Insomnia, which until then had only been sharpening its claws, overwhelmed Masha in December. Alik brought her sedatives, but the artificial sleep was even worse than the insomnia. Her obsessive dream would start at any random place but led always to the same ending: she was trying to find Butonov, to catch up with him, but he kept slipping away, spilling like water, turning into different objects, as if in a fairy tale, dissolving, vanishing into smoke.
Twice Masha went to Rastorguevo just for the sake of making the journey from Paveletsky Station, taking the train to his stop and walking to his house, to stand for a time at the gate, see the house shrouded in snow, look at its dark windows, and go back home. In all, it took around three and a half hours, and the journey there was more enjoyable than the journey back.
Two weeks passed and still there was no sign of him. Masha rang his home in Khamovniki. An elderly woman told her in a weary voice that he would be back at around ten; but he wasn’t there at ten, or at eleven, and the next morning the same voice replied, “Call again on Friday.”
“But has he come back?” Masha asked timidly.
“I said ring on Friday,” the woman replied rattily.
It was still only Monday.
“He’s come back and hasn’t phoned,” Masha thought, hurt. She called Nike to ask whether she knew anything about Butonov’s whereabouts, but Nike didn’t.
Masha set off for Rastorguevo again, this time in the late afternoon. The snow had been cleared away from the gates of his house, and they were closed and locked. His car stood in the yard. In his grandmother’s half a faint light was burning. Masha yanked the icy side gate. The path to the house was deep in snow, and as she walked along, she sank almost up to her knees in it. She rang the bell for a long time, but nobody opened the door.
She wanted to wake up, so much did all this feel like one of her dreams, just as vivid and hurtful; and Butonov gave some flickering sign of his presence in just the same way: his beige car parked there with a blanket of snow on the roof. And she couldn’t get hold of Butonov himself.
Masha stood around for forty minutes or so and left.
“Nike must be in there,” she concluded.
In the train she was thinking not of Butonov but of Nike. Nike had been part of her life from an early age. They were linked, quite apart from everything else, by a physical liking for each other. Since she was a child Masha had loved Nike’s full, puckered lips, her endless supply of smiles, the creases of hidden laughter at the corners of her mouth, her rustling red hair; and in just the same way Nike had liked Masha’s diminutiveness, her little feet, her gawkiness, the delicacy in every aspect of her being.
Masha for her part would unhesitatingly have preferred to be Nike than herself. Nike, of course, didn’t lose time thinking about things like that. She had all she needed in herself.
And now Butonov had joined them together in some sacramental way, like Jacob marrying two sisters. They could have been called comrades-in-arms. Jacob entered the tents, took the sisters, took their handmaidens, and they were one family. And what after all is jealousy but another form of covetousness? You can’t possess another person. Well then, let it be: everybody would be brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. She smiled to herself, thinking about utopian Chernyshevsky and the grand brothel in one or other of the dreams of his heroine in What Is to Be Done?
Nothing unique, nothing personal. All of it boring and bereft of talent. Are we free or not? Where does our awareness of shame and indecency come from? By the time she got back to Moscow, she had written Nike a poem:
A rift between the tree trunk and its shadow;
a rift between the thirst and taking drink;
across the abyss a poem’s swaying ladder
the only way to help us pass the brink.
The shades of sleep, the corridors all gaping,
my only light a captured German torch;
and from contrition there is no escaping:
we do not kill, no ironing we scorch,
don’t slop through puddles, try to hide our errors,
don’t sing forbidden songs, don’t practice guile,
but know, and live in superstitious terror:
the two of us are doing something vile.
She got home around midnight. Alik was waiting for her in the kitchen with a bottle of good Georgian wine. He had finished his experiments and could file their application to emigrate tomorrow if they liked. Only then did it finally sink in for Masha that she would soon be leaving forever.
“That’s splendid. It will put an end to this whole shameful, grisly affair,” she thought. She spent a long evening with Alik, which continued until four in the morning. They talked, made plans, and then Masha fell into a dreamless sleep holding Alik’s hand.
She woke late. Debora Lvovna had not been home for several days. Recently she had often been away on lengthy visits to her ailing sister. The Aliks had already had breakfast and were playing chess. It was a picture of domestic tranquility and even included a cat lying on a cushion on the sofa.
“That’s good! I seem to be recovering,” Masha thought, turning the stiff handle of the coffee mill.
Later they took the sled, and the three of them went to the ice hill. They fell off into the snow, got wet, and were happy.
“Do they have snow in Boston?” Masha asked.
“No, they don’t. But we will go to Utah and ski there, and that will be just as good,” Alik promised.
He always delivered on his promises.
Butonov rang that same evening.
“Not missing me, by any chance?”
The day before, he had seen Masha stamping her feet by his gate but had not opened the door to her because he had a lady visitor, the nice, if fat, translator who had been on his trip with him. They had exchanged glances for the two weeks but no opportunity had presented itself. A soft, lazy woman, very similar as he subsequently realized to his wife Olga, she had writhed like a sleepy cat in Butonov’s arms to the trilling of Masha on the doorbell. Butonov had felt acutely irritated by the translator, Masha, and himself. He needed angular, sharp Masha with her tears and her sighs, not this fatso.
He had been ringing Masha since morning, but first there was no reply because the telephone was unplugged, then Alik picked it up twice and Butonov hung up, and only toward evening did he get through to her. “Please don’t ring anymore,” Masha said.
“When? When can you come? Quickly now,” Butonov said, not hearing what she had said.
“No, I’m not coming. Don’t ring me anymore, Valerii.” Then with a strained, tearful voice she added, “I can’t take any more.”
“Masha, I’m missing you terribly. Have you gone crazy? Are you hurt? It’s a misunderstanding, Masha. I’ll be at your house in twenty-five minutes. Come out then.” He hung up.
Masha was in total confusion. She had decided so splendidly, so firmly, not to see him anymore and had felt a sense of, if not liberation then at least relief, and today had been such fun, with the ice hill and the sunshine. “I won’t go,” Masha decided.
But thirty-five minutes later she threw on a jacket, called to Alik, “I’ll be back in ten minutes!” and rushed down the stairs without stopping to call the lift.
Butonov’s car was waiting by the door. She wrenched the door open and sat down beside him.
“I have to tell you—”