Sonechka

The Queen of Spades

For Natasha

THE AGE difference between Mour and Anna Fyodorovna was decreasing rapidly. There was no explaining it. Either the wheels of the world’s chronometer were wearing out or its cogs had worn away. At all events, time was running faster and periodically suffering a kind of fibrillation, with the result that the passage of thirty of these deficient years between the ages of sixty and ninety hardly amounted to anything. Anna was, however, noticing that things she used to do quickly she now did more slowly, although this was compensated for by her having to spend less time on sleep.

Today she had woken early—indeed, in the middle of the night—because of a bad dream. It was not yet four o’clock. A grown man, shrunk to the size of a large doll, was lying in the drawer of her writing desk and complaining, “Mummy, it feels really awful in here.” He was her son, and her heart went out to him, but she could do nothing to help.

In reality she didn’t have a son, she had a daughter, and she had woken in horror because the dream was more real than reality. For a moment after waking she was convinced she really did have a son she had completely forgotten about. She turned on the light, the delusion was put to flight, and she remembered that the previous evening she had had to search through the drawers of the writing desk for a missing piece of paper. Her ridiculous dream had come about by association with that.

Anna lay in bed a little longer and then decided to get up, the more so since, the day before, she hadn’t managed to find the paper she needed.

Now she found it right away. It was the review of a dissertation, written some ten years previously and now suddenly needed again.

The whole house was asleep, and that was a blessing she had been granted—or perhaps stolen. Nobody was making demands of her. Completely out of the blue, two hours entirely her own had materialized, and she wondered what to spend them on: whether to read a book that a patient, a famous philosopher or philologist, had given her long ago or write a letter to her bosom friend in Israel.

She tidied up her sparrow-colored hair and threw an old cardigan over her dressing gown. Casual clothing didn’t suit her. In the dressing gown she looked like a dacha landlady from the suburbs. People said she looked best in suits, which she had been wearing since she was a student. Now, in gray or navy blue, she looked every inch the professor that she was.

Anna brewed herself some coffee, opened the book of literary criticism written by her renowned patient, readied a sheet of paper for notes, and put a blue dish of chocolates beside herself, an indulgence not usually allowed. She savored the aroma of the coffee, but Mour appeared in the kitchen before she could take a sip, the wheels of her walker squeaking and her back as straight as a ramrod.

Anna nervously checked the buttons on her cardigan to ensure they were done up correctly, but she never was able to predict exactly what she would be found to have done wrong. If the cardigan was buttoned correctly, you could be sure the stockings she had put on would be deemed hideous, or she would have done her hair all wrong, although it was difficult to see how that was possible when all her life she had worn it in an unvarying braid, coiled like a sausage on her neck. Her morning scolding could, however, relate to anything at all: The curtains might need cleaning, or the variety of coffee might smell revoltingly of boiled cabbage. The only surprising thing was the spontaneity with which Anna always reacted, apologizing, trying to find excuses. Sometimes she even attempted to rebut the complaint, but if so always cursed herself afterward, because it only made things worse. Mour raised even higher the eyebrows that nature had already etched very high, to a point where they disappeared under her pink-blond bangs. She would slowly lower her long eyelids and gaze disapprovingly at Anna with eyes the color of an empty mirror.

On this occasion, Mour wheeled herself to the middle of the kitchen and said nothing. The black kimono hung in empty folds as if there were no body beneath it. Only the bony yellowed hands, with rings that were never removed, and the long neck surmounted by a small head, stuck out puppetlike.

All her life, for as long as she could remember, Anna had rehearsed how she was going to behave with her mother. As a child she used to freeze in front of her door, like a swimmer about to take the plunge. When she reached adulthood she psyched herself up like a boxer before a bout with a stronger opponent, not aiming to win but only to lose with dignity. At this premorning hour her mother had caught her off guard, and, without any time to ready herself, she saw the old lady for the first time as somebody else might see her. An angel stood before her, without sex or age and almost without flesh, a being existing only in the spirit. What kind of spirit that was, Anna knew only too well. Clutching a new book in its hand, the spirit gave utterance.

“What nonsense is scribbled in these memoirs! What imbecile gave me this to read? In 1916 I was still living with my father in Paris. I was a little girl. Caspari gave me the diadem in 1922—I was married to him then—and I lost it at the gaming table in 1924 in Tiflis. There was no more Caspari by that time, I was already with Mikhail. He was a great musician.” She gave a sly insinuating giggle and Anna cringed, because there now always followed a stream of utterly vulgar language. Her mother took pleasure in making her cringe. “But he was totally useless when it came to fucking.” Mour laughed tenderly. “It really wasn’t his day when they were dishing out the dicks. It was there, in Tiflis that I lost the diadem at cards; in the portrait Bakst painted—well, that diadem is completely different, some piece of nonsense, a stage property.”

This was the best page of her reminiscences, her famous lovers. Their name was legion. Reams had been written by the best pens in praise of her pale ringlets and the ineffable secrets of her soul, and from the portraits of her that were conserved in museums and private art collections you could have studied the trends of early twentieth-century painting.

She really must have had some mysterious power, because it was not only lovers who would have died for her. Anna was Mour’s only daughter, the progeny of a rare virtuous caprice, and she struggled all her life to find an answer to the riddle. What was the source of the power Mour had been given over her father, her younger sisters, men and women, and even those ambivalent creatures who occupied the narrow and tormented margin between the sexes? Apart from ordinary men with completely unsophisticated intentions, she was constantly being fallen in love with by camp homosexuals and by robust lesbians who had struck out from the wearisome path of womanhood. Anna could find no answer to this question but, herself submitting to the unknown force, hastened to humor her mother’s latest caprice. And Mour, like a pregnant woman, was constantly wanting something elusive and indefinable. In other words, “Go search to the ends of the earth and bring me back I know not what.”

Those who put up any sort of resistance to her superhuman allure simply disappeared from the scene: Anna’s husband, long forgotten by all; the husband of her granddaughter, Katya; and the entire family of Mour’s last husband. It was as if they had never existed.

“You have coffee.” Mour put the mendacious volume down in front of Anna and sniffed the air with her discriminating nose. It smelled good, but she always wanted something different. “I should like a cup of chocolate.”

“Cocoa?” Anna readily stood up from the table, without having time even to regret the demise of her little holiday.

“What cocoa? It’s muck, that cocoa of yours. Can I really not have even a simple cup of chocolate?”

“I don’t think we’ve got any.”

There was no chocolate in the house. Or rather, there was, of course, in the form of masses of chocolates in enormous boxes brought as offerings by patients. There just wasn’t any powder or bar chocolate.

“Send Katya or Lenochka. How can we not have any chocolate in the house?” Mour asked incredulously.

