She had no idea how long she had been sitting there on her bed, where she always sat, ankles crossed, hands in her lap as if they weren’t hers at all. She had stopped crying. Her tears had dried up, and the faint salty encrustations they had left behind tickled her face.
Outside it was very bright when she looked up, so bright that the light hurt. The birch trees glowed yellow, a warm fall this year, thought Nadyeshda Ivanovna. In Slava they’d be harvesting potatoes now, smoke would be rising from the first fires as the potato stems and leaves burned, and when you began burning the potato stems and leaves that time, inexorably, had come: the time of fading light.
Nadyeshda Ivanovna blew her nose and picked up the knitting that she had put down on her pillow in the morning, the socks for Sasha, well, Kurt would get them now, one sock was already finished, she was just turning the heel of the other, she knew a thing or two about socks, she’d knitted so many, Sasha’s first were no bigger than egg cozies, that was thirty years ago now, but to this day she could still smell the hairs at the back of his neck when she thought of the way he used to sit on her lap and they played maltchik-paltchik for hours on end, or she would sing him something, about the little kid who wouldn’t listen to the grandmother in the song, he liked to hear that one again and again, again and again, the boy will have forgotten it now even though he knew it almost by heart when he was two, but again and again: Why, why? Nothing left but hoofs and horns, sadly she mourns, nothing left but hoofs and horns, well, never mind, maybe he’d write a postcard although he probably had more important things to do there, he’d have to get used to everything, America, she knew about it from TV, on the other channel, you switched channels twice, to be honest she usually watched the other channel, she’d seen enough of Brezhnev, America was somehow more interesting, even if you didn’t always dare to look at what the programs showed, so long as he didn’t go to the bad there, thought Nadyeshda Ivanovna, or was what they showed on TV maybe just TV, and really it was much the same as here where you could almost look across and see it, or was what you saw overseas still Germany, or was Germany America, well, a part of it, the part of Germany that was a part of America? It was all so confusing, enough to send you crazy, and what was the point if it all came to the same thing in the end, as Ira claimed, except that you could buy everything there, so Ira had said, in that other Germany that was America, not that she understood that because on the square where the trolleybus came in and where Sasha used to go to school you could buy everything as well, it wasn’t even rationed, buy as much as you could carry, you could buy milk—in bags, no one back in Slava would believe that, only to be honest, whether it was because of the bags or because those cows were state-owned and milked by a milking machine she didn’t know, but anyway their milk never thickened if you left it to stand, it just went bad, the milk from those state cows, now having your own cow in the cowshed at home was something else, milk curds with sugar, he’d always liked that, you had soft quark cheese as well, and butter, you had everything you needed.
For the heel she had to divide the number of stitches by three, but she never counted them, somehow or other it always came out right of its own accord, then the stitches were decreased, and after that it was straightforward, you just went on along needle after needle, Kurt took the same size as Sasha except that he never, to be honest, wore the socks, he always thanked her politely when she gave him socks, but what was a person to do, your hands wanted to be busy with something, in spring there’d be the garden again if she lived to see it, but you had to fill the days until then somehow, watch TV all the time and you went soft in the head, sometimes she read the book Kurt had given her, she could read, after all, she’d taught herself to read when they went to Slava where the Soviets were, only the book was too fat, War and Peace, when you reached the middle of it you’d forgotten the beginning, it was about mowing the grass for hay, she remembered that, heavy work, she’d made plenty of hay in her life, mowing after work when she came out of the sawmill, the hay harvest was in August, then came the potato harvest in September, that’s how it had been in Slava. Now she had only the cucumbers, but they practically looked after themselves, you only had to water them now and then, turn on the hose and there you were, life was so easy in Germany, no one in Slava would believe her, life was really easy, but on the other hand it went ahead at such a pace, and Ira did nothing but grumble, sometimes she wondered whether it had been a bad idea to give up the house in Slava, but what was a person with her old bones to do if she couldn’t even climb the ladder any more to oil the weatherboard, no, she wasn’t complaining, but somehow it was getting to be enough, after all, she was seventy-eight, her sisters hadn’t even lived to see twenty, Lyuba and Vera, they were lying somewhere between Grishkin Nagar and Tartarsk, and here she still was, sitting in this place Germany, she even got a pension, three hundred and thirty a month, at first she’d gone on saving for her funeral, she’d always been afraid she might die before there was enough for her funeral, and who knows, then she might be burned, they did that sort of thing here, but by now she had enough three times over and here she still was, still stuffing her pension away in a pillow case, she’d always given a hundred to Sasha right away, Ira wouldn’t take any money, didn’t need it, you see, proud as she was these days, it annoyed Nadyeshda Ivanovna.
