In Times of Fading Light

She pulled off the outer leaves of the red cabbage, picked up the big knife, sliced the cabbage in half, pressing down firmly on the back of the knife, and once again experienced a brief moment of satisfaction as she reflected that she, Irina Petrovna, had escaped all that, Irina with the black curls for which the other kids teased her, because they showed what kind of girl she was.

The door of Nadyeshda Ivanovna’s room opened with a long-drawn-out creak. Her mother appeared in the kitchen.

“Pomotch tebye?”

Could she help? But Irina didn’t need any help, on the contrary; it annoyed her to have her mother looking into the pans.

“You can leave the giblets for me,” said Nadyeshda Ivanovna, in a tone of voice that wasn’t far from being an order.

“Mama,” said Irina. “I do wish you’d realize that here with us, you don’t have to eat leftovers.”

Nadyeshda Ivanovna went away. Her door creaked—she really must tell the carpenter sometime, thought Irina, because she knew it wasn’t just that the hinges needed oiling, it was the lower hinge scraping against the door frame.

She took the giblets off the heat, seasoned them again with paprika (you always added paprika at the end of cooking, or it lost its aroma), browned the finely chopped red cabbage lightly, added grated apple, a little salt and a pinch of sugar, put the onion spiked with cloves into the pan, added red wine, and topped it up with hot water. Then she poured herself a beer—she liked drinking beer best while she was cooking—and tasted a little of the giblets, still too hot but delicious… no, it wasn’t that she grudged them to her mother. The fact was that her mother saw eating the giblets as a sacrifice—and it was a sacrifice that Irina wasn’t about to accept. You are going to eat that Christmas goose with us today, she thought—and caught herself out imagining what it would be like to stuff a slice of goose down her mother’s throat…

Kurt appeared in his work shirt—as if decorating the Christmas tree could be described as work. He wanted her to go and look at it.

Kurt had been decorating the Christmas tree for the last three years. He had really wanted to give up having a tree after Sasha moved out, but Irina had insisted on keeping the tradition going. What an idea! What would Christmas be without a tree? The tree and the Monastery Goose were part of Christmas, that was that, and even if Irina shrank slightly from the thought of the annual visit from her in-laws, even if she could already sense the laboriously harmonious atmosphere that set in every year around the festive table: the stilted conversations, the elaborate opening of presents, the pretended delight of one and all (apart from Wilhelm, who protested vigorously every year against being given presents, but still received an annual bottle of Stolichnaya and a can of Eberswalde sausages, which he finally accepted, or rather had Charlotte accept on his behalf, half reluctantly, half patronizingly)—even if all that was basically embarrassing and stressful and to a certain extent idiotic, Irina insisted on keeping the ritual going, and in a way actually enjoyed it, if only for the relief after her in-laws had gone, for the moment when Kurt opened the window, and they sank into comfortable chairs to smoke cigarettes, drink cognac, and amuse themselves together at the expense of Charlotte and Wilhelm.

“Is it too kitschy?” asked Kurt.

“It’s not quite straight,” said Irina.

“Yes, but don’t you think I’ve rather overdone the decorations?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Irina, looking at the not-quite-straight tree with her own head tilted to one side. Its branches were thickly laden with tinsel, and white cotton for snow, and had colored baubles hanging from them in the traditional way, and although the tree that Kurt had chosen was no beauty, once darkness fell and the Christmas lights were switched on, none of the company would notice.

“The tinsel,” said Irina. “It’s too lumpy, drape it a bit more.”

“Right,” said Kurt. “Drape the tinsel a bit more.”

“What else do you think is wrong about it?”

“Nothing,” said Kurt, and smiled, which always gave him a slightly mischievous look, in fact almost—did the word exist?—a scampish look, because then his blind eye slipped just a tad out of true. Back when she first met him, in his well-worn pants and padded jacket, she would never for a moment have thought that this scamp would be her husband someday.

Irina washed the green cabbage and blanched it briefly, so that it would stay green. She must be more patient with her mother, she thought, as she nibbled a little more of the giblet mixture. There was no point in getting angry with her. After living in Slava Nadyeshda Ivanovna was set in her ways, and really it was a miracle that she was still alive. Irina thought of her last trip back to Slava a few weeks ago, when she went to fetch Nadyeshda Ivanovna: Slava—fame—what a name for a place populated mainly by exiles and old convicts who had served their sentences! Nothing there had changed. The same gravel roads, the same potholes capable of tipping a car right over; the same bad manners, the same slacking; the same drunks sitting on the wooden sidewalk outside the store passing snide remarks about Irina and her clothes.

In March her last distant relation, Petya Shyshkin, had been robbed when he was out one night. At minus forty-six degrees, he had been stripped to his undershorts, and Petya, who of course was roaring drunk, had knocked at the doors of the surrounding houses to no avail, and froze to death on his way home.

That was Slava. That was her homeland.

And as she drained the green cabbage over the sink, she felt it was like a bad dream to remember that she really had once been deluded enough to want to die for that homeland as soon as possible. For the homeland, for Stalin! Hurrah!

Irina assembled the meat grinder and was beginning to put the green cabbage through it when Kurt announced that the children had arrived.

She wiped her hands on her apron and went into the hall. Kurt had already opened the front door. Sasha was the first to appear. In his lambskin coat, thought Irina, the distinguished pallor of his face made him look like a Russian prince, and his black curls had had time to grow back since his discharge—those gypsy curls that Irina had thought for so long were a blemish in herself, appreciating them only when it was too late, and her hair was beginning to go gray. Sasha stood in the doorway, waited for a moment, and then guided her—the new girlfriend—into the house ahead of him.

So far Irina did not know much about the new girlfriend, except that her name was Melitta (like those coffee filters on Western TV), and that, like Sasha, she was studying at the Humboldt University of Berlin. And that she was the woman of his life, as Sasha claimed to have found out after only three months. Perhaps because of that, or perhaps because of the coffee filter ads, Irina had formed some kind of imaginary picture of her, but as she realized the moment she set eyes on the new girlfriend, vague as her picture had been, this was not what she had expected.

The young woman who offered Irina her not particularly well manicured hand was small and unspectacular, her hair was a dull blonde, her lips were pale, and the only striking thing about her was a pair of watchful green eyes.

“Shoes off?” inquired the new girlfriend.

“People do not take their shoes off in this house,” said Irina, with unconcealed disapproval, because she thought it a terrible thing to insist on visitors removing their shoes. It was petty and provincial, and if anyone asked her, Irina, to take off the shoes that she had carefully chosen to suit her outfit, and go around a stranger’s home in her stocking feet or a borrowed pair of slippers, she drew her own conclusions and never went there again.

Although in fact there was little difference between slippers and the flat shoes, rather like cucumbers in appearance, that the new girlfriend was wearing.

“People do not take their shoes off in this house,” repeated Irina.

But the new girlfriend, eager to oblige, took them off anyway. It was such filthy weather outside, she explained. Now even Sasha was wondering whether to take his own shoes off.

“Nu eshtshyo by,” hissed Irina. This was the last straw.

Sasha looked at the new girlfriend, looked at Irina. Shrugged his shoulders, kept his shoes on.