Sonechka

The Beast

IN ONE and the same year, Nina lost both her mother and her husband, leaving her no one to cook or live for. Now, like Eve from her banishment, she looked back at the past, and everything there seemed beautiful. All the hurts and humiliations were whited away; she even contrived to forget the noman’s-land she had lived in all eleven years of her marriage, caught in the cross fire of mutual hatred of the two people she loved.

Now, with the passing of time, she was inclined to remember it all as a drama between complex characters rather than pathetic routine squabbling, day in, day out, inexcusable mutual goading, irritation that sometimes boiled over, and outbursts of rage that recurred every time Nina succeeded in getting them to sit down at the same white tablecloth in the insane hope of reconciling the irreconcilable.

Never had Nina lived in Paradise, however, unless perhaps when she was young and still a student at the Conservatory, before she met Seryozha and suffered her first misfortune. Now they were all dead. It seemed as if life was being rerun and the past, stagily lit with a cinematic aura of happiness, was greedily swallowing up both the desolate present and a future that had lost all meaning.

Her thoughts and feelings now revolved solely around the dead, who looked down at her from every wall. Mama with her harp, Mama wearing a hat, Mama holding a monkey. Seryozha as a boy on a wooden horse, Seryozha as a schoolboy with a translucent shock of hair, Seryozha as a yachtsman with rock-like shoulders. Then the penultimate Seryozha, with jowly cheeks, sly and dangerous, and the ultimate Seryozha, with the thin face, sunken temples, and look of doubt, or perhaps of insight, in his eyes—or perhaps a thought he had finally been able to formulate but that now would never be expressed. And there was Grandma Mzia, who had died before Nina was born, her face stern and belonging to a bygone age, wearing a round bonnet under a dark shawl, a renowned performer of songs that nobody now remembered.

Almost two years had passed since her mother died and eleven months since the death of Seryozha, and things hadn’t got any easier, only worse. She was tormented by dreams. Not nightmares, but gray scenes set against a sepia background, lifeless and faded and moldering, so that you couldn’t really call them dreams. In these enfeebled scenes, Nina told herself to wake up, but the drab cobweb of shadows would not release her. When at last she did come out of it, she brought to the daylight a mood of indescribable wretchedness as unrelenting as a toothache.

Like a pressure cooker, Nina kept all these unpleasant nocturnal experiences boiling away inside herself and, when she could stand it no longer, complained to her friends. She had two. The elder, Susanna Borisovna, was a highly educated lady with mystical gifts who even belonged to the Anthroposophical Society. The younger was Tomochka, who was very timid, not very bright, and so God-fearing that in the years of their friendship Nina had taken a considerable dislike to this God who demanded so much from her and gave her nothing at all in return. And even that which by birth Tomochka did have, rather pallid good looks, had been taken away from her: her mother had scalded her when she was a child, and her right cheek was disfigured as a result.

Both Nina’s friends helped a great deal in her times of trial, but they did not get on well with each other. They were jealous. When meek Tomochka spoke about Susanna she flushed with anemic petulance, not having enough spirit to manage anything more dramatic. She would go pink in the face and hiss, “She will give herself away yet, mark my words. I can feel her devilish wiles in my water. . . .”

Susanna appeared to regard Tomochka with tolerant condescension. Only occasionally would she pass some incidental comment on Tomochka’s ignorance, bizarre pagan misconceptions, and overall primitiveness. Nina’s late husband could stand neither of them. He considered Tomochka a sad little thing and, recalling Ilf and Petrov’s tale of the twelve chairs, referred to Susanna behind her back as “the widow Gritsatsueva.”

When primitive Tomochka heard from Nina about her torments in the night, she announced that she would pray for her even more fervently and urged Nina to go and take communion, because these trials were being sent to her solely in order to guide her back to God.

Susanna was a physician of sorts in that she possessed a cosmetological cabinet. She prescribed for Nina a tranquilizer and a sedative and explained her trying dreams as being caused by the incomplete destruction of the astral bodies of her dear departed and by unpropitious circumstances attending their path in the afterlife. She recommended that Nina embark on the path of self-improvement without delay and, to this end, left her a quite exceptionally tedious book about spiritual hierarchies and their reflection in the physical world.

