Butonov gathered that he was to wait.
The women went into the dark house and looked into the children’s room. Nothing needed to be done: they were all worn out and sound asleep after their excursion; only Liza was sighing sweetly in her sleep as usual. Tanya was spread out across a very wide ottoman, to one side of which Katya was lying straight and elegant, not forgetting her deportment even in sleep. In the middle of the room stood a large communal chamber pot.
“If you like, you can sleep here,” Nike said, indicating the ottoman, “or if you prefer, you can sleep in the little room—it’s made up.”
Nora lay down beside her daughter. It was already past three in the morning and there was little time left for sleep.
Nike returned to the kitchen and put her hand lightly on Butonov’s neck in passing. “You’ve got sunburnt.”
“I have a bit,” Butonov responded, and it suddenly seemed to Nike that there had been no conquest. “Okay, let’s go, shall we?” Butonov suggested without turning around, his voice expressionless.
Something was wrong here. The game wasn’t being played to Nike’s rules, but she didn’t stoop to flirting to try to obtain the requisite intonation; she squeezed her breast lightly against the firm back covered in stretched pink material.
What followed, on Ada’s territory, does not merit detailed description, but both participants were left wholly satisfied. After Nike had gone, Butonov relieved himself in the planked toilet at the end of the plot, which he had been unable to do earlier in a long day in the company of many people, and fell soundly asleep.
When Nike returned home, it was already getting light and she didn’t feel in the least like sleeping: on the contrary, she was full of energy, and her body, as if appreciative of the pleasure it had just enjoyed, was ready for hard work and more fun. Humming something from a few years back, she scrupulously washed the dishes and cooked the porridge for breakfast. She was stirring it in a large saucepan using a long spoon when Medea came in for her cup of coffee.
“I hope we didn’t disturb you too much last night,” Nike said, kissing Medea’s shriveled cheek.
“No, child, no more than usual.” And Medea touched Nike’s head. She liked Nike’s head: her hair was just as springy and slightly crackly as Samuel’s.
“I thought you were looking very tired yesterday,” Nike half-said, half-inquired.
“You know, Nike, I never used to notice it, but the whole of this last year I seem to have been tired all the time. Old age, do you think?” Medea replied artlessly.
Nike turned down the flame in the Primus. “Haven’t you had enough of that hospital of yours? Perhaps you should give it up?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m used to working. An affliction of slaves, Armik Tigranovna used to call it.” Medea stood up, the conversation over.
Masha came in wearing a jacket over her nightdress, her face pink and inflamed and covered in little spots.
“Masha! What’s wrong with you?” Nike gasped.
Masha drank thirstily from a mug and, when she had finished, said in an odd voice, “The bucket’s full, though. I’ve got an allergy.”
“It isn’t German measles, is it?” Medea asked anxiously.
“Where would I have got that from? It’ll be gone by this evening,” Masha said with a smile. “I had a terrible night. Fever, shivering. But now it’s all over.”
In her pocket was the crumpled piece of paper on which she had written her poem that night. For the moment Masha liked it very much, and she repeated it to herself: “A floating basket brings a child who nameless lies beside the river. Pharaoh’s daughter, heart aquiver, clothes the babe and with her song moves his destiny along. A fish is caught, it takes the bait and thrashes on the bank in netting. On that riverbank, forgetting everything, my name, my state, I sit in silence and I wait. I run the sand through fingers swelling. In that hot sun something’s jelling. I sleep, I bake, and still I wait. But wait for what? There is no telling.”
In fact, however, she had no trouble at all in telling. After yesterday’s confusion and her terrible night, everything was crystal-clear: she had fallen in love.
And she was feeling weak, as you do after a fever.
CHAPTER 9
Throughout her life Alexandra changed not only her men, of whom she grew bored easily, but also her profession. She met her third husband at the Maly Theater, where she worked from the mid-1950s as dresser to an ancient celebrity. Her husband, while collecting a decent state salary there, restored priceless antiques which the theater élite, the Actors of Merit of the USSR and the Actresses of the Soviet People, who had an eye for fine furniture, bought for a song.
Alexandra, always ready for love, had little interest in wealth but worshiped brilliance. Her marriage to Alexei Kirillovich had not been brilliant. They were the three most boring years of her life, and they ended in scandaclass="underline" Alexei Kirillovich caught her in flagrante delicto with the handsome deaf-and-dumb boilermaker who serviced the Timiryazev dachas.
Alexei Kirillovich was deeply shocked and walked out forever, leaving his wife in the embraces of her huge Gerasim. Alexandra cried right up until the evening.
She saw Alexei Kirillovich only once after that, in court for the divorce, but right through to 1941 she received alimony from him through the post. Alexei Kirillovich did not require access to his son.
The boilermaker, needless to say, was an episode of no significance. She had various brilliant liaisons: with a dashing test pilot, with a famous Jewish academician who was a witty but indiscriminate philanderer, and with a young actor, a casualty of early fame and even earlier alcoholism.
Her second husband, Yevgeny Kitaev, was a military man, well built, a lover of Ukrainian folk songs with a powerful voice. She had a daughter, Lidia, by him before this marriage too hit the buffers. They didn’t get divorced but they lived apart, and her second daughter, Vera, born just before the war, had a different father, a man with such an illustrious name that Kitaev modestly kept silent about the vagaries of his family life until the day he was killed. Alexandra’s last daughter, born in 1947, three years after his death, also bore his jolly surname.
When Alexandra passed fifty, however, and admirers ceased to swarm to the no longer gleaming beacon of her red hair, she heaved a sigh and said to herself, “Oh, well, time’s up . . .” She cast her keen feminine eye around, and rather unexpectedly it came to rest on the theater’s cabinetmaker, Ivan Isaevich Pryanichkov.
He was not old, about fifty, a year or two younger than she; not tall, but broad shouldered. He wore his hair longer than was customary among the working class, more in the fashion of an actor. He was invariably clean shaven, and his shirts peeped out freshly from beneath his blue work coat. Walking down the corridor behind him one time, Alexandra analyzed the complex and astringent aroma emanating from him and associated with his profession: turpentine, varnish, rosin, and something she couldn’t recognize. The smell struck her as really quite attractive.
The cabinetmaker had a certain special dignity of his own. He did not fit into the usual theater hierarchy. He might have been expected to occupy a modest position somewhere between a stage mechanic and a makeup artist, but he stalked the theater corridors acknowledging greetings with a nod like an Actor of Merit of the USSR and closed the door to his workshop as firmly as an Actor of the Soviet People. One time, toward the end of the working day when the workers in the workshops had not yet left and the actors and all those needed for the production of the night’s performance had already assembled, Alexandra Georgievna knocked on his door. They exchanged greetings. It transpired that he did not know her by name, although by this time she had been working in the theater for three years. She told him about the walnut cabinet she had inherited from her late mother-in-law, cast a quick glance around the walls of his workshop, at the shelves with great bottles of dark and reddish fluids and at the various tools symmetrically hung up or lying around.