Sonechka

Dauntless Women of the Russian Steppe

THE TABLE was laden with the improvidence of the poor, the food untouched by human hand, having been bought at Zabar’s, an upmarket delicatessen on 81st Street, and lugged by Vera the whole length of New York to Queens before being dished up in haste in rather basic Chinese bowls. There was twice as much food as necessary for three women who were trying to lose weight, and enough drink for five hard-drinking men, of whom, as luck would have it, there were none.

The overprovision of spirits was unplanned. Vera, the hostess, had put up ordinary bog-standard vodka and had a bottle in reserve in the cupboard. Both her guests had brought a bottle each, Margot contributing Dutch cherry brandy and Emma, a Muscovite on a business trip, producing counterfeit Napoleon brandy, acquired at the food hall on Smolensk Square for a special occasion. The special occasion had now arrived, since she had landed this fantastic expense-paid trip that was almost more than she could have hoped for.

Margot and Emma now sat before the feast provided by Vera, but their hostess had gone to take Sharik for a walk; because of his advanced age, he couldn’t contain himself for long. His good breeding meant he couldn’t bring himself to excrete at home, with the result that he was riven by inner conflict. They sat in silence by the lavish spread and awaited the return of Vera, with whom Margot had become very friendly in America. Vera and Emma had not met before but knew a lot about each other, because Margot was a chatterbox. Since yesterday evening some long-forgotten cat had run between Margot and Emma, and Emma was now trying to remember why she had sometimes distanced herself from Margot long ago in Moscow, before returning to her as if to an ex-lover.

EMMA WAS staying not at a hotel but with Margot, whom she had not seen for a full ten years. They had been born in the same month, lived on the same block in Moscow, studied in the same class, and until they were thirty had never been apart for more than a few days. When they met up again they had been sure to pour out to each other every detail of their adventures during the intervening period. They both had babies in the same year, and their children brought them even closer together. Having put them to bed, they would meet up in Emma’s kitchen, smoke a pack of Java cigarettes each, confess to each other as a matter of course all their thoughts and deeds, their sins of omission and commission, and would part absolved, replete with conversation, after two in the morning, with less than five hours left for sleeping.

Now, after a separation of ten years, they had clasped themselves to each other’s bosoms and known a joy of mutual comprehension such as is usually experienced only by musicians in a good jam session, when every twist and turn of the theme can be anticipated through the agency of a special organ not present in other human beings. They knew all the events of the other’s life, since they corresponded not often but regularly. There were many things, however, that you couldn’t put in a letter, that could be communicated only by a tone of voice, a smile, an intonation. Margot had divorced her alcoholic husband, Venik Goven, three years previously—Shitty Bogbrush, as she called him—and was now passing through the phase of her exodus from the darkness of Egypt. The wilderness in which she was wandering afforded her limitless freedom, but she was not happy. There was a void that had previously been occupied by Venik, with the empty vodka bottles in his briefcase, in the wardrobe, among the children’s toys; with the ignominy of his drunken sex; with his stealing of family money, the children’s, the rent, whatever. There now sprouted in this empty space dreadful quarrels with her elder son, sixteen-year-old Grisha, and complete alienation from nine-year-old David. All this she now explained to Emma, and Emma could only tut-tut, shake her head, sigh, and, without actually coming up with any practical advice, empathize so passionately that Margot felt a whole lot better. Emma saluted her successes in émigré life, her truly heroic achievement in getting her university degree recognized and landing a modest goldfish in the shape of a job as nursing assistant in a private cancer clinic, with good prospects of herself becoming licensed in due course, and so on. It was a long story.

The first three days in Margot’s apartment—or, rather, nights, since during the day the friends had to rush off to their work—had been spent mainly discussing the extravagant behavior of Bogbrush. Emma could only marvel that the absence of a husband seemed to preoccupy Margot every bit as much as had his presence. It might have been expected that someone who had endured so many years with a bad person, an alcoholic in the bargain, and reluctant because of her Oriental origins to separate, should now be feeling very pleased with herself for having finally plucked up the courage to get divorced. Alas, no. Now she was agonizing over why she had put up with it for so long and was reliving the saga in great detail and at great length.

The evening did, however, eventually arrive when Margot got around to asking Emma, “So how are you getting on? What’s the score with your hero?” That might even have been genuine interest in her voice.

