She slides the wooden spoon back into the pot, leans against the counter facing him. She speaks slowly, gently, aware of his tiredness. Perhaps it’s the light, but he seems even paler than those few days before.
“I understand. I’m not here to mother you. I’m here to thank you. It’s a celebratory meal.”
“What are we celebrating?”
“My Sofya is getting better. She has been in bed with a temperature, diarrhoea, having trouble holding down food. Of course I thought the worst. But they did some tests and she’s a lot healthier, eating her food, colour back in her cheeks again. It turns out it was only an intestinal infection. It feels as if she has been brought back to life.”
Grigory runs his hand through his hair. He’s still not sure he wants to discuss someone else’s situation. Even if they have good news.
“And we’re celebrating the return of my Artyom. That dog has brought him back to me again. He’s talking again, telling me things. That crippled dog has helped more than you know.”
Grigory nods, relenting, and slumps into a chair.
She serves him and they eat without speaking. The beef and garlic steams up into his face and he drags down the smell and eats heartily. When he finishes she fills his plate again. She waves her finger before he can refuse. “We have enough. It’s a celebration, remember.” She watches him eat, a satisfied smile on her face.
Now that he can look at her, properly consider her, he sees lines of worry etched into her forehead and around her mouth. But her smile is a flare of crooked teeth, a burst of energy and light.
When he finishes she pushes aside the plate, takes a bottle from one of the cupboards, and fills his glass.
“I shouldn’t.”
“None of us should.”
She dips a finger in her glass, then kisses her fingers and flicks a few drops of vodka on the floor. They drink and crack their glasses down.
She puts an elbow on the table and rests her chin on her palm.
“Tell me why you are here.”
This woman can change the tone of the room in an instant. Her manner is both open and direct. Not aggressive, simply without triviality. He puts his two hands flat on the tabletop, tucks his thumbs underneath, settles himself, and thinks about his reply.
“Well, my superior at the hospital recommended me to an advisor at the Ministry of Fuel and Energy. I was sent to Chernobyl, and then they transferred me to a resettlement camp.”
“That’s not why, that’s how, but no matter, we’ll get to it.”
“What about you? Did you come from Pripyat?”
“We lived in the Gomel region. A small village near the plant, obviously. But I’m from Moscow originally, like you.”
“Artyom told you?”
“Don’t worry, we all know about you. Silence is no defence around here.”
He doesn’t test her statement, doesn’t want to know. Grigory takes the bottle and pours both of them another glass.
“How did you end up in Gomel?”
“I fell in love.”
A meandering smile on her mouth.
“Did he… your husband…”
The words came stuttering out. Without his white coat, he is lost with such a topic. He has no idea how to discuss such things outside the realm of professional expertise.
“Yes. He died before they moved us to this camp. He worked as a liquidator for the plant. They gave him the job of cutting down the neighbouring forests.”
“I’m sorry.”
A pause.
“Thank you.”
He considers changing the subject, but there is no other subject here.
“How did you meet him?”
She thinks about her reply. She’d like to describe it all to someone. Why not this doctor? She hasn’t had a chance to relive it in a story. The day Andrei walked into the tailor’s workshop near Izmaylovsky Park and was introduced to the assistant, who was chalking up some suit material for cutting. Pins clamped in her teeth, her jaw clenched in concentration. She looked up at him in acknowledgement, and immediately his blue eyes were the only colour in the room, eyes as resonant as a lingering piano note. She stopped what she was doing to look, and he looked back at her. She took in the way he stood, feet planted on the floor, shoulders back, a man who knew the world, who was equal to its vigour. She slid the pins from her mouth and had to make her apologies and leave, confused. She walked for hours that afternoon, trying to locate the sensation within herself, but she couldn’t read her own feelings, they were new to her, and it was only later that she realized it was the elusive sensation of love that had crept up on her unawares, a sensation for which she had no reference point. And when the thought began to develop into realization, her inclination was to dismiss it: such things are the preserve of adolescents, not someone as old as she. She told herself she is someone who knows the hardness of the world, who understands that to survive is to nurture the practical, to keep steady and quiet and choose things based upon their value.
A week later, he was there again, as she had hoped, modesty and confidence combined in his honest face, back for his second fitting. When the tailor left the room for more pins, Andrei stood there, wearing the frayed material, unable to move, a living dummy, and she approached and put her hand to his waist, folding the swatches for a better fit, and adjusted the angle of his lapels, her breath rippling over his chest as she did so, and he gathered her neck in his hand and they kissed briefly, in the moment. When he returned, the tailor tweaked and tucked the material while they stole glances at each other, the gorgeous pain of anticipation.
Later still, when the streetlights had come on and the tailor had walked away in his hat and coat and she had locked the door, she saw Andrei silhouetted in an alcove, and she unlocked the door again and his shoes clicked against the wet cobblestones and she let him into a darkened corner of the vestibule under the stairs. He bunched her hair in his right hand and placed his left flat and vertical on the downward valley of her smooth stomach, and they kissed a kiss that was a language unto itself, a kiss that was a separate country, until she pulled away from him and smoothed her hair behind her ear, and he saw her flat lobe with two elliptical holes and a small crescent-shaped scar just under it, the healed skin whiter than the rest of her. She, in turn, rotated his face into the light and traced a finger along his jawline. Not speaking, just watching, each of them observing the other.
On the stairs they were all decorum again, playfully affecting nonchalance, both understanding that once through the door there would be a torrent of hands and tongue and want, and she even made a little game with the keys, as though she couldn’t quite remember which was the right one, playing with him, drawing the tension out, until it seemed that Andrei was likely to put his shoulder to the door and pop it off its hinges, and then she did a double take with him. She looked at him casually and put the key in the slot, then paused and turned and looked into his eyes, serious as fire, then turned the key fully and pushed her way in, and his hair was on the cusp of her neckline, his hands on her upper arms, before they even managed to close the door.
She understood the word “belonging” then. Inside herself she was honed and made real and cast around his form, morphing into the same shape, and there was heat and lust and strands of thread in her hair, and a pincushion by her right ear and the dummy looming over them, sides filleted out, and she was there but not there, experiencing everything in the moment, consuming every detail of the experience but also outside herself, fragments of her past blurring through her mind, and he smiled reflectively in the middle of it, their thoughts linked, and they broke somehow into giddy trills of laughter, almost losing the moment and then serious again with a twist of his pelvis and a tightening of her mouth.