"What time?" Maya mumbled sleepily.
Sasha found the watch and tried to turn it so that he could read its face by the dim street light coming through the open window.
"I think it's two-twenty or maybe three-twenty," he said.
This revelation, or the sound of its parents' voices, made the baby cry a bit louder.
"She's hungry," said Maya, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.
"Hungry," agreed Sasha, flopping back on the bed.
He watched Maya rise, her full brown hair uncombed, the white American T-shirt she slept in clinging to her. Sasha smiled and closed his eyes. He could change Pulcharia's diaper, and was quite willing to do so, but he could not produce milk. Besides, Maya was on maternity leave and could sleep late if the baby let her.
In the weeks before the baby was bom, Sasha's mother, Lydia, who slept in the next room, had loaded the pregnant Maya with old wives' tales and reasonable advice.
"Long walks, every day," Lydia had repeated, and Maya had agreed, walking to work in the early days of the pregnancy. "And no sweets. Sweets make the skin itch."
Maya had nodded with a tolerant smile at Sasha. Before the pregnancy, Maya had begun to show signs of irritation with her mother-in-law. Sasha well understood. During the day they were all at workLydia at the Ministry of Information, Sasha at Petrovka, and Maya at her most recent job, a day-care center for the workers at the Ts.U.M. department store on Petrov Street. But in the recent mornings and evenings, Lydia, who was growing increasingly deaf and increasingly irritable, made it difficult for the expectant parents to keep smiling. With only two rooms in the apartment, it was difficult to get away from each other, especially difficult to get away from Lydia's loud voice.
Sasha, eyes still closed, heard Maya pick up Pulcharia, coo to her. He opened his eyes and saw the dark silhouette of Maya, cross-legged on the floor, lifting her T-shirt to offer her full breast to the tiny girl named for Lydia's own mother, a concession Sasha thought was more than Maya should accept but to which Maya had readily agreed. She liked the old-fashioned name and really had no one in her family or in history or in literature that she particularly felt like naming her child for. Pulcharia seemed perfect to her.
Before the birth, Lydia had also announced, from her own experience and that of her few friends, that oxygen was essential to pregnant women. "So breathe deep when the contractions come and rub your stomach in circles like this. The pain will be like no other you have imagined."
"Thank you," Maya had said, smiling at Sasha.
When the baby did come, it was in the hospital, in a large delivery room from which Sasha was barred. Two other women were having babies at the same time. Maya had remembered the pain abstractly even when she told Sasha about it. She remembered the white, loose gown they had put on her and tied at the neck. She remembered the screaming women on either side of her, the white-masked, white-gowned, white-capped quartet of doctors and nurses who helped her, and she remembered the pain. There was no anesthetic. Though the Lamaze method was developed largely through Soviet research, there was no encouragement to practice natural childbirth methods that might lessen pain. Pain was assumed to be a natural part of bearing a child. Pain, the doctor at the clinic had told her, was a reminder of the cost and responsibility of bearing a child. It was not supposed to be easy.
After the birth the baby had been kept from Maya for more than a full day to avoid infection. And though there was nothing wrong with mother or child, Sasha had been unable to see them for ten days. That, too, to avoid infection.
Sasha lay with his eyes closed, trying to remember the time he had seen on his watch. The watch was notoriously unreliable, a recent replacement for the pocket watch he had inherited from his father. The new watch was Romanian and tended to lose a minute every few days.
The baby was cooing now, and Maya was whispering, "Krasee' v/iy doch, beautiful daughter."
In another hour Sasha would have to get up, get dressed like a student, and hurry to a bookstall near Moscow State University that was reported to be a contact for the illegal sale of videotapes and videotape players. Sasha was a junior investigator in the Office of the Procurator General. He looked far younger than his twenty-nine years and was frequently used in undercover operations because of the innocence of his features. He looked nothing like a policeman. He also knew, and didn't like, the fact that among the investigators at Petrovka he had earned a nickname: the Innocent. Still, it was better to have a nickname, a reputation, a future, than to be where Rostnikov was nowdemoted, for some reason, and under the eye of the Gray Wolfhound.
When next he opened his eyes, Sasha would get up quietly, check on the baby, brush his teeth in the tiny bathroom that had no bath and a shower that infrequently worked, shave, dress, and grab a slice of bread and a drink of cool tea from the bottle in the small refrigerator. Then he would walk to the metro and head for the bookstall, where he would pretend to be a student wanting to buy a foreign videotape machine. His reports, which up to now had had little of substance in them, were not only being reviewed by Khabolov, the assistant procurator, butbecause of the economic implications of the case, Sasha Tkach was surewere also being examined by someone in the KGB. No one had told him this, but because the black market was involved it was obvious, and Khabolov's special interest in the case had made it clear that there was an urgency involved that was encountered only when pressure was being put on the assistant procurator.
Sasha felt Maya get back into the bed, cover herself with the thin sheet, and move close to him. The' baby was quiet. Somewhere far away through the open window a drunken voice laughed once and then was silent. Sasha reached over and put his arm around his wife. She moved his hand to her belly and for a moment there was a soft silence. But only for a moment. The door to Lydia's small bedroom shot open and Sasha's mother's voice squealed out in exasperation.
"Can't the two of you hear the baby crying?" With that, of course, Pulcharia woke up again and began to cry.
"Details, routine, vigilance," the Gray Wolfhound announced, holding up one finger of his slender hand to emphasize each word.
Two men sitting at the table in the meeting room at the Petrovka Station looked up at Colonel Snitkonoy and nodded in agreement. The third man, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, was barely aware of the words at all. He was aware of the standing colonel,the tall, slender man with the distinguished gray temples whose brown uniform was perfectly pressed, whose three ribbons of honor, neatly aligned on his chest, were just right in both color and number. The colonel was impressive. And that, indeed, was his primary function: to impress visitors and underlings; to stride, hands clasped behind his back like a czarist general deep in thought about an impending battle. So successful was the Gray Wolfhound at his role that it was rumored that a Bulgarian journalist had returned to Sofia and written a novel with Snitkonoy as the very evident model for his heroic policeman hero.
"Your thoughts, Comrades," Snitkonoy said, waving his hand before again clasping it behind his back. He was the only one standing, poised in front of a blackboard on which he had occasionally been known to make lists and to write words that he wanted those with whom he met to remember.
Two of the men at the table looked at each other to determine which of them might have a thought. They ignored Rostnikov, who doodled on the pad in front of him.
One of the men at the table was the Gray Wolfhound's assistant, Pankov, a near-dwarf of a man with thinning hair who was widely believed to hold his job because he made such a perfect contrast to the colonel. Pankov was a perspirer, always uncertain. His clothes were perpetually rumpled, his few strands of hair unwilling to lie in peace against his scalp. When he stood, Pankov came up to the Wolfhound's chest. In appreciation of Pankov's flattering inadequacy, the colonel never failed to treat his assistant with patronizing respect.