With her son, Nora became reacquainted with the feeling of water—she filled up the bathtub, crawled in with the baby, and enjoyed watching him splash the water with the palms of his little hands, trying to drink the flowing streams and grabbing hold of the water to lift it up, indignant and unable to understand why it ran through his fingers.
Sensing that the child and his remarkable world were leading her into a volatile, uncertain region, she decided to put down anchor—she acquired a once-a-week lover, youthful Kostya, one of the recently matured young men who had studied under her several years before in the classes for young people. “Dialysis” was how she referred to these hasty evening visits. She didn’t bother to invite Vitya for this purpose: he was angry at her and couldn’t forgive her callous use of him to fulfill her biological needs. Kostya was easygoing, frisky, and nearly mute; he demanded nothing of Nora. Sometimes he even brought her flowers. Once, Nora put these abstract, meaningless carnations into a vase in the evening, and in the morning, when she woke up, she saw something very amusing: Yurik had climbed up onto the table and yanked the flowers out of the vase, and was stuffing a whole flower into his mouth with a frown. Nora snatched him off the table, then slowly and deliberately ate a flower herself. It wasn’t at all tasty, but it was edible. That is to say, if you were certain it was food, you could learn to like it.
Yet even Yurik wasn’t enough to fill the gaping hole Tengiz had left in her life, and she tried to patch it up with any available material. Once-a-week Kostya didn’t plug the gap; he was just a little bandage on a big wound. The best caulking for the hole was work; she was eager for any task or job that didn’t require her to leave home.
She bought several watercolor pads of twenty pages each, and every evening, after she put the baby to bed—if she didn’t have visitors from the theater, who had grown fond of her home as a hub on various Moscow walking routes—sketched his fingers and toes, his ear, his back, his folds and fat rumples, and tried to capture his gestures. Only one other body in the world was that intimately familiar to her: a head, slightly flat in back; round, delicate ears, much softer than the rest of him; a broad forehead; deep-set walnut-colored eyes; long clefts along his cheeks; an aquiline nose with a delicate bridge at the top; a neat little mouth with a somewhat protruding lower lip; and a number of missing teeth.
With the tips of her fingers, with her lips, she had explored that body so thoroughly that she could sculpt it in clay. She knew by heart the slightly sagging skin on his neck and in places surrounding the muscles—on his chest and his arms. She knew all the skin folds on his stomach that formed when he sat cross-legged, slightly stooped over.
Tengiz had grown older through the years she had known him, immersing herself in the most intimate details of his body and mind (with long pauses, though deeper and deeper every time); but her child developed more and more wonderful details with each passing month. As he grew, the soft plumpness gradually turned into his first, barely defined shapes—the soles of his feet flattened and roughened up, his teeth came in (slightly crooked on his upper jaw), and the shape of his mouth began to change.
Nora tried rebuilding her life in a way that would free her from Tengiz. Or, rather, from the absence of him.
He appeared again, as always, at the moment when Nora had already begun to think that she had parted with him for good and was already reconciled to the idea that the movie that had been in vivid color with him, and was black-and-white without him, was nevertheless interesting. Just then, he called her and asked whether it was convenient for him to drop by in about fifteen minutes.
“Sure, come right over,” Nora said casually. It had been two years since she had last seen him.
She hung up the phone and began rushing around. The doorbell rang almost immediately, even before she managed to control the cold sweat that made her shiver. He stood in the doorway, dressed in an old sheepskin coat that still carried the acrid stench of living creatures. He was carrying a stuffed bear in his arms—exactly the kind of bear that Genrikh had given Yurik—and the ancient duffel bag that he always traveled with.
“You won’t send me packing?” Tengiz said, sloughing off the sheepskin.
You bet I will, Nora thought to herself; but out loud she said, “Come right in!”
The shivering stopped. Nora realized that, in the space of one moment, she had re-entered the basic condition of her existence—being together with Tengiz. This was, perhaps, the best thing she knew—talking to him, sitting with him at the table, sleeping and sharing her silences with him.
“I want to chase you away and go to bed with you, both at the same time, Tengiz. I’m a Capricorn. For a Capricorn, the world ceases to exist when she is doing what she most loves. And what I love most in the world is you.”
“I adore you, Nora. And I, as it turns out, am a Dragon! Natella has grown keen on astrology, and it’s the best madness she’s ever suffered from.”
“Wait a minute—the Dragon is from another astrological calendar. According to the Chinese, I’m not a Fish … a Goat, I think.”
“For Dragons everything is good! They’re brilliant and wise, and lucky in everything! Like me!”
The dialogue continued, but their clothes already lay in a heap on the floor next to the coatrack. Nora breathed in his smell, the only one in the world that all her receptors were attuned to—sheepskin, the crude country tobacco he liked to smoke, and Tengiz’s body. He noisily expelled a breath of air, like a runner coming in to the finish line.
“Don’t pay any attention to me; it’s just that I haven’t been here for a while.”
But now he was back, and he was still the same, whole and undamaged. Was such a coincidence possible? Inhale, exhale, pulse, blood type, what have you … Nora spat out a piece of the wool that had immediately found its way into her mouth. Tengiz laughed and removed it from her lip. The last time he was in Moscow, it was also winter, and the sheepskin coat had served them trustily in all kinds of unpredictable adventures.
One-and-a-half-year-old Yurik woke up, crawled out of his crib, and toddled up to them. Right away he noticed the bear lying next to the door and grabbed hold of it. He paid no attention to Tengiz. Nora, hopping on one foot, struggled to put on her trousers, which had turned inside out. Tengiz shook out the sheepskin, releasing a cloud of the acrid fragrance, and hung it on a hook on the coatrack.
“Now, where were we?” he asked Nora, and took out a handful of tangerines and a bottle of Cognac from his duffel bag.
“Right here, at this very place,” Nora said, laughing. No, they hadn’t parted ways. They hadn’t parted in any sense whatsoever.
Nora picked up Yurik along with the bear and started dressing him.
While Yurik was introducing the new bear to the old one, Nora went out to the kitchen. “Are you hungry?”
Tengiz nodded. “I haven’t had a bite to eat since yesterday.”
“Buckwheat porridge. Sauerkraut. That’s all there is.”
“Excellent.”
He ate slowly, almost reluctantly, as though he wasn’t even hungry, like all well-mannered Georgians. Nora sat across from him, her chin resting on her interlocking fingers, not feeling anything but his nearness, while he ate silently; but her entire body, still full of his presence, glowed with happiness.