Sonechka

Sonechka

ALMOST BEFORE she was out of the cradle, Sonechka was a bookworm. As Efrem, elder brother and family satirist, never tired of repeating, “All that reading has given Sonechka a butt like a chair and a nose like a pear.”

Unfortunately, his formulation was not too far off the mark. Her nose really was pear-shaped, and lanky broad-shouldered Sonechka, with her skinny legs and flat unmemorable rear end, had only one indisputable physical asset: large womanly breasts, which ballooned at an early age but seemed out of proportion with the rest of her thin body. She slouched round-shouldered and favored shapeless loose-fitting dresses, daunted by her uncalled-for endowment in front and dismayed by her flatness behind.

Her concerned and caring elder sister, herself safely married, remarked charitably on her lovely eyes, but they were run-of-the-mill, rather beady, if anything, and hazelnut brown. To be sure, she had eyelashes of a rare luxuriance that sprouted three rows deep and weighed down the puffy edge of her eyelids, but what was fetching about that? Indeed, they were a hindrance, since Sonechka was also shortsighted and obliged to wear spectacles from an early age.

For a full twenty years, from seven until twenty-seven, Sonechka read almost incessantly. She went off into her books as if going into a trance and came back out only when she reached the last page. She had a rare talent, perhaps even a genius, for reading. Her receptiveness to the printed word was so great that fictional characters seemed no less real than the sentient beings around her, and she found the luminous suffering of Tolstoy’s Natasha Rostova at the bedside of the dying Prince Andrey at least as convincing as the grief and torment of her sister, who carelessly lost her four-year-old child. Deep in conversation with the next-door neighbor, she failed to notice when her fat, ungainly, slow-witted daughter fell into the well.

What are we looking at here, total inability to recognize the element of play that is the premise of all art? The mind-boggling naive trust of a child who has failed to grow up? A lack of imagination leading to inability to distinguish between the real and the imaginary? Or was it a surrender to the realm of imagination so complete that everything outside its bounds lacked meaning and substance?

Sonechka’s reading mania did not relinquish its hold on her even when she was asleep. She seemed indeed to read her dreams, imagining breathtaking historical romances. She was able to visualize, from the nature of the plot, which font the story must be printed in and had a strange background awareness of paragraphs and punctuation. The sense of spiritual displacement that her obsession produced was if anything more pronounced when she was dreaming, because she then existed as a fully fledged heroine (or hero) walking a tightrope between the will of the author, of which she was fully aware, and her own autonomous urge to movement, deeds, and action.

It was the late 1920s, and Lenin’s laissez-faire New Economic Policy was on its last legs. Sonechka’s father, the son and heir of a blacksmith in a little Jewish shtetl in Belorussia, was a born engineer with a practical streak. Sensing a threatening change in the political climate, he prudently closed down his clockmaking business and, suppressing an innate aversion for all forms of mass production, signed on at a watch factory, salving his conscience in the evenings by repairing unique mechanisms created by the ingenious hands of predecessors of various races.

Her mother, who until her dying day wore a silly little wig under a clean polka-dot headscarf, illegally stitched away on her Singer sewing machine, making for her neighbors the straightforward cotton frocks that were suited to those strident years of poverty, whose terrors were personified for her solely by the dread figure of the tax inspector.

Sonechka for her part, just about managing to struggle through the official school curriculum, did her utmost every minute of every day to wriggle out of having to live in the shrill pathos of the 1930s and let her soul graze the expanses of the great literature of nineteenth-century Russia, descending into the disconcerting abysses of politically suspect Dostoyevsky and emerging into the shady avenues of Turgenev and the little provincial estates warmed by the generous and socially incorrect love of Leskov, who for some reason was said to be a second-rate writer.

She graduated from a college of librarianship, began working in the store in the basement of an old library, and was one of a fortunate few who left her dusty, muggy cellar at the end of the working day with the gentle ache of a pleasure curtailed, never quite having had her fill of either the succession of catalog cards and off-white reader’s request slips that came down to her daily from the reading room above or of the living weightiness of the tomes lowered into her thin arms.

For many years she regarded the act of writing as a religious practice. She assumed St. Gregory Palamas, Pausanias, and Pavlov to be writers of equal merit, since each qualified for a place on the same page of the encyclopedia. With the passing years she learned to distinguish for herself between the great breakers in the vast ocean of books and the minor ripples, and between the ripples and the shoreline scum that almost entirely clogged the ascetic shelves of the contemporary Soviet fiction section.

Having served several years like a devoted nun in the library basement, Sonechka gave in to the urgings of her superior, a reader no less obsessive than herself, and decided to read Russian language and literature at university. She started plowing through the vast ridiculous preliminary syllabus, with all its ideological baggage, and was just ready to sit her entrance exams when everything collapsed. In an instant all was changed with the outbreak of war.

This was possibly the first event in all her young life to jolt her out of the hazy world of incessant reading that she inhabited. Together with her father, who in those years was working as a toolmaker, she was evacuated to Sverdlovsk, where she very soon found herself in the only safe place to be: the library basement.

Was this a continuation of the long-standing Russian tradition of hiding away the precious fruits of the spirit, like the fruits of the earth, in dank underground places? Or was it an inoculation for the next decade of Sonechka’s life, which she would spend with an underground figure, the husband who appeared for her in this desperately difficult first year of evacuation?

On the day Robert Victorovich came to the library, just before closing time, Sonechka was at the circulation desk, standing in for her senior colleague, who was off sick. He was short, thin, and angular, his face gray and his hair graying, and he would not have caught Sonechka’s attention but for asking where the catalog of books in French was kept. The library did have books in French, but the catalog had been mislaid long before, due to lack of demand. As there were no other visitors at this hour of the evening, Sonechka took this unusual reader down to her basement to the remote West European corner.

He stood, dazed, before the shelves for a long time, his head to one side, with the incredulous expression of a hungry child confronting a plateful of cakes. Sonechka stood behind, taller than him by half a head, and was herself rooted to the spot by his excitement.

He turned round to her, unexpectedly kissed the long fingers of her hand, and in a low voice that trembled like the flickering light from a blue lamp remembered from the endless colds of her childhood, said, “How miraculous! What riches! Montaigne, Pascal . . .” And, without letting go of her hand, added with a sigh, “And in the Elsevier edition!”

“We have nine Elseviers,” Sonechka said, nodding proudly, pleased to be so conversant with the arcana of librarianship. He looked up at her in a strange way that felt as if he were looking down, smiled with his thin lips, disclosing several missing teeth, and paused as if preparing to say something important— but evidently thought better of it and said, instead, “Please issue me a reader’s card, or whatever you call it here.”

Sonechka extricated her hand, which had been overlooked between his own, and they went back up the cold vampire stairs, which drew the least warmth from any foot coming into contact with them. Here in the cramped reception room of what had been a merchant’s villa, she wrote out his surname in her own hand for the first time, a name of which until then she had known nothing, but which in just two weeks’ time would become her own. All the time she was writing the clumsy letters with an indelible pencil that kept turning in her much-darned woolly gloves, he was looking at her pure forehead and smiling inwardly at her marvelous resemblance to a patient, gentle young camel, and thinking, She even has the coloring: that swarthy, sad umber tint, and the pinkishness, the warmth. . . .

She finished writing, raised her forefinger, and pushed back her spectacles, which had slipped down. She looked at him benignly, without interest but expectantly. He had not given her his address.

He, however, was completely thrown by something that had befallen him as unexpectedly as a cloudburst from the heights of a clear tranquil sky: an overwhelming sense that his destiny was being accomplished. He had recognized that the person before him was to be his wife.

He had turned forty-seven the previous day. He was a living legend, but because he had suddenly and, in the opinion of his friends, inexplicably returned from France to his native land in the early 1930s, the legend had become separated from him and was now living a life of its own, by word of mouth, in the threatened art galleries of Nazi-occupied Paris. His strange pictures too were threatened with extinction, although having suffered obloquy and neglect they would know resurrection and posthumous acclaim. But of this he knew nothing. In his arch black quilted jacket, wearing a gray towel draped around his neck (which sported an unusually prominent Adam’s apple), he was the luckiest of life’s losers, having been imprisoned for a paltry five years. Now he was working on probation as an industrial artist in the offices of a factory, and he stood before this gangly girl and smiled, fully aware that at this very moment he was about to commit one of those betrayals of which his volatile life had been so full. He had betrayed the faith of his forefathers, the hopes of his parents, and the love of his teacher; he had betrayed science and abruptly and harshly ruptured the bonds of friendship just as soon as he began to sense a fettering of his freedom. . . . This time he was betraying a solemn vow never to marry, which, assuredly, had never been remotely similar to a vow of celibacy, and which he had taken in the years of his early deceptive success.

He was a committed ladies’ man and obtained a great deal of sustenance from the seemingly inexhaustible supply of women, but he guarded himself vigilantly against addiction, fearful of becoming fodder for that feminine allure which is so paradoxically generous to those who take from it and so destructively cruel to those who give.

Sonechka, meanwhile, placid soul that she was—cocooned by the thousand volumes of her reading, lulled by the hazy murmurings of the Greek myths, the hypnotically shrill recorder fluting of the Middle Ages, the misty windswept yearning of Ibsen, the minutely detailed tedium of Balzac, the astral music of Dante, the siren song of the piercing voices of Rilke and Novalis, seduced by the moralistic despair of the great Russian writers calling out to the heart of heaven itself—this placid soul had no awareness that her great moment was at hand, preoccupied as she was by the question of whether she was taking rather a risk in allowing a reader to borrow books that she was only allowed to issue for use in the reading room.

“Your address?” she asked meekly.

“Well, you see, I am here on a temporary assignment. I am living at the factory offices,” her strange reader explained.

“Let me have your passport and residence permit then, please,” Sonechka requested.

He delved into a deep pocket and pulled out a crumpled document. She looked at it through her spectacles for a long time before shaking her head.

“No, I’m sorry. You live outside the city limits.”

Capricious Cybele stuck out her pink tongue at him. All, it seemed, was lost. He pushed the document back down into the depths of his pocket.

“What I can do is take the books out on my own account, and you can bring them back to me before you leave,” Sonechka said apologetically.

And then he knew that all was going to be well.

“Only I would ask you to be very sure not to forget,” she added, in a kindly voice, and wrapped the three small volumes up in dog-eared newspaper.

He thanked her tersely and left.

While Robert Victorovich was musing with distaste on techniques for striking up an acquaintance and the rigors of courtship, Sonechka unhurriedly concluded her long working day and prepared to go home. She was no longer in the least concerned about the return of the three valuable books she had so insouciantly issued to a complete stranger. All her thoughts now focused on her passage home through the cold dark town.

THOSE SPECIAL feminine eyes that, like the mystical third eye, open at an improbably early age for a girl, were in Sonechka’s case not so much shut as screwed up tight.

In early adolescence, around the age of fourteen, as if in obedience to some ancient programming of her Jewish heredity, which for millennia had given virgins in marriage at a tender age, she fell in love with a comely classmate, snub-nosed Vitya Starostin. Her infatuation manifested itself only in an uncontrollable desire to gaze upon him, and her searching eye was soon noticed not only by the pretty boy but by all her other classmates, who spotted this entertaining phenomenon even before Sonechka herself.

She tried to control herself, she kept trying to find something else to look at—the rectangle of the blackboard, her exercise book, the dusty window—but with the stubbornness of a compass needle her gaze kept swinging willfully back to that head of yellow hair and seeking contact with the cold attractive blue eyes. . . . Her understanding friend Zoya had whispered a warning to her to stop ogling so, but there was nothing Sonechka could do. Her greedy eyes continued to feast on the fair-haired boy.

The upshot was dreadful and never to be forgotten. Wearying under the burden of her infatuated goggling, her brutal young Onegin arranged a rendezvous with his silent admirer on a side avenue of the park and slapped her a couple of times, inflicting not pain but deadly humiliation, as guffaws of approbation proceeded from the bushes where four of their classmates were hidden. One might chide their insensitivity, were it not that every one of the young peeping Toms was to perish in the first winter of the impending war.

The lesson in manners administered by our chivalrous thirteen-year-old was so compelling that the lady fell ill and lay for two weeks in an ague, the fires of infatuation evidently abating in this time-honored manner. When she recovered and returned to school in the full expectation of new humiliation, her escapade had been totally eclipsed by the suicide of Nina Borisova, the prettiest girl in the school, who had hanged herself in a classroom after the end of the evening’s classes.

As for our hard-hearted hero, Vitya Starostin, to Sonechka’s great good fortune he and his parents had already moved to a different town, leaving Sonechka with the bitter certainty that her sex life was over before it had begun, and for the rest of her life she was freed from any inclination to try to be liked, beguiling, or attractive. Toward more fortunate friends she felt neither soul-destroying jealousy nor ruinous resentment but reverted to her intoxicating and overweening passion for reading.

ROBERT VICTOROVICH came back two days later, when Sonechka was no longer at the circulation desk. He had her called. She came up from the basement, emerging in three short stages out of a dark hole, shortsightedly taking a long time to recognize him and then nodding as if he were someone she knew well.

