her eyes only made it worse.
She opened her eyes. And the pain suddenly receded. But the wetness was still there, quickly losing its warmth, sliming down over the inside of her thighs.
For a long moment, she could only stare into the filthy murk of the canal. Spotted with oil rainbows. So still. Necklaces of garbage on the banks. Islands of junk expelled from high windows. When leaves floated down, the water seemed to reach up and clutch them, anxious to coat them with its filth. The high walls of the apartment buildings lining both sides of the canal were flecked like old, sick skin.
She needed a toilet but had no idea where to look. It was a country that could not even receive its own waste properly. Suddenly Valya imagined that she would die before she found anyone or anything that would help her. Two grandmothers scuttled by, commenting sourly about public drunkenness and sparking Valya back to life, into a powerless, frozen rage.
She had dirtied herself. She had dirtied her entire life. And what if Yuri ever found out? She would lose even that. The bare minimum of safety.
She made herself walk. She went into the first open building she could find and tried to clean herself in the shadows of a basement stairwell. Her underpants were slopping with blood and a thick wetness, and her handkerchief was too small to cope with the problem. At first reluctantly, then resolutely, she pulled the silk scarf from around her neck. Another gift from Naritsky. And she began to clean her thighs, struggling not to lose her balance or to faint, no longer even caring if anyone saw her.
She leaned back against the wall, drinking in the dead air. She released the silken rag from her hand, and it fell heavily to the floor. As her eyes learned the darkness, she saw a row of dustbins, some with newspapers overflowing their collars. Determinedly, she tore off the cleanest-looking pages and bunched them, then held them against herself, trying to bring enough pressure to stop the bleeding. She was awash with sweat, and very cold.
She shoved hard at herself, trying to force away the ache as she stanched the flow of blood. How could men become so helpless over it? she thought. My God, what if they saw you like this? And she began to laugh again, dropping her head back against the cinder blocks, catching her hair.
She made her way back out into the gray day, walking out of any sense of time, until she came to a small, halfrecognized park. She limped down a curling path to a bench and sat down hard, as though dropping from crutches. She stared up into the gray vacancy, aware that she was cold, yet oddly calm and very still. There was no need to shiver. That would have been far too bothersome, too violent. She lowered her eyes slightly, to the emaciated white trees. Going bald. Their last leaves shriveled, hanging on randomly. Her bones pressed down on the cold slats. She felt a bit of wetness, but sensed that the worst bleeding had stopped.
Suddenly, she felt hungry, even though her stomach still sent contradictory signals of nausea. Perhaps, she thought, it was just the other emptiness. My body wants to be full again. Any way it can. Utterly confused at herself, Valya buried her face in her hands. And, at last, she began shaking with the cold.
A female voice intruded. Speaking in a foreign language. English. But with a very bad accent. Perhaps an American. Valya looked up.
She saw the woman's clothes first. Because they were so much more impressive than the woman herself, who merely looked big and well fed. But the richness of the cloth in the coat, the wasteful generosity of its cut, the deep leather gloss and stitching of the shoes, these were qualities beyond anything that Valya possessed. The woman wore a scarf in rich, subdued colors, and Valya realized in shame that she would not have had the sophistication to choose such a scarf, that she would have missed it with her child's eye, captivated by hot colors and too-bold patterns. In a glimpse Valya saw the extent of her ignorance of the world in which she had imagined herself, realizing that her failure was even greater than she had intuited.
The woman held a book, and she turned hastily through its pages with her plump pink fingers. It was an English-language book. The cover said,
And perhaps I am not worth looking at? Valya considered.
The woman mumbled, tearing at the pages. Her English was so unlike the clean, careful sentences Valya drilled into her students. The boys in their blazers, arms growing out of the sleeves. And the white-aproned girls. This foreign woman had a nasal, distinctly unattractive voice.
She was not pretty. But her skin and hair had a quality as rich as her clothing, the sum of a foreign life of luxury. Even after all that had happened, the Americans were very rich. Valya could not understand why any of them would want to come to Moscow. For a vacation in a graveyard.
Perhaps she was a diplomat's wife. Of course. With the war, there could not be tourists. Or perhaps her husband was a great businessman. Naritsky said that business never stopped. Not even for wars.
The big woman's face brightened. And she nodded positively to herself, like a horse about to neigh. She had found her page. And she began to speak.
It was an attempt at Russian. But it merely came out as gibberish. Valya could not understand a bit of it. But she obstinately refused to offer the woman a word of English.
The woman ceased reading and looked at Valya. Imploringly. The sudden confidence had disappeared again. But Valya would not meet the woman's eyes. It was hard enough to look at the soft, thick, flowing fabric of her winter coat, or to consider the fine soft shoes that Valya's own glued-together bits of vinyl and plastic sought pathetically to imitate. Valya was certain that this woman had never suffered, had never endured anything. That she had been able to gobble dependable little pills or use some comfortable device that kept her body out of hell and be damned to her soul. By accident of birth this woman had everything of which Valya dreamed. A life without want, without pain.
Let her suffer now. For this one moment.
The big woman tried again, more timidly, in a measured voice. And Valya could just make out the substance of it. Where was the nearest metro station?
Valya did not even try to answer. She merely stared up at the woman, meeting her eyes at last, in the profoundest hatred she had ever felt in her life. Her feelings toward the brusque attendant at the clinic, or toward Naritsky at the depth of her humiliation, toward other women who had stolen boyfriends or precious clothes, had never approached this intensity.
The foreign woman did not understand, of course. Or did not care. She simply gave up and wandered off in her plush confusion, wearing Valya's ambitions and dreams.
Valya's anger trailed after the woman, weakening with each of the foreigner's steps, finally disappearing with her. It simply took too much effort. Exhausted from the ferocity of her emotions, Valya slumped back emptily against the hard slats, her mind finally idle. Soon, she sensed, she would need to gather her strength and go on. But for one peaceful moment she sat vacantly.
A snap of wind crisped dead leaves around her ankles and calves, then a ragged handbill lofted against her skirt, caught, and fell back onto the pavement. Valya could just make out the faded headline:
VICTORY WILL BE OURS, COMRADES
5
Colonel George Taylor stood erectly in his Soviet greatcoat, waiting for a ride. He set his ruined face against the cold and thought of enemies old and new, of the crisis lurching toward them all, and of a nagging problem with spare parts. He reviewed a recent disagreement with one of his subordinates, a general's son who had been pressed upon him, and that somehow tricked him into thinking about the woman he had left behind, about whom he disagreed with himself. Unexpected, contradictory, and so very welcome, she had a way of coming to mind
