They met beside the Art Cinema, and he suggested going over to the cafe in the Prague Hotel.
«Has something upset you, Zhenya? You're looking a bit dishevelled, somehow,» the artist asked amiably, and Zhenya remembered that he always behaved well towards his relatives. He once helped a really quite distant lady relative when she needed a major operation; and another time he had paid for a lawyer to defend some black sheep in the family who had proved incapable even of stealing a car properly. What a thing is man, how much diversity he has within him.
«I'm afraid this is going to be rather unpleasant. I need to talk to you about your lover,» Zhenya began abruptly, not wanting to give the indignation she felt about this whole disgraceful episode a chance to dissipate.
He was silent for a long time. Purposefully silent. Little muscles were working under his thin skin. He proved not actually to be as handsome as she had imagined. Or perhaps his looks had faded with the years.
«Zhenya, I am a grown man. You are not my mother or my grandmother. Tell me why I should have to explain myself to you?»
«Well, because, Arkady,» Zhenya exploded, «because ultimately we are all responsible for our own actions. And as a grown man, you should take responsibility for the stuations you find yourself in.»
He took a big gulp from the small coffee cup, and put the empty cup on the edge of the table.
«Tell me, Zhenya, has somebody sent you, or have you had an access of do-goodery?»
«What are you talking about? Who could have sent me? Your wife? Lyalya's parents? Lyalya herself? Well, of course it's do-goodery, as you put it. That dumbcluck Lyalya has told me all about it. Of course, I would prefer to know nothing at all. But from what I do know, I am afraid. Both for her and for you. That's all.»
He suddenly softened and changed his tone.
«To tell the truth, I had no idea you knew each other. How interesting.»
«Believe me, I would prefer not to know her at all, and the more so in these circumstances.»
«Zhenya, tell me what it is that you want from me. This affair is not in its first year. And forgive me if I say that you and I are not on such close terms that we should be discussing delicate aspects of my personal life.»
At this point Zhenya realised that things were complicated, and that there was more behind these words than she knew. Arkady himself was looking half-guilty, but also half-perplexed.
«I thought this had only recently begun, but you are saying it is not in its first year…» Zhenya forced out, cursing herself for ever getting involved in these intricacies.
«If you are a private detective, you aren't very good at your job. To be perfectly frank, it has been going on for more than two years,» he shrugged. «I just don't understand why Lyalya had to talk to you. Mila knows all about it, and she is prepared to put up with anything to avoid a divorce.»
He moved his elbow, knocking the coffee cup off the table. It crashed to the floor.
Without getting up, he leant under the table with his long arm and collected the pieces, placing them in front of himself in a heap. He began sorting the white china shards of the broken cup as if assembling them for gluing. Then he looked up. Actually, he was really rather handsome. His eyebrows were so open, and his eyes tinged with green.
More than two years? So he had been molesting a ten-year-old girl? How could he talk about it so casually? Men really must be from another planet.
«Listen, Arkady, I just don't understand. You talk about this so straightforwardly. I can't get my head round it. A grown man sleeping with a ten-year-old girl?»
He stared at her in astonishment.
«Zhenya, what are you talking about? What girl?»
«Lyalya was thirteen a month-and-a-half ago. What is she to you: a babe, a chick, a bird?»
«Who are we talking about, Zhenya?»
«Lyalya Rubashova.»
«What Rubashova?» Arkady asked, genuinely puzzled.
Was he pulling her leg? Or?..
«Lyalya, of course. The daughter of Stella Kogan and Kostya Rubashov.»
«Oh, Stella. I haven't seen her for a hundred years. She did have a daughter, didn't she. What has that to do with me? Can you explain yourself clearly?»
That was it. End of story.
He understood what she was talking about, was horrified, guffawed with laughter, expressed a desire to take a look at the girl who had dreamed up a romance with him. He had no recollection of her. Any number of little girls who were friends of Dasha came into the house.
Then, casting off a terrible weight from her heart, Zhenya laughed too.
«I hope you realise, esteemed Arkady, that I have nevertheless uncovered the fact that you have a lover?»
«Well, okay. I do have a lover. She isn't ten and she isn't thirteen, but as you can imagine there are certain difficulties. I was so angry when you came and…»
The waiter took away the broken china and summoned a cleaner to wipe under the table.
Zhenya waited for Lyalya's next visit. She listened to all her latest revelations, let her finish, and then said, «Lyalya, I am very glad you have been coming to me all this time to share your experiences. You probably needed very much to act out in front of me all these things which have never happened, but which will come to you in good time: love, and sex, and your artist…»
Zhenya didn't manage to deliver the whole of the speech she had prepared. Lyalya was already back in the hallway. Without a word, she grabbed her schoolbag and wasn't seen again for many years.
But Zhenya too had other things to think about. Winter, which had been frozen in darkness, was jolted out of its rut. The director had his premiere and himself flew to Moscow. He was simultaneously on top of the world and rather melancholy, and constantly surrounded by his numerous fans — Muscovite Georgians languishing in a rather abstract way for Tiflis, and Muscovite intellectuals in love with Georgia and her bibulous, free-and-easy ways. For two weeks Zhenya was happy, and the «brooding forest gloom» of «half her span on earth» grew lighter, and March was like April, warm and light, as if bathed in reflections from that faraway city on the wild River Kura. She became less restive. Not because she had been happy for two weeks, but because she had understood in the depths of her heart that the holiday would not last forever, and this fun person who had landed in her life was like a great big present, so big you could only be allowed to hold it for a short while, but not to take it home with you. Zhenya told him the tale of Lyalya. First he laughed, but then he said it would make a brilliant play. Then he left, and Zhenya flew to see him in Georgia several times, and he flew more than once to Moscow. Then it was over, as if it had never been. And life went on for Zhenya. She was even reconciled with her second husband whom, as became clear with the passing of time, it was simply impossible for her to leave: he was as firmly stitched on to her life as her children.
She did not meet Lyalya again for a long time. She didn't show up at family birthdays, and funerals were hardly the right moment.
Only many years later did they meet at a family party, and by then Lyalya had grown into a very beautiful young woman who was married to a pianist. Her little daughter was there too. The four-year-old came up to Zhenya and said she was a princess. That's all. End of story.
About the Authors
SVETLANA ALEXIYEVICH, born in 1948, graduated in journalism from Minsk University then worked on various papers while trying her hand at short stories. In her search for «a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation of real life», Alexiyevich evolved a writing style all her own: she constructs her narratives out of «live voices» culled from interviews with witnesses to and participants in 20th-century cataclysms. Says Alexiyevich: «That is how I hear and see the world — as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday minutiae.» Alexieye-vich's books have sold some 2 million copies in Russia and been translated into more than twenty languages.