“Sit down, please,” he said, offering her a chair.

There were several warmly dressed visitors sitting in the small reading room; it was cold and the heating was barely on.

Sonechka perched on the edge of the chair. A floppy fur hat lay by the edge of the table, next to a package that the man was unhurriedly and very carefully unwrapping.

“It quite slipped my mind the other day to ask,” he said, in his glowing voice, and Sonechka smiled at his pleasingly old-fashioned phrasing, long gone from common speech, “I quite forgot to ask your name. Do please forgive me.”

“Sonya,” she replied briefly, her eyes all the time on his undoing of the package.

“Sonechka. . . . Yes,” he said, as if consenting.

When the wrappings were finally peeled away, Sonya saw before her the portrait of a woman, painted on loose coarsefibered paper in a warm sepia brown. It was a wonderful portrait; the woman’s face was genteel and refined and belonged to a bygone age. And it was her, Sonechka’s, face. She breathed in, a little, and smelled the tang of the cold ocean.

“It is my wedding present to you,” he said. “Actually, I have come to make you a proposal of marriage.” He looked at her expectantly.

At this point Sonechka took a proper look at him for the first time: straight eyebrows, a finely ridged nose, a thin mouth with straight lips, deep vertical wrinkles on his cheeks, and faded eyes, clever and brooding. . . .

Her lips trembled. She was silent, her eyes lowered. She wanted very much to look one more time into his face, so grave and attractive, but the shade of Vitya Starostin gibbered behind her back and she stared fixedly at the light flowing lines of the picture, which had suddenly ceased to represent anything feminine, let alone her own face, and she said in a voice barely audible, but chilly and discouraging, “Is this some kind of joke?”

Then he was suddenly frightened. He had long since given up making plans for the future. Fate had brought him to this dismal place, truly the gates of hell. His animal sense of self-preservation was almost exhausted, and the twilight shadowy existence that was life in this world no longer held him. Now he had found a woman radiant with an inner light and had a presentiment that she was the wife whose frail hands would be the saving of his failing life, which still clung to earthly existence. He had seen her also as a sweet burden for him to bear, unencumbered as he was by a family, a burden for his cowardly virility, which had jibbed at the arduousness of fatherhood and the obligations of the family man. But how could he have thought . . . how had it not occurred to him before . . . perhaps she already belonged to another man, some young lieutenant or engineer in a mended sweater?

Cybele again stuck out her pointed pink tongue at him, and a merry cohort of dreadful unsuitable women, all of whom he had known, cavorted in flickering scarlet reflections. He gave a hoarse, strained laugh, pushed the portrait over toward her, and said, “I was not joking. It simply had not occurred to me that you might already be married.” He rose to his feet and picked up his unspeakable fur hat. “Forgive me.”

In the manner of a czarist officer he bowed abruptly, jerking his cropped head downward, and made for the door. At that Sonechka shouted after him, “Stop! No! No! I am not married!”

An old man sitting at a readers’ table with a file of newspapers looked over disapprovingly. Robert Victorovich turned, smiled a smile with his straight lips, and from his recent state of distraction at the thought that this woman was slipping away from him, graduated to a state of even greater distraction. He had absolutely no idea of what he ought now to say or do.

WHERE DID emaciated Robert and naturally frail Sonechka find the strength to carve out their new life in the desolate circumstances of evacuation, amid poverty and depression and the shrill sloganeering that barely managed to conceal the underlying horrors of the first winter of the war? Where did they find the strength to create a new, hermetically isolated life in an ivory tower with room to accommodate fully every aspect of their separate pasts? Robert’s fractured life, like the flight of a blinded moth, with its quick, exuberant, lightning turns from Judaism to mathematics and then on to his life’s work, senseless but addictive paint-daubing, as he himself defined his craft. And the life of Sonechka, feeding off the bookish imaginings of other people, untrue but captivating.

Sonechka brought a sublime and sacrosanct lack of experience to their life together, an unlimited receptiveness to all the important, lofty, and not wholly comprehensible things with which Robert deluged her. He for his part never ceased to be amazed by how much their long nightly talks revealed his past to him in a quite new and different light. These nocturnal conversations with his wife transmuted the past as magically as the touch of the philosopher’s stone.

Of the five years he had spent in the labor camps, Robert recalled the first two as having been the harshest. After that, things settled down somehow. He began painting portraits of the camp authorities’ wives and copying art reproductions to order. The originals of these were sad examples of Russian art at its worst, and as he churned them out Robert usually amused himself with technical trickery of some sort, like painting left-handed. In the process he discovered that his temporary left-handedness affected his perception of color.

In the management of his personal affairs, Robert inclined toward asceticism and had always managed to get by with little, but having for many years been deprived of what even he regarded as the bare essentials—toothpaste, a sharp razor blade and hot water for shaving, a handkerchief, and toilet paper— he rejoiced now in every little thing, in every new day lit up by the presence of his wife, Sonya, and in the relative freedom of a man miraculously let out of the camps and obliged to register his presence with the local police a mere once a week.

They had an easier life than many. The factory’s industrial artist was allocated a windowless room next to the boiler house in the basement of the office building. It was warm. The electricity supply hardly ever got cut off. The boilerman boiled potatoes for them that Sonechka’s father brought, the old man’s unfailing craftsmanship providing essential extra rations.

One time when Sonechka murmured dreamily, with a touch of really quite uncharacteristic sentimentality, “When the war is over and we have won, our life will just be so happy—” Her husband interrupted crisply.

“Don’t delude yourself. We are living very nicely right now. As regards winning, you and I will always be losers, whichever of those cannibals wins the war.” He concluded darkly with an enigmatic phrase: “To my teacher I owe having become neither a green nor a blue, neither parmularius nor scutarius. . . .”

“What are you talking about?” Sonechka asked, startled.

“Not I: Marcus Aurelius. Blue and green were the colors of the parties in the hippodrome. I meant that I have never been interested by whose horse comes in first. It is of no importance for us. In either case the human being is destroyed, private life is forfeit. Go to sleep, Sonya.”

He wound a towel round his head, a strange habit acquired in the camps, and fell asleep instantly. Sonechka lay awake for a long time in the darkness, tormented by a sense of things left unsaid and trying to drive away the even more frightening suspicion that her husband possessed knowledge so dangerous it was better not even to approach it. She diverted her unquiet mind to another place, to the aching delicate explorations going on beneath her stomach, and tried to imagine little fingers a quarter the size of a matchstick in just the same darkness as now surrounded her, lightly running over the soft wall of their first dwelling, and she smiled.

Meanwhile, Sonechka’s talent for vivid and realistic perception of life in fiction seemed to atrophy, to become opaque and clumsy, and she suddenly discovered that even the most ordinary event on this side of the pages of a book—catching a mouse in a homemade trap, the burgeoning of a gnarled, withered twig in a glass of water, a handful of China tea that Robert acquired quite by chance—was more significant than the first love or the death of a fictional character, more important than his or her descent into Hades itself.

Only a week after their breathtakingly swift marriage, Sonechka learned a horrifying fact from her husband: He was completely indifferent to Russian literature, finding it bare, tendentious, and unbearably moralistic. He excepted only Pushkin, reluctantly. In the debate that followed this revelation, Robert parried Sonechka’s spirited defense with cold and rigorous argumentation that she did not wholly understand, and their domestic seminar ended in bitter tears and sweet embraces.

Pigheaded Robert always had to have the last word and, in the bleak hour before dawn, found a moment to say to his wife just as she was falling asleep, “They’re a curse! They’re a curse, all these authorities from Gamaliel to Marx. As for those writers of yours, Gorky is all hot air, Ehrenburg is scared witless . . . and Apollinaire is all hot air too.”

At the mention of Apollinaire, Sonechka was jolted back to wakefulness. “I suppose you knew Apollinaire as well?”

“Well, yes,” he admitted reluctantly. “During the Great War we shared the same quarters for a couple of months. Then I was transferred to Belgium, near Ypres. Have you heard of Ypres?”

“Yes, veteran of Ypres, I have,” Sonechka murmured, enchanted by the inexhaustible richness of his biography.

“Well, I’m glad of that. . . . I arrived just in time for the famous gas attack, but as I was up on a hill, to windward, I wasn’t gassed myself. One stroke of good luck after another, really. I must be a winner.” To confirm to himself once more just how amazingly and uniquely lucky he was, he slid his arm in under Sonechka’s shoulders.

They abandoned the topic of Russian literature.

ONE MONTH before their baby was due to be born, the term of Robert’s rather vague assignment, which he had been extending by every means at his disposal, ended. He was instructed to return without delay to the Bashkir village of Davlekanovo, where he was to live in exile in the hope of better things to come, in a future that Sonechka still imagined would be beautiful, despite his grave reservations.

Both Sonechka’s father and her mother, whose lungs were by now very bad, did their best to persuade her to stay in Sverdlovsk, at least until after the baby was born, but Sonechka was firmly resolved to go with her husband, and Robert indeed had no wish to be parted from his wife. This was the only area in which a shadow of dissatisfaction crept into the old clockmaker’s relations with his son-in-law. Sonechka’s father had by this time lost both his son and his other son-in-law in the war, and he and Robert took to each other warmly without a word being spoken. The difference in their social status was now, in a world turned upside down, not so much of no significance as tending to show up the uselessness of the supposed advantages of an intellectual over a proletarian. As for the rest, the underwater part of the cultural iceberg, their Jewish heritage, was something they had in common.

Sonechka’s family packed her things in just twenty-four hours, that being the time allowed for Robert to ready himself for departure. Her mother, shedding yellow tears, purposefully hemmed diapers and, with a fine needle, lovingly stitched tiny jackets out of an old nightdress of her own. Sonechka’s elder sister, recently widowed by the front, knitted little booties out of red wool while staring straight ahead with unseeing eyes. Her father, who had managed to acquire a twenty-eight-pound sack of millet, measured it out into little bags and kept glancing doubtfully at Sonechka who, even though in her ninth month, had lately become so thin that she hadn’t even had to move the buttons on her skirt: her pregnancy was evident less from any change in her figure than from a puffiness of her face and swollen lips.

“It’s going to be a girl,” her mother would say quietly. “Daughters always steal away their mother’s good looks.”

Sonechka’s sister nodded noncommittally, while Sonechka herself smiled absently and kept repeating to herself, “Lord, grant that it be a girl, a little fair-skinned girl. . . .”

THAT NIGHT a railwayman they knew got them onto a small three-carriage train that was standing a mile outside the station, into a coach that still retained traces of its noble origins in the form of good solid wood paneling, although its soft seats and folding tables had long since been ripped out and the Pullman luxury replaced by slatted benches.

It took them over a day and a half to get from Sverdlovsk to Ufa in the packed train, and for the whole of the journey Robert kept for some reason remembering a maverick trip to Barcelona in his youth. He couldn’t wait to get there after receiving his first big fee in 1923 or 1924 because he wanted to meet Gaudi.

Sonechka slept trustingly for almost the whole of the journey, with her feet pressed into a great tangle of blankets and her shoulder resting on her husband’s thin chest. He meanwhile was remembering the twisting street in which his hotel stood and which crept uphill, the naive little round fountain in front of his window, and the swarthy face and chiseled nostrils of the exceptionally beautiful prostitute with whom he had caroused like a merchant for the whole of his week in Barcelona. He rummaged through his memory and readily found small vivid details, like the totally owlish face of a waiter in the hotel restaurant and the marvelous shoes plaited from ocher calf leather, bought in a shop with an enormous dark blue sign that said HOMER; he even recalled the Barcelona girl’s name: Concetta! She had been born in the Abruzzi mountains in Italy but had come to Barcelona. He didn’t hit it off with the great architect, though. Now, a quarter of a century later, he could visualize Gaudi’s odd constructions down to the last detail, completely vegetative, and every one of them contrived and unconvincing.

Sonechka sneezed, half woke, and murmured something. He pressed her sleepy hand to himself and came back to the outskirts of Ufa, to the wilds of Bashkiria. He smiled, shaking his gray head in bewilderment. “Was that really me in Barcelona? Am I here now? No, truly, there is no such thing as reality. . . .”

AFTER HER period of gestation, at the first sign that the birth was imminent, Robert took Sonechka to a maternity hospital in a trampled, muddy, treeless area on the outskirts of a big flat-roofed village. The building itself was of clay bricks mixed with straw, a wretched place with small opaque windows.

The only doctor was a blond man of middle years with fine white skin who blushed easily. This was Pan Szuwalski, a refugee from Poland and until recently a fashionable Warsaw physician, a cultivated man and a connoisseur of fine wines. He had his back to the new arrivals, his dazzling blue-tinged white coat incongruous here but reassuring, and he was nibbling the ends of his blond mustache and wiping the lenses of his large spectacles with a piece of chamois leather. He came over to the window several times a day, to look out at this amorphous land with its grubby tufts of grass—instead of elegant Jerusalem Avenue, onto which the windows of his Warsaw clinic had looked—and to dab at his watering eyes with a red-and-green checked English handkerchief. The last one he had left.

