On Tuesdays and Thursdays Mila, the artist's wife, has a morning surgery from eight o'clock. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, her surgery is in the afternoon. She is a gynaecologist. Dasha goes to school every day. She takes the bus to Prospekt Mira, to the French School. She leaves home at seven twenty-five. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, only not every week, just one week on a Tuesday and the next on a Thursday, Lyalya arrives at the remote room at eight-thirty. One week she misses a history and an English lesson, and the next she misses a double period of literature. Yes, she's thirteen. Well, what can she do? Really, what can she do? If they're madly in love? He's dying oflove for her. His hands shake when he's undressing her. It's fantastic. The first man in her life. She knows there'll never be another. What if she gets pregnant? No, she's not worried. Well, actually, she hasn't really thought about it much. After all, there are pills you can take. «You couldn't phone Mila, I suppose, and ask her to prescribe some — pretend they're for you?»
Zhenya is beside herself. Lyalya is the same age as Sasha. Thirteen. But thirteen girl years are obviously quite different from boy years. All Sasha thinks about is astronomy. He is reading books in which Zhenya can't even work out what the table of contents means. This daft little thing, meanwhile, has discovered love and, what's more, she's chosen her, Zhenya, to be the repository of the secrets of her heart. And some secrets they are! A respectable forty-year-old man is abusing his under-age niece, his daughter's friend, in his own house, while three blocks away his wife is conducting a surgery for women on Molchanovka Street and, to tell the truth, could run home for a moment, for a cup of tea, for instance… And what about Lyalya's parents? Her mother, Zhenya's great fat cousin Stella, what does she imagine is going on? That her daughter has gone off to school, swinging her scuffed little schoolbag? And her daddy, Konstantin Mikhailovich, a nutty mathematician, what is he thinking? As for what her late Aunt Emma, the sister of Zhenya's father, might have had to say on the subject, it simply doesn't bear thinking about.
Lyalya played truant in the morning. Sometimes when Sasha and Grisha were at school, she would come to drink coffee with Zhenya. Either her artist was busy, or she just didn't feel like sitting at a school desk. Zhenya couldn't simply turn her away. After all, what if she went and threw herself out of the window? Zhenya obediently listened to what she had to say. And despaired. As if she didn't have problems enough of her own: she had kicked her own husband out because she had fallen for a completely unattainable gentleman, an Actor with a capital A. Well, a theatre director actually. From a beautiful city which almost counted as being abroad. He was phoning every day, begging her to come. And now on top of everything else she had Lyalya.
Zhenya was at her wits' end.
«Lyalya, dearest, you must bring this relationship to an end immediately. It's madness!»
«But why, Zhenya? I'm so in love with him. And he loves me too.»
Zhenya believed her, because Lyalya had been looking much prettier lately. She had beautiful big, grey eyes with black, painted eyelashes. Her nose was long but slim, and aristocratically aquiline. Her skin had improved a lot, and her neck was quite amazing, a thing of rare beauty: slender, tapering even more upwards. And her head was set so prettily on this lissom stem. Wow!
«Lyalya, dearest, if you don't want to think about yourself, do at least think about him. Do you realise what is going to happen if people find out about this? They'll put him straight in prison! You don't want that to happen, do you? He'll get eight years or so in prison!»
«No, Zhenya, no. Nobody is going to send him to prison. If Mila guesses what's going on she'll kick him out, that's for sure. And she'll take him to the cleaners. For his money. She is so-o greedy, and he makes a lot. If he went to prison he wouldn't be paying her alimony. No, no. She won't make a fuss. Quite the opposite. She'll hush it all up.» Lyalya elaborated a cold, calculated scenario of the future which, Zhenya had to admit, monstrous though it might seem, rang true. Mila really was a money grubber.
«And what about your parents? Do you think they aren't going to be upset? Imagine the situation if they find out,» Zhenya tried a different angle.
«They'd better just keep very quiet. My Ma is screwing Uncle Vasya.» Zhenya's eyes popped out of her head. «Didn't you know? Pa's own brother, my uncle Vasya. Ma's been crazy about him all her life. The only thing I don't know is whether she fell for him before she married Pa or after. As for Pa, why should he care about it? He's not a real man anyway, know what I mean? He isn't interested in anything other than his formulas. Including me and Misha.»
God in heaven, what was to be done with this under-age monster? She was, after all, only thirteen. She was a child in need of protection. And who'd have thought our artist was up to it? He was a watery aesthete who wore a kid jacket and a cravate! His immaculate hands were tended by a manicurist who did home visits. He had once said in Zhenya's presence that his work demanded faultless hands, like a pianist's. She'd had him down for a poof, but now it turned out he was a paedophile.
Then again, Lyalya was not a child. In olden times the Jews married girls off at the age of twelve-and-a-half. So from a physiological viewpoint, she was an adult. Her brain was more than adult: the way she had dissected Mila's motivations was something precious few grown women could have managed.
But what should she, Zhenya, do now? She was the only adult who had been told this tale, so she it was who bore the responsibility. There was no one she could turn to for advice. She certainly couldn't go to her own parents. Her mother would have a heart attack.
Lyalya came to talk to Zhenya nearly every week, telling her all about her artist, and everything she said convinced Zhenya that this nightmarish liaison was really quite firmly rooted. If a family man was taking the risk of receiving an under-age lover in his own home every week, he really was head-over-heels in love. Zhenya did buy contraceptive pills, which set her back quite a bit, without, needless to say, imposing on Mila. She gave them to Lyalya and told her to be sure to take them every day without fail. Even after buying the pills, Zhenya felt deeply implicated. She knew she needed to do something before a scandal blew up, but wasn't sure what approach to take. In the end she decided the only thing she could do in the circumstances was talk to the godforsaken artist.
Meanwhile her theatre director was phoning, begging her to fly out if only for a day. He had a premiere coming up, he was working twelve hours a day. But if she were to fly to that warm, marvellous, sunlit city, she would be in trouble. And if she didn't?
Something had to be done about this ridiculous business of Lyalya. It wasn't even so much because ultimately there was bound to be a scandal, as that here, after all, was an adult perverting the life of a child. Lord, how lucky she was to have boys. What problems did they create? Sasha's astronomy questions, and having to drag Grisha away from his books: he read at night under the blanket using a torch. They still fought occasionally, but ever less frequently of late.
Finally she decided to ring Lyalya's lover. She rang during the day, after two o'clock on a day when Mila had an afternoon surgery. He was delighted to hear from her and immediately invited her round, since luckily it was no distance. Zhenya said she would come round to visit him next time, but for the present they needed to meet on neutral territory.