NINE

LUDMILA ULITSKAYA WOMEN'S LIES

Translated by Arch Tait.

How can anyone compare the big, manly lie — strategic, architectural, as old as Cain's riposte — with the sweet ad-libbing fibbing of woman — blameless, shameless, innocent of guile?

Behold the regal couple, Odysseus and Penelope. Not much of a kingdom, perhaps. Thirty homesteads. Little more than a village really. Goats in the pen, no mention of chickens. They probably haven't been domesticated yet. The queen churns cheese and weaves rugs. Pardon me, shrouds. Okay, she is from a good family. Her uncle is another king; her cousin is the Helen who launched the bitterest wars of classical antiquity. Actually, Odysseus was one of Helen's suitors until he weighed up pro and contra and married, not the most beautiful woman, not the super-model of uncertain morality, but canny Penelope who into her dotage bored everyone stupid with her ostentatious and, even then, old-fashioned marital fidelity. And this while he, renowned for his stratagems, capable of competing in craftiness and cunning with the very gods, as Pallas Athena herself attests, is supposedly wending his way back home. For decades he cruises the Mediterranean, making off with sacred relics, seducing sorceresses, queens and their maidservants, the legendary liar of those antediluvian times when the wheel, the oar and the distaff had already been invented, but conscience hadn't. In the end the gods decide they'd better facilitate his return to Ithaca for fear that, if they don't play ball, he may return to his village anyway, in defiance of Fate, and thereby put the Olympians to shame.

Meanwhile, back at home, our aging, simple-hearted deceiver unpicks her day's weaving every night, dulls with tears the eyes so bright in the days of her youth, presses to her sagging, unneeded breasts the joints of thin fingers disfigured by arthritis, and drives away all the suitors whose interest for many years now has been solely in her royal, if modest, possessions, and not at all in her faded charms. Foolish womanly stubbornness. To be absolutely truthful, she isn't even a good liar. Her deception is uncovered. Before you know it, they will be deriding this decent, elderly woman, giving her in marriage to the most lustful of studs.

In the end Odysseus achieved all his heart desired: he conned his way into the culture of mankind just as he once had into the Trojan horse; he left his traces in every sea, scattering his seed over many islands; he abandoned everyone, only to return in due course to his royal duties and beloved homeland. He deceived everybody with whom Fate brought him into contact. Except for Fate herself: one fine autumn day, a young hero moored on the coast of Ithaca in search of the father who had abandoned him and, in a case of mistaken identity, mortally wounded his own dad, leaving just enough of a gap between life and death for the final explanation. So runs one version of the myth of Odysseus. But despite the predestined ultimate misfortune which is the lot of all mortals, Odysseus has remained a hero for the ages, as a great liar, adventurer and seducer. How masterfully he contrived his deceits. He anticipated his opponents' line of thought, then raced ahead, outflanked, excelled, entrapped and vanquished them! He ran rings round the sorceress Circe herself. This is how he is inscribed in the memory of the nations, as a consummate designer and architect of lies.

Penelope ended up with nothing. There she had sat, recycling her yarn, weaving and unpicking, and her lying, like her handiwork, was as well formed as it was duplicitous. Yet for all her best efforts over those years, she has been allotted no place as prominent as that of her husband or her cousin. She was lacking in some special, feminine gift of mendacity. And yet the fibbing of woman, unlike the pragmatic lying of man, is a highly rewarding topic. Women do everything differently: alternative thinking, feeling, suffering — and lying.

And God in heaven, how they lie! Those, that is, who unlike Penelope do have the gift. En passant, unintentionally, purposelessly, passionately, suddenly, surreptitiously, irrationally, desperately, and simply for no reason at all. Those who have the gift lie from the first words they utter to the last. And how enchantingly, how artistically, how innocently and brazenly. What creative inspiration! What eclat! Here is no scope for cunning, self-interest, or premeditation. This is a song, a fairy tale, a riddle. But a riddle without an answer. The lying of woman is as much a natural phenomenon as milk, or a birch tree, or a bumblebee.

Just like every disease, so every lie has its aetiology. With hereditary predisposition or without. As rare as cardiac cancer or as common as chickenpox. It can have all the characteristics of an epidemic, a kind of social lie which suddenly lays low almost all the members of a woman's enterprise, a kindergarten, say, or a hairdressing salon, or some other entity, most of whose members are women.

We propose, then, a brief literary investigation of the topic, with no claims to offer a complete or even a partial answer.

The child resembled a hedgehog, with his stiff, spiky black hair, a curious long nose which narrowed at the end, and the droll ways of a self-reliant being constantly sniffing things out; with his total impregnability also to affection, to being touched, to say nothing of a mother's kiss. But his mother too, as far as one could tell, was a hedgehog kind of person herself. She made no attempt to touch him, not even proffering a hand as they were coming back up the steep path from the beach to the house. So he scrambled up in front of her, and she slowly followed behind, leaving him to clutch at tufts of grass for himself, to pull himself up, to slither back, and go straight on up again to the house, shunning the smooth turn of the road along which any normal holidaymaker would have walked. He was not yet even three, but had such an emphatic, independent personality, that his mother herself sometimes forgot he was still almost a baby and treated him like a grown man, expecting him to help and look after her, before coming back to reality and putting the baby on her knees, and bouncing him gently as she recited, «Let's go berry picking, let's go berry picking», while he shrieked with laughter as he fell between her knees into the taut lap of his mother's skirt.

«Sasha, Sasha, eat your kasha!» mother teased him.

«Mummy, mummy, big fat tummy,» he responded delightedly.

This was how the two of them had lived together for one whole week, renting the smallest of the rooms while the others, scrubbed and readied, awaited their occupants. It was the middle of May and the holiday season was just beginning. A bit cool, and too early still for sea bathing, but the southern vegetation had not yet coarsened or faded, and the mornings were so clear and pure that, from that first day when Zhenya had chanced to wake at dawn, she hadn't missed a single sunrise, a daily spectacle she had not previously appreciated. They were getting along so happily and so easily that Zhenya even began to doubt the prognoses the child psychiatrists had come up with for her boisterous and highly strung little boy. He hadn't been making scenes, hadn't been having temper tantrums, and could probably have been described as well-behaved had Zhenya had any clear notion of what good behaviour consisted of.

In the second week, a taxi pulled up at the house one lunchtime and disgorged a whole crowd of people: first a driver, who extracted an iron contrivance of uncertain purpose from the boot; then a large handsome woman with a lion's mane of red hair; then a lopsided old lady who was promptly installed in the contraption erected from the flat contrivance; then a boy a bit older than Sasha; and, finally, the landlady of the house herself, Dora Surenovna, her face carefully made-up for the occasion and fussing about even more than usual.

The house stood on a hillside. It was slewed relative to everything else; the main road ran below it and another pitted, earthen road ran above the homestead; and a footpath ran close to one side, which was the shortest route to the sea. Against that, the plot itself was delightfully laid out. At the centre of everything stood a large table flanked on all sides by fruit trees; two houses, one opposite the other, a shower, a toilet and a shed enclosed it like a theatre set. Zhenya and Sasha were sitting at one side of the table eating macaroni, but when the whole contingent flooded into the enclosed courtyard they immediately lost their appetite.

«Hello, hello!» The redhead dropped her suitcase and bag and plonked herselfdown on the bench. «I haven't seen you here before!»

Everything fell into place. The redhead belonged here. She was the leading lady. Zhenya and Sasha were newcomers, supporting cast.

«It's our first time here,» Zhenya said apologetically.

«There has to be a first time for everything,» the redhead replied philosophically, and proceeded to the large room with a verandah, which Zhenya had aspired to until being categorically turned down by the landlady.

The driver hauled the old lady down in her cage; she was twittering in what sounded to Zhenya like a foreign language.

Sasha rose from the table and moved away with an air of gravitas and independence. Zhenya collected the plates and took them off to the kitchen. They would have to accept that there was no way of avoiding these people. The redhead's arrival had completely changed the prospect for the summer.

The boy, pallid, with a markedly snub nose and unbelievably narrow skull, addressed the redhead in what was by now unmistakably English, although Zhenya could not make out what he said. His redheaded mater, however, silenced him with a clearly discernible, «Be quiet, Donald».