He had just examined an aging Bashkir woman who had come twenty-five miles on horseback, shouted, “Give the lady a wash!” to the nurse, and was standing now, trying to control an involuntary tremor of resentment in his breast as he remembered longingly his satin-skinned lady patients, and the sweet milky smell of their costly pampered genitals.

He turned, sensing somebody behind his back, to discover a large young woman sitting on his bench in a light-colored, very worn coat and a sharp-featured gray-haired man in a patched double-breasted jacket.

“I am making so bold as to trouble you, doctor,” the man began, and Pan Szuwalski, identifying someone from his own caste of the downtrodden European intelligentsia the moment he heard the voice, advanced on him with a smile of recognition.

“You are most welcome, please. . . . You have brought your wife,” Pan Szuwalski said half interrogatively, taking in the large difference in their ages, which invited conjecture as to a different relationship between this seemingly rather ill-suited couple. He gestured toward a curtain, behind which a tiny office was partitioned off for him.

Fifteen minutes later he had inspected Sonechka, confirmed the imminence of parturition, but advised that she might need to be patient for as much as ten hours, even if everything went smoothly and according to plan.

Sonechka was laid on a bed covered with stiff cold oilcloth. Pan Szuwalski patted her belly with a gesture more befitting a vet than a doctor and retired to attend to his Bashkir patient, who, they heard, had had a stillborn baby three days ago. Everything had been all right, but now it was all wrong.

Two and a half hours later the doctor, with big tears on his clean-shaven cheeks, came out to the veranda where a morose Robert was doggedly sitting it out and confessed to him in a tragical stage whisper, “I ought to be shot. I have no business operating under conditions like these. I have nothing, literally nothing. But I cannot not operate. In twenty-four hours from now she will die from sepsis!”

“What’s wrong with her?” Robert asked numbly, picturing to himself the death of Sonechka.

“Oh, goodness me! Forgive me! With your wife everything is in order; the contractions have begun. I meant that unfortunate Bashkir woman.”

Robert ground his teeth and swore under his breath; he could not stand neurotic men who felt compelled to blurt their feelings out to all and sundry. He chewed his lips and looked away.

The little four-and-a-half-pound girl Sonechka gave birth to in the fifteen minutes Pan Szuwalski was making conversation on the veranda was as fair-skinned as could be and had a narrow little face, exactly as Sonechka had hoped.

EVERYTHING CHANGED for Sonechka as completely and radically as if her old life had turned away from her and taken with it all the bookishness she had so loved, leaving her in return unimaginable travails from the disruption and poverty and cold and from her daily anxieties over little Tanya and Robert, who took turns in being ill.

Their family would not have survived but for constant help from her father, who managed somehow to procure and send them the essential supplies on which they lived. To all her parents’ attempts to persuade her to move to Sverdlovsk with the baby while things were at their most difficult, Sonechka’s invariable reply was, “I have to be with Robert.”

After a wet summer that was more like an interminable autumn, a severe winter suddenly set in without any season of transition. Living in a shaky little house built of damp adobe brick, they remembered their room in the factory basement as a tropical Garden of Eden.

The main worry was fuel. The school for combine operatives where Robert worked as a bookkeeper sometimes gave him the use of a horse, and already in the autumn he would quite frequently ride out to the steppe to cut quantities of tall reed-like dead grasses, the names of which he never did learn. With the cart piled high, there was fuel enough to heat the house for two days, as he knew from his experience of the winter spent in the village before he had gone to Sverdlovsk.

He compressed the grass and crammed their lean-to full of homemade briquettes. He took up part of the floor, which he himself had laid earlier without thinking he would need somewhere to keep potatoes, and dug a storage pit, dried it out, and lined it with stolen planks. He built a lavatory, which made old Rahim, his neighbor, shake his head and smile wryly. In these parts a wooden plank with a hole in it was considered a needless luxury; since the beginning of time people had simply used a place not too far from the house, which they called “out in the wind.”

Robert was wiry and sturdy, and physical fatigue was a balm for his soul, which was strongly averse to the absurd adding up of sham statistics, the compiling of false reports and fictitious documents for writing off fuel that had been stolen, spare parts that had been filched, and vegetables that had been sold on the side at the local bazaar. These were diverted from the small college farm, whose manager was a wily nursery-man, a cheery Ukrainian with a maimed right hand and no conscience.

But by way of recompense, each evening Robert would open his front door and see Sonechka in the living fire-breathing light of the oil lamp, wreathed in an uneven flickering nimbus, sitting in their only chair, which he had refashioned into an armchair. Firmly attached to the pointed end of her pillowlike breast was the little grayish head, soft and shaggy as a tennis ball, of his baby. In the mildest way imaginable, the whole picture would shimmer and pulsate, with waves of uneven light, with waves of the unseen warm milk, and with other invisible currents that left him unable to move or close the door. “The door!” Sonechka would urge in a trailing whisper, all smiles at the return of her husband, and, laying their daughter down across the one and only bed, would produce a saucepan from beneath a cushion and place it in the middle of the bare table. On good days this contained thick soup made from horsemeat, potatoes from the college fields, and millet sent by her father.

Sonechka would be wakened at daybreak by the little scuffling movements of her daughter and would press the baby to her tummy, feeling with a sleepy back the nearness of her husband. Without opening her eyes, she would unbutton her nightdress, draw out her breasts, which hardened toward morning, press the nipples, and two long jets would spurt onto a bright-colored cloth with which she would wipe her nipple. The little girl would start to twist and turn, puckering her lips, slurping and trying to catch the nipple like a little fish trying to latch on to a large piece of bait. Sonechka’s milk was plentiful and flowed easily, and feeding her baby—the little tugs at the nipple and the nibbles at her breast of toothless gums—gave her a pleasure that mysteriously communicated itself to her husband, who unerringly woke at this early hour of the morning. He would embrace her broad back, possessively squeezing her to himself, and she would be overwhelmed with pleasure at this double load of unendurable happiness. She would smile in the first light of morning, her body wordlessly and joyously satisfying the appetites of these two precious beings who were inseparable from her.

This morning feeling illuminated the whole of the day. Her housework seemed to take care of itself easily and adroitly, and every God-given hour remained in Sonechka’s memory, not blurring into those on either side of it but in all its special separateness: one day with its lazy rain at noon; one with the large rust-colored bird with bandy legs that flew in and perched on the fence; one with that first ribbed stripe of a new tooth in her little daughter’s swollen gum. What is the need for this minutely detailed and senseless working of memory? For the rest of her life, Sonechka retained the pattern of each day, its smells and nuances and, particularly, in a grave and exaggerated manner, every word her husband uttered, along with all its attendant circumstances.

Many years later Robert was more than once to be amazed at his wife’s capacity for indiscriminate memorizing, which tucked away in some recess of her brain that whole great heap of numbers, hours, and details. Sonechka would even remember every last one of the toys that Robert made in great numbers for his growing daughter, with a creative delight he had long forgotten. She later took all sorts of bits and bobs with them to Moscow: carved wooden animals, birds in flight made from twisted string, wooden dolls with scary faces. Nor did she forget the toys that were left behind for Rahim’s children and grandchildren: a cheery flock of identical thin little sparrows; a fortress for a puppet king, with a Gothic tower and draw-bridge that opened; a Roman circus with matchstick figures of slaves and wild beasts; and a rather large contraption with a handle to turn and a great many little colored slats that moved, clattered, and produced weird, droll music.

His projects were well beyond a small child’s capacity for play. His daughter had a good memory, which, like her mother’s, retained a host of memories from this time, but it did not register these toys, perhaps partly because, when the family went from the Urals to Alexandrovo in 1946, Robert was to build her entire fantastical towns out of wood chips and colored paper, great strides in the direction of what was later to be called paper architecture. These fragile toys were lost in the course of the family’s many moves in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The first half of Robert’s life had passed in huge unpredictable geographical leaps, from Russia to France, then to America, the Balkans, Algiers, and again to France, and finally back once more to Russia. The second half, however, cut off from the first by his time in labor camps and exile, passed in little moves, from Alexandrovo to Kalinin, Pushkino to Lianozovo. In this way he spent an entire decade gradually moving back toward Moscow, a city he was far from seeing as a new Athens or Jerusalem.

During those first postwar years the breadwinner was Sonechka, who had inherited her mother’s sewing machine and the innocent recklessness of a self-taught seamstress who knew how to stitch a sleeve into an armhole. Her customers were undemanding, and the seamstress conscientious and not given to overcharging.

Robert worked at jobs more appropriate to a semi-invalid: one time as a school watchman and another as the bookkeeper of a cooperative that produced monstrous iron brackets of unknown purpose. Brought up under the free skies of Paris, he never entertained the thought of working as an artist in the service of the dull and dismal state he lived in, even if he could have reconciled himself to its imbecility, bloodthirsty stupidity, and shameless mendacity.

He realized his artistic imaginings on snow-white boards on which he built a third generation of the paper-and-wood-chip structures with which he had earlier amused his daughter. In passing he revealed a special ability to visualize evolvents and a precise knack for getting spatio-planar relations right; it was impossible to tear your eyes away from the whimsical figures he would cut from a single sheet of paper. Squeezing something through here, twisting something there, and turning the whole thing inside out, he would have composed an object that had never before existed in nature and for which there was no name. He began to play the game for himself.

Sonechka’s womanly certainty of her husband knew no bounds. Having already taken his talent on trust, she now looked in awed delight at everything that proceeded from his hands. She had no understanding of the complex spatial problems he set himself, and even less of the elegant solutions he found, but in his strange toys she sensed a reflection of his personality, a moving of mysterious forces. She happily murmured to herself her cherished catchphrase, “Lord, Lord, what have I done to deserve such happiness?”

Robert abandoned painting. From his earlier attempts to amuse little Tanya he developed a whole new craft. As always, fortune smiled on him: In the local train he bumped into Timler, now a famous artist, whom he had known back in Paris and who had bravely stayed in touch with Robert after he returned to Moscow right up to the time of his arrest.

Timler had been branded a formalist. Who is going to explain to us, and when, what the talentless upstarts canonized by officialdom had in mind when they came up with that label? At the time, Timler had gone to ground in the theater. Now he came to visit Robert. He stood for an hour and a half in his insubstantial clapboard shed looking at several of the structures captioned with series of Arabic numerals and Hebrew letters and, while appreciating their exceptional quality, was too embarrassed—as the son of a carpenter in a little Jewish shtetl who had studied two years in the heder—to ask their creator the meaning of these strange ciphers. As for Robert, it never occurred to him that there could be any need to explain what for him was the obvious connection between the kabbalistic alphabet—a dry relic of his adolescent enthusiasm for all things Jewish—and his bold games that took space apart and turned it inside out.

For a long time Timler drank his tea in silence and, just before taking leave, said with a frown, “It is very damp here, Robert. You can move your works to my studio.”

This offer was tantamount to unqualified recognition and was extremely decent on Timler’s part, but Robert did not take it up. His nameless items, called into existence by chance, returned to nonexistence when they rotted away in one or another of his later sheds and failed to survive the many house moves.

However, it was in that shed that the celebrated Timler gave Robert his first commission to design a theater set. Before long, his models of settings were the talk of theatrical circles in Moscow, and new commissions rained down on him. On a stage eighteen inches across he could re-create Gorky’s night shelter for the denizens of the lower depths, the ownerless study of Tolstoy’s intestate living corpse, or cram onto it the ever-popular shops of Ostrovsky’s grain merchants.

AMONG THE woodsheds, dovecotes, and creaking swings stalked odd Tanya. She liked wearing her mother’s old dresses. The tall scrawny girl was swamped in Sonechka’s loose shifts, girt with a faded cashmere scarf. Around a narrow face, like a mature dandelion head as yet unblown by the wind, her wavy, wiry hair stood proud, untamable by comb, unbraidable into pigtails. She would scuttle about in the dense air—heavy with the aromas of old barrels, moldering garden furniture, and the solid, oh-too-solid shadows that surround decrepit and unneeded things—and suddenly, chameleonlike, vanish into them. She would remain immobile for a long time and start if somebody called her. Sonechka was worried and complained to her husband about their daughter’s brooding and edginess. He put his arm on Sonechka’s shoulder and said, “Leave her be. You wouldn’t want her marching in step with the rest, would you?”

Sonechka tried to instill a love of books in Tanya, but as Tanya listened to her mother’s deeply expressive reading her eyes would glaze over, and she would sail away to places beyond Sonechka’s imagining.

Over the years of her marriage, Sonechka herself changed from a highbrow spinster into quite a practical housewife. She longed for a perfectly ordinary house, with water from a tap in the kitchen, a separate room for her daughter and a studio for her husband, with meat and stewed fruit for dinner and starched white sheets that were not sewn together from three different-sized pieces. In pursuit of this grand vision, Sonechka took on a second job, sitting at night over her sewing machine and, without letting on to her husband, saving up. She also dearly wanted her widowed father to be able to move in with them. He was almost blind, now, and very frail.

