“It’s a turning point in my destiny, another turning point,” she thought. “The first was when my parents drove out that morning onto the Mozhaisk highway when I was seven; the second was when Alik came over to me at the studio when I was sixteen; and now again, at twenty-five. A change in my life. A watershed of my destiny. I was waiting for it, I had a presentiment. Dear Alik, the only person out of all of them who could understand. Poor Alik, he has a better understanding than anyone else of destiny, a feeling for destiny. There’s nothing I can do. It can’t be undone. I can’t help it.”
And neither could anybody do anything to help her: she had a feeling for destiny all right, but no experience in adultery.
“Love comes sometimes as a guest, a mistress, sometimes as a horse thief, or a horse, sometimes at midday comes as coolness, at midnight comes as fire and force . . .” She fell asleep.
In the evening it was party time as usual. Instead of Nike and her guitar, the proceedings were presided over by Gvidas the Hun with his red mustache and by his wife Aldona with her mannish face and undulating feminine locks manufactured at the hair salon.
Next to Georgii sat Nora. Stilted conversation, awkward pauses. They were missing Nike, whose mere presence rendered any social gathering smooth and relaxed. Medea was pleased. Gvidas had as usual brought presents from Lithuania and had, in addition, given Medea a decent sum of money to repair the house.
Now he and Georgii were discussing the water supply. There was a water main in the Lower Village, but it had never been extended to the Upper Village, although this had been promised for many years. There were not many houses here, and they all used imported water that was kept either in old reservoir wells or in tanks. Georgii didn’t have too much faith in the pumping station and doubted whether the water would make it up to them.
Aldona often went out of the kitchen to listen at the door of the Blue Room and see whether Vitalis was asleep. Usually he woke up several times a night with a shriek, but now, after the exhausting journey, he was sleeping well.
Masha took no part in the conversation. It was past ten and she hadn’t yet lost hope that Butonov might look in. Seeing Nora get up, she was pleased: “Shall I walk back with you?”
Georgii stopped talking in midsentence before regaining his presence of mind: “I’ll see her back, Masha.”
“I want a walk anyway,” Masha said, getting up.
They walked in silence and in single file to the Kravchuks’ house. They stopped at the back gate. It was dark and quiet in Nora’s cottage. Tanya was asleep, and Nora regretted having left so early. Georgii had it on the tip of his tongue to say something to her, but wasn’t quite sure what, and in any case Masha was crowding them.
Masha looked closely at the Kravchuks’ profitable homestead with its sheds, annexes, and terraces, but could see light coming only from the owners’ house.
“I’ll go and see Aunt Ada.”
She knocked at the Kravchuks’ door and went in. Ada was reclining in front of the television with her pink bosom boiling over à la Madame Recamier.
“Oy, Mash, is that you? Come on in, dearie. Can’t say we’ve seen much of you. Nike came to visit us, but you’re too up in the air. Oy, you’re so scraggy, look at you!” Ada commented disapprovingly.
“I’ve always been like that, forty-eight kilograms . . .”
“. . . of skin and bones,” Ada retorted.
Masha came to an agreement about renting a room for a Moscow friend from the first of June, and asked whether Mikhail Stepanovich could meet her in Simferopol.
“How should I know? He’s got a chart. Ask him yourself. He’s in the shed talking about something with the lodger. It’s bedtime, but there they are . . .”
Like all the local people, Ada went to bed early.
Masha went over to the shed. The door was half-open and the light, hung on a long cord from a nail on the wall, threw an oval patch of light in which two heads were lowered: those of Mikhail Stepanovich and Butonov.
“Well, what is it?” Mikhail asked without turning around.
“Uncle Misha, I came to ask about a car.”
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, surprised. “I thought it was Ada.”
Butonov looked at her out of the light into the darkness, and Masha couldn’t tell whether he had recognized her or not. She stepped into the light and smiled.
His mouth was clamped shut. Two braids of hair not held by the rubber band were hanging down, and he pushed them aside with the back of a hand which was gleaming with black oil. His eyes said nothing.
Masha was frightened: Was this him? Had she dreamed being scorched yesterday by the moon?
She forgot why she had come. Actually she did know why: to see him, to touch him, and obtain proof of something which by its nature can be neither proved nor disproved—something that has happened.
“What car is that?” Mikhail Stepanovich asked, and Masha came to herself.
“To collect my friend from Simferopol.”
“When?”
“On the first of June. She’s going to be living with you, in the guest room.”
“Hey-ho!” Mikhail Stepanovich hemmed. “We might not live till then. Come back nearer the time.”
Masha hesitated, waiting to see whether Butonov would say anything, or at least look in her direction; but he was frowning at the metal, shifted his shoulders inside a taut T-shirt, didn’t look up but smiled wryly to himself: Kitty’s little pussy was on fire!
“Right then,” Masha whispered, and going outside, leaned against the wall of the shed.
“The engine’s absolutely fine, Stepanovich,” she heard Butonov’s voice.
“What did I say?” he responded. “It’s the spark plugs pinking, that’s what I reckon.”
“Didn’t he recognize me? Or did he not want to recognize me?” Masha agonized, unwilling to reconcile herself to either possibility. No third possibility suggested itself. It was dark. Yesterday’s mischievous moon was lighting up other hills and mounds; other lovers were disporting themselves in its theatrical light, its frozen magnesium flash.
Barely holding back her tears, she returned home not by the short path but over the Hub, to convince herself that at least the place was real where everything had happened yesterday. What was going on? Could it be that for one person something could signal a changing of their destiny, an abyss, a rending of the heavens, while the other simply had not noticed anything had happened?
She sat down cross-legged in the very middle of the Hub. Her left hand pressed down on the ground, and her right pressed into her own plaid handkerchief which had lain here for twenty-four hours and whose crumpled, starchy texture did indeed prove that yesterday’s event had taken place. She finally began to cry, and, having cried a little, from the force of a habit of many years of translating her thoughts and feelings into more or less short, rhymed lines of poetry, she murmured: “I’ll cancel all I cancel can—myself, and you, and cares and caring, intoxicated lover’s daring, inveterately sober life.”
It didn’t quite work, but it had something . . . “I’ll cancel all I cancel can, forgetfulness, forgetting self, myself . . .”
It didn’t make anything clearer, but she felt a bit better. Shoving the handkerchief into her pocket, she went into the house. Everybody was asleep. She went into the children’s room, which was all faint moving currents of light and darkness from the striped curtains. The children were sleeping. Alik asked clearly, without waking, “Masha?” and murmured something incomprehensible.