Until that day Zhenya had never set eyes on English people, and English the redhead and her family turned out incontrovertibly to be.

They became properly acquainted in what, by southern criteria, was late evening, after the children had been put to bed and the dinner dishes washed. Zhenya had thrown a shawl over the table lamp to stop it shining on the sleeping Sasha. She was re-reading Anna Karenina in order to compare certain events in her own disintegrating private life with the real drama of a real woman, a woman with ringlets on her white neck, with feminine shoulders, frills on her peignoir, and who clasped a handmade red bag in her piano-player's fingers.

Zhenya would never have ventured to intrude on the lighted terrace of her new neighbour, but the latter herself tapped with large, varnished fingernails at her window and Zhenya came out, already in her pyjamas and with a sweater on top. It was cold at night.

«I was driving past the Party Foodstore. What do you think I did?» the redhead asked her severely.

As no witty response suggested itself, Zhenya rather unenterprisingly said nothing.

«I bought two bottles of Crimean port, that's what I did. But perhaps you don't care for port? Perhaps you prefer sherry? Let's go!»

And Zhenya, abandoning Anna Karenina, followed as if entranced by this sumptuous lady cossetted in a shaggy green and red check garment, half poncho, half tartan blanket.

Everything was upside down on the verandah. The suitcase and the bag had been unpacked, and it was amazing to see how much they had managed to contain in the way of bright, cheerful clothes. All three chairs, the folding bed and half a table were piled high. Mother was sitting in a collapsible chair, and her pale, twisted little face wore an ingratiating smile she had evidently forgotten some considerable time previously.

The redhead, without taking the cigarette from her mouth, poured port into two glasses, and rather less into a third which she pushed into her mother's hands.

«Call my mother Susan Yakovlevna, if you like. Or don't call her anything. She doesn't understand a word of Russian anyway. She did know a little before her stroke, but after it she forgot everything. English too. All she remembers is Dutch. The language she spoke as a child. She is a perfect angel, but completely witless. Drink up, Granny Susie. Chin-chin!»

The redhead again pressed the glass upon her and she took it in both hands with evident interest. It seemed there were some things she had not forgotten.

That first evening was dedicated to a biographical account of the redhead's family — which was dazzling. The witless angel of Dutch origin had been a Communist in her young days, had linked her destiny to that of a British subject of Irish origins, an officer in His Majesty's army and a Soviet spy who had been caught and sentenced to death, bartered for an item of equivalent value, and exported to the motherland of the world proletariat.

Zhenya listened agog, and quite failed to notice how drunk she was getting. The old lady snored quietly in her chair, then emitted a little stream.

Irene Leary — what a name! — threw up her hands.

«I let my mind wander. I forgot to put her on the pot. Oh well, no point in worrying about it now.»

She carried on relating her enviable family history for a further hour while Zhenya got more and more drunk, but by now not from the port, which they had drunk to the last drop, but from admiration and delight at her new acquaintance.

It was after two in the morning when they parted, having changed Susie and given her a quick wash. She woke with a start and had absolutely no idea what was going on.

The following day was full of noise and bustle. In the morning Zhenya cooked the breakfast, making porridge for everyone before taking the two boys for a walk. The English boy, Donald, despite having been born in Russia, had an equally breathtaking pedigree. His paternal grandfather was an even more famous spy, and had been caught and exchanged for an item of even greater value than his maternal grandfather. He proved to be an exceptionally pleasant little boy, courteous, well brought up and, something that disposed Zhenya towards him no less warmly than towards his redheaded mother, he immediately behaved magnanimously and considerately towards the highly strung and nervous Sasha, as an elder towards a junior. He actually was a bit older, already five, and immediately demonstrated a quite adult nobility of spirit by unhesitatingly giving Sasha an ingenious little tip truck, showing him how to raise its body, and when they finally made it to the fizzy drinks kiosk, where Sasha usually started grizzling until Zhenya bought him some carbonated water in an opaque tumbler, the five-year-old declined the proffered tumbler with a wave of his hand and said, «You drink it. I can wait.»

He was a perfect little Lord Fauntleroy. When Zhenya got back home, Irene was sitting at the table in the courtyard with the landlady, and from the way that self-important Dora was fawning on her new lodger it was plain to see how highly Irene was rated in these parts. They were all treated to the landlady's mutton soup, hot and too peppery. The English boy drank it slowly and with faultless table manners. A bowl was placed in front of Sasha, and Zhenya was preparing to negotiate discreetly with him, because he was very particular about what he would eat, and that was restricted to mashed potato and rissoles, macaroni, and porridge with sweetened condensed milk. And nothing else. Ever.

Sasha looked across at little Lord Fauntleroy, put his spoon in the soup and, for the first time in his life as far as she could remember, ate something that was not on his list.

After lunch the children slept but the women sat on at the table. Dora and Irene reminisced about last year's season and talked cheerfully and amusingly about people she didn't know and happenings of long ago in the resort. Susie sat in her chair with a smile as permanently fixed and out of place as the brown mole situated between her nose and her lip. Zhenya sat with them for a time, drank a cup of Dora's good coffee and then went to her room. She lay down beside Sasha and was going to start in on Anna Karenina, but reading a book in the middle of the day didn't seem right, almost improper in fact. She set aside the dog-eared volume and dozed, imagining through sleep how she would sit alone that evening with Irene on her verandah, without Dora, and drink port. What fun it would be. It suddenly dawned on her from on high, as if from out of the clouds, that it was two days now, from the moment redheaded Irene had arrived, since she had last recalled that life was foul and wretched and that hers was a total disaster, as if a wart-covered black and brown crab were sucking her innards. Well to hell with the lot of it. Lurve wasn't that big a deal. She sank down and down and slept like a log.

When she woke up she must still have been on a bit of a high, because she was feeling chirpier than she had for a long time. She got Sasha up, pulled on his trousers, put on his sandals, and they went into town where there was a roundabout which Sasha liked, and opposite it was the Party Foodstore.

«But why 'Party'? I must ask Irene,» Zhenya thought. Two bottles of port. The wine that year was excellent. Gorbachev had yet to launch his attack on alcoholism, and Crimean wine was being produced by state farms and collective farms, and by good old boys working for themselves; dry, demi-sec, fortified, Massandra, wines from Novy Svet, run-of-the-mill plonk and wines of the highest quality. There was no sugar, butter or milk in the shops, but people overlooked that detail, because so much else was going on in life itself.

That evening they again drank port on the verandah, only this time mother was packed off to bed early on. She did not protest. Indeed, she only nodded, said thank you in her unknown language, and smiled. Occasionally she would cry out, «Irene!», but when her daughter went to see what she needed, she smiled in embarrassment, having already forgotten why she had called her.

Irene sat with her elbow propped on the table and her cheek cupped in her left hand. In her right she held her glass. Playing cards were scattered over the table, the remnants of a game of Patience which hadn't come out.

«This is the second month it hasn't been working. Something isn't coming together for me. What about you, Zhenya? Do you like cards?»

«How do you mean? When I was a girl I played snap with my grandad at the dacha,» Zhenya said, surprised by the question.

«Perhaps it's better that way. I love them, though. Both for playing and for fortune-telling. I was seventeen when a fortuneteller made me a prediction. I should just have forgotten it, but I didn't, and everything has come to pass as if my life were following a script. Just as she foretold.» Irene took several cards, stroked their garish backs, and tossed them face upwards on the table. The nine of clubs was on top.

«I can't stand her, but she always dogs me. Away with you! She gives me heartburn.»

Zhenya thought for a moment before asking, «You mean, you always know how everything is going to end? Doesn't that make life boring?»

Irene cocked an ochre eyebrow.

«Boring? You really don't know anything about it, do you? No, it isn't boring. If I were to tell you…»

Irene poured out what remained of the first bottle between the two of them. She took a sip and moved the glass away.

«Zhenya, you must realise by now what a chatterbox I am. I tell people everything about myself. I'm no good at keeping secrets. Mine or anybody else's. Don't say you haven't been warned. There is one thing, though, that I've never told to a soul. You shall be the first. For some reason I suddenly want to.»