Now there was a knock at the door, it was Kurt, was she going to Wilhelm’s birthday party with them? Dear heavens, this morning she’d remembered it, but then it had gone out of her old head again, not that she was going to admit it.
“Of course I’m coming with you,” she said. “What else?”
Only the flower shop near the cemetery was closed by now, ach ty, rastyopa, now what, she still had a box of chocolates, she hoped it wasn’t one that Charlotte and Wilhelm had given her, they always gave her chocolates although she didn’t eat them, but it didn’t hurt to have something to offer when Sasha came with his girlfriend, Kalinka or whatever her name was, the new one, was she in America with him or had she stayed in Germany? She hadn’t been so bad, arms a bit too thin, no use for working, but she didn’t really work at work anyway, she was an actress, after all, thin girls were needed in films, or she could give Wilhelm the pickles, good gherkins pickled in the Urals style with garlic and dill, Sasha had always been crazy for her pickles, only were they the right thing for a birthday present, she’d ask Kurt, ninety, that was quite something, and he still looked good, Wilhelm did, almost like eighty, and always wearing a suit, he looked like a government minister and talked like one, too, with emphasis, you could tell at once that he’d seen the world, they’d gone over the sea in a ship, God forbid, she’d once seen the sea, nothing but water all the way to the sky, no one in Slava would believe her, and right at the top, right on the rim of the sea, tiny ships were crawling along as if it was a roof ridge, terrible idea, she’d rather travel by rail, at least you were on God’s earth, and when you were on the move it wasn’t so bad once you were used to it, in the end she actually dropped off to sleep and then woke up, and suddenly she was in Germany, and didn’t even know how far it was, Sasha had once tried to show her on a map, as if you could see from a map how far it was from Tartarsk, for instance, to Grishkin Nagar, on the map it was four fingers away but in real life they’d been on the move for four years or longer, she didn’t know how long now, but they’d been on the move for an eternity, ever since she could remember, going on and on. To be honest, she didn’t remember Tartarsk where she’d been born, her father who never came back from the raft, her mother, Marfa, had told them, then later he was suddenly said to have fallen in the war, it was all darkness where she came from, and the first visible thing when she thought back was the road, a faint and flickering picture, the road that never ended, and when she looked down she saw her own dirty feet, that was the first thing she remembered, and the eternal thirst, and she remembered that her hand was red with blood if she struck her forehead with it because of all the mosquitoes.
She put on her good dress, lilac with gold threads in it, and a little, well, showy for her age, in Slava she couldn’t have worn something like that, but here people wore all kinds of things, even the old people, when she’d gone dancing in the Volkso-Dali-Rit at club once a year, admission free, she’d liked going there when her feet still worked well, even if she didn’t know the proper steps for the dances, she simply danced as they did at home, in the Urals way, you drank a little liqueur and then, all of a sudden, they were all dancing in the Urals way, more or less, now she just had to put her shoes on, good shoes, Ira had found them for her but the state had paid, no one in Slava would believe her, such shoes, good leather shoes, as a child she’d always looked out for shoes like that when they came to a village and she sat in front of the church, she’d hated that, her two big sisters could go looking for work in the village but she, the smallest, had to hold out her hand all day long, head bowed, hand held up in the air, but if no shoes came by you could drop your hand again, she’d been quick to understand that, rags around the feet brought you nothing, raffia shoes only now and then, but as soon as proper shoes turned up you were on the alert, real leather shoes like the ones she was wearing now, ottopedic they were called, back in Slava no one had ever seen such things, twelve holes for the laces each side, a pity really that she wasn’t going to Slava, Nina had invited her, there was even a visa for her, but what was a person to do, she
