Across from her was a curtained doorway. She said, "Anybody here?" and was answered from behind the curtain by someone half awake, "Hold on a moment."
She held on.
He came across the room, himself, as wholly himself as the stones and sunlight of the city after these eight years: the reality of her wretched dreams in which he and she stopped at inns on roads leading up into grey mountains and could not find, down cold corridors, each other's room: the original of all the facsimiles who, in Krasnoy on winter evenings, crossed a street with his walk or looked round with his turn of the head: himself.
"Sorry, I was asleep."
"I'm Mariya."
He stood still, and his coat hung on him as on a coatrack. Seeing that, she saw that his hair had gone a kind of dull grey – that his hair was grey. He was thin, grey, changed. She would not have known him if she passed him on the street. They shook hands.
"Sit down, Mariya," he said, and they both sat, in large shabby chairs. Across the bare floor between them lay a bar of Aisnar's unalloyed, inimitable autumn sunlight. "I have the alcove, but the Panins let me use this room while they're out. They both work the day shift at the GPR."
"That's where you work too – evening shift? I was going to leave a note."
"Usually I'd be on the way to work by this time. I've had some days off. Flu."
She should have expected him not to ask any questions. He disliked answering them, and seldom asked them. It was his self-respect that prevented him, a self-respect so entire that it included all other men and women, accepted them as responsible, exempted them from question. How had he survived so long in this world of the public confessional?
"I have a two-week holiday," she said. "I work in Krasnoy, teaching. In the primary schools."
It confused her to see his smile on the face of a man she did not know.
"I'm divorced from Givan."
He looked down at the sunlight on the floor. She answered the next question he did not ask – "Four years ago." Then she took out her cigarettes in self-defense. But she summoned up courage, before laying the smokescreen, to offer him one, reaching out to him across the sunlight: "Smoke?"
"Yes, thanks." He looked at the cigarette, smelled it, and leaned forward happily to the flame of her match. He inhaled the smoke and burst into a cough, a hacking, whacking cough, a series of explosions like heavy artillery, the most noise she had ever heard him make in his life. All through it he held on to the cigarette, and when he had got his breath back he took another draw, not inhaling.
"You shouldn't smoke," she said helplessly.
"Haven't been," he said. Sweat stood out on his forehead, even in his hair, which she now saw was only partly grey. Soon he put the cigarette out with care and stowed the unsmoked end in his shirt pocket. This he did with grace and ease, but then he looked at her with apology. She had not been with him during the years when he learned to save cigarette butts, and so might be embarrassed; and she tried to look impassive, knowing how he disliked causing embarrassment.
The strangers' room, the furniture of some other house, stood silently around them.
"Mariya, what did you come here for?" The question, which would have been any other man's, was not his, nor the voice; only the eyes, clear, frank, and obdurate.
"To see you. To talk to you, I mean, Pier. It got so that I had to. I'm lonely. I mean, more than that, I'm alone. By myself. Outside. There's nobody in Krasnoy that I can say anything to, they don't need me. I used to think, while we were married, you know, that if I were by myself, on my own, I'd find a lot of interesting people, friends, and be on the inside, do you know what I mean? But that was all wrong. You had friends then and I expect you do now. You have a place to stand on when you meet people. I never did, I never made friends. I never have reached another person, except you. I suppose I didn't really want to reach anybody. But now I do." She stopped, and with the same horror with which she had heard him cough, heard herself sob loudly. "I can't stand it very much longer. Everything is falling apart. I've lost my nerve." She went on as fast as she could. "Are people here buying salt? You can't get salt any more in Krasnoy, people buy it all and save it, they say if you wrap yourself in a sheet soaked in salt water it will cure radiation burns. Is that true? I don't know. Is everyone here scared? But it's not just the bombs, there are the other things they talk about, germ warfare, and how there are too many people and more all the time, so soon we'll all be like rats in a box. And nobody seems to really hope for anything good any more. And then you get older, and you think about dying, and in a time like this it seems so mean and pointless. Living and dying both. It's like being alone at night in the wind, it just blows right through me. I try to hold myself up and have some dignity, you know, but I can't believe in it anymore, I feel like an ant in a swarm, I can't do it alone!"
To spare her or himself he had gone to stand at the window, and with his back still turned he spoke, gently. "Nobody can," he said. "But you can't turn back, my dear. Nobody can do that either."
"I'm not trying to turn back. Truly I'm not. I'm just trying to meet you, now, here, don't you see? Here where we are now. Because you're the only person I ever have met. All the others are on different roads, they live in other houses. Didn't you ever think I'd have to come back to you?"
"I never once thought it."
"But I never left you, Pier! I only ran away because I knew I belonged to you, and I thought the only way I'd ever be myself was to get free of you. Myself, myself, a lot of good myself was. All I did was run like a stupid bitch till I got to the end of my leash."
"Well, leashes have two ends," he said, leaning forward as if to gaze through the glass at a rooftop, a cloud, a remote grey mountain-peak. "I let go."
She tried to smooth her hair, which escaped in fierce tendrils from the knotted braids, red-blonde. Her voice was still shaky, but she said with dignity, "I wasn't talking about love, Pier."
"Then I don't understand."
"I meant loyalty. Taking somebody in as part of your own life. Either you do or you don't. We did. I was disloyal. You let me go, but you aren't capable of disloyalty."
He came back to the chair facing her and sat down.
Now she had the courage to look at him, and made sure that his face had not in fact changed; it had been eroded, erased, by sickness or hard times: not change, only loss.
"Look, my dear" – that word was most comfortable to Mariya, though she knew it was only the expression of his general kindliness – "look, my dear, no matter how you put it, you're trying to go back. There's nothing left to go back to. In any sense." And he looked at her with that kindness, as if he wished he could soften the facts.
"What happened? Will you tell me? Not now if you don't want. Sometime. I talked to Moshe, but I didn't want to ask questions about you. I came here thinking you still lived in the house in Reyn Street and … all the rest."
"Well, during the Pentor Government we published some works that got the House into trouble when the R.E.P. came back into force. Bernoy, if you remember him, Bernoy and I were tried that fall. We were in prison up north. They let me out two years ago. But of course I can't work for the state now in a responsible position, and that cuts out working for the House." He still called it "the House," the publishing firm Korre and Sons, which his family had owned and run from 1813 to 1946. When the firm was nationalised he had been kept on as manager. That had been his position when Mariya met him and married him and when she left him, and she had never imagined the chance of his losing it.