Subjected to the vagaries of suburban buses and ramshackle suburban trains, Sonechka rapidly grew old and ugly. The soft down on her upper lip turned into a sprouting, unfeminine growth; her eyelids sagged, giving her a doglike expression; and the shadow of fatigue in the bags under her eyes no longer disappeared after her day of rest or, for that matter, after her two weeks’ holiday.

But the bitter cup of aging did not by any means poison Sonechka’s life, as it does the life of proud beauties; her husband was immutably much older, and this gave her an unfailing sense of her own unfading youthfulness. Robert’s matrimonial vigor, which showed no sign of abating, confirmed as much. Her every morning was colored by undeserved feminine delight so brilliant it could never become a matter of routine. Deep in her heart she harbored a secret readiness to be deprived of this happiness at any moment, as something wholly adventitious, something that had come her way by mistake or through an oversight of some kind. Her sweet little daughter Tanya also seemed to her a chance gift, and this, in the fullness of time, was indeed confirmed by the gynecologist: Sonechka had what the medics called an infantile uterus, immature and ill-adapted to childbearing. After Tanya’s birth she never became pregnant again, which grieved her to the point of tears. She constantly felt she must be unworthy of her husband’s love if she could not bear him any more children.

IN THE early 1950s, Sonechka’s Herculean labors were rewarded when the family half exchanged, half bought a new place to live and moved into a whole quarter of a two-story wooden house, one of the few buildings still standing in the by then almost completely demolished Petrovsky Park, near Moscow’s Dynamo metro station. It was a delightful house and had been the dacha of a famous prerevolutionary lawyer. One quarter of the garden adjoining the house went with the apartment.

All Sonechka’s dreams had come true. Tanya had a sunny room of her own on the second floor. Sonechka’s father, living out the last year of his life, had the little corner room, and Robert set up his studio on the heated glazed terrace. They had space to breathe. They even had some money.

By the luck of the apartment-exchange draw, Robert found himself on the fringe of Moscow’s answer to Montmartre, ten minutes’ walk from a whole colony of artists. To his complete surprise he found, in what he had supposed to be a despoiled and trampled place, people who, if not exactly kindred spirits, were at least colleagues he could talk to: Alexander Ivanovich, a Russian Barbizonian, benefactor of stray cats and injured birds, who painted his wild pictures while sitting on the damp earth and claimed that his posterior’s Antaean contact was a source of creative energy; Gregory, a bald Ukrainian Zen Buddhist who achieved an effect of translucent porcelain and silk by covering layers of watercolor dozens of times alternately with tea and milk; the poet Gavrilin, with his variously colored hair, broken nose, and inborn gift of draftsmanship, who drew his palindrome poems among intellectually testing configurations on large, unevenly cut sheets of wrapping paper—Robert delighted in his calligraphic and verbal encryptions.

All these odd people, revealing themselves in the early years of what was to prove a deceptive political thaw, gravitated toward Robert, and his once very private home became a kind of club, with the proprietor himself assuming the role of honorary chairman.

He was, as always, laconic, but a single skeptical comment from him, a single jibe, was sufficient to put back on course a discussion that was in danger of losing its way or move the conversation in a new direction. Russia, burdened for many years with silence, found its tongue again, but these freewheeling conversations took place behind closed doors, and fear was still at their elbow.

Sonechka would be mending one of Tanya’s stockings, pulling it over the smooth wood of the darning egg while she listened to the men. The things they talked about—sparrows in winter, the visions of Meister Eckhart, techniques for infusing tea, Goethe’s theory of color—bore precious little relation to the concerns of the times outside the door, but Sonechka basked reverently in the warmth and light of their universally relevant conversation and kept repeating to herself, “Lord, Lord, what have I done to deserve all this?”

FLAT-NOSED Gavrilin, devotee of all the arts, was in the habit of delving into every conceivable journal. In the library he happened one day upon a long article about Robert in an American art history journal. A brief biographical sketch concluded with an exaggerated report of his death in Stalin’s labor camps in the late 1930s. The critical section of the article was written in language beyond Gavrilin’s linguistic capacity, but from what he did manage to translate it was evident that Robert was regarded as virtually a classic painter and, at the very least, as the pioneer of an artistic movement currently all the rage in Europe. Four reproductions in full color were appended.

The very next day Robert, accompanied by his Barbizonian friend, descended on the library of the Artists’ Union, unearthed the article, and flew into an indescribable rage upon finding that one of the four paintings reproduced had absolutely no bearing on his work since it belonged to Morandi, while another had been printed upside down. When he read the article he became even more furious.

“Back in the 1920s America gave me the impression that it was a country full of complete idiots. They don’t seem to have got any brighter,” he snorted.

Gavrilin, however, bruited the article abroad to all and sundry. Robert’s theater-set models were remembered even by the bright-eyed, quickfire theater designers, and soon they were again beating a path to his door.

One unexpected consequence of all this commotion was his being accepted into membership of the Artists’ Union and allocated a place to work. It was a good studio looking out onto the Dynamo football stadium, and not a whit worse than his last studio in Paris, in an attic on rue Gay-Lussac with a view of the Jardin du Luxembourg.

BY NOW Sonechka was nearing forty. Her hair had turned gray and she had filled out markedly. Robert, as light and wizened as a locust, changed little, and the difference in their ages seemed somehow gradually to even out. For Tanya the great age of her parents was slightly embarrassing, as were also her own large stature, feet, and breasts. It all seemed out of scale, disproportionate in a decade when accelerated development had yet to be heard of in Russia. But Tanya had the advantage over Sonechka in that there was no elder brother to mock her, and from all the walls wonderful portraits of her at every stage of childhood looked beneficently down, mitigating her dissatisfaction with herself. By the time she was in seventh grade she was beginning to receive convincing evidence of her attractiveness from pubescent classmates and older boys.

From infancy onward, all Tanya’s wishes were readily satisfied. Her loving parents were only too eager, and usually anticipated her desires. Goldfish, a puppy, and a piano would appear, almost on the same day the little girl began talking about them.

From the day she was born she had been surrounded by marvelous toys, and playing on her own, without needing anyone else to join in, was the most important thing in her life. So it came about that, emerging from the diversions of an extended childhood, she had a couple of years of dormancy during which she underwent the transition of puberty, before coming to an early recognition of which game exactly was preferred by grown-ups, and throwing herself into it with a confident awareness of her right to pleasure and the uninhibitedness of a personality that had never been repressed.

Tanya endured nothing remotely comparable to Sonechka’s humiliating love for Vitya Starostin. Although she was no beauty in a conventional sense, and not even pretty by most people’s standards, her elongated face with its fine ridged nose and light vitreous eyes, framed by springy, curly hair, was in fact very alluring. Other young people of her age were attracted also by the way she was constantly playing with a book, a pencil, her own hat. A little performance was always in progress in her hands that only her immediate neighbor could see.

On one occasion she got rather carried away in playing with the fingers and lips of her friend Boris, whom she went round to see in order to copy her math homework from him. She discovered that he had something that she did not, which intrigued her very much indeed. At that hour of the evening the door to Boris’s parents’ room was partly open, and the broad chink of light with two large shadows in front of the television set seemed all to be part of a game whose rules they observed to perfection, exchanging lines of dialogue with each other that bore absolutely no relation to what was going on between them. And although the session began with innocent childish questions like “Haven’t you ever done it?” and “How about you?”—followed by a proposal from Tanya, who never stinted herself, to “Let’s try it!”—it concluded with the brief introduction, both figurative and literal, of something new.

At the very moment they were catching fire, an untimely invitation to supper came from the next room, and further trials had to be postponed to a more propitious moment.

Their subsequent liaisons took place without the presence of Boris’s parents. For Tanya the most interesting thing was a new awareness of her body. She discovered that every part of it, her fingers, her breasts, her stomach, her back, responded differently to touch and had the ability to allow all manner of delightful sensations to be elicited, and the shared experimentation gave both of them no end of pleasure.

The puny freckled boy with the buck teeth and the mouth inflamed at the corners also displayed exceptional talent, and for the next two months the young experimenters, laboring inventively and tirelessly from three in the afternoon till half past six, when Boris’s parents came home, mastered every aspect of the physical side of love without in the process experiencing the least emotion beyond the bounds of a friendly and practical partnership.

But then they fell out over a business matter: Tanya borrowed Boris’s geometry notes and lost them. To make matters worse, she reported the fact to him in a completely unserious manner without even apologizing. Boris, an orderly and even pedantic boy, was outraged, not so much by the loss of his notes as by Tanya’s complete failure to appreciate the impropriety of her behavior. Tanya told him to stop whining, and he called her a slob. They were no longer together.

In the time now free between three in the afternoon and half past six, Boris settled down to study mathematics intensively, establishing beyond doubt that his vocation lay in the exact sciences. Tanya, however, was in no hurry to sort her life out and played a flute rather woodenly and badly in her sunny room, bit her nails, and read. . . . Alas for Sonechka and her blissful youth passed on the sublime uplands of world literature! Her daughter, unschooled in the humanities, read only sci-fi and more sci-fi, Western and Russian alike.

Meanwhile, the faltering sounds of Tanya’s flute were attracting droves of admirers. The very air around her was charged, her curls rising up electrified and sparking with tiny discharges if a hand so much as approached them. Sonechka barely had time to open and close the door for all the young men in zoological sweaters with angular deer and the dove-gray military jackets and tunics that were the anachronistic school uniform of the late 1950s, dreamed up by some senescent minister of education in an access of feebleminded nostalgia.

One Vladimir, an outstanding musician whose defection to Europe caused an immense scandal at a time when such a thing was accounted a political crime on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, would later describe in his memoirs, published in the late 1990s and revealing a redoubtable literary talent, the musical soirées in Tanya’s room with the upright piano with the marvelous tone that had to be retuned every day. He would tenderly recall how this ancient instrument revealed the secret individuality of a piece of music to a musician at the beginning of his career. He would speak of it as one might of an elderly lady relative, long since deceased, who had baked unforgettable cherry pies for the author in his childhood.

Vladimir further testified that it was in Tanya’s room, with its intricate little window looking out onto the garden and an old apple tree with a double trunk, while accompanying Tanya’s uncertain flute-playing, that he first experienced the tumult of mutual creative understanding and joyously accepted a measure of musical self-abnegation to afford greater prominence to the tremulous flute.

At that time Vladimir was a short, dumpy boy who looked like a tapir and was in love with Tanya. She left an indelible trace in his life and in his heart, and both his wives, the first one in Moscow and the second in London, were unmistakably of the same type.

Tanya’s second musical soul mate was Alyosha Petersburg, as the young Leningrader styled himself while in Moscow. In contrast to Vladimir’s classical training, he offered improvisation on the guitar and mastery of any item capable of producing sound, from a mouth organ to a pair of tin cans. He was, moreover, a poet, and in a raucous fairground voice he delivered the first songs of the new culture of dissidence.

There were a few other boys, more spectators than participants, but they too played an essential part in providing the admiring audience so necessary to both budding celebrities.

IN THE years of his youth, Robert too had been the center of invisible swirling currents, but these had been currents of a different, more intellectual quality. They too, like Tanya’s tin whistle, had drawn together a crowd of young people. Perhaps surprisingly, this circle of precocious Jewish boys, teenagers as they would be called nowadays, was studying, in the fraught years before the First World War, not the Marxism that was modish at the time but Sefer ha-Zohar, the Book of Splendor, the ground-laying treatise of the Kabbala. These boys from the Jewish Podol suburb of Kiev gathered at the house of Avigdor-Melnik, Robert’s father, whose house abutted the house of Shvartsman, father of the future philosopher Lev Shestov, whose friendship, twenty years later when he was already in Paris, Robert was to enjoy.

Not one of those boys whose lot it was to live through the years of war and revolutions was to become either a traditional Jewish philosopher or a teacher of doctrine. They all grew up to be apikorsim, freethinkers. One went on to become a brilliant theoretician—and slightly less successful practitioner—of the nascent art of cinematography, another became a famous musician, a third was a surgeon with life-giving hands, and all of them had been nourished by the same milk and invigorated by the youthful electricity that accumulated under the roof of the house of Avigdor-Melnik.

What Tanya had going on around her was, as Robert guessed, the same thing as had electrified his own younger years, but the charge was quite different, a female polarity wholly inimical to him and further modified by the quirks of a beggarly decadent generation.

It was Robert who first noticed that Tanya’s late-night visitors sometimes stayed over until the following morning. An early riser throughout his life, he emerged sometime after five in the morning from the house’s living quarters to go through to his studio on the terrace, where he specially enjoyed passing these first hours. To his sensibility they were the purest of the day. In the freshly fallen snow he noticed footprints leading from the veranda to the side gate. He noticed them again a few days later and tentatively asked his wife whether her sister had stayed the night with them. Sonechka, surprised, said no, Anya had not been staying.

Robert did not need to investigate further, since the following morning he saw a tall young man in a very thin anorak going out through the yard. He said not a word to Sonechka about his discovery, and Sonechka laid a head heavy with sleep on her husband’s shoulder and complained. “She is not studying properl y. . . . She is not doing anything. . . . She is getting into trouble at school. . . . That Raisa Semyonovna keeps dropping disgusting hints. . . .”

