Like many children from well-off families that had not needed to think about food or money before the war, Nadya, after their evacuation to Kazan, was constantly discussing rations and weighing up the good and bad points of the various ration-centres. She knew the pros and cons of each kind of buckwheat, the advantages of oil over butter and of lump sugar over granulated.
'Do you know what,' she would say to her mother. 'From today I want you to give me tea with honey instead of with condensed milk. It's all the same to you and it will be more nutritious for me.'
Sometimes Nadya would grow sullen and gloomy. Then she would smile contemptuously and be extraordinarily rude. Once, in Lyudmila's presence, she called her father an idiot. She pronounced the word with such venom that Viktor was too taken aback to reply.
Sometimes her mother saw Nadya crying over a book: the girl considered herself an unfortunate, backward creature who was doomed to live a difficult, colourless life.
'No one wants to be friends with me, I'm too stupid and boring,' she once said when they were at table. 'No one will want to marry me. I'll study to be a pharmacist and then go and live in a village.'
'They don't have pharmacies in remote villages,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna.
'And you're being much too pessimistic about your marriage prospects,' said Shtrum. 'You've grown prettier during the last few months.'
'Shut up!' said Nadya, glaring at her father.
That night Lyudmila saw Nadya reading a book of poetry, her thin bare arm sticking out from under the bedclothes.
On another occasion Nadya came back from the university ration-centre and announced: 'People, myself included, are vile swine to take advantage of all this. And Papa's a swine to sell his talents for butter. Why should weak children and sick men and women have to starve just because they don't understand physics and can't fulfil work-plans three times over…? Only the chosen can stuff themselves with butter.'
That evening she said defiantly: 'Mama, I want double helpings of honey and butter. I didn't have time to eat this morning.'
In many ways Nadya was just like her father. Lyudmila noticed that the traits in Nadya which Viktor found most irritating were those that he shared with her.
On one occasion, Nadya, imitating her father's way of speaking, said of Postoev: 'He's a rogue, a nonentity, a careerist!'
Viktor was indignant. 'How dare you, a half-educated schoolgirl, speak like that about an Academician?'
But Lyudmila could remember very well how when Viktor was a student, he had abused the various academic celebrities in almost the same words. As for Nadya, Lyudmila could see that she was far from happy; she was difficult to get on with and extremely lonely.
After Nadya's departure, it was Viktor's turn to have breakfast. He would squint at his book, swallow his food without chewing, make stupid, surprised faces, grope for his cup without taking his eyes off the book, and say: 'Can I have some more tea? And make it a bit hotter, if you can.' She knew all his gestures: how he would scratch his head, pout his lips, then make a wry face and start picking his teeth. At this point she would say: 'Vitya, for the love of God, when are you going to get your teeth seen to?' She knew very well that if he scratched his nose, pouted his lips and so on, it was not because his nose or lips were hurting, but because he was thinking about his work. She knew that if she were to say, 'Vitya, you're not even listening!', he would reply, still squinting at his book, 'I heard every word. I can even repeat what you said: "For the love of God, when are you going to get your teeth seen to?"' Then he would gulp down another mouthful of tea, look surprised and begin to frown; this meant that he agreed with what his colleague had written on some points, but not on others. After that he would sit quite still for a long time, nodding his head sadly and submissively, with the same look in his eyes as an old man suffering from a brain tumour. This meant that he was thinking about his dead mother.
And as he drank his tea, thought about his work, or gave a despairing sigh, Lyudmila would look at the eyes she had so often kissed, at the curly hair she had so often rumpled, at the lips that had kissed her, at the hands with small, delicate fingers whose nails she had so often cut, and say to herself: 'Goodness me! What a sloven you are!'
She knew everything about him: how he liked to read children's books in bed; his face when he went out to clean his teeth; his clear, almost tremulous voice, when, dressed in his best suit, he had read his paper on neutron radiation. She knew that he liked Ukrainian borsch with haricot beans; she knew how he gave a quiet groan as he turned over in his sleep. She knew how quickly he always wore out the heel of his left shoe and dirtied the sleeves of his shirt; she knew that he liked two pillows in bed; she knew his secret dread of walking across large squares; she knew the smell of his skin, the shape of the holes in his socks. She knew the tune he hummed when he was waiting for lunch; the shape of the nails on his big toes; the names his mother had called him by when he was two; his slow, shuffling gait; the names of the boys he'd had fights with in his last year at school. She knew how he loved teasing his family and friends. Even now, for all his depression, he kept making fun of the way her closest friend, Marya Ivanovna Sokolova, had once confused Balzac and Flaubert.
He was expert at baiting Lyudmila and always succeeded in making her angry. That time she had leapt earnestly to her friend's defence.
'You always make fun of the people I love. Masha doesn't need to read a lot. She has impeccable taste and a real feeling for a book.'
'Certainly,' he had replied. 'And she knows that Max and Maurice was written by Anatole France.'
She knew his love of music and his political opinions. She had seen him cry. She had once seen him so enraged that he had torn his shirt and then got his legs tangled up in his trousers; he had hopped towards her with his fists clenched. She had seen his uncompromising fearlessness; she had seen him inspired; she had seen him reciting poetry; she had seen him taking a laxative.
Outwardly nothing had changed, but she knew he was angry with her at present. She could tell this from the fact that he no longer talked to her about his work. He talked to her about their rations and the letters he got from friends. He talked about the Institute: about events in the laboratory; about the discussion of their work schedule. He would tell her stories about his colleagues: how Savostyanov had fallen asleep at work after a drinking-bout the previous night; how the laboratory assistants had been cooking potatoes in the boiler; how Markov was preparing a new series of experiments. But he no longer spoke to her about his real work, the work that went on in his head. Previously she had been his only confidant.
Once he had told her that if he read out his notes or talked about half-formed hypotheses to his friends – even his closest friends – he would feel bad about it the next day; his work would seem dead, and he would find it hard to return to it. She had been the only person to whom he had been able to reveal his doubts, to whom he had been able to read both his fragmentary jottings and his boldest, most fantastic theories. But now he no longer so much as mentioned his work to her.
Now he found relief from his depressions in making accusations against Lyudmila. He thought incessantly about his mother. And he thought about something he would never have thought about but for Fascism: the fact that he and his mother were Jews.