Anna’s working day begins at eight-thirty sharp. Clocking on late risks having to write a grovelling apology, repeat offences a wage cut. Dark braids intact (she spends twenty minutes each morning fixing her hair), she stays into the evenings, doing what I can’t begin to fathom. Sometimes I wonder if Anna’s scientific bent contributes to her condition. Unnameable, invisible, the cause of her infertility lies deep within. Some organic defect, genetic betrayal. No way of finding out, no obvious line of inquiry.
Fresh from our honeymoon, a blissful week alone at the dacha, we load the mattress and packed boxes into Sergey's Trabant and drive to our new apartment. Anna alights first. ‘Race you!’
Sprinting away she reaches the entrance first, pays way too much for two red carnations from the vendor at the entrance. The crone can’t believe her luck. Anna swats me with hers, smears my face with petal dust. Feint, lunge, parry – my stem snaps against her throat. Flinging up her arms in surrender, she kisses me hard. Gasping from laughter and exertion, we toss the flowers, drag out the mattress from the back seat into the elevator, drag it end-up through our front door and onto its slat base. Anna steps around the packing boxes and dives belly first. Springs protest.
‘Careful. It’s stood there for all of two seconds, and you’re doing your best to break it.’
‘We’ve given it such a thrashing this last week it’s a wonder it’s lasted this long. Where’s the camera? Have a look in the box with the cutlery. I want you to take a picture of Madam lounging on her queen-size. Then I’ll do you.’
I squat at the foot of the bed, take three identical shots. Untidy composition. Anna has on baggy old jeans for the removals and the background is washed-out grey – but her face should emerge.
‘Come on Anyushka, we’ve got six boxes in the car, half the furniture left to collect, all our clothes to put away. Then we can celebrate.’
I'm Trying on for size her straight-ahead practicality. Not the least delightful part of being just married is the easy role swaps, power a baton passed back and forth. Let it always be like this.
‘What’s the rush? We’ve got a bed, a fridge, running water.’ Her face turns wistful. ‘The living room would make a great little dance studio, wouldn’t it? Two or three students at a time. Put the turntable in the corner here.’
Transformed to Odette, she springs up, catches my rebuke, snaps back to the present. ‘Okay, what’s to come? Kitchen table, four chairs, study desk, lamp…’
‘So let’s decide what goes where before we lug things five floors.’
‘Simple. Kitchen’s mine, study’s yours, split the rest down the middle.’ She duck-walks backwards, tracing a dead-straight line lengthways across the parquetry with her big toe. Pauses, tenderness vying with irritation. ‘Oh Vasya, do I have to hold up a sign every time I tell a joke? C’mon, Maria needs a thrill.’
She pulls me down to the bed, pinions me with strong legs. We do it clothes on, the mattress shrieking faster and louder to the rapping of our landlady’s cane, all the way to a giggling, juddering, sawing climax.
Let it always be like this. Back then I was in one kind of marriage. Two years on, SNAP. I find myself in another. It happens, I suppose, the world over. Honeymoon is show and tell. The rest? Fill in the gaps.
Capping all the exquisite ironies of marriage – which is saying something – I’d vouch for prepubescent Anna, the story she told me during our first time alone at the dacha, now a recurring dream, over the redacted version I fuck (now and again), sleep, eat, quarrel and commiserate with. Age fourteen on, she is an ironclad mystery.
Her parents’ last conversation, Anna is sure, took place on the morning of her birth, outside Kaluga Maternity Hospital’s clanging gate. Anatoly, whose local connections did not extend to Moscow’s best facilities, voiced trepidation. Grim tales seeped through the dank walls. Women gave birth alone on chairs or cubicles, afterwards lay on gurneys in the corridor for days on end. In a good week bedpans were changed with the laundry, floors and bathrooms cleaned monthly. Eyes popping from the contractions, Tatiana was beyond protest.
Anatoly Ivanovich Kuplinov was a man unused to hearing nyet in his hometown. Two-metres height, lanky reach and lethal right hook promising a boxing career, he opted instead for football. By nineteen he was an impassable praying mantis of a goalie, captaining the Kaluga State University team that made the regional finals three years running. In tandem with, later eclipsed by off-field distinction pioneering refinements in antisubmarine electronic radar systems, paving his ascension to director of Kaluga Typhoon Radar Instrument Manufacturing Institute where he assembled a team of hungry young talent. From his mid twenties he produced a patented breakthrough on average twice a year, sandbagging his reputation against his curious choice of wife.
Centuries-old tradition nevertheless barred him from this female sanctum. The nurses undressed Tatiana, issued her as to everyone, a dirty gown, wads of rough linen to staunch bleeding and other emissions and slippers with flapping insteps. Patients could summon aid only by screaming loudest and longest. Ten women to a ward, toilets holes in the floor across the corridor. Effectively they were prisoners.
Anatoly paced in the courtyard consoling himself that his wife would not be treated as one more knocked-up trollop. Other fathers in waiting huddled in the shifting shade of an oak tree, shared flasks of vodka, and tried to bribe afternoon staff to smuggle in food parcels. They resorted to scaling the tree to peer through the broken window on the second floor. One after another teetered on the crook of a head-high fork, then jumped to safety. They looked at Anatoly hopefully; he was the youngest, tallest, steadiest on his feet. As he balanced on the bough they passed him a parcel of clean bed linen tied by the corners, bread husks and apples wrapped inside. His toss was fractionally low and left and it fell to the ground, unravelling on impact. He could see ten beds, five by two, the women moaning on their backs, bedclothes drawn up to each pillow. One – who didn’t sound like Tatiana but he couldn’t be sure – roared. ‘Morphine, for love of Christ!’ He shinned down.
One card left to play. Around seven o’clock Anatoly accosted Klavdiya Ivanovna, the night matron presenting for duty and reminded her that Igor, her oldest son, was Anatoly’s protégé at the institute. She made a magnanimous pantomime of admitting him, highly irregular, indeed unprecedented though it was. He trailed her to the babies’ ward. In one cot marked with his wife’s initials a newborn hyperventilated. Klavdiya let him hold Anna, wiped away the green-black meconium, then took him to Tatiana. She lay on a trolley where the corridor turned, draped in a sheet from the shoulders down. Klavdiya tearfully assured him that Tatiana Kirillovna Kuplinova’s lethal perinatal septicaemia – provincial euphemism for someone forgetting to wash their hands – was swift and sudden. But they should not linger and risk spreading the infection. He touched her hand, brushed her clammy forehead with his lips and turned away.
Sickly and underweight, infant Anna withstood a week of intensive care. She brought home whooping cough and recurring intestinal infections, each leaving her weaker than the last, armour-plating her constitution. The doctors gave up. By rights, Anatoly should have buried her before her second birthday. Together with a succession of wet nurses and chaperones Anatoly raised her as best he could in their ribbed-oak terem he’d built himself. Relieved she was a compliant child, her school reports a guaranteed pleasure, he taught her to swim and hoe potatoes, cabbages and onions from their plot. At three by four metres it was small enough for her to tend more or less unsupervised from the time she turned eight. In the corner nearest the river towered a sunflower which, like her, thrived on neglect, grew twenty centimetres each year and sprouted pods of black and brindle seeds she chewed in summer. Behind wooden stakes and chicken wire dangled an opaque mesh of blackberries, dogwood and lilac fronds.