Then, not saying another word, Tanya began to collect her bag. Vitalik, also without saying a word, saw her to the bus that she usually rode to Obninsk.
Gena’s reaction was more circumspect and mature.
“I’m completely at your disposal, Tanka. The only thing I can’t do right now is leave Obninsk before I finish this damn dissertation. As for everything else, you call the shots. If you want, you can move here, at least until autumn. If you want to get married, we’ll do that here, not in Moscow.”
“Why not in Moscow?” Tanya asked, expecting some catch.
“I’ll lose two days on my dissertation. I told you, there’s a huge rush.”
“Ah.” Tanya nodded, satisfied.
Gena did not mention Vitalka. That pleased Tanya. She was ready to marry one of the Goldberg brothers, and the choice had now been made for her: Genka . . .
But things did not turn out according to plan. When Tanya returned from Obninsk three days later, Vitalik was preoccupied with a new problem that had been dumped on him: a notice had come from the draft board . . . It was obvious that this was their way of punishing Goldberg senior.
The answer proposed itself: a draft deferment lay right in Tanya’s belly. All they had to do was get married as quickly as possible and have her pregnancy certified at the polyclinic.
“If that’s the way it has to be . . . What’s there to talk about, Vitalik? Just keep in mind, though, that my choice of husband is Genka.”
Vitalik smiled a crooked smile.
“Are you trying to tell me that ours is going to be a fictitious marriage?”
“I didn’t put it that way. But if you want, we can call it that.”
The rest of the evening they spent battling wits on the subject of who would be related to whom and how as a result of their matrimonial operation. Tanya designated Vitalik a verbal adjective, the future child a half-nephew, and their marriage a Triple Alliance.
Having laughed their full and eaten supper, they lay down on the same distressed couch with its iron ribs sticking out and fell asleep in a close embrace, entirely oblivious to whatever moral dilemma might be seen by any outside observer, but not by the members of this particular family.
The next day they ran down to the civil registry office and submitted an application. Their wedding was set for the beginning of July. Vitalik did not go to the draft board. As a precaution it was decided that he should leave Moscow for a while. He quickly gathered his things, stuffed his bag with dictionaries, and grabbing half of a German textbook on clinical biochemistry—one of his father’s staffers had shared this sweet morsel of a translation with him—set off for his maternal aunt’s house in Poltava. Without calling or otherwise alerting her . . .
Everything turned out to have been calculated flawlessly. Two days after Vitalik left, another summons arrived, and on the next day, at seven in the morning, there was pounding at the door. Tanya admitted three men—two military and one policeman—into the apartment. They had come to take Vitalka into the army.
“The owner’s on a trip. I don’t know a thing. I think he went to the Urals to look for work . . .” was all they were able to extract from Tanya.
Following Vitalik’s departure Tanya fell in love with her pregnancy. Not with the child that was supposed to be born, but precisely with her condition of fullness, contentedness in the literal sense of the word. Usually inattentive to her health, she now obeyed her body’s slightest whim and resolved to indulge herself by doing everything that was pleasant and wholesome. In the morning she drank juice—not store bought, but hand-squeezed; she set up her own kefir production on the windowsill using some especially curative dairy culture; she spent several days a week in Obninsk with Gena. There she would stroll through the woods for hours on end, acquiring in the process a warm brown tan, hemoglobin, and a pleasant fatigue. Her somnolence was replaced by morning sickness. In the morning she would suck on sour hard candy; her nausea usually let up later in the day. To Tanya’s great chagrin her belly had not grown one bit, although she constantly experienced a kind of taut fullness inside her that had nothing in common with the vulgar condition of someone who has eaten two dinners at one sitting. Her breasts, on the other hand, had enlarged noticeably; her nipples stuck out like doorbell buttons, and turned from pink to brown. Tanya scrubbed them with a coarse loofah: somewhere she had read that that was the way to prepare breasts for nursing. Gena sucked at her darkened nipples. He liked the way her nipples hardened from his touch. Tanya also liked this entirely new sensation.
Two more notices addressed to Vitaly arrived from the draft board. Some captain called, threatening and attempting to scare her. Tanya played the idiot.
On rare occasions Tanya would visit her family. She announced that she was pregnant and was planning to get married. But Elena did not react to the announcement at all. It seemed to Tanya that her mother had not heard. But that was not quite true, because in the evening of that same day Elena told her husband that Tanya would give birth to Little Tanya. Accustomed to the chaos of her mental processes, Pavel Alekseevich did not attach any special meaning to this vague bit of news, thinking to himself about the complex processes taking place in his wife’s mind: apparently, the message about Flotov had stuck in the deep layers of her cortex and she had remembered the time when she herself had awaited a daughter. She was identifying herself with the grown-up Tanya.
The letter from the International Legal Collegium remained unanswered. Elena was in no condition to express her opinion about the inheritance, let alone answer. And Pavel Alekseevich had not said anything to Tanya about it: he just couldn’t find an appropriate moment. For him it was a question not of inheritance but of something much more important.
On one of those late light evenings at the beginning of July when, having found her father in a pleasantly intoxicated state, Tanya informed him of her forthcoming marriage, he made up his mind to talk to her about that ill-starred inheritance. He sat her down in his study, placed the slightly pawed envelope in front of himself, and before handing it to her told her how he had met her mother, how he had operated on her and married her soon after she recovered.
“You moved to my place, Tanya, the very same day that a telegram arrived with information about the death of the man who had been your mother’s husband before me.”
Tanya’s eyes burst out of their sockets: she had never thought about her mother having been married to someone before Pavel Alekseevich.
“You were two years old then, Tanechka. Your biological father was Anton Ivanovich Flotov. I adopted you immediately after we got married. Probably I should have told you about this earlier . . .”
“Daddy, what difference does it make?” She saw Pavel Alekseevich’s anxiety, and all her childhood love, like the sun in the sky, shone down upon him at that minute . . .
She hugged his bald round head, kissed him on his fuzzy eyebrows, and on the nose. She inhaled his smell, which she had always liked—a combination of medicine, war, and alcohol—squeezed her eyes shut, and whispered: “Who cares about Flotov or Boatov . . . You’re crazy . . . You’re my real, my favorite elephant, Daddy, you old fool . . . You and I are terribly alike; you’re all the best in me . . . I’m sorry that I abandoned you . . . I love you terribly, and I love Mama. I just can’t live with you . . . Dad, I’m pregnant, I’m going to give birth to your grandson soon . . . Cool, huh?”
He had never had children of his own. He had heard about this moment from others, although many, many times men desperate to have children had learned of the event from him and had become fathers owing precisely to his demiurgic intercession. His adopted daughter had just informed him that she was going to give birth, and his chest filled with the warmth of happiness, and the future child turned out to be at once both desired and long awaited.