Whether it was the medicine working or Tomochka’s prayers, she did for a time begin to sleep better. The shadows of gray and brown ceased to flit before her. Weirdly, however, she now began to dream about a really vile stench. She would be wakened by an intolerable smell so supernaturally powerful it filled her with horror and would then fall asleep again. She began to have the feeling that there was something in her home—a shade, a specter, an unclean spirit—and this stench. It was unlike anything she had ever known, probably related to those chemicals which drive people out of their minds.

After a few days, the stench in her dreams seemed to materialize. One day when she came home from work, Nina found the place filled with a pungent smell of cats. It was revolting, but nothing that went beyond the bounds of respectable realism. With her long sensitive nose Nina soon homed in on the epicenter of the smell: Seryozha’s house slippers, which all this time had been lying on the shoe shelf by the front door. Nina meticulously washed them with detergent, but a number of recalcitrant molecules evidentl y remained, since she also had to spray the apartment with air freshener. The smell of cats still managed to force its way through the fragrances of lavender and jasmine. She rang Susanna to tell her about the problem.

There was a long silence before Susanna unexpectedly said, “You know, Ninochka, you just must give up smoking.”

“What on earth for?” Nina asked in amazement.

“You are under attack from occult forces, and smoking blunts mystical awareness,” Susanna explained. “There are inauspicious forces at work in your apartment.”

Inauspicious was putting it mildly. Her apartment was cursed. It was thrice cursed. She had never liked the place. Immediately after her mother died, Seryozha had taken it into his head to exchange their cosy little apartment on Begovaya Street and her mother’s one-room studio for this mansion, and nothing Nina could say would stop him. He brushed aside her protests that it was on the top floor and that there were leak marks on the ceiling. That year things were going so well for him that a leaky roof was no deterrent. He would replace it if need be. That was the kind of man he was.

In the course of six months he did all he had planned: knocked down walls, raised the floor in half the apartment by almost a foot, and transformed a moderately sized kitchen and one of the rooms into a refectory. Their entire living space became a hall with two chambers, cold and drafty. An interior door led to a large en-suite bathroom, the only place Nina liked in the whole apartment. Now she had installed a small table in there and in the mornings drank coffee while sitting on a stool between the bath and the toilet pedestal.

It was this accursed apartment that had sapped Seryozha’s strength and put him in his grave. Nina particularly hated the fireplace. From a technical viewpoint it was a failure, the flue having been designed by a Candidate of Physics and Mathematical Sciences rather than a competent stove setter. Smoke immediately filled the apartment and billowed in acrid clouds for ages afterward. Sergey had been unable to put it right because, by the time his makeover was nearing completion, he was in thrall to analyses, diagnoses, consultations, and clinics.

He suffered from a malignant cancer for only six months or so before dying and leaving the doctors baffled. He had been eaten away by metastases, but they never did find the primary site. For Nina this no longer mattered. She was left completely alone, and by her very nature loneliness was something she could not endure. She felt like a fly with its wings torn off, driven out of its mind. She circled round and round the same spot while the world collapsed beneath her or fell away to one side. And now there was this devilry.

The mystical attack predicted by Susanna manifested itself in the most disgusting manner shortly afterward. Returning from work, Nina discovered in the middle of her ottoman, on her knitted beige divan cover, a revolting pile of something of a completely and unambiguously material nature. The stench filling the flat was so foul that the very air in her home seemed to have taken on that gray-brown tinge of unendurable wretchedness with which she was so familiar from her dreams. She put her head on her arms, let her sad Caucasian hair fall down, and cried. Not for long, however, because Tomochka arrived. She gasped, busied herself with removing the pile, and explained its provenance.

“Don’t leave the quarter-light in the window open. Some stray tomcat from the roof has got into the habit of visiting you.”

“What do you mean, tomcat?” Nina protested.

“What do you mean, what do I mean? A big tomcat—a very big tomcat, indeed—made that mess,” Tomochka elaborated confidently. She knew what she was talking about. She had been a cat-lover for the whole of her life.