“It’s all over.” Emma sighed. “We’ve split up, at last. I’m beginning a new life.”

“When?” Margot was suddenly interested, having also finished her old life but being quite unable to find a new one to start.

“The day before I came here. On the eighteenth.”

She went over her last meeting with Gosha. She had gone to his studio, which was crammed with people made of twisted metal. She thought they looked tragic, as if they had accidentally come to life not in a body of flesh and blood but in unyielding metal and were now tormented by feelings of rusty inadequacy.

“Do you know what I mean?”

“Well, yes, I think so. What then? You met—”

“We were going nowhere. It was a dead end. There was no way out. His wretched wife is completely useless. One daughter is ill, and the other is a downright psychopath. He can’t get away from them, and I was only making things worse. Our relationship wasn’t helping anyone, and he was drinking because it was all so hopeless.”

Margot gave Emma her Armeno-Azerbaijani look. Disquiet was replaced by distaste, which broke through as an improper question. “Emma, do you sleep with him when he’s pissed?”

“Margot, in the past eight years I have seen him sober perhaps twice. He is simply never not pissed.”

“Poor girl.” Margot screwed up her overlarge eyes. “I do understand.”

“You don’t, you don’t.” Emma shook her head. “He’s fantastic, and it doesn’t matter if he’s drunk or sober. He is just what every woman needs. He is all man. It’s just he’s in this dreadful situation, and he dragged me into it. He owes me nothing, it’s just life, but I have finally decided to break up with him. I’m getting out. I mustn’t stand in his way. He is creative, he is special. He is quite different from all those engineering plodders. The whole world is different for him. Of course, I will never meet anyone remotely like him again, but he belonged to me. That is part of my life, a whole eight years, and nobody can take it away. It is mine.”

“What makes you think this is your final breakup? You have already written to me three times to say you have broken with him, and every time you go back again. I keep all your letters,” Margot reminded her, rather unnecessarily.

“You know, before I only thought about what was best for him, but now I have looked at things from the other side. I am thinking about myself now, what’s best for my own life. I am past forty—”

“I know all about that. Me too,” Margot remarked.

“Well, there you are. It’s just the right moment to start a new life. We have split up on my terms, do you see? I was the one who chose the time and place. We spent our last night . . . I will never forget it, because it went beyond the bounds of what usually happens in sex. This was something else, in the presence of heaven. Those metal people he welds were there like witnesses. You can’t imagine what it’s like, living with an artist.”

“No, I can’t. Venik is a software engineer, admittedly a very good one. He is not at all heavenly, as you know. He is the ultimate egoist, and he really doesn’t need anything other than his computer and his vodka. You were always extraordinary, though, Emma, and so were your lovers. That Hungarian hunk you had! What was his name?”

“Isztvan.”

“And your husband, Sanek, was such a decent man. You will find another and get married again, but I?” Margot pushed her thumbs under her brassiere and raised her still flowering but slightly wilting tackle. “In spite of all this”—she stood up and turned around, swaying her hips to show off the wonderful receptacle she was, with her breasts, her slender waist, the convincing firm roundedness of her rump—“damn little good it does me. In my entire life, since I was eighteen, I have slept with no one other than Shitty Bogbrush. Explain to me, Emma, if you will, how things have worked out this way. You have no figure, your tits aren’t even a size two, and, forgive me for saying it, you are bowlegged. So why do you always have shoals of lovers?”

Emma laughed good-naturedly, not offended in the least. “What I love about you, Margot, is your directness. I can tell you why, though, and anyway I have been saying this for a long time. It’s the Armeno-Azerbaijani conflict. You have to resolve it in yourself. Are you an Oriental woman or a Western woman? If you are Oriental, don’t divorce your husband; if you are Western, get yourself a lover and don’t see it as a problem.”

Margot was unexpectedly upset. “But I know your whole family, your mother and your grandmother. What way are your Jewesses better than my Armenian mum? What makes you so Western?”

“Western woman respects herself. Do you remember my grandmother?”

Margot certainly did. Cecilia Solomonovna was a grand old woman, a czarina, but actually she was bowlegged too. Was she really a Westerner?