Robert comforted her. “Just forget all about it, Sonechka. All that is dead and stinks to high heaven. What does it matter if she walks out of that pathetic school? What’s the use of it?”

“Robert, what are you saying?” Sonechka exclaimed in horror. “She can’t get by without an education—”

“Calm yourself,” her husband interrupted. “Leave the girl in peace. If she does not want to go to school, what matter? Let her toot away on that flute of hers; she’ll learn just as much that way.”

“But Robert, those boys. I am so afraid.” Sonechka went timidly on the offensive. “I think one stayed in there with her the whole night. She did not go to school the next day.”

Robert did not share his morning observation with Sonechka. He made no reply.

After Tanya had given Boris his marching orders, she had attracted admirers like a bitch in heat. Boys throbbing with testosterone swarmed obdurately around her, insistent and relentless. She tried out her new amusement with a few: Boris beat the lot of them hands down.

In the spring it became evident that she was not going to be allowed to progress to the ninth grade. The hassle at school became completely intolerable, and, without a word to Sonechka, Robert transferred Tanya to evening school. His initiative was to have far-reaching consequences for the whole family, and primarily for Robert himself.

THE SAME potent capricious fate that had determined that Sonechka should become the wife of Robert now singled out Tanya. The object of her passionate infatuation was the school cleaning lady, who doubled as her classmate, a little eighteen-year-old Polish girl called Jasia, with a face as smooth as a new-laid egg. Their friendship blossomed slowly in the second to last row of desks. Large, expansive Tanya gazed adoringly at Jasia, transparent as an apothecary’s gleaming flask, and was overcome with bashfulness. Jasia said little, responding monosyllabically to the infrequent questions Tanya addressed to her, and appeared reticent and aloof. She was the daughter of Polish communists who had fled the Nazi invasion: as luck would have it, in opposite directions. Her father went west; her mother, her baby in her arms, headed east, to Russia. She failed to dissolve without trace among the country’s millions but was leniently only exiled to Kazakhstan, where she had a hard time, clung tenaciously for ten years to her exalted and crazy ideals, and then died.

Jasia was put in an orphanage, where she displayed extraordinary determination to cling to life under conditions that appeared specially devised to ensure the slow death of body and soul, and wrenched herself free through her knack of exploiting to her best advantage whatever circumstances she found herself in.

Her eyebrows, arching high above gray eyes, and her delicate little catlike mouth seemed to be begging for protection, and protection was duly forthcoming. She had protectors and she had protectresses, but a natural independence of spirit led her to prefer men, having at an early age mastered an inexpensive technique for settling her debts to them.

One of her most recent protectors, who materialized after she had been sent to a particularly monstrous skills training center for orphans and devised an ingenious plan of escape, was a fat forty-year-old Tatar called Rafil, a railway carriage steward who conveyed her all the way to the Kazan station in the city of Moscow, chosen as the starting point for her meteoric rise. In the side pocket of a checkered shopping bag she had a passport, made out in her name a short time previously, which she had stolen from the principal’s study, and a very modest twenty-three pre-reform rubles pinched from the somnolent Rafil as the train was approaching Orenburg. She had no problem with this stolen money for two good reasons: first, she really had peeled off very little from a very thick wad; and second, she felt she had earned every kopek of it in her four days on the train.

Rafil did not notice the theft and was keenly disappointed when, twenty-four hours later, his young protégée failed to return to carriage number seven to make the return journey to Kazakhstan with him as she had promised.

With a slight self-deprecating smile for having so recently been such a naive little fool, Jasia related to Tanya how she had dampened a gray railway towel in one of the washbasins in the Kazan station public toilets, dumbfounded the Asian women thronging that malodorous place by stripping herself stark naked in front of them, and washed herself from head to toe. She then drew from the checkered bag a white blouse with a frilly collar, double-wrapped in newspaper, that she had long been keeping for just this moment, changed into it, and, tossing the towel into the rusty wire basket for toilet paper, went out to conquer Moscow, her bridgehead being the immediately adjacent and justly notorious Kazan Square, abutting three railway terminuses.

The checkered bag further contained two pairs of knickers, a blue blouse in need of washing, a notebook with some poems she had copied down, and a set of postcards of famous actors. She was hard, she was streetwise, and she was, in all honesty, naive beyond belief: She wanted to be a film star.

Everything pointed toward Jasia’s becoming a full-time prostitute, but that is not what happened.

During her first two years in Moscow she scored some notable successes, obtaining a temporary residence permit and temporary accommodation in a storeroom at the school where she had a cleaning job. From time to time Malinin, the local policeman, would drop by, for it was through the good offices of this florid-faced middle-aged protector that all these temporary blessings came her way. Malinin’s visits were perfunctory, not unduly burdensome for Jasia, and indeed no big deal for Malinin himself; but he was an officer deeply committed to bribe-taking and extortion, and since Jasia had nothing else for him to extort, he had to rest content with what she offered.

It was in that very storeroom and on that very sports mat, which doubled so satisfactorily as a bed, that Jasia told Tanya her story. Tanya took it all to heart, experiencing in the process a powerful emotion compounded of pity, envy, and shame at being so irredeemably well off herself. Jasia, having wryly related everything she could remember about herself in merciless detail, unexpectedly gained an outsider’s perspective on all she had been through and was filled with such loathing for it that she never told the truth to another living soul. She invented herself a new past, complete with aristocratic grandmother, a family estate in Poland, and relatives living in France (who will indeed be appearing like a deus ex machina at just the right moment).

Apart from Jasia’s storeroom, the school had a unit of accommodation occupied by Taisia Sergeevna, a war widow who taught Russian language and literature. She disapproved of Malinin’s visits, but this did not prevent her from delegating Jasia to babysit with her young children and do her laundry. In return for these neighborly services, Jasia was given access to her bookcase and excused attendance at literature classes, which Taisia Sergeevna preferred her to spend babysitting.

The gamut of her duties performed, Jasia would lie down on the mat with its smell of sweaty bodies and set about memorizing Krylov’s fables, which in every age has been a prerequisite for admission to any Russian drama school. Or she would recite Shakespeare, from the first volume of his collected works to the last, acting out all the female roles in a tragic whisper, from Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, to Marina, daughter of Pericles.

The teachers of the evening school were worn out well before dinnertime from teaching the younger daytime brothers and sisters of their evening pupils. These consequently were let off lightly with their lessons. In any case, half the class were the occupants of a nearby police dormitory, and the weary young men dozed peacefully in the ill-lit classroom, achieved grades of satisfactory, and went on to continue their studies successfully before becoming lawyers or something in the Communist Party. Jasia was the only person in the class whose desk fitted her; the others got stuck in the wooden frameworks designed for the torture of small children.

Tanya, abrupt, expansive, moved about noisily with the untrained willfulness of a young colt. When she sat down at her desk, she shifted it in a way that made Jasia with her light little head jump. Jasia got up from her desk by raising the lid soundlessly and making a slinky movement with her hips. As she advanced up the narrow aisle toward the blackboard, the lower part of her body seemed to lag slightly behind the upper part; the foot that was behind dragged slightly, the toe motionless for a moment, and the movement of her knees suggested they were pushing against the heavy fabric of a long evening dress rather than her tatty frock. There was something special about the curve of her loins, and every part of her moved separately, yet all of them taken together, from the slight thrusting of her breasts to the sinuousness of her hips and a particular rolling movement of her ankles, were, in concert, not the practiced techniques of a flirt but the feminine music of a body that demanded attention and admiration. Police Constable Churilin, a mature thirty years of age with dark pockmarks on his jowly face, shook his head at her retreating form and muttered, “Get a load of that! I don’t believe it!”

There was no telling whether his muttering denoted disgust or delight, but Jasia’s demeanor was in any case so aloof that Churilin’s muttering went as far as any of the policemen attempted to take it.

On her way home, Tanya would try to imitate Jasia’s walk in the darkness of the nighttime park, to play that music with her own knees, hips, and shoulders. She craned her neck, dragged her feet, and rolled her hips. She thought perhaps it was her height that kept her from being as pleasingly sinuous as Jasia, and tried slouching. She is elfin, Tanya thought and, wearying of her balletic ambulatory exercises, marched off back home, striding out with her long legs, swinging her arms unevenly to the right and left, raising her head high, and tossing back her hair, to which the evening mist attempted to cling. Robert, who often came out to the park at this hour of the evening to see her home, recognized her gait in the distance, her whole personality so fully expressed in the gawky movements, and smiled at the strength and ungainliness of his daughter, who was already half a head taller than her father.

They both loved the park at evening and cherished their laconic mutual understanding, a secret affirmation of a tacit conspiracy against Sonechka. Robert from an inborn sense of his own superiority, and Tanya from her youth and heredity, both laid claim to an agreeable intellectual elitism, leaving Sonechka her humble round of cleaning and cooking.

It never entered Sonechka’s head to feel ill-used or to envy her Olympians. She washed the dishes and scoured the saucepans, cooking their meals with passionate commitment, checking against the recipes she had copied in blotchy violet ink from her sister’s prerevolutionary cookbook. She boiled up vats of laundry, blued, and starched, while Robert would sometimes peer attentively round her broad back at the soap flakes or the semolina, the bluing or the kidney beans, and with characteristic perspicacity take in the truly aesthetic quality, the sublime meaningfulness and beauty of Sonechka’s domestic creativity. Go to the ant, thou sluggard, he thought in passing and, closing the door of his heated terrace behind him, returned to the realm of his austere paper, white lead paint, and the few other elements he allowed in his severe études.

Tanya took no interest whatsoever in her mother’s culinary activities, since she was now floating in a cloudland of infatuation. Waking of a morn, she would lie long with her eyes closed, imagining Jasia, or herself and Jasia, in some agreeable fantasy: galloping on white horses over a young green meadow or sailing in a yacht in, perhaps, the Mediterranean.

Her uninhibited and even slightly peremptory treatment of her sacred reproductive apparatus led her instincts to stray a little and, while she shared lots of fun with well-built boys, her heart cried out for some higher communion, a conjoining, a fusion, a reciprocity beyond all bounds. Her heart chose Jasia, and she strained all her mental resources to give her choice a rational foundation, an explanation in logic.

“Oh, Mother, she looks weak and as if she might blow away in the wind, but actually she is incredibly strong!” Tanya enthused, telling her mother about her new friend, the cruel life in the orphanage, the times she had run away, the times she had been beaten, the victories she had gained. Jasia’s natural caution had led her to omit a number of things from what she told Tanya: her mother’s exile, the cheap trading of her body in childhood, her ingrained penchant for petty thieving.

Sonechka, however, heard enough even before meeting her to respond to the suffering of a child and to be able to guess at what remained hidden from Tanya. That poor, poor little girl, she thought. She could just as eaisly have been our Tanya. The things that went on!

She thought back over the many occasions when God had saved them from an early death: the time Robert had been thrown out of the local train in Alexandrovo; the time a beam gave way at her workplace and half the room that she had left only a moment before became a pile of dark old-brick rubble; the time she nearly died of peritonitis on a hospital operating table. “Poor little girl,” Sonechka sighed, and the little girl she had yet to meet took on the features of Tanya.

RIGHT UP until the New Year, Tanya was unable to persuade Jasia to visit her home. She just shrugged her shoulders and kept declining the invitation without volunteering any reason for her persistent refusal.

The reason was, however, that Jasia had long had a generalized but keen sense of anticipation of a new and highly promising territory and, like a commander before a crucial battle, she was meticulously making secret preparations for a visit on which she pinned great, if indefinite, hopes.

In the drapery shop at Nikitsky Gate she bought a piece of taffeta that was cold to the touch but fiery to the eye, a scalded color, and late at night she hand-sewed with tiny stitches a very fine dress. She sewed alone, silently, mindfully, prayerfully, like an expectant mother half afraid of attracting the evil eye and endangering her baby’s birth by being too hasty in sewing clothes for it.

She came in the hour before midnight on the thirty-first of December to a set table at which there sat the Barbizonian, the poet, and a film director with a beaky nose and froglike mouth. Even before she had time to take a proper look at their imposing faces she was exultant, conscious of having hit the bull’s-eye of her long-anticipated target. These grown-up men of means were just who she needed if she was to take off, to fly, to achieve full and final victory.

She threw Tanya a glance both loving and grateful, and rouged Tanya glowed back at her, pink and happy. She had been on tenterhooks, wondering whether Jasia would come, and now she was as proud of Jasia’s beauty as if she had imagined and painted it herself.

Jasia’s dress rustled loudly and silkily, and her light brown hair lay heavy, as if molded from light-colored resin, and clung prostrate to her shoulders just like Marina Vlady’s in The Sorceress, a film much in vogue that year. Her neckline plunged and her little nanny-goat breasts, squeezed together, created an inviting cleavage pointing downward. Her waist was naturally narrow and further constrained into the shape of an hourglass. Her ankles were slim beneath firm calves, while the slenderness of her wrists was brought out by a slight chubbiness of the forearm. Hers was not the vulgar figure of some guitar-shaped broad; she had the petite glassy charm of a wineglass, as Robert fleetingly noted.

