«What is my element?»
«You can tell it from a hundred miles away. It's water. You're an aquarian. You don't write poetry, by any chance?» Irene asked briskly.
«I used to. Actually I wrote my dissertation on early twentieth-century Russian poetry,» Zhenya admitted guiltily.
«What I see is — Pisces, the poetically inclined… live in water.»
Zhenya was shocked into silence: her star sign really was Pisces.
«When I was twenty, Zhenya, I had already lost two children,» Irene resumed without prefatory remarks from where they had stopped yesterday. «Two more years of my life went in learning to go on living. I had help. If it hadn't been for that…» she made an indefinite gesture more or less heavenwards. «And then I met the man I was destined for. He was a composer, a Russian aristocrat from a family which fled to France during the Revolution and returned after the Second World War. He was fifteen years older than me and, strange as it may seem, he'd never been married, although his life had been richly endowed as regards women. His father had been private secretary to a minister, and at one time a member of the State Duma. In one sense he was the complete antithesis of my Anglo-Dutch communist forebears. For all that, his father, Vasily Illarionovich — I won't mention his surname, it has too many connotations in Russia — resembled my own father quite amazingly, both in outward appearance and in personality. They greatly disliked all communists, but they accepted me, in spite of my communist tail. Then again, they had no choice: Gosha and I had fallen passionately in love. We fell into each other's arms immediately, and in the morning he took me to the registry office, considering the matter settled once and for all. My second life began, in which there was nothing of the old one other than my mother who, bless her, was unaware anything had changed. Only don't imagine this was after her stroke. It was before! She really didn't notice a thing. From time to time she would call my new husband by the name of my first, but Gosha and I just laughed. He had been educated in France and England, they returned to Russia in 1950, and for a short time lived in exile. Well, you know how it was, the usual story. We met the year the family were finally given permission to live in Moscow and allocated a two-room apartment in Beskudnikovo — as descendants of the Decembrist revolutionaries. In return for the villa they had had near Alushta and their St Petersburg residence on the Moyka Canal.»
A vague, nascent thought about a mysterious law which could bring together such rare, specially invented people as the daughter of a Russian spy of British origins and a descendant of the Decembrists born in Parisian exile, did enter Zhenya's head, and she was even tempted to mention it to Irene, but didn't want to interrupt her slow, almost meditative, story.
«I became pregnant straight away,» Irene smiled, not at Zhenya but at a place far away. «Gosha did not know that I had already lost two children. I kept quiet about that. I didn't want him feeling sorry for me. It was the easiest pregnancy of all time. My stomach grew at an incredible rate, and Gosha would rest on it at night, listening.»
«What are you listening to?» I would ask.
«What they are talking about.» He was certain we were going to have twins.
«In the end the doctors did establish that there were two heartbeats. I gave birth to two lovely boys, one redheaded, the other dark-haired. Both of them were over three kilograms. Believe it or not, from their first hour they took against each other, and so much so that they managed to divide their parents too: Alexander, the redhead, chose me; Yakov, the dark one, chose Gosha. It was dreadful. When one was going to sleep the other would be crying. While I was feeding one, the other would be howling his head off, even though he'd just been fed. Then they discovered how to bite, and spit, and fight. If one got to his feet, the other would promptly knock him down. You couldn't leave them together for a minute. But you had only to separate them for them to want desperately to be together again. When one of them saw the other, he would run to him and kiss and immediately start fighting again. My twins had a special, intense relationship which was all their own. I spoke English to the children and Gosha spoke French to them. When they started talking, they divided on language as well. Alexander talked English, Yakov talked French. Well, that was only to be expected. Between themselves they spoke Russian. But don't imagine they were taught to do that. They chose everything for themselves: it was impossible to coerce them or force them to do anything. When Gosha and I looked at them we were over the moon: this was our legacy — these terrible genes of wilfulness and stubbornness.»
«We lived all the year round in Pushkino, renting a well insulated winter dacha, and Granny Susie moved in with us too. At that time she was in fairly good shape. By that I mean she was still reading novels. You never did get any sense out of her, and she was never any help. Gosha was eventually accepted to teach at a music college. The composition class. He was super-overqualified for the work. He should have been working at the Conservatory. But his western schooling scared everyone off. Sometimes he wrote background music for films. Mainly he earned money by translating. I carried on typing, although he was terribly cross when I took in work. He had a frightful car, a Moskvich which he drove into Moscow and had to repair every time he came back. It was well-trained. It always broke down outside our house. We were terribly happy, but collapsing from exhaustion.»
«I am always ill in the spring, when the flowers come into bloom. I suffer from hay fever. That spring the blossom was particularly plentiful and I was constantly wheezing and choking. While it was wet I could just about get by, taking pills. But then we had a hot spell and on the second day I really began suffocating. It's called Quincke's oedema. The nearest telephone was at the post office. In those days the Pushkino ambulance was a bird as rare as an ostrich. Gosha woke up the boys in the night, hastily dressed them and put them in the back of the car; we couldn't leave them with Susie, she would never have coped. Having been woken in the middle of the night they were unusually placid and didn't even fight. They settled down in the back seat with their arms around each other. Then Gosha dragged me out of the house, put me in the front and drove me to the local hospital. He drove like a maniac, because I was barely wheezing and the colour of a boiled beetroot.»
Irene closed her eyes, but not completely. A little chink still showed, like light seeping under a door. Zhenya thought she might have lost consciousness and jumped up and shook her by the shoulders. Irene seemed to come to herself. She laughed her special laugh, the opera singer's laugh.
«That's all, Zhenya. I've told you all there is. The oedema was so severe that I saw and felt nothing else. I didn't see the tip truck which crashed into us; I didn't even feel the impact. I was the only survivor. When they put me on the operating table there was no trace of Quincke's oedema. It had disappeared at the moment of the crash. It was completely unbelievable that I was alive.»
Irene tossed back the hair from the right-hand side of her head. A deep, even operating scar began behind her ear and went aross her skull. For some reason Zhenya ran her finger along it.
«It is completely without feeling, that scar. I am a medical curiosity. I have almost no sense of feeling. Suppose I cut my finger, I'm not aware of anything. Until I see the bleeding. It's dangerous. But it can be handy too.»
Irene reached for her bag which was lying on the table, pulled out a case the length of three matchboxes, and took a large needle out of it. She pushed it into her alabaster white skin at the base of her thumb. The needle sank softly into her. Zhenya shrieked. Irene laughed.