‘No, you don’t. You can’t understand a woman’s pain, and don’t you dare pretend otherwise.’
The doctor pokes her head through the parting in the curtain. ‘Vassili Sergeyevich? It’s closing time. Let’s talk in the office.’ She sets off at jogging pace, high heels clicking rhythm. The specialists’ office is hemmed in with steel filing cabinets, bottom draws sliding open, manila case note folders and clipboards jutting over shelves. A wooden table for eight serves as communal workspace. She sits at one end, pats down a hairpin, blinks redness from her eyes, massages each temple in turn with her forefinger.
‘She might be a bit groggy from the Fentanyl for a day or two, which isn’t such a bad thing. Might even help her cope a bit better.’ Her clinical poise seems to slip for a moment. She raises her hand to continue. ‘Vassili Sergeyevich, I found what I hoped I wouldn’t. The endometriosis has damaged your wife’s uterus and the scar tissue spreads every month. There’s no kind way of saying this, but from here it will take a miracle.’
‘Why?’
‘Lead residues in the air. Too much red meat. Too little red meat. Genetic deficiency. Deep-seated fear of motherhood. There are more theories than cases. We’re not talking medicine any more, you might just as well ask a priest.’
I thank her and hurry back to the cubicle. Anna is straightening a crimp in one stocking. Smoothing the sheet over the mattress, she tucks it in with immaculate hospital triangles and makes for the front door. We don coats and gloves in the waiting area, deserted except for the cleaning woman swishing a mop across a floor in a scything motion recalling hay harvests. She wrenches the bolt barring the jamb to let us out.
Judging from the tomato pulp and snapped-off trestle legs scattered over the snow, the police have paid a visit to the market. The pavement has turned into an ice-rink. I stumble along, a bear on skates. Anna’s figure slims in the dark. A drunk weaves out from a copse of trees, blocking my path. I shove one hand into the man’s chest. He slurs obscenities, falling backwards. Looking around for Anna, I lose my own footing and both knees strike the ice, cushioning the blow to my face. Wiping granules from my lips, I glance around at the drunk, an upended turtle writhing on his back, then along the road. Anna is lost from view.
I catch up at our courtyard. When we arrive home she flings off her coat, and wipes the muck off our shoes with a rag stiff with old dirt. Without waiting for the tea to draw she pours a cup, sits at the table, head buried in hands. Eyes smarting from the harsh light of the ceiling lamp I cross to the kitchen window and look over birch tops to oblong apartment towers. At this hour they remind me of giant glinting dominoes.
Anna’s breath, even and unlaboured as the tide, stirs behind me. I risk a glance into the bedroom. Dark tresses droop over the pillowslip, shrouding her pale face. Her child-sized body is a forked ridge, now swelling, now subsiding. A glass of stale water is the only object on the table beside her. She has lain there for two days and nights since the prognosis, wrenching up the sheets if she senses me trying to rouse her.
Around midnight I crept like a thief into the study, marked tests, hung washing on the clothes rack that occupies our tiny glassed-in balcony. To sleep elsewhere would be tantamount to abandoning her, even if there was space in our cramped apartment.
Returning to my desk, I slid open the drawer and took out my photo of Anna on the bed. In deference to the elderly woman at the framing studio, everything below collarbone height was cropped out. In the original she sprawled the length of the mattress, legs akimbo. Her severe expression belied the old mischief. A stranger would misread arrogance in her regal chin. It tells a story for which I am the only rightful audience.
To mark the end of our honeymoon, Anna traced a line down the middle of our living room. At the time I thought she was joking. Now it needs redrawing. Ragged but distinct, it runs along the parquetry to the black and white Silelis television – outlying province, my very own Kaliningrad, portal to the regimes toppling around it. On ugly castor legs, thick bakelite rim, its screen is square with rounded corners. My half of the room, the desk draped with English-language texts and journals, the armchair with its rotating pile of unfolded clothes, ends at the oak chest she dusts daily when well, weekly when not. Beside the chest is my turntable, a Korvet 038 with a pop-up lid whose blunt stylus skips tracks, ruining her favourite dance standards one by one, tethering me to her masochism, masquerading as thrift.
Inside the corner cupboard with the wonky latch, next to the flour stash, glass goblets from Gus-Hrustal tinted cerulean and a broad-lipped vessel of Kostromo holy water, she has concealed her icon of Saint Tatiana, maternal heirloom and namesake. Two years ago? Three? Whenever one treatment cul-de-sac too many has driven her to medieval incantations, some mornings, rarely when I am present, she lights a candle and recites the Akathist to Our Lady, her murmurings softer than dreams. She kneels before a palm-sized frosted-enamel rectangle a foreigner might buy for three times its value at Izmailovsky Market. How does piety find such an unlikely repository? A defence scientist steeped in the empirical.
I ladle my inexpert porridge, by turns watery and clotted, into a floral bowl. Fine-spun flakes, tiny cartwheels, settle on the windowsill. Snow is for dead poets. For me it signifies five o’clock dusk, mud on carpets, chipped nails and pallid skin from vitamin deficiency. The stuff below lies in shards, porcelain dropped from a height. It is a clear, if smog-tinted morning. White bedsheets drape balconies opposite.
Our kitchen is neutral ground. Here we often sit bobbing lemon slivers in tea and watching children file through the schoolyard below, scarves bound to throats. Maria Alexandrovna, her trolley laden with potatoes, shuffles across the yard. Gorbachev’s reforms were supposed to do away with tyrants of every stripe but our crafty old Stalinist is the local Housing Committee boss. As if that wasn’t enough power to satisfy your average megalomaniac, she got herself appointed as our apartment manager ahead of privatisation, with self-ordained power to hike rents and evict at whim. She grilled us four times before issuing our apartment permit despite, perhaps because of my parents’ intercession on our behalf. At each interrogation a pockmarked hulk, lips like a scrawl, a security guard sat behind her. The old crabapple conceived a son? If so, the ultimate injustice.
Between coughing fits she read aloud the codicils of the residency laws, all ten pages. ‘Remember, no unauthorised comings and goings. I’m not running a guesthouse here. There’s hundreds breaking their necks for apartments so don’t imagine you’ll get away with any misbehaviour. If I had my way you’d be waiting even longer.’ She brandished our permit in her withered paw, crumpling it almost beyond use.
The trail of Maria Alexandrovna’s trolley curves round the garage, a prefabricated shell just large enough to house Boris. Since our June weekend at the dacha he has skulked there like a pet in disgrace.
I place my porridge in the fridge for later, fish out the crumpled wad of Lenin’s-head tenners stowed in the cupboard alongside and practice counting them with an exchange dealer’s dexterity. Sums involving more than a thousand roubles drive me to distraction. Anna doles out my housekeeping money in careful instalments.
On my way downstairs I am reminded why. The dreaded trolley creaks. Maria Alexandrovna rounds the flight of steps to our floor. Her birch cane which she still bangs on the ceiling whenever our lovemaking gets too loud, punctuates her mutterings as she nears the landing. We haven’t disturbed her much these past months.
I’m trapped. Whenever our paths cross she announces rent increases, as a rule retrospective, easier to skim the difference. Not that she terrifies me but today she is one problem too many. Ducking into the elevator is out of the question. Her laboured ascent signals that the tradesmen have once again failed to perform their monthly maintenance check.