The only person not in the kitchen was Masha. When they were halfway back, she had a disgusting sensation like an itching in her blood, and knew one of her rare and inexplicable attacks was coming on. Her husband Alik, a doctor who thought through every illness as if it were a puzzle in its own right, believed Masha must have a rare form of arterial allergy. She had suffered one of these attacks right in front of him one time when they had gone to celebrate the New Year holiday in the country. Masha had touched the cold nozzle of the water dispenser, and it left a mark on her arm like a burn. Within two hours her temperature went up, and by evening she was completely covered in an allergic rash.
This time something similar had happened, not from touching inanimate metal but from being fleetingly touched by Butonov. Or perhaps she had just got too hot in the spring sunshine. At all events, her right arm was scarlet and slightly swollen.
No sooner had she got home than Masha went to bed, covering herself with every blanket she could find. While she was shivering with the fever and tormented by thirst, she kept dreaming the same obsessive dream in which she seemed to be getting out of bed, going to the kitchen, and trying to scoop water from a bucket, only there was very little and the mug just scraped over the metal without getting any water. Parallel with this, rough lines of verse were shaping themselves, lines in which the seashore figured, and hot sun, and a vague sense of anticipation, along with an entirely real thirst.
Georgii went out to smoke, sat on the bench by the house, and looked back out of the darkness, like someone looking from the darkened auditorium onto a theater stage, at the lit rectangle of the open kitchen door. The light came from two inconstant sources: a yellow light from the oil lamp and a low red glow from the hearth. Faces which in the course of the day had caught the dangerous spring sunshine now seemed heavily made up. Next to dark Medea sat light-colored Nora with her hair pinned back and her fringe tucked up. Nike had told her to rub some of their yogurtlike kefir on her face and now her skin had a dull gleam. When she gathered up her hair like this, her forehead looked too high and steep, the way it is in babies and medieval German Madonnas, and this fault made her face seem even sweeter.
Georgii could also see Butonov’s powerful back in his pink T-shirt, and Nike’s winged shadow with the neck of the guitar and her hands flickering on the wall. In the middle of the table, like a precious globe, stood the samovar, but it wasn’t boiling for the tea. Although Georgii had finally run an overhead cable through to the kitchen, for some reason the electricity was cut off in the Village today.
Along with the light, song poured out into the night, sung in Nike’s strong, simple voice supported by the uncomplicated chords of hands unschooled in music. At the time, everyone was singing Okudzhava, but Georgii, unlike the rest of them, did not like his songs. They irritated him with their cuffs and their velvet camisoles, their blues and their gilding, their smells of milk and honey, with all their romantic charm; but mainly, perhaps because they were captivating, and crept into your heart uninvited, and because you could still hear them long afterward and they left a residue in your memory.
For many years he had been working in the field of paleozoology, the deadest of sciences, and this had given him a strange view of the world: he divided everything into hard and soft. Soft caressed the feelings, smelled, was sweet or repellent. It was associated with emotional reactions. Hard, on the other hand, determined the essence of a phenomenon, hard was its skeleton.
Georgii could pick up one-half of an oyster shell buried in the hillside somewhere in Fergana or here, near Alchak, and tell straightaway in which of ten phases of the Paleogene Period this fleshy, long-vanished animal had lived, together with its adductor muscle and primitive nerve ganglions, all the stuff that made up its unimportant soft matter. These songs seemed to be nothing but soft matter. As distinct from, say, Schubert’s Lieder , in which he could feel the firm musical framework. Luckily he did not know German, so the words were no problem.
Georgii crushed his cigarette end with a flat stone and went back to the kitchen, sitting in the darkest corner, from where he had a good view of Nora and her sweet, sleepy face. “She’s a real northern girl, and not very happy by all appearances,” he mused. “A Petersburg girl. There is an anemic blonde type with transparent fingers, fine blue veins, slender ankles and wrists. Her nipples are probably pale pink too . . .” He suddenly felt hot.
As if sensing his thoughts, she half-hid her face with her slender hands.
The days of Georgii’s youth, with their geological parties, their local cooks, obliging laboratory assistants always ready to offer up their muscular hips to the biting mosquitoes, their geologist girlfriends, were long past. From an Armenian mixture of stubbornness and lethargy, but also because he adhered to the mythology of family life instilled in him by his mother, despite the universal acceptance of promiscuity and all the habits of his circle and the derision of his friends, he preserved a grim fidelity to fat Zoyka but could never remember, no matter how hard he tried, what it was about her that had attracted him fifteen years ago. Nothing, except the touching way she folded her white socks carefully together, placing one on top of the other.
He went out of the kitchen again to escape from the disturbing atmosphere which was bubbling away furiously in there, irritating and arousing him.
“He’s gone,” Nora thought, disappointed.
Nike meanwhile was busy with her favorite art of seduction, fine as lace, invisible but palpable, like the smell of a pie fresh from the oven, instantly filling any space. It was a necessity for her soul, a food almost spiritual, and Nike knew no better moment than when she was turning a man in her direction, breaking through the typical male’s self-absorption in the life taking place deep within himself; arousing interest in herself, deploying her lures, spreading her bait, drawing the bright threads toward herself, and already, while he is still talking to someone at the other end of the room, he is beginning to listen to her voice, picking up the intonations of her joyful friendliness and that other indefinable something which makes the male butterfly struggle dozens of kilometers to mate with the indolent female—and already, against his will, the man Nike has targeted is being drawn to the corner where she is sitting with her guitar, or without her guitar, large, jolly, russet Nike with the appeal in her eyes. Perhaps, indeed, this was the moment of her greatest triumph, with which no physiological delights could compare, when the game bird began to wander its way absentmindedly through the rooms with an empty glass in its hand, responding to the lure, while Nike, radiant, anticipated her victory.
Butonov, sitting motionless in the middle of the bench opposite her, was already in Nike’s hands. For all his bright feathers he was a fairly simple game bird who rarely refused women but also did not allow them to tame him, preferring one-night stands to long-term relationships.
Right now he wanted to go to bed, and he was wondering whether to save this gingersnap for tomorrow. Nike for her part had not the least intention of putting off till tomorrow something that could be done today. She got up casually and put the guitar in the armchair of Medea, who had already turned in.
“The rest is silence,” she said, giving Butonov a smile which promised a continuation of the evening.
Butonov did not recognize the quotation.
“We’ll just check how the children are,” she said, seemingly addressing Nora.