«But what about the scar on her head from the car crash?» Zhenya shook Vera by the shoulders, but she lazily freed herself.
«Well, what about it? What about it? She got it on the ice slide. Kotik Krotov had blades, you know, racing skates. She fell over and he skated straight over her head. There was so much blood! It's true, he all but killed her. They had to put a lot of stitches in her head.»
At first Zhenya cried. Then she started hooting with laughter like a madwoman. Then sobbing again. Then they smoked their way through both the packs of cigarettes they had brought. Zhenya finally remembered with a start that she had never before been away from Sasha for such a long time. They hurried back home. Zhenya told Vera the whole of Irene's story, whose final episode had been reached yesterday. And evidently also made up yesterday. In return Vera told her the true story. Both coincided in the most improbable place: regarding the clandestine past of the Irish-British Communist who had been sentenced to death and subsequently exchanged for a Soviet spy.
By the time they got back to the house, Zhenya felt gutted. The children had already had their supper and were playing junior bingo at the big table: instead of numbers the cards had turnips, carrots and mittens. Sasha, clutching his bingo card, waved to his mother, cried, «Hurray! I've got a hare!» and covered it with a picture. He was an equal among equals, neither slow, nor ill, nor overwrought.
The others were sitting on Irene's verandah drinking sherry. Susie was taking little gulps from her glass with a blissful expression on her face. Vera went up on to the verandah and sat with the rest of them.
Zhenya went to her room. They invited her to join them, but she called back that she had a headache. She lay on the bed. Actually this was one evening when her head was not aching, but there was something she needed to do for herself. She needed to perform an operation of some kind before she could once more drink wine, chat with these friends, and enjoy the company of other, more educated and intelligent friends she had left behind in Moscow.
The children finished their bingo. Zhenya washed Sasha's feet, put him to bed and put out the light. One of the friends invited her to come with a stage whisper which was little short of a shout:
«Zhenya! Come and have some pie!»
«Sasha isn't asleep yet. I'll come in a minute,» she responded in an equally theatrical voice.
She lay in the darkness and researched her spiritual wound. There were two wounds. One was from the misdirected compassion she had lavished on brilliantly invented and brutally murdered, nonexistent children, especially Diana. It was like the pain from an amputated leg, felt even though the leg is no longer there. Phantom pain. Worse than that: this leg had never been there. The second was a feeling of hurt for herself, a pathetic rabbit which had had a senseless experiment performed on it. Or perhaps there had been some sense, only none that she could understand.
Somebody again knocked quietly at the window. Her name was called, but Zhenya did not respond. She simply couldn't imagine the expression on Irene's face, who would guess immediately that she had been unmasked. Or Irene's voice. Or her own embarrassment at Irene's embarrassment. Zhenya lay there, not sleeping, until the light was turned off on the verandah. Then she got up, lit the small wall lamp, and piled everything into her suitcase: clean clothing and dirty, toys and books. She paused only to carefully wrap Sasha's gumboots in a used towel.
Early in the morning Zhenya and Sasha left the house with their suitcase. They went to the bus station, and Zhenya had no idea where they would go after that. Moscow perhaps. But at the bus station the one and only bus, old, almost pre-war, bore the legend «Novy Svet», and they boarded that, and two hours later were in a quite different place.
They rented a room by the sea and spent another three weeks there. Sasha behaved perfectly: none of the hysterical outbursts which so alarmed Zhenya and the doctors. He walked barefoot along the waterline, sometimes running into the shallow water and stamping his bare heels in it. He ate, he slept. He seemed to have outgrown a phase. So did Zhenya.
Novy Svet was wonderful. The wisteria was still in bloom and they were beside the mountains: immediately behind the house a rocky hillside rose, which you could climb and in two hours reach a neatly rounded summit which looked positively Japanese. And you could look down from there to a shallow bay, and rocks with ancient Greek names which had jutted out of the water here since the world began.
Only occasionally did her heart feel a pang: Irene! Why did she have to murder all of them? Especially Diana.
The middle of December. The end of the year. The end of her tether. Darkness and wind. A hitch in her life. Everything has juddered to a standstill in just the wrong place, as if a wheel is stuck in a pothole and is rocking back and forth. In her head two lines of a poem are going back and forth too: «With half my span on earth now left behind me, I stood bereft in brooding forest gloom…» The gloom is all around, no sign of light in the darkness. Shame on you, Zhenya, shame on you… Two boys are sleeping in the little room, Sasha and Grisha. Her sons. Here is the table, her work on it. Sit down, take up your pen and write. There is the mirror. It reflects a thirty-five-year-old woman with large eyes, the outer corners sagging slightly; with large breasts, also sagging slightly; and with nice legs and slender ankles who has driven out of the house a man who was not the world's worst husband, and what's more not her first, but her second… The large mirror reflects also part of a small but admirable apartment in one of the most attractive quarters of Moscow, on Povarskaya Street, away from the road and with a bay window looking out on to a front garden. Later, of course, everyone is going to find themselves rehoused, but for now, in the mid-1980s, life is not bad at all.
Zhenya's family is also admirable: a large family with aunts and uncles, first and second cousins, all of them highly educated, respectable people. If one is a doctor, he or she is a good doctor; if a scholar, then a very promising one; if an artist, then a successful one. Not as successful as the redoubtable Ilya Glazunov, no doubt, but with commissions from publishing houses, almost one of the top book illustrators. Appreciated by his peers and colleagues. More of him shortly.
Besides the first and second cousins, a whole numerous new generation of nephews and nieces has come into the world, Katyas and Mashas, Dashas and Sashas, Mishas and Grishas. There is among them one Lyalya, thirteen years old and already with breasts. She hasn't outgrown her spots yet, and she has a long nose which, alas, she is never going to outgrow, although in the future plastic surgery will be able to take care of it. But only in the future. She also has long legs. Admirable legs, although nobody is paying any attention to them yet. Her emotions, however, are raging right now. She has a mad crush on her uncle, the artist. Long-nosed Lyalya had once come to her relatives' house to see her second cousin Dasha, and had stumbled upon Dasha's dad. He is sitting there at home, in a remote room, drawing. His pictures are so sweet: birds in cages, with poetry. He's a book illustrator, and he's got long, wavy black hair. Down to his shoulders. He wears a little dark blue jacket, and a red and dark blue check shirt under it. He has a cravate tucked into his shirt which has the tiniest little flower pattern, almost like commas, that's how tiny the flowers are. In fact they probably aren't even flowers or commas, but sort of little gherkins. Really, really tiny. She fell in love.
Lyalya comes to see her grown-up relative, Auntie Zhenya, who at that time of the year, in December, really doesn't want to be bothered with her second cousin once removed. She is, however, also related to the artist: he's her first cousin. Young Lyalya confesses she's in love, and tells the whole story: how she went to see Dasha, and he was sitting in this remote room drawing these birds, and he had these gherkins on his cravate. And she tells about how she came back afterwards, when Dasha wasn't there, and sat in his room, and he was drawing, and she just sat there. In silence.