On that note of bathos Margot had cleared the dishes from the table the night before, looked at her watch, and sighed because, as in their days in Moscow, it was already past two o’clock and she had to get up at seven. They had gone off to their rooms to sleep, Margot to the bedroom and Emma to the sitting room where there was a new convertible divan. It had been bought after the departure of Venik, when there was suddenly a lot of money in the house again, as if she had had a big win in the lottery.

NOW VERA returned, her wrinkled but still youthful face flushed and her hair badly dyed. Behind her, Sharik waddled like an old man and sat down to the left of her chair, feigning indifference to the food on the table.

There’s a couple who don’t disguise their age, Emma thought admiringly.

Vera flopped down in her wicker chair, which gave a thin screech. She reached for a bottle. “The date’s an odd number, but I count in lunar months. It is seventeen months today since Misha died.”

She poured out the vodka without asking, and Emma noted that the glasses came from Moscow, crystal from the Stalin era.

“May the Kingdom of Heaven be yours, Misha,” Vera exclaimed joyously, and drained the glass. Then she sighed. “A year and a half. It seems like yesterday.”

She took a piece of smoked turkey from one of the plates and threw it to the dog.

“Pig yourself, Sharik. This is pure poison for you.”

The dog appreciated his mistress’s gesture. He was again torn between two powerful urges. One was to immediately lick her hand in gratitude, and the other was to no less immediately swallow the piece of meat with its golden tan and heavenly taste. He froze in consternation. Sharik had a complex personality.

“Now for a blowout,” the hostess murmured hazily. “Dig in, girls! Since Misha passed away I don’t think I’ve cooked a meal once. It’s been all fast-food outlets. Margot! How about it?”

Either because they were all really starving or because the dog was growling in ecstasy over his turkey, they fell upon the food, forgetting about forks, the proprieties, and pausing for breath. They were suddenly ravenous. They didn’t even say how good the food was, just chomped in silence, helping each other to more, passing around the vodka. Sharik became quite animated under the table as they threw him some as well. Everything was so delicious, the skate and the salads, the pie and the pâté, and just the sheer un-American taste of the food, which Margot mentioned.

Vera laughed. “Un-American: Of course it is! The food tastes Jewish. The store where I bought it, Zabar’s, is Jewish. Misha and I took a fancy to it as soon as we arrived. It was really expensive, and we had no money then. We bought four-ounce portions at a time: potato and herring forshmak, pâté; there was no black bread to be had in America at that time, except in Zabar’s. Here in America, Jews from Russia are called Russians, and people like me who actually are Russians become incredibly judaized.”

Vera laughed, addressing herself to Emma, who was ignorant of these local nuances.

“My poor grandmother died on the eve of our wedding, I suspect from grief that her beloved granddaughter was marrying a Jew. But Mother just kept saying, ‘Who cares if he’s a Jew? At least we’ll have one son-in-law who isn’t a drunkard.’”

Vera chortled with mirth; her wrinkles gathered in bouquets on either cheek and, paradoxically, made her look even younger.

“Was he a heavy drinker?” Emma asked. It was a question in which she had a personal interest.

“Of course he was!” Margot frowned.

“God, yes. Wasn’t he just!” Vera turned her smiling face to the large portrait of her departed husband. The quality wasn’t too good. The portrait had been blown up from an old photograph taken just after the war: a young soldier with an unruly shock of curly hair springing out from beneath his cheese-cutter hat and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “A bit of all right, eh? Everything about him was all right, including his drinking. He died of cyrrhosis of the liver, Emma.”

Margot put her head with its luxuriant tresses on the veined marble of her arm. She was a goddess, a natural goddess, with a Roman nose that grew out of her forehead, improbably large eyes, and lush lips shaped like Cupid’s bow.

“Vera, your Misha was, of course, a lovely man, charming and altogether outstanding, but let’s face it; he put you through hell with his drinking. I know all about it. What good can come from drinking? It’s tantamount to surrendering your humanity! You don’t deny that, do you?”

Vera pushed aside the empty vodka bottle. They had somehow got through it without noticing. She produced the second and said, still with the same smile, “Stuff and nonsense! Getting drunk liberates you. If someone is a good person, he gets even better when he is drunk, and if he is shit, he gets shittier. You can take my word for it, I know what I’m talking about. Wait a minute, though, something’s missing.”

