After a simple meal, which was served in the dining room—featuring a small table for the samovar, a sideboard with colored glass, an étagère, and napkins—Lyudmila showed Ilya to the divan, pointed out where the bathroom was, and left him, wishing him good night. After some time, she returned with a towel.
“I forgot to give you this,” Lyudmila said, smiling.
She had already changed for the night, and was wearing a blue flannel robe, from under which peeped a blue nightgown with a fancy ruffle. She had already loosened her hair from its bun, and her messy plait fell against her chest when she bent over to place the towel on a chair next to the divan. The light from the full moon, blue and intense, the gleaming snowdrifts outside the window, and the old-fashioned coziness (Like an aristocratic home, Ilya thought in passing) awakened romantic impulses in him. He pulled Lyudmila toward him, and she clung to him compliantly.
In the morning, Ilya left, not in the least troubled about the adventures of the previous night. At the end of the week, he met Lyudmila in the library, then accompanied her to Timiryazevka. Again he stayed overnight. Nanny Klava was absent, as before.
They were not having a relationship. That, at least, was Ilya’s view of the matter; and he knew a thing or two about romantic entanglements, falling in love often with pretty girls, and even enjoying a reputation among his friends as a skilled ladies’ man and seducer. But in this case, getting the girl—unprepossessing, and already wilting, without ever having bloomed, it seemed—did not require any effort. She fell out of the blue into his embrace.
Ilya had no thought that these chance meetings, devoid of any festive brightness or intensity, would turn into a dull but tolerable marriage.
In the third year of their uninspired relationship, Lyudmila got pregnant. She was thirty-four years old, ten years older than Ilya. They registered their marriage not long before the birth of their child—and, it must be said, without any special urging on Lyudmila’s part. When Ilya suggested they should get married, she was not over the moon with joy, which disappointed him somewhat: he was rather proud of his noble gesture.
After the birth of their child—named Ilya, whether after his magnanimous father or after Ilya Ivanovich, his indifferent grandfather, the professor—Ilya moved in with Lyudmila more or less for good. He even moved the most valuable part of his book collection out to the dacha. Nanny Klava, whose small room was right next to Lyudmila’s, did not give it up for the young husband. He was given a room on the second floor, which was rather chilly, but spacious.
Lyudmila was in charge of some sort of agronomy research laboratory. She had long before finished her master’s thesis and qualifying exams, and would have gotten her doctorate had it not been for her pregnancy. But the baby, although quiet and uncomplaining, and almost wholly in the care of Nanny Klava, seemed to sap Lyudmila’s enthusiasm for science, and she never managed to defend her dissertation.
Ilya grew to like living at Lyudmila’s more and more. The city was encroaching on one side of the dacha community, but on the other side it was adjoined by fields for research experiments. Beyond that stretched Timiryazevsky Park, with its ancient lime trees and avenues of pine, its ponds and old feeding troughs for hoofed wildlife, which hadn’t been seen in those parts for a long time already.
Sometimes Ilya would stay home without going anywhere for a whole week; then he would leave for several days. Lyudmila never asked him to account for his comings and goings, neither did she ask him for money. He would arrive, and she seemed happy; he would leave, and she didn’t reproach him. She simply asked him to warn her beforehand, if possible.
The boy took after Ilya, with his curly hair and narrow face. He rarely cried, and rarely smiled. Ilya thought the child had inherited his mother’s character. By the time he was three, they began noticing peculiarities in him. He had a large passive vocabulary, and had even learned by heart some difficult poems that they read to him. But when they would ask him, “Do you want it?,” he would answer “You want it.” Nanny Klava thought he was fine, and the only unusual thing about him was that he was smarter than other children, and that he was destined to become an academic. By the time he was five, he could recite all of Pushkin’s rhymed fairy tales aloud, to Nanny Klava’s delight; but the small aberrations in his speech remained. A specialist was consulted, and he was diagnosed with autism. This explained his peculiarities of speech and the developmental abnormalities: gloomy concentration, incommunicativeness, inability to converse. And, according to the doctor, the prognosis was not promising.
In the year that little Ilya was supposed to begin school, his father stopped showing up at the house at Timiryazevka altogether. Just as gradually as he had appeared, and then married, he gradually left them.
That same year, Lyudmila’s father, Ilya Ivanovich, died. A new professor was appointed, and he expressed the desire to live in the house of his late predecessor. After a short legal battle—although Lyudmila was the head of a laboratory, her rank didn’t qualify her for a dacha—she was awarded a three-room apartment not far away, on Krasnostudenchesky Lane, in exchange. Ilya helped her with the move, wrapping up the books in small bundles, packing dishes into boxes, then loading everything into a truck.
* * *
But he didn’t even stay for one day in the new apartment. He took the suitcase with his collection, intending to transport it to the apartment of his new wife, about whose existence Lyudmila had a vague suspicion. At the door, when he was ready to leave, Ilya kissed his son on the head.
“Be good, don’t upset your mom,” he said to his son.
“Don’t upset your mom,” his son replied.
Ilya cringed inside. This trivial parroting of other people’s speech, weak echoes of other people’s words, sounded all too often like mockery.
The heavyset Lyudmila, covered in dust from the move, her hair suddenly gray, stood in the doorway. Ilya, who was abnormally large for his age, pressed against his mother.
“Next time you come, you wouldn’t hang up the shelves for me, would you?” Lyudmila asked.
“Wouldn’t hang up the shelves, wouldn’t hang up the shelves,” the boy repeated.
* * *
Olga was like a pink-and-yellow flower bulb, with laughter always playing around the corners of her mouth, and dimples in her childlike cheeks. By bus to Novoslobodskaya, from there to Rizhskaya, and by commuter train to Nakhabino. Then, the final leg of the trip, a packed bus to the dacha, where his beloved, and a squealing puppy, snowball fights, skiing, hills and slopes, and talkative Kostya, all awaited him … and the typewriter tapping away till all hours of the night, and the closet with the red lights and the black cuvettes, and Olga’s laughter, and tickling, and heat and love …
* * *
Ilya visited his son only occasionally. With books and building blocks. And each time it was the same, but worse: the full-figured, silent Lyudmila, the shriveled-up, spiteful Nanny Klava, and little Ilya, whose curly head was shooting upward, but whose body was long and feeble, like a plant growing in a pot too small for its roots. He sadly repeated fragments of everyone else’s sentences. His favorite toy was a tape recorder. He listened to verse, and the lines lodged effortlessly in his memory. But what he understood them to mean, no one knew. When asked, he could declaim poetry for hours on end, reproducing the intonations of the narrator. He never learned to read, but he could do calculations in his head very quickly. He was always happy to listen to music on the radio, and he loved programs about animals. He was afraid, however, of the real live cat that lived with them, as well as the dogs he saw on the street when he went out walking with Nanny Klava.