She gave a half-smile, and shrugged.

«I'm surprised at myself.»

Zhenya too propped her elbow on the table and cupped her cheek in her hand. They were sitting opposite each other, gazing at one another with an abstracted, meditative expression as if looking in a mirror. Zhenya too was surprised that Irene had suddenly chosen her for her revelations. And flattered.

«My mother was extremely beautiful — the spitting image of Deanna Durban, the film actress. And she was always an idiot. Well, no, not an idiot, but feeble-minded. I love her very much, but she has always been muddle-headed: on the one hand, she is a Communist, but on the other she is a Lutheran; then again, she is an admirer of the Marquis de Sade. She was always prepared to give away everything she had without a moment's hesitation, and she could get hysterical with my father because she suddenly desperately needed that swimming costume she bought in 1930 on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, on the corner near the Jardin du Luxembourg. When my father died I was sixteen, and she and I were left together. I have to give my father his due: I can't imagine how it was possible, given their unbelievably hard life, but she was always notable for her complete, triumphant helplessness. She never did a day's work because, despite being bilingual in English and Dutch, she could never learn Russian. In forty years! My father worked in broadcasting and she could have got a job through him. But even though you don't really need Russian to work there, you do have to be able to say „Zdrastvuite!“ or to read a notice saying „Silence. Recording in progress“. She couldn't. The moment my father died, I went out to work. I had no education at all, but I am a very good typist. I can type in three languages.»

So then, about the prediction. I had an old friend, an Englishwoman marooned in Russia in the 1920s. There is a little colony of Russian Englishmen and Englishwomen like that. I know them all, of course. They are either Communists, or techies who stayed behind in Russia for some reason or another, practically from the time of the New Economic Policy. Well, this Anna Cork washed up here because she was in love. Her lover was shot, of course, but she was luckier and survived. She was imprisoned, naturally, and lost a leg. She hardly left the house. Gave English lessons, told fortunes. She never took money for her fortune-telling, but she did accept gifts. She taught me a thing or two, and I was able to help her also.

One time when I was hanging around there, a beautiful woman came to see her, the wife of a general or a party boss. Either she couldn't have babies, or she was wondering whether to adopt a child. My Anna spoke to her in her usual way, in God knows what language, with a really heavy accent, although she could speak Russian, believe me, no worse than you or I. She had, after all, spent eight years in labour camps. But when she thought it politic, she could put on that accent. She could swear too: the Moscow Art Theatre had nothing on her. But now to this beauty she didn't say «yes» and she didn't say «no», but spoke ambiguously and portentously as a good fortune-teller should — and left it unclear whether she should or shouldn't have a child, but implied it would be better if she didn't.

Then she suddenly turned to me and said, «But you will start at the fifth. Remember that, the fifth.»

«What would I start at the fifth? Gobbledygook. I forgot it immediately. But I was to remember it again when the time came.»

Irene cupped her chin in her hand again. She was lost in reverie. Her eyes had a slight animal sheen, like a cat's, suggestive of cosiness, tenderness, and a veiled anxiety.

Zhenya had friends she had been to University with, friends with whom she discussed large, important matters, like art and literature, or the meaning of life. She had written her degree dissertation on the Russian modernist poets of the 1910s. Her topic had been very rarefied for those times — about the poetic resonances between the poets of the modernist tendencies and the symbolists of the 1910s. Zhenya had been unusually fortunate — her supervisor was a lady professor of advancing years who knew her way around Russian literature much as she knew her way around her own kitchen. Professor Anna Veniaminovna was idolised by her students, especially the girls, and knew all these poets not from hearsay but from personal acquaintance. She had been almost a friend of Anna Akhmatova, had drunk tea with Mayakovsky and Lily Brik, had heard Mandelshtam recite, and even remembered the living, breathing Mikhail Kuzmin. Through her proximity to Anna Veniaminovna, Zhenya herself had acquired important friends, moving among the intellectuals of the arts and having pretensions to becoming important herself with time. And, to tell the truth, never in her life had she heard such banal prattling as she had that evening. Oddly, however, these banalities had contained something important, substantial, and very much alive. Perhaps even the elusive meaning of life itself?

Revelling in the sweet port-induced intoxication, the stillness and the darkness outside her window in which the light from a streetlamp reflected like a quivering mark on the leaves of a great fig tree, Zhenya was also enjoying what she suspected was only a temporary respite from the stubbornly unresolved state of some important (if they were important) questions regarding what she wanted to do with her life.

Irene swept the cards off the table — some of them fell to the floor, others landed on a chair.

«Susie would be lying on the sofa with a book from morning till evening, sucking a caramel. I understand now: she was clinically depressed, but all I saw at the time was that she was turning into my baby. Don't forget, this was long before her stroke. I wasn't actually spoon-feeding her, but if I didn't pour the soup into her bowl she could go three days without eating. I decided I urgently needed to have a baby of my own, a real baby, because turning into the mother of my own mother was something I most certainly did not want. This way she might at least become a grandmother and have a pram to push. I got married in a rush to the first man I set eyes on. The boy next door, good looking but a complete moron. I got pregnant and walked around for nine months flaunting my belly like an award for gallantry. They talk about toxicosis, how you feel, blood pressure. What else do pregnant women get? Well, I had none of it. I went straight from my typewriter to the delivery ward. I didn't even have time to finish the typing and hand the work in. Right, I thought, I'll just quickly have the baby and finish the typing after I'm a mother. There was two days' work still left to do. Things did not turn out that way, though. The umbilical cord became entangled. My baby was dying. The delivery nurse was young, the doctor was a total prat. Between the two of them they killed my baby. All I needed was a good old-fashioned midwife. I was eighteen and a complete fool. Count it on your fingers: my firstborn was dead. David, I was going to call him, in memory of my father. I was gushing milk, and tears were pouring from my eyes.»

Irene looked at Zhenya with intent, narrowed eyes as if assessing whether it was worthwhile to continue.

«Sasha had a looped umbilical cord,» Zhenya said in a quiet, shocked voice. She knew it was very dangerous for a baby, but this was the first time she had seen a mother who had actually lost her child because of this ridiculous noose, which had faithfully served the infant for a full nine months only to suddenly strangle it.

«Two months later I was pregnant again. You don't know what I'm like. If I want something I'll dig it out of the ground if need be. I'm walking around again. Not so perky this time. Sometimes I feel sick, sometimes I get colic, sometimes I have numbness. But never mind, I'm fine. My husband, a prize dickhead, worked as a car mechanic. I told you, I leapt into marriage with the first thing in pants that I saw. Whatever he earned he drank. He was a complete Alain Delon look-alike, only more solidly built. I sat busily banging away at my typewriter, bringing in a fair amount of money. Enough for Susie's caramels.

The first time, I had known for sure it was a boy, but this time I decided on a girl. My bulge grew, but I was just enjoying being a woman: the minute I had two rubles to rub together I would skip off to the Children's World department store. Baby socks, little cardigans, romper suits. It was all rough old Soviet stuff, of course. But I had grown up as a tomboy, swinging on fences. My parents had been sent to live in Volzhsk at first, under a false name. I only discovered my real name when I was ten. After my parents were 'declassified' my mother's sister sent our first parcel. It included a doll for me, but I couldn't bear dolls. I didn't want to be a girl. I bawled whenever I was forced to wear a frock. And when my breasts started to grow, I almost hanged myself.» Irene straightened her shoulders, and her great womanly breasts wobbled from her neck to her waist.

Zhenya looked at her with a tinge of jealousy: this woman had some biography. And you could tell that she was well aware of the fact.

«My baby girl was so pretty from the minute she arrived. There was nothing newborn about her, no mucus, no redness or roughness. Her eyes were blue, her hair was black and long. She got that from the car mechanic. Her facial features were exactly like mine. My nose, chin, the oval of my face.»

Zhenya seemed to see Irene for the first time: the vivid redhead looks made it easy not to see just how beautiful she was. Yes, the oval of her face, her nose, her chin. Even her teeth, which in someone else might have seemed horsy, in her were just English: long, white, slightly prominent, but just enough to make her lips part in welcome, in anticipation.

