Sasha looked across at little Lord Fauntleroy, put his spoon in the soup and, for the first time in his life as far as she could remember, ate something that was not on his list.
After lunch the children slept but the women sat on at the table. Dora and Irene reminisced about last year's season and talked cheerfully and amusingly about people she didn't know and happenings of long ago in the resort. Susie sat in her chair with a smile as permanently fixed and out of place as the brown mole situated between her nose and her lip. Zhenya sat with them for a time, drank a cup of Dora's good coffee and then went to her room. She lay down beside Sasha and was going to start in on Anna Karenina, but reading a book in the middle of the day didn't seem right, almost improper in fact. She set aside the dog-eared volume and dozed, imagining through sleep how she would sit alone that evening with Irene on her verandah, without Dora, and drink port. What fun it would be. It suddenly dawned on her from on high, as if from out of the clouds, that it was two days now, from the moment redheaded Irene had arrived, since she had last recalled that life was foul and wretched and that hers was a total disaster, as if a wart-covered black and brown crab were sucking her innards. Well to hell with the lot of it. Lurve wasn't that big a deal. She sank down and down and slept like a log.
When she woke up she must still have been on a bit of a high, because she was feeling chirpier than she had for a long time. She got Sasha up, pulled on his trousers, put on his sandals, and they went into town where there was a roundabout which Sasha liked, and opposite it was the Party Foodstore.
«But why 'Party'? I must ask Irene,» Zhenya thought. Two bottles of port. The wine that year was excellent. Gorbachev had yet to launch his attack on alcoholism, and Crimean wine was being produced by state farms and collective farms, and by good old boys working for themselves; dry, demi-sec, fortified, Massandra, wines from Novy Svet, run-of-the-mill plonk and wines of the highest quality. There was no sugar, butter or milk in the shops, but people overlooked that detail, because so much else was going on in life itself.
That evening they again drank port on the verandah, only this time mother was packed off to bed early on. She did not protest. Indeed, she only nodded, said thank you in her unknown language, and smiled. Occasionally she would cry out, «Irene!», but when her daughter went to see what she needed, she smiled in embarrassment, having already forgotten why she had called her.
Irene sat with her elbow propped on the table and her cheek cupped in her left hand. In her right she held her glass. Playing cards were scattered over the table, the remnants of a game of Patience which hadn't come out.
«This is the second month it hasn't been working. Something isn't coming together for me. What about you, Zhenya? Do you like cards?»
«How do you mean? When I was a girl I played snap with my grandad at the dacha,» Zhenya said, surprised by the question.
«Perhaps it's better that way. I love them, though. Both for playing and for fortune-telling. I was seventeen when a fortuneteller made me a prediction. I should just have forgotten it, but I didn't, and everything has come to pass as if my life were following a script. Just as she foretold.» Irene took several cards, stroked their garish backs, and tossed them face upwards on the table. The nine of clubs was on top.
«I can't stand her, but she always dogs me. Away with you! She gives me heartburn.»
Zhenya thought for a moment before asking, «You mean, you always know how everything is going to end? Doesn't that make life boring?»
Irene cocked an ochre eyebrow.
«Boring? You really don't know anything about it, do you? No, it isn't boring. If I were to tell you…»
Irene poured out what remained of the first bottle between the two of them. She took a sip and moved the glass away.
«Zhenya, you must realise by now what a chatterbox I am. I tell people everything about myself. I'm no good at keeping secrets. Mine or anybody else's. Don't say you haven't been warned. There is one thing, though, that I've never told to a soul. You shall be the first. For some reason I suddenly want to.»
She gave a half-smile, and shrugged.
«I'm surprised at myself.»
Zhenya too propped her elbow on the table and cupped her cheek in her hand. They were sitting opposite each other, gazing at one another with an abstracted, meditative expression as if looking in a mirror. Zhenya too was surprised that Irene had suddenly chosen her for her revelations. And flattered.
«My mother was extremely beautiful — the spitting image of Deanna Durban, the film actress. And she was always an idiot. Well, no, not an idiot, but feeble-minded. I love her very much, but she has always been muddle-headed: on the one hand, she is a Communist, but on the other she is a Lutheran; then again, she is an admirer of the Marquis de Sade. She was always prepared to give away everything she had without a moment's hesitation, and she could get hysterical with my father because she suddenly desperately needed that swimming costume she bought in 1930 on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, on the corner near the Jardin du Luxembourg. When my father died I was sixteen, and she and I were left together. I have to give my father his due: I can't imagine how it was possible, given their unbelievably hard life, but she was always notable for her complete, triumphant helplessness. She never did a day's work because, despite being bilingual in English and Dutch, she could never learn Russian. In forty years! My father worked in broadcasting and she could have got a job through him. But even though you don't really need Russian to work there, you do have to be able to say „Zdrastvuite!“ or to read a notice saying „Silence. Recording in progress“. She couldn't. The moment my father died, I went out to work. I had no education at all, but I am a very good typist. I can type in three languages.»
So then, about the prediction. I had an old friend, an Englishwoman marooned in Russia in the 1920s. There is a little colony of Russian Englishmen and Englishwomen like that. I know them all, of course. They are either Communists, or techies who stayed behind in Russia for some reason or another, practically from the time of the New Economic Policy. Well, this Anna Cork washed up here because she was in love. Her lover was shot, of course, but she was luckier and survived. She was imprisoned, naturally, and lost a leg. She hardly left the house. Gave English lessons, told fortunes. She never took money for her fortune-telling, but she did accept gifts. She taught me a thing or two, and I was able to help her also.
One time when I was hanging around there, a beautiful woman came to see her, the wife of a general or a party boss. Either she couldn't have babies, or she was wondering whether to adopt a child. My Anna spoke to her in her usual way, in God knows what language, with a really heavy accent, although she could speak Russian, believe me, no worse than you or I. She had, after all, spent eight years in labour camps. But when she thought it politic, she could put on that accent. She could swear too: the Moscow Art Theatre had nothing on her. But now to this beauty she didn't say «yes» and she didn't say «no», but spoke ambiguously and portentously as a good fortune-teller should — and left it unclear whether she should or shouldn't have a child, but implied it would be better if she didn't.