Part 2 (1/2)

”It's cold.”

”He can go into the summer house.”

Anna walked through the pa.s.sage to the next room and found the light switch; the kitchen still looked rustic, but it was equipped with every urban convenience. ”Shall I fix us something?” she asked.

”Yes, make something for us, Annushka,” he called out.

After checking the pantry and glancing at the clock, Anna took out onions, eggs, and sour cream and heated some oil in a small iron skillet. If it takes us an hour to eat, she reckoned, there will still be an hour before Anton has to take me back. If Alexey comes with us, he'll have Anton drop him off first. She turned on the oven, cut the onion into thin slices, and dressed them with cream and paprika. After beating some eggs, she poured them into the skillet and put it in the oven. She heard Alexey moving around in the living room, and soon afterward came the sound of music, a sleepy hit tune featuring lots of violins. He walked into the kitchen. Anna said nothing. Every time, she found the preliminaries more difficult. She hoped he'd start the conversation on his own. With his fingers, he combed her hair aside and kissed her ear, but it wasn't a caress; it was rather a kiss of welcome, as though he were just now greeting her. Without interrupting her work with the two-handled chopper, she leaned her head against his cheek.

”A hard day?”

”The comrades monopolized me for four long hours. The office was overheated, my secretary's coffee undrinkable, and the representative from Tambov had such foul breath that I stood up and pretended I had to walk around in order to think.” Bulyagkov leaned on the sink. ”I'd love to see you cook naked.”

”Not tonight.” She looked into the oven to see whether the eggs had set yet. ”Was the Minister there?”

”He knows what sessions he should stay away from.” With the reserve that she had liked in him from the start, Alexey put his hand on her waist. ”It's always about money. Every oblast wants to distinguish itself through particular achievements in research. The farther they are from Moscow, the more money they want.” He clasped the back of her head, and she enjoyed the pressure of his fingers. She wrapped a cloth around her hand and took the little pan out of the oven.

”Take a seat.” She strewed chopped onion onto the cooked eggs.

”Do you know that this is a Ukrainian recipe?” Alexey asked. ”I was often served this dish as a child.”

”What were you like when you were a boy, Alexey?”

”Happy.” He went back into the front room.

Anna heard the sound of a bottle being uncorked, followed by the tinkle of gla.s.ses. When she carried in the food on a tray, Bulyagkov, who was standing in front of the liquor cabinet, turned around. She served; he took a seat and started eating.

”Seventy-four percent,” he said after a few bites. ”With the help of the technological revolution, they want to boost petrochemical production by seventy-four percent.”

”Isn't that ... extraordinarily good?”

”There is no 'technological revolution.' Seventy-four percent is beyond all reason. It's not even an incentive, it's a fantasy.” He drained his gla.s.s and refilled it at once. ”But Kosygin wants to announce it. And therefore I have to put on the necessary performance for the Minister.” With a sudden blow, he jammed the cork back into the bottle. ”They want units of greater capacity, gigantic power station units to improve primary processing.” He broke off a piece of bread and used it to wipe the traces of egg yolk off his plate. ”But things aren't so advanced as that, not anywhere in the country. In Murmansk, they thought they had the problem solved. Twelve million rubles, and during the trial run, everything blew up in their faces.”

He took Anna's wrist. ”You're not taking care of yourself,” he said, waving her hand back and forth.

”I've used your cream.” She wanted to pull her hand away.

”Rough and blotchy,” he said, spreading her fingers.

”It's the lime.”

”Why don't you wear gloves?”

”They don't help.”

”You're beautiful, Annushka.” He let himself sink back against the cus.h.i.+on. ”Are you cold? Shall I put more wood on?”

”It's fine.” She s.h.i.+fted to the side and took off her boots. While she let her blouse drop and slipped out of her underskirt, she had the feeling that, for her, deceit and reality were getting more and more mixed up. Every day a new piece of her integrity went missing, and her feelings slipped away from her. Obviously, her life was a lie.

Without touching her, he stood up, took a step back, and pointed at her body with an outstretched hand. Calling her affectionate names, he watched as she unzipped her skirt and slid off her pantyhose. Finally naked, Anna set the plate in the skillet and put the remains of the bread on the plate. With a glance at the wall clock, she made sure that there was as yet no reason to hurry. In semidarkness, she sank down onto a rug, and her mood grew darker and calmer. She couldn't help thinking about Anton. Had he made himself comfortable in the summer house? He was probably sitting in the car with the engine running.