«I took one look at her and immediately knew that she was a Diana. No two ways about it. She was small, very well proportioned, with long legs and a shapely body. And pert buttocks. She was the prettiest little girl in the world. No, that wasn't just my prejudice as her mother. Everybody admired her. I dumped the car mechanic three days later, just as soon as I was discharged from the maternity hospital. I simply couldn't bear to look at him. The first time he held her I saw quite clearly that Diana should have a different father. It wasn't anything to do with me. I wasn't yet a woman. Things hadn't worked out with the car mechanic, but I didn't even realise that yet. He took her in his arms and I saw him for the slob he was. My daughter showed it to me. She was clever and calm and collected. In my life I've never met another, don't laugh, woman like her. She knew just how to treat different people, and what she could expect from them. Can you imagine, she was really thoughtful towards Susie. She didn't cry if I left her with her grandmother. She understood that was pointless. She was just four months old when I started reading books to her. If she liked them, she said 'ye-ye-ye'. If she didn't, she said 'na-na-na'. By six months she understood literally everything, and she started talking at ten months. She talked baby talk for a month, and then said, 'Mama, fly flying'. And sure enough, there was a fly.»

«I breast-fed her for a long time. My milk didn't dry up, and she so loved being breast-fed. She would snuggle up, suck, then stroke my breast and say, 'Thank you'. And then I caught 'flu. My temperature soared to over forty. I was poleaxed. I couldn't feed her. My friends came running to help. They fed Diana on yoghurt and porridge. She was almost a year old. She wanted to come to me but they couldn't let her in case she caught my infection. She cried out of her little room, 'Mama, I don't understand'. Susie went down with it too. And what a powerful infection it proved to be. All my friends, one after the other, caught it from me. I don't remember anything.»

Irene shielded her eyes with her hands, as if the light was too bright. Her hair almost hid her face. Zhenya already knew that something dreadful was going to happen, had happened then… but allowed herself to hope against hope.

«Then I got up and went through to Diana. She had a high fever,» Irene continued, and Zhenya noticed how her nostrils and her pale English eylids had reddened. «I called the doctor. She immediately started injecting her with antibiotics. After two injections Diana had an allergic reaction. She was covered in rash. Well, she was my daughter. I'm allergic myself. They prescribed her Seduksen, the same drug I use, only the dosage was twenty times less. I felt worse and worse. My temperature was forty, at times I felt I was floating away. I would come to myself, give Diana yoghurt, give Mother yoghurt. Now and then someone would look in and go away again. I had a shouting match with the doctor who was demanding she should be taken to hospital. I remember glimpses of friends, my neighbour. The car mechanic rolled in, drunk. I kicked him out.»

I would get up half asleep, put Diana on the pot or change her, give her a tablet. My little angel would turn away from the mirror, saying, «No». She didn't like the rash on her face.

«Zhenya, the packaging was completely identical, my Seduksen and hers. I don't know how much I gave her. The more so because I had no sense of time. My temperature was forty degrees, what understanding of time did I have? I couldn't tell morning from evening. But I remembered clearly that I had to give Diana her medicine. It was December, dark all round the clock. The twenty-first of December, the day of the winter solstice. I got up, went to Diana, touched her. She was cold. Her temperature had gone down, I thought. The nightlight was burning. I looked. Her face was as white as chalk. The rash had gone. I didn't try to wake her. I went back to bed. Then I got up again, thinking it was time for her medicine. It was only then I took in that my lovely Diana was stone dead.»

Zhenya could picture the scene as if she were watching a film: Irene wearing a long white nightgown, bending over the child's cot, lifting the little girl out of the cot, also in a white nightgown. Only Zhenya could not see the the little girl's face, because it was hidden by that gleaming red hair, which even now was alive, curling, shining, while Diana was no more.

Zhenya could no longer cry. Something in her heart had crusted over into a hard scab, and tears no longer came to her eyes.

«I wasn't there for my little girl's funeral.» Pitiless Irene looked Zhenya straight in the eyes, and Zhenya thought, «My God, how can I be so concerned about all manner of nonsense when things like this happen in the world.» «I had meningitis. For three months I was out of it, being moved from one hospital to another. Then they taught me how to walk again, how to hold a spoon in my hand. I have nine lives, like a cat.» Irene laughed ruefully.

Yes, Irene had an unusual, unforgettable voice. It was throaty, soft, and you felt that it was the voice of a singer who was holding herself back, because if she were to sing out her voice would have everybody sobbing and weeping, and longing to fling themselves to wherever the siren sound directed.

Zhenya was finally overwhelmed by her wonderful, if imagined, singing and burst into tears, and the searing grief evoked by this story streamed down her face. Irene supplied her with a lacy white handkerchief, perfumed, which Zhenya soaked instantly.

«She would have been sixteen now. I know just what she would have looked like. The way she would have talked and moved. Her height, her figure, her voice. I know every detail. I know the kind of people she would have liked, and whom she would have avoided, the food she would have loved, and what she would have hated.»

Irene broke off here, and it seemed to Zhenya that she was peering into the darkness as if there, in the corner, stood her daughter, slender, blue-eyed and black-haired, and completely invisible.

«She loves drawing more than anything,» Irene continued without for a minute lowering her eyes from the darkness condensed in the corner. «By the time she was three you could already tell that she would be an artist. Her pictures were completely out of this world. By the age of seven she most resembled Ciurlionis. After that her drawing became firmer, although the mysticism and gentleness remained.»

«She's lost her mind,» Zhenya surmised. «She's really out of her mind. She lost her child, and then she lost her mind.»

She said nothing out loud. Irene, however, laughed, tossed her mane of copper wire, and her hair even seemed to give a metallic rustle.

«Call it madness, if you like. Although madness always has a rational explanation. Something of her soul has lodged in me. At times something comes over me, and I have a desperate urge to draw. I do draw, what my Diana would have drawn. In Moscow I will show you whole folders of pictures Diana has drawn in the course of these years.»

The port had long been despatched. It was past three in the morning, and they parted. There wasn't a single word that could be added to what had already been said.

In the morning they set off on a long walk together. They came to the post office, rang through to Moscow, then had lunch on the embankment in a cafe selling crisp meat chebureki. Zhenya was certain the enticing smell of the chebureki would lure them into some gastric misfortune straight out of the medical encyclopaedia, like dysentery, but reassured herself with the thought that Sasha's alimentary minimalism would cause him to reject the aromatic triangular pies. Sasha, however, said «yes» and again, for a second time, consumed a product not on his sacramental list.

Their evening port-drinking, at least on such intimate terms, would soon be over. Tomorrow two friends of Irene would be arriving, one of whom, Vera, was also well known to Zhenya. It was she who had given Zhenya this address on Primorskaya Street. Zhenya was feeling a little sad in anticipation of no longer being able to enjoy a private friendship with Irene.

Their last evening together began later than usual, because Sasha was difficult for a long time. He wouldn't let Zhenya out of his sight. Already asleep, he would wake up, whine, and fall asleep again. Zhenya curled up beside him and dozed. If Irene had not knocked at her window when it was already past eleven, she would have slept through the night just as she was, in her slacks and sweater.

Again they had two bottles of Crimean port, and again it was dark outside the window, without even the streetlight this time, because there was a power cut that day, and the terrace was lit by two thick white candles brought from Moscow for just such an eventuality. Susie and Donald had long been asleep in the room, but Irene was out sitting in a deep armchair on the verandah, swathed in her red and green tartan blanket and with the cards spread in front of her.

«This is Road to the Scaffold, an old French version of Patience. You're lucky if it comes out once in a year. I was just waiting for you to come, and lo and behold, it fell into place. That is a good sign for this house, this time and this place. To some extent, for you also, although you have quite different guardians, from a different element.»

Zhenya was vaguely attracted to the occult, if rather ashamed of such atavism, but ventured to ask the proffered question:

«What is my element?»

«You can tell it from a hundred miles away. It's water. You're an aquarian. You don't write poetry, by any chance?» Irene asked briskly.

