Alexandra took Masha there several times. She could see the little girl was unhappy, but could never have imagined that what was upsetting her most was the appalling accusation of the crazy old woman. Masha said nothing about it because what she feared most of all was that her beloved Alexandra and Nike would find out what she had done and stop coming to see her.
Late in the autumn Masha had a terrible nightmare for the first time. In it nothing happened at all. It was just the door to her room opening, and someone terrifying was going to come in. She could feel the monster coming nearer down the corridor, and the horror grew and grew until Masha woke up with a scream. Who was pushing the door open and why? And it was never quite where the real door was . . . Motya usually came running in when she screamed. She would tuck her in again, stroke her, and make the sign of the cross, and then when it was already almost morning Masha would fall soundly asleep.
If before she had been unable to sleep, waiting for her grandmother to come, now even after she left, Masha could not sleep for a long time, terrified of the nightmare which visited her more often the more she feared it. In the mornings Motya had trouble getting her out of bed. She sat half-asleep through her lessons, came back home half-asleep and performed her musical servitude in front of Vera Ivanovna, and then she fell into a fitful catnap which saved her from nervous exhaustion.
The location above the River Yauza where their apartment block stood had long been considered an unholy spot. Above it was Louse Hill, and along the shore itself there once sprouted the hovels of tinkers and potters. On the opposite bank had sprawled Khitrov Market, whose environs were populated by rag-and-bone men, prostitutes, and tramps. It was their descendants who inhabited the tenements built here at the turn of the century, and these were the people, crammed now into moldering communal flats, who pointed to the vast building which rose up higher than any of the neighborhood churches, a flight of architectural insanity not without irony, with a spire, arches, colonnades above tiers of diverse heights, and said, “That’s an unholy place.”
Many residents of the block died unnatural deaths, and the narrow windows and stunted little balconies attracted suicides. Several times a year the emergency services would drive up to the block with sirens wailing and scrape up the flattened human remains which some compassionate soul had covered with a sheet. Statistics, a science so much cherished in Russia, had long ago established that the number of suicides rose on sunless winter days.
That December was unusually dismal. The sun did not once break through a blanket of cloud. It was the ideal time for a last flight.
The Gladyshevs usually dined in the dining room but ate their supper in the kitchen. One evening as Masha was finishing the potato fritters which Motya had cooked country style, Vera Ivanovna came into the kitchen. Motya informed her that someone else had “made the leap” today. The daughter of a famous aircraft designer had thrown herself from the seventh floor.
“Unlucky in love, I expect,” Motya commented.
“They spoil them. That’s what it leads to. You shouldn’t let girls out,” Vera Ivanovna responded sternly. She poured some boiled water into a glass and went out.
“Motya, what happened to her?” Masha asked, tearing herself away from the potatoes.
“What do you mean? She killed herself. It’s stone paving down there you know, not straw. Oh, this sinful world.” She sighed.
Masha put her clean plate in the sink and went to her room. They lived on the eleventh floor. There was no balcony in her room. She moved a chair over and climbed up onto the broad windowsill. A rudimentary little balustrade was squeezed in between the tenth and eleventh floors. Masha tried to open the window, but the bolts were paint-stuck.
Masha got undressed and put her things on the chair. Motya came in to say good night. Masha smiled, yawned, and fell asleep instantly. For the first time in her life at Tinkers Embankment, she fell into a light, happy sleep; for the first time she did not hear the quiet curses with which Vera Ivanovna came into her room at midnight; and the door of the terrifying nightmare did not open that night.
Something had changed in Masha from the day she heard about the girl who had “made the leap.” Evidently there was a possibility she hadn’t known about, and knowing about it made her feel better.
The next day Alexandra rang to see if she would like to go with Nike to a winter camp run by the Theater Society. Masha would have liked to go anywhere in the world with Nike. Nike was the only girl left from her old life: all her other friends in the southwest region of Moscow, where she had lived before, had vanished without trace, as if they too had been killed along with her parents.
For the few days remaining before New Year, Masha lived in a state of happy anticipation. Motya packed her case, covered it in protective canvas, and sewed a white square to it on which she wrote Masha’s name. The general’s chauffeur brought over her skis from the southwest. He couldn’t find the poles but bought some new red ones in Children’s World, and Masha stroked them and smelled them. They smelled more delicious than any food.
She was to be taken to Pushkin Square on the morning of December 31. She would meet Nike at the place from which the buses would be leaving. She imagined that all her friends from her old home would be there too: Olya, Nadya, and Alyona.
On the evening of the thirtieth her temperature rose to almost 104 degrees. Vera Ivanovna called the doctor and rang Alexandra Georgievna to inform her. That was the end of the trip.
Masha lay for two days in a high fever, opening her eyes from time to time and asking: “What’s the time? It must be time to go. Aren’t we going to be late?”
“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” Motya kept saying, hardly leaving her bedside.
In occasional lucid moments Masha saw Motya and Alexandra, Vera Ivanovna and even her grandfather, Pyotr Stepanovich. “When am I going to the camp?” Masha asked in a clear voice when the illness released its grip on her.
“But the holidays are over, my dear. What camp could you be going to?” Motya responded.
It was the end of the world.
In the evening Alexandra came and comforted her for a long time, promising to take her to stay in the summer at her dacha in Zagoryanka.
That night the nightmare came back. The door from the corridor opened and somebody terrifying was slowly approaching her. She wanted to scream but couldn’t. She sat bolt upright, jumped out of bed in a strange state between sleeping and waking, moved the chair over to the windowsill, climbed up on it, and heaved the bolt with a strength which came from who knows where. The inner window frame opened. The second opened easily, and she slipped down off the sill before she even had time to feel the icy touch of the tin cowling. The hem of her nightdress snagged on its jagged edge, pulling her in just enough for her to fall lightly onto the snow-covered balustrade of the tenth floor.
An hour later Motya finished gorging herself and came out of her storeroom. A cold draft blew over her. Ice-cold air was coming from the open door of Masha’s room. She went in, saw the open window, gasped, and rushed to shut it. On the windowsill a small, uneven pile of snow had drifted. Only after she had closed the window did she notice that Masha was not in bed. Her legs buckled under her and she fell to the floor. She looked under the bed. She went over to the window. It was snowing heavily. She could see nothing other than the slow snowflakes.