As the furniture-mending prelude to their marriage continued, he became even more persuaded of Alexandra Georgievna’s exceptional qualities. “She’s a thoroughly decent person, not some kind of flirt,” he thought, having disapprovingly in mind that Valentina with whom he had lived a few good years before she was unfaithful to him with a captain who had turned up from her home province. It was certainly true that his lumbering Valentina lagged far behind Alexandra.
By now winter was coming to an end, and Alexandra’s long-running affair with the ministry official who had once secured for her the job at the Maly Theater was also coming to an end. A bribe taker and thieving bureaucrat, he was generous toward women and had always helped Alexandra; but now he had another strong liaison, saw Alexandra infrequently, and the end result was that she was a bit short of money.
In late March she asked Ivan Isaevich to go with her to the dacha plot, where the building of her house had been begun last year but not finished. From then on he began to accompany her regularly on these Sunday trips.
They met by the booking office at the station before eight o’clock in the morning. He would take from her the bag with the food she had prepared; they would get into the empty train and with barely a word travel to their station, and then walk two kilometers in silence along the main road. Alexandra had her own thoughts and paid little attention to her companion, while he was pleased by her intense silence because he didn’t like to talk much himself and there was in any case very little for them to talk about, since neither of them cared for theater gossip and they had yet to gain a life in common.
Gradually a genuine topic for discussion did arise between them: the practicalities of building a house. Ivan Isaevich’s advice was always intelligent and practical; the workmen who reappeared at the end of April to complete the building they had begun treated him as the owner and, under his watchful eye, worked quite differently from last year.
The question of matrimony was still not moving forward. Alexandra had become accustomed to not lifting a finger without consulting him, and having him there gave her a quite unprecedented feeling of security. The anxieties, extending over many years, of a lone woman wholly responsible for her family had exhausted her, and then the material support of men, of which she had been readily able to avail herself without raising unnecessary moral issues, had somehow dried up of its own accord.
She was constantly discovering new virtues in Ivan Isaevich but squirmed every time he clumsily misused the Russian language. Although Alexandra Georgievna’s own education had been nothing special—incomplete secondary schooling and her training as a laboratory assistant—her upbringing under Medea’s tutelage had given her irreproachable, grammatically correct speech, and from the Pontic seafarers she had probably inherited a drop of royal blood and honorary kinship with those queens who always had their profile toward the spectator as they spun wool, wove tunics, and made cheese for their husbands, the kings of Ithaca and Mycenae.
Alexandra was conscious that their mutual inspection was dragging on, but she had not yet freed herself of the quite mistaken belief that she was so much better than he in every respect that he should consider her choosing him to be great good fortune: she took her time, still not giving that wordless indication of consent which Ivan Isaevich was so much waiting for. A great and irreparable misfortune which occurred that summer brought them together and united them.
Tanya, Sergei’s wife, was a general’s daughter, and this was not a stereotypical characterization of her, but a simple biographical fact. From her father she inherited ambition, and from her mother a pretty nose. Through the general’s exertions she received a dowry of a new one-room apartment in Cheryomushki and a large secondhand Victory car. Sergei, who was both fastidious and independent, would not touch the car, and did not even obtain a driving license: Tanya was the driver.
That last preschool summer, their daughter Masha was living at the general’s dacha with her grandmother, Vera Ivanovna, the general’s wife, who had an impossible, hysterical personality, as everybody knew. From time to time, the granddaughter would have a row with her grandmother and call her parents in Moscow, asking them to come and take her home. This time Masha rang late at night from her grandfather’s study. She did not cry but complained bitterly: “I’m bored. She doesn’t let me go anywhere and doesn’t let girls come to play. She says they’ll steal things, but they won’t steal anything, honestly . . .”
Tanya herself had not entirely forgotten her upbringing under Vera Ivanovna and promised to collect Masha in a few days’ time. This entailed major disruption of the family’s plans. They had been intending to drive all together to the Crimea in two weeks’ time, to Medea; the holiday had been written into her timetable, they had arranged it all with her, and it was quite impossible to move the trip forward.
“Perhaps Alexandra could look after Masha just for a week?” Tanya enquired, angling cautiously.
Sergei was not keen to take his daughter from “the Junta,” as he called his wife’s family. He felt it was unfair to his mother, whose dacha had only just been finished, to say nothing of the fact that the Junta’s dacha was enormous and provided with servants, while Alexandra had two rooms and a verandah.
“I do feel sorry for Masha,” Tanya sighed, and Sergei gave in.
They decided to play truant in midweek and set off early in the morning. They never made it to the general’s dacha: a drunk truck-driver swerved over onto the wrong side of the road, crashed into their car, and both died instantly in the head-on collision.
Toward the evening of that day, when Nike was worn out waiting for her much loved friend and cousin, and had arranged her dolls in a row for her, and herself beaten the raspberry mousse, the general’s Volga arrived and the dumpy general climbed out and walked unsteadily toward the house. Seeing him through the net curtain, Alexandra came out onto the verandah and stopped on the top step, anticipating news which had already reached her as a terrible inarticulate heaviness in the thickening evening air.
“Lord, Lord, wait, I can’t, I’m not ready for this . . .”
The general slowed his progress up the path, time slowed and stopped. Only the swing which Nike was sitting on did not stop completely, but very slowly glided down from its high point.
In this moment of frozen time Alexandra saw a large part of her and Sergei’s life, and even that of her first husband, Alexei Kirillovich, in that summer at the Karadag station: the newborn Sergei in Medea’s arms; their joint departure for Moscow in the expensive old-fashioned railway carriage; Sergei’s first steps at the Timiryazev dacha . . . and he in his little jacket, his head shaven, when he went to school. And Alexandra saw much more, like so many forgotten photographs, while the general stood on the path with his leg poised to take a step.
She watched it through right to the end, to Sergei’s coming around to Uspensky Lane the day before yesterday to ask her to keep Masha at the dacha for a few days until they could all go to the Crimea, and his awkward smile, and the way he had kissed her hair, which she wore pinned forward in a rolclass="underline" “Thanks, Mum, you do so much for us.”
And she had dismissed his thanks: “Nonsense, Sergei. What sort of favor are we doing when we all worship your little Masha.”
General Pyotr Stepanovich Gladyshev reached her at last, stopped, and said in a slow, thick voice: “Our children . . . a crash . . . both of them killed.”
“With Masha?” was all Alexandra could find to say.
“No, Masha is at the dacha. They were on their way . . . they were going to collect her,” the general wheezed.