«I used to. Actually I wrote my dissertation on early twentieth-century Russian poetry,» Zhenya admitted guiltily.

«What I see is — Pisces, the poetically inclined… live in water.»

Zhenya was shocked into silence: her star sign really was Pisces.

«When I was twenty, Zhenya, I had already lost two children,» Irene resumed without prefatory remarks from where they had stopped yesterday. «Two more years of my life went in learning to go on living. I had help. If it hadn't been for that…» she made an indefinite gesture more or less heavenwards. «And then I met the man I was destined for. He was a composer, a Russian aristocrat from a family which fled to France during the Revolution and returned after the Second World War. He was fifteen years older than me and, strange as it may seem, he'd never been married, although his life had been richly endowed as regards women. His father had been private secretary to a minister, and at one time a member of the State Duma. In one sense he was the complete antithesis of my Anglo-Dutch communist forebears. For all that, his father, Vasily Illarionovich — I won't mention his surname, it has too many connotations in Russia — resembled my own father quite amazingly, both in outward appearance and in personality. They greatly disliked all communists, but they accepted me, in spite of my communist tail. Then again, they had no choice: Gosha and I had fallen passionately in love. We fell into each other's arms immediately, and in the morning he took me to the registry office, considering the matter settled once and for all. My second life began, in which there was nothing of the old one other than my mother who, bless her, was unaware anything had changed. Only don't imagine this was after her stroke. It was before! She really didn't notice a thing. From time to time she would call my new husband by the name of my first, but Gosha and I just laughed. He had been educated in France and England, they returned to Russia in 1950, and for a short time lived in exile. Well, you know how it was, the usual story. We met the year the family were finally given permission to live in Moscow and allocated a two-room apartment in Beskudnikovo — as descendants of the Decembrist revolutionaries. In return for the villa they had had near Alushta and their St Petersburg residence on the Moyka Canal.»

A vague, nascent thought about a mysterious law which could bring together such rare, specially invented people as the daughter of a Russian spy of British origins and a descendant of the Decembrists born in Parisian exile, did enter Zhenya's head, and she was even tempted to mention it to Irene, but didn't want to interrupt her slow, almost meditative, story.

«I became pregnant straight away,» Irene smiled, not at Zhenya but at a place far away. «Gosha did not know that I had already lost two children. I kept quiet about that. I didn't want him feeling sorry for me. It was the easiest pregnancy of all time. My stomach grew at an incredible rate, and Gosha would rest on it at night, listening.»

«What are you listening to?» I would ask.

«What they are talking about.» He was certain we were going to have twins.

«In the end the doctors did establish that there were two heartbeats. I gave birth to two lovely boys, one redheaded, the other dark-haired. Both of them were over three kilograms. Believe it or not, from their first hour they took against each other, and so much so that they managed to divide their parents too: Alexander, the redhead, chose me; Yakov, the dark one, chose Gosha. It was dreadful. When one was going to sleep the other would be crying. While I was feeding one, the other would be howling his head off, even though he'd just been fed. Then they discovered how to bite, and spit, and fight. If one got to his feet, the other would promptly knock him down. You couldn't leave them together for a minute. But you had only to separate them for them to want desperately to be together again. When one of them saw the other, he would run to him and kiss and immediately start fighting again. My twins had a special, intense relationship which was all their own. I spoke English to the children and Gosha spoke French to them. When they started talking, they divided on language as well. Alexander talked English, Yakov talked French. Well, that was only to be expected. Between themselves they spoke Russian. But don't imagine they were taught to do that. They chose everything for themselves: it was impossible to coerce them or force them to do anything. When Gosha and I looked at them we were over the moon: this was our legacy — these terrible genes of wilfulness and stubbornness.»

«We lived all the year round in Pushkino, renting a well insulated winter dacha, and Granny Susie moved in with us too. At that time she was in fairly good shape. By that I mean she was still reading novels. You never did get any sense out of her, and she was never any help. Gosha was eventually accepted to teach at a music college. The composition class. He was super-overqualified for the work. He should have been working at the Conservatory. But his western schooling scared everyone off. Sometimes he wrote background music for films. Mainly he earned money by translating. I carried on typing, although he was terribly cross when I took in work. He had a frightful car, a Moskvich which he drove into Moscow and had to repair every time he came back. It was well-trained. It always broke down outside our house. We were terribly happy, but collapsing from exhaustion.»

«I am always ill in the spring, when the flowers come into bloom. I suffer from hay fever. That spring the blossom was particularly plentiful and I was constantly wheezing and choking. While it was wet I could just about get by, taking pills. But then we had a hot spell and on the second day I really began suffocating. It's called Quincke's oedema. The nearest telephone was at the post office. In those days the Pushkino ambulance was a bird as rare as an ostrich. Gosha woke up the boys in the night, hastily dressed them and put them in the back of the car; we couldn't leave them with Susie, she would never have coped. Having been woken in the middle of the night they were unusually placid and didn't even fight. They settled down in the back seat with their arms around each other. Then Gosha dragged me out of the house, put me in the front and drove me to the local hospital. He drove like a maniac, because I was barely wheezing and the colour of a boiled beetroot.»

Irene closed her eyes, but not completely. A little chink still showed, like light seeping under a door. Zhenya thought she might have lost consciousness and jumped up and shook her by the shoulders. Irene seemed to come to herself. She laughed her special laugh, the opera singer's laugh.

«That's all, Zhenya. I've told you all there is. The oedema was so severe that I saw and felt nothing else. I didn't see the tip truck which crashed into us; I didn't even feel the impact. I was the only survivor. When they put me on the operating table there was no trace of Quincke's oedema. It had disappeared at the moment of the crash. It was completely unbelievable that I was alive.»

Irene tossed back the hair from the right-hand side of her head. A deep, even operating scar began behind her ear and went aross her skull. For some reason Zhenya ran her finger along it.

«It is completely without feeling, that scar. I am a medical curiosity. I have almost no sense of feeling. Suppose I cut my finger, I'm not aware of anything. Until I see the bleeding. It's dangerous. But it can be handy too.»

Irene reached for her bag which was lying on the table, pulled out a case the length of three matchboxes, and took a large needle out of it. She pushed it into her alabaster white skin at the base of her thumb. The needle sank softly into her. Zhenya shrieked. Irene laughed.

«That's what has happened to me. I've lost my sense of feeling. When they told me, three weeks after the crash, that I had lost my husband and children, it was like this.» Irene pulled the needle out and a small drop of blood appeared. She licked it. «I've almost lost my sense of taste as well. I can tell sweet from savoury, but that's it. I sometimes think I am only remembering the taste, from the times when I could still feel things.»

Irene dispensed what was left of the port and stood up, pushing back her chair loudly. Her lodgings were the most comfortable in Dora's domain: besides the verandah there was a small separate kitchen in the porch, where Irene had a modest cache of wine. Six bottles bought in anticipation of her friends' arrival tomorrow. She rummaged about in the darkness for a while before producing a bottle of sherry.

All the tears Zhenya had to shed she had shed yesterday. No new tears had come to replace them. There was a dryness in her throat, and a tightness and a tickle in her nose.

«That witch Anna Cork turned out to be right: Donald is my fifth child. It's just as she foretold: „You will start at the fifth“».

First the darkness became diluted, then the air became grey and the birds started singing. By the time the story was at an end it was completely light.

«Would you like some coffee?» Irene asked.

«No, thank you. I'll get some sleep.» Zhenya went off to her little room and lay face down in the pillow. Before falling asleep she reflected, «What a stupid life I have. To all intents and purposes it's been no life at all. Fall out of love with one man, fall in love with another. Some drama that's been! Poor Irene, imagine losing four children.» She was particularly sad about Diana, blue-eyed, long-legged Diana who would have been sixteen now.

Towards evening a whole crowd of people arrived from Moscow: Vera and her second husband Valentine, whose previous, first marriage had been to Nina; Nina and Nina's elder son — of whom Valentine was the father. In addition there were Nina's two younger daughters, by now from her second marriage. Vera had brought two children with her, her youngest son fathered by Valentine and her daughter fathered by who knows whom, or rather, by Vera's first husband whom none of them knew. In fact, it was one big, happy, modern family.

