“What are you waiting for?” someone asked.
The question startled her out of her reverie into a world that was being swiftly drained of color. Gray hollows were already stretching by her feet like shadowy, somnolent beasts wearied by the passing of another day. Lazy snowflakes wandered through the air.
She frowned at the pale, skinny boy before her; she did not recognize him from school. He could not be more than ten; she was reminded of her own son when he had been that age, though the boy looked nothing like him.
“I don’t think anyone knows,” she said.
“But if you don’t know what it is,” said the boy, “how do you know you need it?”
He wore no mittens, was cradling one hand in the other.
“I’m sure it will be something good,” Anna replied patiently. “Otherwise all these people wouldn’t be here.”
The boy appeared puzzled. His eyes were two tiny pieces of a wintry sky; she could see herself in them, just like in her dream—two dark little figures drowning in a swirling of clouds, then gone in a blink, erased by a sweep of eyelashes wet with snow.
“And in any case,” she said impulsively, “it’s better this way, not knowing. It might be something you don’t need but really like. Like a present. Like flowers—”
She stopped, embarrassed. The boy breathed pensively on his fingers.
She watched the curling of his breath.
“I wonder if Mama would like it,” he said. “Whatever it is.”
“It might be perfume,” suggested a girl a few steps back.
The line had continued to grow all the while.
Anna glanced at her watch and was astonished to see that it was after four. “Would you like to take my place?” she asked. “I have to go, they’ll be worried about me at home.”
“Let him wait his turn like everyone else,” spat out someone behind her.
“That’s right, he isn’t with you, woman!” another voice shouted.
“He’s just a boy,” said Anna reproachfully, but the boy had already slunk away. “Shame,” she sighed, not certain what she meant precisely. Then, having cast one last glance at the boarded window, she ran through the disappearing city.
She burst into their apartment all out of breath, rehearsing some plausible explanation for being late—for some reason, she felt reluctant to confess to her futile two-hour wait in the waning light of the year—but no one asked her. She busied herself at the stove. At seven o’clock, they sat down to supper; her husband had been granted an evening off for the occasion. When she began to pour hot water over damp, odorless tea leaves saved from the previous teatime, her mother rose and, as always, wordlessly departed for her room. Anna set three cups on the table, looked from her husband to her son across the shadows of the dim, stuffy kitchen.
“I was hoping to buy a cake for tonight,” she announced brightly.
“A cake’s always good,” her son rejoined without enthusiasm.
In a small hush, she could hear the clock’s hand rustling toward the next minute, the gulp of liquid traveling down her husband’s throat. “Do you remember,” he said without raising his head, “in the old days, they put those skinny candles into birthday cakes, as many candles as you had years, and then you’d make a wish and blow them out?”
She laughed and protested in a flirtatious, insincere voice: “No, no, there wouldn’t have been space enough!”—yet already imagining the swoosh of the air escaping her lungs, the flickering dance of forty-three candles casting warm spells of golden-red light upon the convexity of the teacups, the concavity of the spoons, before rearing up and dying all at once—already wondering what she would have wished for, what special, unexpected, lovely thing…
Her husband did not contradict her but stared into his cup instead, and her son said, “Well, anyway, happy birthday!”
The boy’s face wore a startled expression, as if he’d only now remembered.
That night, tiptoeing along the unlit corridor, Anna collided with her mother, and her mother wound her thin arms about Anna and stood clinging to her for a moment, light as a bird, then, releasing her, flitted away, as before, in silence.
Anna gazed after her, not moving. In the darkness ahead, the door shut softly.
The next morning, she chanced to leave the house early, so she had time to walk the longer way; it was, after all, not that much of a detour, only a few extra blocks. The sun had not yet risen, and the kiosk was still closed—most places did not open until nine—but people were already starting to come by, drifting down sidewalks like pockets and patches of the departing night in the limpid green twilight of the last predawn hour. Noticing the bright-mouthed woman in the fur hat at the end of the line, Anna approached with hesitant steps.
“Good day. You may remember me—I was here yesterday, but I had to go—”
The woman regarded her blankly, her eyelids gleaming with lavender sleekness.
“Please, what did they end up selling?”
“A big fat nothing,” the woman said, flicking her flimsy scarf over her shoulder. “The cursed kiosk never reopened. Today’s the day, though, I can feel it. Whatever it is, it’ll go fast.”
“Oh.” Anna fiddled with her glove to keep from staring at the mesmerizing rotation of the woman’s earrings. “If you don’t mind… I have to go to work for a few hours—a school just around the corner—I’m a literature teacher… Would you be so kind as to hold the place for me, I’ll come as soon as I can—”
“The nerve,” said the woman indifferently. “The nerve of it. You think just because you’re educated, you don’t have to wait like everyone else?”
“Oh no, it’s not… I didn’t… I’ll be happy to replace you as soon as I… I mean, we could take turns—”
A few shadows around them tsked and shook their heads, and the woman turned away with a liquid toss of her earrings. Mortified, Anna pulled her gloves back on and stumbled off without looking up; but all day in school she felt stabs of acute shame at the memory of her audacity, mixed with a profound impatience that made her yearn to rush out in the middle of class, not waiting for the pupil to finish reciting “Ode to the Industrial Accomplishments of the Eastern Region,” and fly down the white streets, her unbuttoned coat flapping behind her. She felt like crying when the vice-principal, dropping by during her last hour, moved his pale fishlike lips and gleefully informed her that she must stay a while longer, to supervise a boy in detention. It was after five o’clock when she finally gathered her papers, struggled into the tight confinement of her sleeves. The night had already drawn its shutters over the city; windows were glowing with dull, steady lights, and the sky waved back and forth in a skeletal dance of black branches. She arrived just in time to see the line dispersing, to see the woman in the fur hat disappearing into the darkness with furious strides. The kiosk was boarded once again.