She jumped up, poked about on a shelf, produced a cassette, and put it on to play. The gravelly, compelling voice of Alexander Galich half sang, half spoke: A bottle of samogon, halvah, two bottles of Riga beer, and herring from Kerch. . . .

“Misha loved him. They were drinking partners, friends.”

Nobody listened to the poor guitar, and the voice from the past went unheeded as they drank and talked about matters nearer home. Vera drank vodka, Emma her suspect brandy, and Margot took a bit of everything.

Strangely enough, as they went on drinking they gradually changed but in different directions. Vera became more cheerful and her spirits rose, Margot became glum and tetchy and seemed cross because she couldn’t see why Vera was enjoying herself so much, while Emma watched both of them and had a sense that she was about to learn something vital that would help her begin her new life. She sat listening closely but saying little, all the more since the alcohol seemed not to be having much effect on her today.

“I don’t care what you say.” Vera made a sweeping Russian gesture with her arm as if about to launch into a folk dance. “In Russia all the best, most talented people since ever was have been drunks. Peter the Great! Pushkin! Dostoyevsky! Mussorgsky ! Andrey Platonov! Venedikt Yerofeev! Yury Gagarin! My Misha!”

Margot goggled. “What’s your Misha doing in that list, Vera? Gagarin if you must, damn him, but Misha? Misha, for heaven’s sake!”

Vera suddenly went quiet and became serious. She said softly, “Well, he was one of Russia’s best . . . so honest. . . .”

Margot had got the bit between her teeth, however, and there was no stopping her. “And what’s Peter the Great doing there? The man was mad! He was a syphilitic! Okay, he was at least an emperor, but your Misha was a complete Jew! What was so honest about him, eh? The amount of shit he made you eat! Honest, indeed!”

By now Margot was addressing herself not to Vera but to Emma.

“Honest! Him? I can’t bear to hear it! How many abortions did he put her through, her Mr. Honesty? How many women did he put himself around to while you were going through hell with all those abortionists? There wasn’t one of your friends he didn’t poke. It was disgusting!”

“Well, he didn’t try it on with you, did he!” Vera snorted.

“What do you mean? You think he tried it on with everyone except me? He just didn’t get lucky with me!”

Margot proudly cut her short. “Well you’re stupid! If you’d slept with Misha, things might have gone better with Bogbrush!”

“That’s enough! My Bogbrush may be shitty, but your Misha didn’t come to much either. Randy old man!”

Sharik got up laboriously, ambled over to Margot, and barked listlessly. Vera chortled.

“Girls! Margot! Emma! You mustn’t speak ill of Misha in the presence of Sharik. He’ll tear you to pieces.”

Sharik, aware that he had been praised, waddled over to his mistress and opened his black jaw with its raspberry-red lining in anticipation of a reward. Vera tossed him a piece of French cheese.

Margot, her blood now off the boil, downed a glass of brandy. “I didn’t like it, Vera, the way he just did as he pleased. He was unfaithful to you right, left, and center, and you went on loving him and forgave everything. I would have killed him. If I have a husband I love him, but if he cheats on me I cut his throat, I swear to God!”

COULD IT really be that in America, a world away, in the city of New York in 1990, this completely zany conversation was taking place, bitchy, more at home in a Moscow kitchen, and before you know it likely to boil over into a fight?

Emma listened in wonderment and observed her old friend, who had hardly changed at all. As Margot had been, so Margot remained, an Armenian woman with an Azerbaijani surname that had her Armenian relatives looking askance at her throughout her life. Her father, Zarik Husseinov, had died in a climbing accident when Margot was only six months old. There was no getting away from it, her passport might be American but her mentality was resolutely that of a woman from the Caucasus. She would feed everyone, give away all she possessed, but if you forgot her birthday she would kick up such a fuss you would hear about nothing else for the next year. “I’ll cut your throat!”

“MARGOT, you don’t understand at all!” Vera said. “The problem is inside yourself! You are simply incapable of loving. If you love someone, you do forgive them everything. Anything and everything.”

“But not to that extent!” Margot shrieked, shaking her symmetrical curls. “Not to that extent you don’t!”

