There’s a small tuxedo in Alina’s closet and a bow tie with a tiny circumference. They attend competitions in regional halls in the sleet and hail, Mr. Leibniz in the back row swaying his stick from side to side in a disciplined rhythm. The child at a piano bringing them there. A child in a mini-tuxedo.
Maria keeps him on her knee and guides his path through long division, adjusting his deviant numerals, reminding him how to fit the figures into their blue-ruled boxes. She lays out the numbers in neat columns and double-rules the answer line at the bottom. She double-rules it because this is what she’s always done. An unthinking practice passed down through the generations.
Yevgeni has a jar of pencils on the table, which she finds immensely comforting. Bunched pencils bring reassurance. The rubber at the top is often bitten off. She can see where he has made indentations in the metal bracket with his teeth. He sits on her knee and finishes his homework, and then Maria flicks his hair back from his forehead, kisses the peak of his skull, sends him to wash his teeth, and looks at him as he goes out the door.
There was a child of her own once, or the early configuration of a child or a potential child. But she couldn’t bring herself to have it. She didn’t want it in this world. And its departure was followed a few months later by the departure of her husband. After the procedure, Maria believed that if they had taken an X-ray of her, there would be a single line denoting her outer shell, and nothing else. The doctors would see her as she was, just a thin film of skin, no organs or intestines or blood flow. A single, contoured line. She often still thinks these thoughts, feels these feelings: her child’s absence, her husband’s absence. So many empty spaces in her life. And perhaps, she thinks, that’s why she feels such delight when she watches Yevgeni sway along a soundless keyboard. It dignifies that which is not there. It reminds her that life can be experienced in ways that she has never contemplated.
Maria and Alina grew up in Togliatti, an industrial town in the Samara region, in an apartment similar to the one in which they live now. Her father worked the ticket booth in the train station, playing chess round the clock with a small cadre of friends who would drop by at appointed times. As she got older, she realized that when her father was referred to by people outside the family it was in a hushed, strained, maybe sour, way. Stray comments leaked through the cracks of winter-planed doors. People cast glances over downturned shoulders. She was exposed to it from the earliest age, and it took some time to realize—by watching how the same adults treated her few childhood friends—that this was not the norm.
He disappeared one day, a few months short of her twentieth birthday. It was Alina who finally told her that the notebook their father kept in his small booth didn’t contain records of chess matches but a detailed account of the movements of the city. Who went where and when. Who bought what, talked to whom. What someone wore on a particular day, who they welcomed off the platform. Their father was the gatekeeper for the town, the all-seeing eye, passing the information along a chain of connections, resulting in actions which Maria couldn’t help imagining.
Then he too disappeared, and this was something they couldn’t account for. There were no answers to this development. A Saturday afternoon when he went to the hippodrome to lay a little money on the horses and never returned. They questioned everyone. Everyone they asked gave no reply. She accompanied her mother to the buildings of the men he played chess with, and they stood at their doors while a mother and wife broke down under the gaze of her daughters, physically knelt before these men, wrapping her arms around their legs in an action of abject desperation, and they looked into the middistance, viewing the ordinary motions of their street, her wretched family oblivious to them.
Alina is ironing shirts. Alina is always ironing.
“Now he’s having trouble with his maths.”
“I know, I gave him some help.”
“First his timing goes. Now the little genius can’t even count.”
“You can’t worry it away. It’s not like one of your creases.”
“Oh, and he’s your child. You’re right, of course. The past nine years I’ve been thinking he’s mine.”
“Be sarcastic. I’m trying to be supportive.”
“The kid doesn’t even listen to me, he listens to you. Since when did I become the enemy?”
“He doesn’t want to disappoint you. Just give him some time.”
Maria folds some shirts. Alina sprays water from a plastic bottle and runs the iron over the damp patches, and steam expands into the room.
It’s time for a drink.
It’s a thing that has sneaked into her life: a drink or two and the evening counts its own way to its conclusion. And she’s not ashamed. It’s a fringe benefit of manual labour, no one questions your need to unwind. She stands on the balcony, glass in hand, with a clear bottle, its white label inscribed with one word in large black type: VODKA. There is a pleasure, she finds, in its unadorned seriousness. The stark quality of the label eliminates the trivial drinker.
This is Maria’s moment of quiet reflection.
What are my ambitions?
Sometimes she thinks into the middle of her unborn child’s life. It’s not a ghost that follows her around, she doesn’t look at other kids and wonder what colour its eyes would be or if it would have difficulty tying its laces. But she sees imagined scenes. A daughter being fitted for a dress. Sitting for dinner in the apartment of a bright young couple, proud and radiant, though she doesn’t know if her child is the man or the woman. Odd, imagined moments. Snatches of an alternative life.
When she had the procedure—as they kept referring to it—she didn’t tell him beforehand. He is a doctor, he spends his life healing, repairing—there was no way he would allow her to go through with it. Instead she left a note in his jacket pocket. Just the facts, the decision, no pleading for understanding, no fleshing out of her thoughts.
Afterwards, when she had had a few hours’ rest, she took a taxi home, bleeding and weak, and when she opened the door she saw him sitting on a wicker stool beside the stove. He held the note towards her, the scrawled lines she’d left to explain herself. Even in her weakened state she knew it was now a piece of evidence, and he held it up, not needing to voice the question, his eyes asking it for him: Who are you?
Of course, their marriage couldn’t survive such a thing. That too was a calculation on her part. It was not only her actions that would hurt him, it was the independent nature of them, demolishing the closeness that had grown between them. Grigory is a man who listens, who speaks directly to the centre of things. This is why she fell in love with him. At parties he would stand in the corner and, inevitably, people would divulge their lives to him. Teary-eyed women returning from their conversations with him would clasp her forearm as they passed, making eye contact, thanking her, acknowledging her luck in finding such a partner, and her impulse would be to smash her glass into their teeth.
Sometimes, after work, she would visit him in the hospital, and he would be mid-surgery and she could look through the viewing window and watch the refined world in which he functioned, the ghostly lights and bodywear, the goggles and instruments, the small, highly skilled gathering focused upon a single point. She would stand beside the family of the patient as they held hands and wept, mumbling prayers under their breath, watching what she was watching, their loved one at the mercy of her loved one, and sometimes, from a distance, she would observe him—unaware of her presence—speaking to the families in his white coat, and they would kiss his hand or fold into despair depending on his words, and how could she come home, after witnessing all this, and ask him to take on her worries? How could she do this when she wouldn’t even allow herself to be irritated when he left empty containers in the fridge or stubble in the bathroom sink?