “I’ll work it out by myself, okay?”

With the coming of their final year, and with postgraduate studies looming, they needed to accumulate a sufficient number of credits to obtain a recommendation from those very representatives of Soviet public opinion whom the Orlov-Sokolovs had so studiously disregarded. Tanya’s synthetic leather skirts, knee boots, and other fashion accessories were also going to have a bearing, and not to her advantage. Tolya Poroshko, the Young Communist League organizer for their course and the third signature required, along with those of representatives of their trade union and the university administration, on their references, announced for all to hear that he was prepared to sign anything just as long as the text included in black and white: “Takes no part whatsoever in the social and political life of the faculty.”

Tolya was a rustic lad from Western Ukraine. He had completed his army service and was a good-looking, ill-natured idiot. What was more, he could scent blood in a way that any personnel section could only dream of. He got the measure of the Orlov-Sokolovs at first sight; by insisting on his formulation, he could have them automatically debarred from postgraduate study of any description.

True to their origins, however, the Orlov-Sokolovs now revealed their diabolical cunning. Andrey, a qualified boxing referee, had been providing his services to the physical education department, and Tanya, even more cunningly, had been running a gymnastics club for the past two years at a school affiliated to the university. All this had been for a purpose, of course, but the sports department wrote them effusive references on headed notepaper testifying to their valued contribution to social activities. Poroshko got egg on his face and a simultaneous lesson in the omnipotence of the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy.

As far as the crystals were concerned, things could not have been better. Andrey and Tanya were researching symmetry, which was just then coming into fashion, and crystals displayed all manner of symmetrical delights. Andrey duly constructed models, mirrored them, superimposed them, and where the right should have coincided with the left there was always a slight defect, the subtlest discrepancy. This phenomenon had been picked up in times past by the head of their department, and it now greatly exercised the Orlov-Sokolovs, who sat working on the problem till late at night, motivated not by personal considerations but by their passion and enthusiasm for the subject.

Both the postgraduate places allotted to the department were plainly theirs by right, as everybody agreed. In late May, however, when they had already defended their degrees, one of the places was taken away. The head of department, a decent and intelligent man, called in the Orlov-Sokolovs. He had a high regard for them and knew how difficult this was going to be. He had already arranged a good temporary placement in one of the institutes of the Academy of Sciences. The probationer would be working on the same topic and, in effect, also under his wing. He had decided to let them choose for themselves who went where, although his personal preference was for Andrey to get the postgraduate place.

They heard him out, exchanged glances, thanked him, and asked for a day to think about it. They walked to the metro in silence. Both knew that the postgraduate place had to go to Andrey, but each left the other to make the first move. When they reached the metro station Andrey gave in.

“It’s for you to choose.” This appeared to be very noble.

“I already have.” Tanya smiled.

“Well, fine. I’ll take what’s left.”

Each was as good as the other, neither giving an inch.

At Park of Culture station she butted him in the ear with her crew cut, their secret gesture, and stood up. “I’m going home.”

“I thought we were going to—” They had been planning to visit friends that evening.

“I’ll see you there a bit later,” she said, and walked off the train on her improbably high heels.

The pointed toes of her shoes were, Andrey knew, stuffed with triangular wads of cotton wool because her shoes were always too big for her. Her unusually small size was difficult to come by.

Her feet were small, she had a deep scar beneath her knee, a narrow trail of hair down her flat stomach, large nipples that took up half her small breasts, and arms and legs that were a bit too short. So were her fingers and toes. Her neck was exquisite. She had a wonderful oval face.

She went off taking all that with her, and he went home in a bad mood, annoyed and hurt. It really was about time she understood that he . . . it was the one thing they never talked about.

They met up that evening at their friends’ apartment. It wasn’t a great evening. Andrey suffered an attack of malicious wit and several times floored the mistress of the house, which didn’t improve matters. They left late, feeling grumpy. Andrey got a taxi, and they rode to his place. The Orlovs’ apartment was large but inconvenient. His parents occupied two large adjacent rooms, while Andrey had a hundred square feet to himself. Boris Ivanovich suffered from insomnia, and the water pipes were subject to the Pompidou Center effect, which meant they began squealing piteously if you turned on a tap. Accordingly, it would be very inconsiderate to try to wash after his parents had gone to bed.

