At last, suppressing a sigh, she turned away, looked out the window. Through the gap in the curtains, which rippled faintly with the insidious autumnal drafts, the night gazed back at her with a gentle face molded by light, obscured by shadow, reshaped by darkness into a hazy semblance of a once familiar, soft, youthful beauty.
“Something strange happened to me this afternoon,” she said quietly, as if to herself. “I was walking down this empty street, and—”
He glanced up sharply. “You didn’t go to the parade?”
Anna’s eyes met the eyes of the woman floating outside, and the night seemed to fill those eyes to the brim. She turned back to her husband.
“No, no,” she said. “I went. Of course I went, to hear you play. It was very good, I mean wonderful as always, of course.”
“Of course,” he said, but his voice had deflated, and he resumed sloshing the weak tea in his cup. She waited, then dropped another sugar cube into her water, listened to it fall with a small plop, took a sip. Her husband asked nothing else, and after a while she stood up, crossed to the sink, and carefully poured out her nearly full cup.
The next few weeks at school were very busy, and Anna soon forgot about the gathering of people at the kiosk, until one day in December, between classes, she came upon two teachers whispering in the corridor. As she paused at a bulletin board to pin the announcement of the annual composition contest (“The Revolutionary Hero I Would Most Like to Meet” was this year’s topic), she overheard Tatyana Alekseyevna say in an agitated undertone, “It appeared out of nowhere not long ago, and no one, no one at all, knows what they’re selling!”
“But doesn’t it have a sign?” Emilia Khristianovna asked.
Anna lingered with the thumbtack in the hollow of her hand, pretending to skim the other notices, her back suddenly tense.
“No, there’s no sign, nothing at all. But I heard this wild rumor—”
The bell thrashed shrilly above their heads. She looked back just in time to see the math teacher bend to shout the end of the sentence into the physics teacher’s ear and the physics teacher ripple like dough in inaudible astonishment. She was tempted to intrude, but Tatyana Alekseyevna had already tied her lips into a prim little bow and pranced off down the hall, trailing a mawkish vanilla scent in her wake, while Emilia Khristianovna had been rolled away in the opposite direction by a stampede of children late for class.
With a sigh, Anna pushed the thumbtack into the board.
That afternoon, on her way home, she found herself halting for a moment at a turn in the road, then, feeling vaguely embarrassed, continued straight; but in the soggy predawn hours of that night, with the wind rattling the windowpanes on their sixth floor and the world the shade of lead, she dreamed of turning left, and reaching the street with the kiosk. The dream street did not resemble the actual street, that graying afterthought of a shortcut with an abandoned old church at one end, a fence meandering like a sparsely toothed grin at the other, a row of dour six-story buildings in between. It was a slice of some outlandish town instead, like nothing she had ever seen, with a ruined clock tower rising like an accusing finger where the church should have been, eggshells and potato scum running down the gutters, and bald, faceless mannequins contorted in flooded shop windows—yet as she rushed past, her hair flying in a honey-smelling, sun-colored halo about her head, her arms heaped with flowers, she knew the street to be the same. The people were there still, waiting, but she had no desire to stop. She kept glancing at her hands—the delicate, smooth hands, with pearly pink petals of perfect fingernails and a lovely ring on one finger. And then that mad old man lifted his face to her, and his eyes were two round black mirrors, with clouds and branches and her own self reflected in them; but in his eyes she saw no honey mane of hair and no flowers, only an aging, badly combed woman in a shapeless brown skirt.
Anna disliked dreams. Dreams had an unpredictable, shimmering quality to them, seemed to her to be cut from the same illusory, wavering, precarious essence as life before the Change, the way she imagined it from history lessons, at least; she had been too young to remember much herself. Hers was a good life, a stable life. None of them ever went hungry, their apartment was warm in winter, they had their fair share of comforts and, too, more than a few accomplishments; last spring, for instance, she had been named District Teacher of the Year and received a roll of red silk—not real silk, but very smooth and gleaming all the same—from which she had made two pretty pillows for the bed. Not everything was perfect, of course, but if she could change one thing, any one thing, about her life, she was not sure what that thing would be, because her life was good, she said to herself once again as she sat behind her desk in class later that day. But as she thought it, her lips must have moved, or perhaps she even whispered it half audibly, for a few children stopped writing and were now staring at her with flat, incurious eyes resembling buttons and beetles. Looking down quickly, she found herself studying her hands, the weathered, naked hands of a woman no longer young, with blunt nails and fingers that were too short, their tips crumbling with pale chalk—and then she knew where she would go as soon as she was set free into the glittering white stretch of the afternoon.
When she turned into the street, she let out a gasp. More than fifty people stood before the kiosk, back after back, taking over the width of the sidewalk. The kiosk was closed as before, another sheet of paper pasted to its shuttered window.
She approached, squinted at the almost illegible scribble.
Gone to dinner, said the notice. Back after three.
She consulted her watch—it was two-thirty—then looked back at the line.
“So, what are they selling?” she asked.
A wide-faced woman in a fur hat, her mouth painted the color of ripe cherries, shrugged.
“I’m hoping for imported leather boots,” she said.
“Children’s coats, I heard,” a man behind her offered shyly.
“You imbecile, they don’t sell children’s coats in kiosks,” hissed a massive old woman next to him. “Cakes is my guess. Layered cakes with coconut shavings on top.” She smacked her lips. “The kiosk by the tram stop had them last week, but they ran out before my turn.”
“No one knows, then,” Anna said thoughtfully, and checked her watch again. She had half an hour to spare. Of course, on any other day, she would hardly consider wasting her time waiting for God knew what. Today, though—today was different; today, she realized suddenly, she wanted to be surprised; felt entitled to a surprise, in truth. Making up her mind, she hurried down the line, blinking at the snow; the descending sun made things bright and hazy, breaking the city into blinding triangles of chill and brilliance. She took her place at the end. A cake would be lucky, she mused—she loved the anticipation of a sweet mouthful traveling down her tongue, narrowing the whole universe to a pinpoint of one flaking, sugar-sprinkled moment—but of course, she would like any number of nice things: a pair of sheer stockings with their faintly chemical smell, for instance, or a ruby-red drop of nail polish in a square glass bottle, or a smooth pebble of jasmine soap. Once, on a winter afternoon just like this, she had chanced upon a kiosk selling oranges; true, the oranges had turned out to be sour and riddled with hard, bitter seeds, but their smell had been beautiful, beautiful, making her remember something she had not known she remembered, something from the dimmest reaches of childhood: the twilight deepening in a great, silk-lined, velvet-cushioned space, the majestic swaying of crimson and gold as the curtain rose, the rush of sound and motion and color, the stiffness of the lacy collar scratching her chin, the porous spiraling of the aromatic rind under her clumsy fingers as she leaned over the padded edge of the balcony, struggling to peel an orange, her eyes on the stage, now on the fruit, now on the stage again, and the disembodied voice, her father’s voice, breathing into her ear, “There—there she is, in white, do you see her—”