Vera poured herself a drinking tumbler of vodka, not a full one, just half. She held it pensively and looked at the portrait diagonally across from her. It was as if the young Misha with his postwar shock of hair was gazing straight at her, although she had never known him when he looked like that. They had met later, when she enticed him away from his postwar second wife for her own—as it then seemed—private enjoyment. She had been wrong. Oh, how wrong she had been! He had run back even to his wartime wife, Zinka, which she had known about, and to his postwar wife, Shurochka, and there had even been another one. She looked unflinchingly at the portrait and at Margot.

“You are a fool. Listen, I loved Misha with all my strength, with my body and soul, and he loved me. You have no idea how much we loved each other. We made love drunk and sober, especially drunk. He was a great lover. He was not unfaithful to me, he just slept with other women. I wasn’t a bit jealous. Well, perhaps just a bit,” she corrected herself. “But only when I was young, before I understood. He had a talent for loving, and when the cyrrhosis caught up with him, we really loved each other with passion, because time was running out. We both knew it. . . .

“He had a girl in the hospital, a nurse, who fell in love with him one last time. I knew all about her; he didn’t hide it. He slept with her. Then he said, ‘No, I don’t want anyone else. There is not much time. Get them to discharge me. I want to die at home, with you.’ We screwed until we cried. He kept saying, ‘How lucky I’ve been. I was seventeen when I went to the front in 1943, and I survived. I fought right through the war without killing anyone, I was in the maintenance section, repairing tanks. Women always loved me. I was sent off to the prison camps in 1949—they arrested me at college—but I lived to tell the tale. And again, women loved me. And you, my joy’— that’s what he said, my joy— ‘and you, my joy, fell in love with me. You were just a young girl and you went for an old goat. You saw what you wanted. Clever girl. Let me feel those folds, and what knees, what shoulders. I don’t know what to go for first.’ Two days before he died that’s what he said, with me already past my half century! What shoulders, what knees . . .

“They’re nothing of the sort. You’re a fool, Margot, a fool. You’ve let everything slip through your fingers, you haven’t seen anything. You are incapable of loving, that’s your problem. Your Bogbrush is nothing to do with it. He was out of luck, your Bogbrush. Perhaps another woman could have loved him and taught him to love, but what sort of a woman are you? All leafy top and nothing down below!”

Margot started to cry, stricken by this drunken truth. Perhaps that was right? Perhaps she was the problem? Perhaps Venik would not have drunk if she had loved him as much as Vera loved her Misha? Or perhaps he would still have drunk but would have loved her terribly. Then there would not have been the shame and embarrassment of drunken copulation, when you lay there filled with loathing while two hundred pounds of meat jerked up and down on you, braising your dryness, making you feel you were being impaled, and your breasts ended up covered in bruises as if you had been beaten and the brown marks took a year afterward to fade. The stench of the vodka he’d drunk and the smell from down below made waves of nausea roll over you, and you felt as seasick as if you were down in the hold of a ship, and you just hoped you could make it to the toilet to spew everything out into its gleaming white depths. What? Wasn’t that enough? You want more? Get away from me with your insatiable prong! What are you doing? What do you want now?

Emma too began to cry. What had she done? Gosha, I love you as I have never loved anyone, as nobody has ever loved anybody. No, no, I don’t want a new life. Let me just have this one back, with eternally drunk Gosha, with the despair every day, the worry, the trips hither and thither in the night in the ambulance, the redemptive third of a bottle of vodka in the mornings, the warm pie wrapped in newspaper. And all of it under the contemptuous gaze of her daughter: Has he had you flapping about in a panic again? All without the hope of any halfway normal life, without anything in return, without acknowledgment, without gratitude, without compensation. You just give and give, and that’s it.

“You just give, and that’s it! You don’t ask what you’re going to get in return!” Vera declaimed, ablaze with a drunken radiance and her visceral feminine wisdom. She poured out more vodka—in tumblers this time, not in the crystal liqueur glasses. She was chain-smoking and stuffing the cigarettes before she had finished them into a huge ashtray more appropriate to a public smoking area than to the private needs of a widow living on her own. She stubbed out a cigarette, rose to her full height, rocked forward, and clutched the edge of the table. The table also rocked but did not fall over. She kept her feet and shuffled across the floor as if it were an ice rink, chuckling and supporting herself against the wall, to the toilet.