The sexual revolution was already waning, second marriages were proving more durable than first marriages had, and third marriages were turning out just like real marriages.

Dora Surenovna's small courtyard was filled with children of all ages, and her neighbours on either side peeped through the fence to right and left and envied her for managing to begin the season a month before and to finish it two months later than anyone else. She had been doing it for years. They had no idea that the secret was Irene: wherever she went a crowd immediately formed, a collective farm with fireworks, a veritable May Day demonstration of brassieres with mammary glands bursting out of them and bikinis and belly buttons and buttocks which aroused such ire in her Crimean neighbours that they would have refused to rent rooms to all these impudent whores, only their greed overcame them.

Dora herselfset up something approaching a guesthouse: not so much bed-and-breakfast as sleep-on-a-put-you-up-and-dinner. Dora's husband worked at the XVII Party Congress Sanatorium. He drove a bus, collecting holidaymakers from Simferopol and buying groceries while he was there. Dora made meals for all her guests and earned so much money she could afford to buy off the local policeman and the tax inspector without even being ruined.

The first three days passed in arranging things. Nina, mother of three, was terribly domesticated, spread home comforts all around herself, and had a thoroughly feminine way of organising everyday life. When all the little curtains had been hung up, all the little vases put in place and all the rugs shaken out, she compiled a rota so that each day two mothers looked after all the children while the other two, once they had gone shopping for food in the morning, could take it easy for the rest of the day.

On the morning of the fourth day, Zhenya and Vera had the day off, as stipulated by the new schedule. They planned to see Valentine to the bus station since, having fulfilled his purpose by delivering the two families, he was returning to Moscow; they would then buy some milk, if fortune smiled on them, and were intending after that to wander through the bare countryside with no footballs, no children, no shrieking or screaming. Everything went according to plan: they waved goodbye to the husband, didn't buy milk since none had been delivered, and then set off down the main road in the direction of hills from which there came a smell of young grass and sweet earth, and where the clouds of pink and lilac tamarisk were in full bloom. They turned off the road, and although the path led upwards the going was easy and relaxing. They didn't even talk all that much, just exchanging a few words.

They reached a family of acacias, sat in the thin shade of the puny foliage and lit cigarettes.

«Have you known Irene for long?» Zhenya asked, still, despite the passing of several days, reeling under the impression of the eventful fate of the English redhead; a fate before which the old-fashioned suicide of Anna Karenina paled and seemed the mere whim of a spoiled young madam: «He loves me, he loves me not, he cares for me, not a jot…»

«We grew up in the same block of flats. She was a class ahead of me. I wasn't allowed to be friends with her. She was a bit of a naughty girl,» Vera laughed. «But I liked her. Actually, everybody did. Half the block was always hanging out in their little apartment. Susan Yakovlevna was such an old dear before her stroke. We called her Madame Caramel — she was forever giving all the children toffees.»

«What a dreadful life Irene's had,» Zhenya sighed.

«You mean her father? The spying? What do you mean?»

«No, I mean the children.»

«What children, Zhenya?» Vera asked, even more puzzled.

«Diana, and the twins.»

«What Diana? What are you talking about?»

«Irene's children. Which she lost,» Zhenya explained with the beginnings of a terrible foreboding.

«You'll have to be more explicit. Which children are these that she lost?» Vera raised an eyebrow.

«David, her first baby, died at birth, entangled in his umbilical cord; then Diana, she was just one year old; and a few years later her husband, the composer, died in a car crash along with her twins Alexander and Yakov,» Zhenya ran through the list, sounding like a gramophone record.

«Well, I'll be damned,» Vera said, shocked. «And when did this all come to pass?»

«What, didn't you know?» Zhenya asked in astonishment. «She had David when she was eighteen, Diana when she was nineteen, and the twins three years or so later, I suppose.»

Vera put out her old cigarette and lit up a new one. The damp cigarette didn't light easily, and while Vera puffed away at it Zhenya was convulsively shaking a new packet but could persuade nothing to come out of it. Vera was silent, inhaled the bitter smoke, and then pronounced:

«Listen, Zhenya, I am going to have to upset you. Or gladden you. The point is, all the tenants of our house in Pechatnikov were rehoused ten years ago, in 1968. At that time Irene was twenty-five. To my knowledge, she had got through an army of lovers, had, I should guess, a dozen or so abortions, but there were absolutely no children. I swear! Or husbands, for that matter. Donnie is her first child, and she has never been married, although she has had some very famous lovers. She even had an affair with Vysotsky…»

«But what about Diana?» Zhenya asked dully. «What about Diana?»

Vera shrugged.

«For all the years before that we were living in the same house. Do you really think I wouldn't have noticed?»

«But what about the scar on her head from the car crash?» Zhenya shook Vera by the shoulders, but she lazily freed herself.

«Well, what about it? What about it? She got it on the ice slide. Kotik Krotov had blades, you know, racing skates. She fell over and he skated straight over her head. There was so much blood! It's true, he all but killed her. They had to put a lot of stitches in her head.»

At first Zhenya cried. Then she started hooting with laughter like a madwoman. Then sobbing again. Then they smoked their way through both the packs of cigarettes they had brought. Zhenya finally remembered with a start that she had never before been away from Sasha for such a long time. They hurried back home. Zhenya told Vera the whole of Irene's story, whose final episode had been reached yesterday. And evidently also made up yesterday. In return Vera told her the true story. Both coincided in the most improbable place: regarding the clandestine past of the Irish-British Communist who had been sentenced to death and subsequently exchanged for a Soviet spy.

By the time they got back to the house, Zhenya felt gutted. The children had already had their supper and were playing junior bingo at the big table: instead of numbers the cards had turnips, carrots and mittens. Sasha, clutching his bingo card, waved to his mother, cried, «Hurray! I've got a hare!» and covered it with a picture. He was an equal among equals, neither slow, nor ill, nor overwrought.

The others were sitting on Irene's verandah drinking sherry. Susie was taking little gulps from her glass with a blissful expression on her face. Vera went up on to the verandah and sat with the rest of them.

Zhenya went to her room. They invited her to join them, but she called back that she had a headache. She lay on the bed. Actually this was one evening when her head was not aching, but there was something she needed to do for herself. She needed to perform an operation of some kind before she could once more drink wine, chat with these friends, and enjoy the company of other, more educated and intelligent friends she had left behind in Moscow.

The children finished their bingo. Zhenya washed Sasha's feet, put him to bed and put out the light. One of the friends invited her to come with a stage whisper which was little short of a shout:

«Zhenya! Come and have some pie!»

«Sasha isn't asleep yet. I'll come in a minute,» she responded in an equally theatrical voice.

She lay in the darkness and researched her spiritual wound. There were two wounds. One was from the misdirected compassion she had lavished on brilliantly invented and brutally murdered, nonexistent children, especially Diana. It was like the pain from an amputated leg, felt even though the leg is no longer there. Phantom pain. Worse than that: this leg had never been there. The second was a feeling of hurt for herself, a pathetic rabbit which had had a senseless experiment performed on it. Or perhaps there had been some sense, only none that she could understand.

Somebody again knocked quietly at the window. Her name was called, but Zhenya did not respond. She simply couldn't imagine the expression on Irene's face, who would guess immediately that she had been unmasked. Or Irene's voice. Or her own embarrassment at Irene's embarrassment. Zhenya lay there, not sleeping, until the light was turned off on the verandah. Then she got up, lit the small wall lamp, and piled everything into her suitcase: clean clothing and dirty, toys and books. She paused only to carefully wrap Sasha's gumboots in a used towel.

Early in the morning Zhenya and Sasha left the house with their suitcase. They went to the bus station, and Zhenya had no idea where they would go after that. Moscow perhaps. But at the bus station the one and only bus, old, almost pre-war, bore the legend «Novy Svet», and they boarded that, and two hours later were in a quite different place.

They rented a room by the sea and spent another three weeks there. Sasha behaved perfectly: none of the hysterical outbursts which so alarmed Zhenya and the doctors. He walked barefoot along the waterline, sometimes running into the shallow water and stamping his bare heels in it. He ate, he slept. He seemed to have outgrown a phase. So did Zhenya.