As they lay together in the darkness on a narrow little divan bed that left no room for sulking, he began talking as soon as he sensed that he was being refused nothing.

“You are silly, Tanya. I am the man, for heaven’s sake. Rely on me. Don’t feel bad about it. I love you. We share everything. We have everything in common.”

She said nothing, and they shared everything fully. When they had finished, Tanya said in a sad, desolate voice, “I think I’m up the creek again.”

He put on the light and lit a cigarette. She hid her face from the light in her pillow.

“Well, it’s time to go for it, I reckon. Have the baby this time. A girl, okay?”

“Oh, I get it. You go for the postgraduate place and I go for a baby and changing diapers.”

She never cried, but if she had been going to it would have been then. As he realized.

Tanya filled in the forms for the job at the Academy’s institute, had an abortion, and took off for the south. Andrey stayed behind to sit the qualifying exams for the postgraduate studentship. Before she left, they filled in an application to have their relationship officially recognized at the registry office, which Andrey considered to be essential. They still felt dreadful. Neither had done quite what they meant to, and both still harbored a certain amount of resentment toward the other.

Andrey saw her off at the station. She would not be traveling alone. Part of their group was already in Koktebel, and now the remainder were going to join them. They were having themselves a good time and traveling in style, paying an unbelievably high supplement to have two compartments to themselves.

Andrey and Tanya kissed on the platform, and she climbed onto the steps of the train car. Stooping down, she waved to him. That was the way he was to remember her in this last moment of their life together: wearing a man’s red shirt with the cuffs unbuttoned and a ridiculously long scarf draped round her slender neck. It was her personal chic. She would start wearing something unusual, specifically her own, and then others would follow her lead.

The train moved off and he shouted to her, “Don’t go falling in love there with Vitya!”

It was a standing joke in their group. Vitya, the beginning writer, was starting to be fashionable and had girls buzzing around him like bees round a honeypot.

“If I do I’ll tell you straight away! By telegram!” Tanya shouted, already moving away toward the south.

SOKOLOVA, Tanya, never did come back to Orlov, Andrey. She rang him some ten days later in the early hours of the morning, waking up Boris Ivanovich, who in the morning told Andrey exactly what he thought of him. By then it was too late.

Tanya told Andrey she would not be coming back to him, and indeed might not even be coming back to Moscow. She was moving to a completely different city now and, all in all, see you around!

Understanding very well what had happened and why, Andrey said in a sleepy voice, “Thank you for phoning, Tanya.”

She was silent at the end of the telephone for a time before giving in. “How did the exams go?”

“Fine.”

She was silent again, because she really had not been expecting him to take it so coolly. “Well, so long.”

“So long.”

He hung up first.

Andrey’s mother ran round to see Tanya’s mother. They already knew each other slightly but had not hit it off all that well. Galina did not much care for Andrey, and Alla, who had been anticipating a close friendship between their families, seeing so little enthusiasm on the part of his future mother-in -law, took umbrage. Boris Ivanovich had just managed to clarify the situation regarding the housing cooperative in the Academy of Sciences and things really looked quite promising. Tanya could be allocated an apartment since now she too was an employee of the Academy. Then, just when everything had been arranged and they had even put in the application, there suddenly came this telephone call. Now Andrey just spent days at a time lying on the divan, smoking and reflecting that it was hardly his fault there had only been one postgraduate place available.

“Well, Tanya with her abilities will defend her dissertation even before Andryushka does” Alla was blathering on.

Galina just raised her eyes to heaven. She had known nothing either about the telephone call or about Tanya’s change of plans. She was so genuinely and deeply upset that kindly Alla Semyonovna instantly made it up with her. What was there, in any case, to keep them apart? They had bringing up their grandchildren to look forward to, it was all practicall y. . . . They agreed Galina would let Alla know just as soon as Tanya resurfaced.

