The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

18

THREE DAYS AFTER GIVING BIRTH TANYA FELT AS IF SHE had been born again, as if the birth of her daughter had infused her with a certain quality of newness as well. Essentially, that was what had happened: she was a newborn mother and, although she still knew nothing about the lifelong burden of motherhood, about the immutable link between a woman and her child that alters a woman’s psyche—often to a painful degree—a thought had already awakened inside her that she wanted to share with her daughter before anyone else. She lowered her brown beanlike nipple into the child’s delicately opened mouth and tried to imbue the tightly swaddled bundle with the idea that they loved each other, mother and daughter, and would take joy in each other, and belong to each other, but not solely . . . that she, Tanya, would have her own separate life, but, in exchange, when she grew up, Tanya would give her freedom and the right to live the way she wanted, and that she would be the older daughter, and then there would be a little boy, and another little boy, and a little girl . . . And our family will not be like those others where the daddies yell at the mommies and fight over money and the children scream and take each other’s toys . . . And we will have a house in Crimea, and a garden, and music . . . Tanya fell asleep without finishing her picture of the happy future, while the little girl continued to suck. She had an amazing little girl who emanated sleep like a campfire emanates warmth . . . Tanya had never known such strong and powerful sleep . . . The practical nurse collected the fed infant and carried it away, while Tanya, though she noticed some movement around her, had not the will to wake up . . .

A week later Tanya was released, and Pavel Alekseevich delivered her and the baby to a large cold room in an expensive hotel. The little girl was set down perpendicularly on the immensely wide bed made of Karelian birch and covered with a woolen blanket and then a cotton-stuffed one. Soon after, Sergei showed up with a bouquet of frozen roses, champagne, and his saxophone. He pulled off his jacket filled with damp cold and rushed to the child. He sat down on the bed to look at the new face in its multilayered packaging.

“Oh my gosh, she’s so small. And how she makes you want to sleep!”

“She’s a terribly soporific girl, that’s for certain,” Tanya agreed. “As soon as they brought her into the ward, I would conk out.”

Essentially Tanya was not planning to go to Moscow, but things turned out not quite as she had wanted. Poluektova was scheduled to leave for Perm only at the end of January, while a long drawn-out scandal had erupted at Aleksandrov’s communal apartment with the neighbors, who had no intention of putting up with a tiny child on the other side of their plywood wall . . . Sergei refused to travel to Moscow to Tanya’s parents’ place: he had had enough of his own parents. Tanya’s departure upset him mainly because he had already managed to telephone everyone in town that he had a daughter, and no little vodka and dry wine had been drunk over the past week in that connection, but now he had no one to produce as proof.

Tanya hastily introduced her father to Sergei and asked if he would let her and Sergei go for a walk. Pavel Alekseevich let his daughter go for three hours, until the next feeding, and stayed with his little granddaughter. Five minutes after Tanya left, having been exposed to the infant’s soporific energy, he fell into a deep sleep, not to wake up until his daughter returned. He dreamed that he was asleep, but in the dream inside his dream it was summer outside, and a large group of children was getting ready to go to a pond. He was the eldest of the children, who included his younger sisters, nonexistent in real life, but who were very convincingly played by Lenochka in the role of an eight-year-old and Toma as a two-year-old. The other children were familiar, but also refashioned from adults he had come to know in the later years of his life. The duality of these people, however, did not at all surprise Pavel Alekseevich. What troubled him, rather, was that one of the boys was someone he did not know at all. Only at the very end of the dream, when the crowd of them poured out of their old dacha in Mamontovka, did it become apparent that the unknown little boy had been Tanya’s Sergei in disguise, after which Pavel Alekseevich stopped worrying and woke out of his deep sleep into a more shallow slumber and pressed the bundle swaddled in a thick blanket to his chest, thought for a minute about whether or not he wanted to go down to the pond with all these masquerading children, but decided not to return to that place . . .

The next day at eight fifteen in the morning, Pavel Alekseevich, his daughter, and granddaughter were home on Novoslobodskaya Street. Toma had not yet set off for work, Vasilisa crawled out of her pantry and stood with old Murka at her feet in her usual pose of greeting facing the corridor from the kitchen, propping herself with one hand against the wall. Out of the half-opened door into Elena’s room, Murka Jr. poked out first, followed by Elena in a robe thrown over her shoulders.

