It was only later, on the walk home, that Maya realized that the woman had not touched her. At first, Maya felt discouraged by this, as if there was something so wrong with her that the woman could not risk catching it. But the terror that Maya experienced that afternoon was no longer causing the same misery in her stomach. And all it had taken was — the woman had extracted Maya’s T-shirt and underwear from the grocery bag (she touched them without fright), whispered to them softly, as if Maya and her mother were not in the room, then rubbed both with water from a long-necked glass bottle, then smiled generously and returned the items, though Maya knew her mother would throw them out just in case. When would they need to return? Maya’s mother asked. They wouldn’t, the woman shook her head kindly, and Maya desperately wished for her to have a girl sometime soon.
Now, in the car, worry fingered Maya’s chest: The drive to Madam Stella’s would take her and Max slightly beyond town, and — for two exits — down a highway she had never driven before. A second worry: How would she explain their destination to Max? They were receding farther and farther from the hardware store. Max pointed this out, but without alarm; it had taken her some time to understand that Max didn’t need to get his way, only declare his position. She said she would get it on the way back. He shrugged and didn’t ask on the way back from where.
New emergencies — a sick child, a deceived husband — humble the old; Maya managed the highway without trouble. She had found the gate of the botanical gardens on whose grounds Madam Stella had somehow acquired property without having to stop and ask for elaboration on the instructions the Madam had given her over the phone. But the gate was closed and the two guards assigned to it inspected the Corolla with doubt. It was a private gardens bequeathed to the township by a chemist who had participated in the discovery of antihistamines — so the plaque mounted on the gate said. It was closed on Saturdays. Maya consulted the paper crumpled in the ashtray — Saturday 12:00—but this did nothing to sway the guard in her window. He had a scar by his left eye and she did not want to contradict him.
They heard rustling up ahead. A dark gray mastiff was hurtling down to the gate. Behind him waddled the Madam, because if not the Madam, who would be wearing a sun-colored sari hemmed with coins in the middle of a private botanical garden? “Down, down,” she waved at the gate, unclear if she meant the mastiff or the guards. Both obeyed, the animal unraveling into a dung-colored slick by the gate and the guards rolling open the bars.
“I was lovers with the son,” the Madam breathed into Maya’s window after the gate had closed behind the Corolla. Maya smelled cigarettes, lipstick, mint. She looked over at Max — he did not need to hear such confessions — but his eyes were fixed on the mastiff. Madam Stella had colored outside the lines with her lipstick; her eyelashes clumped together when she blinked so that for the briefest moment she seemed at risk of falling asleep. “Follow me,” she said, and jangled up the drive.
“Where are we going?” Max said as his mother inched after the Madam.
“It’s a game,” Maya said, trying to sound excited.
Two hundred feet later, they arrived at a two-story pastel-yellow home with two entrances that Madam Stella shared with a workman’s family, their rent reduced but hers subsidized in full in perpetuity thanks to her seduction of the chemist’s son. The faint yellow, which recalled an overmilky omelet, was the color of the grand residences and palaces lining the embankment of the Neva in St. Petersburg, the wan yellow of aristocracy, and Maya was transported for a vanishing moment back to the Soviet Union, even though she had never been to St. Petersburg. Those palaces were property of the international imagination.
“I don’t know why you didn’t call. . at the beginning,” Madam Stella said into Maya’s shoulder. The Madam lit a cigarette and blew a column of smoke at the gravel. Maya eyed the cigarette enviously, but was afraid to ask. “I offer the full suite of services,” the older woman said. “From the cradle to the grave. Infertility, difficult pregnancy, difficult birth, post-partum depression. Some people have me on retainer — they come once a week, just in case. Families stay with me for generations.” The Madam gargled out a phlegmy laugh. “That sounds as if I’ve been around since the war with Napoleon.”
Maya glanced nervously at her watch. She knew Alex would be checking the clock soon, her cell phone going off. She had brought it this time, had no cover.
“Guess my age,” Madam Stella said.
“Fifty-five?” Maya said, underestimating by twenty years in the name of politeness and a discount at the end of the hour.
Madam Stella whistled. “Try seventy-three.”
“We’re here for a game, okay?” Maya whispered though Max was out of earshot. “He doesn’t know.”
“There are demons in his head,” Madam Stella said. “We are going to very nicely, very politely, ask them to leave. Do you have any demons in your head, Mayechka?”
Maya was briefly startled by this intimate address, used only by her mother and Raisa.
“If it’s a game, everyone plays,” Madam Stella said.
Like a well-painted face that parts to reveal ruined teeth, the smooth, eggshellish exterior of the building gave way to a rotten, sagging staircase that creaked under the four climbers as they summited to a garret of the kind Maya had always imagined inhabited by a Dostoevsky consumptive. If the street was in St. Petersburg, the garret was in a lightless village deep in the Carpathians, next to which even her uncle’s Misha’s modest countryside home was vast. Maya was stunned to discover herself more correct in this than she wished: Madam Stella had them gaze through a window — the mastiff got its plate-sized paws on the windowsill — that revealed a patch of ground sealed by a cellar door. Everything that Madam Stella pickled and cured in the autumn was down there, covered in the summer months by enormous blocks of ice that the workman changed out weekly for a small fee. Madam Stella had had her residence disconnected from the electricity line, and held money only when she received payment or transferred several bills to the workman. Everything that she ate and brewed, she foraged in the botanical garden; she hardly ate meat, and for dairy she bartered.
“With whom?” Maya asked, looking anxiously around the premises: two rooms, the first of which doubled as a kitchen, bedroom, and entryway.
“With the people who have it,” Madam Stella cheerfully informed her. “Sit.”
Where? The twin bed, despite summer, was loaded with horsehair blankets and two enormous square pillows. The dining table held a log of butter the size of a loaf of bread on a triangular cutting board; a bottle of spirits that would have reached Maya’s waist; and a huge clump of tiny, yellow-tipped field flowers that resembled the frizzy hair of a giantess; but no chairs. There was a sour smell in the air that Maya traced to a bread yeasting in a large industrial sink. Her son was poking his nail into it. Maya hissed at him. He scurried back to her side, where she grasped his hand and stood like a wax figure, trying not to touch anything. She felt an attack of remorse; her decision had seemed inspired when she had seen the classified in the Russian newspaper, now reckless and rash.
On one wall hung a clumsy painting of an older woman, a black band of mourning in the corner. Above it, a display of herbs was mounted on a board of cherry-red wood, clump after clump socked into aluminum cones, a handwritten legend beneath: eucalyptus, valerian root, coltsfoot, mint, bur marigold, stinging nettle, cranberry leaves, melissa, motherwort, cabbage. The other walls were decorated with farm implements, for decoration or use who could say: a scythe; clamps with a human-height handle for extracting hot pots from a furnace; ancient, rusty mandolins; not one but two pitchforks.