Where the cows are? My father kept a cow.
Just one?
Just one, outside Stockholm.
Were you born in Stockholm?
I don’t know where I was born.
Your mother could tell you.
I never knew my mother.
She’s dead?
No.
In the heat and the smell of sour wine and the din of the men’s laughter in the Ram’s Run, I suddenly felt a kind of pity for him. Or was it a pity for both of us? I gazed at the lemonade in the bottom of my glass. I could feel him looking down at me — like a tree at a rabbit. I raised my head. My sudden fear had gone.
I’ve been here three months, he said.
And before?
Before I was on a ship.
A sailor?
If you like.
You won’t stay here long if you’re a sailor!
I’d stay long for you, he said.
You know nothing about me!
I’ve known you since I was first conceived in the womb of a mother I never knew. He pronounced this extraordinary sentence in a strange singsong voice.
I have to go, I said.
Spend a little more of the year with me, Odile.
Is that how you talk in your language? I asked.
In my language I’d call you Dilenka.
It was different dancing with him the second time. I’m dancing with a sailor, I kept telling myself. If Mother knew I was dancing with a sailor.
I’ve never seen the sea in my life. When the dance was over, I went to fetch my coat.
I have to work tomorrow, I told him.
Can I see you on Saturday afternoon?
I may have to work, I don’t know.
I’ll be waiting for you by the footbridge, he said.
What time? I could have bitten off my tongue for saying that.
I’ll be there the whole afternoon, listening to the river till you come. He said this in the same singsong voice.
My mother was washing out a bucket in the stable and I was milking before taking the bus to Cluses, it was still dark — and she screamed at me:
You would never have dared do that, if your father was still alive!
Do what?
Go to the Ram’s Run!
There was no harm in it, Mother.
And to come back at four in the morning!
Three!
No one goes to the Ram’s Run!
They’re not beasts.
What did I do — what in God’s name did I do — to deserve a daughter like you?
You did with Papa — may he rest in peace — what most wives do, Mother.
Listen to her! my mother was screaming. She talks like that to her own mother.
She hurled the bucketful of water at me. It was so cold it took my breath away and the shock of it made me fall off the stool. Lilac calmly turned her head to see what had happened. Cows are the calmest cows in the world, was one of Stepan’s jokes. He would say it in a mournful voice.
I kept him waiting the whole afternoon by the footbridge. When at last I arrived, he didn’t complain. He stood there listening and whilst I talked, he fingered the fringe of the scarf I had round my neck. It was so cold, the sound of the river was as shrill as the train’s whistle. A train came once a fortnight to take away the molybdenum and manganese. Always at night. And since my earliest childhood the train woke me up. We walked across the lines to the big furnace shop.
Do you know each furnace has a name? he asked. The big one there is called Peter. The other one is called Tito … Why does it make you smile?
They weren’t called those names when I was young.
Now he was smiling.
There’s another called Napoleon. Why does it make you smile?
A little smile, I said.
Not so little now! he said.
Smaller than yours!
Do you know how to measure a smile?
Yes, I said.
He bent down and picked me up so my mouth was level with his, and he kissed me. On the nose.
I know so little about him, yet with the years of thinking I have learnt a great deal more from the same few facts. Perhaps there are never many facts when you first love somebody. The facts are what destiny has in store for you. His foster parents were Ukrainians and left Russia in the early twenties to settle in Sweden. One day a Russian who knew his foster mother when she was in Kiev arrived with a swaddled bundle. In it was a two-month-old baby. The couple gave the baby their family name of Pirogov. They had no children of their own. The “father” was a chairmaker and the “mother” took in washing. They had had to leave their country because in 1918 the man had joined the wrong army — the green not the red one. His “father” joined the army of a man whom Stepan called Batko Makhno. Batko, he said, meant Father. I didn’t understand much.
The winter passed slowly. One Saturday we went for a walk in the snow. He was wearing blue wool mittens. As we walked, his arm round my neck and one of his huge blue woolen hands on my shoulder, he told me a story.
Once there were two bears asleep under a rock. Their fur was all white with hoarfrost. The smaller of the two opened her eyes.
Mischka! she growled.
Mouchenka! growled the other.
We can speak! Say something. Say a word.
Honey, he growled.
Snow, she said.
Spring, he said.
Death, she said.
Why death? asked Mischka.
As soon as we speak, we know death.
God! said Mischka and pushed his muzzle into her neck.
Why does God have so little power? asked Mouchenka, and placed a paw on his back.
How should I know?
Everything that exists hides him, she said.
He’s in his lair, he said.
He could come out, couldn’t he? complained Mouchenka. Mouchenka moved her head from the shelter of the rock and the snow fell on her large black muzzle. Mischka, why does he have so little power?
Because he created the world, growled the bear.
So he spent all his power doing that and has been exhausted ever since! She blew the snow off her mouth.
No, said Mischka.
What do you mean, No?
He could have created everything differently so it did exactly what he wanted.
That would have been better?
Yes.
For a long while the two bears said nothing. At last the she-bear said: If it did exactly what he wanted, no one would recognise him! Don’t you see? There’d be no need to recognise him. There’d be nothing else but him!
Mouchenka! You were simpler when you couldn’t speak.
As things are, she went on, he hopes to be recognised all the while. Keeps sending reminders. Look at the snow falling, Mischka, it’s falling on every pine needle.
He’s clever, growled the he-bear, he’s made it all so he stays hidden! He scratched the fur on her hip with his paw. He’s made it all so he can be left in peace!
No, no, said Mouchenka, God made the world as it is, so he should be needed. It’s what he wanted.
At that very moment two shots rang out, and a hunter shouted: Bagged the two of them!
The blood of the two bears stained first their fur and later the snow.
Christian is pointing at something below. He is wearing the woolen gloves which I knitted for him. I can’t make out what he’s pointing at.
The next weekend I suggested Stepan should come to the house. I told him about my brothers. I was hoping that if Mother saw him she might relent a little. Since the morning when she had thrown the water in the stable, she hadn’t addressed a single word to me.
Not yet, Dilenka, not yet. You take a man home for the first time and everyone looks at him and starts wondering about the future, they try him on — like a pair of trousers — to see how he fits. If I were your age, but I’m a fully grown man, a foreigner, I don’t have anything here, and they’ll need a lot of reassuring — it’s too soon, I don’t know yet where to take you. Let’s wait a little.
One Saturday Stepan came to Cluses by the midday bus. He wanted to see the room in the widow Besson’s house, where I lodged. This time it was I who was against the visit. The room was too small and the bed took up half the space. Instead, I had a present for him. I’d wrapped it up in a scarf of mine, a white chiffon scarf.