Nina laundered the cover and swabbed the floors, and they were able to breathe more easily. They didn’t manage to dispel the smell completely, however, and went to sleep at Tomochka’s. Before leaving, they closed the quarter-lights firmly.

When Nina came home from work the next day, a pile was lying in just the previous location, directly on the blanket. The quarter-lights were shut. It really was something occult. Susanna was right. No tomcat could climb in through a closed window.

She set about washing and scrubbing again, used up a bottle of air freshener, and, trembling from an attack of nerves, went to bed on the desecrated ottoman. She had learned to put up with the smell, but now she couldn’t sleep because of vague noises coming from a source she couldn’t identify.

“This is what going mad must feel like,” Nina surmised.

When she went to work in the morning, she again took care to lock the windows and the door to the balcony. Despite this, she didn’t feel brave enough to return home alone and went round to collect Tomochka. It was after eight in the evening when the two of them arrived. Nina opened the complicated lock on the double doors and went in. Tomochka followed. He was waiting for them, as if he had decided that the time had come to introduce himself. He was sitting in the armchair, huge, self-assured, with his pouchy cheeks and muzzle turned toward the door. Nina was taken aback. Tomochka seemed positively delighted.

“Wow, what an enormous cat!”

“What are we going to do?” Nina asked in a whisper.

“Do? Feed him, of course.”

“Are you out of your mind? We’ll never get rid of him! Look, he’s fouled again, over there.” A new pile of muck was lying in the middle of the hallway.

He certainly was a character, and with a practiced eye too. He unerringly selected the exact midpoint of his target.

“First, we need to give him something to eat, and then we’ll see,” Tomochka decided.

He was not fluffy. On the contrary, his fur was as smooth as asphalt. He sat there without stirring, his head slightly lowered. He fixed them with a feral stare and, as far as one could judge, totally without remorse.

“How can he be so brazen!” Nina exclaimed indignantly, but took out of the fridge a saucepan of old soup which, obedient to habits of many years’ standing, she still boiled up. She dropped in two rissoles and banged it down on the cooktop.

Tomochka put a bowl of the warmed-up soup down by the door, right on the doormat, and called, “Pussy, pussy!” He was versed in the language of humans, jumped heavily down from the armchair, and strolled over to the saucer. He was an imposing creature. If he had been human you might have said he walked like a retired weight lifter or wrestler, stooped by the combined weight of his muscles, physical attrition, and reputation. He stopped in front of the bowl, sniffed it, crouched down, and, pressing one ear to his head while the other, a torn lop-ear, drooped, began lapping it up rapidly, as Tomochka exhorted him in tones of supplication.

“Eat up, kitty, kitty! Eat up and then off you go. Off you go, there’s nothing to keep you here. Eat up and off you go home, please.”

He glanced around, turning his broad chest, and gave her a knowing look, then stuck his head into the bowl of soup again. When he had finished, he licked the bowl clean.

Tomochka opened the front door for him and said firmly, “And now, off you go!”

He understood the situation precisely, walked craftily in the direction of the door, did a volte-face at the shoe tray, and, executing a lightning-fast semicircular detour around the flat, squeezed in under the bookcase.

“He doesn’t want to leave,” Nina said despairingly. “I knew we shouldn’t have fed him.”

“Pussy, pussy,” Toma hissed heatedly, but the cat did not respond.

Nina brought the mop from the bathroom and rammed it viciously under the bookcase. The cat hurtled out, rushed around the apartment a couple of times, and disappeared under the little sofa, which had its back pressed up against the raised kitchen area. Nina prodded under the sofa, then moved it away. The tomcat was not there. He had vanished. The friends looked at each other.

They stood in silence for a moment, taking in what had happened. Then Tomochka leaned down and began not very happily to feel along the baseboard. She pressed slightly and it shifted. It was the entrance to a flat little basement underneath the kitchen floor.

“So that’s where you’ve got him living,” Tomochka said, with artless satisfaction. “And you thought it was something mystical!”

“How dreadful. We’ll never be able to get him out of there.”

“That baseboard has got to be hammered back in place right away,” Tomochka said with idiotic certainty, as she jumped to her feet.