Novy Svet was wonderful. The wisteria was still in bloom and they were beside the mountains: immediately behind the house a rocky hillside rose, which you could climb and in two hours reach a neatly rounded summit which looked positively Japanese. And you could look down from there to a shallow bay, and rocks with ancient Greek names which had jutted out of the water here since the world began.

Only occasionally did her heart feel a pang: Irene! Why did she have to murder all of them? Especially Diana.

The middle of December. The end of the year. The end of her tether. Darkness and wind. A hitch in her life. Everything has juddered to a standstill in just the wrong place, as if a wheel is stuck in a pothole and is rocking back and forth. In her head two lines of a poem are going back and forth too: «With half my span on earth now left behind me, I stood bereft in brooding forest gloom…» The gloom is all around, no sign of light in the darkness. Shame on you, Zhenya, shame on you… Two boys are sleeping in the little room, Sasha and Grisha. Her sons. Here is the table, her work on it. Sit down, take up your pen and write. There is the mirror. It reflects a thirty-five-year-old woman with large eyes, the outer corners sagging slightly; with large breasts, also sagging slightly; and with nice legs and slender ankles who has driven out of the house a man who was not the world's worst husband, and what's more not her first, but her second… The large mirror reflects also part of a small but admirable apartment in one of the most attractive quarters of Moscow, on Povarskaya Street, away from the road and with a bay window looking out on to a front garden. Later, of course, everyone is going to find themselves rehoused, but for now, in the mid-1980s, life is not bad at all.

Zhenya's family is also admirable: a large family with aunts and uncles, first and second cousins, all of them highly educated, respectable people. If one is a doctor, he or she is a good doctor; if a scholar, then a very promising one; if an artist, then a successful one. Not as successful as the redoubtable Ilya Glazunov, no doubt, but with commissions from publishing houses, almost one of the top book illustrators. Appreciated by his peers and colleagues. More of him shortly.

Besides the first and second cousins, a whole numerous new generation of nephews and nieces has come into the world, Katyas and Mashas, Dashas and Sashas, Mishas and Grishas. There is among them one Lyalya, thirteen years old and already with breasts. She hasn't outgrown her spots yet, and she has a long nose which, alas, she is never going to outgrow, although in the future plastic surgery will be able to take care of it. But only in the future. She also has long legs. Admirable legs, although nobody is paying any attention to them yet. Her emotions, however, are raging right now. She has a mad crush on her uncle, the artist. Long-nosed Lyalya had once come to her relatives' house to see her second cousin Dasha, and had stumbled upon Dasha's dad. He is sitting there at home, in a remote room, drawing. His pictures are so sweet: birds in cages, with poetry. He's a book illustrator, and he's got long, wavy black hair. Down to his shoulders. He wears a little dark blue jacket, and a red and dark blue check shirt under it. He has a cravate tucked into his shirt which has the tiniest little flower pattern, almost like commas, that's how tiny the flowers are. In fact they probably aren't even flowers or commas, but sort of little gherkins. Really, really tiny. She fell in love.

Lyalya comes to see her grown-up relative, Auntie Zhenya, who at that time of the year, in December, really doesn't want to be bothered with her second cousin once removed. She is, however, also related to the artist: he's her first cousin. Young Lyalya confesses she's in love, and tells the whole story: how she went to see Dasha, and he was sitting in this remote room drawing these birds, and he had these gherkins on his cravate. And she tells about how she came back afterwards, when Dasha wasn't there, and sat in his room, and he was drawing, and she just sat there. In silence.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays Mila, the artist's wife, has a morning surgery from eight o'clock. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, her surgery is in the afternoon. She is a gynaecologist. Dasha goes to school every day. She takes the bus to Prospekt Mira, to the French School. She leaves home at seven twenty-five. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, only not every week, just one week on a Tuesday and the next on a Thursday, Lyalya arrives at the remote room at eight-thirty. One week she misses a history and an English lesson, and the next she misses a double period of literature. Yes, she's thirteen. Well, what can she do? Really, what can she do? If they're madly in love? He's dying oflove for her. His hands shake when he's undressing her. It's fantastic. The first man in her life. She knows there'll never be another. What if she gets pregnant? No, she's not worried. Well, actually, she hasn't really thought about it much. After all, there are pills you can take. «You couldn't phone Mila, I suppose, and ask her to prescribe some — pretend they're for you?»

Zhenya is beside herself. Lyalya is the same age as Sasha. Thirteen. But thirteen girl years are obviously quite different from boy years. All Sasha thinks about is astronomy. He is reading books in which Zhenya can't even work out what the table of contents means. This daft little thing, meanwhile, has discovered love and, what's more, she's chosen her, Zhenya, to be the repository of the secrets of her heart. And some secrets they are! A respectable forty-year-old man is abusing his under-age niece, his daughter's friend, in his own house, while three blocks away his wife is conducting a surgery for women on Molchanovka Street and, to tell the truth, could run home for a moment, for a cup of tea, for instance… And what about Lyalya's parents? Her mother, Zhenya's great fat cousin Stella, what does she imagine is going on? That her daughter has gone off to school, swinging her scuffed little schoolbag? And her daddy, Konstantin Mikhailovich, a nutty mathematician, what is he thinking? As for what her late Aunt Emma, the sister of Zhenya's father, might have had to say on the subject, it simply doesn't bear thinking about.

Lyalya played truant in the morning. Sometimes when Sasha and Grisha were at school, she would come to drink coffee with Zhenya. Either her artist was busy, or she just didn't feel like sitting at a school desk. Zhenya couldn't simply turn her away. After all, what if she went and threw herself out of the window? Zhenya obediently listened to what she had to say. And despaired. As if she didn't have problems enough of her own: she had kicked her own husband out because she had fallen for a completely unattainable gentleman, an Actor with a capital A. Well, a theatre director actually. From a beautiful city which almost counted as being abroad. He was phoning every day, begging her to come. And now on top of everything else she had Lyalya.

Zhenya was at her wits' end.

«Lyalya, dearest, you must bring this relationship to an end immediately. It's madness!»

«But why, Zhenya? I'm so in love with him. And he loves me too.»

Zhenya believed her, because Lyalya had been looking much prettier lately. She had beautiful big, grey eyes with black, painted eyelashes. Her nose was long but slim, and aristocratically aquiline. Her skin had improved a lot, and her neck was quite amazing, a thing of rare beauty: slender, tapering even more upwards. And her head was set so prettily on this lissom stem. Wow!

«Lyalya, dearest, if you don't want to think about yourself, do at least think about him. Do you realise what is going to happen if people find out about this? They'll put him straight in prison! You don't want that to happen, do you? He'll get eight years or so in prison!»

«No, Zhenya, no. Nobody is going to send him to prison. If Mila guesses what's going on she'll kick him out, that's for sure. And she'll take him to the cleaners. For his money. She is so-o greedy, and he makes a lot. If he went to prison he wouldn't be paying her alimony. No, no. She won't make a fuss. Quite the opposite. She'll hush it all up.» Lyalya elaborated a cold, calculated scenario of the future which, Zhenya had to admit, monstrous though it might seem, rang true. Mila really was a money grubber.

«And what about your parents? Do you think they aren't going to be upset? Imagine the situation if they find out,» Zhenya tried a different angle.

«They'd better just keep very quiet. My Ma is screwing Uncle Vasya.» Zhenya's eyes popped out of her head. «Didn't you know? Pa's own brother, my uncle Vasya. Ma's been crazy about him all her life. The only thing I don't know is whether she fell for him before she married Pa or after. As for Pa, why should he care about it? He's not a real man anyway, know what I mean? He isn't interested in anything other than his formulas. Including me and Misha.»

God in heaven, what was to be done with this under-age monster? She was, after all, only thirteen. She was a child in need of protection. And who'd have thought our artist was up to it? He was a watery aesthete who wore a kid jacket and a cravate! His immaculate hands were tended by a manicurist who did home visits. He had once said in Zhenya's presence that his work demanded faultless hands, like a pianist's. She'd had him down for a poof, but now it turned out he was a paedophile.