Only Sonechka was a little disappointed. Her heart having already gone out to Tanya’s friend for all she had suffered, she was not expecting to see, in place of a woebegone Cinderella, this tastefully attired beauty with eyeliner, radiating all the sweetness of a fair-skinned Slav maiden.

Jasia responded to questions monosyllabically, her eyes lowered until she fluttered eyelashes heavy with mascara to implore—just that, to implore—in the resigned and regal tones of her late mother, “Thank you, but no”; “You are very kind; yes, please.” In her brief responses a sensitive ear could detect the Polish accent, a blurring of the boundaries between l and w.

Sonechka, touched, kept putting more food on Jasia’s plate. Jasia would sigh and decline it, but then nonetheless manage to put away a leg of duck, another serving of galantine, some crab salad.

“I really can’t eat any more, you are too kind,” she simpered, almost piteously, and still Sonechka’s heart was brimming with sympathy for the waif, the poor little girl from the orphanage. Lord, how could such things have been possible?

Alexander Ivanovich, the Barbizonian, was by this time singing Italian arias in a languid churchy voice. Gavrilin, well oiled, performed a killingly funny imitation of a dog looking for a flea. Rolling his eyes, he was snarling one moment, growling blissfully the next, shoving his head under his arm-pit, and making everyone laugh until the tears rolled down their cheeks. Robert smiled, his eyes and his newly crowned teeth gleaming simultaneously.

Sometime after two in the morning, Tanya’s zealous admirer Alyosha Petersburg, of a future celebrity he was already trying on for size, turned up bearing a little packet of gray herbal matter: he was one of the first devotees of Central Asian grass in the city on the Neva. Without ado, Alyosha peeled the case from his guitar and sang a few songs, wittily knowing or comic, while furiously grimacing and contorting his mouth like a clown at the fairground.

Alyosha was in love with Tanya, Tanya was in love with Jasia, and Jasia on this New Year’s Day fell in love with Tanya’s home. Toward morning, when the guests had left and the girls had helped to clear the table, Sonechka gave Jasia the empty corner room to sleep in, where she was found later that day by Robert who came in looking for a roll of gray paper.

All was quiet in the house. Having tidied up after her guests, Sonechka had gone off to visit her sister. Tanya was asleep in her room, while Jasia, awakened by the creaking of the door, opened her eyes and for a time observed Robert rummaging around behind the cupboard, cursing softly. She stared at his back, trying to remember which Western film star it was he reminded her of. She had seen a face just like that, and the same silvery crew-cut in Przeglad Artystyczny, a Polish magazine she had studied from cover to cover. She could not for the life of her remember his name, but she was fairly sure he had even worn the same shirt, with a simple large checked pattern.

She sat up in bed. The bed creaked. Robert turned round. Out of Sonechka’s enormous nightdress there peeped a little fair-haired head on a short neck. The girl ran her tongue over her lips, smiled, and tugged at the sleeves of the nightdress, which slipped down easily. With a movement of her leg she pushed the blanket onto the floor and stood up to her full height; the huge shirt slid off easily. With little childish steps she ran over the cold stained floor to Robert, took from him the roll of paper he had finally managed to locate, and, as if replacing it with herself, was in his arms.

“Okay, just a quickie,” the businesslike nymph said, without the least flirtatiousness, in the tone of voice she customarily used to her protector, Police Constable Malinin. But with him she knew exactly why she had to do what she had to do, while here there was no self-interest or calculation. She could not have explained it. Out of gratitude to this house, perhaps . . . and then, he really did look like that film star. . . . Peter O’Toole, was it?

The possibility that a man could refuse a proffered favor, this token of attention and gratitude, was something of which she simply had no knowledge. Petite, her body looking as if it had been turned on a lathe from warm light-colored wood, she stretched her inviting little face up toward him.

Robert retreated slightly in the direction of the cupboard, said sternly, “Back under that blanket straight away, you’ll catch cold!” and left the room without his roll of paper. Never before had he seen a body with such a lunar metallic gleam.

Jasia pulled the still-warm blanket over herself and was asleep again in a trice. She slept luxuriously, aware even in sleep of the sweetness of this family dream in a family home; Sonechka’s nightdress, which she did not put back on, rested beneath her cheek and smelt heavenly.

Meanwhile the stricken Robert was pacing around in the next room, hunched and twisting his head from side to side. The early twilight of a year that had only just begun peeped in at the window, and there was no sign of Sonechka, and still Tanya did not come down the creaking staircase. He cautiously opened the door of the spare room and went quietly over to the bed. The girl was almost completely covered; only the light brown hair of the back of her head was showing. He pushed his dry hands under the warm snowdrift of the blanket. Their intrusion did not disturb Jasia’s sleep or spoil a thing. She opened up toward his arms, and yet another final life began for Robert.

A GOOD, honest, New Year’s frost strengthened toward evening. On the table the despoiled leftovers of last year’s banquet were going stale. Robert had lost his appetite. Yesterday’s food turned his stomach, and he thought how wise his forebears had been to burn the food left over from the Passover supper and not allow it to be thus degraded.

Sonechka was pointlessly stirring her tea (there was no sugar in it), and had it on the tip of her tongue to say something important to her husband, but was unable to find the right words.

Robert was looking thoughtful, listening to the muffled reverberations of a joyous hubbub in the marrow of his now-old bones and trying to remember when it was he had felt it before. Where had he felt this strange sensation? Perhaps there had been something of the kind in his boyhood, when he had capered to the point of exhaustion in the heavy waters of the Dnieper before climbing out onto the crunching, unbelievably hot sand, burrowing into it, and basking in a sandy Turkish bath until he was warmed right through to his bones.

And there was about it something akin to a moment of illumination when he had gone out for a pee one night. Avigdor’s little Rubim—who, with the passing of the years, had been transformed into Robert Victorovich—had thrown back his head and seen all the stars in the universe looking down at him from the sky with live inquisitive eyes, and a quiet pealing of bells filled the firmament like the folds of a cloak, and he, a small boy, seemed to hold in his hands all the bellpulls of the world, each with a little bell at the end of it which rang piercingly, and he himself was the heart of this gigantic musical box, with the whole world obedient to the beating of his heart, to his every sigh, to the pounding of his blood and the coursing of his warm pee. He lowered the hem of his nightshirt again, raised his hands slowly upward as if conducting the celestial concert, and the music flooded through him, a wave of sweetness permeating his very bones. . . .

How completely he had forgotten that music, and it was only the memory of it that had survived all these years.

“Robert, we should let that girl live here with us in our home. The corner room is empty,” Sonechka said quietly, the teaspoon motionless in her glass of tea.

Robert glanced at his wife in astonishment and said what he always did say when the matter in hand concerned him little. “If you think that is the right thing to do, Sonechka. Do as you think right.”

He got up and went to his room.

JASIA MOVED into Sonechka’s home. She had a pleasant appearance, said little, and Sonechka enjoyed having her there, as well as being secretly proud of having taken in an orphan. It was a mitzvah, a good deed, and for Sonechka, who was becoming ever more aware as the years went by of her Jewish identity, her good deed was both a joy and a pleasurable fulfillment of her duty.

She had again become mindful of the need to observe the Sabbath and felt drawn to the ritually ordered life of her ancestors with its unshakable foundation, the solid heavy-legged table covered by the stiff ceremonial tablecloth, with candles and homemade bread, and the family sacrament celebrated on the eve of the Sabbath in every Jewish home. Uprooted from the old ways, she put all her unrecognized religious fervor into fussing over the cooking of the meat with onions and carrots, into the crisp white napkins and the setting of the table, where the condiment set, the stands for the knives, and the side plates were correctly placed to the right or left as decreed by a quite different, more recent, middle-class canon. But Sonechka did not think about all that.

These last few relatively prosperous years, she had suddenly begun to feel that her family was too small and was secretly grieved that it had not been her lot to give birth to many children, as was the custom of her race. She bought more and more nonmatching Kuznetsov sauce boats and English bone china plates at bargain prices from the antique shop on Lower Maslovka, as if making preparations for the large family that her daughter Tanya would have.

Sonechka’s religion, like the Old Testament itself, had three components, only instead of the Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim hers were the first, second, and third courses of dinner.

Jasia’s presence at mealtimes gave Sonechka the illusion that her family had increased, and she did grace the table. She comported herself so naturally and sweetly, seeming to eat little but with an insatiable appetite until she was comically exhausted, because there was no rooting out the memory of the hunger endemic in her childhood. Leaning back in her chair she would groan quietly,

“Oh, Aunt Sonya! That was so good. . . . I’ve made a pig of myself again. . . .”

And Sonechka would smile blissfully and bring out the shallow glass dishes of stewed fruit.

TWO MONTHS went by, and Jasia’s catlike adaptability and innate tact enabled her to establish herself not merely as the lodger in the corner room but almost as a member of the family.

Early in the morning she would rush off to swab the uneven school corridors and slushy toilets; and in the evenings she would go back, together with Tanya, to the same school as a pupil. They did not always make it to school, playing truant from the uninspired lessons of teachers who could hardly keep awake themselves. The relationship between her and Tanya resolved itself into sisterliness. Moreover, with Jasia’s moving in, Tanya, although younger in years, imperceptibly took on the role of elder sister, and her love for Jasia became less rapturous and intense.

The girls would often take themselves off up to Tanya’s chamber. Tanya, adopting the lotus posture, would play her flute badly while Jasia, curled up at her feet, would whisper Alexander Ostrovsky’s now sadly dated dramas of the merchant class with a slight lisp in preparation for drama school.

Sonechka was touched by Jasia’s enthusiasm for reading and also supposed that Tanya was thereby becoming conversant with high culture. She was mistaken.

When the girls talked at all, Jasia mainly contented herself with polite listening. She listened to Tanya relating her amorous escapades without great interest or empathy. Her friend’s enthusiasm left her cold, though Tanya mistakenly put Jasia’s indifference down to the insignificance of her own experience when compared with the extravagant sexual adventures of her friend. It never entered her head that, for the first time since the age of twelve, Jasia was at last free from having to allow “their revolting thingies” into her wholly unresponsive body.

FOR ROBERT, Jasia’s presence was a torment. The episode in the corner room in the early twilight of the first day of the year had the quality of a recurring hallucination, as if he had accidentally happened in on someone else’s dream. Now he allowed Jasia only into his peripheral vision, his eye lingering stealthily on her tranquil whiteness while he melted into jelly on the fires of youthful lust. He never allowed himself to make even the slightest pass, but not because he was held back by small-minded moral considerations. His lust belonged to him but this woman did not; moreover, now placed through Sonechka’s exertions in a taboo situation alongside his daughter, she never would.

He gazed for hours at the snow outside the window, its whiteness subtly changing with the light and humidity. He stared at the almost vitreous white side of a porcelain jug, at the scraps of flocked drawing paper on the table, and the matte white plaster casts of ancient reliefs with the barely discernible physical presence of the letters of an ancient script in them.

As the second month drew to its close he started painting again, twenty years after his prison camp exercises, when he had whimsically copied utterly boring kitsch.

Now these were totally white still lifes, in which Robert gave order to complex thinking on the nature of whiteness, its shape and texture, and this subjugated the purely painterly aspects. The syllables and words of his meditations were porcelain sugar bowls, white tea towels, milk in a glass jar, and all the other things which, to a practical person, seem merely white, but which to Robert seemed a tortuous path in the search for the ideal and the occult.

One day when winter was already on the wane and the snowy splendors of Petrovsky Park had faded and shrunk, the two of them came out in the early morning onto the veranda at the same time: Robert with two canvas stretching frames and a roll of kraft paper, and Jasia with a red tote bag with two of her bulky evening-school books.

“Hold this a moment, please,” he said, shoving the roll of paper into her arms with a vague sense that something of the kind had occurred somewhere before.

Jasia hurriedly clutched the roll to herself while he got a better grip on the frames.

“Perhaps I can carry something for you,” the girl offered, without looking up.

He made no reply, she raised her head, and for the first time since they had been living together under the same roof his keen gaze plunged deep into her unresisting eyes. He nodded and she accordingly lowered her head in its downy white headscarf and followed him, stepping magically with her childish rubber boots in his footprints.

He did not once turn round on the way, which was not far. Thus, one behind the other, they arrived at the entrance to a block of flats in whose long corridors, behind door after door, rather well-paid socialist art was being created in a diligent and workmanlike fashion, cumbersome by-products of the bald intellectual Titan, and were periodically brought out into the dreary corridors.

His back pressed against the granite pedestal of the inevitable statue of the Founder of the World’s First Socialist State, he awkwardly held the door open with one foot to let Jasia go in. The instant the door slammed shut he felt the powerful beating of his heart reverberating, only not in his chest but from the pit of his stomach. The pounding of his heart rose in him like the sun rising from the horizon, the roar of the sea filled his head, his temples, extended even to the tips of his fingers. He put down the frames and took the roll of paper from Jasia’s arms, recollecting as he did so where that last time had been.