“It’s four o’clock in the morning,” Anna pointed out defensively, but immediately threw up her hands. “We have, for heaven’s sake; of course we have.”

She pulled an unopened box of chocolates out of the buffet, hastily split open the crackling cellophane, shook out a handful of chocolates, and began to separate the thick soles of the candies from their redundant fillings with a table knife. Mour, who was readying herself for combat, immediately subsided at the sight of such resourcefulness.

“Bring it to my room, will you?”

Carefully protecting her hand with a thick oven glove, Anna warmed the milk in a small dipper. She protected her hands the way a singer protects her throat, and with good reason. Her slender hands had long broad fingers with neatly cut oval nails, their borders stained with iodine. Every day she sank these hands, armed with a manipulator, into the very heart of an eye; carefully made her way around the fibers of tightening muscles, capillaries, Zinn’s ligament, the risky Schlemm’s canal; and proceeded through many membranes to the ten-layered retina. With those rather coarse fingers she patched and darned and glued together the most delicate of the wonders of the world.

With her mother’s little gilded spoon she was skimming the thin milky foam from the thick chocolate when she heard the insistent ringing of Mour’s bell, summoning her. Placing the pink cup on a tray, Anna went in to her mother. She was already sitting in front of her card table in the pose of an absinthe drinker. The little bronze bell, its petaled face gazing downward into the faded baize, stood before her.

“Bring me, if you will, just milk, without any of that chocolate of yours.”

One, two, three, four . . . ten. Anna silently counted out her customary cooling-down period. “You know, Mour, the last of the milk went to make this chocolate.”

“Let Katya or Lenochka run out for some.”

One, two, three, four . . . ten. . . .

“It’s half past four in the morning. The shop isn’t open yet.”

Mour sighed with satisfaction. Her slender brows twitched. Anna got ready to catch the cup. The withered lip with its deep groove, radiating a multiplicity of tiny wrinkles, tightened in a sarcastic smile.

“Well can I get a glass of ordinary tap water in this house?”

“Of course, of course,” Anna hastened to assure her. This morning’s tantrum seemed not to have happened. Or to have been postponed. She’s getting old, poor dear, Anna noted to herself.

It was Wednesday. Her surgery at the clinic began at twelve. She could let Katya lie in today, it was self-service for the grandchildren on Wednesdays. Before she went to the institute, seventeen-year-old Lenochka would take Grisha to the grammar school. Katya would collect him, but Anna needed to be back home no later than half past five. Katya worked from six, teaching English at evening school. She had the food for dinner but needed to buy milk before she left. The bell rang.

One, two, three, four . . . ten. “Yes, Mour?”

A thin hand was holding metal-rimmed spectacles elegantly poised, like a lorgnette. “I’ve remembered. That firm L’Oréal was on the television. A very pretty girl was recommending cream for dry skin. L’Oréal. That is an old firm, I think. Yes, yes. Lilechka ordered their perfume in Paris. She wanted a one-liter bottle, but her poor lover sent a little flacon. He couldn’t afford the big one. She made such a scene about it. And Maetsky brought me a liter bottle. Oh, what am I saying? That was L’Origon de Coty, not L’Oréal at all.”

This was a new disaster. Mour had proved exceptionally susceptible to advertisements. She wanted to buy everything: a new cream, a new toothpaste, a new super-saucepan.

“Sit down, sit down, do.” Mour magnanimously indicated the round piano stool.

Anna sat down. She knew all the circuits, figure-eights, and loops, like those of Grisha’s model railway, along which the little engines of the old woman’s thoughts would slip and slide, making stops and changing direction at familiar points in her great biography. Now she had started in on perfumes. Next came her friend and rival Lilechka, and then Maetsky—whom she had taken from Lilechka—the famous director. The film career that had made her famous. Her divorce. Parachuting— nobody could believe she was capable of that. Then came the airman, a test pilot, so handsome. Crashed six months later but left wonderful memories. Then there was the architect, terribly famous. They went to Berlin; she created a furor. No, she had never worked for the Cheka or the NKVD; such a silly suggestion. She had slept around, certainly. And how! There were men around in those days, real men. But you and Katya are shaggy-arsed fur stockings.

Forty years ago Anna had wanted to hit her over the head with the furniture. Thirty years ago she would have liked to pull her hair. Now, however, with a feeling of nausea and revulsion in her heart, she let all the boastful soliloquies flow past her, only sad that her morning, which had started so promisingly, had come to nothing.

The telephone rang. It was probably her department. Something must have happened for them to be calling so early. She quickly picked up the receiver.

“Yes, yes, speaking! . . . I don’t understand . . . from Johannesburg?”

How had she not recognized that voice immediately, rather high but not at all womanish, the gliding r, the pauses as if he had been cured of stammering. Choosing his words. Thirty years . . .

At first everything rushed to her head. She felt flushed, and a moment later broke out in a sweat. She felt ridiculously weak.

“Yes, yes, I recognized your voice. How are you?” What an absurd question, after so many years. “Yes, of course. . . . No, I don’t mind at all. Goodbye.”

She put down the receiver. The blood had drained from her hand. The pads of her fingertips were weak and sunken as if she had just finished washing a lot of clothes.

“Who was that?”

“Marek.” She needed to get up and leave but hadn’t the strength.

“Who?”

“My husband.”

“Well, what do you know, he’s still alive! How old is he?”

“He is five years younger than I,” Anna replied curtly.

“Well, what does he want from us?”

“Nothing. He wants to visit me and Katya.”

“Nonentity, a complete nonentity. I don’t understand how you could—”

“He has a clinic in Johannesburg.” Anna tried to deflect the arrow and succeeded.

Mour came to life. “A surgeon? How amusing. Your father was a surgeon. I was involved in a car crash in the Caucasus. If it hadn’t been for him I would have lost a leg. He operated brilliantly.” Mour sniggered. “I seduced him while I was in plaster.”

It was amazing how inexhaustible the details were. Anna had long known that Mour got married for a bet, winning a diamond brooch from a famous friend in the process. This, however, was the first she had heard about the plaster, and she felt a sudden access of dislike for her long-dead father, whom she had fervently loved as a child. He was twenty years older than her mother and the last representative, if you didn’t count Anna herself, of a family of German medics. He was devoted to his profession to an extent that was life-threatening, and his survival had been purely fortuitous. In his youth, working as a doctor in a small provincial town, he had performed a trepanation of the skull on a young worker who was dying from a suppurative inflammation of the middle ear. After the Bolshevik Revolution the worker rose to wholly improbable heights, and Dr. Storch, who had forgotten all about him, remained in the grateful patient’s memory and was given a kind of safe-conduct pass. At all events, his service as a doctor in the czarist army and subsequently in the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army did not prevent him from dying in his own bed, an honest if painful death from cancer.