TWO.

At three in the afternoon the next day, when she boarded the special bus on Durova Street, it was already getting dark. At the end of a thirty-minute trip, twenty workers, seventeen of them women, were dropped off in Karacharovo. The worksite was an elongated, twelve-story apartment house that was supposed (according to the plan) to be ready by May. Trouble began because the painters were unable to do their work, and that was because the plasterers were two weeks in arrears on theirs. The walls and ceilings on five entire floors had yet to receive their final coat of plaster. The person in charge defended the delay by blaming it on the unrelenting cold: Not even the propane heaters that burned day and night on every floor could make the surfaces dry. Anna and the other women complained that the plasterers' dillydallying would cause them, the painters, to fail to fulfill their responsibilities in the plan as well. What happened in the end was what usually happened: The women laid aside their paintbrushes and picked up trowels. This was dirty work, and so a settlement for the cost of cleaning the painters' work uniforms had to be reached. When that was done, Anna and some of her colleagues climbed up on the scaffolding, while others mixed the lime plaster. In order to counteract the cold, they used quick-drying cement; the women on the scaffolding had to work very fast. A tub of fresh plaster was hoisted up to Anna; using a hawk with one hand, she scooped up some of the mixture and spread it on the ceiling with the trowel in her other hand. The plaster was too runny, and some of it dripped onto her face. She cursed and called out to the mixers to use less water. Then, with circular movements, she distributed the remaining plaster over the smooth surface.

An hour later, her head and shoulders were sprinkled with gray. Even though she was wearing a headscarf, she could feel wet plaster in her hair and her eyelids were gummy with it, but her dirty gloves prevented her from wiping off her face. Nevertheless, she'd managed to plaster half of the ceiling. Anna jumped down from the scaffolding, crouched next to the propane heater, and drank a gla.s.s of tea. One of the plasterers, a nice-looking, broad-shouldered man, squatted down beside her; after taking a few sips of his own tea in silence, he thanked the comrade for her help.

Is Petya asleep already? she wondered. Will the inhalation treatment give him a more restful night, or will he utter that strangled groan again and sit up in the bed, because he can't get enough air when he's lying down? As long as he was running a fever, she had to let him stay home from school, but spending the whole day together with his capricious grandfather wasn't good for the boy. Papa hardly ever sees anybody but his family anymore, Anna thought. She found it less regrettable that he avoided the literati and their scene than that he had shed all his friends. The extraordinary reading two years previously hadn't given him back his self-confidence; the consequences of his little swipe at the regime were an enduring sign that the ice age was not yet over. Viktor Tsazukhin had reminded the members of the Writers' a.s.sociation that he was a recipient of the Order of the Fatherland, that he had spoken before large Party gatherings and been invited to receptions. How long ago had that been? Twenty years? Basically, Anna knew of her father's significance only from pictures she'd seen and things she'd heard. As a little girl, she'd been told who the people with Viktor Ipalyevich in the framed photographs were, and she knew where the fancy presentation edition of The Red Light stood on the bookshelf. More than his early work, however, she loved the poems he'd written in recent years, poems that remained unpublished. As the man with the peaked cap grew sadder and understood less and questioned more, Anna found herself drawn all the more strongly to his shorter, smaller pieces. Instead of lengthy evocations of the human spectacle, his current output was characterized by instantaneous sketches, a couple of stanzas about a misunderstanding at a bus stop, lines that distilled several weeks' work. His poetry described the people of Moscow, not so much their utopian dream as their actual present; his verse s.h.i.+ned a light on their everyday lives, captured certain moments, dedicated itself to a feeling of disappointed hope for the unattainable. Yes, Anna loved her father through his poems.

”How's your husband?” the plasterer asked, tearing her from her thoughts.

”He's good. He likes it where he is.” To all who knew of it, the fact that Leonid had been transferred without explanation necessarily seemed like a punishment, and as for the real reason, Anna couldn't reveal it to anyone. She screwed the cup back onto her thermos bottle and climbed up her scaffolding.