“Vera really is drunk,” Margot commented, and immediately a crash was heard from the bathroom followed by a loud expletive. Several items had fallen, one of them heavy. Margot and Emma jumped up to run to her aid, but somehow couldn’t. They bumped into each other, which stopped their unwise attempts at running, and walked uncertainly toward the bathroom. Vera was floundering there on the floor, rubbing one of her celebrated knees and muttering to herself,

“People are always leaving their clothes on the floor and tripping you up. . . . Margot, why are you standing there like a cow? God knows, I’ve broken all my perfume bottles.”

The floor was indeed covered with wet glinting pieces of glass, and the smell of perfume hit you like an antitank shell.

They picked Vera up off the floor. She was a bit riotous, but in a cheery way, and kept demanding just a little bit more. Alas, all the bottles were empty: both the vodkas, the brandy, the liqueur, and a bottle of French wine, which had appeared from nowhere and which they had drunk without remarking its premium label.

“The premises are to be searched! Misha always had something hidden awa y. . . . In Moscow before we left, the KGB conducted a search. They found more hidden bottles than hidden books.” Vera opened all the drawers in the writing desk. “I have admittedly searched everywhere here on more than one occasion, but there must be something somewhere. Mishenka! Hello!”

She supplicated her husband’s portrait, raising to heaven her long arms, which were sagging slightly at the shoulders. Then she got down on her knees, not before the portrait but before the bookcase, pushed back the glass, and started hauling books out of the bottom shelf in slithering piles. She emptied the lower shelf: There was nothing there.

Emma and Margot were standing propped up like two trees leaning against each other, one thick and one thin. Margot was assailed by hiccups.

“You need something to drink,” Emma counseled.

“I’m looking, aren’t I? It’s got to be somewhere.”

Vera lay down on the floor on her back and kicked the books out with her foot, by now from the second shelf, on to the floor. One book split open and clinked. It was a pretend book with only a cover, within which there nestled a partly drunk bottle of vodka. Vera seized it and pressed it to her breast.

“Misha! My faithful friend! You thought you could hide it from me. Why did you even try? Found it!”

They poured out this final vodka, a present from Misha, and at last could drink no more. They were full to their ears with alcohol, to the upper limit of a woman’s capacity. Vera, before crashing out, told them to carry her to Misha’s study, and while they were en route completed her last drunken confessions, which might not have been confessions at all but only fantasies.

“Put me on the couch in the study, with Misha. I’ve got myself a gentleman visitor, a Puerto Rican boy, very handsome. I always make sure to put him down on this couch. It smells of Misha. Misha can watch him. He’s young, only thirty-five; Misha can watch him f-fucking my brains out. Misha enjoys it. ‘Enjoy yourself, my joy,’ he says, ‘enjoy, enjoy.’ That’s what he tells me.”

Margot tried for ages afterward to remember whether Vera had told her she had a Puerto Rican lover, or whether she had just imagined it because she was so drunk.

They deposited Vera on the couch. Sharik was already snoring there and didn’t take kindly to having to move. Margot and Emma headed for the bedroom, where a double bed, as wide as Vera’s Russian soul and just as soft, had been made up for them before the festivities began.

Margot, the last respectable woman on the continent, who still wore lace-edged bloomers, chastely extracted her brassiere from beneath them and collapsed onto the nostalgia-inducing feather bed. It had emigrated together with Vera from Tomilin on the outskirts of Moscow where, to this day, Vera’s mother and two elder sisters slept on similar mattresses.

Emma took off everything and slipped under the sheet in the nude, but everything immediately began to sway and rock, first in one direction, then in the other. “Oh, I feel bad,” she groaned.

“For whom is life in Russia good?” Margot responded brightly, remembering her Nekrasov from school. “The main thing is, don’t go to sleep before you feel better. Poor Bogbrush, can he really have felt as bad as this every day?”

“Even worse,” Emma whispered. “In the morning it’s always even worse than in the evening. Poor Gosha.”

