“You are being philosophical today,” said Elena.
“Philosophy is the perfect exercise for a woman with nothing to do but walk and read about hysteria.”
Elena moved back to the chair by the window, sat, and put on her shoes. Then she went to the battered wooden wardrobe in the corner, opened it, selected a clean blouse, and moved to the small bathroom to examine herself in the mirror. “I’m getting fat,” she said.
“It is your genetic burden,” said Anna. “Along with intelligence and determination. Your mother is heavy. I am heavy. But you are also pretty. You won’t be truly fat like us for ten years, twenty if you are careful.”
“Thank you,” Elena said as she came out of the bathroom, buttoning her blouse. “You are very reassuring.”
“I am very practical,” said Anna. “You want lies? Read Izvestia.”
“I suppose I want the truth cushioned,” Elena said, putting on her coat.
“It is still the truth. Besides, I don’t know how to do that.” Anna leaned over to pick up Baku’s clean plate. “It is a skill, like cooking, which I never learned.”
“I don’t know what time I will be back,” said Elena.
“Baku, Freud, Gogol, and I will be here,” said Anna Timofeyeva, moving back toward the chair near the window. “Maybe we’ll watch some television. ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ Who knows? The night is still young.”
“Aunt Anna,” Elena said.
“You look fine,” her aunt replied. “You look modern, efficient, pretty, determined. If I am sitting here with my eyes closed when you return, be sure I’m alive and then let me sleep.”
Elena kissed her aunt’s head and left the apartment.
Anna Timofeyeva folded her hands on the book in her lap and looked into the darkness of the courtyard. The babushkas and children were gone. There was nothing to see but the lights in the windows.
“Well, Baku, what will it be, Gogol, Freud, or ‘Wheel of Fortune’?”
Baku looked up at her and blinked his eyes.
“So?” Lydia said, placing a bowl of borscht in front of her son.
“So?” repeated Sasha Tkach, looking down at the dark red liquid filled with beets and a very small white touch of what may have been sour cream.
Lydia Tkach was a proud woman of sixty-six who was almost deaf and quite unwilling to admit it. She continued to work, as she had for more than forty years, in the Ministry of Information Building, filing papers and telling anyone who would listen that her son was a high-ranking government official, a key adviser to the minister of the interior.
Sasha knew that his mother was no more popular in the Ministry of Information than she was at home. People avoided her because she drew attention to herself with her loud conversation. This tended to make her more lonely and crotchety with those who could not avoid her, particularly her son and daughter-in-law.
Maya had insisted on getting up to sit across from her husband while he ate a hurried meal. Pulcharia sat on her father’s lap. Maya’s lap had slowly disappeared as the baby grew within her.
“So?” Lydia repeated to her son.
Sasha looked at his wife, who smiled in sympathy. Maya’s stomach was large, low, and very round, but her usually beautiful round face was pale and thin, which made Sasha angry, which was easier than being frightened. He did not want her to be sick. He wanted her to be vital, well, warm, and supportive.
“Shchyee,” said Pulcharia, putting her fingers in her father’s bowl of borscht.
Sasha had no worry that his almost-two-year-old daughter would burn her finger in the soup. He had been drinking his mother’s soup for almost thirty years and knew that she believed in tepid soup and room-temperature meat and chicken. What troubled Sasha at the moment was the strange thing in his borscht that looked like an animal claw.
“What is this?” he asked, picking up the object, which was definitely a claw.
“Don’t change the subject,” Lydia shouted, sitting down. “You’ll frighten the baby.”
“Why should changing the subject frighten … what is this?”
Lydia glanced at his spoon. “Meat,” she said. “Gives flavor to the soup.”
“That looks like the claw of a-”
“Kroolyek,” said Maya.
Her voice, with its touch of the Ukraine, usually pleased and soothed Sasha, but there was a rage in him. He had awakened with it and had come through the door this evening determined to hide it. “The foot of a rabbit, yes,” he said.
Pulcharia reached for his spoon. Sasha moved it out of her reach.
“Times are hard,” said Lydia loudly as she poured herself a bowl of soup from the pot she had placed on the table. “Lines are long.”
“You may have the foot of the rabbit,” Sasha said, leaning over to drop it in his mother’s bowl. “The Americans think it is good luck.”
Maya looked at her husband with mild disapproval, but he ignored her.
“So?” Lydia said, looking down at the dark red liquid in which the foot of the rabbit had disappeared.
“You are not eating,” Sasha said to his wife.
“I am not hungry,” Maya said softly.
“The baby inside of you is hungry,” he said.
“Answer my question,” Lydia insisted. She reached over the table to hand Pulcharia a piece of bread. “Without rabbit tricks.”
“‘So?’ is not a question I can answer,” Sasha said, brushing the wild patch of hair from his eyes. He knew he would not drink this borscht, could not drink this borscht. He had a full hour before he had to meet Elena Timofeyeva, but he knew he would soon say he had to leave. Though they were hard-pressed for money, Sasha knew he would buy himself something on the way, possibly even a pahshtyehtah, a meat pie with little or no meat, if he could find someplace to buy one. A woman in a white apron had set up a table inside the Journalists Union Building two days before. She might be there again.
He had bought two pies and asked the woman what kind of meat she had used. The pained smile she had given him made him regret his question. Still, it had not tasted at all bad.
“Eat and answer,” Lydia went on.
Sasha took a piece of bread and pretended to dip it in the soup. Pulcharia dipped her bread in the soup and dripped over her father’s pants and her own dress as she brought it to her mouth.
“She’s gotten you dirty,” Maya said, handing her husband a cloth napkin.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I have to leave.”
He put Pulcharia on the chair next to him and got up.
“So?” Lydia asked again. “How is she? The baby Rostnikov makes you work with while he runs to his son’s play?”
Sasha looked down at his best trousers. The stain was evident. He tried to blot it but had little success. “She is older than I am, and Porfiry Petrovich is on a very important case. He deserves a few hours to see his son’s … why am I arguing about this with you?”
“Good. Don’t argue. Tell us all about her, about this Timofeyeva.”
“Her name is Elena,” he said. “I told you yesterday, and the day before and-”
“So?”
“So, she is fine,” said Tkach. “She doesn’t know anything. She talks too much. She gets in the way. She asks too many questions. She may well get me killed, but she is fine. Does that answer all your questions about her?”
“Is she pretty?” asked Lydia. Maya found the question interesting enough to raise her eyes toward her husband.
“She is fat,” said Tkach.
“She can be pretty and fat,” said Lydia.
“I am fat,” said Maya.
“You are temporarily overweight from a natural condition which will soon end,” said Sasha, moving across the room toward the door. “You are not pretty. You are beautiful.”
Pulcharia was trying to find something in the borscht with her fingers.
“Ida Ivanova Portov, remember her? Married to your father’s partner, Boris. She was fat, but she was pretty. I remember the way your father looked at-”