“Tell me, will you, is this Johannesburg in Germany?”

To some the old woman’s thoughts might seem to be jumping about like hungry fleas, but Anna knew her mother had an extraordinary peculiarity of thinking about several things at once, as if she were plaiting a braid of several strands.

“No, it’s in Africa, the Republic of South Africa.”

“Tell me, will you, the Anglo-Boer War; I remember, I remember. . . . It was so amusing. . . . Well, don’t forget to buy me that cream.” She ran her frail fingers over her skin, which yielded like an old apricot.

In earlier times Mour had been interested in events and people as the setting for her own life and as extras in her play, but with the years all that was secondary had faded, and now only she and her sundry desires remained in the center of an empty stage.

“What is there for breakfast?” Her left eyebrow arched slightly.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were not secondary matters. Her food had to be served strictly on time. She required a full table setting, with a stand for the knife and a napkin in a napkin ring. Increasingly nowadays, however, she would take the fork in her hand only to drop it at the side of her plate.

“I’m not hungry,” she would say, sulky and irritated. “I’ll have a grated apple, perhaps, or some ice cream.”

All her life she had enjoyed wanting and getting what she wanted. Her real misfortune was that she had ceased to want. She was afraid of death only because it meant the end of desires.

THE DAY before Marek was due to arrive, Katya cleaned the apartment till late at night. It was falling to pieces and hadn’t been redecorated for such a long time that cleaning it made little difference. The ceilings were yellowed in the corners and their plasterwork was peeling, the antique furniture needed restoring, and the books were dust-laden in their dried-out bookcases. It was the intelligentsia’s usual mix of luxury and penury. Late in the evening Katya and Anna, both looking like threadbare plush toys in their cosy old dressing gowns, sat down on the little tapestry sofa. It looked as worn as they did themselves.

Anna slumped against the armrest and Katya tucked her thin legs under herself and squeezed in under her mother’s arm like a chick under the wing of a fluffed-up hen. There really was something chicklike about Katya, despite her almost forty years: the round eyes in her pale feathery little head, the thin neck, the long beaky nose. She had a birdlike charm, a birdlike incorporeality. The mother and daugher loved each other infinitely, but that very love got in the way of intimacy, because they were desperately afraid of upsetting each other. Since, however, life consisted chiefly of upsets of one form or another, constantly keeping quiet about things was what they did, instead of quietly complaining to each other, enjoying the pleasures of mutual consolation, or thinking aloud together. Accordingly, more often than not, they would talk about Grisha’s cold, Lenochka’s exams, or getting more sleeping pills for Mour. When something important did happen in their lives, they just huddled closer together, and for longer than usual, or sat silently in the kitchen over their empty cups.

“Before he emigrated he gave me a microscope, a little brass one. It was just so wonderful.” Katya smiled. “I took it and straightaway lent it to Tanya Zavidonova. Do you remember? She was in second grade with me.”

“You never told me about the microscope,” Anna said and, without raising her eyes, snuggled down more into the dressing gown.

“I thought it would upset you if I brought it back home. Zavidonova never did give it back. Perhaps her father sold it for drink. . . . You know, I loved him terribly. Why did you get divorced anyway?”

It was a hard question, one with too many answers. It was like going down the stairs into a cellar: The deeper you went, the darker it got.

“We got married and rented a room in Ostankino, from a woman who baked communion bread. Her stove was always in use, and there were communion wafers everywhere. That is where you were born. Your first solid food was those wafers. We lived there for four years. Mour was living with her sisters, Eva in town and Beata at the dacha. Aunt Eva served her all her life, starching her blouses. She was an old maid, a secret Catholic. She was exceptionally strict and never forgave anyone anything, but she worshiped Mour. She died suddenly, before she was sixty, and Mother immediately demanded that I come to look after her. She couldn’t stand having servants from outside the family.”

“Why didn’t you simply refuse?” Katya interjected sharply.

“Well, she was nearing seventy, and they had made that diagnosis. I couldn’t abandon someone who was dying.”

“But she didn’t die.”

“Marek said at the time that she was as deathless as the theory of Marxism-Leninism.”

Katya grunted. “That’s good.”

“Oh, yes. But as you can see, he was wrong. Mama, thank heaven, has even outlived Marxism. The tumor became encapsulated. It ate part of her lung and then became inactive. I was looking after her, and Aunt Beata was looking after you. She couldn’t stand children. You were sent off to Pakhra immediately. You only came back when it was time for you to go to school.”

“Why didn’t Father move here with you?”

“It was out of the question. She hated him. He kept on living in Ostankino until he left.”

“Were they allowing people to emigrate then?”

“He was a special case. It was because of Poland. His mother was a Communist. She fled Poland and brought him and his elder brother to Russia. His father stayed behind and was killed. They were a large family; many of them escaped. Some went to Holland, some to America. I can’t remember anymore; Marek did tell me. You have a whole host of relatives all over the world. He himself, as you see, is in South Africa.” Anna sighed.

Katya continued her latter-day investigation. “And what about Mour?”

Anna laughed quietly. “She’s ordered a manicurist for tomorrow and wants her striped blouse ironed.”

“No, I meant then.”

“Mour forbade me to write to him. One time an Israeli citizen with Polish antecedents brought me a few hundred dollars and some toys for you, some little clothes. She found out and gave me such a telling off I didn’t know what to do. I don’t know what I was more afraid of. At that time you were put straight in prison for having dollars. I handed everything back to the Pole and asked him to tell Marek not to put us in danger by sending things.”

“How silly all that was,” Katya whispered forgivingly, and stroked her mother’s face.

“No. It is just life.” Anna sighed.

Nevertheless, the conversation left an unpleasant aftertaste: Katya seemed to be hinting that she was living her life all wrong. She didn’t recall her holding that view before.

AFTER MANY da ys of extreme cold, the weather relented and snow began to fall. The Zamoskvorechie region was being blanketed as you watched. From the disproportionately high entrance of a Stalin-era skyscraper perched on a forbidding granite plinth, an elderly gentleman in a thickly padded sheepskin coat emerged. His fur hat had cost not one but two foxes their lives. Some lunatic was coming toward him up the broad steps wearing only a beige jacket and no hat. He had a red scarf tossed over his shoulder and a covering of snow on his curly white hair.

Before the door could slam shut the white-haired man nipped nimbly past the warmly wrapped-up gentleman and into the vestibule.

He rang at the door of the apartment he was seeking and heard footsteps retreating from the door; then a clear woman’s voice shouted, “Grisha, give me that plasticine!” After that he heard the tinkle of breaking glass and someone exclaimed irritably, “For heaven’s sake, open the door!” The door was opened.