The following morning, Petya's fever had increased. Anna swapped s.h.i.+fts with a colleague, dressed the boy so heavily that only his eyes and nose were visible between his scarf and his fur cap, and set out with him for the polyclinic. Along the way, she gave Petya some white lozenges to suck-they didn't help, but he liked them. When he announced that he was feeling better, she knew that he was scared of the treatment that lay in store for him. Not even six months had pa.s.sed since they'd been to see the doctor about his earaches. The doctor, a woman, had pulled his earlobes, and when Petya cried out loudly, she'd diagnosed an infection. She'd prescribed drops, which indeed deadened the pain, but the inflammation grew worse. Petya had whimpered for an entire night and fallen asleep at dawn. When he woke up, Anna had discovered a yellow stain on his pillow; his eardrum had burst and pus had run out of his ear while he slept. From then on, the boy had felt better, even though he was deaf in that ear for weeks. At the follow-up examination, the doctor had proudly announced that the membrane was going to heal.

The freshly painted outpatients' clinic impressed Anna; the work on the window frames and ledges had been skillfully carried out. Inside the clinic, the gray, oil-based paint remained unchanged. Petya was breathing in brief gasps and could hardly keep himself upright. In order to reach the children's department more quickly, Anna carried him piggyback up two floors, only to find a disappointingly long line of people waiting to see a doctor. The queue stretched all the way out to the stairwell. Automatically, she asked who the last person was, and when told, she said, ”Then I come after you.” The other mother nodded. She was handsomely dressed, with a tailored jacket and a black cap. The little girl she was holding by the hand turned toward Petya. At this distance from the treatment rooms, there were no chairs or benches, and so Anna spread her coat in a corner of the stairs to give Petya something to sit on. A nurse hurried past them, muttering something about a ”Gypsy camp.”

The morning was almost gone when they were called. The lady doctor sounded Petya's chest and back, determined that he was suffering from a catarrh, and said that such a condition was standard in wintertime. Anna described his leaping fevers and his breathing difficulties, his frequent coughing and streaming eyes; the doctor a.s.sumed that they were all connected. She stuck to her diagnosis-a feverish cold-and prescribed a dose of ultraviolet therapy and an inhalant. ”It's winter, that's all,” she said, waving the next patient in. ”When spring comes, you'll see ...” She returned to her desk.

In spite of the transfer form she'd been given, Anna and Petya had to wait another forty-five minutes before he was summoned to the radiation room. While the boy was inside, Anna went over the course of the next few hours in her mind. She visualized the trip back home, the shopping she'd do on the way, the ride to her worksite. Because she'd swapped s.h.i.+fts, she had some unexpected free time, several hours' worth. She wanted to get something out of the day, to wrest a little enjoyment from it while she still could. She called Rosa Khleb from the nearest telephone.

”I'm taking my lunch break at twelve noon,” said the pleasant voice at the other end of the line.

”The thing is, I'm not dressed for going out to eat,” Anna answered. ”And at three o'clock, I have to catch the workers' bus on Durova Street.”

”You've got enough time,” Rosa said, and when Anna hesitated, she added, ”Don't worry about your clothes-you don't need to dress up for this place.” She named an address, and Anna rang off.

Petya left the radiation room happy, declaring that he was warm all over. On the way back, he stopped several times to talk about the magic light he'd been shot with; the light, he said, had made the nurse's white coat s.h.i.+ne blue.

When she saw the line in front of the pharmacy, Anna lost patience. With a tight grip on Petya's hand, she pulled him past the waiting customers to the entrance. ”It's an emergency,” she said to the protesting women and gave the gaunt pharmacist an imploring look. If he wished to, he could banish her to the end of the line.

”What does he need?”

Ignoring the murmurs of disapproval around her, Anna took out the prescription.

After a scant look at it, the pharmacist said, ”We don't have that. I can give you something similar.” He turned to the storage drawer cabinet behind him. ”But it'll cost more.”

”The doctor said ...” Anna tapped the prescription.

”Yes or no?” With a jerk, he pulled out a drawer.

”I'll take it.” She removed from Petya's grasp the plastic sign advising customers that they could have only one prescription filled per day.

The subst.i.tute medicine was three times as expensive as the one originally prescribed, but the growing ill humor of the people waiting in line induced Anna to pay without further delay. Taking her boy by the hand, she stepped out into the cold.

When they got home, the apartment had been tidied up and Viktor Ipalyevich, dressed in the jacket he wore around the house, was sitting at the table. His composition book lay in front of him, and next to it, a writing pad with notes. The gla.s.s beside him was empty. Anna laid her hand on the samovar; whatever Viktor Ipalyevich had been drinking, it wasn't tea. His cap was pulled down to his eyes, as if he wanted to shut out the visible world. His pencil hung motionless over the paper.