She resurfaced some days later, on the phone. Tanya informed her mother that everything was splendid, and that she was calling not from the Crimea but from Astrakhan. The line was poor. She promised to write a long and utterly amazing letter. Galina tried to shout something to her about Andrey, but the line went dead.

We lost the connection, that’s all, Galina thought, but she feared for Tanya. How quickly she changed direction. How recklessly she was living. What was she doing in Astrakhan anyway ? What was there for her?

NOT FAR from Astrakhan, in a fishing village hidden away among the marshes, lived the relatives of Vitya the writer. His father had been deputy director of the marvelous Askaniya-Nova nature reserve. A local workingman who had enjoyed accelerated promotion to the top, he had died a few years previously, but any number of his rustic relatives remained. Vitya had fished out his first stories and a novella in these parts, from the waters of the River Akhtuba.

Their village was a poacher’s dream, a realm of fish and caviar, shallow waters, and dense reed beds. All the local lads got around on motorboats instead of bicycles, and Tanya and her writer, with a sharp tug on the outboard motor, would take off in early morning and head for a remote sandbank upstream. She could only wonder at how he managed to find the way between the dense reeds and up the ill-defined and seemingly indistinguishable armlets of the river, to bring her unerringly to the rounded sandy beach of an islet shaped like a narrow-handled spoon dipped in the waters of the Volga.

She gloried in the hot golden sand, the myriad fry on the sandbars, and in her new love with this huge man, who was not far off six foot three. His entire physique was different, which was fine, which was excellent, if a bit awkward. They could seem a little out of sync, but that detail would come right with time. He was constantly amazed at how small she was. He would cup her short little foot in the palm of his hand, and it seemed quite lost. He was only thirty but already fairly jaded, having got through a whole succession of women because of a not wholly unjustified lack of trust. With this small person, however, he was a giant, and their fling was the more piquant for her having dumped her fiancé in favor of him. The fact that Vitya knew Andrey well, felt protective toward him as a younger colleague, always lost to him at cards, and had got drunk more than once in his house only added to the spice.

Even before the hair had grown back on Tanya’s shaved pubis, she could tell that she was pregnant again. “And this time I am going to have the baby,” she exulted, with a sense of triumphant vengeance.

She lolled on the sand with her writer for the best part of a month but then began to find the smell of fish intolerable, and in these parts potatoes cost far more than sturgeon.

He put his hand on her taut athletic belly and anxiously wondered aloud, “How will everything fit in? This is going to be a big baby!”

He was incredibly curious about the goings-on in her belly, already loved what was living there, and felt concern for it. He would fall asleep, fitting all of Tanya onto his shoulder and with his hand sealing her prickly-ticklish muscular entrance and exit.

They registered their union at the village registry office in five minutes flat. The director of this modest institution was the friend of a cousin. No advance application was needed. They just took in their passports, paid one ruble twenty, and in return received a marriage certificate with a violet rubber stamp on it.

It was the day she was supposed to have been marrying Andrey.

Tanya chased the thought of Andrey away but did keep thinking that she must remember to tell him.

Having sunbathed, got sunburned, shed her sunburned skin, and gained a suntan, Tanya returned to Moscow only in mid-August. Without warning, straight from the station, she took Victor home and announced to Galina, “Mum, this is my husband, Victor.”

Galina was dumbfounded. Heavens above! The girl really just did whatever came into her head.

He was not particularly good-looking, this husband of hers. He had a plebeian face, thin hair parted down the center that flopped over his forehead, and a coarse prominent brow. He was a large man, which makes a big impression on small women, but was also unexpectedly well-spoken and had good manners.

Galina went out to the kitchen with the kettle and did not return for a long time. When Tanya went to see what had happened to her and the kettle, she found her mother weeping bitterly on a stool beside the bathroom, she was so sorry to have lost Andrey.

She had forgotten to light the gas under the kettle.

