urge to spit.
Before Vasily’s room, he hesitated, then thought better of it, and proceeded into the dining room to pour himself a brandy. Its prickling warmth comforted him a little, and when Nina’s steps sounded in the hallway, he hastened to intercept her. She went into the bedroom, and he followed her meekly. The darkness, aromatic with the memories of her creams, briefly caressed his skin like a cool, soothing hand. A moment later she switched on the light; in the pink glow of the lamp, her face was chilly.
“Look, I honestly had no idea he was coming,” he said, trying to catch her gaze. “In fact, I’m not even sure who he is, exactly, some thrice removed cousin or something, I don’t think I’ve ever met him.”
“He remembers meeting
“I’m sure he does,” he said, shrugging. “Anyone would if it got them room and board. Anyway, I know it’s very inconvenient, but it’s only for one night, and first thing tomorrow morning… My love, what are you… Why are you doing this?”
Nina was tearing the sheets off their bed.
“We are giving Fyodor the bedroom,” she said matter-of-factly “It’s the least we can do after Vasily’s inexcusable behavior, don’t you think?”
He watched her methodically tuck the starched edges of a new sheet under the mattress corners. “So where are we to sleep?” he asked.
“I thought I’d take the living room couch, and you can have the one in your study, it’s comfortable enough,” she replied evenly. “I’ll bring you your linens. You may want to grab a blanket too, the nights are getting cold.”
“I’ve noticed,” he said with bitterness, and turned to go. In the doorway he paused to cast a furtive glance back at her. Today she wore no sparkling earrings, no clinking bracelets, and her features, bereft of the glossy glamour that makeup lent them, seemed soft and hazy, as if glimpsed imprecisely through a light curtain of rain. Suddenly, prompted by an oddly urgent impulse, he swore to himself that if she looked up, if only for an instant, he would reenter the pink stuffiness of the room—and talk to her, really talk to her, for the first time in who knew how long. He would confess what he had felt when he had seen Belkin walk away in the downpour; he would share with her the happy childhood memory of his father and the upsetting dream about her flying away; he would take her in his arms and tell her that she still looked beautiful, in spite of those resentful lines tugging at her mouth…. For a long moment he waited, but she did not look up.
He nodded curtly and left.
In the middle of the night, having grown at once aware of a rapidly solidifying cramp in his lower back, Sukhanov rose and headed for the bathroom. Barely awake, he moved through the darkness, automatically went through the motions of emptying his bladder, sleep-walked his way back through his familiar kingdom, and unthinkingly pushed open the bedroom door. Here he stopped, first blinded by unexpected light and then befuddled by the sight of his conjugal bed empty and the figure of a man in a robe hunched over in the armchair in the corner, scribbling busily on his knee. And then, for just one instant, before the man lifted his head, Sukhanov was seized by a powerful, disorienting feeling, not unlike vertigo, as if he had been snatched out of his state of semiwakefulness only to be hurled, his mind dizzy, into a darker, deeper vortex of dreaming. But the moment passed, and the world righted itself. His tottering step back was checked by the solidity of a half-unpacked suitcase; the seated man looked up, revealing the old-fashioned glasses, blond beard, and amiably questioning smile of Fyodor Dalevich; and already, feeling perfectly clearheaded, Sukhanov heard himself apologizing gruffly for walking through the wrong door, misled as he had been by the force of habit.
The insignificant incident over, he returned to the study; but the couch, far from comfortable at the best of times, now positively bristled with springs and angularities, and the accidental vision of a man sitting in an armchair with a notebook on his knee tormented him with the nagging persistence of a well-known name or connection that inexplicably escapes one’s memory at the precise instant of alighting on one’s lips and then haunts one for long, helpless hours. Restless minutes followed one after another into the predawn hush, and still he lay tossing. Then the same shadowy radio he had heard the night before carried through an open window the echo of the Red Square clock striking four times—and astonishingly, he had it. As the sought piece of the puzzle slid into its place in the past with a satisfying, liberating click, there surfaced before him the gentle face of an old man from the communal Arbat apartment on whom an unhappy little boy had once been persuaded to play a senseless, cruel prank.
