“What, have I changed beyond recognition?”
“Four years. You changed.” Her eyes swept over his face. “You don’t look as before. I have never seen you so . . . sad. Sorry, but where is your ever-smirking expression?”
“All gone.”
“So, your family life is of no joy for you? And what are you doing in Lipetsk?”
“Haven’t you heard it from Lyuba?”
A black, bitter wave rose in Natasha. “You kept in touch with her all this time even after you married but discarded me as spent goods?”
For an instant, a confusion stole into his expression. “So, she did not tell you.”
“I’ve just came from Vitebsk and was about to see her tomorrow.”
“I’ll spare you a—” He clutched at his collar, pulling it down as though it suffocated him. “I married Lyuba.”
Natasha gulped. Lyuba? What a bitch, flashed through her mind. “But not happily married, I suppose?”
He shook his head slowly from side to side.
“Want to talk?” and, noticing some hesitation in his face, she added, “As friends.”
A forced smile flitted across his features as though bringing some memories to his mind. “Want to go to the pond?”
From the boatman, they took a two-oar like on that day when they’d discovered the pleasure of the irresistibly intimate hunger for each other. Bringing a little shiver of delight, one scene came to light. It happened behind the thicket of the bird-cherry bushes. On the ground with sparse young grass. Did he remember, she wondered. Seven years since.
His face somber, Stepan worked one oar to position the boat, and the next moment it glided toward the opposite shore, noisy with the discordant sounds of birds.
“Seven years since,” she voiced her thought.
Without reaching the shore, he slowed the boat down and let the oars trail behind, peering over her head as though lost in his musings.
Before she could stop herself, she blurted out, “Do you love her?”
The question seemed to throw the dam open. “Don’t ask me why I married her. Just know I am unhappy. She doesn’t love me. Every time I want to touch her, she recoils. We don’t talk. I’m nothing to her.”
At his strangled voice and the look of despair on his face, her heart raced. “Leave her. Come to me. I’ll do anything you ask of me. Stepan, I’ll love you till my last breath.”
“I can’t.”
“But why? Were we not happy together?” She stretched her leg, touching his calf with hers in a slight motion.
“Natasha, don’t. I have a child.”
“Ah, the child.”
“Adopted.”
“What? She even could not give you a child? Bitch,” she hissed the curse. “With me, by this time, you could have had your own children.”
He gave a choked, desperate laugh.
“Stepan!”
His face twisted.
She had never known such a look on him. “Come back to me.” She pulled his hand to her knees. “Let’s love each other as we did before. Before she thwarted us.”
He stared at her with a strained weariness. “Natasha, it’s all in the past. I can’t change anything. Believe me, if I could you’d be the one.”
“But why? Because of your career? Are there no officers who have obtained a divorce?”
“It’s all much more complicated. Natasha, let me see you home.”
When the boat hit the shore, Stepan jumped out and extended his hand to help her out. They walked in silence for ten painful minutes until she ventured, “You did not forget the road to my house.”
“I did not, and thank you, Natasha, for listening to me. Sorry I brought pain on you. Maybe, with you, I would have been happier.”
At the door, she leaned to him, and he did not move away. Confident he would willingly accept her hungry kiss, she looked up at him. In the dim light it was hard to make out his expression, but she could see just enough to think she had noticed passion in his eyes. She buried her face against his chest, inhaling the smell of the body she so loved to please. From somewhere close, a thunder angrily muttered, and a gust of cool air returned her back to the reality. “Good night, Stepan,” she exhaled with tenderness, and that was how she felt about this man. She watched him go away, almost at a run, caressing his silhouette with her eyes till he disappeared behind a corner. You’ll be mine. I’ll win you back from that bitch.
The name they gave her, Lyuba, Lyubov, meaning love! Not a drop of love in her. I’ll repay her with the same coin, Natasha fumed.
How could she get to sleep tonight? Stepan! She placed her hand between her thighs, choking from the unbearable longing. Her Stepan. There was no other man in the world who’d be more desired by her heart and her body. Not that she knew many men with whom she could draw a comparison. She cringed as her memory flashed to that rosy-cheeked, well-padded peasant whom she’d met once at the local market. From some nearby village, he brought flowers to Vitebsk to sell. With a single crimson-red rose, he lured her to meet him at the West Dvina riverbank that evening. He handled her hard and in a haste, grunting like a boar until he moaned and pulled away. He didn’t even see her home. A country bumpkin.
The other one, the sleazy middle-aged schoolteacher, was not better in his own way. After endless spouting off about the socialist morale and “the leading role of the Communist Party in raising the new generation of young people on the principles of Communism builders,” he had drunk like a fish with them, the members of his Agitprop Brigade. When night fell and the agitators, inspired by his speeches and inflamed by vodka, wandered off, he asked Natasha to help with cleaning the dishes. It didn’t come to that. As soon as the door closed behind the last visitor, he grabbed her hand and pulled her to a bed behind the curtain. Her head was swimming then but even now, she could remember the dirty sheets. But what could she do? She had drunk herself into
