stop you? Why, I take people places all the time, and half of them end up somewhere they had no intention of going, but me, I never object, I—”
“Turn left here,” Sukhanov interrupted. “The gray building on the right, you see?”
“This?” the driver said triumphantly. “I knew it! This here is no Belinsky Street. This is Voskresensky Passage. Let me back up to the sign and I’ll show you, hold on.”
Sukhanov smiled indulgently. The tires squealed. The square black letters on the white background spelled out “Belinsky Street,” as, naturally, he knew they would. There was a momentary silence, and then a long, sorrowful sigh sounded in the dimness.
“I don’t believe it!” the man wailed softly. “They’ve renamed this one too! And the old name was so much better…. Please accept my apologies. I’ve memorized the whole map of the city, you see, the street names, the intersections, everything, but my map is a bit out of date—it was printed before the Revolution—so this kind of thing is bound to happen from time to time.”
“And does it happen often?” Sukhanov inquired innocently.
The man suppressed a sob. “Almost always,” he confessed in a tragic whisper.
What a loon, thought Sukhanov, as he extracted a ten-ruble bill from his wallet.
“Perhaps you should buy yourself a new map with the change,” he said generously, and chuckling under his breath, stepped out of the car, catching as he did so the last sparkle of the glasses and a farewell wave of the yellow beard bristling on the man’s invisible chin.
Nina was standing in the illuminated doorway, her face tired and pale, her fingers drumming on the doorjamb.
“I saw the taxi from the window,” she said. “I was getting worried—Ksenya and Vasily returned over an hour ago…. Oh, but your jacket is all wet!”
“The rain was nothing,” said Sukhanov nonchalantly. “On the other hand, I did nearly get mugged.”
Nina clutched the golden-edged blue robe at her throat.
“It’s all my fault, isn’t it?” she said. “I should have waited for you in the car.”
A few minutes later Sukhanov, wrapped in a matching red robe, sat in the brightly lit kitchen, under a low- hanging orange lampshade, drinking cognac-laced tea and energetically devouring strawberry preserves. Around him, his family was gathered.
“And then I said to the man, ‘You want my tie, eh? Well, I don’t think so, I’m rather partial to it myself. Here, take these two kopecks instead, that’s all you are good for,”’ Sukhanov was saying with enjoyment between the sweet spoonfuls.
“But Tolya, he could have hurt you!” Nina exclaimed. “What if he had a knife?”
“He probably did,” he said airily “Ksenya, pass the sugar, please…. But when he saw I wouldn’t make an easy victim, he just took his two kopecks and ran off.”
“Father, you really are something,” said Vasily, smiling.
“Yes, I wouldn’t envy anyone who meets him one-on-one in a dark corner,” said Ksenya.
“Wait a minute, that’s hardly a compliment!” Sukhanov objected with a laugh.
In a short while, Vasily and Ksenya slipped away, and their doors closed in the far reaches of the corridor, his softly, hers with a bang. Nina and Sukhanov were left alone in the kitchen. He was in a wonderful mood.
“To be honest,” he said, “I’m relieved this whole business wasn’t Volodya’s fault.”
She glanced at him and moved her lips, but said nothing.
“He’s a decent fellow, I would have been sad to let him go,” he elaborated.
“I’m just glad everything ended well,” she said, and pushed a plate of chocolate eclairs toward him. “Try these, they are really fresh. Valya bought them this evening.”
For some time they drank their tea without speaking. Occasionally his or her spoon would graze the edge of a cup, and its silver click would fall like a pebble into a translucent pool of stillness, redefining it, making it cozier. The gentle light of the lamp wove a golden cocoon of tranquillity, perhaps even happiness, around them, closing them off protectively from the night, in whose shady courtyards and blind alleys unpleasant things were no doubt continuing to transpire this very moment—somewhere far, infinitely far away from the warm, sparkling, well- stocked kitchen of apartment fifteen, on the eighth floor of the nine-storied building number seven, Belinsky Street, in the heart of old Moscow. Indeed, at this instant, at nearly one o‘clock in the morning on a chilly August night in the year 1985, just after the rain had washed over the roofs of the city, the familiar and delightful world of Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov existed quite independently of the world outside. The eclair melted deliciously on his tongue, and his tea was strong, just as he liked it. Row upon row of little jars containing concentrated tastes of the waning summer glittered evenly in cupboards all around him, and the air whispered of apples and cinnamon: Valya, their help who came in daily, had made his favorite apple pie only the day before, and the smells still lingered. A seemingly endless expanse of rooms unfolded behind his back, their comfortable dusk scintillating with the honeyed luster of parquet floors, damask wall upholstering, golden-flecked book bindings, crystal chandeliers opening like flowers in the high ceilings, many-antlered silver candelabra, and countless other precious possessions that the dim light hinted at tantalizingly, splendidly, as it seeped through the heavy velvet drapes. Somewhere in the recesses of his home, his two children were falling asleep, one a future diplomat, the other a future journalist, both equally gifted; and next to him, enclosed in the glowing circle of light, sat Nina, pale, disheveled, and so beautiful, her lips lightly traced with a glistening chocolate line. This was his world, and it was safe. The ebbing night had tried to meddle with him, to suck him into a dark, hidden, dangerous void—yet here he was at the end of the day, in his robe and slippers, eating his third pastry, and feeling content.
“You have some chocolate at the corner of your mouth, my love,” he said. “Oh, and by the way, you’ll never believe what happened just as I was… No, a bit higher… Now you’ve got it…. Yes, only imagine, as I was leaving the party, I ran into Belkin.”
Nina set down her cup, missing the saucer. Some tea splashed out on the table.
“You saw Lev?” she said quietly.
“Lev Borisovich in person, the one and only,” he replied with a wry smile.
The brown stain slowly devoured the tablecloth between them.
“What was he doing at the Manege?” she asked, her radiant green gaze fixed on his face with an unfamiliar, almost hopeful, expression. “Did he come to—”
“Oh, it was just a coincidence, nothing more,” he said quickly. “He happened to be walking by when the rain began, and decided to wait it out under the portico. Practical things like umbrellas never occur to a man of his nature.”
Her face suddenly remote, she looked down, noticed the stain, and started to dab at it assiduously with a dampened napkin. Sukhanov kept talking.
“He’s become quite unpresentable, our Lev Borisovich has. Aged, unshaved, dressed in God knows what— some unimaginable bow-tie affair… I think he drinks. Of course, I would too if my life were such a dismal failure. But naturally, it was bound to come to this. Even his wife—”
“Do you want anything else?” she interrupted. “If you are done, I’ll put everything away.”
“Please,” he said, and set down his last, unfinished, eclair. “Even his wife left him. Remember Alla? Frankly, I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did.”
Nina continued to open and close cupboards in silence. Pleasantly full, he leaned back in his chair, delicately muffled a chocolate burp in his napkin, and hummed the duel aria from
“His name is Vadim,” she said.
“What was that, my love?”
“Our chauffeur. Our chauffeur’s name is Vadim. Not Volodya. Not Vladislav. Not Vyacheslav. It’s Vadim. He’s worked for us for almost three years, and in all this time you haven’t made an effort to remember his name.”
Sukhanov sat up straight.
“So I did it again, didn’t I?” he said amicably. “But my love, he has one of these names I always get wrong. You know how I am with names.”
“Oh, it’s not just names, Tolya, it’s everything,” she said, turning away. “In all my life, I’ve never met anyone