“What do you mean?” Nina said, imagining the consequences. “Supposing he dies in there? Can you imagine what it would be like having a dead cat in the house?” Oh, if onl y Seryozha were alive, none of this nonsense would be happening.

“We need to buy some valerian drops. That’s it! We’ll lure him out with valerian and then board it up,” Tomochka exclaimed. “Only it’ll take quite a lot of valerian.”

They bought a lot of valerian, filled a saucer with it, and hid. Tomochka clearly had a deep understanding of feline psychology, because within five minutes the tomcat crept out through the loose board, padded friskily over to the saucer, and lapped it all up in a single session. He moved away from the saucer to return to his hole, swaying like a sailor on board ship. He staggered, having plainl y lost his sense of direction, turned round awkwardly, and headed toward the ottoman on which the two friends were hiding. The first glimmerings of a sense of humor appeared in Nina.

“In a minute he’s going to ask us for a cigarette.”

When she had finished giggling, Tomochka instructed, “That’s it. Now we catch him and put him outside. And board that hole up pronto.”

She again hissed “Pussy, pussy” and held out her arms to the cat, but he darted to one side. Nina grabbed him, but he wriggled free and fell heavily to the floor. He might be drunk but he wasn’t giving in. The cat was evidently trying to struggle back to his hole, but Nina, like the Second World War hero Alexander Matrosov, covered the enemy gun embrasure with her own body, holding the loose board in place with her bluish fingers.

“Tomochka, get the cardboard box in the bathroom,” she shrieked, but the cat seemed to have guessed what they were planning and decided on a retreat to the balcony. With every minute that passed he was getting more inebriated. “The door! Shut the balcony door! He’ll fall off!”

Tomochka beat the cat to it and slammed the door in front of his nose. With considerable difficulty they crammed him into the cardboard box the juicer had come in. He snarled something in a deep voice that sounded like swearing, possibly even impugning their mothers’ virtue. They lugged the box down to the courtyard, set it next to the garbage container, and opened the lid. He continued yowling but did not come out. The women hurried home to nail up the gap. They had a little celebration to mark their deliverance from the enemy, toasting it in good Georgian wine, but their rejoicing was to prove premature.

A particular strength of this itinerant cat was the ease with which he transformed himself from a shameless animal, which behaved in ways not even the most backward female cat would countenance in her own home, into an ethereal specter. He could slip in and out of Nina’s dreams and her everyday life, leaving in both of them an appalling stink, fear, and a special cat quality that seemed to become detached from him and to disperse, to settle on everything and penetrate Nina through the air, through the pores of her skin, so deeply that she used up bottles of shampoo and soap trying to wash away its pervasive loathsomeness. The cat himself did not physically reappear, but she now dreamed of him almost every night. He could change his appearance deftly, but Nina learned to recognize him in a dark cloud creeping up from a corner, in a landscape that unquestionabl y related to him, and even in a gentleman she identified in the crowd, as in former times one might have identified a secret agent.

Susanna, informed of all these peripeteias as she was leaving for some colloquium or symposium in Germany, promised Nina to discuss the situation with the most authoritative specialist in the whole of Europe.

One night the tomcat again appeared in the flesh. How he had got into the apartment remained a mystery. The loose baseboard was nailed down, and the balcony door and windows were tight shut. The fireplace was above suspicion, since its straight flue went directly up to the roof and no cat, unless possessed of the physiology of a flea, could have leaped the more than ten feet of absolutely vertical chimney stack. In any case, the fireplace had a fire screen pressed against it. Probably the only way to discover the cat’s secret passage would have been to demolish the old house in its entirety. He jumped up onto a high shelf, capsized it, and brought down all the delicate black potter y, a marvel of Georgian applied art, that Nina had collected in her student years.

Having just survived the horrors of the end of the world, which in her dream had been accompanied by an avalanche with a matte black tinkling sound, Nina turned on the lamp to find the floor covered in pottery fragments. The tomcat, not having had time to dissolve as only he knew how, had retreated to a corner and was baring his teeth like a dog on a chain. This was such a natural continuation of her dream that she wasn’t immediately sure whether she was now in a new dream or in her own home.

