“Of course.”
“I couldn’t even cook that dinner later. I just couldn’t bear the sight of raw meat. I had to dump the package near the station. The blood was leaking through the paper and getting onto my hands. I wanted to puke.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“I haven’t been sleeping well since.”
“I can imagine.”
“I’ve been forgetting things.”
“Yes.”
“So I’m glad you came today. I would have called over anyway. I wanted to ask if you’d heard anything like this before. When you wrote for the newspaper, maybe people talked about such things.”
“No. I’m sorry. They didn’t.”
“I’m sitting here wondering why cats are hanging from lampposts.”
“I don’t know. It seems like a statement of some kind.”
“Who would make a statement there? In Lefortovo?”
“I know. But what else could it be?”
“You don’t know. I don’t know. Such an odd fucking thing.”
Yevgeni pushes open the door again. It’s a little too neatly timed for comfort. Maria hopes he’s just bored with the fish.
“Did you see them?”
“Yes.”
“What did you think?”
“Their colours are beautiful.”
“Varlam loves them. He wakes sometimes in the middle of the night and he says that if he just watches the fish, he falls asleep again.”
“He can see them in the dark?”
“The bottom of the tank lights up.”
Yevgeni definitely wants one now.
They say their good-byes and Maria hugs Valentina, offering reassurance, and Valentina mimes that she doesn’t want what she’s said to fall on other ears, and Maria nods and Valentina knows she can trust Maria. This is a woman who’s never in her life passed on a secret.
They carry the empty laundry bags and feel the release of the weight.
“Thanks for helping me.”
“It’s fine, Zhenya. You’re good to do it all on your own.”
They walk, listening to the sound of their own footsteps.
“I suppose you want some fish now.”
He shrugs his shoulders. “No, not really.”
“Did you hear what we were talking about?”
“No.”
A pause.
“What were you talking about?”
“Nothing.”
Chapter 17
Maria is leaning against the perimeter wall at the viewing point for Lenin Hills: the Moscow River below; a ski jump and slalom course to her right; the star of the main Lomonosov tower rises high into the night sky behind her.
This location was a favoured meeting place in her student days, with its beautiful view of the city. Men would wait here for her and take her ski jumping, a tactic, she now suspects, to get her adrenaline running, her blood pumping, desires racing. She hasn’t stood here in years. It’s the opposite side of the university from the Metro stop, and there’s always somewhere else she needs to be, even tonight. She’s resolved to make her way to Grigory’s later, a relatively short walk by the river. She needs to ask about a rehearsal place for Yevgeni. Although his offer of a piano had been several months ago, Grigory is not the type to go back on his word. He might well be agreeable to letting the boy come over a few days a week, even if he has ignored her phone calls.
She’s waiting for Pavel—an old friend, or teacher, or lover: whichever traditionally comes first in the list of distinctions. Before her classes, she slid a note under his door, asking to meet, something she’s done every three or four months since their reacquaintance at a party last year. They rarely meet casually, even in the corridors of the faculty, but she finds it a relief to have a long-standing friend come back into her life, someone—independent of Alina—who knows her well enough to enable her to think things through. She wants to clear her mind before she meets Grigory, wants to dispel the possibility of unburdening herself to him. She’ll ask for a favour for the boy, nothing else.
She’s been waiting for Pavel for half an hour, watching the skaters on the river below her, lit up from the Central Lenin Stadium. Her gloves are thin and her fingertips feel dumb and immobile. She’s never become used to the snapping cold of the dark season. She’s never known any other kind, and yet the deep winter always finds ways to surprise her, wrapping itself around her skin, biting at her exposed extremities. She’s reminded here though, in this spot, with couples walking past, skates slung over their shoulders, that she loves the peacefulness that descends at this time. People speaking as they dress, in muffled, layered solitude. Condensed steam everywhere, moisture-laden breath. Winter always assumes a certain otherworldly gait. It has a texture and speech all of its own, a written language, snow nestling itself in lucid patterns, iced windowpanes pleading to be deciphered, skaters cutting swirls into the frozen river.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Pavel has placed himself soundlessly beside her, an old habit which makes her jump out of her skin.
“You startled me.”
Pavel smiles. There’s a childish edge to his humour, always seeking an opportunity to irritate, to tease—an aspect so at odds with his status as a professor of literature. People revere him. He repeats his question.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes. And so quiet. I feel like I can hear every sound on the river.”
“Do you skate? I can’t remember.”
“I could skate in a straight line, I just could never turn.”
“That’s a problem.”
“I think it was something to do with relying on only one foot. I stopped trying just before I hit my teens. It was probably a wise decision, looking back.”
“I skate from time to time.”
“Of course you do. The man of five hundred talents.”
“Please, not you. If you start complimenting me, it might be the end of our friendship.”
She smiles and they embrace, warmly.
When Maria was a student, his lectures were eagerly awaited events not just within the department but throughout the university. The hall would be crowded with engineers, medical students, and marine biologists. They’d fill the steps, squeezing in three wide, the crowd clustering at the doorways and spilling out into the lobby, listening intently, laughing with their fellow students inside—those lucky enough to get a seat. Professor Levytsky drew effortlessly on the classics, embellishing his points with stories from the writers’ lives, their sexual proclivities, anecdotes of everyday embarrassments. He could hold a room with magnificent power, using silence as a way to taunt his audience, to stir them into their own internal opinions. From his mouth, poetry became a fine meal, each distinct word gaining its own flavour when issued from his lips.
“You got my note?”
“Of course, I read it with pleasure. You’ve always written a good note, Maria.”
“I’m sure I’ve had many successors.”
As an undergraduate in her first year, Maria had pursued him with zeal. In her first two months she wrote five love letters, slipping them under his office door in the late evenings. The letters themselves were a sexual awakening to her; she was surprised at her ability to write such sensual prose, surprised that she knew what she knew, experiencing the bodily tremors while she wrote, becoming heated as she lay her longings down in ink. And, in later weeks, when they lay in bed, him asleep, she would trace her finger along the lines on his fine-boned face, following the progress of those early words that were etched now into his crow’s-feet, chiselled into the grooves of his forehead.
“No. Notes like you wrote take real daring. There aren’t many out there with your courage. At least that’s what I’m telling myself. I’m claiming it’s them and not me. I’m telling myself I still inspire the same yearnings.”