“My angel,” Nike stopped her. “Aren’t you just imagining that? Every case is unique, believe me. Butonov is an excellent lover, but you measure that in centimeters, minutes, hours, the level of hormones in the blood. They’re all just parameters. He has a good body, no more than that. Your Alik is a remarkable person, intelligent, talented. Butonov isn’t worthy to lick his boots, but Alik just hasn’t given you enough—”
“Shut up!” Masha screamed. “Shut up! Take your Butonov and all his centimeters. You’re welcome to him!”
She rushed out, for some reason seizing the head scarf she had just returned to Nike from the pier table.
Nike did not stop her. Let her rage. If people have idiotic delusions, you have to leave them to get rid of them. When all was said and done, Butonov had put it quite correctly: “Accept it as fact.” But then . . . to her annoyance Nike recollected Masha’s poem: “Accept too that beyond all measure, like heaven’s grace on heaven’s grace . . .” Well, go ahead and accept it. Accept it as fact.
Dear Butonov! I know that correspondence is not your forte, that of all the forms of human interaction the most important for you is tactile. Even your profession is like that—everything in the fingertips, in touching, in delicate movements. And if one stays on the superficial, the surface level, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, then everything that is happening is perfectly proper. Touches have neither faces nor eyes, it is only receptors at work. Nike tried to explain that to me too: everything is determined by centimeters, minutes, hormone levels.
But this is just a matter of faith. I evidently belong to a different confession; what is important for me is the expression on someone’s face, their inner impulse, a turn of phrase, what they feel in their heart. And if that is not there, then we are only objects for each other to use. To tell the truth, that is what torments me most. Are there really no relationships other than those of the body? Is there really nothing between you and me other than embracing until the world disappears? Is there really no communion higher than the physical, when all sense of the distinctness of our two bodies is lost?
Nike, your lover, my more-than-sister, told me there is nothing more than centimeters, minutes, hormones. Say no. Tell me it isn’t true! Was there really nothing in what took place between us that can’t be described by parameters of one kind or another? If that is true, then you don’t exist, neither do I, neither does anybody or anything at all and we are mechanical toys and not the children of the Lord God. Here is a little poem for you, dear Butonov, and I beg you: say it isn’t true.
Play on, centaur, play on, chimera of two breeds,
burn, fire, along the boundary dividing
the human soul and its immortal needs,
the stallion, his lusts unbridled riding.
Your destiny it is to mediate, to ferry,
to ply shores which forget how close they used to be,
and heedlessly you plunge into those waters merry
which care no more than you if you remember me.
Masha Miller
Butonov read the letter and groaned. Knowing Masha’s personality well enough, he was expecting major ructions when she discovered her rival but had never imagined that her jealousy would be expressed in such a complicated, elaborate manner. He really had pissed her off.
Ten days or so later, having given things a chance to settle down a bit, he rang Masha to ask whether she fancied a trip out to Rastorguevo. After much hesitation, periodical yeses and nos (Butonov could tell even over the telephone that it was exactly what she wanted), she agreed.
At Rastorguevo everything was new. There had been a heavy snowfall, so heavy that the path from the gate to the porch had been buried, and in order to drive the car in Butonov had had to scrape the snow up with a wooden shovel into a large snowdrift.
It was cold in the house: it seemed colder inside than out, but Butonov promptly gave Masha such a workout that they both started feeling too hot. She moaned through her tears, and kept pleading, “Say no!”
“What do you want ‘no’ for, when it’s all ‘yes, yes, yes’!” Butonov laughed.
After that he lit the stove, opened a tin of sardines in tomato sauce which had been around for ages, and ate it himself, Masha barely touching it. There was nothing else in the house.
They decided not to go back to Moscow and walked to the railway station. Masha rang home from the public telephone and told Debora Lvovna that she wouldn’t be home that night, as she was visiting friends at their dacha and didn’t want to come back so late.
Her mother-in-law flared up: “Of course not! You don’t care two hoots about your husband and child! If you want to know what that’s called—”
Masha hung up.
“That’s all fixed. I told them I wouldn’t be home.”
They walked back to the house along a path of white snow. Butonov showed her the windows of the apartment block where Vitka Kravchuk lived.
“Want to drop in?” he enquired.
“God forbid,” Masha laughed.
It was cool in Butonov’s house. It did not hold the heat.
“Next on the list is a new stove. I’ll put one in next year,” Butonov resolved.
They settled themselves in the kitchen, where it was at least a bit warmer, and dragged mattresses in from all over the house. They had no sooner warmed up, however, than Butonov got pains in his stomach and went out to the toilet in the courtyard. He came back and lay down. Masha, running her finger over his face, began talking about the spirituality of sex, and the personality which expresses itself through touch.
The tinned sardines had Butonov running out to the courtyard all night. His stomach was churning, and the tender voice of unsleeping Masha cooed on in tones of neurotic enquiry.
To give him his due, he was polite and didn’t ask her to shut up. Only sometimes, when the pain subsided a bit, he slumped into sleep. In the morning as they were driving back to Moscow, Butonov said, “One thing I really am grateful to you for at this moment is that when I was suffering from the runs you did me the favor of not reciting any poetry at me.”
Masha looked at him in astonishment: “But I did, Valerii. I recited ‘Poem Without a Hero’ to you from start to finish.”
Masha’s relations with her husband did not come unstuck, but recently they had been seeing less of each other. The invitation they had received had not been submitted yet because Alik wanted to resign from his job before filing the application, and before that there was a series of experiments he needed to finish.
He disappeared into the laboratory until late at night and turned down any further emergency-duty work. He periodically carted a rucksack full of books to the secondhand bookshop, since he was going to have to say goodbye to his father’s library. He could see Masha was disturbed and jumpy, and treated her solicitously, like a patient.
In December, Butonov went off to Sweden, for a couple of weeks, he said vaguely, although of course he knew perfectly well which day he would be back. He liked his freedom. Nike barely noticed his absence. She had a children’s play to get ready in time for the school holidays, and in any case Vakhtang had finally arrived and she spent all her free time with him and his Moscow Georgian friends. Life was a busy whirl of restaurants, sometimes at the Cinema Club, sometimes at the Theater Society.
Masha pined. She kept trying to get through to Nike to talk to her about Butonov, but Nike was incommunicado. Masha had no wish to talk to other friends about him, and in any case it would have been impossible.