I jumped to my feet, wiped my eyes and came downstairs. I’d send Sergey to bed to get some sleep, I thought, I’d take the gun and keep watch – I’m a good shot. Sergey always praises me for my accuracy, I know how to hold the gun and keep my aim steady.
Without turning on the light on the stairs I came down to the ground floor. It was completely dark downstairs, and the balcony door was slightly ajar. I could feel cold air on my feet and regretted not getting dressed. I tiptoed across the empty lounge, peeped outside and called:
“Sergey!”
I wanted him to turn around at my voice, step inside, tell me off for walking outside undressed – ‘why did you pop out like this, you’ll get cold, silly’ – and then take his jacket off, which I would refuse to put on. I realised how much I missed him, for how long we hadn’t been alone together. We would put the jacket onto the floor, near the window, smoke a cigarette together and then, perhaps, make love right here, on the floor. We hadn’t made love for ages. I opened the door wider and stepped forward.
The person standing on the balcony flicked away his cigarette end, which scattered red sparkles in the air. He turned around and said:
“Anya, damn it, why aren’t you asleep? Go back indoors, you’ll be cold.” It wasn’t Sergey’s voice.
“Where’s Sergey?” A glance at the sofa in the lounge showed that it was empty.
“Let’s go back in,” Boris said and held his arms out towards me. I pushed him off, ran to the edge of the balcony and peered round the corner at the parking spaces in front of the house.
Sergey’s car wasn’t there.
“Sit down, Anya, don’t make any fuss, you’ll wake the whole house up,” said Boris in the lounge, after he had turned the light on and pushed me indoors.
“Tomorrow at the latest we’ll leave. He must at least try and pick them up, if they’re … if they’re fine. I’m sure you’ll understand.”
I did understand. I sat on the sofa and automatically pulled the blanket which was hung over the arm rest, towards me. Last night, it was Mishka who slept under it, when Sergey and I sat on the floor watching the sparks in the fireplace as they landed and faded on the back wall. The prickly wool of the blanket scratched me through the thin fabric of my nightdress, but I put the blanket over my shoulders and thought how silly of me it was not to get dressed before coming downstairs – even at this moment of upset I was aware that Boris was looking at my lacy nightdress and bare knees and I felt awkward – I really shouldn’t be walking around in a nightie with so many men in the house. I was remembering how Sergey and I went to the barrier, to try and collect my mum. He certainly knew then that we wouldn’t get through, because as soon as they announced the quarantine he had tried to break through the checkpoints and get into the city – alone, without me. I remember him going out and coming back, angrily throwing the keys onto the coffee table and saying ‘damn it, it’s all closed off’, but not once, not even once, did he tell me why he tried to get into the city. And on that day when we were arguing, and I begged and cried, he came with me just to prove to me that it was impossible, because he knew that I had to try to do it myself, and even then, in the car, when the empty, dark road was winding under the wheels, he didn’t tell me. And on the way back, although surely he had already offered them money to let him through many times before, ‘guys, I’ve got a son there, he’s little’, and held his hand about a meter above the ground; ‘it’s only about five hundred meters from the inner ring road, it’s a stone’s throw away, we won’t spend any time packing, I’ll just pick him up, put him in the car and come back, give me fifteen minutes’, and then would turn the car around and drive to another barrier, and try again, and again, and fail, and come back home.
I never asked Sergey how his son was, it hadn’t even occurred to me – although there’s his photo on the desk in the study – fair hair, wide-set eyes. Once a week without fail – sometimes more often – Sergey went to see him. ‘You’ve got a day off today, Anya’ – we somehow made a rule not to talk about it – and when he came back I always dutifully asked ‘how’s the little one?’ and he always answered ‘he’s ok,’ or ‘growing fast’, and never gave any more details. I never knew which word he said first and when he said it, which fairy-tales he liked and if he was afraid of the dark. Once Sergey asked ‘have you ever had chicken pox?’ and I understood that the boy was poorly, but didn’t ask if he had a high temperature, if he was itchy, if he was sleeping ok, but just replied ‘yes, both Mishka and I have had it, don’t worry, we can’t catch it.’
Perhaps we were so tense talking about him because of the huge, stifling guilt that completely overcame me when Sergey left the mother of this two-year old boy for me. He was leaving gradually, not in one go, but still too fast both for her and for me, not giving us enough time to get used to the new situation in our lives. Men tend to do this when they make decisions with consequences which hurt everyone with their sharp edges, until women find ways to smooth them over and hide them through daily efforts which are usually tiny and, for the most part, go unnoticed. After this, life becomes normal again, and everything that happens can not only be explained but justified too. Or maybe it wasn’t that at all – maybe neither the woman he had left, nor I made a single effort to bring our worlds – which were spinning around Sergey – closer to each other, at least through our relationship with this little boy, who was so easy to love, only because he hadn’t had enough time to do anything to stop us.
I was prepared to love him, back then, in the beginning, and not only because I was ready to love everything that Sergey held dear, but also because Mishka was growing up and had started brushing my arms away when I’d try to hug him – not in a nasty way, but quite assertively – like horses do when they wave off flies. He didn’t want to sit on my lap or for me to lie down with him before he went to sleep anymore. Or maybe it was because a few years after Mishka was born one of my regular visits to the gynaecologist finished with his phrase ‘it’s lucky you already have a child’; or maybe because the smooth, comfortable, flawless world which I had created in the twinkling of an eye – so fast I didn’t quite have time to realise it myself – around Sergey, his habits and preferences, didn’t allow any other intrusion, even from people who were close to him. And so the little boy, with his need for love, care and entertainment, turning up occasionally during school holidays or weekends, did not encroach on this world to a degree that another child might have done – the one that Sergey and I didn’t have. I’m not sure I explained it to myself like this, but I was prepared to love him, and I would tell Sergey, “Please don’t go, let’s bring him here for the weekend, let’s go to the circus, to the park, I know how to make porridge and to tell stories, I’m a light sleeper and don’t mind getting up at night.” When we moved into our new house I set aside a room for him. I called it a ‘guest bedroom’, but I put a bed there which was too small for an adult and brought in Mishka’s old ‘treasures’, which he’d grown out of, – plastic dinosaurs, whose complex names I still remembered, as well as a set of Red Indians on horses – you could take the Indians off the horses, but their legs were still bent.
None of this was much use because the woman Sergey had left for me categorically rejected both my guilt and my generosity – two emotions which I couldn’t help experiencing and which she must have been aware of. The invisible barrier she built between our lives started long before the quarantine: first she said that she couldn’t let him come to our house until he learned to talk and was able to tell her if everything was all right; later, when the boy started talking, there were other reasons – either he had a cold or he was going through a ‘difficult phase’ and was afraid of people he didn’t know. Then he started going to nursery and it wasn’t appropriate for him to come because there would be extra stress. Once I found a present which I had bought for him, in the boot of Sergey’s car, weeks later – as if he was an ‘accomplice’ in this plot, and then I started noticing that my desire to make the little boy part of our life was fading and turning into a feeling of relief, and soon I was rather grateful to his mother for trying so hard not to remind me about that long period, with highs as well as lows, in Sergey’s life before me.