She glanced furtively at his hands; they looked terrible.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll have a look,” Asya said.
Jacob placed both hands on the top of the desk. They looked as if he were wearing crimson fingerless gloves. His long, white fingers, which bent slightly at the last joints, were clean, but from the knuckles upward, and running under the sleeve of his sweater, was one big scab. She turned his hands over and began examining his palms. The skin was healthy up to his wrists, but above them it looked like a sleeve made of some rough red fabric.
Jacob smiled through his mustache and said, joking, “Asya, did you come here on account of this?”
“Yes, of course! Didn’t Marusya write you about the wonder-working potion? My friend”—here the scrupulous Asya corrected herself—“the daughter of my friend, that is—was cured in two weeks. And she had already tried everything; they even took her to the Military Academy Hospital in Leningrad and gave her X-ray treatments, but nothing helped.”
Asya rushed over to her suitcase, still in its canvas casing and standing in a puddle of melting snow. She started peeling off the soaking layer of heavy fabric. Jacob tried to help her, but she said no, no, she would do it herself. Finally, she pulled out the sacred bottle, removed an outer layer of newspaper, then the thick black paper in which it was wrapped, and plunked it down on the table.
“There. For you.”
How touching, how sweet this Asya is, thought Jacob. She’d carried this ridiculous bottle all the way from Moscow to Siberia.
“Thank you, Asya, I will certainly give it a try. There have been times when the rash cleared up completely, but then it came back. I don’t think they have invented a medicament that will cure eczema once and for all. But I will definitely try it.”
“Let’s try it right now, so as not to waste any more time. Annechka already saw a difference in her condition by the third day. You know, Jacob, I have a return ticket in only eight days. I took a leave of two weeks, but the traveling time takes nearly seven days. So let’s start right away. I’ll apply the poultice and then go to a hotel. Is there a hotel near the station?”
“Asya,” Jacob said. A wild suspicion seized him. “Did you come to Biysk on a business trip, or…?”
“No, no. Didn’t Marusya tell you? I got hold of the medicine, thinking that she would bring it to you herself, but she was busy, so she gave me the address, and … here I am.”
This was some sort of madness. Asya here, and some old lady, a poultice … And this is why she came all the way to Biysk?
Scratching his hand, Jacob suggested that they postpone the first treatment until the next day, but Asya insisted: Right now! No waiting. He firmly announced that it was too late today and that he needed to go to bed, because he had to go to work early the next morning. He settled Asya on his narrow cot and made a pallet on the floor for himself—a sheepskin coat covered with a sheet. There was no hotel to speak of in Biysk, but he’d have to go to the police to register her tomorrow.
In the morning, Jacob went to work at the bank. When he returned, Asya was sitting at the desk, crocheting white lace with a tiny hook. She was embarrassed.
“Everyone says it’s silly and bourgeois, but it’s so soothing.” She quickly folded away her handiwork in a knitted bag.
In the evening, the first treatment took place. At the same time, there was a fall from grace. He didn’t even get the chance to start liking the woman. In all her forty years, no man had ever liked her, even in her youth. But her firm and gentle touch on his hands, and his legs, and his groin, which was also covered with the small, fiery-red spots of eczema, was so arousing that it happened in a flash, almost unconsciously. The prolonged male hunger and the professional sympathy of a woman’s hands came together and quickened the flame of passion.
Asya had no wish to seduce someone else’s husband, especially the husband of her revered Marusya, but everything happened so fast, so spontaneously, for both of them.
They lay on a white sheet spotted with brown herbs from the potion, themselves smeared with the herbal sludge, pressed closely together—and they both cried. It was an upheaval, and a great corporeal celebration, and a terrible shame, which receded when Jacob again entered the heart of the world, the depths of the body of a woman to whom he was not bound by anything except perhaps gratitude. And so, until morning, they both struggled with shame, and came out victors. Almost victors. Devastation, then tenderness, and again gratitude.
They spent the whole week with hardly a break in their nighttime embraces. Then they parted—a decision they had made mutually—forever. Jacob accompanied Asya to the station. The March snow had not ceased falling since the day Asya arrived. She brushed the snow from her eyelashes, and lifted her boots out of the drifts, in which they kept getting stuck. Jacob carried her suitcase. With a certain sense of relief, Jacob kissed Asya, pushed his hand under her coat, and stroked her heavy breasts, destined for nourishing a multitude of children but preserved in barren virginity. They had decided between them that they were not guilty of anything, and that fate had presented them with a holiday they would keep secret for the rest of their lives. And Marusya had nothing to do with it. As for the main purpose of Asya’s visit, it had not been achieved. The wonder-working brew had absolutely no effect on Jacob’s eczema.
Moscow had experienced the same heavy snowfall as there had been in Altai. Ivan Belousov waited for Marusya by the entrance on Povarskaya Street, and when she came downstairs—wearing a black coat with a lambskin collar and a lambskin muff, and with her slightly reddened eyelids lowered, Ivan suddenly embraced her and kissed her. Nothing like that had happened before between them, and the kiss was more like one of childish ecstasy than mature, masculine delight.
Marusya had been spending a great deal of time with Professor Belousov for half a year already. They no longer limited their time together to walks down the boulevards. They attended lectures at the Polytechnic Museum together and went to various concerts and performances. This time, Ivan had invited Marusya to the première of the opera And Quiet Flows the Don.
Marusya was agitated. For one thing, whatever would she wear? She had no appropriate garments for an opening night. Second, going to the opera like this was an open challenge, and an admission. A challenge to those acquaintances she might meet in the theater, and an admission that Professor Belousov had the sort of relationship with her that allowed him to invite her to the theater. In twenty-five years she had never been to the theater with any man other than her husband. In fact, though, Ivan had also invited her to the theater when they were even younger … But the main question was, what should she wear?
When she was able to think more seriously about it, Marusya told herself that one’s attire, in this case, was completely insignificant. This was proletarian art, and it would actually have been awkward to dress in silk and velvet for such an event. Moreover, she didn’t have any fancy attire; she had only old dresses that had long since gone out of fashion and were completely worn out. So never mind!
They took their place in the orchestra seats—Ivan in his everyday service jacket, and Marusya in her blue dress with a striped sash and striped cuffs, modest but stylish, and listened to the music of Dzerzhinsky—not the notorious founder of the Cheka, the secret police, who was already dead, but his namesake.