She recognized him first—and she stepped aside to avoid him. Her braid was gone, her plumpness had sagged, her hand flew up to her face and covered it: the same large hand with dimples at the base of every finger. Only now she didn’t wear red fingernail polish—it was a faint pink. He recognized that hand. It had stroked his bald head for many years, and with that one deft motion had vanquished his troubles and woes. He rushed to catch up with her.
“Sophia Markovna!”
“Afanasy!” she said, covering her mouth. “My God!”
Every other one of her sugary white teeth was missing.
“They released you?”
“Eleven months ago, July last year.”
“Why didn’t you let me know?” When they were face-to-face he was unable to call her by name. Addressing her formally was impossible, too.
She waved her beautiful hand dismissively and turned down the road, as if to walk away from him.
He chased after her and touched her on the shoulder. She stopped and began to cry. He removed his civilian straw hat and started crying, too. She wasn’t the same as she had been, she was someone else altogether; but in a single moment the two merged and became one—that former regal beauty, and the haggard, homely woman standing before him now, who was still the most wonderful in all the world.
She lived with her sister, Anna Markovna, at her sister’s dacha, not far away. He left his car by the market so he could walk her home. They didn’t say a word along the way, as if the breath had been knocked out of them. His mind kept returning to the same question: Did she know that he’d signed the document? Before they reached the dacha, she turned to him and said:
“We have to say good-bye here. My family can’t see you. And you don’t need to see them, either. You know they shot my brother.”
She knows, he thought. His heart seemed to drop to his stomach. But what does she know? Maybe she thinks I betrayed her brother.
Sophia had introduced him to her brother, Iosif. He was a good-natured fellow, and worked at Mikhoels’s Moscow State Jewish Theater. He had even written a few tales in Yiddish. They had met two or three times. But Afanasy Mikhailovich had put his name to paper only once—and that one signature had nothing to do with Sophia’s brother.
“Do you still live on Dayev?”
“I live at my sister’s. They took the room away from me. A yardkeeper lives there now,” she said indifferently, and he recalled the room that smelled like Red Moscow perfume, the flock of pillows, her collections of flacons and cats—of porcelain, glass, stone. “They tell me they’ll get the room back for me, and kick the yardkeeper out.”
Indeed, it was not long before they did return the room to her. Afanasy Mikhailovich began to call her from public phone booths now and then at the old, prewar number. He wanted to see her. For a long time Sophia refused him.
“No, please, I don’t want to, I can’t.”
But one day she said: “Yes, come.”
And once again he went through the courtyard and up the back stairs, which were adjacent to one wall of her room. As before, he avoided going through the main entrance, where the door to the communal flat was covered with doorbells for all the families living there. Instead, he knocked on the wall to her room, and she undid the huge iron latch to the back door, filling the darkness of the corridor with her body and her sweet scent. Then she led him into her little nest of pillows and blankets, where he basked in the warmth of her luxuriant body, which sank underneath him.
And all their former closeness returned, even more intense than before—for they had lost each other forever, and found each other again by chance.
And the second part of their double-feature true-love movie began. One thing, it goes without saying, had changed. They never talked about work. Sophia Markovna was as tactful and circumspect as ever. She never asked him anything. She never talked about her own trials and misfortunes. They talked about the subjects he brought up. The conversation usually concerned domestic matters, his family affairs. And he always talked about his daughter, Olga. Sophia Markovna had known her since she was born, of course—from a distance. Only from photographs. Once, not long before all the trouble, in 1949, he decided that Sophia Markovna should see Olga in person. He bought three tickets to a children’s theater, a ballet performance of Doctor Ouchithurts. He gave two of the front-row tickets to Olga and her girlfriend, and the third ticket he gave to Sophia Markovna. The girls sat next to Sophia Markovna; she watched them, and they watched the performance.
Framed photographs of the little girl adorned her walls. And that’s how things continued. Sophia took a great interest in Olga. It is likely that Afanasy Mikhailovich would not have known as much about his daughter as he did if he hadn’t been assembling this domestic dossier on her for Sophia Markovna: he reported what grade she had gotten on dictation, what museum she had visited the previous Sunday, and so forth …
The years passed, and Sophia heard all about Olga starting college, and about her early marriage. She’d had her doubts about the marriage from the very beginning. No, she said, our Olga is head and shoulders above Vova as far as intellect is concerned; mark my words, she’ll find someone far more interesting. And she was right. She was always right about everything. When Olga’s travails began, Sophia Markovna again gave Afanasy the right advice: she told him to retire.
He wouldn’t have been able to make the decision himself—but, at her urging, he submitted the necessary papers. This decision bolstered his health. After he retired, his life changed, and the changes were much for the better.
Afanasy Mikhailovich never notified Sophia of his impending monthly visit. He didn’t announce himself beforehand. She never left the house before noon, in case he decided to drop by. She always kept frozen minced meat on hand, ready for preparing pancakes at a moment’s notice. She would make the dough, then fry up the paper-thin crepes, two for wrapping around the meat filling and one for the sugar-sweetened cottage cheese. He washed down the meat-filled pancakes with thyme-infused vodka, and the sweet one with tea. All the food Sophia made was slightly sweet—even meat and fish. And the sweetness seemed not to come from the sugar, but from Sophia herself, from the smell of her body, her clothes, her bed.
On March 12, he went to see his girlfriend for the last time, though he didn’t know this yet. He only knew that it hadn’t even been a full month since he had last visited her, but just over two weeks. And already he was filled with longing; he couldn’t contain himself. The bus was running on schedule, and the electric commuter train didn’t let him down, either. He arrived at Rizhskaya Station promptly at 9:50. It had been quiet and still outside of town, but here snow was blowing through the squares. While he was buying flowers—mimosa—the squall died down and the sun peeped out. He boarded the trolleybus. Everything was happening right on time, but for some reason Afanasy felt uneasy. What if she wasn’t home? Something could have come up—maybe she had gone to see the doctor, or gone out shopping. He felt around for the key in his pocket. Sophia had given him the key to her room long ago, just in case. Which was quite pointless, since he didn’t have a key to the main entrance. And he couldn’t have gotten into her room through the rear, because the back door was always latched.