He put his hand on the by now very damp nap of her headscarf and smiled; Jasia, never slow on the uptake, was already undoing the huge buttons on her homemade overcoat, tailored in the course of many evenings by her and Sonechka from an old tartan blanket. That year large buttons were much in vogue. Both Jasia’s skirt and her blouse were sewn with swarms of brown and white buttons and, having cast the coat aside, she set solemnly and thoughtfully about the task of pulling them one after the other from their neatly finished buttonholes.

The pounding of his heart, like a tocsin pealing from a belfry, drove the blood into every nook of every last capillary but then abruptly ceased, and in a dazzling silence she sat down in the broken armchair and tucked her firm little legs under herself. Then she set loose her hair, which had been gathered up on her head with a band, and sat waiting for him to emerge from his state of paralysis and help himself to the slight thing she did not begrudge him.

FROM THAT day on, Jasia ran over to the studio almost daily. Their affair was ardent and strangely wordless. Usually she would come, sit in the now-traditional armchair, and let her hair down. He would put the kettle on the gas ring, brew up some strong tea, dissolve five lumps of sugar in a white enamel mug—her years in the orphanage meant that even now she could not get enough of sweet things—and set the white porcelain sugar bowl before her, because she liked not only to dissolve sugar in her tea but also to crunch sugar lumps in her mouth as she was sipping it.

For a long, long time he watched her slowly sipping her syrup, and he analyzed the whiteness of her all the while, which shone more vividly before him than the colors of the rainbow against the matte whitewashed background of a blank wall. The gleaming enamel of the kitchen mug in her pink but ultimately white hand, the chunks of loaf sugar with their crystalline sections, and the watery white sky outside the window: All this could be meaningfully derived, like a chromatic scale, from her little face, which was the color of egg white, a miracle of whiteness, warmth, and vitality. That face was the keynote from which everything else developed and grew, playing and singing the secret of the whiteness of dead things and the whiteness of things alive.

He delighted in the look of her, and she could sense that and was elevated by his gaze and melted with a glow of feminine pride, reveling in her unequivocal power, knowing that she had only to say to him that shamelessly childish “Fancy a quickie?” for him to nod and take her to the couch; and if she did not say it, there he would be, goggling at her, the poor sad idiot, so weird, so special, and so madly in love with her.

“Madly in love” she repeated to herself, a proud smile barely playing on her lips, and he was aware of her slightly foolish sense of triumph, but carried right on gazing at her until she said, “That’s enough . . . I have to go.”

He never asked her any questions, and she never volunteered any information about herself. There was no need. That he was attracted to her beyond all reason, and that she unfalteringly desired to be near him, needed no confirmation in words. When she was with him she felt she had already achieved all her ambitions and was rich, beautiful, and free— without any need for drama school.

In mid-April he started painting her portrait. First one, with a teapot and white flowers, then another. A whole succession of white faces began to form, one overshadowed by the next, only to reemerge later; and by some curious optical illusion each face was associated with all the others.

Robert painted rapidly, and although she was beside him, and that was important, he was not painting from life. It was as if he had absorbed her into himself and had now only to look inside the secret place where she was stored. He worked all the hours of daylight, spending ever more time in the studio. He had always loved slipping away to the studio very early in the morning, and now he often stayed there overnight.

At just this moment, when the gravitational pull of his home had weakened and the center of Robert’s life was increasingly shifting toward his studio, which gently and bawdishly admitted his taciturn lover, thunderclouds gathered over his home.

The whole of their little suburb was designated for “slum clearance.” Rumors, which had been persistently circulating for many years without being taken seriously, resolved themselves one fine day into a mean little slip of paper with a smudged rubber stamp ordering the demolition of their house and the resettlement of its occupants. The letter was not delivered by hand, as it should have been, but sent by mail. It was the middle of the day, after she had finished the morning’s housework, before Sonechka noticed the document of ill omen in the letterbox.

Clutching it in her hand, Sonechka ran to the studio to tell her husband. She did not usually go there, observing an unspoken prohibition. Robert was alone, working. She sat down in the armchair, which protested beneath her. Her husband sat opposite in silence. Sonechka looked long at the canvases, with their pallid white-eyed women, and recognized the identity of the original snow queen. And Robert knew she knew. They said nothing to each other.

Sonechka sat there in silence for a time, then put the sad notification on the table and left. As she came out of the building she stopped in amazement. It seemed to her that the ground should be covered in snow, but all around the young shoots of May were billowing and curling in many shades of green, and even the long trilling of the trams seemed tinged with green.

She walked back toward her home, her beloved, happy home which for some reason was to be reduced to a pile of logs, and the tears flowed down her flabby, wrinkled cheeks, and she whispered with suddenly parched lips, “This was all supposed to happen long, long ago. . . . I always knew it was too much to hope for. . . . It was all an impossibility. . . .”

In the ten minutes it took her to walk home, she recognized that her seventeen years of happy marriage were over and that nothing belonged to her: not Robert (when had he ever belonged to anyone?); not Tanya, who was quite, quite different from her, perhaps taking after her father or her grandfather, but at all events not of her shy breed; and not the house, whose sighing and groaning she identified with in the night, as the old become aware of their bodies growing ever more alien with the passing years. How right it is that he will have someone so young and beautiful at his side, so soft and clever, and as exceptional and outstanding as he is himself; and how well it has all turned out that life should bring about a miracle in his old age that has made him turn again to the most important thing about him, his painting, thought Sonechka.

Completely devastated, weightless, and with a transparent ringing in her ears, she entered her home, went to the bookcase, took down the first book that came to hand, and, lying down, opened it in the middle. It was Pushkin’s The Peasant Mistress. Liza had just come down for dinner, powdered white to the eyeballs, her eyelashes and eyebrows even more raven black than those of Miss Jackson. Alexey Berestov was being absent-minded and lost in thought, and from those pages there shone out onto Sonechka the quiet joy of literary perfection, the embodiment of true nobility of spirit.

THE RITES of departure took many days. Sonechka tied up bundles, forced saucepans and clothing into cardboard boxes intended for cigarettes, and went around in a curious state of exaltation: She felt she was burying her past life, that each of the boxes had packed in it the minutes, days, nights, and years of her greatest happiness. She stroked the cardboard coffins tenderly.

Tanya wandered abstractedly about the house without bothering to get herself dressed, bumping into furniture that had been shifted from where it usually stood and appeared to be endowed with mobility. Cupboard doors would unexpectedly open of their own accord, and chairs tripped her up. She did not help her mother. Focused only on her own sensations, she was completely overcome by distaste for what was going on in her house.

One further circumstance was greatly depressing her. An inward-looking girl, Tanya was still at that time relatively inarticulate. She had emptied out for Jasia’s benefit all the complexities of her disorderly heart, and Jasia with her talent for intelligent listening had proved a unique confidante, receiving her extremely superficial experiences with a benign neutrality. This was so propitious for Tanya that in the course of their tête-à-têtes, which were to all intents and purposes monologues, she learned to formulate her thoughts and conjure up imagery as she went along, which gave her a great sense of satisfaction.

Her other friends, laugh-a-minute Alyosha, with his talent for turning everything upside down, and Vladimir, with his cosmic talent, omnivorous memory, and information on every topic in the world neatly filed away with its assistance, forced her to enter their own seductive worlds. Only Jasia gave her a chance to think for herself, to reason out loud, tentatively picking the little things from which a person arbitrarily pieces together that first outline from which the whole subsequent pattern of a life will follow. This was the source of Tanya’s feeling of real intimacy with Jasia and of her vague sense of gratitude.

During one of Tanya’s rare moments of respite from her habitual self-absorption, she noticed that Jasia did appear to have a life of her own. However, all her efforts to probe the mysterious daytime period when Jasia was neither at school nor at home foundered on affectionate but evasive silence or bland replies. The first explanation to occur to her, a secret love affair, faced Tanya with the crucial question of whom it could be with.

The question was answered in the most casual way imaginable. Tanya happened upon Jasia and her father by the metro station and was the unseen witness of a quite improbable scene: They were walking along, eating ice cream and laughing. The ice cream was dripping, and Robert wiped a gooey white splodge from Jasia’s cheek with a movement of his fingers that made Tanya, a considerable expert on touches, shudder with a previously unknown sensation: jealousy.

Neither her mother’s interests as a woman nor any moral considerations gave Tanya a moment’s pause. The one thing that really got her goat was that the romance had been kept from her in such an unprincipled manner. Otherwise, it was of no concern to her whatsoever.

Tanya made a scene. Jasia, long ago inured to the prospect of eventual discovery, packed her bags and slipped out via the carved veranda, leaving Tanya bereft and uncomprehending, for she had supposed her friendship with Jasia far more important than any affair. Robert was in the process of dismantling a bookcase he had once put up and did not even register Jasia’s absence right away.

THE DAY finally arrived for their belongings to be carried out. In the bright light of a summer’s day, the scuffed furniture, so comfortable and familiar, bought in a feverish spate of bargain-hunting at Preobrazhensky Market, suddenly seemed positively beggarly. Everything was loaded into a covered truck and driven off to the dismal suburb of Likhobory, to an out-of-the-way three-room flat where everything was humiliatingly cut-price, from the wretchedly thin walls and tiny kitchen, in which Sonechka had barely room to turn, to the bathroom, which hadn’t been properly finished.

With help from Gavrilin, Robert arranged the furniture. Each item resisted obstinately, reluctant to fit the space allotted it: invariably some corner stuck out, invariably a few extra centimeters were needed. Robert had to rip the pediment from a single wardrobe which was really no size at all in order to squeeze it into its wall space. Tanya was almost in tears over the metal-bound trunk with its bowed lid, which promised to end up completely homeless.

Sonechka decided Tanya’s divan and Jasia’s bed should go in the room at the end of the corridor and named it the girls’ room.

Jasia, invited by Sonechka to help with the move, was on her guard. She really could not work out what was going on, and to tell the truth she was not all that bothered. This was not the house she had coveted, and in any case she was fairly sure she had a firm grip on what really mattered.

Sonechka produced a large brown carryall from somewhere and drew out of it a magic tablecloth, which spread itself with napkins, rissoles, and ice-cold summer soup in a vacuum flask.

As if nothing had changed, Sonechka continued to serve Jasia nicely at table, and Jasia smiled back gratefully. She found Sonechka amazing. “Or perhaps she’s just very cunning,” she told herself, not entirely spontaneously, knowing in her heart that this was not the case.

In the middle of the meal, Tanya suddenly threw up her arms and, with her hair flying everywhere and her breasts heaving, started sobbing before bursting out in guffaws of hysterical laughter. When the fit abruptly ceased she announced, still wet with tears and the water that had been thrown over her, that she was leaving for Petersburg without delay.

Jasia took her to the newly designated girls’ room, although both its girls were now well into unambiguous womanhood. They climbed into Jasia’s bed. Jasia took the hairband from the abundant mane crowning her head, and they were reconciled completely, stroking each other’s hair.

Tanya did not, however, change her mind and returned that very evening to her skunked bard.

Robert went back to the Maslovka studio with Gavrilin and Jasia, and, having seen off her nearest and dearest, Sonechka was left to spend her first evening in Likhobory alone. She reflected sorrowfully on the way her life had come apart at the seams, on how suddenly loneliness had befallen her, and then lay down on the unmade divan in the communicating room. At random she took a volume of Schiller from a parcel tied with string and read until morning. Not many people could have read Wallenstein without falling asleep, but Sonechka voluntarily abandoned herself to the literary trance in which her youth had passed.

SONECHKA WAS wrong. Robert had no intention of abandoning her. He came out to Likhobory every Saturday without fail, and once or twice during the week as well. He would bring quiet little Jasia with him, and while she busied herself in the girls’ room to the accompaniment of silken rustling, sorting through her own and Tanya’s frocks and papers, Robert replaced the narrow windowsills with wider ones, strengthened weak shelving, cut his old bookcase up to make two, and hung the apartment with Tanya’s portraits.

They had supper in the middle room, which devolved to Sonechka. They talked a bit about Tanya, who had been in Petersburg for a month and kept putting off her return to grisly Likhobory.

It was not late when they went to their rooms to sleep: Jasia to the girls’ room, Robert to the separate room allocated to him by the front door, while Sonechka flopped down heavily on the divan and, drifting off to sleep, rejoiced at the thought that Robert was there, on the other side of the thin partition wall, and that clever pretty little Jasia was to her left. It was just a shame that Tanechka was not home. . . .

In the morning Sonechka put yesterday’s salad, the leftover rissoles, and buckwheat porridge into jars, covered the tops and tied them tightly, put everything in the brown carryall, and handed it over to Jasia.

“Thank you, Aunt Sonya,” Jasia said, looking down as she thanked her.

When Alexander Ivanovich had a birthday party, Robert told Sonechka to come round to the studio so they could go together. It was their first joint family outing. Alexander Ivanovich, as celibate as a monk since the day he was born, had never in his life been observed in dalliance with the opposite sex and was, on that basis, suspected by a well-intentioned society of sins considerably more interesting; he was the only person in the entire assembly who accepted their ménage à trois as entirely a matter of course.

