"I will remind him about the medicine and the exercises for your leg," she said quietly as she opened the door.
"Spasee'bo," said Rostnikov.
Rostnikov resisted the impulse to turn back and look at Ludmilla Samsonov as he went down the wooden steps and onto the plowed path.
Questions, questions. Porfiry Petrovich needed some space and time for thinking but he decided to make one more visit before going back to his room.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sasha Tkach woke up suddenly with the empty feeling that he was late for work. He looked around the living room at the baby's crib, at his sleeping wife, at the dull winter sunlight coming through the window and for an instant he could not remember if he was an ice cream vendor or a policeman. He had to reach over and touch Maya to restore reality.
She stirred and rolled toward him, her dark, straight hair in disarray over her closed eyes, and laid her right arm over his bare stomach. Sasha wanted to pull her to him but he didn't want to waken her. He lay back looking at the ceiling, listening to the sound of his mother's snoring in the bedroom, even though the door to the bedroom was closed.
Lydia had been given the bedroom because a better sense of partial privacy was possible with the assumption that at night the living room/dining room/kitchen was the territory of Sasha, Maya, and the baby while the bedroom belonged to Lydia. Neutral time was spent in Sasha and Maya's space but Lydia knew that she was to retreat to the bedroom about an hour after dinner which, in any case, was close to her bedtime. None of this had ever been openly discussed. It had been arrived at through trial and error, argument and near argument, compromise and conflict. It had been arrived at in the Tkach household as in hundreds of thousands of households in cities throughout the Soviet Union in much the same way.
"I don't sleep for hours after I go to my room," Lydia had once confided to her son as if it were a secret to be kept from his wife. In fact, Sasha and Maya could tell from Lydia's snoring that she was in bed and asleep almost every night within half an hour of going to her room.
Sasha turned his head toward the window and considered getting up.
"You are awake," Maya whispered in his ear.
"Yes," he answered. "I have get to work in a little while. I'm selling ice cream today."
"I love ice cream," she said in her Ukrainian accent which always sent a thrill through him.
"Bring the baby today to the Yamarka at the Economic Exhibition. You can see the bears in the zoo having fun and me dressed like a fool and I can watch the two of you eat."
She smiled. Her teeth were white. She pulled him down and kissed him. Her tongue played with his lower lip.
"My mother will be getting up in a few minutes," he whispered. "And the baby…"
"I don't care," said Maya touching his stomach and reaching down into his pa jama bottoms.
Sasha wanted to tell her that they should wait till that night, that he was in a hurry, but his body responded and he felt that he owed her the demonstration of love which he felt. He hoped they could stay under the blanket in case Lydia burst into the room. He hoped they could make love quietly. He hoped, but he didn't expect it. He reached for his wife's hands and moved them to where they felt best.
After they had made love with no interruption except a movement by Pulcharia in the crib, Sasha kissed Maya who clung to him not wanting to let him go.
"I hear her," he whispered looking up at the bedroom door.
"When we get the new apartment in North Zmailova," she said, "we get the bedroom with the baby and Lydia gets the small room off the living room."
"I remember," he said, disengaging her arms and kissing her on her warm, exposed shoulder.
"And remember you said you would call the housing registry to see why they haven't called us," Maya said as he stood up and reached for his underwear.
"I'll call today," he promised. "Are you going to come with the baby?"
"Yes," she said. "It sounds like fun."
This time he was sure he heard Lydia moving behind the bedroom door. Sasha finished pulling on his underwear and was yanking on his pants when his mother came through the door and said, "Why did you move the towels?"
Lydia thought she was whispering but, being more than a bit hard of hearing, the whisper was a hoarse shout that immediately awakened the baby. Pulcharia began to cry in fear and Maya reached for her worn robe.
"The towels," Lydia repeated.
"In the lower drawer," Maya said, throwing her hair back and wrapping the robe around her as she moved for the baby.
"In the lower drawer?" Lydia asked. "It's harder to reach the lower drawer. What sense does it make to put towels in lower drawers?"
Sasha buttoned his shirt and moved to the closet for his blue tie.
"Something has to go in a lower drawer," Maya said picking up and rocking the baby.
Lydia made a tsk-tsk sound that made it clear she found the answer insufficient. She returned to the bedroom leaving the door open behind her.
Sasha moved over to smile at his daughter. She saw his face and returned the smile.
"Don't put the tie on," Maya said. "You need a shave."
"I shaved last night," Sasha complained.
"Virility is making your hair grow faster," she said with a smile, brushing the hair from her face.
"I'll shave," he said, pausing to kiss his daughter before moving to the sink in the kitchen corner. "An ice cream vendor should be immaculate."
"A husband should be immaculate," Maya said, picking up and cuddling the baby. "Sasha, we must get that apartment. We must."
"Yes," he agreed, reaching for his razor on the shelf above the sink.
In the small bathroom off the bedroom, Lydia hummed a completely unrecognizable song. Pulcharia looked as if she might cry again but Maya offered her a nipple which the baby took with glee.
In less than half an hour Sasha would be on his way to the Exhibition to sell ice cream and Lydia would be on her way to the Ministry of Information where she worked filing papers. Maya would be alone with the baby, her thoughts and the shopping before she could take the metro to the Economic Exhibition. It wouldn't be a bad day.
"… and I've been working like uh dug," Lydia sang-shouted the Beatle song in terrible English. Sasha and Maya looked at each other and laughed. The baby paused in her sucking, startled, and then continued drinking.
It wouldn't be a bad day, Sasha thought. Not a bad day at all.
He turned out to be quite wrong.
"He's coming. He's coming," Liana Mirasnikov shouted from the window of the People's Hall.
"Coming here. The square one?" wailed Sergei wide-eyed from across the hall.
"No, the other one, the ghost," she said without turning.
'"Oh no. Worse and worse," the old man groaned. "Is he wearing a hat?"
The old woman squinted through the curtains.
"No hat," she announced. "He is mad."
"We are undone," he moaned.
He had prepared for this moment. He had gone through everything that they had accumulated over the years and decided whether they had a right to each piece. If they did not, he moved the piecean old pair of candlesticks, a chair with a worn velvet covering, a movie projector that he had never tried to useto the loft which could not be reached without a ladder. The loft already contained a collection of articles which Mirasnikov had kept just in case. These articles included paintings of Stalin and Khrushchev and even a small painting of someone Liana thought was Beria and Sergei was sure was Trotsky. The large painting of Lenin with the flag remained in place in the main hall as it had for almost fifty years. Lenin was always a good, conservative art investment.