“Tanechka, I’ve been waiting for you for so long,” Elena said coherently and joyfully, and Tanya, passing her daughter to a perplexed Toma—who still did not know what to say and what to do—kissed her mother, while the latter pushed her away and reached for the bundle:

“Tanechka . . .”

“Momma, that’s my daughter.”

“That’s my daughter,” echoed Elena, anxious consternation forming on her face.

“Come with me, Momma, and I’ll show her to you . . .”

Tanya spread the child on her mother’s bed, while Pavel Alekseevich was relieved that Tanya was acting the right way, not scaring poor Elena, but drawing her into the new event.

Tanya undid the layers of clothes and extricated the tiny body. The little girl opened her eyes and yawned.

Elena looked on tensely and as if with disappointment.

“Well, do you like her?”

Elena lowered her head in embarrassment and looked the other way.

“That’s not Tanechka. That’s another little girl.”

“Mom, of course it’s not Tanechka. We still haven’t decided on a name for her. Maria, maybe? Masha, huh?”

“Evgenia,” Elena whispered barely audibly. Tanya did not hear what she said.

Vasilisa repeated: “How else? Evgenia. After your grandmother . . .”

Tanya bent over the little girl, who was pushing her little fist into her mouth.

“I don’t know . . . I have to think about it. Evgenia?”

While the women crowded around the baby, Tanya was swept upward, as if by a tidal wave, held there for a minute, then lowered down . . . She rushed about the apartment, looking into every cluttered corner . . .

“Dad, we’re remodeling,” she said to her father fifteen minutes later.

“Yes, actually, we’re long overdue,” Pavel Alekseevich agreed, “only now, I think, is not the time. There’s a baby in the apartment. Maybe in the summer, when you all go to the dacha . . .”

“No, no, I’ll leave for Piter later, we need to do it right now. We can start with the nursery . . . Then the common spaces, your study, the bedroom . . .”

In the evening, when Toma arrived home from work, half of her flowers had been distributed among the neighbors, half discarded, the furniture was stacked in the middle of the room, everything was covered over with a drop cloth, and a deal had been struck with the painters . . . Pavel Alekseevich got the feeling that their dilapidated abode, which had stood like an abandoned ship at anchor, had moved from its spot and set off sailing toward its destination, its sleepy crew awakened, and even the limp and sunken-in furniture lined up in formation and standing at attention . . . Vasilisa, who never threw anything out, surrendered to Tanya’s pressure and carried out of her pantry in her own two hands the decayed blanket given to her as a present by Evgenia Fedorovna in 1911, when it had already been not very new. But even that seemed not enough for Tanya, and with a cheerful sweeping movement she carried the chipped plates, burned pots and pans, and empty glass jars stored up just in case—Vasilisa’s entire collection of pauper’s-and-hoarder’s household goods—out to the trash heap.

The nameless little girl abided the orchestrated chaos almost without a peep, getting in no one’s way and demanding practically no attention. Tanya settled her in a laundry basket she had first lined with clean cotton print fabric, and for a while hauled the basket from room to room. Then Elena asked that the little girl be left near her bed, which formed a quiet corner that Tanya did not touch for the time being. The speed with which the apartment metamorphosed was amazing: the former girls’ room was redone in a week, and although Toma’s jungle suffered substantial losses, the surviving plants sparkled fresh against the background of sand-yellow wallpaper that recalled the heat of African deserts.

The next week was devoted to the kitchen and the bathroom. Cooking at home was cancelled. Tanya bought incalculable quantities of inexpensive food at the takeout store, fed the workers and her family as well as acquaintances, who dropped in from time to time. Vitalik telephoned on the third day, and Tanya greeted him with indifferent gladness. He came over immediately, frowning, with an insulted look on his face, but she did not trouble herself to notice. She showed him their daughter, as if she were her own private trinket. To his proposal that she move to Profsoiuznaya Street Tanya responded with a hurtful smile, but promised to visit him as soon as she finished her household affairs here.

“Valentina’s living with us now.” Vitalik reported his principal news.

“Why didn’t you bring her along?” Tanya asked with surprise.

“She’ll come. She frequently comes to visit Pavel Alekseevich. You know, all the legal hassles . . . Perhaps they’ll parole him early. The crime is the variety they usually serve only two-thirds of their terms for . . .”

