The last time I had seen Katia was backstage at Carnegie Hall, four years earlier. A hundred men in pressed black suits, dandies in seersucker, a procession of women in taffeta and jewels, Steinways and Rockefellers, Rosens and Schillingers, the Bolotines and little Yolochka, prawns and devilled eggs, wine and mousse, playbills and coiled cables, and Ekaterina Pavlova Termen, my secret, hidden in a corner, clutching her elbows. Do not imagine that I ignored her. I said hello. I said I was surprised to see her there. I lingered. I wondered if she had come to embarrass me. So many others were waiting for me, around the room. I went away but came back later with a plate of melon and gravlax. She picked at the capers. She wore a plain dress and a gaudy necklace that was not in fashion. When I introduced her to Otis Skinner she nodded at what he said but I do not think she understood him. Her English was not good. I realized that she probably did not even know who he was. In Russian I said, “He’s an actor.”
“Yes,” she replied. “You can tell by how much he talks.”
I had not liked Otis Skinner in Kismet but he had come to my performance. He told stories of sneezing during the filming of the movie’s harem scenes. Katia stood like a faded statuette. After a little while I found a reason to leave her. I glanced back often. Through the glad crowds I glimpsed her arms, her back, the side of her face, always at right angles, as if she had been carved out with a chisel. Then finally she disappeared.
At Newark I changed to the Erie line. I sat across from a father and son. The father was my age. I was not sure of the age of the son; only parents seem to have an instinct for the age of children. He was a boy. He had blond hair and a dark summer tan. He was holding an incandescent light bulb. “Hello,” he said to me.
“Hello,” I said.
His father gave me a nod.
The boy tapped his light bulb against the carriage window.
“Be careful with that,” his father said.
I wondered why the boy had a light bulb, why he was not at school. Where was he going with his father, was the light bulb new or burnt out. The boy tapped the light bulb against the carriage window.
His father glared. “Leon,” he said sternly.
The boy sighed. “Yes, Pop.”
A boy named Leon, carrying a light bulb through New Jersey.
I rang the hospital from the station in Paterson.
“Can you please connect me to Katia Termen?” I asked the switchboard operator.
“Who?”
“Katia Termen. She is a nurse.”
“You mean Catherine Termen?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask who is calling?”
“This is Mr Termen.”
“Just a moment, please.”
Katia answered the telephone in English. She said “Hello” in an elongated way, rising. I scarcely recognized her voice.
“Hello?” I said back.
“Yes?”
“It’s Lev.”
I told her I was in Paterson. She was not friendly or unfriendly. I said I had come to see her.
“When?” she said.
“Tonight?” I said.
“Lev, I can’t. There is a shower tonight for one of the other girls.”
We were speaking in English. “Before, then?”
There was a short silence. “At lunchtime, maybe, I have some time.”
“Where should I meet you?”
“Come to the sanatorium.”
“All right.”
“Wait outside.”
“Outside the sanatorium.”
“Yes, Valley View,” she said.
“What?” She had pronounced valley like velly.
“Valley View.”
“Velly View?”
“Valley View!” she shouted, angry.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you,” I said.
I met her outside Valley View, a little after one o’clock. It was a small tuberculosis hospital. There was a measured lawn, empty flower beds. A thousand suspended leaves, red and brown, like old ornaments. A single path led past the gate, through the centre of the grass. A patient drooped in a wheelchair. I looked away. I sat on a bench. The path was made of the sort of dusty gravel that coats your shoes, turns the cuffs of your trousers to parchment. A carriage rattled past, horse kicking up powder, and I imagined my face caked in a thin layer of dust.
Suddenly Katia was standing before me, hands at her sides, in perfect whites. I felt my heart jerk.
I stood. I greeted my wife.
She did not seem to have changed. Her upturned chin and long legs, an oval face like the image on a cameo. A mouth small and elegant. Brown hair, shorter than I had ever seen it, still parted to the right. She had always been small; she was even smaller in her uniform. Slender, compact at the shoulders, a thin belt in a ring at her waist. She was twenty when we were married, ten years ago. Now there were lines around her eyes. These eyes were clear, soft, unlaughing. They matched the season.
She smelled of washing powder and vinegar but also of herself, in a memory I could not place. Snow, books, a new cardigan.
Something twinged in my jaw. I tried to think of New York City. I lifted my head. “If it isn’t ‘Catherine,’ ” I said, in English.
Katia shook her head. “You just show up at the train station?” Her voice was as thin as paper. “Why couldn’t you call first? You appear. Just like a ghost. I have a job, Lev. I do not have your life — your luxury life. My one break in the day, and here I am meeting you.”
“I’m sorry, I …” I trailed off.
“Well, what is it? What’s wrong?”
I swallowed. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Then why are you here, waiting outside a gate?”
“I …” I swallowed again. I turned to gaze back through the gate. “The hospital looks like a very good place to work.”
“It is not a hospital; it is a sanatorium,” Katia said. She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. She wore two slim bracelets at her wrist. One of them I had given to her, ten years ago. The other I did not recognize. She muttered something to herself, then lifted her eyes to me. “Well let’s walk at least.”
We set off side by side, and within this parallel movement, strange and familiar, I suddenly glimpsed her wedding ring. There, on her right hand. I stuffed my hands into my pockets. I looked not at her, but up toward the hill. I wished I had brought her something: a flower, a box of chocolates. I had brought her just my bare hands.
Later we were in the rising grass. The conversation was rote: questions about weather, health, family.
“And your brother?” I asked.
She seemed so brittle. “Sasha? You don’t even keep in touch with Sasha?”
“Not in a little while.”
“A little while?” She snorted. “Two years? Three?” It had been four. “I knew you were not writing to our friends, to my parents; but Sasha—he’s a scientist.” She said the word mockingly, as if it were the title of a lord. “You’re so busy now that you can’t even dictate a letter to one of your colleagues?”
I cleared my throat. “It is not like that.”
“What’s it like, Lyova?”
I looked at her. She was being deliberately cruel. I didn’t blame her. “Tell me how is Sasha.”
“He is all right.” She took a breath. “Everyone is all right. Just all right. It is a bad time, Lev.” She sighed. “You hear stories. The letters feel sometimes like they are being written onto — no, from on top of ice.”
“Not for people like Sasha, surely.”
She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “There are several reasons I do not go back to Russia.”