It was nearly noon, and schoolchildren began arriving in the park, in which bright parasols against the sun now made their appearance too. Molkho took the trolley back into town, looked for his little Russian in the hotel, and then returned to their café, where there was no trace of her among the handful of customers. In front of the embassy all was quiet. Why, they must have agreed to take her after all, he told himself, smiling at the thought of Mr. Shimoni’s surprise.
MEANWHILE, HE THOUGHT, I had better put my time to good use, and so, though hungry again, he decided to find out the cheapest route to the Soviet Union. On a street they had walked on that morning, he recalled, there had been a travel agency whose window was designed to look like a train compartment, complete with a white-sheeted Pullman bed and a female mannequin looking out at the passing landscape while her hair whipped in the breeze. “Ne manquezpas la route,” had said a poster in French, and another in English, “Go by Rail and Know Where You’ve Been.” Retracing his steps to the place, on whose wall was a map of railroad lines reaching all the way to Peking, he was plied with so much helpful information that by the time he stepped back out into the street the sky had clouded over and the humid air brushed his face like a damp cloth.
He hurried back to the hotel to see if his little Russian had returned, but her key was still behind the desk, though he imagined for a moment that it swung back and forth as though it had just been hung up. Fraulein Zand, the desk clerk told him knowingly, had neither been back since the morning nor left any message, so that, though the sky was growing more threatening, Molkho had no choice but grumpily to set out again for the café in the hope that she was mistakenly waiting there. But she was not, and so he ordered a club sandwich and thought, She’s run out on me again and who’s fault is it but my own? I grew soft looking after a wife whose effective range shrank to zero and now I’m paying for it. To calm himself, he took out Anna Karenina and resumed reading Part Eight, but soon he put it down unhappily. Indeed, it was so obvious that nothing more was going to happen that he wondered what made Tolstoy keep writing.
Only one guard remained by the gate of the embassy, all the traffic through which was now outward. Could they really have taken her off his hands and left him with his mission accomplished? He paid for his sandwich, left the café, waited for the guard’s view to be blocked by some Russians leaving work, and boldly passed through the gate and into the building, down the corridors of which he walked with a pounding heart, reminded of the times he had come to take his wife home from her chemotherapy, which had always ended as the oncology ward was emptying out for the day, so that he would find her alone in a silent room, exhausted yet glowing with hope in her hospital frock. How, he had wanted to ask, did the isotope injected into her veins find the spreading cancer, which he imagined as a reddish lode in a dark mine? Controlling his fear, he glanced cautiously into rooms whose tired officials were cleaning their desks before quitting time, wondering whether, had he taught the little Russian a secret whistle, he would dare use it now. Outside the barred windows a noiseless rain began to fall, drowned out by the chorus of Russian voices in the building. A curly-headed stranger in their midst, he turned and headed back for the entrance, careful not to lose his way.
BRIEF THOUGH IT WAS, the fresh-smelling downpour cleared the muggy air, which turned a luminous velvet beneath the prodigal streetlights. After all, thought Molkho on his way back to the hotel, satisfied that his little rabbit wasn’t being held prisoner, not even the Russians would torture her in some dungeon just because she’s homesick. Taking a shortcut through a busy arcade, he let himself be swept into a large department store, where he decided to look for presents, considered buying a fat English-Russian dictionary in the book department on a top floor, and thought better of it. Why waste the money, even if it wasn’t his, when the little Russian would soon be gone anyway? Replacing the book on its rack, he wandered off to the classical music section, which had an especially rich collection of Viennese composers, and soon bought a cassette of Mahler’s The Song of the Earth for his mother-in-law. This time, rather than another embarrassing blouse or scarf, he would bring her something cultural.
As he was riding the escalator back down he suddenly spied the plump figure of Miss Nina Zand trying on hats before a little mirror. Droplets of rain still clung to her clothing and hair, whose curls had shriveled forlornly, and the makeup was streaked on her worn face. So the answer was no after all, he thought even before laying a pitying hand on her shoulder and smelling the liquor on her breath. She smiled sheepishly, not at all surprised he had found her there drowning her sorrows in shopping, as if it were only natural for him to dog her faithfully everywhere. “What happened?” he asked quietly. “They say no,” she replied, slowly removing another hat and throwing it into a pile of discards with a grimace of resignation. “No visa. No nothing. Byurokratya. Very too much byurokratya. They say no can take me.” Her big blue eyes filled with guilt for letting him down. Resignedly he led her to a corner and tried getting more information, but all he could find out was that she had been made to run from one office to another all day long. The bastards, he thought, plying her with more questions that she didn’t understand while steering her through the throng of shoppers, furious at the Russians for not helping, perhaps because she looked so crestfallen in her rumpled suit and white blouse, the open collar of which revealed the perspiring whites of her breasts. “Byurokratya,” she repeated, as if her encounter had been with some supernatural force. Suddenly he felt a flash of violence. Damn her! he thought, almost shoving her across the boulevard past clanging, orange-lit trolleys and into the regal lobby of the hotel, with its crowd of guests and wild strains of gypsy music from the dining room. Should he go straight to his room and telephone the bad news to Israel or should he wait a little longer?
AFTER DINNER they went to see Mr. Shimoni, who was curious to hear the little Russian’s story, even if the outcome, which Molkho had told him about on the phone, did not come as a surprise. No doubt he wanted to know about her contacts in the embassy, and perhaps, too, he felt guilty for having denied her the letter she had asked for. This time, they found other guests in the antique drawing room, two Viennese Jews who had come to pay a sick call. Mr. Shimoni, however, seemed much better, for he was now fully dressed in a dark suit and tie, although his face, the ascetic intellectuality of which had so impressed Molkho the night before, was as pale as ever. The tiny old woman from the back room was present too, wearing a black silk dress like a delicate mummy. She was Mr. Shimoni’s mother, and after introducing the new arrivals she sat Molkho by her side, while her son moved the piano stool over to Miss Zand’s armchair and began a brisk interrogation. Happy to be the center of attention, the little Russian related her adventures in her musical voice, gesturing broadly to help describe the Soviet officials and their offices.