Inside stood a large elderly woman, in the depths of whose ravaged face remembered features could still be discerned. Perhaps the trigger was a sizable mauve bean on her cheek, the fetching little beauty spot of yesteryear. In one hand she was holding the broken neck of a glass jar, and she looked out at him fearfully.

At the end of the corridor, where it turned toward a small room, was a puddle; a girl he didn’t know was standing in it with a cloth in her hand. Her age was closer to that of a granddaughter than of a daughter of the man who had just entered. She was tall and gangly and had narrow shoulders and round eyes. From a far room the shout was again heard: “Grisha, give me that plasticine!”

The visitor trundled his bag in and stopped. Anna, sucking the blood from her cut finger, said “Hello, Marek” to him in a down-to-earth manner.

He took her by the shoulders. “Anelia, I could go mad! The whole world has changed, everything is different, only this house is exactly the same.”

From the far room Katya emerged, dragging Grisha behind her.

“Katushka! My bobbin!” the visitor gasped. This was a long-forgotten childhood name, given to Katya back in the days when she was a chubby baby.

Katya looked at his youthful, suntanned face, which was far more handsome than she remembered it. She recalled how ardently she had loved him, how awkward she had felt about it, and how she had hidden it from her mother in order not to cause her pain. Now, suddenly, she found that in the depths of her heart her love was undiminished. She was embarrassed, and blushed.

“These are my children, Grisha and Lenochka.”

Katya’s little face, he now noticed, was no longer young but wrinkled, and the hands clasped under her chin were not young either. Before he had time to take a close look at his newly acquired grandchildren, a door in the depths of the apartment slowly opened and, in the doorway, the metal rails of her walker clinking delicately, Mour appeared.

“The Queen of Spades,” the visitor whispered, in stunned amazement. “It could drive you out of your mind.”

For some reason he gave a cheerful laugh and rushed to greet her, and she, grandly proffering her desiccated hand to be kissed, stood before him, frail and magnificent, as if it were she this well-dressed gentleman, this foreign stud, had come to see. With her newly manicured hand the grand old lady swept aside the general awkwardness, and all the members of the family immediately saw clearly how they should behave in this unfamiliar situation.

“You look marvelous, Marek,” she commented amicably. “The years have been kind to you.”

Marek, without letting go of her redemptive hand, rattled back his response in Polish.

It happened that this was the language of their childhood, the one, born Maria Czarnecka in a narrow semi-Gothic house in Stare Miasto, the other the grandson of a chemist from Krochmalna, a Jewish street in Warsaw known to the whole world for a variety of reasons.

Katya exchanged a glance with her mother. Even here Mour had imposed herself ahead of his daughter, ahead of his grandchildren.

“You may come into my room” was Mour’s gracious invitation, as if she had forgotten just how strongly she had disliked Marek thirty years previously. At this point, however, something unexpected happened.

“I thank you, madame. I have only one and a half hours at my disposal today and wish to spend it with the children. I shall come again tomorrow. And now, if you permit, I shall see you to your room.”

She had no time to object before he firmly but gaily turned her walker about, together with Mour herself, and ferried her back into the boudoir.

“Everything in your room is just as elegant as ever. Will you permit me to help you to your chair?” he inquired, in a tone that allowed of no alternative.

Anna, Katya, and Lenochka stood at the door like a tableau vivant, waiting for the shrieks, the screams, and broken teacups, but nothing of the sort eventuated. Mour sank meekly into her armchair.

Marek bent down, touched her narrow foot—squeezed into a wizened shoe of old blue leather—and said, rather strictly, “No, really, you must not wear such shoes. I shall send you a pair that will be much more comfortable: a specialist firm. The girls will need to take your measurements.” He left her alone and closed the door gently behind him.

“How can you get away with talking to her like that?” Anna asked in total bewilderment.

He gestured casually. “Experience. Eighty percent of the patients in my clinic are over eighty years of age, and all of them are rich and capricious. It took me five years to learn how to deal with them. Your mama, though, is a real Queen of Spades. Pushkin drew his character from her. But enough of that. Let’s go, Grisha, and take a look at what we’ve got in the suitcase.”

Grisha promptly forgot all about the plasticine with which he had just so skillfully blocked the drain in the sink, and pulled along the well-made wheeled case that held so much promise.

Anna stood beside the set table. Nothing that was happening seemed to involve her at all. Even loyal Katya could not take her eyes off Marek’s tanned face; Anna found her daughter’s smile weak and even slightly foolish.

It’s just as well, she thought, that I didn’t dye my hair from that doubtful bottle I bought the day before yesterday. He might have thought I was trying to look younger for his benefit. All the same, it’s a pity to have let myself go so much. When he’s gone back to South Africa, I will dye it.

Marek looked over toward her and made a familiar gesture with his hand as if he were playing table tennis, and Anna remembered what a good player he used to be. It had just been catching on during their engagement. He talked easily and freely with the children. He had his arm round Katya’s shoulder all the time, and she melted beneath it like a cow.

Yes, like a cow, Anna confirmed to herself.

The presents were splendid: a cordless telephone, a camera, some little pieces of technological wizardry. He produced a small photograph album from the inner pocket of his velvety jacket and showed them his house in Johannesburg, the clinic, and another pleasing two-story house by the sea, which he referred to as his dacha.

Then he looked at his watch, ruffled Grisha’s hair, and asked what time he could come tomorrow. He really had only spent an hour and a half in their home.

“I’d like to come fairly early in the day. Is that all right?” He was asking Anna; she had the impression he was a little daunted by her.

“Don’t you wear a coat?” Grisha asked admiringly.

“I do have a jacket for outdoors back in the hotel, but what do I need it for? I have a car waiting for me downstairs.”

The children gazed at him with such admiration that Anna was quite upset and immediately felt ashamed of herself. It was all entirely understandable. He always had been charming and now, having grown older, he was also handsome. An ache in her heart, however, left her feeling indefinably disgruntled and bewildered.

AS OFTEN happens, a tradition of fatherlessness in their family had grown stronger with each succeeding generation. In effect, the last man in the family, the last father figure, had been old Czarnecki, descendant of a fierce Polish military commander and the doting sire of three beautiful girls: Maria, Evelina, and Beata.

Anna herself was at first left without a mother, when Mour ditched Dr. Storch on the spur of the moment, walking out of the house one day and seemingly forgetting to come back. Several days later she sent for her immediate necessities, but these did not include her eighteen-month-old daughter. Mour’s new marriage was not to be her last but represented a step in the right direction, her antennae having sensed that the age of decadent poets and unruly heroes was over.