Then again, Lyalya was not a child. In olden times the Jews married girls off at the age of twelve-and-a-half. So from a physiological viewpoint, she was an adult. Her brain was more than adult: the way she had dissected Mila's motivations was something precious few grown women could have managed.

But what should she, Zhenya, do now? She was the only adult who had been told this tale, so she it was who bore the responsibility. There was no one she could turn to for advice. She certainly couldn't go to her own parents. Her mother would have a heart attack.

Lyalya came to talk to Zhenya nearly every week, telling her all about her artist, and everything she said convinced Zhenya that this nightmarish liaison was really quite firmly rooted. If a family man was taking the risk of receiving an under-age lover in his own home every week, he really was head-over-heels in love. Zhenya did buy contraceptive pills, which set her back quite a bit, without, needless to say, imposing on Mila. She gave them to Lyalya and told her to be sure to take them every day without fail. Even after buying the pills, Zhenya felt deeply implicated. She knew she needed to do something before a scandal blew up, but wasn't sure what approach to take. In the end she decided the only thing she could do in the circumstances was talk to the godforsaken artist.

Meanwhile her theatre director was phoning, begging her to fly out if only for a day. He had a premiere coming up, he was working twelve hours a day. But if she were to fly to that warm, marvellous, sunlit city, she would be in trouble. And if she didn't?

Something had to be done about this ridiculous business of Lyalya. It wasn't even so much because ultimately there was bound to be a scandal, as that here, after all, was an adult perverting the life of a child. Lord, how lucky she was to have boys. What problems did they create? Sasha's astronomy questions, and having to drag Grisha away from his books: he read at night under the blanket using a torch. They still fought occasionally, but ever less frequently of late.

Finally she decided to ring Lyalya's lover. She rang during the day, after two o'clock on a day when Mila had an afternoon surgery. He was delighted to hear from her and immediately invited her round, since luckily it was no distance. Zhenya said she would come round to visit him next time, but for the present they needed to meet on neutral territory.

They met beside the Art Cinema, and he suggested going over to the cafe in the Prague Hotel.

«Has something upset you, Zhenya? You're looking a bit dishevelled, somehow,» the artist asked amiably, and Zhenya remembered that he always behaved well towards his relatives. He once helped a really quite distant lady relative when she needed a major operation; and another time he had paid for a lawyer to defend some black sheep in the family who had proved incapable even of stealing a car properly. What a thing is man, how much diversity he has within him.

«I'm afraid this is going to be rather unpleasant. I need to talk to you about your lover,» Zhenya began abruptly, not wanting to give the indignation she felt about this whole disgraceful episode a chance to dissipate.

He was silent for a long time. Purposefully silent. Little muscles were working under his thin skin. He proved not actually to be as handsome as she had imagined. Or perhaps his looks had faded with the years.

«Zhenya, I am a grown man. You are not my mother or my grandmother. Tell me why I should have to explain myself to you?»

«Well, because, Arkady,» Zhenya exploded, «because ultimately we are all responsible for our own actions. And as a grown man, you should take responsibility for the stuations you find yourself in.»

He took a big gulp from the small coffee cup, and put the empty cup on the edge of the table.

«Tell me, Zhenya, has somebody sent you, or have you had an access of do-goodery?»

«What are you talking about? Who could have sent me? Your wife? Lyalya's parents? Lyalya herself? Well, of course it's do-goodery, as you put it. That dumbcluck Lyalya has told me all about it. Of course, I would prefer to know nothing at all. But from what I do know, I am afraid. Both for her and for you. That's all.»

He suddenly softened and changed his tone.

«To tell the truth, I had no idea you knew each other. How interesting.»

«Believe me, I would prefer not to know her at all, and the more so in these circumstances.»

«Zhenya, tell me what it is that you want from me. This affair is not in its first year. And forgive me if I say that you and I are not on such close terms that we should be discussing delicate aspects of my personal life.»

At this point Zhenya realised that things were complicated, and that there was more behind these words than she knew. Arkady himself was looking half-guilty, but also half-perplexed.

«I thought this had only recently begun, but you are saying it is not in its first year…» Zhenya forced out, cursing herself for ever getting involved in these intricacies.

«If you are a private detective, you aren't very good at your job. To be perfectly frank, it has been going on for more than two years,» he shrugged. «I just don't understand why Lyalya had to talk to you. Mila knows all about it, and she is prepared to put up with anything to avoid a divorce.»

He moved his elbow, knocking the coffee cup off the table. It crashed to the floor.

Without getting up, he leant under the table with his long arm and collected the pieces, placing them in front of himself in a heap. He began sorting the white china shards of the broken cup as if assembling them for gluing. Then he looked up. Actually, he was really rather handsome. His eyebrows were so open, and his eyes tinged with green.

More than two years? So he had been molesting a ten-year-old girl? How could he talk about it so casually? Men really must be from another planet.

«Listen, Arkady, I just don't understand. You talk about this so straightforwardly. I can't get my head round it. A grown man sleeping with a ten-year-old girl?»

He stared at her in astonishment.

«Zhenya, what are you talking about? What girl?»

«Lyalya was thirteen a month-and-a-half ago. What is she to you: a babe, a chick, a bird?»

«Who are we talking about, Zhenya?»

«Lyalya Rubashova.»

«What Rubashova?» Arkady asked, genuinely puzzled.

Was he pulling her leg? Or?..

«Lyalya, of course. The daughter of Stella Kogan and Kostya Rubashov.»

«Oh, Stella. I haven't seen her for a hundred years. She did have a daughter, didn't she. What has that to do with me? Can you explain yourself clearly?»

That was it. End of story.

He understood what she was talking about, was horrified, guffawed with laughter, expressed a desire to take a look at the girl who had dreamed up a romance with him. He had no recollection of her. Any number of little girls who were friends of Dasha came into the house.

Then, casting off a terrible weight from her heart, Zhenya laughed too.

«I hope you realise, esteemed Arkady, that I have nevertheless uncovered the fact that you have a lover?»

«Well, okay. I do have a lover. She isn't ten and she isn't thirteen, but as you can imagine there are certain difficulties. I was so angry when you came and…»

The waiter took away the broken china and summoned a cleaner to wipe under the table.

Zhenya waited for Lyalya's next visit. She listened to all her latest revelations, let her finish, and then said, «Lyalya, I am very glad you have been coming to me all this time to share your experiences. You probably needed very much to act out in front of me all these things which have never happened, but which will come to you in good time: love, and sex, and your artist…»

Zhenya didn't manage to deliver the whole of the speech she had prepared. Lyalya was already back in the hallway. Without a word, she grabbed her schoolbag and wasn't seen again for many years.

But Zhenya too had other things to think about. Winter, which had been frozen in darkness, was jolted out of its rut. The director had his premiere and himself flew to Moscow. He was simultaneously on top of the world and rather melancholy, and constantly surrounded by his numerous fans — Muscovite Georgians languishing in a rather abstract way for Tiflis, and Muscovite intellectuals in love with Georgia and her bibulous, free-and-easy ways. For two weeks Zhenya was happy, and the «brooding forest gloom» of «half her span on earth» grew lighter, and March was like April, warm and light, as if bathed in reflections from that faraway city on the wild River Kura. She became less restive. Not because she had been happy for two weeks, but because she had understood in the depths of her heart that the holiday would not last forever, and this fun person who had landed in her life was like a great big present, so big you could only be allowed to hold it for a short while, but not to take it home with you. Zhenya told him the tale of Lyalya. First he laughed, but then he said it would make a brilliant play. Then he left, and Zhenya flew to see him in Georgia several times, and he flew more than once to Moscow. Then it was over, as if it had never been. And life went on for Zhenya. She was even reconciled with her second husband whom, as became clear with the passing of time, it was simply impossible for her to leave: he was as firmly stitched on to her life as her children.

She did not meet Lyalya again for a long time. She didn't show up at family birthdays, and funerals were hardly the right moment.

Only many years later did they meet at a family party, and by then Lyalya had grown into a very beautiful young woman who was married to a pianist. Her little daughter was there too. The four-year-old came up to Zhenya and said she was a princess. That's all. End of story.