Real life began in earnest. Tanya started her first job. That day Andrey came to the institute to see her, not yet knowing she was married. Tanya and Victor had said nothing to their mutual friends, and so far the marriage was a secret.

“Let’s go and sit somewhere,” Andrey suggested.

“Here’s a bench.” Tanya sat down on the nearest one.

He told her to stop playing the fool. She told him she was married.

“To Vitya?” he guessed astutely. They were both well versed in the laws of symmetry.

“Yes.”

“Well, fine. Let’s go round to his house right now and collect your things so there are no grounds for misunderstanding.” He made the suggestion so confidently that for a moment Tanya thought that was just what she was going to do.

“I’m pregnant, Andrey.”

“That doesn’t matter. You’ll have to have another abortion. One last time.” Andrey shrugged.

That was the breaking point. “No,” Tanya said gently. “I can’t do that anymore.”

He took out a cigarette and lit up. “And all because of that shitty studentship?” he asked viciously.

Tanya had already thought this over only too many times. She already knew she would soon be leaving this institute; her interest in crystals was dependent on having Andrey by her side. Now everything was shattered and she had no interest at all in finding out why the crystals in the druse of one rock were dextrogyre while those in another were levogyre. What she did not yet know was that one of the twin boys she would give birth to would be left-handed. It was to be a strange and delightful surprise.

Something had, quite unpredictably, gone wrong. If Andrey were now to say to her, “You can have the studentship, I’ll take the temporary post,” would her interest in crystals revive? There had been a glitch, a malfunction of some kind in their destiny but . . . by now it had happened. There was no more to be said.

She stood up, placed her finger on the top of his head, and ran it down across his forehead to his chin, where she put a full stop. “No, Andrey, no. Amour perdu.”

THEY WERE next to meet eleven years later, at the seaside in the Crimea, in the place they used to go to when they were young. They were there with what was left of the old crowd, although the physicist had emigrated to America, the ideal married couple was no more since he had died in a car crash and she now had another, even more ideal family. In their place, though, were other perfectly agreeable people. Through mutual friends they had advance warning that they would meet up again on this holiday.

Andrey came with his wife and five-year-old daughter. Tanya was with her ten-year-old twins, scrawny bespectacled boys who were already taller than she was. Her husband was staying in Moscow to write a novel about being a fish, having already written about being all the other animals. It was his way of fighting against the Soviet system but fell considerably short of Animal Farm.

Tanya had changed less than Andrey, who had put on a lot of weight. This was not something a person of his height could afford to do. He was now a doctor of science. Tanya had exchanged bikinis for one-piece swimsuits, because her once bewitching belly was crisscrossed with coarse Soviet stitching left behind by her cesarean section. Otherwise she was just the same: she walked on her hands on the beach, wore extravagant outfits, and, as before, stuffed wedges of cotton wool in the toes of her shoes.

Everyone had brought their kids. They walked to coves near and far and taught the children to swim and play card games. Andrey and Tanya met only when other people were present, at large gatherings, and said nothing the least bit meaningful to each other. From time to time Tanya caught the anxious gaze of Andrey’s wife, Olga, resting on her, but found that merely amusing. Olga was tall. She had a good figure, was almost pretty, and belonged firmly in the bimbo category. Andrey would occasionally shut her up, and she would flap eyelashes heavy with mascara and pout. Their daughter was a sweet little thing.

A few days before it was time to return home, everybody decided to camp out at Seagull Bay. It was the kind of outing the children loved. Tanya said in advance that she did not want to go, but her sons begged and begged and the ideal family agreed to take them and be responsible for them. Their son, the same age as Tanya’s boys, was very put out to think his best friends might not be coming. Tanya was tired of having people around her all the time and wanted a day on her own, away from the ceaseless hullabaloo. She had no prior arrangement with Andrey, and indeed genuinely did not know that he too had decided against joining the excursion.

After she had seen the children off early in the morning, Tanya spent the day lounging around, reading Thomas Mann in her muggy room, dozing off, waking up, and dozing off again. It was evening before she got out of her chair, took a shower (the water had warmed up during the day), shaved her armpits, made herself a facial from the owner’s shot cucumbers, brewed herself some coffee, and took it out to the garden table. This was the moment Andrey appeared.