Mour’s first fora y into the realm of the new Soviet literature was not one of her more propitious ventures, but her subsequent attempts led ultimatel y to success. She came up with a truly classical Soviet writer, a genius of duplicity, wearing the mask of an ascetic but with nouveau riche passions raging in his breast. Showing off his porcelain collection, a newly acquired Borisov-Musatov, or a sketch by Vrubel, he would open his arms wide in a most charming gesture and say, “All Mour’s whims. I’ve taken me a lass from the nobility, and now I just have to put up with the consequences.”

This last marriage was an excellent match, and little Anna got to stay with her own father until the time came for her to be remembered. Mour was relaunched into the upper reaches of literature, had an affair with the most important playwright of the time, another with a very notable director, and several amusing liaisons in first-class sanatoria in the south of Russia that were well appointed to cater for them. At last a solid residential block was built in Zamoskvorechie where the apartments were allotted not on the basis of a plebeian calculation of so many square feet per head but in accordance with the true dimensions of a writer’s soul. Even here, certain bureaucratic requirements needed to be met. Mour had to register both her sisters as living in the apartment, and it was decided to take back the little girl. Mour noticed, moreover, that the great Soviet classical writer who belonged to her was casting a less than platonic eye over plump waitresses and young chamber-maids, and she decided the time had come to support the institution of the family and give her classic the opportunity of realizing himself as the parent of a young girl.

Mour took the aged surgeon’s seven-year-old daughter away from him. The girl, who adored her father, was removed from the sweet languor of Odessa to the prim newly acquired apartment in Moscow. She was forbidden any further contact with her father and gradually forgot him. At Mour’s insistence, Anna had her birdlike German surname changed to a name famous the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. She was instructed to call the fat bald man Papa and was entrusted to the care of her second aunt, who lived all year round at the writer’s dacha in the countryside.

A few years later came the outbreak of war and evacuation to Kuibyshev, which left Anna with a fear of the cold that remained for the rest of her life. They returned to Moscow in an overheated government railway carriage, and the first months after their happy homecoming to the capital cemented its status as her hometown. She never did see her father again and had only a vague intuition of how deeply similar she was to him.

The memories that Anna’s daughter, Katya, retained of her own father were even more tenuous. They were fragmentary images, but taken in close-ups. In one she was ill and had bandages over her ears, and her father was bringing a puppy straight into her bed. In another she was standing on the porch and watching him fish a sunken bucket out of the well, using a long stick with a hook on the end. In yet another they were going out of a little wooden house with an acrid smell of smoke and walking along a snowed-up road to an enormous czarist palace that smelled of forests and summer and had great windows from floor to ceiling, decorative tiled stoves, and oil paintings on the walls.

For some reason, she could hardly remember her father visiting Pakhra, where, like her mother before her, Katya lived until she was ready for school. She retained just one vivid memory: she was walking along a narrow path to the bus stop wearing her spotted cat-fur overcoat and hat, holding Aunt Beata by one hand and her father by the other. The bus was already waiting and she was terribly afraid her father would be too late to get on it. Tearing her hand away, she shouted to him, “Run quickly! Run!”

That very year he acted on Katya’s advice.

It was truly amazing how deep down her filial love was buried. For many years she had not thought about her father at all or remembered her honest German instrument for studying the cells of an onion skin or the tiny feet of a flea.

Katya’s early daughter Lenochka did not remember her own father at all; Katya had divorced him a year after the baby was born. She never received any alimony from him, and only through mutual acquaintances did she even know he was alive.

Until Grisha was born, the family consisted of four women, but the total absence of men troubled nobody apart from Mour. Mour was used to regarding her daughter, Anna, as a colorless, asexual creature of value only for rushing through the housework, but she was puzzled as to why her granddaughter, Katya, led such a dull life. Mour couldn’t imagine how they came to have any children, given such a complete dearth of feminine wiles. These people seemed no better than animals: they fucked purely in order to procreate.

Mour was profoundly unjust in respect to Katya, who was blessed with an unhappy love life of enviable intensity. It had led her to abandon her first dysfunctional husband. She suffered egregious torments with the object of her great love, had Grisha by him, and for thirteen years now had been running to this high-minded lover for stolen rendezvous. She kept putting off from one year to the next the moment when her son and his secret father would become genuinel y, rather than one-sidedly, acquainted. The family is sacrosanct, he declared, and Katya could not but agree. Fatherlessness had thus become a deep-rooted inherited condition in their family, firmly established over three generations. It would never have occurred to Anna, Katya, or even Lenochka, who was approaching puberty, to introduce into this house, so completely and utterly the domain of Mour, even the most modest and insignificant male. Mour, filled with a magnificent disdain for her female progeny, had accorded them no such right. Anna and Katya had entirely reconciled themselves both to the ambience of fatherlessness and to their womanly solitude, while Lenochka, who was entirely infantile in precisely the area in which her great-grandmother had most fully displayed her great talents, had never given the matter a thought.

All the more acutely was Anna aware of how the whole house had gone mad after that first visit from Marek. Not only eight-year-old Grisha but even lanky Lenochka, who that winter had reached a height of almost five-foot-eleven, and Katya herself ran out to answer the doorbell. From all the excitement you might have thought it was Father Christmas standing outside. Marek even rather fitted that downmarket red-and-white image. Above his African suntan billowed those dazzling white curls, and in place of the vulgar red tunic with its white cotton-wool collar he had, casually wrapped round his neck, that woolen scarf of a blood-red hue and a quality so superb as almost to turn material values into spiritual ones. As behooved Father Christmas, he was jolly, ruddy, and incredibly generous in dispensing treats and presents and, even more so, promises. Mour herself was displaying an immoderate interest in him.

Anna was suffering from a sense of personal humiliation that she had not experienced for a long time. Three days ago Marek had not even known of the existence of Grisha and Lenochka, yet already he was playing a central role in their lives. Lenochka talked only about where she should go to study abroad, England or America. Grisha was hooked on some Greek island where Marek had a cottage, a two-story villa with its back resting against a pink cliff. It looked out onto a small bay with a white yacht anchored in the midst of it, like an ivory brooch pinned on deep blue silk. Grisha eviscerated Marek’s photograph album, and the color prints of someone else’s unreal life were spread all over the apartment, even in Mour’s room. What was most annoying, however, was that Katya was walking around with a really rather stupid grin on her face and purring slightly, exactly like her grandmother. To add insult to injury, conscientious Anna was tormented by the fact of harboring such mean-spirited feelings and being unable to control them.

Something had upset Anna at work too. One of her most difficult cases of recent times, a young policeman who had come in as an emergency, had been operated on remarkably successfully. It seemed sure that one eye at least had been saved. A few days ago, however, he had dragged the television set from one corner of the hall to the other, and all the fine craftsmanship she had practiced on his eye had been wrecked. There were new ruptures in the retina, and it now seemed very uncertain whether she would be able to save the oaf’s eye a second time.

