She leaves. Annushka rides the metro until one o’clock in the morning, and then, when it shuts down and the hellhounds chase everyone away, she circles around the place where she thought the entrance to the warm boiler room was, but she doesn’t find it. So she goes to the station and there, scraping up almost all of her remaining money, she spends the night over a series of teas and borshchts in small plastic cups, valiantly propped up on her elbows over the laminated tabletop.
The second she hears the grating of the bars being opened, she buys a ticket from the machine and goes downstairs. In the window of the train she sees her hair’s become greasy already, that there’s no trace left of her hairstyle, and that the other passengers are somewhat reluctant to sit beside her now. Periodically she panics at the fleeting thought she might run into someone, but the people she knows don’t take this line; just in case she finds a place in the corner, against the wall. Come to think of it, who does Annushka even know? The postwoman, the woman from the shop downstairs, the man who lives across from them: she doesn’t even know their names. She feels like covering her face like that shrouded woman, that’s actually a good idea – putting a covering over your eyes to be as little visible to yourself as you can be, and to be seen as little as you can. She gets bumped into, but it only brings her pleasure, to be touched by someone. An older woman sitting near her takes an apple out of a plastic bag and offers it to her, smiling. When at the Park Kultury station she stands in front of the pirozhki kiosk a young guy with close-cropped hair buys a portion for her. She gleans from this that she must not look her best. She says thank you, and she doesn’t refuse, although she still has a couple of coins left. She is witness to a number of events: the police nabbing a guy in a leather jacket. A couple arguing, voices raised as loud as they will go, both of them drunk. A young girl, a teenager, who gets on the train at Cherkizovskaya and sobs, repeating: Mum, mum, but no one has the courage to do anything to help her, and then it’s too late, the girl has got off at Komsomolskaya. She sees someone running away, a short dark man, knocking into passers-by, but he gets stuck in the crowd at the stairs and gets caught there by two other men, who pry open his hands. A woman fleetingly bemoaning having just had everything stolen, everything, but her voice arrives from an ever-greater distance, dies down and finally dies away. And twice today she sees a stiff old man with absent eyes flitting before her on the brightly lit train. She doesn’t even know that it’s been dark for a long time now, and that lanterns and lamps are on, seeping yellow light into the icy, thick air; today sunlight has completely escaped Annushka. She goes up to the surface at Kievskaya and heads towards the temporary passageway along the building being built in the hopes of finding the shrouded woman.
She is where she usually is, doing what she usually does – scampering in place, tracing circles of sorts and figures of eight and snarling out her same old curses, looking like a clump of dampened rags. Annushka stands in front of her for so long that the woman finally notices and stops. Then – although they’ve made no plans to – they both start hurriedly walking, without so much as a word, as though rushing towards some objective that will vanish for all time if they’re not quick enough. At the bridge the wind hits both of them like a kind of lady boxer.
At the kiosk on the Arbat they have delicious blinis, not expensive, dripping with grease and with sour cream on top. The shrouded woman puts some coins on the little glass saucer and gets two warm servings. They find themselves a place on the wall where they can eat this treat. Annushka gazes as though hypnotized at the young people all along the benches despite the cold, playing guitar and drinking beer. Making a ruckus more than singing. Shouting over one another, mucking around. Two young girls ride up on horseback; an unusual sight indeed, the horses are tall, well-cared-for, evidently straight from the stable; one of these Amazons greets the kids with the guitar, elegantly dismounts, chatting, keeping a tight hold on the bridle. The other girl tries to talk some straggling tourists into giving her some money to feed the horse – or so she tells them – but they deduce the money is really for beer. The animal does not look like it lacks for nourishment.
The shrouded woman elbows her. ‘Eat,’ she says.
But Annushka cannot take her eyes off this little scene, she looks greedily at the young people with her blinis steaming in her hand. In all of them she sees her Petya, they’re around the same age. Petya comes back into her body, as though she’d never given him up into the world. He’s there, curled up, heavy as a stone, painful, swelling inside her, growing – it must be that she has to give birth to him again, this time out of every pore she has in her skin, sweating him out. For now he comes up in her throat, sticking in her lungs, and he won’t emerge in any other way besides a sob. No, she won’t be able to eat a blini – she’s full. Petya’s lodged in her throat, when he could have been sitting there and reaching up with a beer can in his hand, giving it to the girl with the horse, leaning into it with his whole body, bursting out laughing. He could have been in motion, could have bent down to his boots and then lifted his arms and placed his foot in the stirrup and swung his other leg over. Sat on the back of that animal, traversing the streets sitting straight up and smiling, a scraggly moustache shading his upper lip. He could have run down the stairs, storming them, after all he is the same age as these boys, and she, his mother, would have worried about him failing his chemistry class, not getting into university and winding up like his father, worried he’d have trouble finding a job, that she wouldn’t like his wife, that they’d have a baby too soon.
This ocean of lead gathers heavily inside her and becomes unbearable and runs into a gesture one of the girls makes, wanting to tame the impatient horse – she jerks his head down by his bridle to force him to be still. And when the horse tries to pull away she cracks a whip over his back and screams, ‘Stay, goddammit! Hold still!’
And now Annushka’s blinis with sour cream fall from her hand, and she has launched at the girl fighting the horse, begun attacking her blindly with her fists. ‘Leave him alone!’ she shrieks, her voice straining in her throat. ‘Leave him alone!’
It takes a second for the startled kids to react, to try to pull off this woman in the checkered coat, suddenly deranged, but by now another woman is rushing to her aid, some shrouded lunatic all dressed in rags, and both of them are trying to take away the reins from the girl and to push her away. The girl whimpers, shielding her head with her hands – she hadn’t expected this furious attack. The horse kicks, whinnies and gets away from the girl, running down the middle of the Arbat, spooked (it’s a good thing the promenade is almost empty at this hour); the clatter of his hooves echoes off the walls of the buildings and brings to mind a street fight, a strike; people’s windows open. But now at the end of the street two policemen appear, walking serenely, probably talking about video games – there’s nothing happening – but then they see the commotion, swing into action, grabbing their truncheons, taking off at a run.
‘Sway,’ says the shrouded woman. ‘Move.’
They’re sitting at the police station awaiting their turn for the flushed and disagreeable policeman to take down their statements.
‘Sway.’ And for these couple of hours she chatters in a kind of frenzy, no doubt scared. Adrenaline has awakened the shrouded woman’s tongue. She whispers directly into Annushka’s ear so that no one else is privy to their conversation – not the man who was robbed, not the two young dark-skinned whores, not the man with the wounded head holding a bandage in place with one hand. Meanwhile Annushka cries, tears spilling down her cheeks incessantly, though her reserves will run out soon, it’s clear.