Nina picked up the shards of pottery and, without turning around, complained disconsolately, “What sort of bastard are you? Where do the likes of you come from? Why do you keep coming here? What is it you want from me? Just tell me, will you?” She took half a chicken from the fridge and carried it out to the landing. “Here, go and eat that, and I never want to set eyes on you again!”

He hadn’t actually been demanding food, but neither was he going to turn up his nose at it. He strolled indolently out after the chicken. Nina closed the door behind him, well aware that she couldn’t get rid of him that easily.

Four days later he was back. He was sitting in the armchair entirely at his ease, as if it were his place. In the center of the beige cover, which had been laundered and aired on the balcony, lay proof positive of his dominance over both this apartment and Nina herself.

Susanna, meanwhile, returned from Germany and invited Nina for dinner. Susanna was now serene and calm. Her home was redolent of wealth, ecclesiastical odors, and burning candles. For dinner she served something completely insubstantial that Nina would have been ashamed to offer to a guest. In contrast, Susanna herself was like a widowed queen. She was cloaked in a lilac vestment, her head bound round with a turbanlike violet scarf, and her makeup was so dark and monstrous that no one could have accused her of coquettishness.

They ate a dark blue salad of red cabbage before drinking claret-colored rose-hip tea, all color-coordinated. Susanna then explained to Nina something that could have occurred only to her. She stressed that this was not only her personal opinion but a particular insight of her teacher. It seemed that a human being is set certain specific tasks that he or she must complete, and that higher powers, angels and the like, and also our teachers in this world, help us to do so. If, however, a person rebels, these tasks become transformed into something nightmarish: an illness, for example. A tomcat, even. Nina’s cat was nothing less than a manifestation on the physical plane of some spiritual disharmony. It was even possible that this was not something caused by Nina herself but to be found in the relationships of relatives who had already passed on.

“This is very serious, Nina. Much work will be required. I am prepared to help you myself, to the extent of my abilities, and to introduce you to advanced people,” Susanna concluded.

This conversation and all the lilac coloration left Nina feeling even worse, and she began to wonder whether after all she shouldn’t go to church with Tomochka, since she was after all an Orthodox Christian, baptized as an infant in the old Church of Saint Nina in Tbilisi. She even had godparents.

Nina could not sleep again that night, and pills did not help.

The following day Mirkas, her boss and a friend of the late Seryozha, called her into his office after lunch. He had taken her on in his office after Seryozha died and offered her a good salary, even though at that time he had no idea how exact and meticulous she always was. In practice, her record keeping couldn’t be bettered.

Now Nina was worried that she might have made a mistake. Last week they had put through a very complicated contract, and she might well have muddled something up.

When she entered his office, however, he took her aback by sa ying, “Look, Nina, you’re not ill, are you? You don’t look at all well.”

There was an awkwardness in their relationship. When Seryozha was alive they had been on straightforward friendly terms, but now this was in conflict with their new business relationship.

Nina went to some lengths to keep the mood neutral. “It’s nothing serious. I’m having trouble sleeping.”

He looked her over as if appraising a new consignment of goods. Not his type, but undeniably stylish. She was thin with an early, frank graying of her hair, and always wore black. Her chin was too long, of course, and her cheeks hollow; she had rings under her eyes; but there was certainly something about her. . . .

“Get yourself a lover,” he advised her bluntly.

“Is that an instruction from the boss or a piece of friendly advice?” She looked down, but her chin wanted to rise. Silly girl. So proud of herself.

“Insomnia is an illness too. Perhaps you need a holiday. Tunisia, the Canaries, or wherever it is that girls go on holiday nowadays. The firm will pay for it. Take a week, ten days. You look dreadful.”

He sounded irritated, perhaps even disdainful. Nina raised her chin higher and higher.

Then he pulled a wry face and said, in a kindly, direct voice, “Come on, what’s happened? What’s troubling you?”

At that, proud Nina’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Mirkas, you won’t believe it. There’s this tomcat that’s driving me crazy.”

Haltingly and not entirely coherently, Nina told him the whole story. The more he heard the more his sympathy seemed to evaporate, until at the end he cut her short with his routine senior-management voice. “Okay, fine. Next time it shows up, call my pager straight away. I’ll sort it out.”

