But he didn’t reappear. He stopped Masha halfway to the toilet.
“Don’t you recognize me?”
Masha looked at him closely but did not recognize him.
“It’s not surprising. We don’t know each other yet. My name is Alik Schwartz. I wish to propose to you.”
Masha looked at him questioningly.
“My hand and my heart,” he elaborated in all seriousness.
Masha laughed merrily. Something was beginning which she had heard so much about from Nike. An affair. She was more than ready for it.
“ ‘Maria Miller-Schwartz’ sounds pretty awful, but let’s think about it,” she replied airily, terribly pleased by the inconsequential tone of their conversation.
A sense of triumph engulfed her. At last she would be the equal of Nike and say to her on the telephone this very evening, “Nike, darling, I’ve hitched up with this guy, he’s so sweet, cute face, designer stubble, and you can tell at a glance that he’s got all his marbles about him.”
“Only bear in mind,” he warned her, “I have absolutely no time for courtship. But I’m free this evening. Let’s get away from here.”
Masha had been intending to go back and listen to a bespectacled youth who had been crumpling his papers while waiting for his turn, but there and then thought better of it.
“Okay, wait for me here.” She went into the lavatory, and he stood by the door.
Masha hurriedly put on her things. She had a feeling that there was absolutely no time to lose. Alik, without knowing it, had already infected her with his innate sense of urgency. He helped her on with the thin, elegant little coat that Alexandra had made.
Outside, it was dark and desolate, the worst kind of winter, with no snow but severely cold. Masha, as was the fashion in the preboot era, was wearing light shoes and no hat. Alik took hold of her cold, bony fingers.
“We’re always going to be very short of time, and there’s a lot to be said. To get the boring stuff over with: in weather like this it wouldn’t be a bad idea to wear felt boots and your grandmother’s shawl. I offer you that advice as a doctor. But as regards your poems,” he unconsciously moved closer to her, “there are some you should throw out, but some of them are remarkable.”
“Which ones should be thrown out?” Masha asked, flustered.
“No, it’s better if I tell you which ones you should keep.” And he recited to her one of the poems he had just heard and which he had memorized by ear and with total accuracy:
“We live like exiles in the busy Hades
of this sad, homeless world our orphaned Earth;
the autumn day is bright with light unfading
And pangs of piercing cold attend a birth.
Above the graveyard, cloudlike in the air,
a silence hovers redolent with singing,
a promise of relief through sculpted prayer,
a promise of tumultuous torrents bringing.
Though rustling maple leaves astound the gaze
and unconsumed by flames the eye astonish,
Though graves like martyrs’ pyres accusing blaze,
the calendar has yet to be abolished.”
“I think that is a very fine poem.”
“It’s in memory of my parents. They died in a car accident ten years ago,” Masha said, amazed how easy it was for her to tell him something she had never spoken about to anyone else.
“They lived their lives happily together and died on the same day?” Alik looked at her seriously.
“There’s nothing else left now but to believe that.”
Some marriages are made in bed, while others burgeon in the kitchen to the metallic music of the kitchen knife and the egg whisk; some couples are nest builders, forever redecorating, snapping up bargain lots of timber for their dacha plot, nails, drying oil, and fiberglass wrap; other couples live for blazing, set-piece rows.
Masha and Alik’s marriage was consummated in conversations. This was their ninth year together, but every evening when he came home from work, the soup would be left to get cold and the rissoles to burn while they told each other about the important events of the day.
Each of them lived life twice over: the first time directly, the second time in selective paraphrase. The paraphrase did slightly rearrange events, giving more prominence to something which had been less significant at the time and bringing a personal coloration to what had happened, but both of them were perfectly aware of that and took the other’s interests into account when deciding what to offer.
“Here’s something you’ll like,” Alik would say, stirring the hot soup in his bowl, “I’ve been saving it up for you all day.”
There would follow a description of a ridiculous row in the Metro that morning, or of a tree in the yard, or a conversation with a colleague. Or Masha would lug an old volume into the kitchen with so many bookmarks in it they looked like noodles, or a samizdat brochure and slew it around at the right place and say, “Here’s something I picked out specially for you.”
In recent years they had partly exchanged roles: previously he had been the one who read more and dug deeper into cultural problems, but now his researches left him no time for intellectual distractions, especially since he couldn’t yet move on from working in the ambulance service which, apart from being professionally interesting, left him with enough free time for research work in the laboratory. He had completed his postgraduate studies through extension courses, which had suited him fine.
Masha sat at home with her son, a unique little boy who could keep himself meaningfully occupied from morning till evening. She churned out entries for a journal of abstracts, read large numbers of books avidly, and wrote poetry and other less readily classifiable texts which seemed to have been plagiarized from a variety of other writers. She hadn’t yet found her own voice and was pulled in different directions—sometimes toward Rozanov, sometimes to Kharms.
Her poems were also written in different voices, and although they had been published along with those of other poets in magazines, hers had seemed peripheral and unremarkable. On the page they hadn’t looked like hers, the overall selection didn’t seem to have been made very well, and to crown it all there had been two printing errors. Alik was terribly proud and bought up a whole stack of copies to give to all their friends, but Masha privately resolved not to allow any more ephemeral publications but to wait until she could bring out a proper volume of her own work.
Their closeness was so rare and so complete that it showed in shared tastes, in the structure of their speech, and in the tone of their humor. Over the years even their body language became similar, and it looked as though by the time they were old they would be like a couple of parrots. Sometimes, guessing an unspoken thought from the other’s eyes, they would chorus their beloved Brodsky: “They had lived so long together that the second of January again fell on a Tuesday.”
Masha found a German word in a linguistics textbook which expressed their special relatedness: Geschwister. It was a unique word meaning “brother and sister,” but the German conjoining had some hidden additional meaning.
They had given each other no vows of fidelity. Indeed, on the eve of their wedding they had agreed that their union should be a union of two free people and that they would never stoop to jealousy and deceit because each would retain the right to independence. In the first year of marriage, feeling a slight disquiet that Alik should be the only man she had known, Masha undertook a few sexual experiments: with a former classmate, with a literary bureaucrat at a youth journal where she had once been published, and with some completely random individual, just to make sure she hadn’t been missing out.