‘What could it be that Vassily kept so secret?’
I shrugged.
‘How would you find Kolya? Is he here in Vilnius?’
‘Vassily gave me Kolya’s letter. It seems he is back in the city.’
‘What did you do with it?’
‘I threw it away,’ I said. ‘I want nothing to do with it.’
We sat then, together, for some time in silence, each pondering the events that had unfurled over the last few days.
‘I feel betrayed in some way,’ Tanya said. ‘As though I’ve just discovered there was more to him than I knew. As though he hid a part of himself from me.’
When I returned to our apartment the next day Daiva was in the hallway, taking her coat from a hook. ‘We need to talk,’ she said, when I opened the door. I paused on the threshold. She stood in the shadows, making it hard to see the expression on her face: to judge whether her eyes were red-rimmed with tears again. Perhaps it would have been better if I had turned then arid gone back out, but I could not think of anywhere I might go.
I shrugged off my own coat and hung it on a peg. She stood, arms folded, against the wall.
‘I’ll just change,’ I said, indicating my crumpled clothes, wanting to avoid the conversation for a few more moments. She nodded. The baby was not in the bedroom, her cot was empty, and I could hear no sound from the sitting room. I opened the cupboard to get some dry clothes and noticed that the small pile of baby clothes was gone.
‘Where’s Laura?’ I asked, once I had changed. ‘I’ve taken her to my mother’s,’ Daiva said.
We stood in the kitchen in silence, looking out from the window down at the street below, dark already though it was only late afternoon. Daiva filled the kettle and put it on the hob.
‘I’ll make you a drink,’ she said. Her voice was soft and there was concern there, but not a bridge. I nodded and sat down at the table. I fiddled with some of my daughter’s toys while she boiled the water and made the coffee.
‘I can’t go on like this,’ she said suddenly, her back to me, pouring the steaming water into the cups.
I did not reply. She turned and put the coffee before me. The steam curled up and dissolved in the gloom. She sat lightly in a chair on the other side of the table, her hands folded in her lap. Her legs were close enough for me to reach out and touch. I could, I knew, get up and go round to her, put my arms around her, and perhaps it would have worked. Perhaps, after all, there was still a path by which I could have gone back to her, a bridge that remained standing while all the rest smouldered.
I spooned sugar into my coffee and stirred it slowly, deliberately, not raising my eyes from the cup. I sipped it, but it was too hot and it scalded my lips. She raised her hands to her face and for a moment I was afraid she was going fo start crying again. I looked up sharply. She rubbed her hands across her eyes and looked at me.
Her hair fell around her face. I noticed she had made herself up. Her eyes were not red-rimmed, they were lined with mascara. Her cheeks were flushed a little, and she was wearing lipstick. She looked more beautiful than I remembered seeing her in months.
‘I’m going,’ she said. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘Yes,’ I said a little too quickly. I looked back at the steam. Put my fingers into it, feeling the drops condensing warmly on my skin. Maybe I should have said something more. A thick pain had gripped my chest and a sense of sorrow overwhelmed me. I said nothing. I did not know what to say, did not know any more which words would take me to her, which words I could use that had not already been used, that might open up some line of communication rather than lead back into the same argument.
I should, I knew, explain that it was not Tanya but the past which was pulling me away from her. I should tell Daiva that, after protecting me for so many years, her cool indifference to my past was failing me now.
That the ghost of a love was seducing me once more from the grave. But I could not explain because I did not want to face up to the pain myself. Did not want to remember. Because I struggled still against the dark hole opening up beneath me.
It had, anyway, been to Tanya that I had always turned with my fears. As the years had passed, especially after Daiva became pregnant, the natural closeness between Tanya and me had became more of a strain for Daiva. Occasionally her cool pride broke and . she would fly at me in fury. Though it was Tanya who had introduced us, Daiva rarely saw or spoke to her or Vassily now.
I exhaled slowly, wearily. The chances were, in any case, that my drinking had gone on too long for Daiva to want to start building bridges back across to me. There had been too many arguments, too many of her friends alienated by my behaviour, too many scenes. She needed those bridges down, I suspected. I had hurt her too much. Let her down too often. Promised too much, time and again, but changed nothing.
She got up and put her cup by the sink. For some moments she stood above me in the gloom, perhaps waiting for me to reach out and stop her. Perhaps giving me one last chance to say those words I could not find. Then she sighed and turned away. I heard her putting on her coat and rummaging in the bottom of the cupboard for her handbag. She opened the door and for a few seconds she paused again, or perhaps she was just checking she had all she needed. The door closed and I heard the click of her heels on the stairs.
In the cupboard above the sink there was a bottle of her brandy. The bottle Daiva kept there in case friends came around, which they never did any more. Taking the bottle and a glass, I went to the balcony and poured myself a drink. It was a few minutes before she emerged. There was a taxi waiting which she must have ordered before I came home. She stepped into it and it drew away slowly, jolting in the deep potholes. I watched until it turned into the thick flow of traffic on Freedom Boulevard.
Lying on the sofa, I drank some more of the brandy. Daiva had forgotten to take Laura’s teddy bear, I noticed, the one I had bought her some weeks before. I picked it up and fondled it. When I lay down, though, it was of Vassily that I thought. He lay silent now. His stories had been stilled. Vassily had rebuilt me, had enabled me to forget, to find new purpose in life. But now he was gone.
Chapter 8
When I awoke the next morning, Laura’s teddy bear was clasped tight in my hand, while beside me, on the floor, the bottle of brandy lay on its side, empty. With my ear pressed painfully to the floor, I could hear the sound of the couple in the apartment below shuffling through their morning routines◦– the run of water, a man’s cough followed by the trumpeting of his nose, the sharp bark of his wife calling him and his responding grunt; the sound of their feet moving slowly across the floorboards, unhurried, following their accustomed patterns, patterns that had taken them through thirty years of marriage, the birth and rearing of children, the loss of their eldest boy in Afghanistan, communism, revolution, jobs and unemployment.
I rolled on to my back and felt a paralysingly sharp pain shoot down my spine. My arm was numb and my fingers cold and lifeless. I flexed them, working some blood back into circulation. Beneath me I heard the sound of a chair being pulled out from the table and its creak as my neighbour sat down to his breakfast.
My own apartment was eerily silent. Laura always woke early. It was the first sound of the day, her small cry, followed by the sound of Daiva turning in her sleep, waking slowly. Laura would stand at the bars of her cot and call to us. Daiva’s voice would be thick and rough with sleep, and the bed would dip as she levered herself up. They would wander out to the kitchen, leaving the door open so I could hear them talk as Daiva lit the hob and warmed some milk. Later she would drop Laura on the bed beside me, and put a cup of coffee on the small table beside me, and I would sit up then and watch as my daughter played.