There were rumors circulating to the effect that Mirkas was well able to sort out troublemakers.

Those rumors may possibly also have reached the cat, because there was neither sight nor sound of him for several days, although he did not leave Nina’s apartment without his attentions. One time she went off to work without closing the wardrobe door, and the unconscionable creature naturally took advantage of her oversight to foul in there. Poor Nina had to take all her considerable collection of clothes to the cleaners, and even then she still seemed to detect that catty smell. It was too awful.

The day did come, however, when she discovered the cat sitting, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, in her armchair. She immediately called Mirkas. He arrived precisely twenty minutes later, all of which time Nina spent sitting dejectedly on a stool in the bathroom.

Without a word, Mirkas made straight for the armchair, but the two sides proved evenly matched. He grabbed the cat by the scruff of its neck and it sank its claws into his arm. A visceral roar was heard, and there was no way of telling who it had come from.

“Goodness me!” Nina gasped, when she saw the bloody stripes on Mirkas’s arm.

“The balcony!” Mirkas barked.

Nina ran ahead of him and opened the balcony door. Well, that’s not going to do any good, she reflected, not yet having read Mirkas’s mind. He’ll just come back again.

The bloodied Mirkas held the tomcat by the scruff of its neck while it scratched at him with all its claws. Nina pressed herself against the door in horror. She couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Growling a low ominous curse, Mirkas took a swing and hurled the cat over the balustrade of the balcony. Nina distinctly registered a moment when the cat’s trajectory took it upward for an instant. As it flew, it straightened its forepaws and lowered its head. It seemed then to freeze like a weightless cosmonaut in the emptiness of space, before disappearing from view. A sound was immediately heard from below as if somebody had emptied out a bowl of water. In the darkness of the courtyard nothing could be seen. Nina, still traumatized, rinsed Mirkas’s scratch wounds as he shook his head.

“That was some beast. . . . Animals like that should be shot.” He looked as if he had just killed an old woman with an ax.

For the whole of that night, Nina slept like a log. It was a long time since she had felt so completely rested. As she was about to leave the house in the morning, however, she was suddenly horrified at the thought that the dead cat might be lying beneath her balcony. How could she possibly walk past it? Of course, everyone knows a cat can keep its balance while flying through the air, rotate its tail like a propeller, and land on all four paws.

There was no dead cat by the house; in fact, there was nobody around at all. Nina left Chisty Lane and walked toward Zubovskaya Square.

The cat had disappeared, either for the present or forever. Nina’s mood went from bad to worse. Mirkas probably had killed it, and although it was undeniably a terrible rogue, Nina had only wanted it removed, not dispatched. Now, however, after all the upset, there did seem to be some relief, although each day when Nina came back from work she was half expecting to find the wretched brute sitting in her chair.

Meanwhile, the anniversary of Seryozha’s death was approaching. She needed to hold a reception for thirty people or so, and to do it not just anyhow but in a fit and proper manner. Mirkas was remembering the anniversary too. The whole week he had been walking around looking grumpy as hell. His arm had gone septic and he was having antibiotic injections. As he walked past Nina’s desk, however, he put down an envelope.

“Are you inviting people to a restaurant or having it at home?”

Nina’s pride was wounded. Nobody would have humiliated her like that when Seryozha was alive, but she snapped out of her absurd fit of pride, tossed her incomparable hair back from her face, and said, “Thank you, Mirkas.” She bought another suckling pig, some eels, and half a kilogram of caviar.

Early in the morning, Tomochka went off to church and commissioned a requiem for the dead. Nina didn’t go with her; Seryozha could never stand that kind of thing when he was alive. Instead, she took some flowers to the cemeter y. The headstone had already been erected. Nina had made all the arrangements early in the spring. It was a large black-and-gray stone, rough and simple.

In the evening, ever ything went off perfectly. The tables were generously laden and beautifully set, just the way Seryozha liked. Everybody came whom Nina wanted to see: his friends, his cousin and his cousin’s family, Seryozha’s single sister who didn’t much like Nina. Mirkas came with his old wife, Vika, whom he didn’t usually treat very well, rather than with any of his more recent acquisitions, of whom there had been a good few lately. Nina was pleased about that. Even Mikhail Abramovich came, a lawyer who had defended Seryozha long ago when he got into serious trouble. The lawyer had since become famous and was forever appearing on television, but even he hadn’t forgotten the first anniversary of the death.

