When he unveiled the portrait of the woman in the headscarf, Aslan flared up in anger. Taking no notice of his host, he went up to the painting several times, turned to Almira and rapidly uttered a string of curt remarks, getting louder and louder, full of evident outrage. She tried to calm him down and reason with him, but this infuriated him even more. The violent exchange of remarks in their own language went on for about a minute, then Aslan took her by the hand and led her back to Mrs Z’s flat, where quite unaware of all this, Mrs Z was standing in the doorway with a baking tin full of cake. They collected the child and, without bothering to call the lift, began to make their way down the stairs.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Almira as they left, averting her gaze. ‘Izvinitye.’
He stayed on at Mrs Z’s, where they sat up for ages over a bottle of brandy and some tea. If he was cross, it was only with himself. There was something he had failed to foresee, with disastrous results. He did not bear them a grudge, but he would have felt better about it if he had been told, even in unpleasant terms, exactly what his mistake had been.
‘Perhaps it’s Islam,’ said Mrs Z, nodding hesitantly towards the portrait, ‘because you’ve painted her almost like the Madonna. But why is there that desert in the background? I’d have painted over the sand and left it at that!’
He shook his head. ‘He’s not a fundamentalist. I don’t think he’s religious at all, it’s not that.’
But as the days went by no other explanation came to light. As he passed the cottage on his way back from the shops, the two of them were just on their way out to the car.
‘Good day,’ he said.
‘Good day,’ they replied almost simultaneously, and she added: ‘How are you? Everything all right?’
He nodded to say it was. Then he kept thinking to himself: ‘Well I never, it’s as if nothing had happened at all! Not the slightest ripple!’
When at the beginning of November the first snow fell, some unknown miscreants threw stones and smashed all the windows in the gardener’s cottage. With the help of several of the neighbours, he collected some money and dropped by to deliver his donation.
‘You see, he has gone to the glazier’s in the car,’ she said, standing in the doorway. ‘Please come in.’
But he refused, so she held him by the arm and said that time, with the painting, there had been a misunderstanding, that many times before now she and her husband had wanted to apologise to him, but they didn’t really know how to do it, so now, if he would like to come by that afternoon once they had put in the glass, they would be happy to hang the painting above the chest of drawers.
He came back an hour later, when he saw the old Wartburg and the glazier’s van from the balcony. They split the work three ways: two windows at the front, two at the back facing the copse, and two small ones in the side extension. The glazier took the money and drove away. He leaned the painting in its plastic wrapping against the chest of drawers and tried to leave too, but it would have been wrong to refuse a cup of tea. Behind a partition made of boards there was an entire workshop. The area where they were sitting served as the kitchen and bedroom. In a cubby-hole by the toilet stood the washing machine.
‘Aslan was so angry,’ she said at last, ‘because he thought I had met you earlier. But where? I couldn’t explain. Only when I showed him the picture, the one from the newspaper, did he stop. That day, when I was here on the border, he was still in Chechnya.’
They shook hands as they said goodbye.
Almost a month later, when the first Molotov cocktail landed on the roof of the gardener’s cottage, probably everyone on the estate was still asleep. Only the glow of the fire and the fire engine sirens awoke the people living in the blocks. Lots of them looked out of their windows. Several, like him, ran to the scene, but it was already too late. The woman and her child were sitting in a police car. Aslan, who at the final moment had managed to drive the Wartburg to a safe distance, was now walking towards his wife, in the company of a fireman and a policeman. Soon after, once the firemen had finished putting out the burning ruins, the police car drove away.
He called the local police station from home and said he wanted to talk to the victims of the fire. He was asked for his name and whether he had any connection with the case. He explained that he could offer them accommodation for a while. Then he was asked if he had seen anything suspicious, and if so, would he like to make a statement. He left his phone number and asked for it to be passed on to the fire victims. But by dawn no one had called, nor after. He heard on the local radio that an intensive investigation was under way, aiming to identify a potential ring of suspected perpetrators. The county administration had assigned the victims a safe place to live, at one of the holiday centres in the north.
As he was coming home from the shops next day, he could see the old Wartburg from some distance. The car was standing in front of what was left of the gardener’s cottage, its two-stroke engine whirring away. Aslan was poking about in the charred remains with a long pole, and next to him, with her head wrapped in a thick scarf, stood Almira. It was snowing. As he approached, she nodded to him, and soon after she got into the back seat of the car, beside the child. Aslan hadn’t found anything. He threw aside the pole and went behind the cubby-hole, from where he brought out a small box of tools.
‘I’ve got this left,’ he said. ‘As I was running for the car I threw it into the snow. Well,’ he offered his hand, ‘as you say here now, Happy Christmas. Uyezhayem – we are going away, i budyet kharasho – and it will be all right.’ He slammed the door and drove off slowly, so the wheels wouldn’t spin in the snow.
As he walked along that same path in the spring, a bulldozer was clearing the remains of the rubble. In a heap of rubbish, between a broken brick and a coil of wire he noticed a bit of reddish-brown material. He took it in his fingers and crumbled off a crust of ash. He hadn’t any doubt: the fibres rubbed across his hand were from a scrap of the canvas he had primed more than a year ago.