Marek had come to Moscow on business. This consisted of a single meeting with medical bureaucrats, and the appointment had been on the first evening of his stay. There was a deal concerning special equipment for the postoperative care of patients, and he had some kind of involvement in manufacturing it. He himself later admitted that the negotiations had been a pretext for coming to see his daughter. He had not repeated his first attempt to establish communication with his former family all these years, having had only too much experience of dealing with Soviet power in both its Russian and Polish varieties.

Marek had had no idea what to expect from the trip, but he had certainly not anticipated meeting such direct and lovable children, in effect his own family, who were getting along fine and knew not the first thing about him.

He even felt a hint of interest and liking for old misery guts. He spent several hours with her that day because, as it happened, Grisha had bounced off to yet another New Year’s party at a classmate’s apartment and Lenochka had gone off to fail yet another exam.

Marek cunningly asked Mour a very well-received question about the Stalin Prize that her husband, the great Soviet writer, had received. This launched her into a spate of agreeable memories. Her husband’s final success had coincided with a revival of Mour’s fortunes, a string of brilliant successes in her related field. There had been a tempestuous romance with a secret general, who held the entire literary process in his hairy fist; some hanky-panky with her husband’s male secretary; an affair with the husband of her dearest friend, an Academician of some description in biology; et cetera, et cetera. All this had been witnessed by her frowning daughter, Anna, who suffered a puritanical sense of outrage and a profound despair at the impossibility of loving and her inability not to love this subtle, improbably beautiful, and always theatrically overdressed woman who happened to be her mother.

Mour told the stor y disjointedl y, selectively, dropping in names and details, but Marek saw the picture she was painting with complete clarity, and in any case he already knew a lot from Anna.

The great Soviet writer died at just the right moment, not surviving his much lauded Leader by very long at all and thereby demonstrating his remarkable perspicacity one last time to his envious colleagues. He was laid beneath a heavy gray stone in Novodevichy Cemetery, and for a time Mour’s life became drabber. She did, however, have obscene amounts of money, and it kept flooding in: fees from books, productions, and royalties. A lesser woman might have settled down to living a quiet life, but Mour was restive. Her romances had become wearisome and lost their savor; her desires had lost their old resilience. The years between fifty and sixty she found dreary, later putting this down to the menopause. Her menopause came to a satisfactory conclusion, however, when Mour had two minor but, for the time, unusual operations. Her friend Verochka, a famous film star, gave her the name of her doctor, and Mour was rejuvenated—needless to say, by an affair, dazzling, unprecedented, with a young actor. There was a forty-year difference in their ages. Every record in the crumpling of bedsheets was broken. Her friends were in nursing homes and hospitals, some were living out their last years in exile, but she was alive, with pert breasts, a neat little bum, and an overhauled neck, entertaining her ravishing gypsylike boy while his young wife raged at the front door. Moscow was abuzz; life was back to normal.

Alas, at this point things began to go wrong. The boyish actor descended into alcoholism with incredible rapidity; her old friends were going down like skittles; her daughter Anna left home and married a skinny student, and he was a Jew. Mour had had an aversion to Jews since she was a child. Live and let live, of course. She certainly didn’t want them sent to the gas chambers. But really, the thought of marrying one!

Marek was greatly intrigued—who did she think she was talking to?—but asked no questions. He just listened attentively.

Her ex-lovers all died off one after the other, the generals and the civilians. Most annoying of all, her sister Eva died too, loyal devoted Eva, who was ten years younger. She had to bring Anna back to the house, and soon they had Katya living there also. Before you knew it, the place was overrun with children and life was trivial, no fun, nothing of any interest happening.

Coming into her mother’s room to take away the teacups, Anna noted to herself that Mour was looking just as happy as the children and was, moreover, ready for action: Her voice was a purr and an octave lower than usual, her eyes were two sizes wider, and her back, if such thing was imaginable, was even straighter. A tigress on the prowl was how Anna characterized her mother at such moments.

Marek was just sitting there, smiling enigmatically.

THE LAST evening of the family’s ecstasy was in progress, with Anna trying to take as little part in everything as possible. Grisha was hanging on Marek, unglueing himself from time to time only in order to take a run and jump higher up on him and cling even more tightly. Lenochka was heading full steam ahead to failure in her exams, but in these crucial days she had abandoned her studies and was following her brand-new grandad around like a shadow. Since the allure of England had taken away her appetite for studying in her homeland, she now felt not a twinge of concern at the prospect of tomorrow’s exam. As for Katya, Anna did her best not to look her way at all. Her expression was too embarrassing.

It was past eleven when Marek, having said goodbye to all of them, went in to Mour. Her feet clamped on a hot-water bottle, she was watching television and eating chocolate. It was one of her guiding principles that one pleasure should never be allowed to get in the way of another. As regards the hot-water bottle, at which Anna had been protesting for the past thirty years, Mour had been accustomed to go to a warmed bed since she was little, even when a rubber bottle was not her only companion for the night.

As Marek respectfully bowed to her, she graciously held out a slip of paper half covered in spidery letters. “This is for you, my friend. There are one or two things there that I need.”

Without glancing at it, Marek put the paper in his pocket. “With the greatest of pleasure.”

He knew how to treat old ladies. He went out and Anna lingered, straightening the column of pillows behind Mour’s back.

Mour licked a finger smeared with chocolate, smiled mysteriously, and fired a question at her. “Well, now do you see?”

“What?” Anna asked in surprise. “Do I see what?”

“How my lovers treat me.” Mour smirked.

First signs of dementia, Anna decided.

The children wanted to see him back to the hotel. He was staying nearby, in what had been the Hotel Balchuga. It had been transformed over the last few years into something quite magnificent, like the crystal bridge in the fairy tale that in a single night spans from shore to shore.

“No, let’s decide that we have said goodbye,” he announced, with unexpected firmness, and Grisha, who would whine about anything, usually until he got his way, immediately accepted the situation.

Marek wound his unendurably red scarf round his neck and kissed the children for the last time as naturally as if it were not a mere five days before that he had first met them. Then from the hall stand he took Anna’s fur coat, which was balding on the breast, and said, in that inexorable voice, “Let’s go for one last walk.”

For some reason Anna submitted, although a minute before she had had no intention of going down to the street with him. Without a word, she squeezed into the coat and put round her neck a shawl that was a present from Orenburg. She accepted presents if she was offered them: boxes of chocolates, books, envelopes with money. She took them and thanked the givers in a reserved way. She never named the price for her own operations, and in that respect, although she was quite unaware of it, she was following exactly in her late father’s footsteps.

