I RAN INTO HER the following morning in the dining room with a plate of apple sauce in front of her. Help yourself, she said, and pointed to a big jar of the stuff on the table. I said I hadn’t managed to find a working outlet for my laptop and the lights weren’t working either, perhaps there was a fuse somewhere that had blown. We don’t have any power, said Ana, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. While I was still eating, she got up and left the room. A little later, I saw her disappearing between the trees with a towel and a roll of toilet paper.
My battery was dead, and seeing as I didn’t have a printout of my talk with me, there wasn’t much more I could do. I read around in Summer Folk and in Gorki’s correspondence, and jotted down a few notes, but it didn’t make much sense. The sensible thing would be to leave as soon as possible. But instead of packing and looking for Ana, I went into the Ladies’ Saloon and played billiards. At noon, there was a table laid for two in the dining room. No sooner had I sat down than Ana came in with a can of ravioli. I put it in the sun to warm it up a bit, she said. It didn’t seem to be any warmer than the day before. Don’t you like it? she asked.
I said I couldn’t do my work without electricity. She looked at me as if I was some kind of weakling and said, Surely you’ll find something to occupy yourself with. I have to hand in the manuscript in two weeks, I said. Why do people write such things, she said, who’s really interested? That’s not the point. I have a deadline, and I have to stick to it. She smiled mockingly and said, But you don’t even want to leave. Ana was right. I wanted to stay here, I didn’t know why, maybe it was for her sake. Don’t get your hopes up, she said, as though she’d read my mind.
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS the weather remained fine, and I often lay out and dozed on one of the deck chairs. I read a lot, and played billiards or solitaire. Ana was around, but each time I asked if she wanted to play cards with me or practice cannons, she would shake her head and disappear. When I went into the library, I would find her sitting there, staring out the window. I pulled a book off a shelf at random and started reading. If I happened to get to a bit I liked, I would read it out loud, but Ana never seemed to be listening.
After the jug in my room was empty, I washed in the stream every morning, the way Ana did. I hung back in the dining room until she was finished, and then I headed out. I had found a good spot, where the banks were flat and the stream had a quiet flow. In the soft earth I saw traces of bare feet, and assumed it was the same spot that Ana used as well. When I dipped my head in the ice cold water, it felt as though it was exploding, but after that I would feel refreshed for the entire morning. Only the noise of the rushing brook was starting to bother me a little. There was nowhere you could avoid it, even inside the hotel you could hear it everywhere. I kept thinking of Ana, the whole day we circled one another restlessly, to the point that I was often unsure who was tracking whom.
She didn’t cook and she didn’t clean, I even had to make my own bed. The only services she performed were opening cans and setting the table. One time I remarked that I wasn’t exactly getting my money’s worth. Ana’s face darkened in a scowl. She said it would be better if I stopped wasting time on Maxim Gorki and started thinking about my own attitude toward women. That has nothing to do with it, I said, surely you can at least expect running water and electricity in a hotel. You’re getting much more than that, Ana snapped back. I didn’t know what she meant, but I was careful to stay off the subject in future.
I tried to imagine what the place would be like with visitors in summer, with the dining room packed, someone playing the piano, and children running up and down the corridors, but I couldn’t manage it.
The stack of dirty plates in the kitchen grew. One time I counted them. If Ana used three plates a day, then she must have been here all winter. I asked her if she was some kind of housekeeper. If you like, she said. I didn’t believe her, but by then it was a matter of some indifference to me why she was here.
FOR LUNCH WE usually ate tuna with artichoke hearts, in the evening we lit a fire outside and heated a can of ravioli on a stone. The sun left the valley early and it got cold quickly, but even so we sat by the fire a long time in the evening, drinking wine. We had barely exchanged a word all day, and while Ana wasn’t any more talkative than before, she did at least listen to me. I didn’t feel like talking about myself, I didn’t want to think about my home life, which seemed remote and irrelevant. So I started telling her about Summer Folk. She responded to the various characters as if they were real people: she got annoyed with Olga for complaining all the time and called the engineer Suslov a bastard. Varvara and her ravings about the writer Shalimov left her cold. How could she fall for such a man, she said indignantly, he’s just a bad seducer. What would a good seducer be like, then? I asked. He would have to be honest to the woman and himself, said Ana, and shook her head disapprovingly. Her favorite was Maria Lvovna. I knew the famous monologue from Act IV pretty much by heart, and was asked to recite it several times by Ana. We are summer folk in our country, we’ve traveled here from somewhere. We bustle about, look for some comfortable niche in life, we do nothing and we talk all the time. Yes, said Ana, we all need to change. We need to do it for our own sakes, too, I said, so that we don’t feel our awful solitude so much. Ana looked at me suspiciously, and said I wasn’t to start getting any ideas. You would fit well into the play, I said. In a letter, Gorki said all his female characters hate men and all his men are rotters. Then you would fit into the play yourself, said Ana. By the flickering firelight I couldn’t be sure of her expression.
I never found out where Ana slept. When we went back inside at night, each of us with an oil lamp, she said I should go on ahead, she would be along in a while. Once I waited for her in the corridor outside my room. I had turned my lamp off, and listened in the darkness for a long time, but I couldn’t hear anything, and in the end I just went to bed.
Half dreaming, I imagined Ana coming into my room. In the middle of the night I awoke and saw her silhouette in the pale moonlight. She got undressed, pulled aside the covers, and climbed on top of me. It all happened in complete silence, the only thing that could be heard was the distant rushing of the brook through the thin windows. Ana was rough with me, or perhaps I should say she treated me like an object she needed for a particular end, but for which she had no particular regard. When she had satisfied her hunger, she left, without a word passing between us.
IN THE MORNING, as usual, Ana was already sitting at the breakfast table when I walked into the dining room. Not really thinking what I was doing, I stroked her hair on my way to my seat. She gave a jump and cringed. I tried to start a conversation, but Ana didn’t answer, and only looked at me with a grim expression, as though she knew about my dream. As she always did, she gulped down her food and got up as soon as her plate was empty.
After breakfast I browsed through some illustrated volumes in the library, and later I went along to the Ladies Saloon and knocked billiard balls around. There was no sign of Ana, and she didn’t come in for lunch either. I ate downstairs in the kitchen, and then I went back up to the library and started reading one of the American thrillers. In the early afternoon I heard a car outside. When I looked out the window, I saw a couple of men getting out of an old Volvo in the driveway. For a moment I thought of hiding somewhere, but then I just stayed put and went on with my book. It was maybe an hour later, and I had just thrown aside my thriller in irritation, when the double doors swung open and the two men walked in. They looked at me in amazement, and one of them—not replying to my greeting—asked me what I thought I was doing. I’m reading, I said. And how did you get in? asked the man. Through the door, I said, and got up. I’m a guest at the hotel. The Kurhaus has been closed since last autumn, said the man. The owner has gone bankrupt. The hotel is going under the hammer next month.