Shortly before midnight Masha came to see her. No sooner had she opened the door than Nike realized that the long-expected unpleasantness had occurred. Masha rushed to hug her. “Nike, say it isn’t true! It can’t be true, say it!”
Nike stroked her hair slippery with rain and said nothing.
“I know it can’t be true,” Masha insisted, crumpling in her hands a crepe de Chine head scarf with a lilac, grey, and black diamond pattern. “What was it doing there? Why was it there?”
“Shush, shush! You’re all tensed up.” Nike made a warning gesture in the direction of the children’s room.
Nike had been expecting this inevitable storm for so long, ever since July, that now, if anything, she felt relieved. The whole ridiculous business had dragged on all summer. When she left the Village in May, Nike had genuinely intended to give a secret present to Masha by letting her have Butonov, but things hadn’t worked out that way.
All the time Masha had been taking the children for walks in the Crimea, Nike had been seeing Butonov, saying to herself that time would tell. They had slipped into an amazingly relaxed relationship. Butonov was delighted by Nike’s forthrightness, the way she could talk about absolutely anything, and her complete lack of possessiveness; but when he did one time try to express this in his halting way, she stopped him: “Butonchik, the head on your shoulders is not your greatest asset. I know what you are trying to say. You are quite right. The point is that I have a male psychology. Just like you, I’m afraid of getting stuck in a long affair, in obligations, in marriage, for heaven’s sake. You might like to bear in mind that means I’m always the first to dump my men.”
It wasn’t quite true, but it sounded good.
“Okay, but I’ll need two weeks’ notice,” Butonov joked.
“Valerii, if you are going to be so witty, I shall fall head over heels in love with you, and that would be dangerous.” Nike burst into peals of laughter, throwing her head back and making her mane of hair and her breasts shake.
She was constantly laughing: in the tram, at meals, in the swimming pool they had gone to one time, and Butonov, who didn’t usually laugh much himself, was infected by her laughter, guffawing till he sobbed, till his sides ached and he couldn’t speak. They laughed themselves silly in bed too.
“You are a unique lover,” Nike said admiringly. “Laughing usually deflates erections.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, perhaps you just haven’t made me laugh hard enough.”
As soon as Masha got home at the beginning of July, she dropped the children on Alexandra and immediately rushed off to Rastorguevo. She was doubly in luck: she found Butonov at home, and she didn’t find Nike there, because she had left the day before.
Masha’s arrival coincided with the height of the renovations abandoned two years previously. The day before, Butonov had cleaned out his grandmother’s half, in which nobody had lived for twenty years, and now two men he had hired to help him had arrived. Nike persuaded him not to line the walls with paneling as he had planned, but rather to strip everything down to the logs, clean and recaulk them, and repair the rough-hewn furniture left from the distant past.
“Mark my words, Butonov, you are using this furniture as firewood today, but in twenty years’ time these will be museum pieces.”
Butonov was amazed, but he consented, and now he and the workmen were stripping off the many layers of wallpaper.
“Butonov!” a woman’s voice shouted up from the street. “Valerii!”
He came out in a cloud of dust, wearing his old doctor’s hat. Masha was standing at the gate, although he didn’t recognize her immediately. She had a deep and very attractive Crimean tan, and a wide grin which filled her slender face. Pushing her hand through a space between the pickets, she drew back the latch and, while he was still slowly wondering what to do, rushed up the winding path and threw herself at him like a puppy, burying her face in his chest.
“It’s been so terrible! So terrible! I was beginning to think I would never see you again!”
A strong smell of the sea came from the top of her head and he again heard, like that time in the Crimea, the thunderous pounding of her heart. “What’s going on?! I can hear your heart as if I were listening through a stethoscope.”
She was radiating heat and light like the white-hot coil of a powerful lamp, and Butonov remembered all he had forgotten about the way she furiously, desperately struggled with him in the little room in Medea’s house; and he forgot what he had remembered: her long letters full of poetry and reflections on things which were not exactly beyond his understanding, but of no earthly use to anyone.
She pressed her lips to the dusty white doctor’s coat and breathed out hot air. She raised her face. The smile had gone and she was so pale that he could clearly see the two inverted crescents of dark freckles running from her cheekbones to her nose.
“Here I am.”
If Grandmother’s half of the house was in a mess from the redecorating, then the attic, which they climbed up to, was a complete dump. Neither his grandmother nor his mother ever threw anything out: old washing troughs with holes in them, boilers, the bric-a-brac of a hundred years. The house had been built by his great-grandfather at the end of the nineteenth century when Rastorguevo was still a trading village, and there was a good century’s worth of dust in the attic. It was impossible to lie down, so Butonov sat Masha on a rickety cabinet; and she looked just like a pottery money-box cat, only thinner and without the slit on the top of her head.
It was all so powerful and over so quickly that Butonov couldn’t tear himself away, so he carried her over to an armchair which was in tatters and again he was seared by the tightness of the chair and even more by the tightness of her childlike body. Tears flowed down her otherworldly face, and he licked them off and they tasted of seawater. God Almighty!
Masha soon left, and Butonov went back to stripping wallpaper with the workmen, who seemed not even to have noticed his absence. He was as empty as a stovepipe or, more precisely, as empty as a rotten nut, because his emptiness was enclosed and rounded and now had no outlet. He fancied he had given away more than he meant to.
“Well, those sisters”—he didn’t know their exact relationship—“are a complete contrast. One laughs, the other cries. They go well together.”
For three days Masha could not catch Nike at home, although she phoned constantly and Alexandra had told her Nike was in town. Finally she got through.
“Nike! Where on earth have you been?”
It never occurred to her that Nike had been avoiding her, feeling ill prepared for this meeting.
“Three guesses!” Nike snorted.
“A new romance!” Masha said, bursting into laughter, swallowing the bait without a moment’s hesitation.
“Top marks and then some!” Nike rewarded her perspicacity.
“Your place or mine? Yours is better. I’m on my way,” Masha exclaimed, burning with impatience.
“Let’s meet at Uspensky Lane instead,” Nike countered. “Mother must be at her wits’ end after having them for three days.”
Having taken the children to Alexandra on her first day back, Masha had quite forgotten about them. Alexandra and Ivan Isaevich were celebrating a festival of love with their grandchildren and were not in the least tired of them. Ivan Isaevich would, though, have liked to take them to the dacha: much better than having them cooped up in town.
“No, no. It’s better if I come to your place. We couldn’t talk there,” Masha begged, and Nike surrendered. There was no escape, and she knew in advance that she would be receiving Masha’s confession.
From that day Nike was cast in the role of confidante. Her position was ambiguous to say the least, but it seemed too late now to admit to her own involvement in the affair. In her ardor, Masha was bursting to tell Nike about every meeting with Butonov. It was terribly important for her.