“Forgive me, forgive me, little one.”
When he got to his knees and looked up, it seemed to him that they had been caught in the beam of a searchlight: the air was lit up with a bluish light and every blade of grass was clearly visible. There was no searchlight: high in the sky a round moon was riding, enormous, completely flat and silver-blue.
“Sorry, the show’s over.” He slapped her on the hip.
She got up from the ground, and he saw that she was well proportioned, except that she was slightly bowlegged and, as with Rosa, her legs were set in such a way that they didn’t quite come together at the top. He liked this narrow chink of light: it was certainly better than fat thighs rubbing against each other till they got red marks, like Olga’s.
He was already dressed, but she was still standing naked in the moonlight and he misunderstood her languor. Now all he wanted was to sleep, and before doing so he wanted to finish thinking through why his trip might have been set back.
The Village was now as clearly visible as the palm of his hand, and Butonov saw a path which led directly to Vitka’s house, to the back of Ada’s yard. He gave Masha a squeeze and ran his finger along the thin ridge of her spine.
“Do you want me to see you back or will you run up there on your own?”
“On my own.” But she didn’t go, she held him back. “You didn’t say you loved me.”
Butonov laughed. He was in a good mood. “Well, what have we just been doing right here?”
Masha ran home. Everything was new: her hands, her legs, her lips. Some physical miracle had occurred. What delirious happiness! Could this be the thing Nike had been hunting for all her life? Poor Alik.
Masha looked in on the children: in the middle of the room stood an already packed rucksack. Liza and Alik Junior were sleeping on folding beds. Katya was stretched out on the ottoman. Nike wasn’t there. “She’s probably gone to sleep in Samuel’s room,” Masha surmised. She was greatly tempted to waken her without more ado and lay everything out before her but decided she shouldn’t disturb her in the middle of the night. She didn’t open the door to Samuel’s room, and tiptoed through to the Blue Room.
Butonov’s adventures that night were not yet over. He found the door to Vitka’s house half-open and was surprised: he remembered latching it from outside, although he hadn’t pad-locked it. He went in, making the door creak, threw his sneakers down on the mat, and went through to the second room, where he usually slept.
On the high bed, made up in the complicated Ukrainian fashion with a valance, a bedspread, a mound of pillows which Ada rearranged in strict order every morning, on the white woven blanket with her long hair spread out over the chaotically disordered pillows, slept Nike. The truth was that she had been wakened by the sound of the door creaking. She now opened her eyes and beamed a slightly theatrical happy smile: “A surprise just for you! With home delivery!”
Butonov always performed better on the apparatus the second time. Nike was straightforward and fun, and didn’t darken their last night with foolish reproaches or say any of the things that might have been said by a woman scorned.
Butonov, still conducting himself by the same rules for treating a lady, the first of which he had been unable to implement this evening because of Masha’s alacrity, now availed himself of the second and most important one: never explain yourself to a woman.
At dawn, to their complete mutual satisfaction, Nike left Butonov, not forgetting to write her telephone number in his little black book. When she got back, Medea was already sitting with a cup from which there rose the aroma of morning coffee, and there was no telling from her expression whether she had seen Nike’s return through the kitchen window. Actually there was really no need to try to hide anything from Medea: the young people were always sure she knew everything about everyone. Nike kissed her on the cheek and immediately went out.
Medea’s perspicacity was in general greatly exaggerated, but this night she really had found herself right at the epicenter: some time after two in the morning, having patiently but fruitlessly waited for sleep to come, she had gone out to the kitchen to take some of her “sleeplessness potion,” as she called the spoonful of poppy seeds she boiled in honey. The moon came out at the same time as she did, lighting up the mound on which a young couple were disporting themselves, their white, unidentified bodies gleaming dazzlingly. A little later, when she had finished drinking her decoction with little mindful sips and was lying in her room, she heard the adjoining door open and springs creak softly. “Masha’s back,” Medea thought, and dozed off.
Now, seeing Nike return, Medea was puzzled for a moment: there was, after all, only one young man to go around the entire neighborhood, the athlete Valerii with his iron body and the long, priestly hair constrained by a rubber band. Medea noted this occurrence with a certain bafflement and filed it away where she kept her other observations of the life of her young relatives with their ardent romances and unstable marriages.
Nike came in again with a pile of laundry she had just taken off the line. “I washed it ready for the Lithuanians. I’ll iron it before I leave.”
At midday a neighbor took Nike, Katya, and Artyom off to Simferopol. Half an hour previously Nike had taken a stack of fresh laundry into the Blue Room, which Masha was relinquishing in favor of the Lithuanians, and here it was that, having a moment alone with Masha for the first time that morning, Nike received her confession and was immeasurably surprised.
“Nike, it’s so awful!” Masha’s gaunt face beamed at her. “I’m so happy! It was all so simple . . . and amazing! If you hadn’t said, I’d never have dared.”
Nike sat down on the stack of laundry. “Never have dared what?”
“I grabbed him like you said.” Masha gave a rather silly giggle. “But you were absolutely right. You always are. I just had to stretch out my hand.”
“When?” was all Nike could ask in a strangled voice.
Masha embarked on a detailed account of how at the post office . . . But Nike stopped her. She no longer had time for long explanations and asked just one, seemingly quite odd, question: “Where?”
“At the Hub! It all happened right at the Hub. Like in an Italian movie. Now we can put a cross there in memory of my unshakable fidelity to my husband.” And Masha smiled her clever smile, just the same as it always had been.
Nike had never imagined that her crosspatch advice would be acted on with such precipitate literalness. But Butonov was obviously no dud.
“Well then, Masha, now you’ll have something to write poetry about, love lyrics,” Nike predicted, and was entirely correct.
“What a mess . . . Should I perhaps make her a present of this sports doctor?” Nike wondered. “Never mind, I’m leaving anyway. What will be, will be.”
CHAPTER 11
The small leather trunk bound with strips of molded wood, lined inside with glued white-and-pink-striped calico, full of partitioned boxes which interacted ingeniously to form a series of little shelves and compartments, had once belonged to Elena Stepanyan. This was the trunk with which she had returned from Geneva in 1909; and she had traveled with it from St. Petersburg to Tiflis; she had come with it to the Crimea in 1911. With this small trunk she returned to Theodosia in 1919 and there, immediately before her departure for Tashkent, she had presented it to Medea.
Three generations of little girls had swooned over it longingly, persuaded that Medea’s little trunk was full of treasure. There were indeed a few poor treasures in there: a big mother-of-pearl cameo, without its frame, which had helped feed them in the lean year of 1924; three silver rings and an inlaid Caucasian belt for a man, and for one with a very slender waist at that. But apart from these insignificant treasures the little trunk housed everything Robinson Crusoe could ever have dreamt of. There stayed there, securely packed and faultlessly tidy, candles, matches, threads of every color, needles and buttons of every size, spools for no longer extant sewing machines, fastenings for trousers and fur coats, hooks for fishing and needles for knitting; postage stamps—tsarist, Crimean, German occupation; shoelaces, braid, lace edgings, and insertions; thirteen locks of hair of various colors from the first haircut of yearling babes of the Sinoply family, wrapped in cigarette paper; a hoard of photographs; old Harlampy’s pipe; and much more besides. In the two lower drawers were letters, arranged by year and all of them in their original envelopes, neatly slit open down the side with a paper knife.