“First,” said Lydia, “the child kicks in her sleep. She moves all around. I can’t sleep.”
Lydia’s unceasing snoring was evidence to the contrary, but Sasha looked up as his mother moved toward him.
“I’m afraid you’ll just have to sleep in your apartment more,” he said.
Hovering over him, she ignored his comment. Maya looked at her watch, gulped down the remainder of her coffee, kissed Pulcharia, gave Sasha a look of sympathy, and moved to give the baby a good-bye kiss. “Second, this apartment is too cold,” Lydia said.
“Everyone’s apartment is too cold or too hot,” said Sasha. “It is a fact of winter life in Moscow.”
“I intend to complain,” Lydia went on.
“To whom?” he asked, dipping his bread into the soup.
“Third,” Lydia said. Maya was putting on her coat.
“I thought you said there were only two things,” Sasha said before he could stop himself.
“Grandma did,” Pulcharia confirmed.
“You have still made no effort to be assigned to an office job,” Lydia said.
“I don’t want an office job,” Sasha said with what he thought was remarkable composure considering that he had gone through this conversation with his mother perhaps a hundred times before.
“You have a family,” she said.
Maya closed the door quietly and escaped.
“Yes,” he said.
“People try to kill you. You do dangerous things.”
“Sometimes,” he said.
“You’re like your father,” Lydia said. “You have a temper. You’re easily angered and your emotions get you into trouble.”
Sasha checked his watch. On this point, he knew, his mother was right. Sasha’s father, whom Sasha did not even remember, had been an army officer. He had died on duty in Estonia when Sasha was two. The official cause of death was pneumonia, but Lydia was convinced that he had died of debauchery.
“Your father was always volunteering to go to distant places, even Siberia,” she said, “because of his hot blood.”
And, Sasha was certain, to escape from his wife, who had been a beauty but who almost certainly had the same personality then as she was displaying now.
“Today you ask for a transfer to a ministry office position,” she insisted. “I will go back and see some of my old friends. They have already said they would help.”
Sasha took his and Pulcharia’s bowls and put them and the spoons in the small sink behind him.
“No, Mother,” he said.
“Then I will talk to Porfiry Petrovich again,” she shouted.
To this the baby reacted with a scream followed by crying. Lydia didn’t seem to hear him. Pulcharia ran to the crib, where she had some success in quieting little Illya.
“Porfiry Petrovich has no power to transfer me,” Sasha said. “Besides, he would not do so without my consent, even if he could.”
“Colonel Snitkonoy,” she said. “I’ll go directly to him.”
“He will pat your hand, tell you he understands, promise to see what he can do, and then forget you came except to tell me that it would be best if I did what I could to keep you away from him.”
“Stubborn,” she said. “Like your father.”
Sasha nodded.
“He needs a new diaper,” Pulcharia called. “He stinks.”
“The baby needs a new diaper,” Sasha shouted, walking across the room to take his own coat and wool cap from the rack near the door. “And I am very late.”
“This conversation is not over,” Lydia said.
“Of that I am certain, Mother,” he said, buttoning up.
“Gloves,” Lydia said.
He pulled his gloves from his pocket and displayed them.
“He stinks,” Pulcharia repeated, leaning over the railing of the crib to get the odor more directly.
Sasha hurried back across the room, kissed his mother’s cheek, and marched quickly toward the door.
“I don’t want to stay home with Grandma,” Pulcharia said as he opened the door. There were tears in her eyes.
“She loves you,” Sasha whispered so that his mother could not hear. “You must stay with her.”
“Yah n‘e khachooo,” said Pulcharia. “I don’t want to.”
“I’ll bring you something special,” Sasha said, taking his daughter in his arms and kissing her again. “Now I’m late.”
“We’ll go for a walk,” said Lydia, moving to the crib. “We’ll go to the park.”
“Okay,” said Pulcharia.
When Lydia had worked in the offices of the Ministry of Public Affairs, she had frequently lived with Maya and Sasha and it had been almost tolerable. Now Lydia was retired, on an insignificant and often unpaid pension, and had plenty of time. In spite of the pitiful pension, Lydia was not poor. During her more than forty years in the ministry, Lydia had quietly managed to put away money. What little she saved, she converted from rubles into jewelry, jewelry she bought from people who needed cash for bread. Gradually Lydia learned enough about jewelry to know what she was buying and to make sometimes remarkable purchases. She kept everything in a box she hid carefully wherever she was living. Then, after she had officially retired, with the Soviet Union in the process of falling, Lydia sold her jewelry, piece by piece, at a profit, to the sudden influx of entrepreneurs, carpetbaggers, and outsiders in Moscow.
While Yeltsin stood on the top of a tank proclaiming the end of Communism, Lydia was going to the proper ministry offices and arranging to buy government Bread Shop 61 half a block from where she was living near Solkonicki Park. When Gorbachev had started using words like perestroika-the restructuring of the Soviet communist system-and glasnost-openness to express one’s opinions-Lydia had called a cousin who was a farmer on a collective outside of Kursk and made a deal with him. It was simple. If the government ever did fall and the farmers became free to own and deal, she would be willing to purchase all the wheat he could produce on his land and that of some of his neighbors. It was not an enormous amount, but it would be enough to supply flour for the bread she planned to sell. Lydia’s cousin even knew someone in Kursk who could convert the wheat to flour at a reasonable rate, with her cousin, of course, getting a small commission for that service. Lydia and her cousin would annually reset the price, and she would make it a fair one. Living in fear of having no government to which to sell his crop, her cousin and his friends had readily agreed. Then she had made the necessary vzyatka-the unofficial bribes needed to get services-obtained the necessary purchases, and became the owner of a bread store. The bureaucrats who had sold her the government store that they now deemed worthless were happy to take her money even though its value was dropping crazily. She had bought the store and had full papers and rights to it. It had even left her with significant savings.
While the people of the right and left and middle were marching and buildings were in flames, Lydia offered each of the state employees who worked in the store the opportunity to stay and work for her with the incentive of bonuses if business went well. Some stayed. Some left. They all thought she was a bit mad. Gradually the bread shop workers learned that it was to their advantage to produce and to be reasonably respectful to customers.
Now, more than three years later, Tkach’s Bread Shop, which sold only one size of loaf at a price lower than competing shops, was a thriving business with long lines. It was an assembly line of bread, and prices were listed in rubles and dollars.
Once, a little more than a year before, a gang of young men, too few to be called a mafia, too many to be ignored, and too violent to be reasoned with, had come to the shop and demanded a regular weekly protection payment. The bread shop manager had called Lydia, and she had agreed to meet the gang the next Tuesday morning. When the gang of tattooed young men in leather jackets arrived, they were greeting by the old lady and three men who displayed both their weapons and their police identification. One of the policemen looked like a boy but had a glint of near madness in his eyes. A second policeman was bulky and looked a bit dull-witted. The third was tall and dressed in black, with a paste-white face and sparse combed-back hair. Ultimately the gang decided the money they might collect from the bread shop was not worth a confrontation with these three. Six months later a larger, older gang of Georgians also backed down when Sasha and his fellow policemen showed up. The few rubles they would collect from Lydia were simply not worth dying or going to jail for.