“I should have done something about Ilya Iosifovich’s affairs . . . The whole lot of them, after all, are so amazingly inept,” thought Tanya. But that was unjustified: Valentina was entirely competent, and whatever she did she thought through carefully and carried out to the letter . . .

Tanya slept in Pavel Alekseevich’s study between the laundry basket holding her daughter and the telephone: Sergei called at night, and they would talk at length about everyday nothings, about the little girl, who had not yet been given a name, about the remodeling, and about Poluektova’s borzois, then Sergei would turn on a tape recording so that Tanya could hear the music he had played that day . . . That week he played a lot, almost every evening, because there were New Year’s parties everywhere, and they had a lot of gigs lined up—at institutes, clubs, and cafés . . . On the morning of December 31, Tanya was about to set out for one night in Piter, having tricked Sergei into telling her where he was playing and even bought a ticket for the day train. But such a fierce freeze set in the evening before that Tanya, not having told Sergei about her secret plan, cancelled her trip. She remembered how cold it had been in the train when she returned to Moscow with her newborn daughter. She was frightened that the little girl might catch cold . . . The decision turned out to be more than wise, because Sergei, following the same logic of caprice, or surprise, arrived to spend New Year’s Eve in Moscow and killed the few hours in between at a restaurant at the Leningrad train station . . .

By this time the remodeling had engulfed the entire apartment like fire. The place smelled of paint, glue, and roast goose. The table was set up in the former nursery. Toma, on Tanya’s orders, decorated the seven-foot fatsia (referred to by laypeople as fig tree). At the head of the table sat Pavel Alekseevich; next to him Elena, whom Tanya had dressed for the occasion, sat with a childlike, happy face. Vasilisa had donned her carpetlike yellow and crimson headscarf, which made her as self-conscious as if she had come out with bare shoulders. Toma, on the other hand, had put on a dress with a deep plunging neckline, the same one she had sewn for Tanya’s wedding, and had piled her hair so that her little head resembled a big sheep. The guests included the three Goldbergs—the two brothers and Valentina (maiden name Gryzkina), the young stepmother of Tanya’s retired husbands. The basket with the little girl stood at a distance, on Toma’s bed—she was the star that night—and Pavel Alekseevich understood perfectly that were it not for her, Tanya would not have come home or organized this huge, wonderful perturbation.

At a quarter to twelve the doorbell rang, and Tanya ran to open the door, having prepared in advance a snide phrase for their neighbor Roza Samoilovna, who had come by at least fifteen times today and by this time had managed to borrow positively everything there was in the house, from salt and a stool to candles and napkins . . . In the doorway, wearing a light cloth jacket and a huge fur cap, saxophone and sports bag in hand, stood Sergei.

This was the most bizarre family holiday one could imagine. Except for Tanya and Sergei—happy and unconcerned about either the past or the future—each of those present experienced a profound loneliness and a piercing sense of alienation from the others. As if their natural ties to each other had been severed, scrambled, then retied in some perverted way: Pavel Alekseevich’s wife had long ago become his child, while his daughter over the last two weeks had turned out unexpectedly to be the true head of the family; Elena, who sat at a crowded table for the first time in three years, experienced a nauseating form of anxiety caused by all the familiar people who had completely lost their names. Even her daughter Tanya, who more or less resembled her old self, was slightly doubled because the little girl lying in the basket was also Tanechka, but not entirely, only in part, as in a cutaway or cross-section, where the invisible, internal contours of the object usually indicated by lines of dashes were those of the little girl revealed by the cutaway . . . Vasilisa, with her eye resurrected from darkness, saw bright spots of light and the colored contours of bodies against a flat background, and Tomochka’s light-blue spot was the only one that was reassuring. Fluttering about the table like a thin gray bird, placing food on everyone’s plate, and dropping her, Vasilisa, a piece of ferial goose—in total disregard for the Orthodox Christmas fast—Tanya kept disporting herself and touching the young long-haired fellow in black (a member of the clergy?) as she went, all in the presence of her husband and just as Elena had done during the war, while her husband sat and watched, as if he didn’t care, and was this good . . . Filled with disgust by the picture before her, Vasilisa entreated: Lord, have mercy, Lord . . . Establish, O Lord, my unstable heart on the rock of Thy commandments, for Thou only art Holy and Lord . . . The words flew off and fell downward, the pieces of the psalms and prayers that Vasilisa had preserved in her failing memory were forgotten and jumbled, and all that remained was her remorse for her dear ones, all of them living incorrectly, committing sins, and not observing God’s commandments—both temporal and spiritual, no matter where you looked . . . Sins, all our mortal sins . . .

