The plant’s main building shimmers in the gray distance, flocked by outbuildings so irregularly constructed and located, their purposes so abstruse, that they can never be totaled; men snort and spit in the dressing room under the pale blue eyes of a golden-braided, white-frocked Katya emblazoned on the panelled wall; each man claims his work place, adjusting his chair and placing his favorite tools within easy reach; the machines clatter and sigh; complaint forges bonds of friendship; the cafeteria’s white-smocked babas, passing bowls of stew over the counter, make rude, self-mockingly flirtatious jokes; the brusque foreman tosses off any suggestion or criticism, but is willing to put his own shoulder to the wheel; newly minted rubles slide under the cashier’s grate and crackle like dry firewood in his hands: Vasya’s old enough to know what a real job is, but not old enough to have ever had one. By the time he had left the army, perestroika was in full swing and the chemical factory had stopped hiring, and now only fitfully pays its workers. He can no longer search for a job, it’s worse than futile, for his inquiries exasperate the acquaintances who may someday be in a position to give him one. When Vasya asks about getting a table in the market, his boss slams his fist against the side of his van, telling him that he’s lucky to work Mondays. The number of tables allowed in the market is strictly controlled.
Vsevolod Vsevolodovich
In Ira’s face, especially in the narrow, tawny triangle scored by her eyes and the bridge of her nose, he can nearly make out her late father’s. The truth is that Vsevolod Vsevolodovich cut a more handsome figure, the flecks of Tartar blood lending his features elements of gallantry that in his daughter have transmuted to insipidity and coarseness. His dignified bearing was something European. An accountant at the chemical factory for more than thirty years, he conducted himself like a government minister, circumspect and ostentatiously discrete. Even as a pensioner, as the contents of his good black business suit diminished, he strolled through the neighborhood coldly surveying its clotheslines and livestock. Liquor never moistened his lips, not even at Vasya and Ira’s wedding banquet, not even for the first toast.
Transaction
There is White Eagle and Red Lion. Also Birch Fire, Troika, Star of the North, Tundra Gold, Rasputin, Russian Roulette, and, if someone else is buying, Ivan the Terrible. The bottles are poised like ICBMs beneath the kiosks’ rusting, corrugated metal roofs while, somewhere else, ICBMs are poised like bottles beneath the rusting roofs of missile silos. His hands parenthetically at his temples, Vasya peers through the dense glass that, even when clean and unscratched, refracts the objects several degrees from the plane of the material world. Single exemplars of foreign goods line the shelves, Czech chocolate cherries alongside a box of French tampons, German condoms in taunting juxtaposition with ajar of Polish pickles.
Someone nearly invisible, usually a girl, works within each kiosk, whose goods are identical to those of its neighbors but are arranged in a slightly different permutation. The spectral presence who possesses the second kiosk from the corner especially excites Vasya’s imagination. What is she doing in there behind the money hole, before he raps on the vitrine to summon her attention? He stoops low to announce his choice and within the kiosk’s gloom there is a rippling glimmer of lipstick, a glint of eye-light, and, perhaps, even more briefly beheld, an expanse of skin well below her neck. His posture is unsupportable for more than a small fraction of a minute and the medium between them is too thick for conversation; he straightens and points to the consumer object of desire. He places his money in the trap in front of the hole. A creamy-skinned hand, long and bejeweled, slides open the little glass gate, emerges from the hole, and slithers around the bills. Its nails are lacquered vermilion to remind him that they can draw blood. The hand withdraws as silently and languorously as it has come. Now it passes among the shelves, lightly caressing the packets and bottles, until it rests on his choice. It pauses there for a moment. And then the hand reemerges, embracing the object. He would like to stroke that hand but once, as if by accident, as he accepts his purchase.
Kitchen
The kitchen is laid out like a long box (a cigarette pack, a shoe box, a coffin), its ceiling low and sooty, its fixtures grease-streaked. Crinkled strips of paint peel from the walls. The cupboard totters over the buckling wooden floor. Wash soaks in the basin’s scummy gray water.
The heat of the day has released the kitchen’s odors and sensitized the nerves along the lining of Vasya’s nostrils. Sour milk pools at the back of his tongue. A cloying sweetness rises from the washtub. The paint’s lemony tang stings his eyes.
Vasya recently acquired a toaster oven. Two weeks later he had to sell it. He insists now that they took a very small loss on the appliance, but the counter space it occupied has been left unfilled as a standing rebuke.
The Abortions
The second was a botch, less than a year ago, its bloody and tissue-stained details kept from him. But before the telephone receiver even reached his ear, his mother-in-law had flooded the kitchen with frenzied accounts of her daughter’s ill treatment in the hands of rude nurses, complaints about hygiene, demands for money for bribes, calls for fresh sheets and nightgowns, and implied and explicit accusations of his own complicity. Vasya hadn’t seen Ira during her entire month in the hospital. Men were kept out of the women’s ward for sanitary reasons. It was also for sanitary reasons that he hadn’t been allowed to send candy or flowers, though afterwards Ira accused him of not having the money for them, which was true enough, but was not the determining factor.
The first: early spring, early morning, early life. The top of the snow melted the day before and has refrozen overnight, leaving a translucent glaze. Already the sun is working on the ice. Wisps of steam huff off it, patches puddle. Vasya halts on the dry sidewalk by the schoolyard and takes a step onto the berm. His boot crashes through the frosting and finds the cake beneath it spongy and moist. Little clumplets of snow bunch around his laces. He smiles at them and then hurries along, catching up with the shadow-Vasya who hasn’t stopped for the experiment.
He crosses the hospital driveway and passes through the double rubber-sealed doors into a waiting room as dim as a tomb. Thinking he’s early, Vasya stops at the doors and waits for his pupils to widen. There’s a distinct interval, perhaps seven or eight seconds, between the moment he begins to admire the slight, rounded form of a girl stooped over the counter signing a document of some sort, and the moment in which he identifies that it belongs to Irina. Perhaps he has mistaken her for a schoolgirl, two or three years younger than she actually is. The murk evaporates around the room’s places of incandescence and reflection. Her black hair, gleaming as if wet and unencumbered by bows or berets, falls down the sides of her face. Only the tip of her nose is visible, hardly recognizable as a nose.