“You have not been …”
“I am well,” she said. “If you are too tired …”
“I am definitely not too tired,” he said.
“There is one condition.”
“What is that?”
“Lenin goes under the bed where he belongs,” she said.
Rostnikov laughed. He rarely laughed. The world was often amusing, tragic, dangerous, and touched with individual sadness, but not funny. He could not remember the last time he had laughed. Granted, this had been a brief laugh but it was a real one.
“I’ll shower first,” he said.
“Shower later,” Sarah said.
Chapter Nine
Don’t cry for me I never cried for you
Just left without the name
Of the place I’m going to
Left without so much as a whisper to remind you
I’m traveling to forget you
And to find you
In the morning the sun was shining and the snow had stopped falling. For today at least there would be a clean, soft white blanket covering Moscow. People would be polite. Some might even smile. This was Moscow weather. If there were no rain the snow would slowly take on a fragile crackling crust of gray, and if it did not melt it would begin to break out in irregular pocks of dirt and city grime. Smiles, always held dear and protected by seriousness, would fade. All would wait for, hope for, discuss the winter, the expectation of a fresh snow.
“It will snow tomorrow,” said Maya in a whisper, lying next to her husband on the mattress laid out on the floor. “The television said so.”
Sasha faced her, his head propped on two pillows.
“Yes,” he said.
They said nothing. Her left breast was exposed under her nightgown. When he had gotten home, the children had been asleep in the bedroom. His knees had threatened to give way under him when Sasha opened the apartment door.
Would she be dressed in a business suit, arms folded before her, ready for no-nonsense discussion, a laying-out of the ground rules of their fragile reconciliation?
Maya had been sitting on the sofa in her nightgown.
She had said nothing, simply stood, looking quite beautiful, her dark hair pulled back, her face clear and clean, her full lips in a welcoming smile which, Sasha was certain, carried with it a touch of caution.
Maya had come to him, moved into his arms. He had pulled her close, gently, his knees still shaking, and then he had wept.
Now, with the sun coming through the window, he knew it was time to talk, talk about more than the winter and the snow, about more than the Trans-Siberian Express.
“Your mother is coming back tomorrow,” said Maya, who still had the distinct lilt of the Ukraine in her voice. “She called. She is bringing her artist.”
“Good,” said Sasha.
Silence again.
“Maya, I … I will do better. I must do better. Just stay.”
She took his right hand and placed it on her exposed breast.
“I am here, Sasha,” she said. “The children are here.”
They had made love when he came home. He had shaved and washed on the plane wanting to look as good as possible when she saw him. They had made love. He had been afraid that he would be too tired or too frightened or that she would reject him, but they had made love and it had been good, and strong and long, and she had been satisfied.
“A new beginning,” she said as the baby began to make small whimpering sounds in the bedroom behind them.
He kissed her, remembering her smell, a special smell, not sweet but distinct. Each woman had a smell, her own smell, that came not from perfumes or perspiration but from her essence. Maya’s smell was gentle, the hint of some forgotten forest and a spice which eluded him. He put his face to her neck, pulling in her smell, savoring it.
“The baby is up,” said Pulcharia from the doorway of the bedroom.
Sasha turned on the mattress to face his daughter. She was going to be four years old in less than a month. She had been gone for more than two months. Pulcharia was the same child and yet a different one. She wore a large white T-shirt that came down to her ankles. Her hair had grown longer and was unbrushed and tumbling into her eyes. She stood looking at her father.
She is her mother's child, he thought.
“Pulcharia,” he said.
She rubbed her eyes and took a step forward, a slow tentative step, and then padded across the floor and into his arms. The baby was crying with conviction now.
“I will get him,” Maya said, getting up.
“Kiev looks like Moscow, only different,” Pulcharia told her father. “Why do you have tears?”
“I am crying for joy,” Sasha said. “I am crying because you are all back.”
“Are you hungry?” the child asked.
“Very,” he said. “Let us find something to eat.”
In the morning the sun was shining and the snow had stopped falling. Vendors, packed in layers of clothes, looking like ragged Marioshki dolls, set up their tables near the metro stations selling
There was a wariness held in deep check, the recollection of a bombing that kept some of the vendors out of the underground pedestrian tunnels that carried swarms of shuffling people under the broad streets. After the bomb, people had braved the dangers of reckless drivers rather than go where they might be trapped by explosion. Now, more were going through the echoing tunnels.
Viktor Dalipovna had called in to his office and said he would not be coming in that day and possibly the next and possibly the one after that.
He had taken the metro, gone through a pedestrian tunnel, and walked many blocks. He could have gotten closer, but he wanted time to think, the cold air, the tingle that should slap at his cheeks and make him truly understand the reality of what had happened to his daughter.
They had given him an address, actually a street where a neighborhood police station was tucked between an old gray five-story office building and a garage. The station was on a small side street. Viktor had lived all of his fifty-five years in Moscow but remembered no police station here.
There were many things he had not noticed in his lifetime.
The station was dark. Uniformed young men who did not look old enough to shave stood inside the doors with automatic weapons. People, mostly policemen talking to each other, moved by him, ignoring him.
Viktor moved to an old desk behind which sat a man with pockmarked face, a heavy man with gray-black hair and a uniform with a collar so tight it turned his exposed neck into a line of taut ridges. The man’s face was red and he wheezed slightly when he spoke.
“My name is Viktor Dalipovna,” he said. “My daughter is here. I was told I could come.”