Valentina Goldberg, raised in Old Believer purity in everything, from body, hut, and habits to thoughts and actions, and having deviated from her ancestors not in the slightest degree—despite her total and final estrangement from their unintelligent and outdated religion—observed Tanya mournfully. She had become acquainted with Pavel Alekseevich only after Ilya Iosifovich’s arrest, come to trust him, and to love him, and now she found it impossible to connect the dots between the well-known story of their children’s strange marriage, their indecent family triangle, the appearance of this long-haired musician (obviously, Tanya’s lover), and Tanya herself, whom she was seeing for the first time, having taken a dislike to her in advance, and now on seeing her, for some reason feeling somehow sympathetically disposed toward her . . . although what else should this girl elicit except protest and indignation with the way she carried about, thinking of nothing, and destroying the relationship between the two brothers . . . She was promiscuous, promiscuous . . .

The Goldberg brothers—or husbands—conducted themselves appropriately, but they hardly “didn’t care,” as Vasilisa had surmised. Both of them were pained by the appearance of the pretender. For the first time in the last year they both felt one and the same thing—a condition familiar to them since early childhood, perhaps, one of their first conscious experiences—that of the disappointment and justice of defeat . . . It had already struck twelve, and they were late with the champagne. Tanya had forgotten the bottle in the refrigerator, and by the time she brought it out and Pavel Alekseevich opened it . . . The New Year had already begun, and they drank a toast that all be well, that Ilya Iosifovich be released, and that everyone be happy and healthy, especially the brand-new baby girl . . . They all talked noisily, interrupting each other, clanking their forks against their plates, while only Tanya and Sergei sat silently, looking at each other, well, staring at each other like two icons. Everyone saw that this musician was a perfect match for Tanya, you could see they shared the same nature, lived on the same planet, or whatever . . . What in Tanya was singular and slightly enigmatic was written all over him in full color. The Goldberg brothers had absolutely nothing to do with this and understood that perfectly. Especially when the musician unpacked his saxophone and asked Tanya to accompany him a bit, and she immediately, without mincing, cleared the stack of newspapers off the piano, warned that she had never heard a more out of tune piano, and sat down without protest, and he showed her the left-hand accompaniment on the bass, and she picked it up. Pavel Alekseevich immediately guessed that she had been practicing on and off over the past months . . . Sergei first extracted out of that horn of his some prospective trills, and Tanya harmonized, going right, then left, until they bumped into each other in some indeterminate place, and then Sergei sang long jubilant tidings on his saxophone that ended with such a happy wail that the Goldberg brothers exchanged understanding glances and felt like they were back in the schoolyard in Malakhovo during recess among those hostile rural, small town, and children’s home kids from whom they suffered particularly for not belonging to any of those groups . . . At the first sound of the saxophone Elena dug her fingers into the cuff of her husband’s house jacket: she heard—rather, saw—the music as a set of French curves running from the dark core of the instrument’s metal throat: the principal curve, taut and matte like fresh rubber, first flattened itself, then rolled into a harmonious Archimedean spiral that kept expanding, filling the entire room, and then with a flip of one of its arms whipping out the window . . . The sound itself, it turned out, was the projection of something unknown, unnamed, but produced with obvious effort by the long-haired youth with the familiar face . . .

Pavel Alekseevich was amazed at how skillfully Tanya accompanied; she had obviously not forgotten her music lessons—and this gladdened him.

Sergei diminished the sound, blowing the remnants out of the saxophone, and Elena saw the French curves topple, fade, and dissolve. The young man’s face was not just familiar, but as familiar as if she had memorized it: his thick light brows in a single line, his upper lip hanging slightly over the lower . . . He placed his saxophone alongside the laundry basket, shook his head, ran his fingers through his hair, then threw it back with a familiar gesture . . . His hair is full of sand, Elena thought.