Everybody had good things to say about Seryozha, some of which were even true: about his strength of character, his courage, his fortitude, and his talent. Valentina, the sister, did manage to slip in a reference to the fact that Nina had never borne him any children, but Nina didn’t bat an eyelid. This aspect of their life was something she had mourned long ago. She had forgiven him for forcing her, fool that she was, so passionatel y in love with him. . . . It was her mother who could never forgive him. What was the point of remembering it now, when she was thirty-nine?

The guests were late in leaving. They carried away Nina’s exceptional fare in their stomachs and left behind them a table that still retained something of its festive splendor and the aroma of expensive cigarettes. Nina packed Tomochka off home; Toma had got herself as tipsy as a schoolgirl and kept wanting to say something special and deeply felt about God, which just embarrassed everybody else. Left alone, Nina took her time clearing everything up, talking under her breath to Seryozha, as she often did. Entirely predictably, she got no more response back from him now than she had when he was alive.

At about four in the morning, she climbed into her clean cold bed, with the blue-and-green checked bed linen she had bought three years ago in Berlin, when she and Seryozha had been there on their last trip together. Even though this time she had taken no pills, she fell asleep just as soon as she was warm and slept deeply, her eyeballs moving to and fro beneath her dark eyelids. Toward morning, when the branches of the great lime tree began coming to life and quietly rustling in the first breeze of the day as they touched the railing of the balcony, she had the most amazing dream of her entire life.

She was standing on the top floor of a large dachalike building that was not yet complete, because looking down you could see the accommodations on the lower stories, rafters and staircases, and all this on several levels that weren’t clearly separated. She suddenly heard singing. A woman’s voice was singing an old Georgian song. Her grandmother, Nina guessed, and immediately saw her. She was sitting on a little stool, on a cushion with a brown tassel. Her black hat was pulled over her hair, and dark cloth cascaded down the sides of her glowing face. She was singing but her mouth was firmly shut, the lips unmoving, and Nina again very easily guessed that this was a different singing, which proceeded not from the vocal cords but from a different organ, one unrelated to the throat but without which no singing is possible. As soon as she guessed which point in the solar plexus the singing was coming from, she heard the song divide into two voices: her grandmother’s low alto and a second soprano voice, her own lost soprano, her irretrievable joy but even more wonderful, purer, more silken than it had been when she was studying at the Conservatory. The sound of her voice, restored to her and rejuvenated, had an otherworldly quality that drew others to it as a magnet draws iron, and the light unfinished house began suddenly to fill up with people. There were no strangers among them, even though Nina did not know all of their names. These were her gray-brown shades, but the sound of this mysterious singing made them become lighter, and they developed like images on photographic paper. Among them she first made out her mother and then also Seryozha.

Nina was descending a staircase toward them just as they recognized each other in the crowd and embraced, as if one had been waiting for the other on a station platform and the train had finally arrrived. Her mother, slim and very young, still half hidden behind Seryozha’s wide embrace, suddenly caught sight of her, laughed, and cried out, “Niniko!”

The sound of her mother’s voice was not as it usually was. It too was part of the Georgian song, although the song had ceased to be in Georgian and its words, although wholly understandable, were in a different language.

Seryozha put his arm around Nina’s shoulder, and the smell of his skin and his hair burned her, and she saw that his nostrils were flared, and he lowered his head to her hair.

Something gently butted her below the knee, and turning she saw an enormous cat rubbing against her legs and demanding to be stroked. It was him, the accursed tomcat that had given her so much grief. Seryozha bent down and stroked its asphalt back. Her mother, with a gesture of friendly familiarity, straightened the side of Seryozha’s jacket. But that was not all. From somewhere to one side, arm in arm, her two friends, Tomochka and Susanna, were coming toward her. Their faces too were so lovely that Nina laughed as she realized that, although the two of them had been the most terrible idiots, that had only been for a while.