It happened in the spring of 1937, some three months after Pavel Sukhanov had left Moscow. The mystery enveloping his father’s job had lifted from young Anatoly’s mind one day shortly after his eighth birthday. On that January day, when the whole world was particularly white and cold and every word seemed to hang in the air a bit longer, as if frozen, his smiling but curiously red-eyed mother sat him down and explained that a new factory near Gorky needed the help of a talented engineer with an unparalleled knowledge of building airplanes. It would only be for a little while, she said; and even though his eyes glistened, he nodded with the seriousness of an adult and felt proud of his father’s importance to the country.
But after his father had gone, with a handshake so strong that for days afterward he could recall its grip in his fingers, things started to change—imperceptibly at first, then faster. Nadezhda Sukhanova now wandered through life without animation, leaving dirty plates in the sink and forgetting to turn off the lights in the shared bathroom, and Anatoly’s school days, with no one to ask about them, chased one another into bleak oblivion. Then gradually, as the winter melted into spring and his evenings were slowly drained of all hope of his father’s speedy return, the presence of the Morozovs began to make itself felt in the rambling six-room apartment. The head of the family, Anton Morozov, a burly thirty-three-year-old man with hairy arms and a face resembling a slab of beef, left obnoxious cigarette stubs in the music teacher’s teacups, and was once heard to inquire in a conspicuously loud voice, his eyes narrowed shrewdly, why the old couple who sat at the Sukhanovs’ table were occupying two rooms between them when one would suffice just as well. Morozov’s sister Pelageya, when hanging lines of stockings and camisoles to dry, took to casually usurping the other half of the kitchen, and a few times at supper, his wife, Galka, sharply berated the nervously perspiring Zoya Vienberg for the weekly singing lessons she gave, threatening to complain to the authorities about the noise.
In late March, when the icicles started to break off the roofs, smashing onto the pavement below with precise crystal explosions, and there was still no sign of Pavel Sukhanov, the Morozov boys seemed to notice Anatoly’s existence for the first time. The younger of the two viciously tripped him in the hallway and, as he sat up, surprised and hurt, hugging his scraped knee, snickered coldly and told him to run and cry in his mother’s lap; and a week later, the older boy got hold of a nice red notebook in which Anatoly had been laboriously drawing the unsteady round letters of his homework and, grinning with pleasure, fed it page by page into a trash chute before Anatoly’s eyes. Their shouting and guffawing disturbed him almost nightly, populating his dreams with wide- mouthed, red-faced, thick-armed, terrifying bullies. And when one day the two cornered him in the yard and, nudging each other, told him about the old man’s manuscript, it was in the hope of shaking off his nightmares, of showing them that he was not to be ridiculed—that, indeed, he could be one of them—that Anatoly swallowed and, his eyes bright, said quickly, “Sure, I’ll do it.”
In spite of seeing him and his blue-haired wife daily at the kitchen table, I knew almost nothing about the old man. His name was Gradsky; he seemed to be in his late sixties; his hands were delicate, frail, and yellow, like ancient papyrus. Anton Morozov derisively called him “the Professor.” Apart from quiet greetings spoken into his meticulously trimmed beard, he said very little, and I never heard him talk about himself, but the Morozov boys claimed to have found out quite a bit about him—including the interesting fact that every night, after his wife retired to the neighboring bedroom, the light continued to seep out for hours from underneath the door to his tiny study. Once, when the door had stood briefly ajar, they had caught a glimpse of him dozing over a thick stack of papers on his desk. He was writing some book, they said to me; they had overheard him referring to it as the work of his life. If I returned successful from my mission, they told me smiling, they would fold the pages into boats and set them traveling with the merry blue waters of melting April snows down the widest streets of Moscow.
“Great,” I said to them, my throat dry.
That night my soul wept with loneliness as I lay awake, adapting my shallow, anxious breathing to my mother’s measured breaths and delaying, delaying for as long as I could. When the predawn dampness crept in through the cracks in the windowpanes, I rose and tiptoed barefoot along the creaking corridor. The stillness