Then Tanya carried the basket with the sleeping baby girl into Pavel Alekseevich’s study, where she and Sergei closed the door behind them, and the guests, passing through the corridor past the door to the bathroom, could hear them laughing. They chatted and laughed for two hours. In the morning Sergei left while everyone was still asleep. Pavel Alekseevich had put Elena to bed and lay down to sleep in the bedroom, in his former spot, without undressing, and slept until late in the day: the night before he had had a lot to drink. Elena practically did not sleep and lay with her eyes open as she recollected where she knew that musician from, and seemed to have remembered . . .

By the end of January the remodeling was finished. The apartment had been renovated, and Vasilisa now could not find anything: the pots, and plates, and vegetable oil all stood in new places, and she so tired of constantly searching that she ultimately took the bread into her pantry, wrapped it in a towel, and kept it in her nightstand. Tanya turned the household over to Toma, stocked up on grains and macaroni, sugar, and flour. She hung new curtains and bought a washing machine . . . Then she announced to Pavel Alekseevich that she was leaving.

“Mama’s grown accustomed to her, leave her with us. When you get your life in order in Leningrad, you can take her,” Pavel Alekseevich implored.

In the space of time that his granddaughter had spent at the apartment he had understood that he had lived to the point in his life when this little baby girl was capable of replacing his entire professional life, his students, his mentees, and, most of all, his patients. No matter what he did at the section—follow the quivering lines of a cardiogram, poke his seeing hands into a hemorrhaging uterus rupture, or palpate a ripe belly—he never forgot for a minute the little girl in the wicker basket. He mentally kept track of her newborn, still not rich time: now she was sleeping, already waking up, sucking, belching, stretching and kicking her little legs, performing the grave act of defecation, then falling asleep again . . . His sole and constant desire was to be alongside her basket, alongside the little girl who emitted infantile radiation and sweet slumber. She still had very little individuality, but her family heritage was beginning to show through: her eyebrows were long, and several little hairs stuck out in that same place where the family brush would eventually grow. She sort of reminded you of a hedgehog: a long nose and locks of hair clumped together in little needles . . . But her forehead was Goldberg’s high forehead . . .

Tanya had been two years old when she had come into Pavel Alekseevich’s life, and she had been a beautiful and tender child, kindhearted and trusting, while this tiny mite was almost without any character at all; she did not have to capture her grandfather’s heart, she had simply from birth been imbued with power over Pavel Alekseevich, and he relished sitting alongside her basket, helping Tanya bathe her, touching her little red unwalked-on feet. It was a purely natural feeling that needed neither justification nor explanation, like a lion loving a lion cub, a wolf a wolf pup, and an eagle an eaglet . . . At this point, he discovered, pedagogy of any sort is nonsense and cold rationalism, and when pedagogy begins, what recedes is this natural feeling, this profound animalistic sense of love for one’s young . . . The lowest of all high emotions . . .

“I say that absolutely seriously. We’ll match her up with donor breast milk. Tomorrow I’m turning in my resignation . . .”

“Dad, what are you saying?” Tanya gazed at her father’s wrinkle-lined face and caught an expression she had never seen in it before—entreaty. It made her feel uneasy, and she became indignant: “What are you talking about? I can’t imagine you retired! You’re going to make her porridge, are you? Take her for walks in her stroller?”

He nodded. “Uh-huh. With pleasure. Tanya, I’ve spent too little time on the family. And now’s just the time. Mama and I will take her for strolls.”

“Mama’s totally out of it,” Tanya responded gloomily.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure . . .”

Tanya embraced his neck and tickled him behind his ears.

“Dad, you’re fantastic, really. I’ll bring the baby girl to you, for sure. You know I want to have a lot of children. Girls and boys, five of them.”

Pavel Alekseevich clenched Tanya’s hands, wasted on laundry and remodeling, kissed them, and went to the kitchen to down an absolutely necessary dose: three-fourths of a medium-size, broad-faceted glassful. The gears were turning in his aging head: why of all the tens of thousands of children he had brought into the world, saved, and even planned through his own intuition, was this baby girl and the other two or three Tanya planned to have so dear? I can’t even say that it’s blood . . . There’s no blood, no parentage, nothing but the irrational, inexplicable, capricious, and good-for-nothing call of the heart . . .

