‘So, a hard day’s shopping,’ said Edward, when she was back in the flat that evening.
‘Whatever you were doing today, I guarantee it was better than going to that place.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Edward. ‘My day was quite distressing.’
There was something about Edward’s tone which suggested to Marianne that he had more to say. She stopped stirring the goulash and turned to look at him. ‘How come?’
‘I had to assist at an appendectomy for a twelve-year-old boy. Simple, you might think – except when it’s done under local anaesthetic which doesn’t last long enough and the boy is writhing in agony.’
‘Appendix out under a local?’
‘Yes. The thing is, no one thought this to be particularly strange.’
‘How horrible.’
‘Yes, it’s obscene. A country which builds nuclear missiles and sends people into space…’
‘Are they short of the right drugs?’
‘Probably – also short of trained anaesthetists.’
‘My poor honey,’ said Marianne walking over to her husband and giving him a long hug. ‘Despite being a doctor, you’ve never been good with pain.’
‘That’s true. Neither my own nor others. But I think doctors should be sensitive to pain. Managing pain is as important as curing the sick.’
Marianne felt unusually animated as she and Edward prepared to leave the flat to attend their dinner invitation with Larry. Perhaps, she thought, it’s because we don’t often get to go out now or perhaps it’s the prospect of dinner at the Aragvi. Edward was less cheerful. He was upset because one of the nurses was leaving the hospital. ‘You know, we are the ones who screw up their system,’ he said. ‘Yevgenia only made seventy roubles a month. Now she has doubled that working as a nanny for some foreign family like us.’
Indeed, thought Marianne, as she watched their babysitter Lyudmila smiling and laughing as she and Izzy played some incomprehensible game together. Marianne didn’t mind that Lyudmila spoke very little English, jabbering away to Izzy in Russian, and it seemed that Izzy didn’t mind too much either. ‘Don’t worry,’ she had been assured soon after arriving in Moscow, ‘all Russians love children,’ and that had certainly been her experience to date.
It took Marianne and Edward longer to get to the restaurant than they had expected and all the other guests had arrived before them. Marianne had tried to cheer Edward up, explaining that the Aragvi was a famous Georgian restaurant – perhaps the best known in the whole of Moscow – which had been popular for decades with the Soviet elite and especially with Stalin’s favourite henchman Beria.
As introductions were being made at the table Marianne tried to concentrate. She noted she was being seated to the right of Larry. On the other side was Hank, a large, baby-faced Texan with cropped blond hair. Opposite was Hank’s wife, Cynthia, a sharp, angular woman who gave Marianne a ‘don’t mess with my husband’ look. Next to Cynthia, she was surprised to find a good-looking Russian man, a theatre director, Andrei – was that his name? – contradicting what she had been told, that Soviet citizens weren’t supposed to mix with embassy people. Further down was his attractive wife Galina and at Edward’s end of the table another American couple, Barbara and some man whose name she didn’t quite catch.
‘So, have they fixed you up with some decent accommodation?’ asked Baby-face.
‘Not too bad, apart from the cockroaches.’
‘Ah well, hunting cockroaches is a national sport in Moscow – isn’t that so, Larry?’
‘True,’ said Larry, ‘though actually it’s often the newer apartments with central heating that have the most cockroaches – they come up the pipe tunnels.’ As conversation flowed back and forth Marianne was pleasantly surprised that there didn’t seem to be any subjects off-limits. From further down the table she could hear discussion about the events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia; Galina was saying, ‘…unfortunate, I agree, but remember our people died to save them in the war, so they have to make the same sacrifices as we do.’ Opposite her, Andrei seemed to raise his elegant eyebrows a little and Marianne leant forward and said to him in Russian:
‘I sense that perhaps you don’t entirely agree?’
‘Ah, my dear, I never dare to disagree with my wife. And may I say that your Russian is excellent but I think it would be rude for us not to speak English when not all of our company can speak Russian as well as you.’ Then, continuing in English, he said, ‘Larry tells me you are at the university, finishing your doctorate in Russian literature.’
‘Yes.’
‘May I ask on what subject?’
‘It’s to do with Lermontov’s use of the Byronic Hero.’
‘Goodness! Quite the intellectual then,’ said sharp-faced Cynthia joining in the conversation. ‘And I hear you have a four-year-old daughter to take care of as well.’
‘Yes, but I have just started her at the local kindergarten so that will be a big help.’
‘You mean a Russian kindergarten?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s incredibly brave. Does she understand any Russian?’
‘Not much yet, but I’m sure she will in time.’
‘Well, I’d rather my children stick with the language they know. I think that’s better for their development. And I’ve heard some alarming stories about the kindergartens here: how they smack the children and sometimes lock them in the closet if they misbehave.’
‘Well, it’s true they are strict, but they seem kind enough and I’m sure Izzy will tell me if anything like that happens to her.’
On their arrival at the table Marianne had noticed that there was already an elaborate spread of food. Plates of cold herring and fried trout with pomegranate, interspersed with small dishes of red caviar; a meat dish which Marianne recognised as cold chicken with walnuts and garlic was immediately in front of her and she noted several plates of crushed French beans further down the table. A waiter handed around hot flat bread which he held out in a damask napkin.
‘Quite a banquet you’ve got for us,’ she said, turning to Larry.
‘This is just the beginning,’ he said. ‘There are lots more dishes to come. You know there is a tradition in Georgia that when you are entertaining guests there should be as much food on the table at the end of the meal as there was at the beginning.’
‘That seems incredibly wasteful.’
‘True – and we won’t be quite that extravagant tonight, so enjoy what’s on the table but leave some room for what’s to come.’ Sure enough, the cold dishes were gradually replaced with hot ones. ‘Khachapuri – that’s like a cheese pie,’ said Larry. ‘Khinkali – dumplings, very popular in Georgia, and that’s a Georgian Solyanka, a kind of meat stew. These are fried eggplant – try some.’
‘Ah, yes. Aubergine,’ said Marianne, smiling at Larry.
Despite his encouragement that Marianne should sample all the dishes that appeared on the table, Larry appeared to eat sparingly whilst keeping up a steady dialogue with her. She learnt that he was thirty-six and had been in Moscow for two and a half years. He had been married but the marriage had broken down before he had left America and he was now divorced. They spoke of Russian culture and history: he seemed well informed even though he had no academic background in Russian and had only started to learn the language in a six-month crash course in Washington.
Marianne found Larry an easy conversationalist. He didn’t flirt or boast but spoke quietly, sometimes earnestly, but with a lacing of irony which she found refreshing – for all that it was surprisingly un-American. She managed to forget the startling similarity to Daniel which had so unsettled her at the embassy party; or perhaps it was precisely that similarity, that sense of the familiar, which gave her the feeling that she had known him for years already. They spoke of the increasingly harsh tone which the authorities were using against Solzhenitsyn and the continuing newspaper campaign against him and Andrei Sakharov.