«That's what has happened to me. I've lost my sense of feeling. When they told me, three weeks after the crash, that I had lost my husband and children, it was like this.» Irene pulled the needle out and a small drop of blood appeared. She licked it. «I've almost lost my sense of taste as well. I can tell sweet from savoury, but that's it. I sometimes think I am only remembering the taste, from the times when I could still feel things.»
Irene dispensed what was left of the port and stood up, pushing back her chair loudly. Her lodgings were the most comfortable in Dora's domain: besides the verandah there was a small separate kitchen in the porch, where Irene had a modest cache of wine. Six bottles bought in anticipation of her friends' arrival tomorrow. She rummaged about in the darkness for a while before producing a bottle of sherry.
All the tears Zhenya had to shed she had shed yesterday. No new tears had come to replace them. There was a dryness in her throat, and a tightness and a tickle in her nose.
«That witch Anna Cork turned out to be right: Donald is my fifth child. It's just as she foretold: „You will start at the fifth“».
First the darkness became diluted, then the air became grey and the birds started singing. By the time the story was at an end it was completely light.
«Would you like some coffee?» Irene asked.
«No, thank you. I'll get some sleep.» Zhenya went off to her little room and lay face down in the pillow. Before falling asleep she reflected, «What a stupid life I have. To all intents and purposes it's been no life at all. Fall out of love with one man, fall in love with another. Some drama that's been! Poor Irene, imagine losing four children.» She was particularly sad about Diana, blue-eyed, long-legged Diana who would have been sixteen now.
Towards evening a whole crowd of people arrived from Moscow: Vera and her second husband Valentine, whose previous, first marriage had been to Nina; Nina and Nina's elder son — of whom Valentine was the father. In addition there were Nina's two younger daughters, by now from her second marriage. Vera had brought two children with her, her youngest son fathered by Valentine and her daughter fathered by who knows whom, or rather, by Vera's first husband whom none of them knew. In fact, it was one big, happy, modern family.
The sexual revolution was already waning, second marriages were proving more durable than first marriages had, and third marriages were turning out just like real marriages.
Dora Surenovna's small courtyard was filled with children of all ages, and her neighbours on either side peeped through the fence to right and left and envied her for managing to begin the season a month before and to finish it two months later than anyone else. She had been doing it for years. They had no idea that the secret was Irene: wherever she went a crowd immediately formed, a collective farm with fireworks, a veritable May Day demonstration of brassieres with mammary glands bursting out of them and bikinis and belly buttons and buttocks which aroused such ire in her Crimean neighbours that they would have refused to rent rooms to all these impudent whores, only their greed overcame them.
Dora herselfset up something approaching a guesthouse: not so much bed-and-breakfast as sleep-on-a-put-you-up-and-dinner. Dora's husband worked at the XVII Party Congress Sanatorium. He drove a bus, collecting holidaymakers from Simferopol and buying groceries while he was there. Dora made meals for all her guests and earned so much money she could afford to buy off the local policeman and the tax inspector without even being ruined.
The first three days passed in arranging things. Nina, mother of three, was terribly domesticated, spread home comforts all around herself, and had a thoroughly feminine way of organising everyday life. When all the little curtains had been hung up, all the little vases put in place and all the rugs shaken out, she compiled a rota so that each day two mothers looked after all the children while the other two, once they had gone shopping for food in the morning, could take it easy for the rest of the day.
On the morning of the fourth day, Zhenya and Vera had the day off, as stipulated by the new schedule. They planned to see Valentine to the bus station since, having fulfilled his purpose by delivering the two families, he was returning to Moscow; they would then buy some milk, if fortune smiled on them, and were intending after that to wander through the bare countryside with no footballs, no children, no shrieking or screaming. Everything went according to plan: they waved goodbye to the husband, didn't buy milk since none had been delivered, and then set off down the main road in the direction of hills from which there came a smell of young grass and sweet earth, and where the clouds of pink and lilac tamarisk were in full bloom. They turned off the road, and although the path led upwards the going was easy and relaxing. They didn't even talk all that much, just exchanging a few words.
They reached a family of acacias, sat in the thin shade of the puny foliage and lit cigarettes.
«Have you known Irene for long?» Zhenya asked, still, despite the passing of several days, reeling under the impression of the eventful fate of the English redhead; a fate before which the old-fashioned suicide of Anna Karenina paled and seemed the mere whim of a spoiled young madam: «He loves me, he loves me not, he cares for me, not a jot…»
«We grew up in the same block of flats. She was a class ahead of me. I wasn't allowed to be friends with her. She was a bit of a naughty girl,» Vera laughed. «But I liked her. Actually, everybody did. Half the block was always hanging out in their little apartment. Susan Yakovlevna was such an old dear before her stroke. We called her Madame Caramel — she was forever giving all the children toffees.»
«What a dreadful life Irene's had,» Zhenya sighed.
«You mean her father? The spying? What do you mean?»
«No, I mean the children.»
«What children, Zhenya?» Vera asked, even more puzzled.
«Diana, and the twins.»
«What Diana? What are you talking about?»
«Irene's children. Which she lost,» Zhenya explained with the beginnings of a terrible foreboding.
«You'll have to be more explicit. Which children are these that she lost?» Vera raised an eyebrow.
«David, her first baby, died at birth, entangled in his umbilical cord; then Diana, she was just one year old; and a few years later her husband, the composer, died in a car crash along with her twins Alexander and Yakov,» Zhenya ran through the list, sounding like a gramophone record.
«Well, I'll be damned,» Vera said, shocked. «And when did this all come to pass?»
«What, didn't you know?» Zhenya asked in astonishment. «She had David when she was eighteen, Diana when she was nineteen, and the twins three years or so later, I suppose.»
Vera put out her old cigarette and lit up a new one. The damp cigarette didn't light easily, and while Vera puffed away at it Zhenya was convulsively shaking a new packet but could persuade nothing to come out of it. Vera was silent, inhaled the bitter smoke, and then pronounced:
«Listen, Zhenya, I am going to have to upset you. Or gladden you. The point is, all the tenants of our house in Pechatnikov were rehoused ten years ago, in 1968. At that time Irene was twenty-five. To my knowledge, she had got through an army of lovers, had, I should guess, a dozen or so abortions, but there were absolutely no children. I swear! Or husbands, for that matter. Donnie is her first child, and she has never been married, although she has had some very famous lovers. She even had an affair with Vysotsky…»
«But what about Diana?» Zhenya asked dully. «What about Diana?»
Vera shrugged.
«For all the years before that we were living in the same house. Do you really think I wouldn't have noticed?»