Tanya was in a hurry. She had a whole list of things to do, which she crossed out one after the next—the ineradicable habit of a responsible and organized human being . . . The most expensive and labor-consuming task was replacing all the plumbing fixtures, including the bathtub, which had become unusable of late because of a constant leak; the most delicate task was getting her daughter baptized. Vasilisa was commissioned as expert to arrange this sacred procedure, with Toma as godmother. For starters, Vasilisa flatly refused to go to the St. Pimen Church, which was closest to their house, because it had—in Vasilisa’s mind—besmirched itself in the past with “revisionism”; she suggested they go to some rural church in the far reaches of the Moscow region where a “proper” priest served. Tanya dealt with Vasilisa’s principles with surprising ease, telling her that she would not travel that far and that she was not sure herself how she had got it into her head to baptize the child in the first place, and if there were going to be complications, then she was prepared to give up the notion entirely. At that, Vasilisa pursed her lips and began changing from her trimmed felt boots, which served as house slippers, to her street felt boots with the rubber galoshes . . . The sacrament of baptism was performed at the Church of St. Pimen. From that day on the little girl was designated Evgenia, and Tanya struck the thin cross from her list. All that was left was to give Elena a bath in the new bathtub. It had been more than a year since they had last used the bathtub, taking showers instead, not plugging the drain and rinsing off as quickly as possible so as not to flood the neighbors downstairs.

Tanya filled the tub. Elena pressed her elbows to her side and feebly resisted.

“You have to get undressed. Look, Mommy, there’s already water in the tub . . .” Tanya coaxed her, and reluctantly she obeyed.

Her mother’s gauntness was painful, and it was not a matter of her being underweight: Tanya herself weighed less than 110 pounds. Empty folds of flesh hung from Elena’s shoulders and arms, and at the sight of her mother’s nakedness Tanya was struck by the thought of how sad and sexless the human skeleton was, and how what lent women their charm and men their strength and even made for the difference between men and women were merely pieces of fat-streaked flesh. Of her mother’s former womanhood all that remained were her pale breasts and the vague shadow of her almost hairless pubis.

At long last Tanya sat her mother in the warm water. Elena lay back and stretched out her legs.

“How good it is . . .”

“I’m like Ham,” Tanya laughed to herself as she lathered the sponge. Looking was indecent, but washing, trimming, and wiping dry was quite all right . . .

“Wait, Tanechka. I want to lie here for a bit. It’s such bliss . . . Was the bathtub broken before?” Elena asked in a very hale voice.

“Yes. Now it’s fixed.”

Elena closed her eyes. Her hair slipped into the water and got wet. Tanya moved it to the side.

“Everything changes in water. My head is a lot better in warm water. I don’t want you to live at home. I don’t want you to live with me. I forget everything, and it seems to me that now I’ve forgotten more than I remember. But soon I’ll forget even how much I forgot. Don’t be frightened, I don’t have anything terrible in mind, I am simply dying in the most usual way, from the middle of my head. Right now I feel very good. I haven’t felt so good in a long time, and I want to say good-bye to you. I’m being consumed by a hole. For some reason what’s happening to me is very shameful. And I don’t know if anything will remain at the very end. Tell me, how old am I?”

“Soon you’ll be fifty-two . . .”

“And you?”

“I’m twenty-three.”

“Good. The water has cooled. Add a little bit more hot . . . I’m not sure of anyone or anything. Sometimes strangers come, and sometimes people I know . . . At times there’s Vasilisa, with someone else inside her . . . I’m not even sure of myself . . . You know about that.”

“No, Mommy. I don’t know anything about that . . .”

“Never mind, whatever. I wanted to tell you that at this minute I am I and you are you, and I love you very much. And now I’m going to say good-bye to you. And then you soap me up . . . And then leave . . .”

Tanya wanted to object, but her tongue refused, because all she could have said would have been pathetic, meaningless words. She lathered her mother’s hair, leaning her head back slightly so that the soap would not run into her eyes, scrubbed her scalp, and directed the stream of water from the shower head to rinse off the suds . . . She washed all the sagging folds of Elena’s narrow body, dried her dry, and covered her skin with baby cream. Then she dressed her in a long flannel shirt and took her to her bed. It was nearly nine in the evening. Pavel Alekseevich arrived soon after: that day he had delivered evening lectures at the institute of continuing professional education. Tanya was all packed. They ate supper together, and he saw the girls off to the station.

The Moscow period of Tanya’s life was over.