An inexplicable feeling of tenderness welled up in Margot, and she couldn’t even tell toward whom it was directed. It might almost have been for Shitty Bogbrush. She sniffed, because her tears were ready to trickle, and put her arms around Emma’s skinny back. She was as thin as a fish and just as smooth, only not wet but as dry as toast, and slippery under her hands. Margot began to stroke her, at first her back, then her shoulders a little, and a warm powerful wave swept over her, carrying her out into uncharted waters. Emma just kept groaning, but she lay there completely still and motionless, and Margot raised herself a little. She stroked Emma’s insignificant breasts and was amazed at how delightful it was to touch them, as if the whole of her adolescent body had only been made to be stroked. She pressed her lips to her neck, and Emma’s skin smelled not of Vera’s explosive perfumes, which still had the entire apartment reeking as if someone had burned the milk. It smelled of something that caught you and entered the very center of your being, the very center. Margot felt as if a flower were opening up inside her belly and reaching out toward Emma, and she melted with pleasure. She touched Emma’s breasts, first with her lips and then with her fingers, lovingly, around the button of the nipple. . . .

Emma groaned. She was floating who knows where, but her stomach was lurching quite separately and she very much wanted to be sick. In order to do so, however, she needed to stay still, she needed to make an effort, but the swaying was so strong she couldn’t stop it. That anyone’s hands were stroking her was something of which she was quite unaware. Her feelings were concentrated in her stomach, and a bit in her throat.

Margot’s flower, however, was swelling up and about at any moment to burst open. She pressed her belly to Emma’s side, and her fingers rejoiced in the feel of Emma’s firm breasts, such a solid gland, she was palpating the inferior part, following a cord upward to the nipple, and farther left, a second one. A lump, another one. A textbook case. Cancer! No need for a biopsy! She must be operated on immediately!

Margot sat up with a jolt. “Emma!” she yelled. “Emma, get up! Get up at once!”

The intoxication vanished as if it had never been. Everything fell away. She stood there in her yellow lace-trimmed combinations with her sagging but perfectly healthy breasts; she had a mammogram twice a year, as any civilized woman does. She caught Emma under the armpits, set her on her rag-doll legs, shook her, and continued yelling.

“Stand up, will you, you silly bitch? Stand straight. Put your arms out, like this. It’s your armpits I need, not your elbows. Hold my shoulders!”

And with searching fingers she pressed into the soft hollow of Emma’s armpits, probing the depths. The lymph gland on the left was hardened and swollen, but not very much. The gland on the right was problem-free. She squeezed the left nipple.

“Ouch!” Emma responded.

“Did that hurt?”

“What do you think?!” Emma snapped and flopped back onto the bed.

Margot’s fingers were damp. “Emma, have you had a discharge from your nipple for long?”

“Give over, I’m already feeling sick enough. Give me something to drink.”

Margot dragged her to the bathroom. Emma was sick, then had a pee. After that, Margot pushed her under a cold shower. Morton was on duty at the clinic today, the best of their doctors. He was an old man who really knew his job and was very accommodating. They were in luck.

Margot pulled Emma out of the shower. By now she was looking entirely together. “Get ready quickly. We’re going to my clinic.”

“Margot, are you mad? I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got today off.”

“Me too. Get ready quickly. You’ve got God knows what going on in your mammary gland. It needs to be checked right away.”

Emma saw the situation at once. She pulled a towel off the rack and dried herself. She prodded her left breast. “Here?”

Margot nodded.

“Put the kettle on, Margot, and calm down. Do you think it would be very expensive for me to phone Moscow?”

“Go ahead. Do you know how to dial through?”

Margot brought the telephone. Emma dialed the code, then the Moscow number. Gosha didn’t answer for a long time.

“What time is it there now?” Emma suddenly wondered.

“It’s half past five here, plus eight. Half past one in the afternoon,” Margot calculated.

“Gosha! Goshenka!” Emma shouted. “It’s me, Emma. Yes, from New York. It’s all off. No split-up. I was being stupid. Forgive me! I love you! What’s up, are you drunk? Me too! I’ll be back soon. Only, you’ve got to love me, Gosha. And don’t drink. I mean, don’t drink so much.”

“I need half an hour to get my things together. No, forty-five minutes. I’ll order a taxi for six-fifteen,” Margot announced, taking the telephone out of Emma’s hands.

“Hey, what’s the hurry? Is it really that urgent?”

“It couldn’t be more urgent.”

At the door stood Sharik, old age making his needs, too, very pressing. He stood there waiting and smiling, with his tongue stuck out engagingly. They would have to take the old codger out for a walk before the taxi arrived.