In the street he took her arm. From Lavrushinsky Lane they came out onto Ordynka. The street was clean, snowy white and virtually deserted. The few passers-by looked round at the lean foreigner wearing only a light-colored jacket and walking unhurriedly along with an elderly citizen packaged in a thick fur coat. They couldn’t relate her to him in any way; she looked too educated to be his cleaner, and she was too old and badly dressed to be his wife.

“What a lovely city. For some reason I was remembering it as gloomy and dirty.”

“There are different sides to it,” Anna responded politely.

Why did you come back? she was wondering. Turning everything upside down, unsettling everyone. But she did not say it out loud.

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

“Where? At night?” she asked in surprise.

“There are any number of places open at night. There’s a marvelous restaurant quite near here. I had lunch there yesterday with the children.”

“You have to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow,” Anna said evasively.

Marek was going back on an early flight, and she herself had to get up at half past six. The reference to tomorrow calmed her. He would leave; everything would get back to normal; all this turmoil in the family would come to an end.

“I would like to invite the children to come to Greece for the summer. Would you mind?”

“Not at all.”

“You are an angel, Anelia. And my greatest loss.”

Anna said nothing. Why on earth had she come out with him? It could only be because at home she had been used to doing as she was told for so many years. She really should have refused.

He detected her wordless irritation and caught hold of her puffy mittens with his thin glove.

“Anna, do you think I don’t see or understand anything? Emigration is a hard school, very hard, and I have experienced it three times. From Polish to Russian, from Russian to Hebrew, and for the last fifteen years I have been speaking English. Each time you have to learn your way into a new life again from scratch. I have been through all sorts of things. I have fought in wars, starved . . . I have even been in prison.”

What a sweet boy he used to be, a student in the third year, so different from the hearty males performing the robust ritual of the dog’s wedding beside her mother. As part of her duties as a postgraduate she had been conducting an undergraduate seminar at the time, and their romance began among the retorts and the bacilli. For a long time she had meticulously concealed their relationship from everyone. It was embarrassing that he was so young, but it was precisely his youthfulness, the absence of aggressive meat, that subconsciously attracted her to him. He had a white hairless chest and a constellation of birthmarks, the dipper of Ursa Major to the left, near the nipple. To this day he was the only man there had been in her life, but she never regretted either that or the fact that it had been him. She always knew, though, that marriage was not central to her life. She was around sixteen when she decided never to get married. She knew nothing more repugnant than the purring voice, the sexually aroused laughter, and the drawn-out moaning proceeding from her mother’s bedroom. The eternal sex hunt, animals in heat. For a moment she relapsed into an immensely powerful childish sense of the irredeemable filthiness of sex, when it was an embarrassment to look at any married couple because you immediately imagined them, sweating and grunting, getting on with that dirt. How fine to be a nun, dressed all in white, pure, without any of this. But what a joy it was, all the same, that Katya existed.

Marek was talking, saying something, but it flew past her like the snow. She was suddenly jolted back to herself by his faltering words.

“. . . a real miracle how a curse can turn into a blessing. This monster, this demon of egoism, the Queen of Spades, has destroyed everything, has put everyone in their graves. And how do you bear it? You are simply a saint.”

“Me? A saint?” Anna stopped in her tracks as if she had walked into a lamppost. “I am afraid of her . . . and there is my duty . . . and I feel sorry for her.”

He brought his face close to hers, and she could see that he was not by any means so young. His skin was that of an old man, with little incised wrinkles and senile dark freckles beneath the year-round suntan. “How can I help you? What can I do for you?”

She waved a gray mitten at him. “See me back home.”

MAREK CALLED from Johannesburg more frequently than her friends called from Sviblovo. Grisha waited frantically for his calls, pouncing on the telephone and shouting to absolutely anyone who rang, “Marek! Is that you?” Lenochka devoted herself exclusively to the study of English and to readying herself for the journey abroad. She became remarkably businesslike, not an attribute that had been much in evidence up till then. She set about selecting the location for her future studies with intelligence and discernment. Even Katya, always calm and a little indolent, was expecting indefinable changes that would relate in some way to the reappearance of her father. She seemed to have cooled a little toward her secret lover, who for his part began making noncommittal remarks about possibly leaving his family.

Marek enthusiastically set about fulfilling his Christmas promises. The first to materialize was shoes of an uncompromisingly orthopedic appearance for Mour. They were exceptionally ugly and probably no less exceptionally comfortable, and they were brought directly to their home by an old friend of Marek’s who was practically a first secretary at the Israeli embassy. Mour did not even try them on, merely muttered something. They had schoolgirl heels and were elasticized, as befitted footwear for the elderly. For the past seventy years, Mour had worn only pumps with heels as elegant as the latest fashion allowed.

The pair of shoes was followed by a pair of small computers, their size in inverse proportion to their cost. He also took time to find computer games for Grisha. Lenochka had yet to get over the amateur ciné camera he had left her before departing. She was still in thrall to that special perspective on the world revealed by a viewfinder when her new present arrived, demanding that she should promptly learn to do all the things that were now possible with its magical assistance.

Finally, six weeks after Marek’s departure, there came an invitation from Thessaloniki, signed by a certain Evangelia Daoul who was a close friend of Marek’s wife. Of Marek’s wife, all that was known was that she had a Greek friend who would send them an invitation.

The wording of the invitation left it open to them to come at any time between June and September.

Grisha, delighted to seventh heaven by the mere sight of the envelope with its rectangular window, rushed around the apartment with it until he collided with Mour, who was steering toward the kitchen in her metal contraption. He waved the envelope in her face.

“Look, Mour, we’re going to Greece, to the Island of Sériphos. Marek has invited us.”

“What nonsense!” Mour snorted. She never made concessions of any kind to age. “You’re going nowhere.”

“We are, we are!” Grisha shouted, jumping up and down in excitement.

Mour wrenched her hand from the rail of her walker and stuck it with great aplomb under the nose of her eight-year-old great-grandson in an obscene gesture, the bright red nail of her thumb jutting out between the fingers of her clenched fist. With her other hand she deftly snatched the invitation from the grasp of the startled boy, who had not been expecting such an audacious attack. Leaning her elbows on the rails, she screwed up the envelope and threw it in a ball as solid as a good snowball straight at the front door.

“You foul old witch!” Grisha howled, and rushed to the door.

Katya jumped out of her room, seized her son, not knowing what had transpired between him and her grandmother. Grisha was straightening out some kind of paper and continuing to shout wholly unexpected words.

“You godforsaken old crow! You fucked-up old bitch!”

Lowering her eyelids, Mour reproached her granddaughter more in sorrow than in anger. “Remove your little bastard, my dear. One really does have to teach children a modicum of good manners.” Her wheels squeaking, she proceeded to the kitchen.

Katya, still unaware of what the scrap of paper was that the sobbing Grisha was trying to straighten out, dragged him off to her room, from which his sobs were to be heard for a long time afterward.

