“Valerii hasn’t come out all day, either,” Nora said, nodding in the direction of the Kravchuks’ house. “He’s watching television.”
Nike got lightly to her feet, turned at the door, and said, “I’m just going to see Aunt Ada for a minute.”
The television was turned up full volume, and there was a big meal on the table. Landlord Mikhail didn’t like small portions, and Ada’s saucepans, for all the modest size of her family, were practically the size of buckets. She worked in the kitchens of one of the sanatoriums and had all the resources of the state catering organization at her command, which also reflected gratifyingly on the rations of the two pigs she kept.
Valerii and Mikhail were sitting looking slightly dazed after their heavy meal, while Ada herself had just gone down to the cellar for the stewed fruit. She came into the room behind Nike with two three-liter jars. Ada and Nike kissed.
“Plums,” Nike guessed.
“Nike, do sit down. Mikhail, pour something,” Ada ordered her husband.
Butonov stared fixedly at the television.
“I won’t, I just came in to say hello. My Liza is visiting your lodgers,” Nike excused herself.
“You don’t come to see us yourself. You only visit our tenants,” Ada reproached her.
“No, really, I’ve come ’round several times, but you were either out at work or driving around looking up your friends,” Nike said.
Ada furrowed her little brow and rubbed her nose, which was barely visible on her fat face.
“That’s right enough, we went to Kamenka to see my godmother.”
Mikhail had meanwhile already poured her a glass of chacha. He was good at all sorts of practical things, as Valerii had already heard from his neighbor Vitka: distilling chacha, smoking meat, salting fish. No matter where Mikhail lived, in Murmansk, in the Caucasus, in Kazakhstan, what interested him most was what people ate, and he made a mental note of all the best practices.
“Here’s to our meeting,” Nike exclaimed. “Your health!”
She held out the glass to Butonov too, and he finally tore himself away from the television. She gave him a look which Butonov did not like. Right now he didn’t like Nike. Her head was tightly bound with an ancient green scarf which concealed her lively hair and made her face seem too long, and her dress was the color of dilute iodine. Little did Butonov know that Nike had put on precisely the things which most suited her, and in which she had posed for a famous artist. It was he who had told her to wear the scarf tight, and had gazed at her for a long time almost in tears, repeating over and over again, “What a face . . . my God, what a face . . . it’s a Fayum portrait.”
But Butonov knew nothing about Fayum portraiture, and was just feeling ratty that she had come trolloping over here to him without an invitation, a right he hadn’t conferred on her yet.
“This is a friend of our Vitka. He’s a famous doctor,” Ada boasted.
“Yes, we went to the coves with Valerii yesterday. We’re already acquainted.”
“You always were quick off the mark,” Ada said waspishly, alluding to something Butonov didn’t know about.
“Yes, that’s the truth,” Nike replied brazenly.
At that point Liza started squealing and Nike, vaguely aware that something wasn’t right with her new romance, slipped out through the door, swishing her long iodine-colored dress as she went.
Nike spent the evening with Masha. Nobody came to see them. They had plenty of time to smoke a cigarette together, to sit in silence together, to talk together. Masha confessed to Nike that she had fallen in love, read the poem she had written during the night and another two besides, and Nike for the first time in her life reacted wryly to her favorite cousin’s poetry.
All day she had been unable to find a moment to tell Masha about yesterday’s conquest and now it had soured completely, and in any case she did not want to upset Masha with this fortuitous rivalry. Masha, however, was engrossed in her own thoughts and didn’t notice anything.
“What should I do, Nike? What should I do?”
She was so concerned about her newly acquired condition of being in love, and was looking up at Nike with such expectation, the way she did as a child. Nike, suppressing her irritation with Butonov, who had evidently decided to punish her for some reason, and with her daft niece who had found a fine one to fall in love with, the idiot, shrugged and replied, “Give him one and calm down.”
“What do you mean, ‘Give him one’?” Masha asked.
Nike got even more exasperated: “ ‘What do you mean? What do you mean?’ Are you a child? Just grab him by the balls.”
“It’s as simple as that?” Masha asked in astonishment.
“It’s simpler than a steamed turnip,” Nike snorted, and thought, “What a hopelessly innocent idiot. Love poems and all! If she wants to land in the shit, so be it.”
“You know, Nike,” Masha suddenly decided, “I’ll go to the post office right now and ring Alik. Perhaps he’ll come and everything will settle down again.”
“Perhaps he’ll come! That’s just the problem!” Nike laughed unkindly.
“ ’Bye!” Masha said, suddenly jumping up from the bench and, grabbing a jacket on the way out, ran to the road. The last bus to town, the ten o’clock, was leaving in five minutes’ time.
At the city post office the first person Masha saw was Butonov. He was standing in a telephone booth with his back to her. The telephone receiver seemed tiny in his big hand, and he had to dial with his little finger. Without having talked, he hung up and came out. They said hello. Masha was standing at the end of the queue, with two other people in front of her. Butonov took a step to one side, letting the next person in, looked at his watch, and said, “It’s been engaged for forty minutes now.”
The streetlamps, flickering bluish wands, were very close together and gave off something like daylight; the light was stark, like in a horror movie when something’s about to happen, and Masha felt frightened that this big, movie-star-like man in his blue denim shirt might make her reasonable and well-ordered life collapse. But he moved toward her, his mind still on the same tack.
“Women gossiping, or the telephone’s out of order.”
Now it was Masha’s turn. She dialed the number, desperately hoping to hear Alik’s voice, which would settle everything down again, but nobody answered.
“Engaged too?” Butonov asked.
“Nobody home,” Masha answered, swallowing hard.
“Let’s take a walk along the embankment and then try calling again,” Butonov suggested.
He suddenly noticed she had a nice face and a round ear which stuck out touchingly on her closely cropped head. In a friendly gesture he put an arm on the thin velveteen of her jacket.
Masha’s head came up to his chest, and she was thin and angular like a boy. “She’d make a good partner as a trapeze artist,” he thought.
“I heard there’s some kind of barrel on the embankment and a special wine.”
“Novy Svet champagne,” Masha responded, already walking.
They walked down to the embankment, and Masha suddenly saw them from one side, as if they were on a screen, walking quickly, looking both relaxed and purposeful at the same time, whirling past the backdrop of a resort with oleanders planted in urns and carried out and placed at the sanatorium entrances, past the fake plaster pillars, the glittering eternally green boxtree, past the shoddy palms worn out by pavilion living, and the local prostitute Serafima with her fat face, and several sturdy miners with goggling eyes were there to be glimpsed in the depths of the frame, and the soundtrack was “Oh, the Sea at Gagry,” of course. And while all this was going on, her feet were joyfully dancing along in time to his walking, and her body was full of a holiday lightness and even a kind of wordless merriment, as if the champagne were already working.