“Hello, Tanya. What are you up to?”

“Having my morning coffee. Fancy a cup?” She answered him unfazed but aware that this was the moment she had been waiting for all month.

“I don’t drink coffee. It makes my ears go all buzzy.” It was a phrase they had used in the old days. “Let’s imbibe some of the local beverages.”

They strolled down to the promenade where Crimean wines were sold directly from the barrel. Tanya was relaxed and feeling on top of the world, the unbuttoned cuffs of her man’s white shirt flapping. They drank the white Aligoté, then the local port, then the sticky-sweet red Kokur, constantly putting off a moment that was already behind them.

Everybody else was renting rooms in landladies’ houses. Only Andrey was living like a general in a small separate cottage in the grounds of a military sanatorium. Its medical director had ceded his official accommodation in consideration of a large sum of money.

They walked along the embankment a fine hairsbreadth from each other, talking inconsequentially about the weather, and the thin crust above the abyss was still bearing their weight but sagging markedly. They had done the rounds of the wine barrels and were walking back to the sanatorium, rather than to Tanya’s accommodation. They went in the service entrance and across the crunching gravel straight to the little cottage set among rosebushes. The door was unlocked and they didn’t turn on the light.

“Only, please, don’t say a word. . . .”

Oooh, what a lot I’ve forgotten: the metal brace behind his front teeth where he had them knocked out . . . no, I haven’t forgotten; my tongue in here, under the brace. . . .

My poor dear home, abandoned, given over to a stranger. Your porch, your steps, your front door . . . your walls, your hearth! What have you done, Tanya? Andrey, what have you done? Instead of those three children, there might have been someone quite different. Perhaps not one. . . . What have we done?

These are not two foolish cells rushing toward each other for a mindless continuation of the species. Every cell, every filament, a whole being is thirsting for them to enter each other and be still, to be one. One flesh laments, crying out to become.

Wordlessly the flesh lamented until morning. Then it came to its senses. They still had a whole day before evening. They had something to eat and crawled back under the crumpled sheet. Tanya ran her finger from the top of his head to his chin.

Andrey saw very clearly how it was going to be: Everyone would come back from the cove, get their things together, and return to Moscow. He would take his family home, and then he would take Tanya and her boys to the dacha. It would be cold in the winter. His car would get stuck in snowdrifts. He would clear a path to the gate with a wooden shovel and drive the boys to school. Olga and his daughter . . . well, he had no idea what they would do. Perhaps he would have to take Vera to kindergarten as well.

Tanya supposed Vitya would just shrug it off. He would probably even be pleased and run off to some Regina. Difficult to imagine Andrey in our house. He must have worn out his red terry-cloth dressing gown by now. He doesn’t drink coffee in the morning, only tea. And then, the crystals. Of course, there were the crystals to think about. Actually that might be the biggest worry. What was to be done about the crystals?

Tanya wanted it more than anything in the world, he could tell, and that was why he said nothing. Neither did she, until again it was she who gave in.

“Well, then?” This could be understood in many different ways. It could just mean it was time to split.

The flesh had groaned its last groans. What a fantastic figure Olga had, though. Those breasts, that waist, those legs. No, this wasn’t going to work.

He ran his finger over Tanya’s face. “Amour perdu. Time to get up.”

She jumped up lightly, laughed, and shook her head. Short hair had suited her better.

“No, you can’t fool me. Not perdu.”

“It’s not on, Tanya.”

She put on the white shirt, raised herself on her improbably high heels, and left.

NEXT MORNING Olga was sweeping the cottage. With the besom, she brushed a triangle of cotton wool out of a corner.

“Yuk! What’s this?”

Andrey gave it a glance. She really must have been born yesterday. Well, in 1939. How could she know what it was for? “I feel I’ve had about enough of this holiday. Why don’t we go back a bit early? Maybe tomorrow?”

Olga was amenable. “Anything you say, Andryusha.”