That day Anna returned from work more tired than usual. Some things are more draining than work itself. A seriously injured girl had been brought in. They had no suitably qualified doctor in the pediatric department for her. She was about Grisha’s age and had a shrapnel wound. The operation had been very distressing.

Putting the blood pressure cuff back in its case, Anna wondered where Mour got her energy from. With those readings she should have been feeling weak and sleepy, but instead she was aggressive and acute in her reactions. Other mechanisms were evidently coming into play. Ah, well, gerontology. . . .

“You’re not listening to me! What are you thinking about? I’m against it, do you hear? I was never in Greece. They are going nowhere!” Mour was tugging at Anna’s sleeve.

“Yes, yes, of course. Of course, Mama.”

“What do you mean, of course? Don’t you mama me!” Mour shrieked.

“Everything will be just as you wish,” Anna said, in a soothing tone, meanwhile deciding emphatically, for the first time in her life, No, my dear mother. Not this time! The word no had not yet been uttered but it already existed. It had already broken through like a puny shoot. She decided simply to face her mother with the fact of her family’s disobedience without any preliminary discussion. One could only imagine what kind of hullabaloo this bloodless insect would raise when it became apparent that the children had left.

BY EARLY June they had obtained external passports for travel abroad and the necessary visas. Air tickets to Athens had been booked for the twelfth of June. That same day, in accordance with Anna’s ingenious plan, had been chosen for the move to the dacha. Everything had been thought through down to the last detail. In the morning Katya and the children would go to Sheremetievo Airport, which should rouse no suspicion because Katya always went on ahead to the dacha in order to prepare it for Mour’s arrival. A taxi had been ordered for twelve to take Mour and Anna there. Anna hoped the turmoil of the move would soften the blow, the more so since preparations to go to the dacha would disguise the great escape. Grisha and Lenochka were simply bursting with excitement, especially Grisha. His semi-Greek grandfather had turned up at just the right moment. All Grisha’s classmates had been abroad. He was almost the only one who had never been taken farther than Krasnaya Pakhra. A photograph of his grandfather with his curly white hair standing on board a white yacht had been shown to the entire class and successfully made up for the absence of a father of his own.

On the eve of their departure, Anna and Katya hardly slept at all. Marek rang early in the morning to tell them not to bring more luggage than they needed because, as no doubt they knew, they could get everything in Greece, and said he couldn’t wait to see them and would meet them at the airport.

At half past seven, Mour demanded her coffee. Her morning coffee she took with milk, while coffee after dinner was required to be black. Anna helped her to dress and made the coffee, at which point she discovered that the milk carton in the refrigerator was empty. This was Lenochka’s slovenliness: she was forever putting empty cartons back in the fridge. The time was approaching eight, and the taxi to Sheremetievo was due at half past eight.

Anna popped out of the house wearing an indoor blue dress and bedroom slippers on her bare feet. She ran down to Ordynka to get the milk. It should take no more than ten minutes at the most. She hurried along, almost running at first, but suddenly slowed down. It was an extraordinary morning: the light was bluish and hazy, the sky was shimmering like the iris of an enormous, very deep blue eye, and as she passed the welcoming little rounded Church of All Who Mourn, which she occasionally dropped into, the small well-tended square beside it was of the purest green. She walked slowly and easily, as if in no hurry at all. The shop assistant, Galya, a local Ordynka Tatar who had worked all her life in shops around here, greeted her warmly. Some fifteen years previously Anna had performed an operation on her mother-in-law.

“How is Sophia Ahmetovna?”

It was amazing how, given such a quantity of gold teeth, a smile could be so shy and childlike.

“She’s gone completely deaf. Can’t hear anything, but her eyes see well!”

Anna took the cool carton of milk. In fifteen minutes’ time the children would leave, and in another two hours Mour would learn that they were gone. Most probably by that time Mour would be in Pakhra. She pictured to herself her mother’s faded eyes, her quiet croaky voice rising to a shrill glassy shriek, the fragments of broken crockery, and the wholly disgraceful, utterly unbearable swearing to come. Suddenly she saw, as if it had already happened, herself—Anna—taking a long easy swing and giving that old rouged cheek a good hard long-overdue slap. And she didn’t care in the slightest what happened after that.

She felt surrounded by a marvelously triumphant sense of freedom and victory, and the light was so intensely bright, so burning bright. But at that very moment it was switched off. Anna had no time even to notice. She fell forward without letting go of the cool carton, and the light slippers came off her strong stoutly Germanic feet.

By this time Mour was already raging. “The house is full of ne’er-do-wells! Is it really too difficult to buy a bottle of milk?” Her voice was transparently shrill with fury.

Katya looked at her watch. The taxi would be here in fifteen minutes’ time. Where could her mother be? she wondered in perplexity. There was nothing for it: She ran out to get the milk herself.

Galya, the shop assistant, whom she knew, was running about on the pavement. A small crowd had gathered round the entrance to the shop. There was a woman lying on the pavement in a blue dress with stars on it. The ambulance arrived some twenty minutes later, but by then there was nothing for them to do.

Katya, clutching to her breast the still-cool carton of milk, kept murmuring, “The milk, the milk, the milk,” until she was sent to get her mother’s passport. As she approached the house, she repeated, “Passport, passport, passport.”

Back in the apartment, Katya discovered the place in uproar. The taxi driver, having waited some twenty minutes downstairs for them as arranged, had come up to the apartment to ask why his fares for Sheremetievo had not come down.

Grisha, trembling with impatience like a puppy waiting for its morning walk, yelled joyfully, “Hurray! We’re going to Sheremetievo!”

Mour came wobbling out into the hallway in her metal cage and guessed she was being duped. She forgot all about her coffee and the milk and, in ripe expressions which even the taxi driver did not hear every day, she declared that nobody was going anywhere, and that the driver could take himself off to a most original destination. The driver, a young man who had graduated from a theater institute, was overcome by purely professional admiration and leaned against the wall, reveling in the unexpected theatricality of the situation.

“Where is that cunt-headed turkey? Who is she trying to trick?” Mour raised her bony hand in the air, and the sleeve of her extremely expensive old kimono fell back to reveal the dry bones that, if we are to believe Ezekiel, should at some future time be clothed in new flesh.

Katya went over to Mour, took a long easy swing, and gave her old as yet unpainted cheek a good hard long-overdue slap.

Mour shook in her cage and then was still. She grasped the rail of the captain’s bridge from which, for the last ten years, since she broke her hip, she had been steering the course of life in this apartment, and said, quietly and distinctly, “What? What? All the same, everything shall be as I wish.”

Katya walked past her to the kitchen, slit open the carton, and slopped the milk into the cold coffee.