The other guests, especially the artistic ladies, salaciously discussed the love triangle in the corners of the room, getting themselves as high as dough in a loaf tin. Ginger-haired Magdalena, slightly dotty at the best of times, was so overcome with anguish and sympathy for Sonechka that she suffered a migraine attack. They need not have bothered: Sonechka was happy that Robert had brought her. She was proud that he was, as she saw it, such a faithful husband to his ugly old wife, and she was openly admiring of Jasia’s beauty.

At Alexander Ivanovich’s request she acted as hostess for a time, taking the brought-in food round to the guests. Mindful of Jasia’s ever delicate stomach, she whispered in her ear, “My dear, I think the stuffed cabbage is a bit—you know. You’d better go easy on it.”

Some of the grand ladies were inclined to condemn Sonechka for hypocrisy—she really did seem to be coming much too well out of what should have been a thoroughly disadvantageous situation. Others would have liked to condole with her and to censure Robert, but this was completely impossible for they seemed to be a family unit, a perfectly well-adjusted matrimonial triangle sitting there at the table with Robert in the middle, Sonechka rising half a head taller than him to the right, and Jasia to his left, her whiteness gleaming and a sharp little diamond sparkling on her finger.

It was preposterous to imagine Robert going into a jeweler’s shop to buy a diamond ring for his bit on the side, although in fairness it has to be said that Jasia really was just the kind of vulnerable little waif onto whose tiny finger one might well wish to slide a ring and to drape a fashionable cloak over her chilled little shoulders.

Robert gave outsiders—that is to say, friends—no opportunity of siding with one or the other of his spouses or of expressing condolence, censure, or indignation concerning them.

The party started to swing. Gavrilin got a bit the worse for wear and did his impression of a dying swan, then of Lenin, and then for an encore the already familiar dog-looking-for-a-flea. Then they played charades, featuring a specter that did not so much haunt as flounder over Europe in the shape of a kind of six-legged cow comprising three fat ladies with a linen curtain draped over them.

At this point in the festivities everybody remembered Tanya, most ingenious deviser of charades, and the more alert ladies exchanged glances as if thinking, Poor girl!

The poor girl was, however, at this time agreeably installed in a crash pad on Vasilievsky Island with her pal Alyosha. It was the season of midsummer white nights in Petersburg, and Tanya was fearless and inquisitive, ready at the drop of a hat to take any new game seriously. They had no wish at all to split up. In a world of their own they looked about them, and Alyosha found to his surprise that having her on board not only did not cramp his unpredictable lifestyle, it seemed rather to open up additional opportunities for dropping out of the sovbourgeois system, as he contemptuously referred to conventional existence.

A few days after Alexander Ivanovich’s celebration, Sonechka went to Leningrad to visit her daughter, waited half a day in the little courtyard for her to come home, then sat forty minutes with Tanya and Alyosha at a table piled high with books, records, leftovers, and empty bottles, drank a cup of tea, and returned to Moscow on the evening train after urging her daughter to ring her aunt a bit more often and leaving her some money.

Sonechka did not sleep in the train. She thought on and on about what a lovely life Tanya and her boyfriend were having, how much all the young people around her seemed to be enjoying themselves, and what a pity it was that it was all over for her. But what a joy it was that it had all happened. . . . Her head nodded like an old woman’s, in time to the rhythms of the railroad car and in anticipation of the tremor she would develop two decades later.

THEN IT was winter again. The girls should have been in their last year at school but both had dropped out. Tanya spent the whole winter traveling to and fro. She was forever quarreling with Alyosha and going home to Mother, but then she would find Likhobory so utterly depressing that she hastened back again to her beloved Petersburg.

Robert spent the entire winter painting. He lost a lot of weight, but in this new incarnation his expression became less clouded and he treated everybody more kindly. His little concubine lived quietly by his side, rustling her candy wrappers or cheap silks (she was forever making herself dresses of different colors but to the same pattern, stitching busily away with her glinting needle), or looking through Polish magazines.

At that moment, in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Poland was all the rage, with its breath of Western freedoms, slightly less heady after their turgid passage through Eastern Europe.

By now Jasia had ceased to conceal her Polish origins and proved to have remembered admirably the language she had spoken with her mother as a child. Robert, along with the more common European languages, also spoke Polish, and this bewitching, lisping, caressing language got them talking together. As once he had to Sonechka, he now told little stories to Jasia, comical, improbable, or frightening incidents that had really happened in his life, although because of a kind of verbal chasteness it was a rather different, bowdlerized version of his life from what Sonechka knew from his tales.

Jasia laughed and cried and exclaimed, “Jesus Maria!” and was proud and delighted, so pleased that she even learned to experience certain agreeable sensations during their lovemaking of whose existence she had previously had no inkling, despite her precocious and protracted commerce with the male sex.

He could not stop gazing at her unblemished neck, her fresh young face, the white down beneath the slender eyebrows, and thought how precious young physical being was, and about that form of perfection which Russia’s only genius had said should be “a little silly.”

Robert’s subjection bore fruit. He had to have a new mezzanine built in his studio to house his canvases. His various white series were completed, but it seemed to him that the big discovery had eluded him. He had turned over the ground he had been allotted and that was no mean achievement, but the actual secret he had seemed so close to revealing had slipped through his fingers, leaving behind a sweet ache at having come so near, and leaving to him also its vicarious representative, whose charms were so devastatingly potent that they vanquished his weariness and old age and the decrepit lassitude of his flesh. Old Robert found his immoderate labors of love no burden at all.

At the end of April, in the middle of a raw nocturnal thaw, Robert squeezed Jasia’s shoulders hard and sank his jerking head heavily into the hard pillow.

It was some time before Jasia realized he was dying. With a shriek she leaped out into the corridor, onto which the doors of seven other studios opened. The artists did not live there permanently and few stayed overnight. She tugged desperately at the two nearest door handles before rushing down from the third floor to the telephone in the lodge.

The old woman with her scrawny pigtail let down for the night gave a little squeal when she saw Jasia naked but was pushed aside. “An ambulance, quick, we need an ambulance!” Jasia dialed the number with a shaking hand.

When the medics arrived, Robert was not breathing. He was lying on his stomach, his dark face buried in the pillow. Jasia had been unable to turn him over.

The circumstances of death were obvious. “Cerebral hemorrhage,” barked a fat unpleasant doctor who smelled of alcohol and cheap food. He wrote down the telephone number of the mortuary.

The ambulance men went back down the stairs, rattling the now redundant stretcher. “Bit old to die on the job. Quite young she is too,” one said.

“So? Better than rotting in hospital,” the other responded.

THE LIKHOBORY apartment did not have a telephone. Jasia arrived just as Sonya was about to drink her morning cup of coffee. Sonya’s head shook a little, she scooped Jasia up and pressed her to her bosom, and they wept in the corridor for a long time.

Then they went to the studio. The body had already been removed to the mortuary. The unnatural, horrible disorder in the studio after the comings and goings first of the medics and then of the mortuary attendants was quickly put to rights.

Sonya stripped the incriminating sheets from the divan and hid them away in her suitcase. Then they went to ring Tanya in Leningrad, but the neighbors said she and Alyosha had gone off somewhere. Jasia was clinging to Sonya’s hand the whole time like a little child. She was an orphan and Sonya was her mother.

The concierge had already managed to relate with great pathos to anyone who would listen every detail of old Robert’s scandalous death. From midday on, his artist neighbors came to the studio, bringing whatever they thought appropriate in the circumstances: flowers, vodka, money. . . .

In the process, public opinion formed. The public were sorry about Robert, hated and despised Jasia, but found Sonya considerably less straightforward. They waited to see what she would do, watching her with a curiosity that was, however, entirely sympathetic.

Late that evening, when only close friends remained in the studio, Sonya had a quiet tearless weep before suddenly saying firmly, “Get a good-sized hall. I want these pictures hung where the coffin will be standing.” She pointed upstairs to the mezzanine, where the canvases were ranged.

The Barbizonian exchanged glances with Gavrilin. They nodded.

And that is what was done.

The Artists’ Trust allocated a hall. They hung the pictures the evening before. There were fifty-two of them. Sonya expertly supervised the hanging. The sun suddenly thrust its way in, painfully bright and harsh, hindering and even interfering in Sonya’s work. The canvases gleamed in the sunlight and mirrored it, and Sonya asked for the official-looking flounced cream curtains to be lowered. She completed the hanging, the curtains were raised, the sun stopped being awkward, and everything was found to be positioned just right. Robert could not have done the job better himself.

The following day at around noon the flow of people began. No one could have imagined how many people would flock to Robert’s funeral. There came the old and venerable who had earned themselves calluses and medals by churning out official portraits of we shan’t say whom; the middle-aged and by now only relatively New Wave; and also those whom respectable members of the Artists’ Union would never have allowed through the door: the streetwise bohemian riffraff of the avant-garde.

This posthumous exhibition was not the place for critical debate, and indeed Robert had never felt any need to discuss what he was doing.

In the center of the hall stood the coffin. The face of the deceased was dark and looked somehow melted. Only the hands folded on his breast gleamed with an icy hue—what Robert called the whiteness of dead things.

Jasia, wearing a black silk dress, clung to large, shapeless Sonechka, peeping out from under her arm like a fledgling peeping out from under the wing of a penguin. There was no sign of Tanya: it had been impossible to find her on her junketings in Central Asia, whither she and Alyosha had repaired to graze new pastures.

All the whispering and scandalmongering about the death were left behind in the cloakroom. Here in the hall even those most avid to sniff other people’s dirty linen kept their counsel. People came up to Sonya to proffer clumsy condolences, and she, pushing Jasia slightly in front of herself, replied mechanically, “Yes, it’s a great misfortune . . . a great misfortune for us both. . . .”

Timler, who had come in the company of his young mistress to bid his old friend farewell, said in a thin, quavering voice, “How beautiful! Leah and Rachel. . . . I never realized Leah was so beautiful.”

GOD GRANTED Sonechka a long life in her apartment in Likhobory. Long and lonely.

Tanya gradually drifted into matrimony with Alyosha and received as his wedding gift the sorcerer czar’s standoffish city, where only the proud and self-reliant feel at home. She became a native of Petersburg. Her talents blossomed late. She was already past twenty when it became clear that she had an astonishing talent for music, and drawing, and anything else her scatterbrain took a fancy to. She effortlessly learned French, then Italian and German, and only for some reason had a curious aversion to English. She rushed from one enthusiasm to another until in the mid-1970s—by now separated from Alyosha and having seen off a further two short-term husbands—with a six-month-old son in her arms and a bag slung across her shoulder, she emigrated to Israel. Shortly afterward she obtained an excellent job at the United Nations, owed in no small measure to the world renown of her father.

For several years Jasia lived with Sonechka in the apartment in Likhobory. Sonechka looked after her tenderly, feeling a reverent gratitude to providence for sending such an adornment to her dear husband Robert, such a solace in his old age.

Jasia returned to the idea of entering drama school, but somehow not very seriously. She and Sonechka enjoyed taking up various handicrafts, knitting an unusual patterned sweater for Tanya or taking in sewing to order, but for all that they spent most of their time sitting at home, immoderately drinking black coffee and eating Sonechka’s honey cakes. When Jasia’s health gradually began to fail, Sonechka sought out two of her aunts and a grandmother in Poland by means of an extensive correspondence kept secret from Jasia. They were not in the least aristocratic, of entirely modest social origins. Kitted out by Sonechka, Jasia emigrated to Poland, where a conventional fairy-tale plot soon ran its course. She married a rich young handsome Frenchman and now lives in Paris not far from the Jardin du Luxembourg, a stone’s throw from the house where Robert once had his studio, although of course she does not know this.

The house in Petrovsky Park, bereft of its residents, its windows broken, scarred by minor fires caused by youthful arsonists, stood empty and unused for many years more, affording shelter only to stray dogs and stray people. Once someone was found murdered in it. Then the roof fell in. There was no telling why officialdom had been in such a hurry to resettle its former occupants in the soulless suburbs.

Robert’s fifty-two white pictures were dispersed all over the world. Each time one turns up at a contemporary art auction, collectors are put at risk of a heart attack. As for his prewar works, when he was living in Paris, these command fabulous prices. Very few of them have survived, however: only eleven.

A fat whiskery old woman, Sophia Yosifovna still lives in Likhobory on the third floor of a five-story building dating from Khrushchev’s crash program of apartment-building. She has no wish to move, either to the Jewish homeland, whose citizenship her daughter enjoys, or to Switzerland, where her daughter is currently employed, or even to the Paris that Robert so loved and to which she is constantly being invited by her other daughter, Jasia. Her health is failing with the apparent onset of Parkinson’s disease. Her hands shake when she tries to read.

Each spring she goes over to the Vostryakovo Cemetery and plants white flowers on her husband’s grave, but they never take root. In the evenings, she perches a pair of lightweight Swiss spectacles on her nose shaped like a pear and plunges into blissful depths, returning to the shady avenues of Bunin or flinging herself headlong once more into the torrents of spring.